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7 Tips For Writing Realistic War Stories (UPDATED 2024)

by Writer's Relief Staff | Inspiration And Encouragement For Writers , Nonfiction Books , Other Helpful Information , The Writing Life | 15 comments

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Both fiction and memoir writing have endeavored to make sense of (or even see the senselessness of) violent conflict. But writing about war can be tricky: Some readers might be sensitive about graphic depictions of war and violence; others may have a hard time understanding what’s happening if you don’t go into detail. Here’s how to write battle scenes that are accurate and effective.

Important Tips For Writing About War

Consider whether certain violent elements need to be included. Graphic, explicit scenes can become offensive when they’re overdone or unnecessary. Of course, you may be going for “offensive” in order to make a point about your subject, but violence that’s heavy on detail needs to have a point. The key is to be aware of your choices and why you’re making them.

Use a panoramic lens. Capture the vastness of a battle by showing us a wide view of the action. Allow your narrator a moment to look around at what’s going on so that your reader can also see what’s happening. However, remember that “epic” doesn’t necessarily mean emotionally engaging. If not handled properly, big battles can feel impersonal and lead to “action fatigue.”

Focus on the details. Whether you’re writing about the trenches of World War I or the Time-Space Wars of the Zygine Galaxy, pay attention to the little details of everyday life. Sometimes, the familiar smell of coffee and a campfire can be more emotionally powerful than the less familiar smell of a lit cannon fuse.

If your violence is comic, be cautious of subtext. Some people may laugh; others might be offended. If you need to make a choice about your character’s actions that happens to align with stereotypes of violence, make sure you do so with caution.

Understand your characters . Whether you’re writing about a perpetrator of violence or a victim, dig deep within your own personal capacity for empathy to tease out elements that will make all of your characters human, relatable, and real—even the villains. You might not respect your antagonist’s decisions, but by understanding them, you’ll bring depth and emotion to your work.

Get it right. If you’re writing historical fiction or even memoir, check (and recheck!) your facts. Confirm that your details are accurate. By spending the extra time and doing the research , you’ll have a story that resonates with authenticity and powerful details—especially if you’re writing military fiction .

Avoid clichés. While every genre has its tropes, be aware of choices that lead to scenes that are overly familiar. Falling back on clichés is sometimes the easy way out. If you find yourself writing a familiar battle scene (one soldier dragging another to safety, or one person dying in another’s arms), be sure to mix up the action with your own unique perspective.

When In Doubt, Read Military Memoirs And Fiction

If you’re not sure your battles have a realistic edge, read other books in the genre. Reading is one of the best ways to improve your writing, regardless of your topic.

When you’ve finished reading military memoirs and fiction, why not try to get published alongside them? The research experts at Writer’s Relief will help you pinpoint the best markets and boost your odds of getting an acceptance. Learn more about our services and submit your work to our Review Board today!

Whether you want to take the traditional publishing route or prefer to self-publish , we can help. Give us a call, and we will point you in the right direction!

15 Comments

In response to your question, “What do you think one of the things many battle/war scenes get wrong is?” I would like to say it is the disconnection/connections between two common enemies. Many solders do not even know the real reason they are fighting. Many American solders have gone to battle under the false premise of spreading Democracy. Our enemy fight for what they believe to be the opposing cause. Yet, when the war is believed to be over, a new bicultural atmosphere has almost always been established. That is because, as humans, we all have more in common than not.

To Mr. JL Gibson: I loved your comment. I don’t imagine that many of us think of what the other guy is fighting for. I have no plans to write a novel about war, but I still believe that this article and your comment could be used for any other type of story. We all have our battles to fight whether it be for love, wealth, a job promotion, or even our own simple way of life. Thank you for the insight.

I’m writing a war story and this has been helpful.

I’m also writing my first war book too. My book is called Ghost Squad, the war I’m researching is very hard trying to put all pieces of information together so that the war itself is real, but my characters, operation groups, and seans are made up of this book. I’m worried if my information of this war would have false information in my novel. I’m still writing and researching, but so far my book is looking pretty good. If you guys have any tips for me that would be helpful.

This is some really good information about writing good war stories. My sister wants to be an author and she loves historical fiction. I liked your advice about getting it right and doing research about the time period. It does seem like a good idea to try reading some memoirs of actual soldiers.

I’m going to write a battilistic war book. It’s not an American war. Another countries war. A central american one. This has been helpful.

