By George Friedman

A complex sequence of meetings addressing the international financial crisis took place this weekend. The weekend began with meetings among the finance ministers of the G-7 leading industrialized nations. It was followed by a meeting of finance ministers from the G-20, the group of industrial and emerging powers that together constitute 90 percent of the world's economy. There were also meetings with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank. The meetings concluded on Sunday with a summit of the eurozone, those European Union countries that use the euro as their currency. Along with these meetings, there were endless bilateral meetings far too numerous to catalog.

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By Reva Bhalla

One day after 9/11, U.S. President George W. Bush declared a global "war on terror."

Al Qaeda had first reared its head years before in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the 1998 U.S. Embassy attacks in East Africa and the 2000 USS Cole bombing, but it was not until the World Trade Center towers came crashing down that the global international security community became almost completely consumed with battling global jihadism.

Professors of political Islam came out of the woodwork, Osama bin Laden became a household name, university students started pouring into Arabic language courses and, for the first time, terrorism became a national security priority. This era became known as the "post-9/11 world."

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