American Foreign Policy and The Politics of Fear

Threat Inflation since 9/11

A. Trevor Thrall, Jane K. Cramer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135969028
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

This edited volume addresses the issue of threat inflation in American foreign policy and domestic politics. The Bush administration's aggressive campaign to build public support for an invasion of Iraq reheated fears about the president's ability to manipulate the public, and many charged the administration with 'threat inflation', duping the news media and misleading the public into supporting the war under false pretences.

Presenting the latest research, these essays seek to answer the question of why threat inflation occurs and when it will be successful. Simply defined, it is the effort by elites to create concern for a threat that goes beyond the scope and urgency that disinterested analysis would justify. More broadly, the process concerns how elites view threats, the political uses of threat inflation, the politics of threat framing among competing elites, and how the public interprets and perceives threats via the news media.

The war with Iraq gets special attention in this volume, along with the 'War on Terror'. Although many believe that the Bush administration successfully inflated the Iraq threat, there is not a neat consensus about why this was successful. Through both theoretical contributions and case studies, this book showcases the four major explanations of threat inflation -- realism, domestic politics, psychology, and constructivism -- and makes them confront one another directly. The result is a richer appreciation of this important dynamic in US politics and foreign policy, present and future.

This book will be of much interests to students of US foreign and national security policy, international security, strategic studies and IR in general.

Trevor Thrall is Assistant Professor of Political Science and directs the Master of Public Policy program at the University of Michigan - Dearborn. Jane Kellett Cramer is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Oregon.

1 Introduction

Understanding threat inflation

Jane K. Cramer and A. Trevor Thrall

The Bush administration’s launching of a global war on terrorism in the wake of 9/11, coupled with its aggressive campaign to build public support for war against Iraq, have brought the term “threat inflation” into popular use. President Bush’s ability to stoke public fear about Iraq’s connections to Al Qaeda and about its weapons of mass destruction despite the lack of any hard evidence has fueled both public outcry as well as a vigorous debate among academics about why the administration argued with such certainty about Iraq and how its arguments came to dominate debate. The implications of the debate are profound. To the extent that the president can dominate debate about foreign threats, it becomes difficult for the United States to rely on the marketplace of ideas (i.e., the news media and public vetting of foreign policy) to assess accurately the pros and cons of competing arguments about foreign policy and the use of force. In extreme cases, as several scholars have labeled the invasion of Iraq, a president may convince the public to support a war that it would otherwise strenuously oppose.

This volume focuses on the whys and hows of the threat inflation process. Threat inflation, most simply understood, is the attempt by elites to create concern for a threat that goes beyond the scope and urgency that a disinterested analysis would justify. Many scholars, including several in this volume, do not find this definition a perfect one to describe the process. Nonetheless, this view sits at the heart of both public and academic debate over Iraq, and for many it describes the handling of threats since 9/11, thus providing an important baseline definition with which to compare and contrast competing explanations for the same historical cases.

To date scholars have offered a wide range of arguments about why the Bush administration has sought to inflate threats since 9/11 and Iraq in particular. Many observers insist that much of the threat exaggeration since 9/11 has been intentional, politically opportunistic and even self-serving. Others see the administration as sincere, led by long-held ideology to see the post 9/11 world as extremely threatening. Some scholars point the finger at neoconservatives in key positions; arguing that they pressed their worldview on the administration and hijacked the decision-making process regarding Iraq. Others have argued that common psychological short cuts in reasoning biased the threat perception process and most likely significantly account for the widespread misperceptions among administration leaders and their followers. Still others find the threat inflation process likely to be at root politically motivated, but nonetheless primarily institutionally determined and perhaps even necessary to exaggerate threats to enable bold foreign policy initiatives. Finally, a few scholars have assessed the post 9/11 era and found simply a series of heightened fears, unavoidable intelligence failures, and mistakes in judgment.

With regard to how the threat inflation process actually impacts public opinion change and the policy-making process, scholars are likewise in conflict. Why does threat inflation sometimes succeed when clearly, at many other moments in history, elite attempts to inflate the threat do not succeed? Even in cases where scholars agree threat inflation was successful, as with Iraq, observers disagree about what factors moved the needle. Was Bush’s ability to manage the news the critical ingredient, his information dominance as president with respect to Congress, or simply the fact that Congress was unwilling or unable to challenge him so soon after 9/11?

