What policy is best for the United States to reduce the threat of Islamic extremist terrorism? Recent American presidents have applied alternative conflict resolution approaches. Clinton practiced conflict avoidance, talking tough but rarely retaliating against anti-American terrorist attacks. G. W. Bush adopted a fighter approach and the Global War on Terrorism and military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq reflect this strategy. Obama introduced a third alternative: problem solving and extending peaceful overtures while keeping up resistance. Will the strategy succeed? Feste analyzes presidential rhetoric on counterterrorism policy through the lens of issue framing, enemy aggression, self -hardship, and victimization expressed in a variety of speeches delivered by these chief executives to highlight and compare their conflict resolution strategies.

Feste develops a framework of terrorism termination dynamics constructed from empirical cases and applies it to the current al Qaeda problem to offer a new method for tracking development of terrorist episodes with implications for U.S. foreign policy.