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.     

Book reviews

Books reviewed in this issue. International Relations theory The global commonwealth of citizens: toward cosmopolitan democracy. By Daniele Archibugi. Order, conflict, and violence. Edited by Stathis N. Kalyvas, Ian Shapiro and Tarek Masoud. Human rights and ethics Torture and democracy. By Darius Rejali. Sexual enslavement of girls and women worldwide. By Andrea Parrot and Nina Cummings. International law and organization International justice in Rwanda and the Balkans: virtual trials and the struggle for state cooperation. By Victor A. Peskin. Humanitarian intervention after Kosovo: Iraq, Darfur and the record of global civil society. By Aidan Hehir. Foreign policy America and the world: conversations on the future of American foreign policy. By Zbigniew Brzezinski, Brent Scowcroft and David Ignatius. Conflict, security and armed forces Does peacekeeping work? Shaping belligerents’ choices after civil war. By Virginia Page Fortna. Fighting terror: ethical dilemmas. By Alex J. Bellamy. Twilight war: the folly of US space dominance. By Mike Moore. Global non‐proliferation and counter‐terrorism: the impact of UNSCR 1540. Edited by Olivia Bosch and Peter van Ham. National missile defense and the politics of US identity: a postcultural critique. By Natalie Bormann. The way of the world: a story of truth and hope in an age of extremism. By Ron Suskind. Political economy, economics and development The shape of the world to come: charting the geopolitics of a new century. By Laurent Cohen‐Tanugi. Globalization, regionalization and business: conflict, convergence and influence. By Marc Schelhase. Energy and environment The end of food. By Paul Roberts. History Great Britain and the creation of Yugoslavia: negotiating Balkan nationality and identity. By James Evans. The voices of the dead: Stalin's great terror in the 1930s. By Hiroaki Kuromiya. Europe Explaining institutional change in Europe. By Adrienne Héritier. European defence policy: beyond the nation state. By Frédéric Mérand. Turkish accession to the EU: satisfying the Copenhagen criteria. By Eric Faucompret and Jozef Konings. Serbia in the shadow of Milo?evi?: the legacy of conflict in the Balkans. By Janine N. Clark. Spanish politics: democracy after dictatorship. By Omar G. Encarnación. Russia and Eurasia Oilopoly: Putin, power and the new Russia. By Marshall Goldman. Russian civil–military relations: Putin's legacy. By Thomas Gomart. Axis of convenience: Moscow, Beijing, and the new geopolitics. By Bobo Lo. Middle East and North Africa Harmonizing foreign policy: Turkey, the EU and the Middle East. By Mesut Özcan. Sub‐Saharan Africa Africa: altered states, ordinary miracles. By Richard Dowden. Crouching tiger, hidden dragon?: Africa and China. Edited by Kweku Ampiah and Sanusha Naidu. China returns to Africa: a rising power and a continent embrace. Edited by Chris Alden, Daniel Large and Ricardo Soares de Oliveira. China into Africa: trade, aid and influence. Edited by Robert I. Rotberg. Gulliver's troubles: Nigeria's foreign policy after the Cold War. Edited by Adekeye Adebajo and Abdul Raufu Mustapha. Becoming Somaliland. By Mark Bradbury. Crude continent: the struggle for Africa's oil prize. By Duncan Clarke. Asia and Pacific Descent into chaos: how the war against Islamic extremism is being lost in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia. By Ahmed Rashid. Korea. By Christoph Bluth. Butcher and bolt. By David Loyn. North America The American civilizing process. By Stephen Mennell. Latin America and Caribbean US presidents and Latin American interventions: pursuing regime change in the Cold War. By Michael Grow.     