I’m writing a fictional war story, meant to focus upon the ascension of a Battalion Commander, to the ranking of General. One issue I’m having is the rankings themselves. While I can hide behind the excuse that this is a fictional war, with a fictional military that could have fictional ranking orders, I still would like to know what the actual officer ranking order is like. Google isn’t very helpful, could somebody please point me to an explicit explanation of military officer ranking ? I would greatly appreciate it, thank you! I eagerly await your reply.

Vincent, the ranks for officers are easy to find. They are: 2nd Lieutenant, 1st Lieutenant, Captain, Major, Lieutenant Colonel, Colonel, Brigadier General, Major General, Lieutenant General, and General.

Thank you , I am a struggling writer who will indeed benefit from this

Thank you for the help! I am writing a book that has many military scenes. I appreciate this a bunch!

Read books written by veterans

Definitely read books by veterans. And if you are writing a book about the military, it would be extremely helpful to have a veteran as a beta reader. Lee Childs doesn’t write military, but his main character, Jack Reacher, is an ex soldier – however he has so many military fact incorrect it sometimes drives me crazy. One of his main problems is that the author is British, and the character is American. In the British Army, I guess, the enlisted shine the officer’s boots and do their laundry; this is absolutely not what happens in the US Army. Also, his premise that the military police are better trained in weapons and hand to hand so they can subdue elite Rangers and green berets when necessary is crazy.

The government actually has many good primary resources in this area. I recently took over a blog written by a librarian that highlights government sources to help authors with realism in their fiction. I am still in the process of transferring, editing, and updating the older entries (which has been fascinating), but it has several military history posts:

https://fictionwritersguidetogovernmentinformation.wordpress.com/

Hope this is helpful!

Hi. I´m terrible when it comes to battle strategy. I just have my characters with the planned development, dynamics, relationships and often – fitting deaths. I have the moral questions. I have the magical system. I somehow just make the war fit my needs… Which is extremely frustrating! I have to think of stuff to fill plot holes and all the strategies don’t add up! It’s like a patchwork – a beautiful piece of art (an emotional moment, a character death, a release of a magical power) is hanging on some weak shit.

Please send help. I always get stuck on the tactics. How to master it? Or how to write smart and compelling fantasy stories without it? Even if it’s not fantasy, I have the feeling that without all these scheming and mind games my stories sound boring.

Look at what you did in the first paragraph. You have already arrived at most of the story, since story is about character and relationships. The action that arises from the characters, i.e., what each character does, moves along the plot, defines character, and produces story theme and meaning. Then, think of your story within the context of a particular moment in the war. For example, “Platoon” selected a section of a company to go on patrol in the Vietnam jungle, night and day, to tell the story of young American foot soldiers and particularly, the growth of one particular named Taylor. How does the war fit into the story? The war, or a particular aspect of the war necessary to the story is selected and used as a container to hold the entire story about Taylor.

Take a look at another war story, “The Deer Hunter”. This is the story about Russian-American steelworker friends who go off to Vietnam as foot soldiers. Each one is altered. Therefore, the writer must have planned particular moments in the war to highlight the exigencies of each character as such character encounters life-challenging and possibly, life-changing conflicts that determine what we must notice about the character.

Please don’t allow the loud and epic nature of war to scare you into giving up. Writing about war is no different than writing about a city, or school, or people on a cruise liner. The fact remains that all of those are contexts or backdrops to your story, which should always be about the human condition, i.e., our thwarted desires that lead us to the truth and beauty of realization and/or learning, if we (the characters) accept the challenging lessons, or losing, if we reject, as the author intends to depict.

Finally, a war is always about one side against the other, with a line drawn in the sand. Such could be visible or invisible. Find your war, select a context and people that context with who would be necessary for the particular story. My war story challenge tonight is to tell a story about particular soldiers on the frontline of WWI, but not across the entire several hundred miles of trenches. I selected one small area that produces the particular challenges of that area, which I feel excited about depicting., and how that place set up significant pressure on the characters to think and behave in certain ways that I believe to be necessary for telling the reader/viewer about our mysterious human condition — perhaps, even deepening the mystery.

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Essays About War: Top 5 Examples and 5 Prompts

War is atrocious and there is an almost universal rule that we should be prevented; if you are writing essays about war, read our helpful guide.

Throughout history, war has driven human progress. It has led to the dissolution of oppressive regimes and the founding of new democratic countries. There is no doubt that the world would not be as it is without the many wars waged in the past.

War is waged to achieve a nation or organization’s goals, but what is the actual cost of progress? War has taken, and continues to take, countless lives. It is and is very costly in terms of resources as well. From the American Revolution to World Wars I and II to the Crusades and Hundred Years’ War of antiquity, wars throughout history have been bloody, brutal, and disastrous.

