“Winning” the Forever Wars? Presidential Rhetoric and US Ontological (In)Security

Abstract

Like success at the individual level, ideas of “winning” and “victory” in war have reaffirmed American exceptionalism, its place in the world, and its ontological security. This has been true in response to both policy successes and failures. As other studies have noted, the indeterminacy and longevity of the War on Terror has brought US perceptions of order and control into question, thus generating widespread ontological insecurity. Conducting a discourse analysis of the rhetoric of Presidents Bush, Obama, and Trump, this paper is the first to explore how the ideas of “winning” and “victory” have manifested themselves in political discourse on a national scale. All presidents utilized different components of American identity narratives for their own political purposes, but the inability to produce results commensurate with previous American wars produced significant national ontological insecurity in each case. Accordingly, this paper has implications for politics and policy. Contrary to scholarship that predicts that presidents will avoid predicting unrealistically short conflicts against transnational terrorist groups, the paper shows how the unique promise of ontological security associated with “victory” encourages presidents to use the decisive language of interstate warfare. However, the realities of postmodern war and great power competition mean that presidents will ultimately be unable to create a consensus around what “winning” or “victory” might look like in these conflicts, thus producing widespread ontological insecurity. In that way, the paper illustrates the significance of identity-based issues in policy evaluation processes.

Tout comme le succès au niveau individuel, « gagner » et la « victoire » dans les guerres ont réaffirmé l'exceptionnalisme américain, la place de ce pays dans le monde et sa sécurité ontologique; autant en matière de succès que d’échecs politiques. Comme l'ont fait remarquer d'autres études, l'indétermination et la longévité de la guerre contre le terrorisme ont remis en question le point de vue américain sur l'ordre et le contrôle, et généré une insécurité ontologique généralisée. À l'aide d'une analyse discursive des rhétoriques des présidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama et Donald Trump, le présent article est le premier à s'intéresser aux façons dont « gagner » et la « victoire » se manifestent dans le discours politique à l’échelle nationale. Tous les présidents ont exploité différentes composantes de l'identité américaine pour servir leurs propres objectifs politiques. Néanmoins, l'incapacité à obtenir des résultats identiques aux guerres américaines précédentes a à chaque fois engendré une importante insécurité ontologique nationale. Le présent article s'accompagne donc d'implications politiques. Contrairement aux chercheurs qui prédisent que les présidents éviteront d'annoncer des conflits déraisonnablement courts contre les groupes terroristes transnationaux, cet article démontre que la promesse de sécurité ontologique associée à la « victoire » encourage les présidents à employer le langage catégorique de la guerre interétatique. Néanmoins, tant la guerre postmoderne que la concurrence entre les grandes puissances empêcheront toujours les présidents de créer un consensus autour de la définition de « gagner » et de « victoire » dans ces conflits. L'insécurité ontologique généralisée est donc inévitable. De ce fait, l'article illustre l'importance des problématiques fondées sur l'identité dans les processus d’évaluation des politiques.

Al igual que el éxito a nivel individual, las ideas de «ganar» y «victoria» en la guerra han reafirmado el excepcionalismo estadounidense, su lugar en el mundo y su seguridad ontológica. Esto ha sido así tanto en respuesta a los éxitos como a los fracasos de las políticas. Como han señalado otros estudios, la indeterminación y la longevidad de la Guerra contra el Terror han puesto en tela de juicio la percepción de orden y control de Estados Unidos, generando así una inseguridad ontológica generalizada. Realizando un análisis discursivo de la retórica de los presidentes Bush, Obama y Trump, este trabajo es el primero en explorar cómo las ideas de «ganar» y «victoria» se han manifestado en el discurso político a escala nacional. Todos los presidentes utilizaron diferentes componentes de las narrativas de la identidad estadounidense para sus propios fines políticos, pero la incapacidad de obtener resultados acordes con las guerras estadounidenses anteriores produjo una importante inseguridad ontológica nacional en cada caso. Por consiguiente, este documento tiene implicaciones en el ámbito político y las políticas públicas. Contrariamente a los estudios que predicen que los presidentes evitarán pronosticar conflictos irrealmente cortos contra grupos terroristas transnacionales, este artículo muestra cómo la promesa única de seguridad ontológica asociada a la «victoria» anima a los presidentes a utilizar el lenguaje decisivo de la guerra interestatal. Sin embargo, las realidades de la guerra posmoderna y la competencia entre grandes potencias se traducen en que los presidentes serán incapaces, en última instancia, de crear un consenso en torno a lo que podría ser «ganar» o «victoria» en estos conflictos, produciendo así una inseguridad ontológica generalizada. De este modo, este artículo ilustra la importancia de las cuestiones identitarias en los procesos de evaluación de las políticas.

Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser. Americans play to win all the time . . . That's why Americans have never lost and will never lose a war. Because the very thought of losing is hateful to Americans.

—General George Patton, June 1944 (Johnson and Tierney 2006, 14–15)

The people of America will always fight on to victory, victory, victory. You don't know how to lose . . . You'll never have to find out about losing.

—Donald Trump, March 20, 2019¹

Winning Matters . . . When we send the U.S. Army somewhere, we don't go to participate, we don't go to try hard, we go to win.

—Chief of Staff of the Army, General James McConville (2020)

Introduction

As these quotes demonstrate, the idea of “winning” is an “American obsession” (Duina 2011).² Accomplishments in life are interpreted as indications of an actor's worthiness, and this is no different in the area of foreign policy: international successes have confirmed the perceived righteousness and legitimacy of America's values and its unique purpose in the world (Duina 2011, 44–46). This is particularly apparent in war, with victory providing uniquely powerful evidence of America's perceived superiority over its enemies. Memories of “winning” and “victory” in previous wars are intertwined with the belief in American exceptionalism that has “performed for generations of Americans that essential function of giving order to their vision of the world and defining their place in it” (Hunt 1987, 14–15 in McCrisken 2003, 2, emphasis added). Accordingly, the idea of the US being ever-victorious plays a foundational role in America's ontological security, meaning the nation's sense of order and continuity that enables its agency and contributions to world politics. Indeed, this paper details how the three presidents to have currently served a full term during the War on Terror have all invoked the emphatic language of “winning” and “victory” when discussing this conflict.

However, this rhetoric is at odds with the record of the War on Terror. The central warzones of the conflict and the broader military campaign against transnational terrorist organizations have been marked by such indeterminacy and longevity that both Donald Trump and Joe Biden commonly referred to “endless” or “forever” wars during their 2020 presidential campaigns. Even after the withdrawal of all US troops from Afghanistan in August 2021, the War on Terror “shows no sign of winding down” (Landler 2021), as epitomized in the killing of al-Qaeda's Ayman al-Zawahiri in Kabul via a drone strike in August 2022. Furthermore, rather than the achievement of clear-cut victories, each terrorist attack in the US or other Western nations brings “a warning that the War on Terror is nowhere near an ending” (Danner 2016, 5). Scholars have observed how the inability of the US to achieve decisive victories in the War on Terror has impacted America's ontological security: “by not winning the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States perceives its strength and power on the world stage to have evaporated” (Subotic and Steele 2018, 388, 393; see also Ackerman 2021). In 2013, for example, 53 percent of Americans felt that the US was less powerful than it had been ten years previously, representing a 33 percent increase from 2004 (Pew Research Center 2016).