Embedding the War on Terror: State and Civil Society Relations

The global war on terror was used by the Bush administration and its allies to defend a US dominated geopolitical configuration. To this end, counter‐terrorism measures (CTMs) were introduced which strengthened the alignment of development aid with diplomacy and defence. The broad, adverse effects of CTMs on civil liberties and human rights are well documented. Despite the advent of a new US administration and a ‘soft power’ approach to international relations, the legacy of the war on terror remains embedded in the laws, policies and attitudes of many states and regimes that continue to enclose the lives of citizens. This article describes the experiences of civil society organizations (CSOs) as ‘securitization’ processes unfolded. Studies over two years involving some forty countries provide an on‐the‐ground view to probe the gains and losses of securitization, both for governments in the US‐led ‘coalition of the willing’ and for civil society in terms of the pressures emerging from a development‐for‐security agenda. The authors identify some of the perverse zero‐sum effects on governments of CTM philosophy and the means employed. Findings also show asymmetry between northern and southern CSOs in terms of their negative‐sum subordination, found in the definition of security and in the vulnerability to new risks involved in undertaking development work.     

Just a war against terror? Jean Bethke Elshtain's burden and American power

Just war against terror: ethics and the burden of American power in a violent world. By Jean Bethke Elshtain.
This article discusses Jean Bethke Elshtain's recent book Just war against tenor: the burden of American power in a violent world. It argues that Elshtain's book, though characteristically powerful and thought provoking, combines both an intelligent and thoughtful defence of the idea that the immediate US response to September 11 was a just use of force, as well as a claim about the moral importance of US power in contemporary world politics. It concludes that the problems with the second claim run the risk of nullifying the considerable power of the first.     

When a gamekeeper turns poacher: torture,diplomatic assurances and the politics of trust

Diplomatic assurances are promises which purport to manage the tension between the need for national security and the human rights obligations not to send individuals to countries where they would be at risk of torture. This article looks at how and why diplomatic assurances have become a part of policy efforts to make counterterrorism human rights compliant and as part of a wider strategy for drawing a line under the damaging legacy of the ‘war on terror’. This positive gloss on the use of diplomatic assurances is, however, in contrast to the worries motivating human rights advocates which centre on the implications for the global anti‐torture regime. Behind the doubts surrounding diplomatic assurances is a wider concern, centred on whether the past architects of the war on terror can be trusted to progressively develop the rules and norms governing this domain.     

America as a European power: the end of empire by integration?

Is the postwar partnership between Europe and America now a historical artefact? Much depends on whether the notion of America as a ‘European power’ still holds. The US attained this status through a strategy of ‘empire by integration’, extending its postwar ‘empire’ through negotiation and support for European integration, and envisaging a collectively powerful Europe as fundamental to the health of its most important security alliance. The election of George W. Bush, the terrorist attacks of 9/11, and the war in Iraq are often seen as producing deep ruptures both in American policy towards Europe and the transatlantic alliance. Yet, the embrace of a new US policy of ‘disaggregation’ of Europe is unproven, and in any event unlikely to mark a permanent shift. The US and Europe are surprisingly close to agreement on ends for the international order. Conflict over Iraq has obscured a significant increase in policy cooperation and convergence of strategy in the war on terrorism.     

The empire writes back (to Michael Cox)

Some analysts contend that the future of the US is bleak and that its days as a superpower are numbered. While no one can ignore the very serious challenges that confront America at home and abroad, most analyses are dangerously onesided. First, they suffer from a short‐term view that overlooks the strong structural underpinnings of American power. Second, naysayers of American power often play up America's faults while ignoring the very serious challenges rising powers must confront if they are to continue on their upward trajectory. Third, writers on America's decline fail to grasp the changing fundamentals of global politics and the shift within world politics that requires states to move away from zero‐sum conceptions of international affairs. This response addresses these issues and the assertion by Professor Michael Cox that the US is in decline—again. It argues that that US will continue to be a pre‐eminent global superpower and that this power can be extended if the US makes wise choices to expand global governance in its final years as the sole superpower.     

