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In chapter four, “Biosecurity Noir: WMDs in a World without Borders,” Masco singles out concrete evidence of the amplification of the invisible biothreat triggered by the receipt of a few anthrax letters in 2001 to support his argument about the made-up ambiguous link to WMD. The author highlights that by proliferating visions (depictions) of catastrophic danger, biosecurity created a militarized response of global preemption in the name of domestic defense. Masco argues his case well and sharply, providing compelling evidence, but his interpretations of evidence at times seems exaggerated and biased. Though Masco does not deny the existence of the real threats, his recognition of them is too brief, while consideration of an alternative view is rather weak. He acknowledges that terrorist violence is not fictitious but insists that for the most part the United States inflated threats and politically exploited potential danger to declare and maintain the state of emergency. Such focus on the amplification of threats seems to suggest that for the most part the threats are not that real. Masco suggests that the link between terrorists and WMD is mainly inflated. Yet there is a real global concern about 2,000 tons of highly-radioactive nuclear materials being stored in poorly secured civilian locations around the world. The book never mentions the threat of a dirty bomb, which today is viewed as a more likely occurrence than an atomic bomb explosion. The IAEA cites a hundred reported thefts of nuclear materials on average each year. There is a good chance terrorists can get their hands on enough nuclear materials to produce a dirty bomb. The United States meets these challenges with increased international cooperation. Masco’s main argument that “the US is no longer constrained by territorial limits” is exaggerated. The only two cases cited when the United States appeared unconstrained were the invasion of Iraq. Though the invasion of Iraq was opposed by some U.S. allies (France, Germany, and New Zealand), it was still a combined force coalition from the U.S., the UK, Australia, and Poland. The United States does not have an unrestricted reach as Masco wants to depict. It is constrained by sovereignty and territorial integrity of other stable states. The unstable nuclear regimes in North Korea and Iran present that existential nuclear threat to the U.S. described by Masco, but the United States is in no rush to invade these countries. According to the anticipatory and preemptive logic Masco prescribes to the United States, it could have already invaded those states to prevent the disaster. Another limitation of his argument is that he paints the nuclear and counterterror states as consistent through all the presidencies, thus, drawing all administrations under a common denominator. Under Obama, the counterterror state became a liberal democracy again. The ‘unrestrained’ theater of operation has shrunk by ending the presence in Iraq and withdrawing from Afghanistan, even though our presence there could have been extended based on the preemption logic. Obama recognized the faults of the Bush administration in acting unilaterally, scaled back stability operations, and emphasized sharing the costs and responsibilities of global leadership. The emergence of the real ISIL threat undermines the book’s core argument of threat amplification, the U.S. preemption logic of response, and unconstrained global reach. The U.S.-led global effort against ISIL amounts to more than 50 nations, which shows the unified nature of the fight. Masco asserts that U.S. superpower depends on the ability of the state to monopolize a discourse of danger, but he doesn’t discuss how the United States succeeded in doing that. Masco could have developed his argument by tracing how the United States was able to use its soft power to mobilize like-minded states to agree with U.S. hegemony on WOT. It will be interesting to trace the U.S. internalization of fear and terror. He could have examined how allies responded to U.S. domestic mobilization of its population and whether other states imitated U.S. emotional management projects to mobilize their own populations. This would boost his argument that the U.S. was able to project its power on the global scale. In Theatre of Operations, Masco makes a compelling argument about the creation of the unrestrained theater of operations via domestication of fear and terror carried over from the Cold War days. His anthropological study reveals the extent to which a democracy is willing to use fear to assure the core principle of the social contract, defined by Hobbes as the exchange of public obedience for collective security. A democracy that chooses to be preoccupied with security risks to forgo core democratic values resulting in the lack of transparency, restriction of free flow of information, and negligence of non-military threats—no less threatening than nuclear terrorism. Making criticism of U.S. actions the main focus of the book, however, Masco’s interpretations are not properly balanced and sometimes appear biased. Still, reading Masco’s insight of the purpose of U.S. actions in the post-9/11 context offers opportunities to think critically about the effects of 9/11 emotional reprogramming of society and state of emergencies in U.S. history.

However institutions may also be designed and used precisely to correct individual bias or offset cognitive limitations, as Bendor and Hammond show in their influential critique of Allison.82 Bureaucratic procedures are often designed to collect and disseminate information, evaluate options, and study the consequences of choice more systematically and thoroughly than a single and especially “intuitive” decision maker can do. Contestation between rival departments can also lead to the airing and resolution of differing views, leading to more “rational” decisions. What appear to be slow, dysfunctional, and contentious procedures from a rationalist perspective may be quite effective and appropriate if we begin with the assumption that individuals working within complex organizations are vulnerable to cognitive biases, misperception, mistaken beliefs, and outright error. Bureaucratic procedures in effect transform possible System 1 decisions at the level of the individual into slow, agonizing, but more rational System 2 policies at the level of the aggregate. This suggests the counterintuitive possibility that policy can be more “rational” than any of the individuals involved, at least in settings where institutions successfully incentivize robust decision-making processes.

Fear and Threat Perception. Among the emotions generally considered to be basic, the impact of fear is the most widely studied. Fear has been central to the study of foreign policy and international politics. From Thucydides, the great student of the Peloponnesian Wars, to Hobbes, who wrote about the state of anarchy that induced fear, to Morgenthau, the twentieth-century classical realist, who started his analysis of international politics with a Hobbesian analysis of international anarchy that generated fear and an unending search for power, realists have premised their analyses of international politics on the ubiquity of fear. In these realist and rationalist accounts, however, fear remains an assumption, unexplored, rather than a dynamic process that is experienced.

Neuropsychologists and behavioral economists treat fear very differently. Fear is conditioned in part by our evolutionary makeup and is frequently evoked by crude or subliminal cues. Fear typically peaks just before a threat is experienced and is highly dependent on mental imagery and vividness. It is, of course, highly adaptive; fear heightens attention and vigilance, and prepares people to respond to what they perceive as imminent danger. Neuroscientists have now demonstrated that fear conditioning, however, may be permanent, or at least far longer lasting than other kinds of learning. “To the extent that these differences exist between the calculus of objective risk and the determinants of fear, and to the extent that fear does play an important part in risk-related behaviors,” argues Loewenstein and his colleagues, “behavior in the face of risk is unlikely to be well-described by traditional consequentialist models” (2008: 280). Fear, in other words, last longer than the threat and can become a learned response that is embedded over time.