In the continuing effort to think “critically of the politics of victory in an era of endless war” (Hartnett et al. 2022), this paper deepens our understanding of the relationship between American ontological security and contemporary conflicts. Previous studies have explored the ethics of “victory” and its applicability in modern warfare (Hom, O'Driscoll, and Mills 2017; O'Driscoll 2020), the emergence of “moral injury” as a consequence of the inconclusiveness of the War on Terror (Subotic and Steele 2018), and the processes by which the US has attempted to cope with this situation via “cruel” border policies (Steele 2021; Agius 2022), “welcome home” rituals (Steele 2019), and “honor flights” for veterans (Steele, forthcoming). No study, however, has explored how the ideas of “winning” and “victory” have manifested themselves in political discourse on a national scale. By studying elite rhetoric concerning these two themes and the effectiveness of these appeals, this article improves our understanding of why and how ontological insecurity has emerged in response to the ongoing War on Terror. Contrary to scholarship that predicts that presidents will avoid damaging their credibility by predicting an unrealistically short conflict against transnational terrorist groups (Huff and Schub 2018), the paper shows how the unique promise of ontological security associated with “victory” encourages presidents to use the decisive language of interstate warfare. However, while the presidents studied here put forward different conceptions of winning in the War on Terror, the paper demonstrates how the ultimate unattainability of clear-cut “victories” in the model of valorized American wars has resulted in widespread ontological insecurity during both conflict continuation and termination. By exploring ontological security dynamics, the paper reveals that barring a process of “self-interrogative reflexivity” that “involves the questioning of issues of self-identity” (Steele 2008, 151; in this case, America's identity as a “winner”), presidents will be unable to create a consensus around what “victory” might concretely look like in the conflict against transnational terrorist organizations. This contravenes studies of presidential decision-making that outline the suitable steps toward successful policies, such as the claim that “good judgment can avoid wars or win them while poor judgment can start wars or lose them” (Walker and Malici 2011, 6, see also; George 1980; Renshon and Larson 2003; Barber 2019). Furthermore, this paper uniquely contributes to public policy literature by demonstrating how ontological security studies (OSS) can explain policy evaluation and debate (Bovens and ‘t Hart 2016, 653–54).

The paper proceeds as follows. The first section introduces OSS in international relations (IR), with particular focuses on the relationships of ontological security to identity narratives, anxiety, and securitization. This part of the paper also expands upon the centrality of “winning” in America's ontological security, alongside the incongruity of these ideals with the realities of postmodern war. The following three sections conduct a discourse analysis of prominent speeches and tweets concerning counterterrorism through the George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Trump presidencies to analyze how these leaders have engaged with this contrast when discussing the winnability—or the capacity of something to be won—of the War on Terror. The analytical focus reflects both the widespread salience of ideas around “winning” in American society (Duina 2011) and how the president occupies “a unique space in the American symbolic universe . . . as the nation's narrator-in-chief” (Krebs 2015, 49). Bush consistently utilized familiar tropes in America's identity narrative to reassure the public of the winnability of the War on Terror in a time of widespread anxiety, but the ailing fortunes of the conflict meant that the then-unprecedented levels of support emerged among the American electorate in 2008 for a more restrained foreign policy, as indicative of a state of ontological insecurity. Obama reframed the relationship between American ontological security and the winnability of the War on Terror around the role of American values, but his argument that the US should abandon the standards of “victory” achieved in prior wars was heavily criticized with the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). These criticisms revolved around the lack of control associated with previous American wars, and Trump exploited the electoral power of this anxiety and ontological insecurity with his promises to eradicate ISIS. As president, Trump declared “victory” against ISIS in Syria and doubled down on the importance of “winning” in American warfighting more generally, but like Bush, he failed to accomplish the results commensurate with this rhetoric.

Ontological Security, Crises, and Winning in War

As a corrective to the discipline's primary focus on physical security, OSS now features prominently in IR scholarship, with scholars detailing the importance of an actor's ontological (in)security in influencing their policies in world politics (inter alia, Huysmans 1998; Kinnvall 2004; Mitzen 2006b; Krolikowski 2008; Steele 2008; Rumelili 2014a; Subotic 2016). The drive for ontological security manifests itself at multiple levels of analysis. Giddens’ (1991) theory of ontological security was formulated at the level of the individual, “internalist” OSS have focused on the domestic processes behind a state's ontological (in)security (Solomon 2018), while “externalist” works have explored how a state's place and actions within the international sphere help or hinder their ontological security needs. Interrogating the domestic political effects of the inability to “win” wars, this paper follows previous IR studies in demonstrating the challenges of conducting OSS at the state level without reifying the object of analysis (Subotic 2016; Selden and Strome 2017). As discussed in the conclusion, however, the focus on “winning” in the US has an international component, thus suggesting the compatibility of “internalist” and “externalist” approaches in OSS.

The paper follows Giddens’ ontological security theory and subsequent IR works by focusing on narratives about the Self, as compelling identity narratives are an essential component of the sense of consistency necessary for ontological security and a sense of agency (Lupovici 2012; Browning and Joenniemi 2013; Solomon 2018, 937). Building upon previous OSS works (Cash and Kinnvall 2017, 269; Steele 2017, 72), this paper shows how ontological insecurity is the norm by detailing the degree of political contestation around self-narratives. As Giddens (1991, 54–55) noted, ontological security is both “robust and fragile”; “robust” because identity narratives can regularly adapt to or withstand changes in the external environment, but “fragile” because these narratives “cannot be wholly fictive” and are but “one ‘story’ among many other potential[s]” that can be told. In this case, the debates over what story is to be told even occur concerning a foundational belief of national identity. Elites are shown to “selectively activate” elements of a state's “autobiographical identity narrative” to not only legitimate their policies and maintain ontological security but also contest policies and encourage ontological insecurity (Subotic 2016). This is important because of the “political costs to attending to ontological security in democracies” (Steele 2008, 143).

Accordingly, discourse analysis provides a direct insight into ontological security contestation and its consequences. During crises, events that do not align with expectations can undermine narratives about the Self and lead “to the paralysis and anxiety that inconsistent self-narratives engender” (Solomon 2018, 935). For example, the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks struck at the heart of US ontological security, with John Lewis Gaddis noting how “it was not just the Twin Towers that collapsed on that morning . . . so too did some of our most fundamental assumptions about international, national, and personal security” (Croft 2006, 40). With the striking images of the planes crashing into New York's tallest skyscrapers being broadcast live on television, “the attack hit home where it mattered most,” namely “the imagination” of the American people (Coker 2009, 14). This is a crucial point because of the relationship between terrorism and anxiety, a concept that features heavily in OSS. While fear is “a response to a specific threat and . . . has a definite object,” anxiety is a “generalized state of emotions” concerning hypothetical events (Giddens 1991, 43). Although anxiety generally emerges as “public mood,” because of how it revolves around the unknowability of the future it is ultimately integral to the human condition (Rumelili 2020, 2021). Anxiety thus affects ontological security because it takes away an individual's sense of control, which is exactly what the indiscriminate nature of the attacks did. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, for example, 58 percent of Americans were “very” or “somewhat worried” that they or a family member would be a victim of a terrorist attack, despite the statistical improbability of this occurring (Mueller and Stewart 2018).