From terrorism to dispossession: Pakistan's Anti‐Terrorism Act as a means of eviction

The discourse of the ‘war on terror’ fails to address the complex and multifaceted structural violence of landlessness, food insecurity and environmental degradation that afflicts the world. Pakistan, for instance, has been a subject of great discussion and geopolitical analysis as the ground zero in the war against terror. However, the scholarship on terrorism in Pakistan analyzes militant and jihadi groups as discrete agents of primordial conflicts, spy agencies and sectarian rivalries with little analysis of the history of the cold war and the effects of the Afghan war. In this article, the author analyzes how the global ‘war on terror’ has proliferated into seemingly unrelated domains of life, and specifically how anti‐terror security legislation has pulled the rug out from under the most successful peasant land rights movement in Pakistan.     

Soft balancing among weak states? Evidence from Africa

Recent literature on the use of soft balancing to counter the hegemony of the United States has focused primarily on middle powers in Europe and rising powers such as China. But what about weak states? Do they simply go along with the hegemon, or do they challenge its policies despite the odds? And to what extent does the soft balancing argument explain their behaviour? In recent years, several historically friendly African countries have used non‐military means to undermine the unilateral policies of the United States. Leaders in South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria, Tanzania, Mali, Namibia and Niger especially have resisted US demands in areas such as the ‘war on terror’, the International Criminal Court and the US Africa Command. This article seeks to explain the strategies of opposition that some African countries have pursued. It finds that the behaviour is driven both by regional power concerns and by domestic political considerations. Interestingly, public opinion in these relatively democratic countries is motivated by disagreements with US policy and by resentment of the predominance of American power. Thus, the evidence both confirms and challenges the notion of soft balancing. On one hand, the behaviour of African states is driven at least in part by the global balance of power—directly, as leaders respond to power concerns within the continent, and indirectly, as citizens pressure leaders to resist the hegemon. On the other hand, these findings challenge the underlying premise that state behaviour is determined solely by structural concerns. Instead, the oppositional behaviour of African states has both systemic and domestic explanations.     

Counter‐terrorism and the Regulation of Civil Society in the USA

This article examines the impact of counter‐terrorism measures on non‐profit regulation in the USA, where some of the most interventionist legal and policy responses took hold soon after the brutal attacks of September 2001. It highlights the sternness of these measures by comparing the US approach to counter‐terrorism and charity regulation with that of the UK. It suggests that the different institutional arrangements for charity regulation in the two countries account in part for different treatment and policy choices, with implications for civil society groups working domestically and overseas. The article particularly analyses the impact of legislation and policy on the American philanthropic sector, and the responses of civil society to measures enacted and undertaken in the USA. It argues that groups directly affected by the new legislation and hardened policy, especially Muslim charities and some civil liberties group, have openly resisted these measures, while mainstream non‐profit sector and philanthropic institutions have often acquiesced in the introduction of new policies, ‘guidelines’ and legislation, opposing them only when they felt directly threatened.     

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.     

Brown Britain: post‐colonial politics and grand strategy

How do we approach the subject of British grand strategy today? This article seeks a new approach to this question. It argues that there is a gap of grand strategic significance between actually‐existing Britain and the Britain its political elites tend to imagine. The colonial and imperial histories that helped constitute and still shape the contemporary United Kingdom have fallen through this gap. One consequence is a grand strategic vision limited to a choice of partner in decline—Europe or the US. Overlooked are the power political potentialities of post‐colonial generations situated in multiple sites at home and abroad. In search of this potential, we lay the conceptual basis for a strategic project in which the British ‘island subject’ is replaced by a globally networked community of fate: ‘Brown Britain’. This entails reimagining the referent object of British strategy through diaspora economies, diverse histories and pluralized systems of agency. What might such a post‐colonial strategy entail for British policy? We offer initial thoughts and reflect on the often occluded social and political theoretic content of strategic thought.     

