Description
Scholarship on the “American way of war” suggests that domestic support for war policies should be generated by policymakers promising and achieving a rapid and total victory. However, the War on Terror constitutes a stark deviation from this paradigm. How then have US presidents legitimated the War on Terror despite its breaks with the American way of war? While scholarship has examined ideas of success and victory in the War on Terror, their role in the process of legitimation has not been explore. To address this lacuna, this paper introduces the concept of winnability to study the legitimation efforts of US presidents, given that the capacity for a war to be won touches upon the crux of the justification of war policies. The paper employs a discourse analysis of speeches by George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump, finding a significant degree of rhetorical variability between presidents regarding the issue of winnability. Significantly however, the paper finds that all three presidencies have reflected either an inability to legitimate an accepted endpoint for the War on Terror or abandon the finality of the American way of war without significant levels of critique. These findings call for further research on the role of winnability in the legitimation and termination of the War on Terror.