If you are writing essays about war, look at our top essay examples below.

1. War Is Not Part of Human Nature by R. Brian Ferguson

2. essay on war and peace (author unknown), 3. the impacts of war on global health by sarah moore.

4. The Psychosocial Impacts of War and Armed Conflict on Children by Iman Farajallah, Omar Reda, H. Steven Moffic, John R. Peteet, and Ahmed Hankir

5. Is war a pre-requisite for peace? by Anna Cleary

5 prompts for essays about war, 1. is war justified, 2. why do countries go to war, 3. the effects of war, 4. moral and ethical issues concerning war, 5. reflecting on a historical war.

“Debate over war and human nature will not soon be resolved. The idea that intensive, high-casualty violence was ubiquitous throughout prehistory has many backers. It has cultural resonance for those who are sure that we as a species naturally tilt toward war. As my mother would say: “Just look at history!” But doves have the upper hand when all the evidence is considered. Broadly, early finds provide little if any evidence suggesting war was a fact of life.”

Ferguson disputes the popular belief that war is inherent to human nature, as evidenced by archaeological discoveries. Many archaeologists use the very same evidence to support the opposing view. Evidence reveals many instances where war was waged, but not fought. In the minds of Ferguson and many others, humanity may be predisposed to conflict and violence, but not war, as many believe.

“It also appears that if peace were to continue for a long period, people would become sick of the monotony of life and would seek war for a changed man is a highly dynamic creature and it seems that he cannot remain contented merely with works of peace-the cultivation of arts, the development of material comforts, the extension of knowledge, the means and appliances of a happy life.”

This essay provides an interesting perspective on war; other than the typical motivations for war, such as the desire to achieve one’s goals; the author writes that war disrupts the monotony of peace and gives participants a sense of excitement and uncertainty. In addition, it instills the spirit of heroism and bravery in people. However, the author does not dispute that war is evil and should be avoided as much as possible.

“War forces people to flee their homes in search of safety, with the latest figures from the UN estimating that around 70 million people are currently displaced due to war. This displacement can be incredibly detrimental to health, with no safe and consistent place to sleep, wash, and shelter from the elements. It also removes a regular source of food and proper nutrition. As well as impacting physical health, war adversely affects the mental health of both those actively involved in conflict and civilians.”

Moore discusses the side effects that war has on civilians. For example, it diverts resources used on poverty alleviation and infrastructure towards fighting. It also displaces civilians when their homes are destroyed, reduces access to food, water, and sanitation, and can significantly impact mental health, among many other effects.

4. The Psychosocial Impacts of War and Armed Conflict on Children by Iman Farajallah, Omar Reda, H. Steven Moffic, John R. Peteet, and Ahmed Hankir

“The damage done by war-related trauma can never be undone. We can, however, help reduce its long-term impacts, which can span generations. When we reach within ourselves to discover our humanity, it allows us to reach out to the innocent children and remind them of their resilience and beauty. Trauma can make or break us as individuals, families, and communities.”

In their essay, the authors explain how war can affect children. Children living in war-torn areas expectedly witness a lot of violence, including the killings of their loved ones. This may lead to the inability to sleep properly, difficulty performing daily functions, and a speech impediment. The authors write that trauma cannot be undone and can ruin a child’s life.

“The sociologist Charles Tilly has argued that war and the nation state are inextricably linked. War has been crucial for the formation of the nation state, and remains crucial for its continuation. Anthony Giddens similarly views a link between the internal pacification of states and their external violence. It may be that, if we want a durable peace, a peace built on something other than war, we need to consider how to construct societies based on something other than the nation state and its monopoly of violence.”

This essay discusses the irony that war is waged to achieve peace. Many justify war and believe it is inevitable, as the world seems to balance out an era of peace with another war. However, others advocate for total pacifism. Even in relatively peaceful times, organizations and countries have been carrying out “shadow wars” or engaging in conflict without necessarily going into outright war. Cleary cites arguments made that for peace to indeed exist by itself, societies must not be built on the war in the first place.

Many believe that war is justified by providing a means to peace and prosperity. Do you agree with this statement? If so, to what extent? What would you consider “too much” for war to be unjustified? In your essay, respond to these questions and reflect on the nature and morality of war.

Wars throughout history have been waged for various reasons, including geographical domination, and disagreement over cultural and religious beliefs. In your essay, discuss some of the reasons different countries go to war, you can look into the belief systems that cause disagreements, oppression of people, and leaders’ desire to conquer geographical land. For an interesting essay, look to history and the reasons why major wars such as WWI and WWII occurred.