Desecuritization causes depoliticization---removes the politics of threat management from the public view which link turns their impacts and allows elite control

That’s Van Rythoven

Once we attempt to enact an ethics of responsibility that challenges existing political ontologies, especially nationalist ones, a new danger appears: it seems unmooring. By playing out what Connolly calls 'a politics of disturbance through which sedimented identities and moralities are rendered more alert to the deleterious effects of their naturalisation upon difference' and 'a politics of enactment through which new possibilities of being are propelled into established constellations', the new ethics produces uncertainty - political and ontological. 'The politics of disturbance can backfire', he writes, 'inducing that identity panic upon which the politics of fundamentalism feeds'. By antagonising conservatives and provoking them to cling to fundamentalist certitudes, the deployment of such an ethics may unwittingly reinforce the very politics it is seeking to transform. The Israeli settler lobby, and the US government's fundamentalist faith in the utility of military violence as a panacea for insecurity and uncertainty, are powerful contemporary examples of this problem. As Michael Barnett suggests, the post-Oslo process exacerbated such problems: the growing divisions within Israeli society exemplified by Yitzhak Rabin's assassination in fact 'grew more severe, in no small measure due to his secular and liberal response'.84

Buber senses this problem in advance, arguing that a movement from a form of existence based on I—It to one that privileges the You forsakes a world that is 'ordered', 'detached' and 'somewhat reliable' for one that 'cannot be surveyed', that must live with contingency and surprise. This, he argues importantly, is still better, because it holds the promise of a more durable and stable world order:

Looking ahead, is the American liberal martial combination likely to endure? The answer is probably not. Most importantly, the ability of the US to win wars has declined significantly. Vietnam, Iraq and most likely Afghanistan defy the successful application of American military power. Also, the ‘liberty gradient’ which was once so pronounced has declined with the spread of liberal democracy. The United States is surrounded by democracies, a novel experience. Although this spread of democracy has long been a goal of the United States, the significant realization of this goal leaves the United States somewhat disoriented, and its familiar patterns of mobilization no longer seem so relevant.

Tragedy is largely absent from the existing normative debate on securitization. Instead, the debate has become organized around whether securitization is a “negative” or “positive” concept. In the classic formulation, the Copenhagen School points to how “[n]ational security should not be idealized. It works to silence opposition and has given power-holders many opportunities to exploit ‘threats’ for domestic purposes” (Buzan et al. 1998, 29; Williams 2003). Securitization has negative effects when it functions as “a political technology that consistently favors the interests of the powerful and enables violence and exclusion” (McDonald 2015, 154). Correspondingly, Wæver admits a “‘bias’ for desecuritization” or de-escalation, although he quickly notes that this is “not always better than securitization” (Wæver 2011, 469). At the same time, a number of approaches point to cases where securitization is ethically desirable. In her compelling consequentialist argument, for example, Floyd asks “whether the consequences of, and the gains from, the securitization are preferable relative to the consequences and gains from a politicization” (2007, 338). Relatedly, Roe contends that “the extent to which securitization necessitates a lack of openness and deliberation has been overexaggerated” and suggests it may even elicit unappreciated forms of cooperation (2012, 250).

The problem with the negative/positive debate is that it appears to impose moral certitude where there often is none. Registering securitizing moves as clearly positive or negative can be difficult because their effects can be mixed and temporally distant. The difficulty in making this determination may also be an indicator of the uncertainty surrounding securitizing moves. In the end, because the outcomes of security claims are uncertain, we cannot know in advance whether they will lead to positive or negative consequences. Instead, we should entertain a distinctly tragic vision of securitization that councils an ethic of self-limitation. The core of this tragic vision is a recognition that the powerful allure of using security talk to “gain control” over a situation will always be present (Wæver 1995, 54). However, we should also recognize that this control is always illusory because it presumes all of its effects can be predetermined. The tragedy of securitization is that the failure to recognize how contingency imposes limits on action lures political actors into a false sense of certainty and the conviction that they can determine the future. This leads to a hubristic adoption of “misplaced certainty,” such as when Vice President Dick Cheney declared in August of 2002 that “there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction” (quoted in Mitzen and Schweller 2011, 3). A similar situation emerged when Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld subsequently claimed in November that the Iraq conflict could be “[f]ive days or five weeks or five months, but it certainly isn’t going to last any longer than that” (Esterbrook 2002). A similarly misplaced certainty is evident in US General Stanley McChrystal’s assurances to the Obama administration in 2009 that a surge in troops and resources were critical to stave off American defeat in Afghanistan (Woodward 2009). More recently, it is visible in President Donald Trump’s 2018 assertion that he was “100 percent right” on the weaknesses of the Iran nuclear deal (CNN 2018).

Nevertheless, the conflation of ontological and physical security in the extant literature has constrained the theorisation of the ways in which processes of securitisation/desecuritisation and identity construction impinge on one another. First, much of the critical literature on security has reduced identity either to a subject position constituted by discourses of physical security or to a sector of physical security. Those who have focused on discourses of security have emphasised ‘how representations of danger make us what we are’ and how ‘politics of security, constituting and mobilizing difference … specifies who we are and what we are allowed to be’ (Dillon 1996: 34–35). For example, Maria Stern (2006: 192) has traced how identity emerges in the context of discourses of security and is essential to their functioning: ‘In order for the subject of security to be secured, it must be named, represented, and given an identity’. In her conceptualisation, the definition of an Other has followed the naming of danger and the identification of threat and thus the Other necessarily becomes radical and dangerous. Similarly, in securitisation theory, identity is only one among the many issues that can be framed as security issues, and it enters the picture only if and when it is explicitly discussed as a security issue. According to Wæver (1998: 69), identity remains an ‘external factor’ when other issues are being securitised or desecuritised. Similarly, Williams (2003) has neglected the question of whether and how identity allows for desecuritisation, and has focused instead on how securitisation reifies identities and challenges their negotiability and flexibility.

Thus, critical security theorists have predominantly focused on the state of ontological security/physical (in)security, and on how discourses and practices of physical (in)security condition and constrain processes of identity formation and the pursuit of ontological security. As a result, the security of the capacity to constitute a distinct Self, that is, ontological security, has been conflated with discourses of physical (in)security and acts of securitisation. The possibility for attaining ontological security in alternative states of physical security, and in particular, the question of whether and how the pursuit of a stable identity allows for a move to a state of ontological security/physical asecurity have remained unexplored.

This is not merely an inside baseball question for security studies scholars and watchers of American politics—discursive framing matters in concrete ways. How actions are politically constituted largely determine the appropriate response. We have seen how acts of terrorism are increasingly framed as an act of war, virtually necessitating war in response—France’s response to the Paris attacks mirrors in word and deed the US response in 2001. Given the twin focuses of US security policy on cyber operations and terrorism, Russian information operations pose a unique threat. If it becomes commonly accepted that Russia attacked and damaged the self-proclaimed core of American exceptionalism—its commitment to democracy via free and fair elections—one can easily see that being appropriated legally and politically as an “act of war.” If combined with traditional acts of violence in response—such as those the Russian government has utilized in the recent past (e.g., assassinations) in Europe and the United States—the lines could blur. Even worse, political actors on both sides could see it as in their interest to deliberately blur these lines for domestic political gain. It does not take a significant imagination to consider a future United States government responding to such acts of war by the Russian government with a proxy war in Syria, Ukraine, the Baltics, or elsewhere, translating rhetoric into traditional kinetic warfare. This is, after all, the country with which the United States has already once fought a “Cold War,” willingly risking nuclear escalation to contain Russia’s global influence. While this scenario is perhaps somewhat fanciful it is by no means unimaginable. And when compared to what was considered unimaginable three years ago, it is decidedly less so, given the “interesting times” we’ve been “cursed” to live in.¶ The supposed “curse” of “interesting times” is worth reflecting on. In popular usage, this “curse” has typically been attributed to “ancient China.” Yet, despite the cliché’s lengthy history, no scholar has been able to find evidence to verify this claim. In other words, the “ancient Chinese curse” is only “ancient” and “Chinese” among non-Chinese in the present-day United States. It’s a false past, deployed in a specific present, used to signify something temporally universal—the challenge of living through changing times.¶ The point I wish to underscore is this: the present is always a time of change and divergence, uncertainty and the new. Regardless of how we choose to define it, whatever borders we draw around it, whoever “our” present includes and more importantly, whoever it excludes, it is a crucial time of politics. Unless IR scholarship learns to take the present more seriously, we will face the same challenges and experience similar dissatisfaction the next time we confront apparently seismic changes in world politics. And when we do, we will once again wonder why it is that we’ve generated so much valuable scholarship, yet have such a hard time using it.

