Discursive framing is the difference between war and peace

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.