Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 April 2017
The attacks by terrorists against the United States on September 11, 2001, left a scar on the American psyche that will never fully heal. This date, too, will live in infamy, along with the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. The brutality of the attacks on 9/11 awakened the American people to two central facts of the new century: first, we continue to live in a hostile world, despite the end of the Cold War, and, second, we are vulnerable to adversaries who not only reject our way of life but seek to destroy it.