Mueller: Terrorism and the Dynamics of Threat Exaggerstion August 2, 2005
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while a far less costly potential alternative policy, stressing containment and determined harassment, went
unexamined.
Section 3 focuses on the Cold War. It argues that the threat presented by international
Communism and by the domestic subversion that formed a key part of its stock in trade proved to be much
exaggerated and that the policies designed to deal with it turned out to be overly militaristic, were far too
expensive, and, ultimately, were probably unnecessary.
Section 4 looks at other threats during the Cold War that proved to be overblown such as
unfulfilled fears about strategic nuclear war. It also considers overreactions to essentially minor acts of
terrorism against Americans in distant lands, and at unjustified anxieties about the challenge presented by
an economically resurgent Japan.
Section 5 assesses policy in the immediate post-Cold War period in which problems previously
considered minor were elevated into a position of prominence when the big one--the challenge presented
by international Communism--disappeared. Of particular concern are the misguided anxieties about the
spread of ethnic warfare and the tendency to become preoccupied with a newly-fabricated category of
"rogue states," countries with unpleasant regimes which present little actual threat. Also assessed is the
process by which the designation, "weapons of mass destruction," has deftly and unwisely been expanded
to embrace not only those capable of extensive devastation, nuclear weapons, but also ones that are not
likely to be remotely so destructive: chemical and biological weapons.
Sections 6, 7, and 8 then extend and extrapolate the discussion to current--post 9/11--concerns
about international terrorism.
Section 6 assesses the damage international terrorism has caused in the past and is most likely to
inflict in the future. It concludes that this is probably limited and therefore readily, if grimly, absorbable.
Section 7 argues that most of the harm caused by terrorism arises from the
overreactive--sometimes even hysterical--policies designed to deal with it. It also explores the makeup and
impact of the terrorism industry--politicians, bureaucrats, journalists, commentators, and risk entrepreneurs
who systematically exaggerate, play on, and profit from fear-mongering and alarmism.
And section 8 proposes an alternative policy toward terrorism, one that focuses primarily on
reducing its principal cost: the knee-jerk fears, anxieties, and acts of overreaction that it too regularly
inspires.
The tendencies to exaggerate threat and to overreact are hardly new--they could be seen as well,
for example, in the responses to the challenges presented by international anarchism in the years before
World War I and by international Communism in the years just after it. However, I do not wish to suggest
in this paper that all fears are unjustified or that threats are never underestimated. Indeed, I suspect that
some of the tendency to overestimate threats in the period after World War II derives from the fact that
the dire threat presented by Adolf Hitler's Germany had been underappreciated in the period before it.
This underestimate, however, was premised in part and in turn on an overestimate: the exaggerated
supposition that the next war would lead to human annihilation, an assumption that led to the logical
conclusion that Hitler could not possibly be willing to risk one (see Mueller 1989, 57-60). The postwar
proclivity toward exaggeration and overreaction may also stem in part from the prewar experience with
Japan. There had been something of a tendency to underestimate its capacity and its willingness to take
risks, and the traumatic experience of Pearl Harbor led to embracing the over-learned lesson never to
allow that to happen again.
Robert Jervis has suggested that "those who remember the past are condemned to making the
opposite mistakes" (1976, 275). It is a central burden of this paper that the prewar experience with Hitler
and with Japan may have been too well remembered and that, in our present era of anxiety over the threat
presented by tiny bands of international terrorists, it is time to think again.
Convention