In this essay, you can write about war’s effects on participating countries. You can focus on the impact of war on specific sectors, such as healthcare or the economy. In your mind, do they outweigh the benefits? Discuss the positive and negative effects of war in your essay. To create an argumentative essay, you can pick a stance if you are for or against war. Then, argue your case and show how its effects are positive, negative, or both.

Many issues arise when waging war, such as the treatment of civilians as “collateral damage,” keeping secrets from the public, and torturing prisoners. For your essay, choose an issue that may arise when fighting a war and determine whether or not it is genuinely “unforgivable” or “unacceptable.” Are there instances where it is justified? Be sure to examples where this issue has arisen before.

Humans have fought countless wars throughout history. Choose one significant war and briefly explain its causes, major events, and effects. Conduct thorough research into the period of war and the political, social, and economic effects occurred. Discuss these points for a compelling cause and effect essay.

For help with this topic, read our guide explaining “what is persuasive writing ?”If you still need help, our guide to grammar and punctuation explains more.

Martin is an avid writer specializing in editing and proofreading. He also enjoys literary analysis and writing about food and travel.

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How to Write a War Story

So, you started writing a War story and got stuck along the way. Maybe you aren’t sure if your story meets all the obligatory scenes and conventions of its genre. Maybe you’re wondering if your controlling idea or theme addresses the overall values at stake in a War story. Maybe you’re asking, what are the core emotions, subgenres, and audience expectations of a War story? Do you even have a War story?

I’ve completed a great deal of research on War stories and I’m excited to answer these questions and more by sharing what I’ve learned.

Let’s get started.

What is a War story?

Fundamentally, a War story includes a single soldier or group of soldiers preparing for, waiting for, engaging in, and possibly recovering from wartime combat. A war story must have soldiers on a battlefield with the possibility of death. It’s important to note that it’s not every story set in time of war. It has to build and lead to a core battle, which is the equivalent of the “hero at the mercy of the villain” scene for a Thriller or the “proof of love” scene for a Love story. A wartime setting could function as a backdrop for any genre. A War story is not a history lesson on war-time conflict, a bunch of battle sequences strung together, or about a protagonist who is just a bad-ass Terminator robot. A war story is much more.

In War stories, human behavior is dramatized to demonstrate the coexistence of brutality and altruism and how extreme circumstances and trauma bring out the best and the worst in soldiers.

The story dramatizes a political perspective on war. (See subgenres and commentary on politics, below.)

What is the Global Value?

The global value at stake describes the protagonist’s primary change from the beginning of the story to the end. It’s the primary arc you’ll keep your protagonist moving along throughout your story.

The global War story turns on honor and disgrace in the context of war.

Conflict in a War story is expressed on three different levels:

External Conflict arises from fellow soldiers and/or the environmental pressures (weather, enemy forces, terrain). The protagonist is motivated by the expectations and limitations of his team to stay alive, win the battle, and obtain honor via sacrificing for fellow soldiers.

Interpersonal Conflict is between the antagonist and protagonist. The antagonist of a War story is usually the enemy forces and at least one member of a soldier’s own side, often a higher ranking official.

Internal Conflict is a war within the protagonist. This usually follows a Worldview or Morality trajectory (or both) and culminates in a shift in thinking that allows the protagonist to display all their gifts while fighting in the Big Battle. In most stories, the conflict might unfold on one or two of these levels. A War story’s conflict must unfold on all three. Confusing? Let’s take a look at the infographic.

The protagonist doesn’t necessarily have to be defeated with dishonor, but it must be a possible outcome. In a War story, the “negation of the negation” is dishonorable defeat presented as honorable. In other words, trying to convince others that one’s dishonorable behavior in war was honorable is equivalent to a character’s damnation.

War stories arises from the protagonist’s physiological AND emotional needs for safety. The War protagonist’s primary goal isn’t love, self-esteem, or financial rewards. Initially their want is to win the battle and stay alive (external storyline, conscious object of desire). They come to realize their need is to believe that life is worth living but, if they must die, dying with honor is better than dying in disgrace.

What’s the Controlling Idea?

A story’s Controlling Idea (sometimes called the theme) is the lesson you want your reader to come away with. It’s the meaning they will assign to your story.

Each of the main content genres has some generic premise statements. They are either prescriptive–a positive story that shows the reader what to do–or cautionary–a negative story that warns the reader about what not to do.