However, there are significant problems with Mearsheimer’s ontology—and, indeed, with the ontology of realism in general. To understand why this is so, we must examine realism’s midcentury origins. Realism was developed in the 1940s and 1950s by a cohort of German émigrés scarred by the international relations of the 1930s, a decade in which two great powers—Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan—launched a devastating world war that killed and maimed tens of millions. It is not surprising that in response to the horrors of World War II—and the inability of the League of Nations to prevent it—thinkers such as Morgenthau, John Herz, Hans Speier, and Arnold Wolfers developed a theory of international politics that was incredibly pessimistic about the possibilities of international cooperation and which considered great power wars endemic features of geopolitics. These beliefs formed the core of realism and remain at the center of its philosophy.¶ These convictions are problematic, however, because they reify a peculiar historical moment as ontological reality. As Mearsheimer succinctly puts it, “realism is a timeless theory” that is true throughout all eras of history. But as the historian Nicolas Guilhot has shown, this belief “places limits upon the kind of political goals that one can pursue and . . . makes it difficult if not impossible to pursue positive or transformative goals.” Thus Mearsheimer maintains that human beings will never be able to create a world state capable of transcending international anarchy and are instead doomed to fight war after war until one, presumably, finally wipes out the entire species. There is a reason that Mearsheimer’s most famous book is titled The Tragedy of Great Power Politics.¶ From a historical perspective, though, Mearsheimer’s pessimism appears unwarranted. If anything, the broad sweep of human history evinces a trend toward ever-larger political units that encompass wider and wider geographic and cultural spaces. Human beings, in other words, have repeatedly built new solidarities that at one time appeared impossible. Why would this process stop at the nation-state, a political form that is only 225 years old? Even if one believes a world state is an unrealistic fantasy, why is it impossible to create novel political constellations based on mutual respect and cooperation? Simply put, I am not convinced that Mearsheimer is correct to claim that human beings are congenitally unable to build regional, continental, and, perhaps, global political communities that, eventually, transcend war. While this process will no doubt be difficult and painful, there is no reason to believe it is impossible—unless you think it always is, and will forever be, the 1930s.¶ Realism’s midcentury origins also lead Mearsheimer to emphasize worst-case scenarios. This is clear in his anxiety over China’s rise, which he considers a threat to U.S. hegemony, and hence to the U.S. national interest. Beyond the fact that it seems to me profoundly unrealistic to believe Americans will indefinitely support a U.S. military presence in East Asia, it is unclear why, exactly, the emergence of another great power far from our shores threatens the United States. Indeed, a negotiated security transition in East Asia (the United States maintains approximately 375,000 personnel in its Indo-Pacific Command) would free up funds that could be used to bolster the social safety net and address domestic income inequality, two of the most pressing issues of our time. It could also make China a true stakeholder in maintaining international peace. Furthermore, there are historical reasons to be wary of worst-case scenarios. During the Cold War, the mistaken belief that the Soviet Union was necessarily an existential enemy bent on the United States’s destruction engendered costly arms races, prevented the sort of honest negotiations that could have ended the U.S.-Soviet struggle in the 1950s, and encouraged Americans to create a massive global basing system (currently about 800 bases in dozens of countries). More recently, the fear of another 9/11 led to the fruitless “War on Terror” and its many violations of civil liberties that Mearsheimer rightly deplores. This is all to say that we must not allow worst-case scenarios to determine U.S. foreign policy. In the entirety of its existence, one could argue that the United States’s survival has been urgently threatened by external forces only twice—during the War of 1812 and during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. Our average condition is one of safety, and it is from this base that we must develop our grand strategy.¶ Mearsheimer’s—and many realists’—obsession with worst-case scenarios emerges from the assumption that “most states, most of the time, follow balance-of-power logic.” This is simply not true. As manifold historians have demonstrated, decision-makers pursue policies for a diversity of reasons, whether they be ideological, economic, developmentalist, racial, gendered, or, perhaps most importantly, political. To take a famous example, Lyndon B. Johnson escalated the Vietnam War not only—or even mostly—because of the “domino theory,” but because he was anxious about his political future. In retrospect, even the Cold War—the balance-of-power struggle par excellence—seems to have been mostly about the ideological fight between capitalism and communism. Ironically, Mearsheimer himself has recognized the limits of the balance of power as an explanans of state behavior, co-writing a book about the pernicious effects of the “Israel lobby” on U.S. foreign policy. Indeed, in The Great Delusion he admits that an important way to combat liberal hegemony “is to build a counter-elite that can make the case” for a heterodox approach to world affairs. By Mearsheimer’s own admission, then, the balance of power often does not explain U.S. international relations. A central category of realist thinking about geopolitics is thus undercut, which implies that the pessimism of realism might be unwarranted.

In addition, as the state is hijacked by the financial-military-industrial complex, the “most crucial decisions regarding national policy are not made by representatives, but by the financial and military elites.”53 Such massive inequality and the suffering and political corruption it produces point to the need for critical analysis in which the separation of power and politics can be understood. This means developing terms that clarify how power becomes global even as politics continues to function largely at the national level, with the effect of reducing the state primarily to custodial, policing, and punishing functions—at least for those populations considered disposable.

The state exercises its slavish role in the form of lowering taxes for the rich, deregulating corporations, funding wars for the benefit of the defense industries, and devising other welfare services for the ultra-rich. There is no escaping the global politics of finance capital and the global network of violence it has produced. Resistance must be mobilized globally and politics restored to a level where it can make a difference in fulfilling the promises of a global democracy. But such a challenge can only take place if the political is made more pedagogical and matters of education take center stage in the struggle for desires, subjectivities, and social relations that refuse the normalizing of violence as a source of gratification, entertainment, identity, and honor.

