The chapter surveys various papers in the literature that specifically analyze deterrence and preemption policies from the perspective of game theory. Emphasis is given to certain classes of models in order to highlight key aspects and characteristics of the policies studied. For example, when countries engage in deterrence against terrorist organizations, it is likely that they may simply deflect terrorist attacks to other countries. Preemptive policies on the other hand, provide positive benefits to other countries and therefore any benefits stemming from this policy, may be underprovided due to the problem of free riding.

The objective of this chapter is to consider the effect of terrorism on trade. We rely on the existing literature on trade and terrorism and primarily use perfectly competitive models of trade. First, we highlight how terrorism may affect trade by damaging resources and causing general equilibrium reallocations of factors of production. Second, we consider how these trade effects may be altered in the presence of optimal counterterrorism policy. Third, the chapter discusses how trade may affect intra-industry trade in varieties using a monopolistically competitive framework. Finally, we discuss some of the existing empirical literature that has focused on trade-terrorism and FDI-terrorism issues. A central message of our analysis is that while terrorism will likely raise costs and dampen economic activity, whether it will raise or reduce trade of a nation depends on how terrorism affects that nation’s resource reallocation, relative prices and real income level.

Over the years since 9/11, there have been many calls for systematic analysis of domestic counterterrorism expenditures—indeed, in the United States, it is required by current regulations. The paper lays out and explains the standard cost/benefit and risk-analytic approaches that might be applied to evaluate such expenditures. However, such research has been quite limited so far. While systematic analysis can make the counterterrorism enterprise more coherent and efficient, domestic terrorism in most countries (particularly those outside of war zones) scarcely presents enough of a hazard to justify the enormous efforts and expenditures that have been made to counter it. It is an area of research that should be more fully developed.

This chapter provides a broad overview of academic and policy research, which explores the efficacy of external assistance to states in diminishing the threat of terrorism. In general, external economic and military aid seeks to mitigate the threat and intensity of terrorism by enhancing recipient states’ coercive and non-coercive capacity, and by incentivizing them to meet donors’ demands. As this chapter shows, the effectiveness of aid depends on a number of factors, which includes the type, magnitude, conditions, and modality of aid as well as recipient states’ governance capacity, and the alignment of donor-recipient priorities. Moreover, aid can often result in negative unintended consequences such as human rights violations and repression by recipient states, or anti-American terrorism and discriminate violence by targeted groups. Yet, research suggests that aid can indeed reduce terrorism levels in some environments, especially if donors devise effective mechanisms to circumnavigate highlighted challenges.

Terrorism has instrumental value in terms of achieving political, ideological, or religious goals; and non-instrumental value, in terms of organizational and psychological motivations. I introduce canonical models of terrorism under asymmetric information that account for both types of goals. As these equilibria identify counterfactuals that would be otherwise unobservable, they illuminate the ‘known unknowns’ that matter for counterterror policy. Finally, I address the signaling value of partial government concessions when voters or terrorists are uncertain about a target government’s type.

In this chapter, we explore the scholarly literatures on the effects of liberal democratic governance on the likelihood of terrorist violence, and on the threat posed by terrorist campaigns to liberal democracy.  Most disagreements in these literatures stem from the fact that the reciprocal relationship between democracy and terrorism is highly complex and largely contingent upon structural elements and other characteristics of states and terrorist organizations.  In regard to general institutional structure, we maintain that in offering checks against the majoritarian impulse towards authoritarianism, in subjecting policymaking to institutional competition, and in allowing for the responsible and effective exercise of executive prerogative, presidential democracy offers greater resistance to autocratization in the face of terrorism than parliamentary democracy.  We find empirical support for this proposition in analysis of cross-national time-series data on democratic structural integrity and the maintenance of civil rights and liberties for the period 1970-2012.

This chapter investigates the role of science and technology as a function of the history of the World War II effort to transform national security resource and acquisition under Vannevar Bush at MIT, its effects upon American society as President Eisenhower warned the nation in 1961, and the later forces of globalization, the knowledge economy and accelerating emerging and disruptive science and technology as applied to war and terror today. Important is our understanding of our application of a specific logic to war and terror after 9/11; forward deployment of American military power overseas and homeland security (defense of the homeland) for the purpose of understanding the rapid evolution of technological capability in achieving outcomes. Furthermore, we will look more specifically at emerging science and technology as a particular area of technological innovation that stems from research and development phenomena that is tasked to provide outsize national security, specifically counterterrorism deliverables for the United States.

The chapter provides a selective survey of studies on terrorism. In particular, we emphasize theoretical and empirical studies where the rationality of terrorists, their allies, and their adversaries are essential. With data on terrorist attacks during 1970–2018, we indicate the evolving nature of terrorism in terms of the distribution of attacks by alternative terrorist groups’ ideologies, the casualties of terrorist attacks, and the regional distribution of terrorist incidents. Based on key studies, we evaluate differences between domestic and transnational terrorism, the effectiveness of counterterror measures, the economic impact of terrorism, and the drivers of terrorism. Next, we highlight areas of deficient knowledge: e.g., governments’ actions to address terrorism, governments’ expenditures on counterterrorism, and practices of international cooperation. Finally, we indicate omissions to our knowledge including the melding of micro- and macro-level studies, the collection of counterterror event data, and the impact of immigration on transnational terrorism.

Terrorist groups face a wide range of organizational issues. They have to recruit members, raise funds, articulate a political vision, develop operational plans, train personnel, execute attacks, and justify their actions. Unlike most organizations, however, they must do so while remaining as covert as possible, making all the normal challenges of organizational management significantly harder. This chapter reviews the organizational issues that terrorist groups face and that counterterrorist organizations should take into account.