A public mood of anxiety frequently materializes itself as specific fears. Huysmans (1998) has shown that securitization often occurs in the pursuit of ontological security, as “concrete objects of fear” allow for the externalization of internal differences to Others to reinforce self-identity (Mitzen 2006a, 274; Browning and Joenniemi 2013, 496; Rumelili 2014c, 14). Securitization and conflict can thus lend themselves to regular practices that reduce a sense of uncertainty and encourage ontological security; routines feature heavily in Giddens’ work on the same logic (Mitzen 2006b; Rumelili 2014b). Yet, because securitization also relies on the prospect of “a possible way out” of a crisis and presents a threat to be defeated (Buzan, Wæver, and Wilde 1998, 33), desecuritization can also lead to ontological security by offering closure and returning to “normal” politics (Browning and Joenniemi 2013, 496–97). Another way anxiety is commonly evaded is “through turning to tradition, authority, and unambiguous moral standards.” “Ideological frameworks” such as nationalism “offer . . . certainty” in times of unknowability by invoking familiar ideas and routines (Rumelili 2021, 1024).

One such tradition in US identity narratives is the idea of “winning” in war. Like at an individual level, “winning” acts as a “routine” in US foreign policy, providing “affirmation” of America's “place in the world” (Duina 2011, 8, 35–36; Subotic and Steele 2018, 392). Because self-identity must be “routinely created and sustained” (Giddens 1991, 52), actions perceived to be “successful” in world politics—such as brokering a peace deal or securing favorable trade agreements—are a crucial component of consolidating a state's ontological security. However, given its unique human costs and associated scale of control, “winning” or “victory” in war holds special value in reaffirming self-identity. As Lacanian scholar Stavrakakis (2007, 197 in Solomon 2015, 49) argues, “a national war victory or the successes of the national football team” are one of the few examples of something approaching full “enjoyment” on a national scale. Put another way, imaginations of “victory” hold a significant “moral weight” (O'Driscoll 2020, 108). After all, in terms of the anxiety-reducing dynamics discussed above, “victory” in war provides a clear object of fear and establishes control by defeating said enemy, alongside reaffirming familiar narratives of the Self.

In this case, perceived victories feed into the tenets of American exceptionalism, which dictate that the US is a one-of-a-kind and superior nation with a special role to play in world politics. American exceptionalism does not deny the uniqueness of other countries, but makes a normative claim that the US “is more unique” than others, particularly in terms of its ability to resist the historical laws of great power decline (McCrisken 2003, 1; Restad 2015, x, 3–4). This sentiment was captured by Senator Mitt Romney during the 2012 presidential election campaign: “God did not create this country to be a nation of followers . . . America must lead the world.” However, this is not simply a political trope: 80 percent of Americans in one 2010 poll agreed with the claim that the US “has a unique character because of its history and Constitution that sets it apart from other nations as the greatest in the world” (Restad 2015, 2, 5). As Romney's quote suggests, there is an important providential rationale to these beliefs that descends from America's founding. The influential nineteenth-century concept of “Manifest Destiny” ensured that “every success” in US expansion across North America “was to be understood as a fulfillment of a divine plan” (Duina 2011, 44). Although this concept was contested and closely associated with a certain period, the foundational logic and self-identification as “exceptional” have remained across different eras. For example, US identity narratives valorize successful wars to an unparalleled degree as a means of reaffirming ontological security (Subotic and Steele 2018, 392). As Hilde Restad observes, for Americans, “the proof of” their country's exceptional status in the world is “in the superior American pudding”: defeating the British and Spanish empires, conquering the North American continent, triumphing in two World Wars, and achieving victory in the Cold War (Restad 2015, 6). The memories of these conflicts represent an anxiety-reducing tradition in which America's ontological security and role in the world are reaffirmed.

A case in point is the memory of World War II as the “good war,” especially after the cultural renaissance of this war in the 1990s (Campbell 2015, 67; Ramsay 2015). While most countries attempt to forget World War II, the conflict is commemorated in countless American books, films, and television series, consequently structuring popular imaginaries of war as a series of decisive military battles between good and evil (Tierney 2010; Brooks 2016). The conflict holds a privileged place in American memory precisely because it is one of the rare “widely agreed-upon moral reference points” in times of political polarization. Not only does the memory of World War II confirm the uniqueness of America's unique national identity and special place in the world (Ramsay 2015, 63–64, 202), but it also reaffirms “the model for how the nation should conduct war as a way to resolve problems definitively and conclusively” (Martel 2011, 154–55, emphasis added).

Because of their significance in reaffirming America's place in the world, the ideas of “winning” and “victory” traverse the context of World War II and have remained ever-present in response to both national failures and successes. While the Korean War was “forgotten,” the paradoxical lesson of the Vietnam War was to reinforce the centrality of “winning” to American thinking about war. After Vietnam, US Army officers moved away from limited war theory and refocused on “what they viewed as real soldiering,” particularly a potential Warsaw Pact attack on Central Europe (Bacevich 2005, 45). To encourage scenarios of decisive military victories, the AirLand Battle doctrine relied on the establishment of clear aims and objectives from the president and Secretary of Defense, with these principles being consolidated in the Weinberger–Powell doctrine (Lock-Pullan 2006, 380). Weinberger (1986, 686) argued that “should the United States decide that it is necessary to commit its forces to combat, we must commit them in sufficient numbers . . . to win,” while Powell derided how Vietnam was a “half-hearted war” and argued that “when we go to war . . . we should mobilize the country's resources to fulfil that mission and then go on to win” (Record 2006, 14). By aiming to prevent situations in which the US military could fail to “win,” the Weinberger–Powell doctrine doubled down on the centrality of “winning” to American identity (McCrisken 2003, 189).

This reassertion of winnability was consolidated before, during, and after the Gulf War, with George H. W. Bush promising to the American public on January 28, 1991, that the conflict would “not be another Vietnam” and that the costs of war could “only [be] justified when victory can be achieved.” US military strategy revolved around the doctrine of “overwhelming force” and a viable exit strategy, with the emphasis on “winning” being confirmed upon the war's conclusion by the largest military parade since the end of World War II (Subotic and Steele 2018, 392). The Gulf War left “the nation with its reassuring images from World War II intact” (Sherry 1995, 472), with the 1993 US Army Field Manual acknowledging that “the American people expect decisive victories” (Eikenberry 1996). Although these ideals quickly became a distant memory with the failures of the US-led intervention in Somalia and consequential American inaction during the 1994 Rwandan genocide, familiar tropes surrounding winnability remained. In his August 3, 2000, presidential nomination speech, Bush called for the US to “remember the lessons of Vietnam: when America uses force in the world . . . the goal must be clear, and the victory must be overwhelming.” Against the ideas of presidential decision-making studies that outline mistakes to be avoided and lessons to be learnt, the “moral weight” of “victory” in war explains why policy successes and failures are both interpreted through the self-reaffirming prism of winnability.

However, notions of “winning” and “victory” do not translate easily to contemporary conflicts. Traditionally associated with battles between nation states and decisive military victories, “industrial war” such as World War II “no longer exists” (Smith 2007, 13). Instead, postmodern war generally consists of a mix of law enforcement and combat operations wherein “military activity is not clearly distinguishable from political activity” (Simpson 2012). Conflicts occur in a globalized world where differing opinions are instantly accessible due to technological ideas, creating a global battlefield for ideas (Krieg and Rickli 2019, 40–41). In contrast to the “decisive strategic victor[ies]” of the past, the best that participants can hope for is “establishing a condition” (Smith 2007, 242). This is echoed by the war as “risk management” literature, which posits that although the binary distinctions between “war” and “peace” have always been an illusion, this has become particularly apparent after the Cold War with the emergence of globalized “risks” that can only be managed, as opposed to defeated (inter alia, Heng 2006; Coker 2009). As “security never seems to make any progress” in the postmodern era (Heath-Kelly 2018, 85), scholars have argued that “victory” has become an “outmoded concept,” with the War on Terror epitomizing these trends in postmodern warfare (Coker 2009, 120–21).

