Ten years on: Obama's war on terrorism in rhetoric and practice

Ten years after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington DC on September 11, 2001, the United States remains embroiled in a long‐term struggle with what George W. Bush termed the existential threat of international terrorism. On the campaign trail, his successor as US President, Barack Obama, promised to reboot the ‘war on terror’. He claimed that his new administration would step back from the rhetoric and much of the Bush administration policy, conducting a counterterrorism campaign that would be more morally acceptable, more focused and more effective—smarter, better, nimbler, stronger. This article demonstrates, however, that those expecting wholesale changes to US counterterrorism policy misread Obama's intentions. It argues that Obama always intended to deepen Bush's commitment to counterterrorism while at the same time ending the ‘distraction’ of the Iraq War. Rather than being trapped by Bush's institutionalized construction of a global war on terror, the continuities in counterterrorism can be explained by Obama's shared conception of the imperative of reducing the terrorist threat to the US. The article assesses whether Obama has pursued a more effective counterterrorism policy than his predecessor and explores how his rhetoric has been reconstituted as the actions of his policy have unfolded. By addressing his policies toward Afghanistan and Pakistan, Guantánamo Bay and torture, the uses of unmanned drone attacks and domestic wire‐tapping, this article argues that Obama's ‘war’ against terrorism is not only in keeping with the assumptions and priorities of the last ten years but also that it is just as problematic as that of his predecessor.     

‘General interests’ as a rationale for the US–Republic of Korea alliance between 1998 and 2008

The US–Republic of Korea (ROK) alliance had significantly developed asset specificities and common social identities attached to it during the cold war period. If institutional features and ideational factors originating from the cold war threat can account for alliance resilience in the post-cold war period, the US–ROK alliance should be a ‘most likely case’ to support those causal links. This article shows that such is not the case. This article, instead, argues that the US–ROK alliance went beyond being an instrument of threat response to becoming a more complicated mechanism for serving ‘general interests’ in relation to North-East Asian regional order maintenance and order-building, which drove the US–ROK alliance between 1998 and 2008.     

From the Sands of the Ogaden to Black Hawk Down: The End of the Cold War in the Horn of Africa

From the Ogaden War to the Black Hawk Down incident, the Horn of Africa was a theatre of events with far-reaching international consequences. This paper argues that the distinctive process leading to the end of the bipolar conflict in the Horn is crucial to understanding the role of this region both during and after the Cold War. Through an extensive analysis of the period 1985–1991, this article explains why only a few years after the ‘burial’ of SALT II in the sands of the Ogaden, the superpowers withdrew from the region which had been the symbol of the failure of détente. Similarly, an analysis of the end of the Cold War is paramount to understanding why, after the break-up of the USSR, the Horn of Africa hosted one of the most tragic episodes of post-Cold War US foreign policy.     

An airline at the crossroads of the world: Ariana Afghan Airlines,modernization, and the global Cold War

In 1957, the United States government provided funding for Pan American World Airways to purchase a 49% share in Afghanistan’s national airline, Ariana Afghan Airlines. While unusual in its scope, the arrangement was part of a broader program of US technical assistance, administered jointly by government agencies and private corporations, to newly formed airlines in Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. Between 1955 and 1965, technical assistance for commercial aviation was critical to the USA’s Cold War strategy to win ‘hearts and minds,’ and to contain Soviet influence, in the developing world. Using Ariana as a case study, this article examines what was at stake for the USA – politically, economically, and culturally – in aviation technical assistance projects. However, the article also argues that such projects should be seen as instances of ‘co‐production,’ in which recipients of technical assistance exploited superpower rivalries and actively shaped the airplane’s uses and meanings.     