War stories can have broad-ranging purposes. You need to be absolutely clear which type you’re telling.

Prescriptive:

War is justified and meaningful when waged against a truly evil enemy. (war propaganda, Pro-War subgenre)

War’s meaning emerges from the nobility of the love and self-sacrifice of soldiers for each other. (Credit to Editors Anne Hawley and Leslie Watts)

Honor is gained in war when a soldier sacrifices for their fellow soldier, regardless of victory or defeat in battle.

Cautionary:

War lacks meaning when it is not morally justified. (Anti-War subgenre)

War lacks meaning when leaders are corrupt and dishonor soldiers’ sacrifices on the battlefield. (Credit to Editors Anne Hawley and Leslie Watts)

Honor is lost in war when a soldier refuses to sacrifice themselves for their fellow soldier, regardless of victory or defeat in battle.

What Are the Core Emotions?

Controlling Ideas help the writer elicit core emotions from the audience. Because a War story operates on three levels of conflict, it can elicit several different emotions:

Excitement, Fear

People choose War stories to experience courage and selflessness in the face of intense fear, without actual danger. False bravery.

Satisfaction, Pity, Contempt

They may also choose War stories to experience righteous satisfaction at the proper outcome for the protagonist, whether negative or positive. They want to feel pity for the tested and contempt for the unrepentant but righteous satisfaction when the punishment comes.

What are the essential moments?

Each subgenre has its own essential moments but here is what they all have in common:

A shock (negative or positive) upsets the homeostasis of the protagonist and disrupts their ordinary life. The inciting incident of a War story is an attack that challenges the morals of the protagonist. It must put them under pressure.

The protagonist denies responsibility to respond.

Editor Tip: In overtly refusing the call to change, the protagonist expresses an inner darkness (fear of cowardice and/or fear of uncontrollable rage) or a clinging to unrealistic ideals (a worldview that never allows for the expression of violence). Classic Hero’s Journey.

The protagonist’s refusal of the call complicates the story and the call comes a second time but in a different form, usually as a requirement to fight for someone or something else.

Editor Tip: The War story often compels the protagonist to act without much choice beyond do or die.

Forced to respond, the protagonist and other soldiers lash out according to their positions on the power hierarchy.

The protagonist’s initial strategy to outmaneuver antagonist fails.

The protagonist learns what their antagonist’s object of desire is.

Editor Tip: The real antagonist is often on the “side” of the soldier rather than a member of the enemy forces.

There is a clear “Point of No Return” moment, when the protagonist accepts the inevitability of death.

The protagonist, realizing they must change their approach to attain a measure of victory, undergoes an All Is Lost moment. The All is Lost in a war story is usually cathartic, a moment of acceptance of fate that either compels madness or resignation.

A Big Battle is the story’s core event. This is when the protagonist’s gifts (usually the gifts of all the team members) are expressed or destroyed. They discover their inner moral code or choose the immoral path.

Editor Tip: Make sure the primary antagonist is present in the Big Battle scene of the climax with the intent to see the protagonist fail.

The protagonist is rewarded with at least one level of satisfaction (external, internal or interpersonal) for their sacrifice. They gain honor or dishonor.

What are the essential situations?

Each subgenre has its own essential situations but here is what they all have in common:

The war portrayed must be necessary to your story, not ancillary. As an example, in Platoon , the war is what isolates the men together and forces them to act.

There is a team of soldiers on a battlefield confronting life and death stakes.

Editor Tip: Five is a common cast of predominant characters; the protagonist plus four. As Editor Anne Hawley pointed out, “Odd numbers of characters in any scene will generate more dynamic energy than even numbers.”

There is one protagonist with offshoot characters that embody a multitude of that character’s personality traits. Examples are Achilles in The Iliad , Dienekes in Gates of Fire, and Chris in Platoon .

Editor Tip: Make sure you have a foil for your protagonist within the team. This is the character who embodies the ideals and attributes opposite of your character. As in a Status story , this character exists to show the reader the other path your protagonist could have taken. An example is Mother in A Midnight Clear who represents the emotional and vulnerable traits that the protagonist, Will, is too cynical and skeptical to show. Another example is Bunny in Platoon who represents a complete lack of moral character and thoughtfulness in opposition to sentimental Chris.

The War itself is a seemingly impossible external conflict. The protagonist confronts overwhelming odds. Often, their team is substantially outnumbered.

As in a Horror story , physical violence (or the threat thereof) is ever present.

Editor tip: Use this to heighten the consequences of seemingly minor character actions.