A forward strategy of freedom in the Middle East: US democracy promotion and the ‘war on terror’

Following the 11 September terrorist attacks, a belief has emerged that one of the root causes of Islamic extremism lies in the repressive nature of the regimes that populate the Middle East. Thus the spread of democracy has become a major component of the Bush administration's ‘war on terror’ Previously dismissed as Wilsonian idealism, the promotion of democracy is now considered a strategic necessity to address the threat posed by terrorism. Despite the significant role democracy promotion has played in the present foreign policy of the United States, the focus has tended to be on the more controversial policies of preventive warfare and coalitions of the willing. The purpose of this article is to help rectify this imbalance by examining the role the promotion of democracy plays within the current administration's foreign policy in the Middle East. It considers the logic behind America's ‘forward strategy of freedom’ in the Middle East as well as the likelihood of this strategy succeeding.     

Iran's Shortsighted Policies in Iraq: Between Inflaming and Containing of Radical Sunni Islam: 2003–2015

The main goal of the 2003 war with Iraq of the coalition forces led by the United States was to topple Saddam Hussein's regime and establish a new political system that would adopt democratic practices. Iran, a country that deemed Saddam's regime to be a threat, considered this war to be very helpful in many ways — first because it put an end to Clinton's “dual containment” approach and would thus help Iran to become a regional superpower at Iraq's expense. Second, a war with Iraq could put an end to the decades of oppression of the Shi'a community in Iraq. This article argues that Iran's involvement in Iraq's internal affairs created chaos in Iraq and contributed to the sectarian conflict against Sunni terror groups, notably the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), also known by the Arabic name Daesh, a terror group with the most extreme form of Sunni Radical Islam ever known. The sectarian conflict that resulted from the above is now taking place between the Sunnis and the Shi'a of both Persian and Arab backgrounds and this clash could not have become as radical as it is without Iran's aggressive foreign policy. It should, however, be noted that Iran is not the sole player in the country and therefore its part in inflaming sectarian conflicts should be viewed through a realistic prism that allows other forces — domestic and foreign — to be seen as having influenced the events for their benefit.     

Southern (Over) Exposure? Quebec and the Evolution of Canada’s Grand Strategy, 2002–2012

ABSTRACT

One of the most persistent themes in the debate on Canadian foreign policy over the past few decades concerns the influence Quebec is thought to possess over the design and implementation of Canadian foreign and defense policy. Our purpose in this article is to situate this general debate within a more specific context, of Canada’s grand strategic choices as they principally involve the country’s security and defense relations with the US. To do this, we adopt somewhat of a “counterfactual” tack; to wit, we inquire whether, in the absence of Quebec from the Canadian confederation, we should expect to have seen a fundamentally different grand strategy fashioned by Ottawa, one with different significance for relations with the US. We focus on two specific cases, both of which have figured prominently in recent Canadian–American strategic relations: the war in Afghanistan and the invasion of Iraq. We conclude that while there is something to the claim that Quebec can and does boast of a certain “specificity” in the matter of Canada’s grand-strategic preferences, it is hardly the same thing as arguing that the country without Quebec would have adopted policies on both Afghanistan and Iraq that were fundamentally different from the ones it chose to follow.     