As critics argued from the inception of the conflict, the War on Terror was unwinnable on the basis that “terrorism”—as a tactic—could not be defeated any more than “night raids” (Bentley 2014, 94). However, even if one conceptualizes the War on Terror as aiming to defeat specific terrorist organizations, these groups generally transcend national boundaries, making their military defeat on any battlefield unlikely (Coker 2009, 74). This has implications for war legitimation: as former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates reflected on the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, “even the best possible outcome would not look to most Americans like winning or a victory” (Gates 2014, 469). More broadly, the Bush administration's National Strategy for Combatting Terrorism in 2003 acknowledged that the “desired endstate” of the War on Terror was reducing the “scope” and “capability” of terrorist organizations to “return terrorism to the ‘criminal domain’” (The White House 2003). Likewise, the 2018 National Strategy for Counterterrorism stated that “terrorism will persist as a tactic” of American enemies (The White House 2018). In that way, the perceived necessity of endless counterterrorism campaigns is ripe for the emergence of “ontological dissonance,” which occurs when the solutions to an actor's ontological insecurity simultaneously threaten their self-identity (Lupovici 2012, 813). As such, long-term ontological insecurity is encouraged by both the unique nature of a globalized terrorist threat and the disconnect between the emphasis on “winning” in American identity narratives and the endless nature of the War on Terror. The paper's conclusion explores the implications of this state of affairs for public policy literature and postmodern war more generally. Before that, the next three sections carry out a discourse analysis of how Bush, Obama, and Trump have utilized different narrative components to handle this contrast and their relative success in doing so.

Ontological Security in Times of Crisis: Bush's “War on Terror”

The following discourse analysis relies on an extensive dataset sourced from the American Presidency Project for a broader research project concerning winnability in the War on Terror, which includes presidential speeches referring to key concepts (“Iraq,” “Afghanistan,” “Syria,” “al-Qaeda,” “ISIS,”³ “victory,” “defeat,” “win,” “winning,” “lose,” and “losing”) in conjunction with the words “terror,” “terrorist,” and “terrorism.” After removing speeches that were less relevant or replicated previous content, highlights were taken from over one hundred statements from each presidency studied here, alongside the incorporation of data from presidential campaigns. The statements included in this paper reflect a wide variety of purposes and audiences from speeches at party rallies to addresses aimed at the nation. In Trump's case, tweets are included given the extent to which he relied on this medium to communicate with the electorate when in office (Lacatus 2021, 37). Alongside the analysis of primary sources, opinion polls and content from American newspapers via the Factiva database are analyzed to gauge ontological (in)security concerning winnability in reaction to key speeches and junctures.

Bush's rhetorical strategy in the widespread state of anxiety and ontological insecurity brought about by 9/11 was to try and reaffirm America's sense of Self (Steele 2017, 79). Bush remarked on the day of the attacks that “America was targeted . . . because we're the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world” but reassured the American public that “no one will keep that light from shining,” thus explaining the potentially incomprehensible crisis. Likewise, in a speech on September 15, 2001, Bush linked America's pain to its eventual triumph when he pronounced that “underneath our tears is the strong determination of America to win this war. And we will win it.” In a landmark address to a Joint Session of Congress on September 20, Bush outlined the proposed scale of the War on Terror, arguing that although it began with al-Qaeda, it would “not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated.” This echoed Bush's statement on September 13 that “we will lead the world to victory,” with this scope of ambition reflecting the need to reestablish American ontological security in the wake of a potentially humiliating crisis for conceptions of the American Self (Saurette 2006, 518). Indeed, the inevitability of America's victory was repeatedly reasserted in Bush's rhetoric as a means of offering certainty in an otherwise very uncertain period (Jackson 2005, 137).

As a reflection of the nature of the nascent conflict, these confident declarations often coexisted with warnings concerning its longevity; on November 21, Bush cautioned that he could not predict “every turn this war will take,” but still crucially reaffirmed that he was “confident of the outcome” because of the “resolve of the American people.” Bush similarly stated on December 11 that although “we still have far to go, and many dangers lie ahead . . . our enemies have made the mistake that America’s enemies always make. They saw liberty and thought they saw weakness, and now they see defeat.” As this final quote shows, in his effort to rebuild the sense of continuity with America's past and demonstrate the winnability of the War on Terror despite the uniqueness of warring against non-state actors on a global scale, Bush returned to traditional memories in American identity narratives, regularly drawing upon World War II and the Cold War as relevant comparisons to the nascent conflict (Jackson 2005, 46).

Due to the unique promise of “victory” as an American routine, winnability remained at the heart of Bush's rhetorical strategy despite the ailing fortunes and popularity of the War on Terror. For example, after a significant uptick in sectarian violence in Iraq in the middle of 2005, a clear majority of Americans felt that the Iraq War had been a mistake and were in favor of withdrawal (Gallup 2007). Yet, Bush doubled down on the theme of victory in this conflict: his November 30, 2005, address used the word “victory” fifteen times and the National Security Council's accompanying report was titled National Strategy for Victory in Iraq (Berinsky 2009, 1). “Victory,” as Bush later informed members of the Iraq Study Group, was “a word the American people understand” (Sanger, Gordon, and Burns 2007). More broadly, between October 2005 and July 2006, however, Bush declared on seven occasions that “we will never back down; we will never give in; we will never accept anything less than complete victory” over transnational terrorist organizations.⁴

To use Giddens’ terminology, while the “moral weight” of victory in America's national identity is “robust,” self-narratives remain “fragile” in that they must resonate with the external environment. Especially in the run-up to the November 2006 midterm congressional elections, Bush's rhetoric showed acknowledgment of the skepticism among the American electorate concerning the achievability of “victory.” Again, however, this recognition was situated in the timeline of victorious American wars and the country's exceptional nature. For example, on September 5, 2006, Bush recognized that “the road ahead is going to be difficult, and it will require more sacrifice.” “Yet,” Bush argued, Americans could “have confidence in the outcome, because we've seen freedom conquer tyranny and terror before” in World War II and the Cold War.

By situating the troubles in the War on Terror (and particularly in Iraq) in America's ever-victorious tradition, Bush's narrative aimed to prevent ontological insecurity and its political consequences from emerging. A prior speech to West Point graduates on May 27, 2006, devoted much of its time to the wisdom of Harry Truman's “bold action[s]” that “laid the foundation for freedom's victory,” even when this “was not obvious or assured” during the first five years of the Cold War. Extrapolating this logic to Iraq, although Bush acknowledged on October 25 that “many Americans are not satisfied with the situation” and that he was “not satisfied either,” the president contended that “the only way we lose in Iraq is if we leave before the job is done.” Building on this position, on November 2, Bush claimed that “the Democrats have no plan for victory” and that the opposition “have no idea how to win.” Bush selectively activated the idealized memories of previous wars to both offer a pathway for ontological security in a time of anxiety and suggest that it would be out of keeping with America's ever-victorious character to withdraw.

