An Asymmetry of Existential Fear

Twenty-five years ago, nineteen men brought down two towers in lower Manhattan and launched a war the United States is, in some sense, still fighting. This year's 9/11 anniversary has produced the usual retrospectives on Afghanistan, Iraq, and the sprawling counterterror apparatus constructed in their wake. But the American war on terror was not the only one of its kind. Within its own borders, largely against its own citizens, in the same era, Russia fought its own war on terror: one that is all too often ignored in the American reckoning with its struggle.

By the turn of the century, the Kremlin had watched one campaign fail outright and a breakaway region slip toward the door: the territorial fear that Russia might unravel as the Soviet Union did was indeed a live, ongoing question of the decade. More than mere strikes against Russian citizens, violence in Chechnya was mounting evidence that Moscow could no longer reliably control part of the territory it claimed to govern. French counterinsurgency theorist David Galula cited political violence as an effective if repugnant insurgent tactic in generating disorder: cheap for the insurgent to provoke, expensive for the government to prevent, and most importantly a clearly unacceptable flouting of the government’s duty to provide security. Terrorism, therefore, became inseparable from the older question of whether the new Russian state could hold itself together.

One retrospective on Russia's political trajectory notes that holding the Russian Federation together haunted Yeltsin throughout his decade in office. Some analysts see no democratic breakthrough in Russia in the 1990s at all, but rather only state collapse arrested partway through. The pattern itself was not new; in 1993, Yeltsin resolved a constitutional standoff with his own parliament by shelling the Russian “White House” itself.

Against this backdrop of territorial concerns, Chechen acts of terror began molding the Russian state approach to terrorism overall. Notably, by then, this was not even a purely domestic insurgency. Foreign fighters like the Saudi-born commander Ibn al-Khattab had brought Gulf funding and an imported jihadist ideology into the Chechen cause. While this gave Moscow every opportunity to frame Chechen separatism as foreign infiltration rather than a domestic legitimacy problem, it generally chose the latter. The terrorism further gave Moscow a new justification for treating the weakness of the central state itself as a security problem.

In September 1999, bombs leveled apartment blocks in Buynaksk, Moscow, and Volgodonsk, killing more than 300 people. Soon, officials blamed Chechen separatists. These bombings remain historically contested; some Russian critics argue the bombings were a false-flag operation by Russia's own security services, especially after an incident in Ryazan where another bomb was defused under suspicious circumstances. Whatever their origin, the bombings' political effect was unmistakable: within six months, the political fortunes of an obscure former FSB director named Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin rose. Polling at roughly two percent when he became prime minister, Putin found himself president by the last day of the millennium.

The pattern repeated when Chechen fighters seized a Moscow theater in October 2002, holding almost 1000 people hostage and demonstrating again that the crisis could reach beyond the Caucasus. But it was the September 2004 Beslan school siege, which killed 333 people with more than half of them being children, that led to Putin's most structural response. Within weeks, he had informed governors that "the fight against terrorism should become a national task," and used the tragedy to abolish direct gubernatorial elections outright, replacing them with presidential appointments. Russia's governors would no longer derive their authority directly from regional voters, but from the Kremlin. It was a remarkably direct translation of a terrorist attack into the formal centralization of the Russian state.

What makes the Russian case particularly distinct is not just that terrorism was driven by fears over the state's integrity, nor that terrorism drove centralization: it is also the extent to which that centralization ran through individuals. At the top, the relatively unknown Putin told reporters that Russia would hunt terrorists down anywhere. "If we catch them in the toilet," he promised, "we'll waste them in the outhouse." The unfamiliar use of Leningrad gangster slang became a signature of Putin's early public image: blunt and violently unconcerned with the conventions of post-Soviet politics. Thus did an intelligence bureaucrat with no political base convert a national crisis into his personal reputation, one of decisive and extra-institutional toughness.

At the bottom, meanwhile, the Russian state made counterterrorism personal through its new viceroy in Chechnya, Akhmad Kadyrov. A former separatist leader, he had grown alarmed at other Chechen warlords' turn toward transnational Islamism and pledged personal allegiance to the Kremlin as the second war in Chechnya began. Moscow installed Akhmad as president in 2003, with his son Ramzan inheriting much of the security establishment after his 2004 assassination. It was the fulfillment of Moscow's wish for unambiguous de jure state control in the region, where Moscow cared less about administering Chechnya through uniform federal institutions than about ensuring it remained within the Russian state.