Book reviews

Book reviewed in this article: Human rights and ethics Syndromes of corruption: wealth, power and democracy. By Michael Johnston. Gambling on humanitarian intervention: moral hazard, rebellion and civil war. Edited by Timothy W. Crawford and Alan J. Kuperman. Global corruption report 2006: corruption and health. By Transparency International. Child labour and human rights: making children matter. Edited by Burns H. Weston. International law and organization The future of the United Nations: understanding the past to chart a way forward. By Joshua Muravchik. Foreign policy Security strategy and transatlantic relations. Edited by Roland Dannreuther and John Peterson. Conflict, security and armed forces Deadly connections: states that sponsor terrorism. By Daniel Byman. Peace operations seen from below: UN missions and local people. By Béatrice Pouligny. The next attack: the failure of the war on terror and a strategy for getting it right. By Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon. Curbing the spread of nuclear weapons. By Ian Bellany. Annual review of global peace operations 2006. By the Center for International Cooperation. Politics, democracy and social affairs The Blair effect 2001–2005. Edited by Anthony Seldon and Dennis Kavanagh. Ethnicity and cultural politics The illusion of cultural identity. By Jean‐François Bayart. Anti‐Americanism in the Islamic world. Edited by Sigrid Faath. Political economy, economics and development China shakes the world: the rise of a hungry nation. By James Kynge. The white man's burden: why the West's efforts to aid the rest have done so much ill and so little good. By William Easterly. Energy and environment Oil titans: national oil companies in the Middle East. By Valérie Marcel. Half gone: oil, gas, hot air and the global energy crisis. By Jeremy Leggett. The final energy crisis. Edited by Andrew McKillop and Sheila Newman. History Churchill and war. By Geoffrey Best. The war council: McGeorge Bundy, the NSC, and Vietnam. By Andrew Preston. The triumph of military Zionism: nationalism and the origins of the Israeli right. By Colin Shindler. The almost impossible ally: Harold Macmillan and Charles de Gaulle. By Peter Mangold. Europe Germany, pacifism and peace enforcement. By Anja‐Dalgaard Nielsen. Europe as empire: the nature of the enlarged European Union. By Jan Zielonka. Middle East and North Africa The international politics of the Persian Gulf: a cultural genealogy. By Arshin Adib‐Moghaddam. Saudi Arabia: power, legitimacy and survival. By Timothy Niblock. Losing Arab hearts and minds: the coalition, Al‐Jazeera and Muslim public opinion. By Steve Tatham. Palestinian refugee repatriation: global perspectives. Edited by Michael Dumper. Sub‐Saharan Africa African politics in comparative perspective. By Göran Hydén. Africa: a modern history. By Guy Arnold. AIDS in Africa: how the poor are dying. By Nana K. Poku. Asia and Pacific US—Pakistan relationship: Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. By A. Z. Hilali. India—Pakistan negotiations: is past still prologue? By Dennis Kux. New directions in the study of China's foreign policy. Edited by Alastair Iain Johnston and Robert S. Ross. China the balance sheet: what the world needs to know now about the emerging superpower. By C. Fred Bergsten, Bates Gill, Nicholas R. Lardy and Derek Mitchell. Beyond Japan: the dynamics of East Asian regionalism. Edited by Peter J. Katzenstein and Takashi Shiraishi. South Korean engagement policies and North Korea: identities, norms and the Sunshine Policy. By Son Key‐young. North America The case for Goliath: how America acts as the world's government in the 21st century. By Michael Mandelbaum. After the neo‐cons: America at the crossroads. By Francis Fukuyama. Restless giant: the United States from Watergate to Bush v. Gore. By James T. Patterson. US intervention policy and army innovation: from Vietnam to Iraq. By Richard Lock‐Pullan. The peace of illusions: American grand strategy from 1940 to the present. By Christopher Layne. The Republican war on science. By Chris Mooney. Latin America and Caribbean Mixed signals: US human rights policy and Latin America. By Kathryn Sikkink. Latin America's political economy of the possible: beyond good revolutionaries and freemarketeers. By Javier Santiso.     

Osama or the Georges: Shifting Threats and State Policy towards Civil Society in Uzbekistan

In examining the relationship between the War on Terror and restrictions on civil society, Uzbekistan is an important case, given its emergence as a key player in the operations in Afghanistan, its own terrorist threat, and its particularly stringent policy towards civil society. This article argues that while the ‘crackdown’ on civil society has followed a similar pattern to that of other countries where civil society is perceived as harbouring a threat, there has been a significant shift since the War on Terror began as to the perceived nature of the threat. At the time of 9/11, the government of Uzbekistan took Islamic terrorism to be the main threat; yet within the space of just over two years a new threat was perceived. Western support for civil society, a concession made to the US‐led coalition in return for support against Islamic terrorism, emerged as an even greater threat to the regime. It is this perceived threat that has primarily driven state policy towards civil society, raising important questions about how democracy promotion can be best taken forward in the post‐9/11 world.     

