BUZAN, Will the 'global war on terrorism' be the new Cold War

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Will the ‘global war on terrorism’ 
be the new Cold War?
International Aff airs 82: 6 (2006) 1101–1118 
© 2006 The Author(s). Journal Compilation © 2006 Blackwell Publishing Ltd/The Royal Institute of International Aff airs
BARRY BUZAN*
Washington is now embarked on a campaign to persuade itself, the American 
people and the rest of the world that the ‘global war on terrorism’ (GWoT) will 
be a ‘long war’. This ‘long war’ is explicitly compared to the Cold War as a similar 
sort of zero-sum, global-scale, generational struggle against anti-liberal ideolo-
gical extremists who want to rule the world. Both have been staged as a defence 
of the West, or western civilization, against those who would seek to destroy it. 
As Donald Rumsfeld says of the ‘terrorists’: ‘they will either succeed in changing 
our way of life, or we will succeed in changing theirs’.1 The rhetorical move to 
the concept of a ‘long war’ makes explicit what was implicit in the GWoT from its 
inception: that it might off er Washington a dominant, unifying idea that would 
enable it to reassert and legitimize its leadership of global security. The demand 
for such an idea was palpable throughout the 1990s. When the Cold War ended, 
Washington seemed to experience a threat defi cit, and there was a string of attempts 
to fi nd a replacement for the Soviet Union as the enemy focus for US foreign and 
military policy: fi rst Japan, then China, ‘clash of civilizations’ and rogue states. 
None of these, however, came anywhere close to measuring up to the Cold War 
and the struggle against communism, which for more than 40 years had created a 
common cause and a shared framing that underpinned US leadership of the West. 
The terrorist attacks of 9/11 off ered a solution to this problem, and right from the 
beginning the GWoT had the feel of a big idea that might provide a long-term 
cure for Washington’s threat defi cit. If it could be successfully constructed and 
embedded as the great new global struggle, it would also underpin the shaky legiti-
macy of US unipolarity, maintenance of which was a key goal in the US National 
Security Strategy (USNSS) of 2002, and is still visible, albeit in more muted tones, 
in the 2006 USNSS.2 Will this strategy succeed? Will the GWoT become the new 
Cold War?
* I am grateful to Ole Wæver and Lene Hansen and an anonymous reviewer for International Aff airs for comments 
on an earlier draft of this article.
1 ‘Rumsfeld off ers strategies for current war: Pentagon to release 20-year plan today’ and ‘Abizaid credited 
with popularizing the term, “long war”’, Washington Post, 3 Feb. 2006, p. A08, http://www.washingtonpost.
com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/02/AR2006020202296.html and www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/ 
content/article/2006/02/02/AR2006020202242.html, accessed 17 Feb. 2006.
2 Morten Kelstrup, ‘Globalisation and societal insecurity: the securitization of terrorism and competing strate-
gies for global governance’, in Stefano Guzzini and Dietrich Jung, eds, Contemporary security analysis and Copen-
hagen peace research (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 106–16.
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Barry Buzan
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International Aff airs 82: 6, 2006 
© 2006 The Author(s). Journal Compilation © 2006 Blackwell Publishing Ltd/The Royal Institute of International Aff airs
These questions seem at fi rst to mark disagreement with the recent argument 
of Kennedy-Pipe and Rengger that 9/11 changed nothing fundamental in world 
politics.3 What it does pick up on is their idea that the only thing that changed 
is the belief that something had changed. This article is about the strength and 
durability of that belief, and whether as a social fact it can be used to create a 
new political framing for world politics. In addressing this question I diff erentiate 
between a traditional materialist analysis of threat (whether something does or 
does not pose a specifi c sort of threat, and at what level) and a so-called securitization 
analysis (whether something can be successfully constructed as a threat, with this 
understanding being accepted by a wide and/or specifi cally relevant audience).4 
These two aspects of threat may run in close parallel, but they can also be quite 
separate. States, like people, can be paranoid (constructing threats where none 
exist) or complacent (ignoring actual threats). But since it is the success (or not) 
of the securitization that determines whether action is taken, that side of threat 
analysis deserves scrutiny just as close as that given to the material side.