The ‘political life of methods’ draws attention to the role that methods can play in challenging and changing dominant productions of (in)security. Methods do not just carry substantive assumptions about the world; they also have effects for social and political life. This demands that critical security methods consider not only the ‘situated-ness’ and limits of knowledge and the contestations surrounding methods, but also include a sensitivity to potentially subjugated, silenced or marginalized practices and knowledges. Unease with scientificity and the dominance it entails upon other forms of knowledge has often surfaced in critical approaches. For example, feminist scholars have rightly pointed out that scientific knowledge entails its own forms of masculine domination (Tickner 2006; Sylvester 1994). They have led a call for a methodological privileging of subordinated positions, in which knowledge about the world can be formulated from the position of those who are politically as well as epistemologically marginalized. As such, feminism has been most outspoken about developing knowledge that is grounded in the lifeworld of women who are often absent from security knowledge (Enloe 2007; Haraway 1988). Poststructuralist approaches similarly experimented with methods of intertextuality and the breaking down of disciplinary distinctions between genres of text and knowledge to demonstrate how worlds are not simply created by political and security systems and elites but are also brought into being in mundane practices that are often seen as insignificant in the security studies field, such as sports, travel writing, diaries, popular TV series and so on (see e.g., Lisle 2013; Rowley and Weldes 2012; Kiersey and Neumann 2013; Derian and Shapiro 1989). Their methods also made visible how instituted scholarly methods tend to reproduce dominant power relations and the legitimating frameworks that sustain them. Disrupting the latter by introducing genre-crossing methods aimed at creating the possibility for subjugated knowledge and practice to gain presence in the scholarly field of security knowledge.

The political life of methods thus refers to reflexivity about the power relations and habitus that methods produce and sustain. This means proactively positioning oneself through the development of methods so as to challenge familiar and instituted processes of validation of what matters for security practice and studies. A key question for critical scholars, in spite of their IR/security studies heritage, is what it means to start not here in ‘the international’ but elsewhere. Feminist, Marxist, and postcolonial approaches share this mobilizing of a distinct positioning, as does the use of popular culture and the recent experimenting with autoethnographic methods to understand international politics. For critical security scholars this can mean starting with situated practices of struggle rather than security (see Chapter 6). For example, developing critical mapping methods when analysing geopolitical security practice or the reification of territoriality through border control regimes often work by making visible the victims and injustices produced by security practices (Chapter 2). Or, it can require that critical security scholars undo security as an object and experiment with methods that analyse security practices as more dispersed and possibly not primarily intelligible as ‘security’ (see Chapter 6). Another way of taking a critical position through method is to experiment with collaboration in order to challenge the limits of individualizing forms of knowledge production in scholarly fields organized through new management practices (Chapter 8).

The imaginaries of biological threats and the prominence of these issues on the political agenda of Western governments have undergone major changes. What started to be seen as a security concern has been not only a deliberate spread of disease, but also much broader scope of biological risks related to the increasing global circulation of bodies, materials, and technologies (Braun, 2007; Cooper, 2006). The narratives of how biological agents may be used in political violence changed further in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks on the United States and the anthrax letters incidents as a part of a broader concern that malign nonstate actors may seek to develop and use WMD (Guillemin, 2005; Wright, 2006). The taxonomy of biological threats and risks started to increasingly include not only biological warfare, but also biological terrorism, biological crimes, laboratory incidents, and dual-use research, and some add even naturally occurring pandemics to this issue-area as well (Koblentz, 2010). To address biological risks and threats, many governments started to develop new strategies for managing these issues (Bonin, 2007; Lentzos and Rose, 2009).

These changes have been compiled under the notion of biosecurity (Lakoff and Collier, 2008; Rappert and Gould, 2009). Biosecurity embodies a new approach to secure society against biological threats and risks, legitimizing a state of continuous bio-emergency (Braun, 2007). As such, biosecurity leads to not only new understanding of values and vulnerabilities in security politics but also new techniques of anticipatory governance (cf. Anderson, 2010), which justify the establishment of new preparedness policies and practices crossing the boundaries of disarmament, policing, public health, science governance, etc. (Caduff, 2012; Cooper, 2006; Dobson et al., 2013).

Our analysis sheds light on how pandemic influenza has been conceived of as a political problem by the WHO and, by extension, one that requires a particular form of intervention. The texts analyzed here construct specific versions of reality that are implicated in both the problematization of, and the solution to, a future pandemic. This in-depth empirical work contributes to contemporary understandings of biopolitical regulation by exposing the organizing logic underpinning preparedness, and by considering the possible implications of this imagining for intervention into a future global pandemic. The construction of the natural features of the influenza virus in terms of its potential to transform into the next pandemic virus and spread across multiple boundaries, necessitates the integration of preparedness activities (characterized by flexibility and contingency) into everyday practice. Thus, the potentiality and inherent uncertainty of the virus becomes at once the target of intervention and representative of the underlying reasoning of response mechanisms.

Pandemic preparedness discourse operates as a technology of (in)security that renders the uncertainty of pandemic emergence governable. The threat of pandemic influenza to the health of the global population is conceived of, and responded to, through specification of the very features of the virus and its potential to disrupt society in numerous ways. The construction of the virus, both in terms of its pandemic potentiality and its capacity to transgress corporeal and territorial boundaries, is key in this regard; these features reveal the interconnectedness of territories, and how such interconnectedness constitute zones of vulnerability to pandemic emergence, and thus threats to global health.

Ideation and hegemony are also evident politically speaking. Economic neoliberalism’s political counterpart, democracy, is a parallel projection of global governance. Democracy is advanced, rightly or wrongly, as the means by which we may secure a less violent interstate system, as the institutional architecture in which to embed liberal economic practices; and as a panacea for producing peace in conflict and post-conflict environments (Paris 2004; Chesterman 2004; Sorensen 2oo6).Western states and international institutions coerce democratic development through lending conditionality, human rights bodies observe concordance with democratic practices concerning prison conditions, media freedom and judicial impartiality, and democratic standards like accountability and transparency are applied in Weberian fashion to audit, evaluate, reward and punish conformity and non-conformity with liberal values and practices. Even where the evidence shows that political liberalization fails to change elite behaviour, or fails to enhance everyday lives in any meaningful way, the idea of liberal democracy and the Liberal Peace enjoys institutional, productive and ideational hegemony and authority (Roberts 2008a; Richmond 2008). Global governance is biopolitical in this sense: it disciplines the international system into conforming to liberal political values, reaching into supposedly sovereign territory and, where conformity is absent, punishing a state and its people. Transiting states are audited for such conformity; there is no shortage of organizations in the West, public and private, that scrutinize the Other for conformity with global governance demands. Transparency International, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the World Bank — all act to check that particular liberal political and economic processes are being adhered to, with requisite punishments for nonconformity. The power of global governance is profoundly capillary in this sense; but it is focused primarily on top-down institutional transformation that anticipates trickle-down democracy. In practice, liberal peace is often a limited peace for a limited minority, since institutional democracy is not meaningful in any immediate sense for the majority of a ‘democratizing’ society because its top-down institutional metropolitan emphasis has very limited impact on urgent everyday needs in very poor societies, since immediate—to—medium-term needs are normally governed by and a product of access to socio-economic resources, rather than abstract political rights (Roberts 2oo8c5 Mac Ginty 2008). Thus, both political and economic liberalism are advanced as means to ends as well as ends in themselves. Gill calls this the ‘new constitutionalism’, which is ‘the political project of attempting to make transnational Liberalism, and if possible liberal democratic capitalism, the sole model for future development’ (1995: 412), in a discourse that parallels Tom Young’s consideration of the ‘Liberal Project’ as a means of assimilating the non—liberal Other into ‘Westernity’ (I004). The means by which they are propelled are the institutions and productive values of global governance with the explicit intention of disciplining and assimilating the non-liberal Other. Global governance, then, can be understood as the ideationally hegemonic biopolitical process by which neoliberalism disciplines and punishes polities, economies and societies globally through asymmetrically orientated public and private international institutions.

