Strategic Illusions

This chapter illuminates the disenchantment with one strategy of mitigation in the current era, that of counterinsurgency. The analysis shows how policies of managing and mitigating the threat of mass violence stemmed from the manner in which the threat was defined and framed in political discourse, and how this in turn reflected a particular ideological worldview, not just in the United States but across what we might term the democratic West. That ideology is one that this chapter shall delineate as “globalism.” It was globalist ideas that were to inform much of the thinking that underpinned the initial identification of the nature of the threat and influence subsequent policy directions about how to manage that threat. It was also the paradoxes and incoherence in globalist-influenced thinking that was also to lead to strategic mistakes and the subsequent disillusionment with much of the post-9/11 consensus.