The Berlin Wall’s collapse in 1989 was a deceptive victory. Exhilarated by crumbling stones, the West did not notice the crumbling of its own culture. Overlooked, too, was the complete failure of Western intelligence to anticipate not only the timing but the circumstances of the collapse. After “winning” the Cold War, it was back to pursuing the American dream of consumerist happiness. Americans showed little interest in seeking to understand the ideology that, had its lethality been appreciated, might have prevented millions of deaths from totalitarianism. They didn’t know, and they didn’t want to know. 

Overconfident, underinformed, and naïve Americans squandered the unique unipolar moment when they stood as the sole superpower in history. They forgot that the age-old dialectic pitting pluralist communities against monolithic autocracies is endemic to history. So, the end of one tyranny can mean the start of another, even more deadly. The American foreign policy establishment had long ignored virulent fundamentalist Islamism, despite its having been brewing for decades, oblivious that its own inattention enabled that growth. Not having taken Osama Bin Laden at his word, America was caught entirely unprepared as a new century of strife dawned. 9/11 was literally a bolt out of the sunny blue sky.  

In an instant, everything came to a standstill. A stunned, outraged citizenry demanded safety now. So Congress appropriated money — lots of it. The administration sprang into action. The president declared “an axis of evil,” then hardly ever mentioned it again. How had all this come about? How is Sunni Islamism related to, say, North Korea’s communism or Iran’s theocratic Shiia “democracy”? No clue.