Keeping this distinction in mind, the explicit ‘long war’ framing of the GWoT 
is a securitizing move of potentially great signifi cance. If it succeeds as a widely 
accepted, world-organizing macro-securitization, it could structure global security 
for some decades, in the process helping to legitimize US primacy. This is not to 
confuse the GWoT with US grand strategy overall, despite the GWoT’s promi-
nence in the 2006 USNSS. US grand strategy is much wider, involving more tradi-
tional concerns about rising powers, global energy supply, the spread of military 
technology and the enlargement of the democratic/capitalist sphere. US military 
expenditure remains largely aimed at meeting traditional challenges from other 
states, with only a small part specifi cally allocated for the GWoT. The signifi cance 
of the GWoT is much more political. Although a real threat from terrorists does 
exist, and needs to be met, the main signifi cance of the GWoT is as a political 
framing that might justify and legitimize US primacy, leadership and unilater-
alism, both to Americans and to the rest of the world. This is one of the key 
diff erences between the GWoT and the Cold War. The Cold War pretty much was 
US grand strategy in a deep sense; the GWoT is not, but, as a brief glance at the 
USNSS of 2006 will show, is being promoted as if it were. Whether this promo-
tion succeeds or not will be aff ected by many factors, not least how real and how 
deep the threat posed by terrorism actually is.
The next section surveys the rise of the GWoT as a successful macro-
 securitization. The one following examines conditions that will aff ect the sustain-
ability of the GWoT securitization. The conclusions refl ect on the consequences 
of the GWoT should it become successfully embedded as the new Cold War. The 
argument is that it is unlikely, though not impossible, that the GWoT will be 
anything like as dominant and durable as the macro-securitization of the Cold 
3 Caroline Kennedy-Pipe and Nicholas Rengger, ‘Apocalypse now? Continuities or disjunctions in world poli-
tics after 9/11’, International Aff airs 82: 3, 2006, pp. 539–52.
4 Ole Wæver, ‘Securitization and desecuritization’, in Ronnie D. Lipschutz, ed., On security (New York: Colum-
bia University Press, 1995), pp. 46–86; Barry Buzan, Ole Wæver and Jaap de Wilde, Security: a new framework for 
analysis (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1998).
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Will the ‘global war on terrorism’ be the new Cold War?
1103
International Aff airs 82: 6, 2006 
© 2006 The Author(s). Journal Compilation © 2006 Blackwell Publishing Ltd/The Royal Institute of International Aff airs
War. One of the reasons for its fragility is precisely that it is not representative of 
US grand strategy as a whole. Another is that the means used to pursue the GWoT 
threaten two of the core things they are supposed to be defending: liberal values 
and the unity of the West.
The rise of the GWoT as the new macro-securitization
The Al-Qaeda attacks on the United States in 2001 brought the post-Cold War 
period to an abrupt end. It solved the threat defi cit problem for the US, and 
triggered a substantial shift in security defi nitions and priorities in many countries. 
The GWoT played strongly to the long-established propensity in US foreignpolicy 
to frame American interests as universal principles. This had worked well during 
the Cold War to legitimize US leadership. Washington saw itself as representing 
the future, and therefore having the right and the duty to speak and act for human-
kind, and this claim was, up to a point, accepted in much of the rest of the West. 
Right from the start the GWoT was also presented in this way:
At the beginning of this new century, the United States is again called by history to use 
our overwhelming power in defense of freedom. We have accepted that duty, because we 
know the cause is just … we understand that the hopes of millions depend on us … and 
we are certain of the victory to come.5
So far, the GWoT has been a rather successful macro-securitization.6 That Al-
Qaeda and its ideology are a threat to western civilization is widely accepted 
outside the Islamic world, and also within the Islamic world, though there opinion 
is divided as to whether or not this is a good and legitimate thing. The US-led war 
against the Taleban and Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan shortly after September 11 was 
generally supported at the time, and NATO is still playing the leading role in the 
(so far not very successful) attempt to stabilize and rebuild that country. Beneath 
its exaggeration, there is some real substance to President Bush’s boast about the 
coalition backing the GWoT:
the cooperation of America’s allies in the war on terror is very, very strong. We’re grate-
ful to the more than 60 nations that are supporting the Proliferation Security Initiative to 
intercept illegal weapons and equipment by sea, land, and air. We’re grateful to the more 
than 30 nations with forces serving in Iraq, and the nearly 40 nations with forces in Af-
ghanistan. In the fi ght against terror, we’ve asked our allies to do hard things. They’ve risen 
to their responsibilities. We’re proud to call them friends.7
Immediately following 9/11 NATO invoked article 5 for the fi rst time, thereby 
helping to legitimize the GWoT securitization. Since then leaders in most western 
5 Dick Cheney, ‘Success in war is most urgent US task, Cheney says: remarks to the Commonwealth Club of 
California’, 7 Aug. 2002, http://japan.usembassy.gov/e/p/tp-se1585.html, accessed 26 Dec. 2005.