Pinker’s establishment ideology kicks-in very clearly in his comparative treatment of communism, on the one hand, and democracy and capitalism, on the other. He is explicit that whereas communism is a “utopian” and dangerous “ideology” from which most of the world’s serious violence allegedly flowed during the past century, democracy, capitalism, “markets,” “gentle commerce,” and the like, are all tied to liberalism—or more exactly to “classical liberalism.”[133] These institutional forms are not the result of ideologies, much less utopian and dangerous; they are the historically more advanced permutations of the Leviathan that help to elicit those components of the neurobiology of peaceableness (or “better angels” as opposed to “inner demons”) for which the human brain has been naturally selected over evolutionary time. Hence, they are sources of the alleged decline in violence, and their spread is a force for positive and more peaceful change in the world.[134]¶ Not so communism. At the outset of Chapter 6, “The New Peace,” Pinker approvingly quotes Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s line that, unlike the communists, “Shakespeare’s evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses [b]ecause they had no ideology” driving them. (295) In discussing the alleged mental traits of the members of a society mobilized to commit genocide, he argues that “Utopian creeds that submerge individuals into moralized categories may take root in powerful regimes and engage their full destructive might,” and highlights “Marxism during the purges, expulsions, and terror-famines in Stalin’s Soviet Union, Mao’s China, and Pol Pot’s Cambodia.” (328) In his 2002 book, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, he devoted several pages to what he called the “Marxist genocides of the twentieth century,” and noted that “Historians are currently debating whether the Communists’ mass-executions, forced marches, slave labor, and man-made famines led to one hundred million deaths or ‘only’ twenty-five million.”[135] And in the section of the current book titled “The Trajectory of Genocide,” Pinker cites the authority of the “democratic peace” theorist and “atrocitologist” Rudolph Rummel, who in his 1994 book Death By Government wrote that whereas “totalitarian communist governments slaughter their people by the tens of millions[,]…many democracies can barely bring themselves to execute serial murderers.”[136] (357)¶ As we have seen, Pinker rewrites history to accommodate this familiar establishment perspective, so that the Cold War was rooted in communist expansionism and U.S. efforts at containment, and the several million deaths in the Korean and Vietnam wars were attributable to the communists’ fanatical unwillingness to surrender to superior force, not to anti-communist and racist attitudes that facilitated the U.S. military’s mass killings of distant peoples. He deals with U.S. state-capitalism’s support and sponsorship of the corrupt open-door dictatorships of Suharto, Marcos, Mobutu, Pinochet, Diem, the Greek Colonels, and the National Security States of Latin America (among many others), and the “burgeoning” of torture following the end of the Cold War, by eye aversion. ¶ In Pinker’s view, the Third World’s troubled areas are suffering from their failure to absorb the civilizing lessons modeled for them in the United States and other advanced countries. He ignores the eight-decades-long massive U.S. investment in the military and ideological training, political takeovers, and subsequent support of Third World dictators in numerous U.S. client terror states, including Guatemala, transformed from a democracy to terror state in 1954, Brazil, shifted from a democracy to military dictatorship in 1964, the Philippines in 1972, and Chile the same in 1973, among many others. A tabulation by one of the present authors in 1979 found that 26 of the 35 states in that era that used torture on an administrative basis were U.S. clients, all of them recipients of U.S. military and economic aid.[137] These clients were capitalist in structure, but threatened and employed force to keep the lower orders disorganized and more serviceable to the local elites and transnational corporations investing there. One Latin American Church document of that period spoke of the local U.S.-supported regimes as imposing an economic model so repressive that it “provoked a revolution that did not exist.”[138] This was a deliberate “decivilizing” process, with the civilized serving as co-managers.¶ We have seen that Pinker finds the modern era peaceful by focusing on the absence of war between the major powers, downplaying the many murderous wars carried out by the West (and mainly the United States) against small countries, and falsely suggesting that the lesser-country conflicts are home-grown, even where, as in the cases of Iraq and Afghanistan, it was U.S. military assaults that precipitated the internal armed conflicts, with the United States then actively participating in them. The Israeli occupation and multi-decade ethnic cleansing of Palestine he misrepresents as a “cycle of deadly revenge,” with only Israel fighting against “terrorism” in this cycle. He speaks of Islamic and communist ideology as displaying violent tendencies, and congratulates the U.S. military for allegedly overcoming the kind of racist attitudes reported at the time of the Vietnam war (U.S. soldiers referring to Vietnamese as “gooks,” slopes,” and the like)—but the military’s new humanism is another piece of Pinker misinformation and pro-war propaganda. And he fails to cite the numerous instances of Israeli leaders referring to Palestinians as “grasshoppers,” “beasts walking on two legs,” “crocodiles,” “insects,” and a “cancer,” or Israeli rabbis decrying them as the “Amalekites” of the present era, calling for extermination of these unchosen people.[139]¶ As regards Israel, Pinker never mentions the Israeli belief in a “promised land” and “chosen people” who may be fulfilling God’s will in dispossessing Palestinians.