Polling data, however, suggest that despite Bush's efforts to adopt narrative components consistent with America's identity and capable of legitimating continued military interventions, he was unable to prevent the emergence of ontological insecurity among the American electorate. The Iraq War proved to be the pivotal issue for the American public in the 2006 midterm elections, and even former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld later reflected how “there was no mistaking in 2006 that Americans were losing confidence” in the conduct of the War on Terror (Dieck 2015, 3, 75). After the Democrats won control of both houses of Congress for the first time since 1994, Bush publicly recognized the fragility of his administration's narratives, conceding for the first time that the US “was not winning” in Iraq (Baker 2006). More broadly, the president attempted to create national unity around the War on Terror by announcing a bipartisan advisory council on January 23, 2007, to “share ideas” and demonstrate “that we are united in the goal of victory.” The damage, however, had already been done. Although Bush claimed on September 13, 2007, that the supposed success of the “Surge” was indicative of how “it is never too late to support out troops in a fight they can win,” the new policies had little effect on majorities of the American public's perceptions of the likelihood of victory in Iraq (Baum and Groeling 2010). Furthermore, concerning the perceptions of control and agency needed to act in international politics, in 2008 a record number of Americans (36 percent) since 1947 felt that it would be “best for the future of the country” if the US “stay[ed] out of world affairs” (Chicago Council on Global Affairs 2008). While “winning” and “victory” are powerful ideas in US identity, self-narratives are ultimately “fragile” and must resonate with the external environment to maintain ontological security. The next section studies Obama's rhetorical strategies to exploit and then cope with this ontological insecurity.

Obama and the End of the “War on Terror”

There were not only debates surrounding whether the US was “winning” the War on Terror, but also regarding the ontological dissonance between the controversial counterterrorism policies adopted by the Bush administration and American values. To emphasize this situation, during his presidential campaign Obama claimed that torture, extraordinary rendition, Guantanamo Bay, illegal wiretapping, and most relevantly “an endless war” in Iraq were all at odds with “who we are.” Obama's 2009 inaugural address instead argued that World War II and the Cold War showed that “our security emanates from the justness of our cause, the force of our example, the tempering qualities of humility and restraint.” Obama's identity narrative on May 21, 2009, explicitly linked these ideals to the winnability of the War on Terror: “I do know with certainty that we can and will defeat Al Qaida. Because the terrorists can only succeed if they swell their ranks and alienate America from our allies . . . they will never be able to do that if we stay true to who we are.”

This quote is indicative of how Obama restricted the securitization of terrorism (and thus also the language of winnability) to specific terrorist groups as part of the efforts to move away from the politics of Bush's “War on Terror.” Obama also avoided the concept of “victory” in the conflict because he was “worried” that using the term would invoke inappropriate events such as the surrender treaty at the end of World War II (ABC News 2009). Instead, Obama consistently referred to his administration's efforts to “disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaida.” As such, while Obama's rhetoric echoed his predecessor's by framing “winning” wars as an American routine, his language was much more specific and selected different narrative components by focusing on idealized liberal values in an attempt to “humanize” and justify the ongoing conflict despite its longevity (Morefield 2021; Moyn 2021).

The tensions between the celebrated victories of previous American wars and how “spatial and temporal finality [has] proved elusive” in the War on Terror were apparent in Obama's address announcing the death of Osama bin Laden on May 1, 2011 (Steele 2019, 331). Obama referred to how it was America's “most significant achievement to date” in the War on Terror, noting how it was a reminder that the US could do “whatever we set our mind to.” In terms of ontological security, research has since shown how bin Laden's death brought about psychological closure for some Americans (Gollwitzer et al. 2014, 614). Yet, the president also attempted to legitimate continuing counterterrorism campaigns by cautioning that bin Laden's death did “not mark the end” of the War on Terror and calling for the US to “remain vigilant at home and abroad.” This contrast played out in the media reaction to bin Laden's death: CNN's Peter Bergen declared that it was “the end of the War on Terror,” although others warned “that this is not V-J Day” (Campbell 2015, 96–97). Likewise, while there was a 6 percent increase in Obama's approval ratings immediately after the raid (Cohen 2020), it was just “a matter of days” before Republicans returned to criticizing the president for his counterterrorism policies (Klaidman 2012, 248). At the level of public opinion, some found themselves “wanting more” after bin Laden's death (Gollwitzer et al. 2014, 614). The contrasts in Obama's speech, media reaction, and political consequences all reflect the inability of the US to realize the ontological security and political unity associated with conclusively “winning” previous wars.

Obama's most significant effort to counteract this problem was in a speech at the National Defense University on May 23, 2013. This address reflected the political context of the time: Obama's approval ratings on national security had enjoyed a significant turnaround during his first presidential term (Klaidman 2012), and even after the Boston marathon bombing in April 2013, anxiety regarding terrorism was at its lowest ebb since December 2003 (Mueller and Stewart 2018). Obama argued that while the “systematic effort to dismantle terrorist organizations must continue,” the War on Terror, “like all wars, must end.” For Obama, this was because of the “values of our founding” and the “demands” of “our democracy,” later arguing on December 6, 2016, that “democracies should not operate in a state of permanently authorized war.”

The tensions between continuing a militarized “effort to dismantle terrorist organizations” and calling for the end of the War on Terror to maintain the health of American democracy represent another form of ontological dissonance, with Obama's response being to try and reduce the salience of this dissonance by deprioritizing the ongoing US counterterrorism campaigns (Hall 2021b). The president stated that because he could not “promise the total defeat of terror,” “victory against terrorism” would “be measured in parents taking their kids to school; immigrants coming to our shores; fans taking in a ballgame; a veteran starting a business.” In the effort to adjust the standards traditionally associated with “victory” in previous wars while reaffirming US ontological security, Obama's image of “victory” engaged with quintessentially American events, and the president referred to the “national pastime” of baseball in the same context on three other occasions. One journalist aptly summarized the central message of Obama's speech: “it is time to declare victory and get on with our lives” (Robinson 2013). Albeit effectively the fulfilment of the earlier cited end goal of the Bush administration's 2003 National Strategy for Combatting Terrorism (to “return terrorism to the ‘criminal domain’”), the decision to declare the War on Terror “won” was a significant narrative shift that most Democrats and all presidential candidates had not made (Mayer 2013).

The problem, however, is that while the methods for coping with ontological dissonance at the individual level can be internalized, because collective narratives are an essential aspect of a state's ontological security, these processes must occur in the public domain and rely upon their reception and acceptance (Lupovici 2012, 818). Conservative critiques echoed the arguments made by Bush toward the end of his presidency by claiming that the Cold War was an appropriate analogy to the ongoing campaign against transnational terrorist groups, noting that Dwight Eisenhower did not declare the end of that conflict simply because twelve years had passed (Krauthammer 2013; Stephens 2013). Senator Saxby Chambliss even inverted Obama's language to claim that the speech would “be viewed by terrorists as a victory” (Baker 2013). Bret Stephens (2013) contended that contrary to Obama's account of America's past with his stress on constitutional values and finite periods of wartime, “what history really advises is that America does best when it fights its wars to a successful conclusion.” In failing to define a “successful conclusion” to the War on Terror, this type of critique both reaffirmed the ideals of victory in US self-narratives and encouraged the emergence of ontological insecurity.

These criticisms, along with Obama's initial characterization of ISIS as a “jayvee [read: second tier] team” and the group's subsequent rise (Remnick 2014), resulted in the president using more decisive language than usual when describing his administration's counterterrorism strategy against the organization. For example, in his first prime-time speech to the nation regarding the group on September 10, 2014, Obama employed the language of traditional conceptions of war in promising that the US and its allies would “degrade and ultimately destroy ISIL.” As an indication of the shift in Obama's language, he pledged that his administration would “destroy ISIL” on fifty-one separate occasions; the comparative figure for “destroy Al Qaida” was just seven, as opposed to the thirty-six times that Obama promised to “disrupt, dismantle, and defeat Al Qaida.”⁵ What's more, in terms of quelling anxiety in terms of concrete Othering, on September 24, 2014, Obama described the group as “evil” and a “cancer,” arguing that there could “be no reasoning . . . with this brand of evil.”