Are there objective criteria that we can use to discern if an act of violence constitutes terrorism, or is such labeling always a subjective and political decision? Wherein lies the boundary between domestic versus international terrori and is that a meaningful distinction to make? How do individuals get radicalized, and how do they reach the point of committing violent acts? In this chapter, we tackle these questions (and others) and the issue of terrorism in international security. There are no easy, agreed upon answers to most of them, and terrorism continues to be a highly contested and politically charged concept, while constituting a very real and pressing security threat in many countries around the world. But that is even more reason to look closely at the controversies surrounding its definition, its historical evolution and patterns, and its contemporary manifestations in the twenty-first century as well as approaches to countering terrorism and attempts at international cooperation.

The Trump and Biden administrations have spent an enormous amount of energy blaming each other for the final collapse. Pompeo excoriated Biden in his memoir, fully blaming him and claiming the Doha agreement had nothing to do with Afghanistan’s subsequent collapse. In turn, the Biden White House released a twelve-page document in April 2023 with their version of events, placing blame on the Trump administration. In their mutual finger-pointing, they are both right: Trump signed the deal, and Biden implemented it. Trump was determined to withdraw from Afghanistan irrespective of what the Taliban said or did, weakening the United States’ diplomatic and military position to the point of collapse. Biden, despite having campaigned on a promise to undo Trump’s legacy, inexplicably followed Trump’s example and implemented Trump’s strategy. Thanks to Trump, Biden inherited an extremely difficult situation – one he managed to make even worse. He played a bad hand badly. And he did so, in large part, because when he looked at Afghanistan, he saw Vietnam.

President Obama spent almost his entire presidency talking about withdrawing from Afghanistan, which ended up being the one thing he managed not to accomplish. Endless and repetitive strategy reviews had all come to similar conclusions – that the US should stay for the long haul and do more to rebuild Afghanistan – conclusions which Obama resisted until the logic of events forced his hand. The timetable was not the single point of failure of the Afghanistan war, nor the only driver of all the problems with Obama’s handling of it. It is, however, the most potent symbol of Obama’s war. The timetable was the product of the defeatism and cynicism that pervaded every aspect of Obama’s handling of the war even as it undermined the surge, obviated reconstruction, and hamstrung negotiations, worsening the very failures and disappointments that Obama used to justify lowering his ambitions in the first place, made all the worse by how predictable the consequences would be.

The Taliban insurgency happened because they enjoyed a permissive environment: safe haven in Pakistan, state failure in Afghanistan, and an America increasingly focused on Iraq. In turn, most of those had common roots in the Bush administration’s decisions in 2001: to define the conflict as a “War on Terror” best waged with a light footprint and to conflate the Taliban and al-Qaida. Some of those decisions made sense in 2001, but none of them bore scrutiny as the situation in Afghanistan changed, and the Bush administration failed to adapt quickly enough.

The 2009 strategy review resulted in the most consequential decisions of the war. While scholars and historians have typically focused on the surge of 30,000 additional troops, the administration’s strategy was not simply to add more troops. Obama rejected the logic that to defeat al-Qaida required defeating the Taliban and made an explicit decision not to seek the Taliban’s defeat – but he also chose to escalate the war against them anyway. Instead, Obama adopted a vague goal of “reversing their momentum,” while training Afghan security forces. That was muddled enough, but he undermined even those goals by adopting a public withdrawal timetable for US troops and failing to coordinate the surge with reconstruction and diplomatic efforts. Coupled with internal miscommunications, tensions with the military, and a growing attitude of pessimism, the changes introduced in the December 2009 strategy hamstrung the surge and set the course for the rest of Obama’s presidency.

For its first eighteen months, the Trump administration steered a surprisingly defensible course in Afghanistan, thanks to many of Trump’s appointees who worked to preserve something of America’s interests intact within the confines of Trump’s desire to reduce American commitments overseas. They were squeezed from two sides: on the one hand, the frustrating results of the Obama administration’s various strategies – surge, drawdown, and negotiations – seemed (wrongly) to prove their futility. On the other hand, virtually no one was convinced that Trump’s demand to get out fully and immediately was a good idea. They wanted to stay, but it was unclear what kind of posture, mission, or strategy would be more effective than what Obama had tried.

Trump’s newly empowered foreign policy led to the Doha agreement with the Taliban and America’s final defeat in Afghanistan. The Taliban’s principal demand and the central element of the eventual Doha agreement was the full withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan. It was hardly something the Taliban needed to demand because Trump was demanding it too. Trump was not inclined to enforce the agreement anyway. Trump campaigned on getting out of Afghanistan and repeatedly and publicly announced his intent to withdraw, which undermined negotiations just as much as Obama’s timetable had done.

Some common themes emerge from these lessons about strategy and bureaucracy. The statesman and strategist also need wisdom to take the long view, prudence to discern what is practical, persistence and fortitude in implementation, courage to overcome groupthink and pride and bureaucratic resistance, temperance and humility to toil in unglamorous details. Above all the strategist must have a passion to pursue justice and peace. Statesmen and stateswomen need wisdom, courage, temperance, and justice. If that is true, such timeless principles do not apply only to the individual policymaker. They apply to the nation we serve. American foreign policy should be characterized by wisdom, courage, temperance, and justice; our role in the world should serve those principles. Our grand strategy should take the long view, be practical and aware of our limits yet also courageous and visionary, fearless and uncompromising in the face of obstacles. Above all it must aim at justice – which means it must serve American interests, but it must do so with an awareness of how our interests are entwined with others.