[140] Although the lack of angelic behavior in these assaults and this language, ethnic cleansing, and dispossession process is dramatic, and has had important effects on the attitudes and behavior of Islamic peoples, it fails to fit Pinker’s ideological system and political agenda, and therefore is not a case of conflict with ideological roots. ¶ For Pinker, there is also nothing ideological in the “miracle of the market” (Reagan), no “stark utopia” in Friedrich von Hayek’s assertion that the “particulars of a spontaneous order cannot be just or unjust,”[141] no ideology in the faith that an unconstrained free market will not produce intolerable inequalities and majority resistance that in turn require the likes of Pinochet, Suharto, or Hitler to reassert the requisite “stability.” It is simply outside of Pinker’s orbit of thought that liberalism and neoliberalism in the post-Soviet world are ideologies that have serviced an elite in a class war; that the major struggles and crises that we have witnessed, over climate change, the massive upward redistribution of income and wealth, the global surge of disposable workers, and the enlargement of NATO and the police-and-surveillance state, are features of a revitalized consolidation of class power, under more angelic names like “reform,” “free markets,” “flexibility,” “stability,” and “fiscal discipline.” For Pinker, the huge growth of the prison population shows the lack of “self-control” of the incarcerated savages still with us; and it is one merit of the liberal state that it gets the bad guys off the streets. ¶ Another device that Pinker uses when weighing capitalism versus communism is to take notorious state abuses committed in the name of communism (e.g., under Joseph Stalin), not as perversions of communism, but as inherent in its ideology, and flowing directly from it. Many historians and leftists have long argued that Stalinism constituted a radical betrayal and perversion of genuine communism, and that it emerged out of crises and stresses that made anything approaching genuine communism unreachable.[142] Pinker never addresses this kind of explanation and exemption of real-world communism, but he does this implicitly for real-world degenerate forms of capitalism. Thus, Nazi Germany and its mass murders are not credited to capitalism’s account, even though Germany under the Nazis was still capitalist in economic form and surely a variant of capitalism arising under stress and threat from below, with important business support.[143] Suharto’s Indonesia and Pinochet’s Chile could be said to fit this same pattern. Rightwing believers in the crucial importance of free markets, such as Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman, approved of Pinochet’s rule, which ended political freedom and freedom of thought, but worked undeviatingly for corporate interests and rights. But it took only one decade of the Chicago Boys’ privatizations and other “reforms” for Chile’s economy and financial system to collapse. In the harsh depression that ensued, the banks were re-nationalized and their foreign creditors bailed-out in a process sometimes called the “Chicago Road to Socialism,” but then shortly thereafter they were re-privatized all over again, at bargain-basement prices.[144] (Pinochet does not show up in Pinker’s index; Chile does, but never as a free market state loved by von Hayek, Friedman, and the Chicago School of Economics, and supported by the United States.)¶ In one of his book’s more outlandish moments, Pinker even allocates Nazism and the holocaust to communism. He writes that since “Hitler read Marx in 1913,” Marxism led definitively if “more circuitously” to the “[dekamegamurders] committed by the Nazi regime in Germany.”[145] (343) But while there is no evidence that Hitler really examined Marx or accepted any of his or his fellow Marxist writers’ ideas,[146] it is incontestable fact that Hitler held Marxism in contempt, and that communism and communists ranked very high among Hitler’s and the Nazi’s demons and targets (along with Jews) when they held power in Germany.[147] So is the fact that racist theories and “mismeasure of man” literature in the Houston Stewart Chamberlain tradition—of which Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray arguably are heirs—were fanatically embraced by Hitler, and therefore linked to Nazism—and not very “circuitously,” either. ¶ Pinker not only doesn’t credit the Nazi holocaust to capitalism, he also fails to give capitalism credit for the extermination of the Native Americans in the Western Hemisphere and the huge death tolls from the Slave Trades,[148] which should have been prevented by the rising “better angels.” As noted, he also ignores democratic capitalism’s responsibility for the surge of colonialism in the 18th and 19th centuries, the associated holocausts,[149] and the death-dealing and exploitation of the Western-sponsored terror states in Indonesia, the Philippines, Latin America and elsewhere. He also fails to address the huge toll of structural violence under capitalism flowing from its domestic and global dispossession processes, and, interestingly, intensifying with the post-1979 transformation of China and the breakup of the Soviet bloc and Soviet Union (1989-1991), which reduced any need on the part of Western capitalism to show concern for the well-being of its own working class majority. This helps explain the significant global increases in inequality and dispossession and slum-city enlargement over the past two decades, a period that Pinker calls the “New Peace” and depicts as an age of accelerating “Civilization”!¶ Pinker refers to the deaths during China’s Great Leap Forward (1958-1961) as a “Mao masterminded…famine that killed between 20 million and 30 million people.”[150] (331) For Pinker, clearly, the dead were victims of a deliberate policy that demonstrates the evil behind communist ideology. But as the development economists Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen have pointed out, China under Mao installed a massive and effective system of public medical services, as well as literacy and nutrition programs that greatly benefitted the general population in the years prior to the famine—a fact that is difficult to reconcile with the allegation that Mao regarded mass starvation as an acceptable means to some other end. Instead, Drèze and Sen blamed this tragedy on the lack of democracy in China, with the absence of pressure from below and a lack of timely knowledge of policy failure significantly offsetting the life-saving benefits of communist China’s medical and other social welfare programs.[151] ¶ Drèze and Sen also compared the number of deaths caused by this famine under Mao with the number of deaths caused by what they called the “endemic undernutrition and deprivation” that afflicts India’s population year-in and year-out. “Estimates of extra mortality [from China’s famine] vary from 16.5 million to 29.5 million,” they wrote, “arguably the largest in terms of total excess mortality in recorded history.”[152] But “despite the gigantic size of excess mortality in the Chinese famine,” they continued, the “extra mortality in India from regular deprivation in normal times vastly overshadows the former. Comparing India’s death rate of 12 per thousand with China’s 7 per thousand, and applying that difference to India’s population of 781 million in 1986, we get an estimate of excess normal mortality in India of 3.9 million per year. This implies that every eight years or so more people die in India because of its higher death rate than died in China in the gigantic famine….India seems to manage to fill its cupboard with more skeletons every eight years than China put there in its years of famine.”[153] Indeed, by 2005, some 46 percent (or 31 million) of India’s children were underweight, and 79 percent suffered anemia. “Forty years of efforts to raise how much food-grains Indians are able to eat has been destroyed by a mere dozen years of economic reform,” Jawaharal Nehru University economist Utsa Patnaik observes.[154]