US democracy promotion in the Arab Middle East since 11 September 2001: a critique

Promoting democracy in the Middle East has been a key foreign policy objective of the Bush administration since n September 2001. Democratizing the Arab world, in particular, is seen as an important instrument in the ‘war on terror’. To help democratize the Arab Middle East, the US initiated a number of policies which, it claims, have encouraged reform. But what has really been the impact of US initiatives? This article examines the implementation of US democracy promotion policies across the Arab region, and in particular Arab countries, and argues that it has had mixed results. The article suggests three reasons why this is so. First, democracy is part of a wider set of US interests and concerns with which it is frequently in contradiction. Second, the Bush administration conceives democracy as a panacea: it overlooks the problems its implementation may cause and lacks clear ideas about achieving this implementation. Third, democracy promotion policies have limited outcomes because neither a politically neutral nor a more interventionist approach can initiate a reform process if it is not already underway for domestic reasons. On the basis of the three critiques, the article concludes with recommendations for US policy.     

Unpacking the Neoliberal Approach to Regional Policy: a Close Reading of John Freebairn's ‘Economic Policy for Rural and Regional Australia’

A close reading of a neoliberal intervention in policy debates on ‘the regional economic problem’ is used to throw light on this method. When it is compared to economic geography, the neoliberal approach advances a relatively simplified conception of regional economic and social life that pays little regard to their richness, complexity and grounded realities. Correspondingly, this approach encourages a vision of regional policy that normalises and exonerates the spatially uneven outcomes of market forces. This article argues that policy‐makers’ ends in the field of regional development should be alert to the limitations that arise from the neoliberal tendency to override the evidence of empirical complexity in favour of a more simple narrative.     

Performing security: The imaginative geographies of current US strategy

Political geographers have recently focused their attention on the performative nature and imaginative geographies of US security strategies. This work has illuminated a number of mechanisms through which geographical knowledge has been interpreted and reformulated to support specific political agendas. This paper builds upon and develops the insights of these recent studies, arguing that current US security strategies are constructed around a policy of integration, whereby states are encouraged, through a range of measures, to mesh with attitudes and perspectives on the world. It assesses the ways in which these integration strategies are being performed, through an analysis of US National Security Strategy documents, the works of writers such as Kagan and Barnett, and the imaginative geographies and popular geopolitical representations of the US and its enemies. This paper contends that these practices combine to produce the effects that they name, bringing to life an imaginary geography that mirrors and supports the particular logics of the US-led ‘war on terror’.     

Of Sodomy and Cannibalism: Dehumanisation,Embodiment and the Rhetorics of Same‐Sex and Cross‐Species Contagion

This article explores ideas of the ‘human’ in discourses surrounding the AIDS epidemic, from the 1980s to the present. It compares two sequential lines of thought: first, the notion of AIDS as the result of ‘unnatural’ gender behaviours and queer sexualities; and second, the notion of AIDS and other zoonotics (cross‐species diseases) as the result of non‐western dietary practices and social mores. In the first case, the early years of the AIDS crisis are traced through the languages of sexual perversity utilised by the popular press and the Christian right. In the second case, the later years of the epidemic are traced, once the ‘roots’ of the virus became tied to Africa, and carriers became bestialised in narratives that located HIV as a consequence of unnatural, or inhuman, interactions with the animal world. The article argues that we have witnessed a paradigm shift in the didactics of the epidemic, from a narrative of sexual impropriety to one that also includes a narrative of dietary impropriety, each of which consistently relies upon a clear dichotomy between the human and the inhuman.     

‘Enormous Opportunities’ and ‘Hot Frontiers’: Sub-Saharan Africa in U.S. Grand Strategy, 2001-Present

Abstract

This article argues that, in the 21st century, there has been a significant turnaround in the US approach to Sub-Saharan Africa. No longer is the region viewed solely as the site of human tragedy and internal wars where Washington has no tangible interests. Instead, US policymakers have increasingly viewed this part of Africa as a site of valuable commercial, geopolitical, and security interests—with particular emphasis on petroleum reserves, the market potential of its growing population, and its apparent locus as a site of transnational Islamist terrorism. Sub-Saharan Africa is now considered in grand strategic terms. Unintended consequences of US intervention are already visible, however; as it integrates the region into its global strategic calculus, the United States has begun to repeat mistakes made in other key regions of the world.     

