On 26th February 1993, just one month after President Clinton’s inauguration, just after noon a bomb went off in the “parking garage beneath the World Trade Center,” killing six people and injuring more than 1,000 others. [1, 2, 3]
“This event was the first indication for the Diplomatic Security Service (DSS) that terrorism was evolving from a regional phenomenon outside of the United States to a transnational phenomenon”. The FBI stated the “Middle Eastern terrorism had arrived on American soil—with a bang”.
This “terrorist attack” comes just 3 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, an event that marks the end of the US-Soviet Union Cold War, and with it an end to the justification of a huge military budget with no enemy.
But on July 1, 1994, President Clinton introduced the National Security Strategy as a way to “sustain our active engagement abroad” [4, 5]
With few, if any, military threats to the US, Clinton defined security as including “protecting … our way of life” in order to seize the new opportunities for prosperity presented in the post-Cold War environment. The general approach of this strategy is “globalist” with “selective engagement” in areas and events in which the US has “particular interest”.