Constructivism, US foreign policy and the ‘war on terror’

There is no doubt that the decision to launch a global ‘war on terror’ was a historic moment in US foreign policy which was to have profound consequences both internationally and domestically. To date, the ‘war on terror’ has entailed two major wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, significant military operations in Pakistan, Somalia, the Philippines, Georgia and elsewhere, a global intelligence and rendition programme, the expansion of US military bases to new regions, increased military assistance to new and old client regimes, an extensive international public diplomacy programme, the articulation of new national security doctrines and priorities, and a major domestic reorganisation of and increased investment in the military, domestic security agencies, policing, the legal system and numerous other agencies – among a great many other important developments. It is no exaggeration to suggest that the ‘war on terror’ is now comparable to the Cold War in terms of overall expenditure and its impact on all aspects of US foreign policy, external relations and domestic politics. And yet, understanding or explaining these developments is not a straightforwardtask. It is not obvious that attacks by a small group of dissidents aggrieved by the US military presence in the Arabian Peninsula on 11 September 2001, as devastating as they were, should have generated such an expansive and far-reaching response from the world’s only superpower, or that the response should have involved all of the specific elements we have thus far witnessed. In the first place, as ongoing contestations over the meaning and significance of the Pearl Harbor attack (Rosenberg 2003) or the Kennedy assassination clearly demonstrate, acts of political violence do not necessarily ‘speak for themselves’; they have to be narrated and interpreted in meaningful ways within a particular social, cultural and historical context. The attacks on New York and Washington were potentially open to a number of different interpretations, only one of which was as an ‘act of war’ necessitating a military response. The choice to launch a potentially unlimited and global war is all the more puzzling given the relatively limited extent of the terrorist threat to human life (certainly compared to climate change, disease or poverty, for example) and the ultimately foreseeable consequences of specific actions such as intervention in Iraq, the Guantanamo Bay detentions, extraordinary rendition, the announcement of the Bush Doctrine, and so on. And it is certainly far from clear that the elimination or even significant reduction of the terrorist threat has been achieved through the means the Bush administration and its allies have employed in the ‘war on terror’. A key puzzle therefore, lies in understanding why the ‘war on terror’ was chosen overother foreign policy or counter-terror frameworks by key foreign policy decisionmakers, and why it took the form that it did. Traditional accounts of internationalrelations and security (most notably Realism) would provide at best a partial and at worst a misleading account of the US government’s foreign policy choices and practices in this context, emphasising as they do the central role of material distributions of power and the rational calculation of the national interest.1 In this chapter, we argue that a Constructivist perspective provides a productive and informative analytical lens through which to understand how the ‘war on terror’ emerged as the dominant US foreign policy discourse after the events of 11 September 2001, taking on the particular form/s that it did. We suggest that a focus on ideational factors characteristic of a Constructivist approach to international relations – narrative, framing, identity, norms, contestation and negotiation, among others – provides particularly important insights into the emergence and institutionalisation of the ‘war on terror’ in the US context. The chapter begins with a necessarily brief overview of Constructivism, outlining itsorigins, variants, shared assumptions and ontology. The second section examines the application of Constructivist insights to US foreign policy in the ‘war on terror’, focusing in particular on the inter-subjective social construction of the ‘war on terror’ itself. In the conclusion, we reflect on the utility of the Constructivist approach.