Given the rising interest in the question of threat inflation and the tremendous diversity of competing explanations for recent events, the time is ripe to bring together the different theoretical approaches and make them speak to one another. Too often scholars studying different aspects of threat inflation have not confronted each other’s work. Scholars who have studied intelligence failures, psychological misperceptions, intentional elite manipulation of threats, the formation of public opinion and the power of identity have often been analyzing the same historical cases and evidence without explicitly recognizing either the challenges or the synergies from other perspectives. Thus, in these pages, we asked our contributors to do two things. First, we asked them to address specifically the concept of threat inflation as we have defined it here. Second, we asked them to consider the extent to which their understanding of threat inflation is complementary or competitive with other explanations. In short, these essays on threat inflation have been brought together here to begin a more comprehensive discussion of the causes of threat inflation and the factors that contribute to its success or failure in the United States. Our hope is that a robust debate on this topic will shed light on an important period in U.S. foreign policy and prove fruitful for scholars trying to build theories that offer enduring lessons about threat inflation.

Theories of threat inflation

There are four broad theoretical approaches explaining threat inflation: realist, psychological, domestic political and constructivist. Part of what makes it difficult to reconcile these approaches is that they often operate on different levels of analysis and highlight different elements as most crucial to the process. At times, scholars appear to be in near-agreement as to the causes of threat inflation, but slight differences in emphasis or characterization of what the most important causes of threat inflation are lead to major differences in policy prescriptions as to what the cure for threat inflation might be, if a cure is indeed possible. Nonetheless, a complete theory must explain the causal chain outlined in Figure 1.1. The figure provides the simplest possible model of the threat inflation process, in which elites perceive threats, create communication strategies to inflate threats, implement those strategies within the news media, or marketplace of ideas, in an attempt to shape opinions and influence policy, and either succeed or fail to do so.

Figure 1.1 A simple model of threat inflation

Looking at the model, a useful way to understand the major differences between the four theoretical approaches is simply to ask in case of each approach: Where does threat inflation begin? Realists begin at the far left of the model, highlighting the uncertainty that elites face in trying to assess threats. Unable to be certain of other’s intentions, elites often feel they have little or no choice but to focus on the worst case, and they may even spin threats to the public in order to prepare for the same. Psychological theorists generally start a step further to the right from realists, arguing most often that the key problems arise in the information-processing step as elites fall prey to various cognitive and emotional biases in perception. Some psychological theorists emphasize the fifth step in that they emphasize ways in which the very same cognitive biases lead the public to overreact to certain threats and to be most receptive to elites who emphasize worst case scenarios.

Constructivist perspectives on threat inflation similarly suggest that threat inflation begins with elite threat perception, but argue that elite threat perceptions are not discrete events but are historically and culturally determined, rooted in national identity, norms and values, which in turn reflect collective discursive processes within the society. As with psychological theories, many constructivist theories are also used to explain how public perceptions are determined. Instead of looking at cognitive processes, constructivists aim to understand how and why certain arguments become hegemonic among the public from a social perspective.

Domestic politics explanations of threat inflation primarily focus on the middle two steps of the process, arguing that many elites have institutional, electoral, bureaucratic, personal or material incentives to promote threats and that threat inflation’s success or failure rides on the political maneuvering, competition between President and Congress, the influence of interest groups and lobbies, public opinion, and the behavior of the mass media.

Most scholars, regardless of general theoretical approach, acknowledge that threat inflation has multiple and interacting causes. To date, however, there have been few attempts to bring these different perspectives together in a complete explanation of the entire threat inflation process. In this chapter we provide a brief overview of these four types of explanations and how the phenomenon of “threat inflation” has been explored previously.

Realist explanations of threat inflation

Realist scholars emphasize that what appears to be “threat inflation” is really the result of leaders attempting to cope with uncertainty. For realists, overestimations of threats are the inevitable, regular consequence of insufficient intelligence and the opacity of other states’ intentions. (Knorr 1976; Waltz 1979; Walt 1987; Mearsheimer 2001; Tang 2008). Large overestimations of threats are most likely to happen at times of increased uncertainty and perceived high risk such as after a surprise attack because leaders need to constantly analyse ambiguous and incomplete intelligence in real time and pay close attention to worst case analyzes as they decide how to respond to possible threats within the international system (e.g. how could a leader ever know for sure that Iraq really did not have weapons of mass destruction somewhere, even with inspections?) (Freedman 2004; Jervis 2006a). Realist analysis emphasizes the primary importance of uncertainty as the root cause of what appears to be “threat inflation.”

Realist arguments stress that analyses of threats at all times vary greatly, and what appears to be “threat inflation” is most often a disagreement over the probability or significance of worst case analyses. Realists argue that people can sometimes know with the benefit of hindsight that threats were inflated at a particular time, but for many analysts that does not mean that seemingly extreme estimates were insincere, unreasonable or implausible. Many interpretations of a threat are always possible, so deciding what threat analysis is beyond the range of plausible at a particular time is most often unknowable (Krebs 2005).