British Muslims,multiculturalism and UK foreign policy: ‘integration’ and ‘cohesion’ in and beyond the state

After the 7 July and 21 July 2005 attacks on London the government‐sponsored effort to ‘prevent extremism together’ has repeatedly acknowledged the central role of anger at UK foreign policy in the radicalization of some British Muslims. This acknowledgement has been incorporated into a ‘comprehensive framework for action’ centring upon the need for increased ‘integration’ and an effort, critically, to re‐work British multiculturalism as a means to combat terrorism. Examining the history of multiculturalism in Britain and the tradition of living and acting ‘together’ that it suggests, however, raises a set of questions about the society into which integration is supposed to occur, what integration might involve and its real efficacy for combating terrorists. In addressing these issues, this article suggests that the debate over contemporary multiculturalism should be situated within a much wider social and political crisis over the meaning of ‘community’ in the UK, to which questions of global order and foreign policy are central. Comparing the ‘ethical’ basis of Al‐Qaeda's attacks with Tony Blair's invocation of ‘values’ as the foundation for military intervention reveals that both seek to realize models of community through violence and a shared process of ‘radicalization’ which in both cases precedes 9/11 and which might be traced back to the Gulf War of 1991. The article concludes that debate over the future of multiculturalism in the UK is being conducted alongside and is implicated within a second, violent global conflict over community: one which is central to, but essentially unarticulated within the domestic context.     

Trumping foreign policy: public diplomacy,framing, and public opinion among middle power publics

Even as the world’s sole superpower, the United States requires the cooperation of other states to achieve many of its foreign policy objectives. The President of the United States thus often serves as ‘Diplomat in Chief’ in public diplomacy efforts to appeal directly to publics abroad. Given Donald Trump’s antagonistic approach to foreign relations and widespread lack of popularity, what are the implications for support for US policy among publics abroad – particularly among middle power states allied to the US? While previous research on public opinion relying on observational data has found that confidence in the US President is linked to support for American foreign policy goals, the mechanisms at work remain unclear. Using original data from survey-based experiments conducted in Canada and Australia, this article seeks to clarify the effect of ‘presidential framing’ (presenting a policy goal as endorsed or not endorsed by Trump) on attitudes toward key policy issues in the Canada–US and Australia–US relationships. Results point to a negative ‘Trump framing’ effect in Canadians’ and Australians’ trade policy attitudes, but such an effect is not observed in other policy domains (energy policy in Canada, and refugee policy in Australia).     

Justifying sacrifice: Barack Obama and the selling and ending of the war in Afghanistan

Since taking office, United States President Barack Obama has attempted to refocus and revitalize the US war against terrorism. The centrepiece of this effort has been an increased emphasis on the war in Afghanistan, which he has characterized as the real frontline of the war on terror—as opposed to the ‘distraction’ of the Iraq war. After years of fighting under the Bush administration, Obama has had to ‘sell’ to the US public the renewed effort in Afghanistan and bordering Pakistan in order to maintain support for his policy. In speeches and other public pronouncements, Obama has drawn heavily on the idea of ‘sacrifice’ to justify the deepening of the commitment to the war, arguing that the costs of the war are necessary in order to keep the US safe from further terrorist attacks. This article explores this symbolic engagement with the sacrifices being made in the name of keeping the United States ‘safe’ from terrorism. It considers whether this approach resonates with public and elite opinion; it also considers the sustainability of underlying public support for the war and analyses how Obama has adapted his approach in order to fulfil his goal of drawing the US intervention to a close. While Obama appears to have judged well the price that the US public is willing to pay to defend against terrorism, it is argued that there are major risks involved in using the central principle of sacrifice when justifying the war. Obama has risked creating a ‘sacrifice trap’ whereby the more emphasis is placed on the sacrifices being made, the more necessary it becomes to demonstrate outcomes that make those sacrifices worthwhile. Obama's ultimate objective of withdrawing US forces from Afghanistan may yet be undermined, therefore, by the justifications he has given for the continued importance of the commitment.     

