Momentous historical events, like the September 11 terrorist attacks and the subsequent Terror War, test social theories and provide a challenge to give a convincing account of the event and its consequences. Social theories generalize from past experience and provide accounts of historical events or periods that attempt to map, illuminate, and perhaps criticize dominant social relations, institutions, forms, trends, and events of a given epoch. In turn, they can be judged by the extent to which they account for, interpret, and critically assess contemporary conditions, or predict future events or developments. One major theory of the past two decades, Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History (1992), was strongly put into question by the events of September 11 and their aftermath.
In the wake of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks against the New York City World Trade Center and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., the U.S. Congress, at the urging of the Bush administration, overwhelmingly passed legislation known as the 2001 USA Patriot Act. The act, standing for "Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism," was primarily intended to provide law enforcement agencies with a legally defined mandate to preempt and respond to real and potential terrorist threats against the United States. However, since passage of the Patriot Act, opposition from every part of the political spectrum from extreme Leftists to ardent libertarians have voiced serious complaints over the nature and scope of these 340 pages of new law. To date, some 165 communities around the country have passed resolutions either condemning the Patriot Act or seeking to restrict its application.
A consensus is emerging, made urgent by the war on terrorism, that U.S. public diplomacy requires a commitment to new foreign policy thinking and new structures........