6 Kelstrup, ‘Globalisation’, pp. 112–13.
7 George W. Bush, ‘President Bush discusses progress in the war on terror’, White House, 12 July 2004, http://
www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/07/20040712–5.html, accessed 28 Dec 2005.
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Barry Buzan
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International Aff airs 82: 6, 2006 
© 2006 The Author(s). Journal Compilation © 2006 Blackwell Publishing Ltd/The Royal Institute of International Aff airs
pursuit of the GWoT inevitably generates profoundly diffi cult choices for liberal 
societies between eff ective counterterrorism policies on the one hand and quite 
fundamental compromising of the principles of the liberal order on the other. This 
dilemma is made more poignant by the fact that terrorism is the dark, uncivil, side 
of liberalism’s much prized liberation and cultivation of domestic and global civil 
society as an antidote to excesses of state power. The GWoT is mainly about the 
state versus uncivil society. This is the traditional form of the Hobbesian insecurity 
agenda, where the state protects its citizens against each other by creating a legal 
framework, and enforcing a monopoly of legitimate violence against warlords, 
terrorists, organized crime and whatever uncivil elements seek to disrupt the peace 
or deploy force against the citizenry for private ends. But under globalization a 
wider dimension gets added. The openness of a liberalized economy provides 
opportunities for transnational criminals and terrorists and extremists of all sorts 
to operate on a global scale. As a consequence, the traditional Hobbesian domestic 
security agenda gets pushed up to the international level. Because a world govern-
ment is not available, the problem pits international society against global uncivil 
society. An additional diffi culty, as Wilkinson notes, is that Al-Qaeda and its ilk 
have such profoundly revolutionist objectives that a negotiated solution is not 
really an option.36 Rumsfeld is quite right that the struggle is to the death.
The dilemma arises out of the policy choices faced by liberal societies in 
responding to terrorism. The three options currently in play all require that 
terrorism be securitized and emergency action of some sort taken to try to counter 
and eliminate it. In each case, the necessary action requires serious compromising 
of liberal values.
Insulation
Insulation is exemplifi ed by homeland security and hardening the state both against 
penetration by terrorists and against vulnerability of infrastructure to terrorist 
attack. Pursuing the logic of homeland security quickly begins to undermine some 
core elements of the LIEO. The free movement of people for purposes of business, 
education and the arts is restricted by tighter controls on travel and immigration. 
The free movement of goods is restricted both by increased requirements for 
inspection and traceability, and by the imposition of more controls on the export 
of technology related to WMD. The free movement of money is restricted by 
the measures taken to disrupt the fi nancial networks of terrorists. By hardening 
borders, homeland security measures erode some of the principles of economic 
liberalism that they are designed to defend; and the same argument could be made 
about the trade-off between enhanced surveillance under the GWoT and the civil 
liberties that are part of the core referent object of western civilization.37 At various 
points insulation blends into the next option: repression.
36 Wilkinson, International terrorism, pp. 133–16.
37 Jef Huysmans, ‘Minding exceptions: the politics of insecurity and liberal democracy’, Contemporary Political 
Theory 3: 3, 2004, pp. 321–41. See also Stephen Gill, ‘The global panopticon: the neoliberal state, economic life 
and democratic surveillance’, Alternatives 20: 1, 1995, pp. 1–49.
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Will the ‘global war on terrorism’ be the new Cold War?
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International Aff airs 82: 6, 2006 
© 2006 The Author(s). Journal Compilation © 2006 Blackwell Publishing Ltd/The Royal Institute of International Aff airs
Repression
Repression is about carrying the fi ght to the terrorists in an attempt to elimi-
nate them by police and/or military action. It is the sharp end of the GWoT, and 
involves a wide spectrum of activities from, at one extreme, taking down whole 
states (e.g. Afghanistan, Iraq), through sustained occupations (e.g. Israel in the 
West Bank and Gaza) and military searches for and assaults on terrorist bases (e.g. 
in Pakistan, post-Taleban Afghanistan, the Philippines), to, at the other extreme, 
targeted assassinations (e.g. Israeli policy against Hamas and the PLA) and arbitrary 
arrests and detentions (the US extra-legal gulag in Guantánamo Bay and elsewhere) 
of individuals. War is seldom good for liberal values even when fought in defence 
of them. It undermines civil liberties, peace, the openness that the LIEO requires 
and, as US practice shows, the commitment to human rights.
