Terminate terrorism

Washington's approach to terrorism and homeland security after September 11 has been driven by sincere attempts to contain and stop serious foreign threats. Officials have tried a wide range of countermeasures and reforms, yet none has produced a lasting, satisfactory outcome, and international terrorism remains a serious danger to American security. Why do terrorist threats ever wind down?

The author looks at four major waves of international terrorism against the United States, when it held superpower status. These were the Cuban hijacking wave from 1968 to 1973, the Iran hostage crisis from 1979 to 1981, the kidnappings in Beirut, Lebanon, from 1982 to 1991, and the suicide bombings carried out by al-Qaeda, which began with overseas attacks in the late 1990s, escalated into the events of 2001, and persist today. Each episode grew out of intense ideological conflict, dramatic public crises, and deep frustration for the policymakers trying to end them.

In the first three episodes, terrorism was brought under control only after defensive and deterrent measures were established and the sides reached mutual agreements. Along the way, American leaders had to reconsider how they saw the conflict and their adversaries, and that change led both parties to pursue settlement through bargaining over their underlying interests, even though the U.S. ultimately negotiated against its own declared policy. Drawing on conflict resolution theory and research, the author builds a framework of termination dynamics, applies it to those three concluded cases and to the current al-Qaeda threat, and offers a method for tracking how a terrorist conflict moves forward.

The book asks how anti-American terrorism comes to an end and explains why it differs from terrorist campaigns elsewhere. It argues that understanding the causes of terrorism reveals little about how it is ended. It also shows how cognitive and instrumental reasoning shape policy choices, sets out a dynamic framework for breaking long-term deadlocks, and considers when negotiation is the right path to ending a terrorist problem.