A special responsibility to protect: the UK,Australia and the rise of Islamic State

In the summer of 2014 Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) emerged as a threat to the Iraqi people. This article asks whether the UK and Australia had a ‘special’ responsibility to protect (R2P) those being threatened. It focuses on two middle‐ranking powers (as opposed to the US) in order to highlight the significance of special responsibilities that flow only from the principle of reparation rather than capability. The article contends that despite casting their response in terms of a general responsibility, the UK and Australia did indeed bear a special responsibility based on this principle. Rather than making the argument that the 2003 coalition that invaded Iraq created ISIS, it is argued that it is the vulnerable position in which Iraqis were placed as a consequence of the invasion that grounds the UK and Australia's special responsibility to protect. The article addresses the claim that the UK and Australia were not culpable because they did not act negligently or recklessly in 2003 by drawing on Tony Honoré's concept of ‘outcome responsibility’. The finding of a special responsibility is significant because it is often thought of as being more demanding than a general responsibility. In this context, the article further argues that the response of these two states falls short of reasonable moral expectations. This does not mean the UK and Australia should be doing more militarily. R2P does not begin and end with military action. Rather the article argues that the special responsibility to protect can be discharged through humanitarian aid and a more generous asylum policy.     

Strategizing Britain's role in the world

In recent commentaries on British foreign policy, the New Labour and coalition governments have been criticized for lacking strategic thinking. Academics describe a ‘strategy gap’ and note that old ideas about Britain's role in the world, such as Churchill's 1948 reference to ‘three circles’, continue to be recycled. Parliamentarians bemoan the ‘uncritical acceptance of these assumptions’ that has led to ‘a waning of our interests in, and ability to make, National Strategy’. This article argues that a primary problem has been the lack of consideration of how identity, strategy and action interrelate in foreign policy. Using the insights of role theory, the article seeks to address this by outlining six ideal‐type role orientations that the UK might fulfil in world politics, namely: isolate, influential (rule of law state), regional partner, thought leader, opportunist–interventionist power and Great Power. By considering how variations in a state's disposition towards the external environment translate into different policy directions, the article aims both to highlight the range of roles available to policy‐makers and to emphasize that policy often involves making a choice between them. Failure to recognize this has resulted in role conflicts and policy confusion. In setting out a variety of different role orientations, the author offers a route to introducing a genuine strategic sensibility to policy‐making, one that links identity with policy goals and outcomes.     

Why US-Sino strategic competition is good for Australia

ABSTRACT

Faced with an increasingly authoritarian and assertive China, the United States (US) under President Trump administration’s has embarked on a course toward a more openly competitive US–China relationship. However, the debate in Australia has viewed the new era of US-Sino strategic competition mostly negatively. Indeed, arguments have been made for a need to ‘radically’ rethink Australia’s defence policy in order to prepare for a ‘post-US-led’ regional order. For some analysts, Canberra has even no other choice than to adopt a strategy of ‘armed neutrality’ to deal with an emerging China-dominated regional order and a declining US, confused and unwilling to defend its allies. In contrast, this article argues that on balance Trump’s course correction on China is positive for Australia as the US is likely to maintain its robust engagement in the Indo-Pacific. While the president’s inconsistencies partly undermine US declaratory statements in regards to greater competition with China, a bipartisan consensus is likely to continue to shift US policy in this direction. While greater US-Sino competition requires Australia to assume greater responsibilities for regional security, radical changes to its defence policy and security alignment are not needed.     

Labour's Strategic Defence Review

Labour’s Strategic Defence Review claims to be ‘radical’, leading ‘to a fundamental reshaping of British forces’ while being ‘firmly ground in foreign policy’. Five questions are discussed: 1) Is labour’s defence policy different from that of its Conservative predecessors? 2) Has foreign policy ‘led’ defence policy? 3) How open was the review process and to what extent has Labour succeeded in creating a new consensus on defence policy? 4) Has the SDR successfully addressed the problem of overstretch? 5) Does it provide the ‘modern, effective and affordable armed forces which meet today’s challenges but are also flexible enough to adapt to change’, as it claims? This article argues that on the first two questions the answer is a qualified ‘yes’; that on the third, the process was more open than ever before but that it is difficult to identify specific decisions influence by more open debate; that on the fourth, Labour has attempted a balancing act which may be vulnerable, not least to changes in the economy; and that on the last question, Labour has succeeded in shifting the focus of the armed services towards power projection capabilities as required by their foreign policy baseline.     

