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.

This book examines the shape, sources and dangers of information warfare (IW) as it pertains to military, diplomatic and civilian stakeholders. Cyber warfare and information warfare are different beasts. Both concern information, but where the former does so exclusively in its digitized and operationalized form, the latter does so in a much broader sense: with IW, information itself is the weapon. The present work aims to help scholars, analysts and policymakers understand IW within the context of cyber conflict. Specifically, the chapters in the volume address the shape of influence campaigns waged across digital infrastructure and in the psychology of democratic populations in recent years by belligerent state actors, from the Russian Federation to the Islamic Republic of Iran. In marshalling evidence on the shape and evolution of IW as a broad-scoped phenomenon aimed at societies writ large, the authors in this book present timely empirical investigations into the global landscape of influence operations, legal and strategic analyses of their role in international politics, and insightful examinations of the potential for democratic process to overcome pervasive foreign manipulation. This book will be of much interest to students of cybersecurity, national security, strategic studies, defence studies and International Relations in general.

This book challenges the dominant strategic culture and makes the case for restraint in US grand strategy in the 21st century. Grand strategy, meaning a state's theory about how it can achieve national security for itself, is elusive. That is particularly true in the United States, where the division of federal power and the lack of direct security threats limit consensus about how to manage danger. This book seeks to spur more vigorous debate on US grand strategy. To do so, the first half of the volume assembles the most recent academic critiques of primacy, the dominant strategic perspective in the United States today. The contributors challenge the notion that US national security requires a massive military, huge defense spending, and frequent military intervention around the world. The second half of the volume makes the positive case for a more restrained foreign policy by excavating the historical roots of restraint in the United States and illustrating how restraint might work in practice in the Middle East and elsewhere. The volume concludes with assessments of the political viability of foreign policy restraint in the United States today. This book will be of much interest to students of US foreign policy, grand strategy, national security, and International Relations in general.

This volume presents the best scholarly thinking about why the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, a pivotal event in modern US foreign policy and international politics. The years since the announcement of the invasion of Iraq by George W. Bush in 2003 have revealed that the WMD threat was not the urgent threat the administration declared and that Saddam Hussein was not involved with Al Qaeda or 9/11. At least in part because of these revelations a majority of Americans (not to mention a majority of people globally) now believe that invading Iraq was a mistake and that the Bush administration misled the public to build support for war. Lending credibility to public doubts is a growing number of critical scholarly analyses and in-depth journalistic investigations about the invasion, which mostly suggests that the administration was not fully candid about its reasons for wanting to move against Iraq when it did. Thus the question remains: Why did the United States invade Iraq? The central purpose of this volume is to spur and inform the debate by organizing the best recent thinking of foreign policy and international relations experts about why the U.S. invaded Iraq. Taking a broad range of arguments -- about the role of ideas, Israel, and oil, in partcular - and organizing them around a coherent structure, the book highlights current areas of agreement and disagreement, and allows scholars directly to talk to each other. The volume will be of much interest to students of the Iraq War, US foreign and security policy, strategic studies, Middle Eastern politics and IR/Security Studies in general.

This book examines the shape, sources and dangers of information warfare (IW) as it pertains to military, diplomatic and civilian stakeholders. Cyber warfare and information warfare are different beasts. Both concern information, but where the former does so exclusively in its digitized and operationalized form, the latter does so in a much broader sense: with IW, information itself is the weapon. The present work aims to help scholars, analysts and policymakers understand IW within the context of cyber conflict. Specifically, the chapters in the volume address the shape of influence campaigns waged across digital infrastructure and in the psychology of democratic populations in recent years by belligerent state actors, from the Russian Federation to the Islamic Republic of Iran. In marshalling evidence on the shape and evolution of IW as a broad-scoped phenomenon aimed at societies writ large, the authors in this book present timely empirical investigations into the global landscape of influence operations, legal and strategic analyses of their role in international politics, and insightful examinations of the potential for democratic process to overcome pervasive foreign manipulation. This book will be of much interest to students of cybersecurity, national security, strategic studies, defence studies and International Relations in general.

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.

This book challenges the dominant strategic culture and makes the case for restraint in US grand strategy in the 21st century. Grand strategy, meaning a state's theory about how it can achieve national security for itself, is elusive. That is particularly true in the United States, where the division of federal power and the lack of direct security threats limit consensus about how to manage danger. This book seeks to spur more vigorous debate on US grand strategy. To do so, the first half of the volume assembles the most recent academic critiques of primacy, the dominant strategic perspective in the United States today. The contributors challenge the notion that US national security requires a massive military, huge defense spending, and frequent military intervention around the world. The second half of the volume makes the positive case for a more restrained foreign policy by excavating the historical roots of restraint in the United States and illustrating how restraint might work in practice in the Middle East and elsewhere. The volume concludes with assessments of the political viability of foreign policy restraint in the United States today. This book will be of much interest to students of US foreign policy, grand strategy, national security, and International Relations in general.

This volume presents the best scholarly thinking about why the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, a pivotal event in modern US foreign policy and international politics. The years since the announcement of the invasion of Iraq by George W. Bush in 2003 have revealed that the WMD threat was not the urgent threat the administration declared and that Saddam Hussein was not involved with Al Qaeda or 9/11. At least in part because of these revelations a majority of Americans (not to mention a majority of people globally) now believe that invading Iraq was a mistake and that the Bush administration misled the public to build support for war. Lending credibility to public doubts is a growing number of critical scholarly analyses and in-depth journalistic investigations about the invasion, which mostly suggests that the administration was not fully candid about its reasons for wanting to move against Iraq when it did. Thus the question remains: Why did the United States invade Iraq? The central purpose of this volume is to spur and inform the debate by organizing the best recent thinking of foreign policy and international relations experts about why the U.S. invaded Iraq. Taking a broad range of arguments -- about the role of ideas, Israel, and oil, in partcular - and organizing them around a coherent structure, the book highlights current areas of agreement and disagreement, and allows scholars directly to talk to each other. The volume will be of much interest to students of the Iraq War, US foreign and security policy, strategic studies, Middle Eastern politics and IR/Security Studies in general.