The protagonist has a mentor or sidekick, for better or worse. This character may lead the protagonist astray or encourage moral behavior. In Platoon , Chris has Elias.

The protagonist brings their past into the war in the form of memories, ghosts, photographs, traumas, representational trinkets, etc. Whether they are able to overcome these or lean on these for support in war in order to make the right choices in the end depends upon your subgenre. In Platoon , Chris brings his emotional isolation with him. He clings to his grandmother and refuses to acknowledge his father. He comes to war to rid himself of the privileges he has at home.

The protagonist receives assistance from unexpected sources, the Herald archetypes. Some examples are the characters who tell the protagonist “the truth” such as Rhah pointing out how good and evil are battling for Chris’ soul in Platoon or Eldridge calling out James in The Hurt Locker . Or they are characters who enable the protagonist, like Bunny in Platoon .

The protagonist’s values are tested, and the test culminates in a sacrifice for the team, or, in the negative story, in a failure to make the necessary sacrifice. Platoon’s final battle scene tests Chris’s values by giving him the chance to kill Barnes. Chris chooses to sacrifice his own safety during the battle for his fellow soldiers and he kills Barnes in the name of the good of humanity.

Editor Tip: The protagonist’s self-sacrifice makes little emotional sense unless the relationships among the soldiers has been clearly shown long before this culminating scene. By the end of Platoon, Chris has stopped writing his grandmother, is connected to other soldiers, and acknowledges both Elias and Barnes as father figures.

What are the Subgenres?

Ideologically Pro-War, more externally focused stories

The core values of this subgenre ride between honorable victory and dishonorable defeat. These stories focus on the false idea that it is “us versus them” and that one side (usually American) represents the liberators and freedom fighters. “We are good. They are bad.” These stories often assert that a low status person can become a high status person and hero by virtue of their involvement in battle, that they can finally belong. Soldiers are honored and portrayed as the saviours of humanity. Violence is glorified, justified, and meaningful. Battle sequences might be under-realized and the impact of violence and the cost of war are minimized. These stories carry aspects of the Brotherhood subgenre.

Examples of this story are The Longest Day, Inglorious Bastards, Black Hawk Down, Red Dawn, and The Guns of Navarone.

Ideologically Anti-War, more externally focused stories

The core values of this story range between honorable victory and dishonorable defeat. The explicit use of random violence and repeated terror, combined with characters’ heinous acts as behavioral norms within context of their humanity, dramatize the basic premise that war negatively influences behavior and damages lives. Soldiers are flawed and often behave as their own worst enemies. Suspense techniques are employed to simulate the harsh realities of combat whether there is victory or defeat. War is meaningless and horrific for all of humanity, not just soldiers. These stories include at least one war crime scene and carry aspects of the Brotherhood subgenre.

Examples of the Anti-War story are The Red Badge of Courage, All Quiet on the Western Front, Paths of Glory, A Midnight Clear, The Thin Red Line , Dispatches (the novel on which Full Metal Jacket was based), Platoon, and Bridge On The River Kwai .

Editor Tip: Some critics and scholars argue that no film can qualify as an Anti-War story. For more information, check out this link . Whether or not their assertions apply to novels as well is unclear.

Brotherhood, more internally focused stories

The core values of this subgenre are honor and disgrace regardless of victory or loss in battle. Battle sequences are well realized. The trials of War are the external framework on which the internal genre is hung. Action and battle scenes are only used when needed to drive the internal transformation of the protagonist. Scenes may be longer than those of other subgenres to allow for more dialog and the dramatization of the protagonist’s change arc. These stories carry aspects of either the Pro-War or Anti-War subgenres or both. This story has a secondary genre of Morality or a Morality/ Worldview combo in which the protagonist must sacrifice for their fellow soldiers. This story type has a lot in common with the Performance story .

Examples of this story are Gates of Fire and The Deer Hunter.

Do you really want to tell a War story?

The challenge in writing a War story is how to innovate while remaining respectful and truthful; how to make sure the story resonates with audiences and that you don’t accidentally glorify war if you meant to damn it.

In my examination of many War stories, I saw the same story repeated over and over. If you can’t make a strong case for why you’re adding another War story to the world and clearly state how your story will be different, I challenge you to ask yourself why you want to tell a War story in the first place.

If you’re telling a primarily external genre story, you may find that your story is better told through the Performance , Society , or Action Genre. Look at the controlling ideas and value shifts of these stories and see if they are a better fit.