Despite this securitizing and more traditional rhetoric, Obama's identity narrative continued to utilize the idea of staying true to America's true Self to “win” against ISIS, especially after the rising prominence of Islamophobia during the Republican primary campaign in 2015. Four days after the December 2, 2015, San Bernadino terrorist attack, Obama argued that

we have always met challenges—whether war or depression, natural disasters or terrorist attacks—by coming together around our common ideals as one Nation and one people. So long as we stay true to that tradition, I have no doubt America will prevail.

Additionally, two days after the 12 June, 2016, shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando, the president cautioned that if America moved away from its founding values and “the very things that make us exceptional . . . then the terrorists would have won.” These speeches epitomize Obama's continuing commitment to reframing the relationship between America's identity narrative and the War on Terror: victory would only come if the US remained committed to its liberal values, rather than waging a highly militarized and discriminatory war with the unrealistic expectation of complete destruction of the enemy. For Obama, American ontological security would be attained by the recognition of those complexities; the problem, as the next section shows, was the salience of discourses that rejected these ideas in favor of traditional and reassuring conceptions of winnability in war.

The 2015–2016 Republican Primary Campaign, Trump, and the Reassertion of Winnability

Given the rise of ISIS, the spate of ISIS-inspired terrorist attacks in the West, and the prevailing wisdom that Republicans tend to perform better on national security issues than Democrats, it was unsurprising that the issue of (counter)terrorism featured prominently in the 2015–2016 Republican primary campaign. What is striking, however, is the extent to which the criticisms of the Obama administration's counter-ISIS campaign revolved around the lack of clarity associated with idealized memories of previous American wars and thus with ideas of control and US ontological security. Much like the reaction to Obama's National Defense University speech, these criticisms implied that the president was pursuing something less than what America has and should pursue in war. These critiques appeared to resonate, with 67 percent of respondents in one March 2016 poll answering that Obama did “not have a clear plan to fight the threat posed by ISIS” (McCardle 2016).

First, there was the criticism that Obama was refusing to “name” the enemy to be defeated, which again points to the link between securitized Others and ontological security. As Senator Ted Cruz argued on August 6, 2015, “we will not defeat radical Islamic terrorism so long as we have a president unwilling to utter the words, ‘radical Islamic terrorism’.” This would later become a central part of Trump's campaign, as he charged that Obama “should step down” and Hillary Clinton “get out” of the presidential race for their refusal to say the phrase “radical Islam” after the Orlando attack (Prokop 2016). Second, despite Obama's sterner rhetoric regarding ISIS, the president was accused of having goals in war below the threshold of elimination of the enemy associated with previous conflicts. Evoking Obama's surgical language concerning al-Qaeda, Cruz argued that it was time to “have a commander in chief who makes clear that the object is not to weaken, it's not to degrade, it is to utterly destroy” ISIS (Baker and Harris 2015). Third, in an echo of the critique that the US had fought a “half-hearted” and un-American war in Vietnam, Obama was criticized for excessive political interference and restricting the freedom of the American military. Jeb Bush referred to the “need to remove the self-imposed constraints . . . Obama has placed on our . . . military” (Falcone 2015), while Ben Carson contended on December 15, 2015, that the US had “to get rid of all this PC stuff” in their counterterrorism efforts to ensure military success. Last, Republicans repeatedly condemned the Obama administration for not “winning” against ISIS and promised to resolve this. New Jersey Governor Chris Christie declared in the same debate that “I've fought terrorists and won and when we get back in the White House we will fight terrorists and win again,” while Senator Marco Rubio stated on January 14, 2016, that “when I'm president of the United States, we are going to win this war on ISIS.” As per Obama's logic for using the more decisive language of previous American wars, this collection of criticisms can be explained by the unique promise of control that decisive military victories can bring in reducing anxiety.

In their plans for defeating the terrorist organization, Republican candidates promised to intensify US warfighting efforts, as encapsulated by Trump's promise to “bomb the s**t out of” ISIS (Engel 2015). Indeed, Trump's proposed counterterrorism measures were consistently vague (including a “secret plan” to defeat ISIS; Tan 2017), acting less as a policy agenda to persuade voters and more as a “vessel” to exploit the ontological insecurity of voters (Hall 2021a, 56). Fear regarding terrorism continued to rise throughout the campaign, and especially among Trump supporters, 57 percent of whom felt that a terrorist attack “causing large numbers of lives to be lost” in the “near future” was “very likely” in September 2016, in comparison to just 19 percent of Clinton voters (Shepard 2016). As such, Republican candidates in 2016 not only took advantage of the perceived weakness of not “winning” against ISIS but also exploited the anxiety surrounding the threat of terrorism.

Trump—more so than any of his Republican competitors—successfully harnessed the ontological insecurity associated with ISIS’ rise. Trump's campaign rhetoric was highly traditional and nationalistic; as an “identity-signifier,” this provided reassurance to reduce ontological insecurity (Kinnvall 2004, 763). Moreover, “ontological insecurity undermines trust and accentuates the perception of general threat from the outside world” (Rumelili 2014b, 2), which enabled Trump to successfully exaggerate the threat of terrorism as a threat to “our very way of life” and promise to personally resolve this (Hall 2021a, 53). This duality of exaggerating threats and vowing to combat them is why recent research has explored the connections between ontological (in)security and populism (Steele and Homolar 2019), for populist discourses—among other things—both emphasize the humiliation of “the people” and offer a redemptive pathway to restore a nation's former glory (Homolar and Löfflmann 2021).

Trump, whose fame on The Apprentice revolved around his status as a “winner” who fired “losers” (Moon 2020), epitomized this paradoxical dynamic. In seven of the eleven Republican primary debates Trump participated in, his opening or closing statements featured a series of lines on how the US did not “win anymore” and how this would be corrected, such as the following on February 25, 2016:

my whole theme is make America great again. We don't win anymore as a country. We don't win with trade, we don't win with the military. ISIS, we can't even knock out ISIS, and we will, believe me. We will.

On September 7 and October 13, 2016, Trump criticized the “endless wars we are caught in now” that had produced “only death and bloodshed, but no victory,” before claiming that his administration would know how “to win” and “avoid . . . endless wars.” Having originally begun in 2014 as a hashtag (#EndEndlessWars) among progressive grassroots activists against the yearly renewal of war funding in Congress (Moyn 2021), by 2016 the phrase “endless wars” had been commandeered by a presidential candidate calling for measures such as the killing of family members of suspected terrorists (Fox News 2015). In a time of widespread anxiety, Trump's campaign rhetoric and proposed policies revolved around simple ideas that offered the potential certainty associated with “winning.”

In the White House, Trump remained committed to securitizing terrorism and using decisive language to describe the end state of the War on Terror. Later boasting on July 24, 2018, of how his administration was “calling the threat by its real name” as “you have to know your enemy before you can defeat” them, his 2017 inaugural address promised to “unite the civilized world against radical Islamic terrorism” and “eradicate [it] completely from the face of the Earth.” On April 5, even as he acknowledged that ISIS was but “one [terrorist] group” and that “others have formed . . . all over the place,” Trump restated the simply unattainable goal that “we will . . . eradicate terrorism.” Additionally, Trump's August 21 announcement that more American soldiers would be deployed to Afghanistan centered on the theme of winnability. Having declared that “the American people” were “weary of war without victory,” Trump maintained that “from now on . . . we will fight to win” and that the US would deal “terrorists . . . a lasting defeat.” In an insightful example of the relationship between ontological security and national agency in foreign policy, Trump employed the traditional tropes of winnability when attempting to justify an interventionist policy that went against his campaign statements. Much like the rest of his rhetoric concerning terrorism, the vision of victory in Trump's speech was highly militarized, with the president stating that “we are not nation building again. We are killing terrorists.” This strongman-styled rhetoric aimed at reestablishing American ontological security by promising to defeat terrorism in an account of war aligned with previous conflicts, despite the unlikeliness of achieving as much in conflicts such as Afghanistan.