Once we acknowledge that academic concepts and analyses can have constitutive effects, we need to analyze their performative role. This means addressing the “double hermeneutic”—the way “‘findings’ of the social sciences very often enter constitutively into the world they describe” (Giddens 1987, 20)—and reflecting on what our interpretations might “do” (Guzzini 2007, 23). It is not necessary to accept social constructivism to recognize that the practice of social science is interlinked with power relations outside of academia. Far from scholarly navel-gazing, a reflexive attitude is arguably a necessary ingredient of any rigorous social science practice (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992).¶ Hence, since the power-shift discourse is not simply a descriptive account of an independent reality but is destined to be constitutive of that reality, it is essential to explore its power. Thomas Diez (2005) makes a similar investigation into the power of the concept of “normative power Europe” (NPE). He finds that NPE constructs a benevolent and peaceful identity for Europe, but also that its alleged peacefulness is contrasted with and therefore dependent on an idea of what Europe is not—an outside consisting of “challenging threats” (2005, 636). The double hermeneutic twist is that the coining of the originally academic NPE concept has become an important instance of Europe’s “normative power.”¶ Diez (2013), however, seems to take for granted the distinction between post-Westphalian normative powers, which engage in a struggle over the definition of “normality” in world politics, and Westphalian great powers, which engage in war, empire building, and physical conquest. “Great powers,” however, are also the products of normative, discursive pressures, and they reproduce ideas of what is “normal” great-power behavior. Much of the power-shift discourse reproduces the same familiar self/ other dichotomy as the NPE literature. Here, the other is a rising and potentially threatening China, while the self is a weak but inherently righteous United States/West/Japan.¶ Pan argues that the “China threat discourse” is “always intrinsically linked to how US policymakers/mainstream China specialists see themselves (as representatives of the indispensable, security-conscious nation, for example)” (2004, 306). Hagström demonstrates how the discourse on Japan’s “abnormality” and “weakness” reproduces a standard of “normality” in world politics that is centered on the ability to go to war. Postwar Japan is socially constructed as deviant from this norm and thus as a threat to itself. This discourse, which emerges in both Japanese and Western academia and in Japanese political debate, legitimizes a road map for a more “realistic,” “active,” “responsible,” and “normal” Japan (Hagström 2014).¶ The power of the power-shift discourse does not stop at the production of identities and standards. The point is that identities and standards produce effects. Pan illustrates this by showing how the Taiwan Strait Crisis in 1995–1996 was often understood as “further objective proof of the long-suspected ‘China threat,’” but few acknowledged that “the ‘China threat’ discourse itself had played a constitutive role in the lead-up to that crisis” (2004, 323, 320). Moreover, standards in Japan’s “normalization” discourse have enabled Realpolitik changes in its foreign security policy. Chinese vigilance vis-à-vis Japan and the United States might also be interpreted as discursive phenomena—the theme of national reinvigoration is a product of the lingering notion that China has been continually humiliated and victimized by the great powers since the nineteenth century. As these examples illustrate, the ultimate power of discourse is the production of self-fulfilling prophecies. When self-fulfilling prophecies occur on both sides of a dyad, we might end up with a socially generated security dilemma (Johnston 2004).¶ Much research has warned of self-fulfilling prophecies in the East Asian context. Some observers suggest that US or Japanese discourses about China might produce policies of containment, Japanese “normalization” and “remilitarization,” and US “rebalancing” toward East Asia (Pan 2004; 2012; Hagström 2012; Turner 2014a; 2014b). Nonetheless, Japan and the United States have not yet embarked on containing China. Instead, both countries have on the whole accommodated China’s rise (Christensen 2006; Jerdén and Hagström 2012). In a similar manner, perceived increases in bellicose or nationalistic representations in Chinese discourses led some observers to jump to the mistaken conclusion that this had already resulted in a more assertive Chinese foreign policy (Jerdén 2014). As important as it is to remain vigilant against the emergence of socially constructed security dilemmas, we need to bear in mind that there is no deterministic connection between discourse and policy—just an enabling one. Dominant discourses create propensities for action but do not make any action inevitable. More empirically informed theorizing is needed to address the questions of how, when, and why discourses make some actions politically conceivable, easy to communicate, and sometimes even coercive (Holland 2013).¶ Reflecting on the possible power exercised through the alternative approaches introduced in this special issue is also necessary. In this article we raise analytical and normative concerns about the ideas of a more “powerful” and “threatening” China, a “weak” Japan, and a “declining” United States. We argue that such representations risk offsetting balancing policies and a security dilemma in East Asia, in line with the self-fulfilling prophecy logic discussed above. These arguments clearly belong to another site of discursive power production. That we have not seen any obvious balancing policies in East Asia thus far might arguably be interpreted as one of its effects.