If you’re telling a primarily internal story, you may find your story is better served by using the frameworks of the Morality , Worldview , or Status Genres. Does your story even need ever present threats of violence and horror to work? As you recall, just because it’s set in wartime doesn’t make it a War story. You may even find your story is better served in a different setting than War.

So, if a War story is what best serves your idea, how do you craft it?

By now you know a War story isn’t created by stringing a bunch of battles and carnage together. You’ve seen they’re not a history lesson on the who, what, when, or where of war-time conflict. And you know you are going to have to take your protagonist to emotional extremes as a reaction to war events.

Your story will dramatize how a combat soldier is split between the person they were at home and the person they are at war. Put them through an emotional journey where they are helped by certain members of their team, fight an enemy, destroy part of themself, and suffer a real or metaphorical death and rebirth. Show how individual soldiers react to trauma in different ways, how they struggle with the expected and approved deception of combat with their sense of self and the world outside of combat where they’ve only ever been told to avoid deception. After the trials of horror and pain, they may or may not physically return to the world they came from.

Remember, a soldier isn’t a robot. The journey of a soldier is one of change the hard way. Consider taking your protagonist through the stages of the Kubler-Ross change curve .

From what I’ve read, soldiers in a war zone go through four immutable stages. You could send your protagonist through all four or assign individual stages to various supporting characters.

Stage One: This soldier just arrived. They think they’re in for an adventure and are sure they will survive. They don’t accept advice from senior soldiers or leaders. They’re special and this war gig is manageable without the need for personal change. Or, they underestimate the transformation they need to make to stay alive and honorable. They’re experiencing shock and denial. An example is Chris in the beginning of Platoon.

Stage Two: This soldier has seen combat and is changed by it. They recognize they’re in danger and institute caution. They implement change. Now they are accepting mentorship. In Platoon, Chris starts paying attention to Elias after Chris is accused of falling asleep on his shift and failing to prevent an attack.

Stage Three: They’ve seen enough to know the brutalities of war and the rules for staying alive. They are willing to share useful information with others. In Platoon , King, Elias, Rhah, and Lerner are all at this stage.

Stage Four : The soldier believes they are more likely to die than live through the war. They’ve seen the unexpected and horrific over a long period of time and now believe they’ve cheated death and luck longer than they deserve. In Platoon, Barnes reaches this state after he kills Elias.

Stage Five: Real soldiers rarely get clear resolutions but our protagonists require them. A War story must deliver meaning by dramatizing how the protagonist comes to integrate their experiences in war, even if it is in the short-term. In Platoon , Chris gives a monologue in the helicopter as he’s lifted off the battlefield that explains both his short-term and long-time thinking.

No matter which stage your protagonist is in, find what could disturb them via the real horrors of war. Is it their fellow soldiers raping, pillaging, killing, and burning civilians? Is it prostitution, a crisis of faith, insubordination, cruel punishment, irreconcilable moral choices? All of it? Mine those events for opportunities to create misinformation and misunderstandings for which your protagonist must contend. Your protagonist is likely hiding something crucial about themselves from their team and maybe something from their people at home. Exploit that.

Find what is truly beautiful and meaningful to the protagonist. Find ways to represent those values in external form. Some examples might be in an animal (“save the cat”), a civilian (mother protecting a child), photograph of a loved one (Betsy back home), religious trinket (pocket Buddha statue), or nature (a crushed flower).

Final Thoughts?

Do your research or be consistent with your world building if your story is set in a fantasy setting. Know the following:

Social customs, landscapes, and costumes of the time period

Daily routines of soldiers, their slang, profanity, and communication patterns

Communication devices and transportation methods

Cause of the war and precipitating events

Key figures in the war and which outcome you want to highlight

Editor Tip: Spare us the weaponry lecture or gun porn (specs display). In the context of story, this is exposition and unnecessary detail. What do I mean by that? It’s boring. Good writers skip the boring parts.

On Politics:

If you find a way to avoid becoming polemic in your War story, you’ll be the first I’ve ever seen. You can try the “neutral as possible” approach to your story. After all, if you really understand the horrors of war, you won’t want to support the violence, but what about supporting individual soldiers fighting a war? Can you write a story that is Anti-War but pro-soldier? Is it possible? Or maybe you want to make a political point. If so, make sure you are well-informed. Know the political atmosphere and be very specific about what you want your audience to believe. Even if your story has a fantasy or sci-fi setting, politics apply.

On Moving to the Next Level in Your Writing:

Now you have the basics of the War Genre and are ready to finish that story. When you’re ready for an editor, please contact me for a consultation on your work.

I hope I’ve been able to help you with your story and I wish you the best of luck and hard work with your writing.