Australia's relationship with the United States: the case for greater independence

A number of recent events—especially attempts to negotiate a bilateral trade agreement and Australia's participation in the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq—have thrown Australia's relationship with the United States into sharp relief. While this relationship has historically enjoyed strong bilateral endorsement, such uncritical support is beginning to unravel. At the very least, the relationship is being subjected to a renewed, more critical scrutiny. This paper argues that a dispassionate analysis of the relationship is appropriate and overdue. Not only are the benefits that accrue to ‘Australia’ from the relationship debateable, even when judged within the limited calculus of the ‘national interest’, but Australia's uncritical support for US foreign policy is also helping to entrench potentially damaging aspects of American foreign policy and— somewhat ironically—undermining the legitimacy of its pre-eminent ‘hege monic’ position.     

‘Mightier Than Marx’: Hassoldt Davis and American Cold War Politics in Postwar Ivory Coast

ABSTRACT

Using the travels of Hassoldt Davis in Ivory Coast to explore the global Cold War in French West Africa in the 1950s, this article argues that the main line of confrontation in the postwar era did not always pit Americans against Russians. In many instances, the struggle for the mind and soul of Africans was between the Americans and the French. The study highlights the role of everyday technology in the expansion of the American informal empire. By focusing on Davis and the significance of low-tech artifacts, the article suggests that in our scrutiny of Cold War science/technology, we need to supplement the study of the various production regimes of consumer goods with a comparable research on consumption and how they mediated the daily battles of the era. Such approach not only underscores the historical reality of the ‘social life of things’, but also gives agency to non-state actors as both users of Cold War technoscience and as participants in the politics that informed its mobilization on the world stage. Besides bringing Francophone Africa in the historiography of US–Africa relations, the article demonstrates a convergence of vision among American consular agents, US transnational corporations and an idiosyncratic travel writer.     

Beyond Eurocentrism? Heritage conservation and the politics of difference

There is a long-standing debate concerning the suitability of European or ‘western’ approaches to the conservation of cultural heritage in other parts of world. The Cultural Charter for Africa (1976), The Burra Charter (1979) and Nara Document on Authenticity (1994) are notable manifestations of such concerns. These debates are particularly vibrant in Asia today. This article highlights a number of charters, declarations and publications that have been conceived to recalibrate the international field of heritage governance in ways that address the perceived inadequacies of documents underpinning today’s global conservation movement, such as the 1964 Venice Charter. But as Venice has come to stand as a metonym for a ‘western’ conservation approach, intriguing questions arise concerning what is driving these assertions of geographic, national or civilisational difference in Asia. To address such questions, the article moves between a number of explanatory frameworks. It argues declarations about Asia’s culture, its landscapes, and its inherited pasts are, in fact, the combined manifestations of post-colonial subjectivities, a desire for prestige on the global stage of cultural heritage governance and the practical challenges of actually doing conservation in the region.     

The ideological roots of failure: the application of kinetic neo‐liberalism to Iraq

This article argues that American policy towards Iraq went through four major shifts between the invasion in 2003 and the announcement of the surge in 2007. The best way to understand the Bush administration's evolving policy towards Iraq is by examining the ideological parameters within which it was made. The article assesses various approaches to understanding the relationship between ideology, policy making and foreign policy, concluding that ideology shapes the paradigm and analytical categories within which foreign policy is made. A major change in foreign policy originates either from the decision‐maker consciously recognizing and attempting to rework the ideational parameters within which policy is made or in reaction to ‘discrepant information’ or ‘anomalies’ that destabilize the paradigm and its analytical categories. The article goes on to examine the extent to which both neo‐liberalism and neo‐conservatism shaped George W. Bush's foreign policy. It identifies a series of major analytical categories that originate from within these two doctrines and shaped policy towards Iraq. The article argues that the four major shifts in Bush's policy towards Iraq were forced upon the administration by the rising tide of politically motivated violence. Ultimately this violence forced Bush to abandon the major analytical categories that, up to 2007, had given his policy coherence. In order to extricate his administration from the quagmire that Iraq had become by 2006, Bush totally transformed his approach, dropping the previously dominant neo‐liberal paradigm and adopting a counter‐insurgency doctrine.