Consequently, Trump's approach to try and square this circle was to make “misleading or outright false claims” regarding his administration's successes against terrorism (Löfflmann 2021). In Trump's sudden announcement on December 19, 2018, that US troops would be returning from Syria, he explained that this was because “we have won against ISIS. We've beaten them, and we’ve beaten them badly.” Like Obama then, Trump attempted to reestablish ontological security by declaring (a) victory in the War on Terror. Trump's effort suffered a similar fate, with the president's actions prompting the resignations of Secretary of Defense James Mattis and Special Presidential Envoy for the Global Coalition to Counter ISIS Brett McGurk, along with a rare bipartisan congressional backlash sufficient enough to permanently delay the withdrawal of said troops (Stewart 2019). McGurk's resignation revolved around the inappropriateness of Trump's winnability-centered language and policies concerning ISIS, having declared just one week before the withdrawal announcement that “if we've learned one thing over the years, enduring defeat of a group like this means you can't just defeat their physical space and then leave” (Nordland 2018). Similar dynamics occurred in October 2019 with Trump's second surprise announcement that all US troops would be withdrawing from Syria, as the president encouraged the US to “get out of these ridiculous Endless wars” on October 7 and “take a victory” on October 11. Again, there was an uncommon degree of bipartisan dissensus and policy was again tempered until after Trump had lost the 2020 presidential election (Hall 2020).

More generally, however, Trump's invocation of winnability in the attempted withdrawals from Syria was indicative of a broader effort to double down on the value of previous warfighting traditions. Trump's repeated invocation of the “endless wars” trope from the beginning of 2019 onward marked his first use of the term since November 2016, such as his contention in the 2019 State of the Union Address that it would be un-American to keep troops in Syria (among other countries) because “great nations do not fight endless wars.” This argument aligned with the emphasis on the return to “great power competition” in the 2018 National Defense Strategy (Mattis 2018), as the US looked to refocus away from the perceived strategic distraction of the War on Terror.

This strategy document enshrined the so-called Third Offset (pioneered by former Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work), which centered around the advanced technologies needed to counter Chinese and Russian capabilities. Although this strategic thinking itself may not have reflected ontological security issues, it is striking that Work and his colleagues referred to how an “offset” offered a narrative “hook” for their ideas because of the similarities between 2014 and the post-Vietnam period when the “Second Offset” occurred with the return to “real soldiering” and doctrines such as AirLand Battle (Gentile et al. 2021).⁶ In an echo of the “learning” process between Vietnam and the Gulf War, the promise of ontological security in explicitly winnable conflicts against conventional Others remains strong in periods of continued strategic failures.

Indeed, Trump repeatedly invoked the idealized notions of victory in previous interstate wars during the second half of his presidency. In a 2019 Independence Day speech at the first Washington, DC, military parade since the Gulf War, Trump's autobiographical narrative of the US incorporated the War on Terror into a long line of American conflicts before it, referring to the spirit and success of American troops in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. According to Trump, what united these soldiers was that “they live by the creed of Douglas MacArthur: ‘in war, there is no substitute for victory’.” Such was Trump's valorizing of the past that despite his previous derisions of American exceptionalist tropes, multiple September 2020 reelection campaign speeches included the pledge to “teach our children the truth about America, that we are the most exceptional nation on the face of the Earth.”

Trump's promises regarding winnability can be seen as part of the more general shift in the president's discourse toward encouraging ontological security for electoral gain, as epitomized by the change in election campaigns from “Make America Great Again” to “Keep America Great Again.” Trump's rhetoric concerning winnability was forward facing too. On September 30, Trump praised the new Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, for his work in preparing the US army “to achieve complete victory in the conflicts of tomorrow,” while on November 28, the president referred to how if the US was “forced” to go to war, “we will win like—the old days.” Like during the post-Vietnam period, Trump's rhetoric revolved around the need for the US to return to its routine of “winning” despite the strength of recent evidence to the contrary. Even Trump acknowledged on September 9, 2019, the challenges of achieving “victory” in the Afghanistan War, referring to how “we beat them militarily, but as soon as we leave, it seems to form again.” In this way, Trump's rhetorical strategy was an example of Giddens’ theory of “avoidance” in response to ontological dissonance, which occurs when actors ignore or reinterpret information at odds with their self-narratives to prevent ontological insecurity (Lupovici 2012, 818). The public nature of this avoidance meant that even despite Trump's unprecedented efforts to try and resolve the ontological insecurity associated with the War on Terror, his presidency was again marred by the problem of being unable to produce results commensurate with previous victories. The Trump presidency thus suggests both the ongoing intimacy between “winning” and American ontological security (and especially in periods of anxiety) and the ongoing unlikeliness of achieving as much.

Conclusion

This paper has highlighted the foundational role of “winning” and “victory” in American exceptionalism and consequently US ontological security. Like “winning” at the individual level, US conceptions of being ever-victorious have provided affirmation of America's place in the world and its sense of Self. As a promise of a unique degree of control against specific objects of fear, ideas concerning winnability offer a powerful appeal for the ideas of order and continuity during public moods of anxiety. Hence, the familiar narratives of “winning” and “victory” have repeatedly appeared during the War on Terror, despite consistent failures of the US to achieve these goals as traditionally conceived. Contrary to the literature on the importance of credible rhetoric regarding war lengths, the unique promise of winnability for US ontological security explains why presidents have utilized these tropes throughout the War on Terror. However, building on previous substate-level studies in OSS, this paper has also shown that even with a narrow focus on “winning” in the War on Terror, there has been significant narrative contestation concerning ontological security issues. All three presidents studied here have selectively activated different components of identity narratives surrounding winnability to encourage ontological (in)security among their supporters depending on their political goals. The result has been the emergence of significant national ontological insecurity during every presidency studied here. In line with public policy literature on the disputed nature of policy assessment (McConnell 2016, 680), this paper has shown that while winnability may be a core component of US ontological security, ideas of “winning” and “victory” are contestable and likely unattainable in the mold of previous American wars. Accordingly, this paper has illustrated how identity-based issues interact with policy evaluation.

The magnitude of this issue is suggested by the reaction to the termination of America's war in Afghanistan in August 2021. Although Biden avoided claiming “victory” or “defeat” in his justification of the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan (Sanger and Shear 2021), the chaotic scenes at Kabul airport were reminiscent of the pictures from the US withdrawal from Vietnam in 1973, which—in opposition to the confusion around what “winning” would constitute—brought clarity to what “defeat” looked like (Steele 2010, 146). Stephens (2021) bemoaned that “we are a country that . . . could not win . . . a war against a morally and technologically retrograde enemy,” while General H. R. McMaster argued that the US had “defeated ourselves” in Afghanistan (Crowley 2021). As an example of Hagström's concept of “great power narcissism,” these claims focus entirely on America's agency while recognizing the insecurity of “losing” at the international level. As one scholar observed, “much of the outrage aimed at Biden” did not concern the exit of Afghanistan itself but instead by revealing “America's failures while the world was watching” (Orr Bueno 2021). Put another way, the withdrawal was contested because it brought the self-narrative of an ever-victorious US into question. Here, then, is an illustrative link of the potentially fruitful dialogue between “internalist” and “externalist” approaches in OSS, as competing drives for ontological security domestically (ending “endless wars” versus defeat in Afghanistan) result in ontological insecurity for the US on the global stage.