Realists who stress disagreements over intelligence as the root cause of what appears to be “threat inflation” often acknowledge other contributing factors such as understandable and excusable “spinning” of threats for political mobilization purposes (Mearsheimer 2004). This does not mean that leaders are lying or pursuing self-serving domestic political interests. Instead, leaders are primarily rationally coping with international threats that are unknowable and largely unpredictable. Leaders are acting responsibly in an uncertain and anarchic system where states must constantly search for security. It is a tragic reality that leaders’ actions and frequent over-reactions often leave them worse off, but this is the result of the usually unavoidable security dilemma (Jervis 1978). Future capabilities and intentions of adversaries can never be known with certainty, and thus “threat inflation” is to be expected as leaders attempt to “play it safe” by anticipating unknowable threats. For many realists, “threat inflation” cannot be “cured.” Vigilance by states against possible threats is necessary and hyper-vigilance that can be counterproductive can only be somewhat guarded against through better intelligence collection and analysis.

Psychological explanations of threat inflation

Many scholars believe that there is a significant amount of “threat inflation” that cannot be explained by uncertainty, intelligence failure and rational worst case analysis alone. One approach turns to theories of social and cognitive psychology to explain the central misperceptions of national security threats (Jervis 1976). Based on years of laboratory experiments, psychological theories suggest that people may misperceive national security threats due to common cognitive biases that limit the ability to assess threats rationally (Janis and Mann 1977; Nisbett and Ross 1980; Janis 1982; Larson 1989; Lebow 1981; Khong 1992; Johnson 1994; Kaufmann 1994; Jervis 2006b).

A common argument with respect to Iraq in line with the psychological perspective generally begins with the observation that people often interpret facts in ways that support their expectations and in ways that support plausible arguments about potential threats even when the facts do not warrant such conclusions. In the case of Iraq, this tendency may have led the Bush administration to assume (and possibly the American public to accept) that Saddam Hussein’s uncooperative behavior was hiding his pursuit of nuclear weapons. Since the United States knew he had sought such weapons in the past and expected him to continue doing so, the Bush administration and the U.S. intelligence community may have been unable to read the true underlying situation, leading them to inflate the threat (Jervis 2006b).

Relatedly, psychologists have argued that people do not update their beliefs in response to new information in the manner assumed by rational actor theories. Instead, once people form beliefs they tend to stick with them and use them as guidance for interpreting and understanding the world (Jervis 2006a). Having decided and argued that Iraq was the central front in the war on terror and that terrorism was an existential threat that had to be confronted aggressively, for example, it would be psychologically difficult and even painful for President Bush and his supporters to acknowledge at a later point that Al Qaeda did not represent an existential threat and that the war in Iraq was unnecessary and costly, even if a great deal of factual evidence pointed in that direction. Thus, psychological theories also suggest the potential for threat inflation to persist once it has begun.

The psychological biases that underlie these misperceptions come in two main types: unmotivated biases and motivated biases. Unmotivated biases are thought of as “short cuts in reasoning” and are unconscious, systematic errors, operating at all times or at least often, leading to theoretically predictable and observable divergences from rationality within individuals. In contrast, motivated biases reflect people’s attempts to protect their egos, rationalize prior decisions, or prevent cognitive dissonance, and involve affect and emotion, not just cognition. Harder to predict, these biases help to explain how leaders who appear self-serving actually sincerely believe they are not self-serving and are instead acting in the best interest of the nation or cause. Taken together, scholars argue, these two types of biases can lead to a range of misperceptions and beliefs that make threat inflation more likely (Jervis 2006a; Renshon 2006; Gilovich et al. 2002).

One of the most famous unmotivated biases with threat inflationary capability is what psychologists call the fundamental attribution error (Kelley and Michela 1980). When one person observes another, the observer tends to attribute the other’s actions to their character, nature or deeply held motives. At the same time, the observer tends to reason that her own actions are in response to her situation and to the other’s actions, and not due to her own character, motives or nature since these aspects of herself are less “salient” or apparent to her. Thus, an observer is likely to reason that the other is buying arms or behaving threateningly because she is innately hostile and aggressive, while she is buying arms and behaving aggressively because she was provoked by the other and needs to defend herself. This type of cognitive bias could cause leaders and members...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of tables
• List of figures
• Notes on contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: understanding threat inflation
• 2 Understanding beliefs and threat inflation
• 3 Imperial myths and threat inflation
• 4 Estimating threats: the impact and interaction of identity and power
• 5 Hawkish biases
• 6 Threat inflation and the failure of the marketplace of ideas: the selling of the Iraq War
• 7 The sound of silence: rhetorical coercion, democratic acquiescence, and the Iraq War
• 8 Militarized patriotism and the success of threat inflation
• 9 The war over Iraq: selling war to the American public
• 10 Framing Iraq: threat inflation in the marketplace of values
• 11 Inflating terrorism
• 12 Perception and power in counterterrorism: assessing the American response to Al Qaeda before September 11