The Foreign Service Journal, December 2018

116 DECEMBER 2018 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL current problems and recom- mendations for the Trump administration? All could serve as useful contributions. The opening page offers an excellent enticement to read fur- ther: high praise by nine academ- ics and practitioners in opening blurbs. The preface lays out that the book “is intended to put into context the strate- gic challenge facing the Trump adminis- tration,” asking whether the new adminis- tration would deal with the problem as an existential threat as the Bush administra- tion had done, or as merely a serious threat as the Obama administration did. This is not a long book: only six chap- ters and 206 pages, of which the last 83 pages are “Key Documents,” consisting mostly of excerpts from statements by U.S. officials, but also a few references to documents from the Obama years and the first months of the Trump administration. The authors are to be commended for this useful compendium. The first chapter provides a solid discussion of the terrorist threat, the key elements of the policies of the Bush and Obama administrations, and the ques- tions facing the Trump administration. The second chapter, labeled “Definitions, Sanctions and Legislation,” looks specifi- cally at these three issues. The final four chapters examine ter- rorism from the perspective of separate administrations. One problemwith the book is that the first chapter is sufficiently comprehensive that the final chapters occasionally seem repetitive. Will a Coherent Strategy Emerge? U.S. CounterterrorismFromNixon to Trump—Key Challenges, Issues and Responses Michael B. Kraft and Edward Marks, CRC Press, 2017, $69.95/hardcover, $47.18/Kindle, 240 pages. Reviewed By Parker Borg Terrorismas amilitary tactic can be traced back at least to Roman times, but for Amer- icans it only began surfacing in the past 50 years—andmostly in foreign lands. Events of 9/11 dramatically changed our perspec- tive. Terrorism, which had plaguedmost of the rest of the world for generations, hit Americans at home for the first time. The George W. Bush administra- tion responded to 9/11 as an existential national crisis and declared a global war on terrorism, one which put security ahead of personal privacy and Fourth Amend- ment freedoms. Battling this new terror- ism threat and the ramifications of our responses to it seems sometimes to have become the overriding U.S. foreign policy concern of the early 21st century. Michael B. Kraft and EdwardMarks have written a new book about U.S. efforts to combat terrorism in the years between the Nixon and Trump administrations. Up front I need to acknowledge that I worked with both of the authors in State’s counterterrorismoffice during the Reagan administration. Before opening the book, I wondered what would be the objective of this volume. Would the target be a general audience interested in the evolving world of terrorist threats and U.S. responses? Or perhaps the audience might be future policymakers seeking analysis about the effectiveness of American actions over the years? Maybe it would be a blueprint of BOOKS Of the final sections, Chapter Five on the Obama administra- tion is the strongest, setting forth the efforts after 2009 to scale back on the excesses of the Bush administration and providing good perspective on the state of play on cybersecurity, counter- ing violent extremism, lone wolf terrorists and international cooperation. ChapterThree, covering the early years of U.S. terrorismpolicy fromNixon to Clin- ton (only 12 pages to cover these 32 years, and given the title “Background”), is the weakest part of the book. Considering the book’s title, this section should probably have been givenmore attention. Most of the chapter focuses on the rise of modern terrorism (although omitting developments in Latin America). In its five final pages it reviews organization within the U.S. government to fight terrorism, a bit of U.S. legislation and a fewU.S. military actions, but overlooks the evolution of policy in these years. While those developments may be less relevant now because of 9/11, many current U.S. policies and programs trace their foundations to these earlier years. The chapter doesn’t examine actions to enhance either interagency or interna- tional cooperation, what might have been learned from these policies, or whether any have contemporary relevance. Anti-terrorism laws and the programs created as a result of legislation are the core of the volume. While the provisions of the legislation are sometimes spelled out, there is little background about the inter- Before 9/11 the war against terrorism focused on international cooperation, police actions and the judicial system, and only occasionally on operations by specially trained military units.