Equalizing
Equalizing starts from the assumption that the root causes of terrorism lie in the 
inequalities and injustices that are both a legacy of human history and a feature 
of market economies. The long-term solution to terrorism in this perspective is 
to drain the waters in which the terrorists swim by redressing the inequalities and 
injustices that supposedly generate support forthem. It is not my concern here to 
argue whether this contested cause–eff ect hypothesis is correct or not. My point 
is that if a policy along these lines is pursued, it cannot avoid undermining the 
foundations of a competitive market economy. Redistribution on the scale required 
would put political priorities ahead of market logics, and in doing so quench the 
fi res of the market which fuel the liberal project. A possible liberal counter to this 
view is that a liberal policy would be not so much redistributive as ameliorative, 
making the liberal system work better by, for example, eliminating rich country 
protectionism in agriculture. However, while this might reduce inequalities in the 
very long run, in the short and medium term it is likely to cause huge amounts of 
pain (as in the recent shift in the textile regime, which enabled China to drive many 
Third World producers out of the market). If inequality is the source of terrorism, 
neo-liberal economics does not provide a quick enough solution.
It thus becomes clear that terrorism poses a double threat to liberal democratic 
societies: open direct assaults of the type that have become all too familiar, and 
insidious erosion as a consequence of the countermeasures taken. It is easy to see 
how this dilemma drives some towards seeking a solution in total victory that will 
eliminate both the terrorists and the contradiction. But if it is impossible to elimi-
nate terrorists, as is probably the case, then this drive risks the kind of permanent 
mobilization that inevitably corrodes liberal practices and values.
If the priority is to preserve liberal values, one is pushed towards the option 
of learning to live with terrorism as an everyday risk while pursuing counter-
measures that stop short of creating a garrison state. This choice is not to securitize 
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International Aff airs 82: 6, 2006 
© 2006 The Author(s). Journal Compilation © 2006 Blackwell Publishing Ltd/The Royal Institute of International Aff airs
terrorism, but instead to make it part of normal politics. Taking this route avoids 
a contradiction between counterterrorist policies and liberal values. The necessary 
condition for doing so is that state and society raise their toleration for damage 
as a price they pay for openness and freedom. Kenneth Waltz long ago made the 
point that ‘if freedom is wanted, insecurity must be accepted’,38 though it has to 
be said that this part of his analysis has made little impact on US thinking about 
national security.39 This is not to say that under this policy nothing would be done 
to counter terrorism; but the countermoves would stop short of declaring war 
and/or a state of siege. Terrorism would be treated like traffi c accidents: a struc-
tural problem dealt with through normal politics, despite the quite large number 
of deaths and injuries involved. Citizens would have to accept the risk of being 
killed or injured by terrorists in the same way that they accept the risk of accident 
when they enter the transport system. In principle, this should be possible—trans-
port accidents kill far more people than terrorists do—though whether any form 
of polity, and especially a democratic one, could in practice sustain it is an inter-
esting and diffi cult question. Perhaps, with brave, honest, charismatic and deter-
mined leadership, it could be done. But these qualities are not abundant in political 
life, and there is a question whether such a policy could or should be sustained 
if terrorist violence escalated beyond current levels. Short of such escalation, a 
strategy along these lines should be possible. But if terrorism is a problem of the 
long term, as it well might be for advanced industrial societies, it would require a 
level of democratic sophistication and commitment rather higher than anything 
yet seen.
If this is the way to go, then Europe, which has already learned to live with 
a degree of terrorism as normal politics, may have much more to off er than the 
United States, which is driven by much higher demands for national security. 
Robert Kagan had a point when he noted that the US and European positions in the 
world were determined by their respective power and weakness.40 But in relation 
to the GWoT, and the defence of liberal values, the positions may be reversed. 
Europe is more resilient and better able to defend its values without resorting to 
excesses of securitization. By comparison, the United States seems a softer target, 
too easily pricked into intemperate reactions that in themselves work to under-
mine what it claims to stand for.
38 Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of international politics (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1979), p. 112.
39 Buzan, The United States and the great powers, pp. 172–3.
40 Robert Kagan, Paradise and power: America and Europe in the new world order (London: Atlantic Books, 2003).
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