The evolution of threat narratives in the age of terror: understanding terrorist threats in Britain

This article examines the evolution of threat narratives in the age of terror, focusing on the United Kingdom. The analysis is broken down into two sections. The first part of the article presents four distinct and yet overlapping notions of the threats which have influenced both the West, and more specifically the UK, in debates about counterterrorism since 9/11. The four threat narratives—Al‐Qaeda as a central organization; decentralized terror networks; home grown; and finally apocalyptic threats—have all been used to inform counter terror measures in the West. The second section of the article argues that terrorism has evolved strategically, and is hybridized owing to the security environment—interpenetrated by globalization, digital media and information communication technologies—in which it occurs. The article concludes with a preliminary discussion of some strategic and operational themes which have influenced the form and character of terrorism and insurgency, exploring how they impact on the ways in which threats are constituted and countered, illustrating that what is new maybe the nature of our own fears.     

Strategy and contingency

The determination that strategy should have a long‐term predictive quality has left strategy seemingly wanting when having to address what are currently called ‘strategic shocks’, such as the recent Arab Spring and the NATO commitment to Libya. The focus on grand strategy, particularly in the US, is responsible for this trend. Its endeavour to mitigate risk in the national interest is inherently conservative, rather than opportunistic, and it is favoured and probably required by powers that are committed to the status quo, that need to manage diminishing resources, and that are dealing with relative decline. Strategy as traditionally but more narrowly defined by generals for use in a military context, is much more exploitative and proactive. Precisely because it is designed to be used in war it presumes that its function is offensive, that it will have to deal with chance and contingency, and that its aim is change. Its task is to deal with the uncertainties of war, and to respond to them while holding on to long‐term perspectives. Clausewitz addressed the issue of ‘war plans’ in book VIII of On war, but the thinker who did most to inject planning into European strategic thought was Jomini. His influence has permeated much of American military thinking. The effect of nuclear planning in the Cold War was to ensure that strategy at the operational level became conflated with broader views of grand strategy—not least when the Cold War itself provided apparent continuity to strategic thought. Since 1990 we have been left with a view of strategy which fails to respond sensibly to chance and accident. Strategy needs context, and a sense of where and against whom it is to be applied. Its core task is to embrace contingency while holding on to long‐term national interests.     

The United States, The United Nations and Iraq: 'Multilateralism of a kind'

Much is made of the need for any second war against Iraq (following Desert Storm of 1991) to be sanctioned by a resolution of the UN Security Council, approved necessarily by all five Permanent Members. Yet only two of the five, the USA and the UK, show any enthusiasm for renewed war in the Persian Gulf; and British policy is undeniably following rather than leading American actions on the diplomatic and military fronts. What are the sources of this American policy? Some critics say oil; the latest arguments of proponents invoke humanitarian concerns; somewhere between the two are those who desire ‘regime change’ to create the economic and political conditions in which so‐called western political, economic and social values can flourish. To understand the present crisis and its likely evolution this article examines American relations with Iraq in particular, the Persian Gulf more generally and the Middle East as a region since the Second World War. A study of these international relations combined with a critical approach to the history of American actions and attitudes towards the United Nations shows that the United States continues to pursue a diplomacy blending, as occasion suits, the traditional binaries of multilateralism and unilateralism—yet in the new world‐wide ‘war on terrorism’. The question remains whether the chosen means of fighting this war will inevitably lead to a pyrrhic victory for the United States and its ad hoc allies in the looming confrontation with Iraq.