A ‘continuing, imminent’ threat: the temporal frameworks enabling the US war on terrorism
| Author | Christopher McIntosh |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/00471178221128196 |
| Published date | 01 December 2022 |
| Date | 01 December 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/00471178221128196
International Relations
2022, Vol. 36(4) 568 –590
© The Author(s) 2022
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DOI: 10.1177/00471178221128196
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A ‘continuing, imminent’
threat: the temporal
frameworks enabling
the US war on terrorism
Christopher McIntosh
Bard College
Abstract
For nearly two decades, the United States has chosen to narrate its response to terrorism
through what Judith Butler refers to as the ‘frame of war’. Despite this, victory in that country’s
longest war remains largely unimaginable. In some ways this is a problem of time – it is not that
victory or an end to the conflict is literally unimaginable, it’s that from our political present, an
end appears radically discontinuous. This article builds on recent work using temporality and
the political present as a lens and conceptual framework to better understand how temporal
assumptions and frames shape the practice of war and political violence. In this article, I show
how time and timing play a significant role in justifying the violence of the war on terrorism and
in making it intelligible as war. I examine the past three administrations and focus on three areas
– the borders of wartime, temporal continuity, and the vision of a post-war future – to show
important differences in administrative approaches. To more concretely understand the practice
of political violence going forward, attention to the temporal dynamics of politics must be front
and center, particularly one possessing ambivalent frames. Doing so reveals the implications these
dynamics have for the conduct and permissibility of violence.
Keywords
temporality, time, war
Introduction
As the United States’ war on terrorism now stretches across four very different
Administrations, each has had to provide a means by which these efforts cohere into one
intelligible campaign of violence. As Carol Cohn observed regarding nuclear strategy,
the way we speak about, frame, and articulate a security problem creates the imaginary
Corresponding author:
Christopher McIntosh, Bard College, PO Box 5000, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, NY 12504, USA.
Email: cmcintos@bard.edu
1128196IRE0010.1177/00471178221128196International RelationsMcIntosh
research-article2022
Article
McIntosh 569
of what is and is not materially possible in response.1 In the national security realm,
narrations of collective violence bring together countless disparate acts to create the
events known as war.2 These narratives are irreducibly temporal – they link together
past, present, and future in a way that makes ongoing assassinations or decades-long
military occupation appear not only justifiable, but unremarkable acts of a discrete time
of war.3
Countless forms of violence exist, but only some are materially instantiated as war
and when it comes to those policies that embrace violence, the US security imaginary
remains dominated by what Butler refers to as a ‘frame of war’.4 This frame positions
war as a temporary gap in normal political time tolerated in pursuit of whatever end
fighting, winning, and concluding the war seeks to achieve.5 One thing that links
together the American narration of these acts, regardless of administration, is the circu-
lation of this frame throughout politics and society.6 Yet, it is simultaneously framed as
an unending concern, an issue to be managed. While these frames serve as a means of
ordering political practice, worldmaking, and rendering the violence politically intelli-
gible, frames like these also possess a temporal ambivalence. Not ambivalent as in
unclear, diffuse, or indifferent, but ambivalent in the literal sense of the term – possess-
ing simultaneous valences that are equal and opposite. While each administration has
insisted that the war on terrorism is a war to be fought and won – no different than
World War II – terrorism itself remains an ongoing state concern, consistently reappear-
ing even as various threats are defeated, ‘neutralized’, and then ‘forgotten’.7 This circu-
lation of ambivalent frames produces a conceptual tension that situates efforts to fight
and win a war at cross purposes with efforts to manage terrorist violence. This was
perhaps most succinctly captured in the 2015 National Security Strategy where terror-
ism was characterized as a ‘continuing, imminent threat’ [emphasis added].8 Terrorism
is something against which ‘we’ must remain vigilant, yet attack is simultaneously
‘imminent’ and inevitable.9 These contradictory temporal frames generate a representa-
tional morass that is conceptually problematic, allowing the lines between war and
peace to be manipulated, disabling political resistance, and deemphasizing nonviolent
conflict resolution. In short, it creates an ever-present set of temporal registers those
with power can draw from to justify their preferred policies, even when those policies
are inconsistent, ineffective, and contradictory.
This temporal dynamic also creates a conceptual inertia that enables American vio-
lence to continue even as various administrations make efforts to limit and/or end it.
Even if we narrow our perspective only to American standards of what a ‘victory’ could
or should look like, so long as they remain politically meaningful and continue to coex-
ist, these frames preclude its achievement. Wars are discrete campaigns with beginnings,
middles, and ends. In the United States security imaginary, they are acceptable only
when discursively produced as temporary, even though in reality, most of US history
occurs during a time of war.10 Practically speaking, competing temporal frames are con-
tinually circulating throughout American security discourse, providing powerful actors
the opportunity to narrate their preferred set of actions into existence, something we see
seized upon by successive administrations, regardless of policy preferences.
While others have usefully pointed out the difficulties of conducting a war on terror-
ism, much of that work flourished during its early stages and emphasized the broader
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