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This article maps the historical analogies of the war on terrorism used by the Bush administration. It identifies four historical analogies of the war on terrorism present in the US political and academic discourse since the attacks on 11 September 2001. These are the war on terrorism as: (a) the Second World War; (b) the Crusades; (c) the Vietnam War; and (d) the Cold War. These analogies have been a constant presence in the US discourse, although the analogy with the Crusades has been more prominent in the academic discourse than in the political. There is, moreover, no conclusive pattern of when and how these analogies have been used, suggesting that we cannot use them to evaluate how well the war on terrorism is progressing. This also indicates that the Bush administration, with one exception, was not successful in framing the policy agenda in a certain direction regarding the war on terrorism. Understanding the war on terrorism as a new Cold War, for example, still implies different policy measures such as roll-back and containment.

This article appeared in Strategic Insights, v.10, Special issue (October 2011), 36-48. Topic: Global Trends and Future Warfare ; Part I: Alternative Perspectives: Traditional Powers, Rising Powers, and the Developing World ; In this paper, I will develop a slightly different approach that instead assumes that the future is path-dependent. This approach allows for a greater impact of agency and can be easily summed up as what happens in 2030 depends upon what we do in 2029, and what happens in 2029 depends upon what we do in 2028, and so on. Agency thus becomes crucial for shaping the future. Moreover, rather than focusing on actions, in this paper, I will primarily focus on norms. Norms change only gradually and slowly and are therefore a more promising baseline than current actions. Specifically, I will focus on norms of political order: about what it means to govern and be governed, how we understand the relationship between the public and private, and the concepts of civil and military. This paper is structured as follows. First, I will briefly discuss current patterns in war and warfare to evaluate whether or not there are trends that can be discerned. This part of the paper is based on the second approach and it serves a springboard to begin to think differently about the future. Throughout the paper, I will use the trends as a point of departure. Second, I will begin with a discussion on what we already know about the future. In doing so, I will critically engage with the NIC documents Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World and Tomorrow's Security Challenges: The Defence Implications of Emerging Global Trends. In short, my critique will stress the lack of attention given to ideational factors. Third, and finally, I will suggest ideationally driven scenarios and identify the challenges to such a development of war and warfare. ; Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited.

A review essay on a book by John Baylis, Steve Smith and Patricia Owens [Eds], The Globalization of World Politics ([(4th edn)] Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).