Time & Perspective Quote by Ulrich Beck

Beck flips the usual superpower storyline on its head: the point of a “sensitive” attack isn’t the damage it causes, but the kind of insecurity it exposes. “Largest military power” reads like a credential, yet in Beck’s framing it’s also a liability. Scale can’t buy invulnerability when the threat is asymmetric, networked, and designed to turn openness into a weakness. The sting is in the absolutes he denies: the U.S. “was unable” to prevent it, and will never be able to “rule out such a possibility.” That phrase matters. He’s not saying America is doomed; he’s saying the promise of total security is structurally impossible in late modernity.

The subtext is classic Beck: risk society. Modern institutions excel at producing and managing certain kinds of order, but they also manufacture new hazards that don’t respect borders, hierarchies, or conventional deterrence. When that contradiction becomes visible, politics often answers with theater: interventions that can be measured, televised, and narrated as control. “Background” signals causality without moral grandstanding; he isn’t just critiquing militarism as ideology, but as a compensatory response to humiliation and uncertainty.

Read against the post-9/11 climate, the argument lands as a diagnosis of the security state’s emotional economy. Military action becomes less about eliminating threats (which cannot be eliminated) and more about restoring the image of sovereign mastery. Beck’s edge is that he treats intervention not as a confident projection of power, but as evidence of power’s limits - a modern empire acting out because it can’t guarantee what it claims to guarantee.