The Afghanistan withdrawal thus supports the detailed analysis above, that all presidents in the War on Terror era have been affected by the contrast between the ontological security associated with “winning” in war and the ontological insecurity related to the ongoing existence of transnational terrorist organizations. Without a significant process of “interrogative reflexivity,” the evidence suggests that presidents will be unable to either continue protracted conflicts or generate a consensus around war termination without creating ontological insecurity. This has significant implications for policy and America's agency in the world. Although this paper has focused exclusively on counterterrorism, the ontological insecurity caused by the inability to achieve clear-cut “victories” against securitized Others likely translates to other forms of postmodern war such as cyber and hybrid warfare. While the return to “great power competition” might in theory offer a resolution to this problem (and even account for the newfound popularity of this strategy), the changing character of war in the postmodern era suggests that the US could these conflicts equally problematic in terms of satisfying US conceptions of “victory.” This suggests that the US may have issues in remaining in for the “long haul” in the modern era of great power competition, much like the common assumption among belligerents against the US in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

In its exploration of ontological (in)security and winnability, the paper has thus made theoretical and empirical contributions to OSS and US foreign policy studies. The paper also opens avenues for future research. First, the idea of “winning” and its consequences for policy assessment could be explored in other arenas. In healthcare, what were the consequences of Trump's decisive language in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic (such as his statement on March 28, 2020: “with the grace of God, we will win this war”) in terms of expectations of policy responses? It is noticeable that several commentators, including in the New York Times and Time, referred to how the US was “losing the war on COVID-19” (Bennett 2020; Fitzpatrick 2020; Krugman 2020; Ahmed 2021). In foreign policy discourses, future research could build on the work of Solomon (2015) and Heath-Kelly (2018) to analyze how “victory” functions as a “signifier,” particularly in terms of offering knowability in periods of anxiety and humiliation. By extension, in line with previous research on the “gendered” nature of self-narratives and the “masculinist logics” of ontological security (Delehanty and Steele 2009; Agius 2022), the connections between “winning” and masculinity could be investigated. Related to this point, the relationship between “winning” and populism offers fruitful grounds for analysis. Inherently reliant on a sense of crisis (Moffitt 2015), populism has thrived in an era of globalization that Giddens (2003) referred to as “a runaway world” that “seems out of our control.” The sparsity of clear “wins” in a globalized world offers a potentially crucial and underexplored dynamic in the success of populist—and masculinist—discourses of “taking back control” (as a slogan for Brexit put it). As shown in this paper, without a system conducive to clear evidence of policy success, the trope of “winning”—and the desired control this suggests—is likely to remain a potent political discourse for populist actors and beyond.

Footnotes

1

Here only referenced with date and location, all uncited primary evidence is accessible via the attached appendix. All emphases to these quotes are added.

2

“America” and the “US” are used interchangeably in this paper for stylistic purposes, but it should be noted that this reflects a particular geopolitical imagination by overlooking Central and South America (Löfflmann 2017, 12).

3

Including spelling and naming variations for al-Qaeda and ISIS.

4

As per the “all of these terms” search function on American Presidency Project (2022).

5

As per the “all of these terms” search function on the American Presidency Project (2022), accounting for alternative spelling of “al Qaeda” in all cases.

6

This phenomenon is particularly noteworthy given the distance that it shrinks between military doctrine (with its focus on issues such as tactics and strategy) and preeminent domestic political ideas (in this case, “victory” against a clearly identifiable other).

Appendix A. Appendix A. Primary Sources

George W. Bush

2000

August 3—Address Accepting the Presidential Nomination at the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia

2001

September 11—Address to the Nation on the Terrorist Attacks

September 13—Remarks in a Telephone Conversation with New York City Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and New York Governor George E. Pataki and an Exchange with Reporters

September 15—Remarks in a Meeting with the National Security Team and an Exchange with Reporters at Camp David, Maryland

September 20—Address Before a Joint Session of the Congress on the United States Response to the Terrorist Attacks of September 11

November 21—Remarks to the Community at Fort Campbell, Kentucky

December 11—Remarks at a September 11 Remembrance Ceremony

2006

May 27—Commencement Address at the United States Military Academy in West Point, New York

September 5—Remarks to the Military Officers Association of America

October 25—The President's News Conference

November 2—Remarks at a Montana Victory 2006 Rally in Billings, Montana

2007

January 23—Address Before a Joint Session of the Congress on the State of the Union

September 13—Address to the Nation on Military Operations in Iraq

Barack Obama

2007

May 2—Remarks to the California State Democratic Convention in San Diego

June 23—Remarks in Hartford, Connecticut: “A Politics of Conscience”

August 1—Remarks in Washington, DC: “The War We Need to Win”

October 2—Remarks in Chicago: “A New Beginning”

2009

January 20—Inaugural Address

May 21—Remarks at the National Archives and Records Administration

2011

May 1—Remarks on the Death of Al-Qaida Terrorist Organization Leader Osama bin Laden

2013

May 23—Remarks at National Defense University

2014

September 10—Address to the Nation on United States Strategy to Combat the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant Terrorist Organization (ISIL)

September 24—Remarks to the United Nations General Assembly in New York City

2015

December 6—Address to the Nation on United States Counterterrorism Strategy

2016

June 14—Remarks on United States Strategy to Counter the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) Terrorist Organization at the Department of the Treasury

December 6—Remarks on United States Counterterrorism Strategy at MacDill Air Force Base, Florida

Republican Primary Debates

2015

August 6—Republican Candidates Debate in Cleveland, Ohio

December 15—Republican Candidates Debate in Las Vegas, Nevada

2016

January 14—Republican Candidates Debate in North Charleston, South Carolina

February 25—Republican Candidates Debate in Houston, Texas

Donald Trump

2016

September 7—Remarks at the Union League of Philadelphia in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

October 13—Remarks at the Renaissance Hotel in Columbus, Ohio

2017

January 20—Inaugural Address

February 18—Remarks at a “Make America Great Again” Rally in Melbourne, Florida

April 5—The President's News Conference with King Abdullah II of Jordan

August 21—Address to the Nation on United States Strategy in Afghanistan and South Asia from Joint Base Myer-Henderson Hall, Virginia

2018

July 24—Remarks at the Veterans of Foreign Wars National Convention in Kansas City, Missouri

December 19—Tweets of December 19, 2018

2019

February 5—Address Before a Joint Session of the Congress on the State of the Union

March 20—Remarks at the Joint Systems Manufacturing Center in Lima, Ohio

July 4—Remarks at a “Salute to America” Celebration

September 9—Remarks and an Exchange with Reporters Prior to Departure for Havelock, North Carolina

September 19—Remarks at a “Great American Comeback” Rally in Fayetteville, North Carolina

October 7—Tweets of October 7, 2019

October 11—Remarks at “Make America Great Again” Rally in Lake Charles, Louisiana

November 28—Remarks to United States Troops at Bagram Airfield in Bagram, Afghanistan

2020

March 28—Remarks at a Send-Off Ceremony for the USNS Comfort at Naval Station Norfolk, Virginia