Obama's War on Terror

We think some of the administration’s misjudgments have been serious. Perhaps the most fundamental and most consequential was the decision to downplay the degree to which what the administration refuses to call the global war on terror still dominates American policy and American strategic thought. Like the characters in a Harry Potter story who don’t want to speak Lord Voldemort’s name because they are afraid that using his name makes him stronger, the Obama administration hoped that it could help end the war on terror by calling it something else, calming both American public opinion and opinion in the Middle East and reducing what it correctly identifies as a major threat—that radical groups in the Middle East could trigger a civilizational and religious war between Islam and the rest of the world that would plunge the world into a generation of turmoil while enabling these groups to seize and hold power in their homelands. From Boko Haram in Nigeria to the Taliban in Afghanistan and to others beyond, radicals seek to polarize domestic and global politics through violence, and it is very much in the interest of the United States and others to make this strategy fail.