U.S. Security Policy Discourse” https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/10.5771/0175-274X-2016-3-165/threats-of-a-different-kind-china-and-russia-in-u-s-security-policy-discourse-jahrgang-34-2016-heft-3

The U.S. perspective sees the substantial need to integrate China and Russia more into international normative structures and to thereby affect an alignment of China’s and Russia’s actions with Western norms and interests. Both China and Russia are called upon to become responsible stakeholders in global order, meaning democratic and rule-of-law-oriented. The almost paternalistic call for responsibility expresses the view of a, in power and values, superior U.S. vis-à-vis China and Russia. Discourse then also offers warnings in the case that China and Russia do not learn or abide by the rules, in particular if they endanger U.S. interests. Again, seeing that both China and Russia are needed to deal with global and/or regional challenges, the U.S. must in some way continue to work with both. A new U.S. administration could, however, change policy.

In other words, the new international order moved very quickly to reassert the connection between economic and national security: the commitment to the former was simultaneously a commitment to the latter, and vice versa. As the doctrine of national security was being born, the major player on the international stage would aim to use perhaps its most important power of all – its economic strength – in order to re-order the world. And this re-ordering was conducted through the idea of ‘economic security’.99 Despite the fact that ‘econ omic security’ would never be formally defined beyond ‘economic order’ or ‘economic well-being’,100 the significant conceptual con sistency between economic security and liberal order-building also had a strategic ideological role. By playing on notions of ‘economic well-being’, economic security seemed to emphasise economic and thus‘human’ needs over military ones. The reshaping of global capital, international order and the exercise of state power could thus look decidedly liberal and ‘humanitarian’. This appearance helped co-opt the liberal Left into the process and, of course, played on individual desire for personal security by using notions such as ‘personal freedom’ and‘social equality’.101 Marx and Engels once highlighted the historical role of the bour geoisie in shaping the world according to its own interests. The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere . . . It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them . . . to become bourgeois in themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.102 In the second half of the twentieth century this ability to ‘batter down all Chinese walls’ would still rest heavily on the logic of capital, but would also come about in part under the guise of security. The whole world became a garden to be cultivated – to be recast according to the logic of security. In the space of fifteen years the concept ‘economic security’ had moved from connoting insurance policies for working people to the desire to shape the world in a capitalist fashion – and back again. In fact, it has constantly shifted between these registers ever since, being used for the constant reshaping of world order and resulting in a comprehensive level of intervention and policing all over the globe. Global order has come to be fabricated and administered according to a security doctrine underpinned by the logic of capitalaccumulation and a bourgeois conception of order. By incorporating within it a particular vision of economic order, the concept of national security implies the interrelatedness of so many different social, econ omic, political and military factors that more or less any development anywhere can be said to impact on liberal order in general and America’s core interests in particular. Not only could bourgeois Europe be recast around the regime of capital, but so too could the whole international order as capital not only nestled, settled and established connections, but also‘secured’ everywhere. Security politics thereby became the basis of a distinctly liberal philosophy of global ‘intervention’, fusing global issues of economic management with domestic policy formations in an ambitious and frequently violent strategy. Here lies the Janus-faced character of American foreign policy.103 One face is the ‘good liberal cop’: friendly, prosperous and democratic, sending money and help around the globe when problems emerge, so that the world’s nations are shown how they can alleviate their misery and perhaps even enjoy some prosperity. The other face is the ‘bad liberal cop’: should one of these nations decide, either through parliamentary procedure, demands for self-determination or violent revolution to address its own social problems in ways that conflict with the interests of capital and the bourgeois concept of liberty, then the authoritarian dimension of liberalism shows its face; the ‘liberal moment’ becomes the moment of violence. This Janus-faced character has meant that through the mandate of security the US, as the national security state par excellence, has seen fit to either overtly or covertly re-order the affairs of myriads of nations – those ‘rogue’ or ‘outlaw’ states on the ‘wrong side of history’.104 ‘Extrapolating the figures as best we can’, one CIA agent com mented in 1991,‘there have been about 3,000 major covert operations and over 10,000 minor operations – all illegal, and all designed to disrupt, destabilize, or modify the activities of other countries’, adding that ‘every covert operation has been rationalized in terms of U.S. national security’.105 These would include ‘interventions’ in Greece, Italy, France, Turkey, Macedonia, the Ukraine, Cambodia, Indonesia, China, Korea, Burma, Vietnam, Thailand, Ecuador, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Uruguay, Bolivia, Grenada, Paraguay, Nicaragua, El Salvador, the Philippines, Honduras, Haiti, Venezuela, Panama, Angola, Ghana, Congo, South Africa, Albania, Lebanon, Grenada, Libya, Somalia, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, and many more, and many of these more than once. Next up are the ‘60 or more’ countries identified as the bases of ‘terror cells’ by Bush in a speech on 1 June 2002.106 The methods used have varied: most popular has been the favoured technique of liberal security – ‘making the economy scream’ via controls, interventions and the imposition of neo-liberal regulations. But a wide range of other techniques have been used: terror bombing; subversion; rigging elections; the use of the CIA’s ‘Health Alteration Committee’ whose mandate was to ‘incapacitate’ foreign officials; drug-trafficking;107 and the sponsorship of terror groups, counterinsurgency agencies, death squads. Unsurprisingly, some plain old fascist groups and parties have been coopted into the project, from the attempt at reviving the remnants of the Nazi collaborationist Vlasov Army for use against the USSR to the use of fascist forces to undermine democratically elected governments, such as in Chile; indeed, one of the reasons fascism flowed into Latin America was because of the ideology of national security.108 Concomitantly, ‘national security’ has meant a policy of non-intervention where satisfactory ‘security partnerships’ could be established with certain authoritarian and military regimes: Spain under Franco, the Greek junta, Chile, Iraq, Iran, Korea, Indonesia, Cambodia, Taiwan, South Vietnam, the Philippines, Turkey, the five Central Asian republics that emerged with the break-up of the USSR, and China. Either way, the whole world was to be included in the new ‘secure’ global liberal order. The result has been the slaughter of untold numbers. John Stock well, who was part of a CIA project in Angola which led to the deaths of over 20,000 people, puts it like this: Coming to grips with these U.S./CIA activities in broad numbers and figuring out how many people have been killed in the jungles of Laos or the hills of Nicaragua is very difficult. But, adding them up as best we can, we come up with a figure of six million people killed – and this is a minimum figure. Included are: one million killed in the Korean War, two million killed in the Vietnam War, 800,000 killed in Indonesia, one million in Cambodia, 20,000 killed in Angola – the operation I was part of – and 22,000 killed in Nicaragua.109 Note that the six million is a minimum figure, that he omits to mention rather a lot of other interventions, and that he was writing in 1991. This is security as the slaughter bench of history. All of this has been more than confirmed by events in the twentyfirst century: in a speech on 1 June 2002, which became the basis of the official National Security Strategy of the United Statesin September of that year, President Bush reiterated that the US has a unilateral right to overthrow any government in the world, and launched a new round of slaughtering to prove it. While much has been made about the supposedly ‘new’ doctrine of preemption in the early twenty-first century, the policy of preemption has a long history as part of national security doctrine. The United States has long maintained the option of pre-emptive actions to counter a sufficient threat to our national security. The greater the threat, the greater is the risk of inaction – and the more compelling the case for taking anticipatory action to defend ourselves . . . To forestall or prevent such hostile acts by our adver saries, the United States will, if necessary, act pre emptively.110 In other words, the security policy of the world’s only superpower in its current ‘war on terror’ is still underpinned by a notion of liberal order-building based on a certain vision of ‘economic order’. The National Security Strategy concerns itself with a ‘single sustainable model for national success’ based on ‘political and economic liberty’, with whole sections devoted to the security benefits of ‘economic liberty’, and the benefits to liberty of the security strategy proposed.111

Calls for alternative approaches to the phenomenon of state failure are often met with the criticism that such alternatives could only work in the long term whereas 'something' needs to be done here and now. Whilst recognising the need for immediate action, it is the role of the political scientist to point to the fallacy of 'short-termism' in the conduct of current policy. Short-termism is defined by Ken Booth (1999, p. 4) as 'approaching security issues within the time frame of the next election, not the next generation'. Viewed as such, short-termism is the enemy of true strategic thinking. The latter requires policymakers to rethink their long-term goals and take small steps towards achieving them. It also requires heeding against taking steps that might eventually become self-defeating.  The United States has presently fought three wars against two of its Cold War allies in the post-Cold War era, namely, the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein and the Taliban in Afghanistan. Both were supported in an attempt to preserve the delicate balance between the United States and the Soviet Union. The Cold War policy of supporting client regimes has eventually backfired in that US policymakers now have to face the instability they have caused. Hence the need for a comprehensive understanding of state failure and the role Western states have played in failing them through varied forms of intervention. Although some commentators may judge that the road to the existing situation is paved with good intentions, a truly strategic approach to the problem of international terrorism requires a more sensitive consideration of the medium-to-long-term implications of state building in different parts of the world whilst also addressing the root causes of the problem of state 'failure'.  Developing this line of argument further, reflection on different socially relevant meanings of 'state failure' in relation to different time increments shaping policymaking might convey alternative considerations. In line with John Ruggie (1998, pp. 167–170), divergent issues might then come to the fore when viewed through the different lenses of particular time increments. Firstly, viewed through the lenses of an incremental time frame, more immediate concerns to policymakers usually become apparent when linked to precocious assumptions about terrorist networks, banditry and the breakdown of social order within failed states. Hence relevant players and events are readily identified (al-Qa'eda), their attributes assessed (axis of evil, 'strong'/'weak' states) and judgements made about their long-term significance (war on terrorism). The key analytical problem for policymaking in this narrow and blinkered domain is the one of choice given the constraints of time and energy devoted to a particular decision. These factors lead policymakers to bring conceptual baggage to bear on an issue that simplifies but also distorts information.  Taking a second temporal form, that of a conjunctural time frame, policy responses are subject to more fundamental epistemological concerns. Factors assumed to be constant within an incremental time frame are more variable and it is more difficult to produce an intended effect on ongoing processes than it is on actors and discrete events. For instance, how long should the 'war on terror' be waged for? Areas of policy in this realm can therefore begin to become more concerned with the underlying forces that shape current trajectories.  Shifting attention to a third temporal form draws attention to still different dimensions. Within an epochal time frame an agenda still in the making appears that requires a shift in decision-making, away from a conventional problem-solving mode 'wherein doing nothing is favoured on burden-of-proof grounds', towards a risk-averting mode, characterised by prudent contingency measures. To conclude, in relation to 'failed states', the latter time frame entails reflecting on the very structural conditions shaping the problems of 'failure' raised throughout the present discussion, which will demand lasting and delicate attention frompractitioners across the academy and policymaking communities alike.