President Clinton called Osama bin Laden's terrorist group ''a network not sponsored by any state, but as dangerous as any we face.'' Nothing better summarizes the most immediate threat to America today. It is not from another hostile superpower. There is none -- for the moment. It is from super-empowered individuals, super-empowered angry men.
The super-empowered angry men have no specific ideological program or demands. Rather, they are driven by a generalized hatred of the U.S., Israel and other supposed enemies of Islam. Ramzi Yousef, mastermind of the World Trade Center bombing, was a super-empowered angry man. Osama bin Laden is another.
Globalization gives them both the added incentive to hate America and the added power to do something about it. That is, globalization is in so many ways Americanization: globalization wears Mickey Mouse ears, it drinks Pepsi and Coke, eats Big Macs, does its computing on an I.B.M. laptop with Windows 98. Many societies around the world can't get enough of it, but others see it as a fundamental threat.
As the historian Ronald Steel has pointed out, Americans think of themselves as having a conservative society. The Russians and Chinese were supposed to be the ''revolutionaries.'' But America today is actually the most revolutionary society in the world, notes Mr. Steel. For the rest of the world, we are wild, crazy revolutionaries, with rings in our noses and paint on our toes, overturning cultures and traditions wherever we go. ''We believe that our institutions must confine all others to the ash heap of history,'' says Mr. Steel. ''We lead an economic system that has effectively buried every other form of production and distribution -- leaving great wealth and sometimes great ruin in its wake. The cultural messages we transmit through Hollywood and McDonald's go out across the world to capture and also undermine other societies. We are the apostles of globalization, the enemies of tradition and hierarchy.''
The American message particularly tells young people around the world that we have a better way than their fathers. This is why the Osama bin Ladens constantly speak of ''American arrogance'' and how America is ''emasculating'' the Muslims. That's why they just want to kill America. And globalization, through its rapid spread of technologies, also super-empowers them to do just that. It makes it much easier to travel, move money or communicate by satellite phones or Internet. Ramzi Yousef kept track of all his plots on a Toshiba laptop. Osama bin Laden was running a multinational JOL, Jihad Online.
So what to do? There is much debate on this question, notes the Middle East expert Stephen P. Cohen: ''Some argue that what we need to do is just boycott Iran, condemn Egypt for not treating its Christians right, bomb Iraq, treat Yasir Arafat as no better than Hamas, treat the Saudis the same as the Afghans. In other words, make this a war of civilization and treat the Muslims as the successors to the Communists. But that is not how you deal with this problem. It is how you make it worse.''
The key to making the problem better is by a three-pronged policy: mercilessly attacking anyone, anywhere, who attacks our citizens or diplomats, embracing those who would be friends by constantly trying to build a moderate political center, particularly in the Muslim-Arab world, and always showing a road map to a better future for those who waver in between.
