Thus far, our biggest deficit in waging the War on Terror has been a lack of ideas—the kind of reshaping ideas that Viner, Brodie, Schelling, and others developed to cope with the emergence of the nuclear threat during the Cold War. We must reconceptualize terrorism, warfare, and the aim of the war that we seek in victory before the notion of "winning a war against terror” can make any sense. We must understand that the struggle against terror is really three wars: there is the war against twenty-first-century terrorism—global, networked, outsourcing of operations—there is the effort to prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction for the purposes of compelling rather than deterring, and finally there is the struggle to prevent genocide and ethnic cleansing. These separate wars exist in relation to one another in a very complex way. Progress in one dimension tends to exacerbate the difficulties in other dimensions. This imposes on the United States a kind of triage of terror: we must address the most acute problems first, knowing that doing so will make other problems worse off, and we must have the flexibility to attack those other problems when they themselves become acute, with the sure knowledge that doing so will make the initial problem addressed worse also.