The junior Kadyrov subsequently consolidated the Kadyrovtsy, a security apparatus that was formally absorbed into Russian state structures but remained loyal to the Kadyrov family. The Kremlin, in turn, has tolerated the extraordinary autonomy and patronage surrounding Putin’s self-described “foot soldier” for two decades, effectively subcontracting much of Chechnya’s coercive governance to a loyal strongman. It was and remains part of the personal characteristic of Russia's war on terror: a national leader whose political reputation was raised on a tough counterterrorist reputation, delegating control of a peripheral area to a strongman whose authority rested on the same principle, each substituting for an institution the Russian state did not fully possess.

Nothing in the American experience of September 11th carried this weight of internal angst. The United States moved the fight outward almost immediately, given the geography of the attackers. Several conditions made that outward projection possible in a way it was not for Russia: the unipolar moment left no peer competitor to resist American overextension; the enemy was foreign and stateless rather than a breakaway piece of the country itself; and the United States already possessed a global force-projection infrastructure built for the Cold War and ready to be redirected. America’s response transformed the domestic security state without confronting a fundamental question about whether Washington possessed legitimate authority itself over its territory. Neither did questions exist over the viability of the U.S. governmental system. The only decision to be made was how far to project this power.

This friction illustrates a fundamental divide in the two models. Where Russia’s war on terror relied on personalistic bargains, such as Putin’s strongman persona at the top and Kadyrov’s feudal fiefdom at the bottom, the American war on terror was defined by its bureaucratic endurance. George W. Bush launched the effort, for example, Barack Obama expanded drone warfare and surged troops in Afghanistan, and Donald Trump and Joe Biden oversaw its scaling-down. Yet through every administration, the underlying machine remained intact: the worldwide combatant commands, the intelligence infrastructure, and the standing legal authorizations among them. Simply put, the United States did not need to forge a personalist pact to guarantee state survival. Rather, its political architecture was already robust enough to absorb a major shock and project force globally, all the while without threatening its domestic political order.

Neither war ended with anything resembling total closure, but rather when each state judged the threat manageable. Russia chose the route of elite bargaining: to buy off, co-opt, and arm a local ruler until the insurgency stopped threatening Moscow's control of the federation. America's route was closer to strategic reprioritization. It was a period of lowering strategic expectations, putting counterterrorism on a sustainable footing, and gradually relegating it behind other national priorities. Jihadist terrorism became manageable enough that the Global War on Terror as an organizing principle for national strategy, in particular the occupation of Afghanistan, simply stopped being necessary. The 2024 Crocus City hall attack in Moscow, which killed over 140, is the clearest evidence that the underlying threat never vanished for Russia either: even coming from a new jihadist threat and not a regional insurgency. Terrorism persists, but it is simply no longer a central raison-d'être for the state or its security machinery.

The two wars left each government with a different vocabulary for what security means. For the United States, the initial shock of 9/11 was in large part due to the scale of suffering on U.S. soil, so close to home. But the following global war on terror was an expeditionary campaign against an enemy that never truly threatened the integrity of the American political system.

For Russia, on the other hand, security remains inextricably bound to the state’s internal cohesion and territorial integrity. A conception of security was created around proving and re-proving that the state could hold itself together in the “Wild 90s:” something the Soviet Union could not do. In the Kremlin’s worldview, the line between internal disintegration and external encirclement is dangerously thin. Russia has certainly exploited narratives of NATO expansion and Western aggression to its benefit in information warfare. Thus the loss of control in the North Caucasus and the alignment of border states with Western institutions are viewed through the same existential lens. Where Washington sees sovereign nations rightfully exercising self-determination in Georgia or Ukraine, Moscow has interpreted these developments through the lens of the state collapse it fought to avert thirty years ago. As the U.S. seeks to back Ukraine and simultaneously strike a peace deal with Russia, decisionmakers would do well to remember not just the asymmetry of power, but also the asymmetry of existential fear.

Astor Lu is a Princeton University graduate who writes on national security, economic statecraft, and Russian foreign policy. He has conducted research with the Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs’ Blue Center for Global Strategic Assessment and the U.S. Army. Fluent in Mandarin and Russian, his writing has previously appeared in Small Wars Journal and RealClearDefense.