For more discussions on war stories, check out the excellent Editor Roundtable Podcasts on The Hurt Locker and A Midnight Clear .

Here is a list of War novel suggestions . I’ll add Bring Out the Dog to that list.

Suggested readings: How to Tell a True War Story , On Writing the War , and Write a War Story .

This post originally appeared at storygrid.com where I am a regular contributor for the Fundamental Fridays Series.

2 thoughts on “ How to Write a War Story ”

Thank you ever so much for providing this guidance. As you know, this comports with C.G. Jung and Joseph Campbell, as well as Oliver Stone in his approach to writing ‘Platoon’, and it resonates as sound litetary instruction to me. I’m a Vietnam Combat Vet, and the information you’ve provided I shall share with our Vietnam Veterans group. We are being encouraged to write about our experiences, and some don’t know how to go about it. This will certainly help. Thank you!

C.T. Clements

I specialize in helping people write their nonfiction stories and used to be a mental health therapist. Should anyone in your group need assistance in writing around the tough topics of war, I’d be happy to assist.

Writing a Compelling War Essay: Crafting a Powerful Narrative of the Russia Ukraine War 2022

Writing a compelling war essay can be a daunting task. It requires a deep understanding of the subject matter and a keen sense of story-telling to craft a powerful narrative that captures the essence of the Russia Ukraine War 2022. In this blog article, we will explore the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, the historical context of the war, and the elements of a powerful essay. We will also look at strategies for researching and presenting the evidence in the essay, as well as tips for writing and editing the essay. Finally, we will discuss how to review the essay before submission.

Understanding the conflict between Russia and Ukraine

The conflict between Russia and Ukraine is not a new one. In fact, the two countries have been at odds since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. Russia has long been an ally of Ukraine, with the two countries sharing both a cultural and political history. However, tensions have been escalating in recent years due to the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the ongoing war in eastern Ukraine.

The conflict between Russia and Ukraine is primarily driven by geopolitics and economics. Russia sees Ukraine as a strategic buffer against the West and as a potential market for its energy resources. Ukraine, on the other hand, is keen to assert its independence from Russia and has sought to strengthen its ties with the West. This has led to a number of clashes between the two countries, including the current ongoing conflict in the Donbas region of Ukraine.

The Russia Ukraine War 2022 is a major event in world history and has had a profound impact on both countries. It is, therefore, important to understand the conflict and its implications in order to write a compelling war essay.

Historical context of the Russia Ukraine War and its implications

In order to write a powerful narrative of the Russia Ukraine War 2022, we should understand the historical context of the conflict. The conflict between Russia and Ukraine dates back to the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, when Ukraine declared its independence from Russia. The two countries have since been locked in a tense and often hostile relationship, with Russia attempting to reassert its influence over Ukraine and Ukraine striving to maintain its independence.

The conflict escalated in 2014 when Russia annexed Crimea, sparking outrage in the international community. This led to the imposition of sanctions on Russia by the European Union and the United States. In response, Russia has continued to support separatist forces in eastern Ukraine, leading to the ongoing war in the Donbas region.

The Russia Ukraine War 2022 is the culmination of this long and bitter conflict. The war has had far-reaching implications, not only for the two countries involved, but for the entire region and beyond.

Crafting a powerful narrative: Elements of a compelling War Essay

Writing a powerful narrative of the Russia Ukraine War 2022 requires an in-depth understanding of the conflict and its implications. A compelling war essay should include a clear thesis statement and well-structured argument. It should also include evidence to support the argument, as well as an analysis of the sources used.

In order to craft a powerful narrative, it is necessary to understand the key elements of a compelling war essay. These include:

-A clear and concise thesis statement -An understanding of the historical context of the conflict -A well-structured argument -Evidence to support the argument -An analysis of the sources used -A conclusion that ties together all the elements of the essay

By incorporating these elements into the essay, it is possible to craft a powerful narrative of the Russia Ukraine War 2022.

Analyzing and evaluating the sources used in the essay

To writing a compelling war essay, using reliable sources that provide accurate information is important. It is also important to analyze and evaluate the sources in order to determine their credibility.

When analyzing sources, we should consider the source’s reliability, accuracy, and relevance. Sources should be reviewed for bias and possible errors. It is also important to look at the date of publication and the author’s credentials.

When evaluating sources, we need to consider the evidence presented in the source. Does the evidence support the argument? Is the evidence presented in a fair and balanced manner? Does the evidence contradict or support other sources?

By analyzing and evaluating the sources used in the essay, it is possible to ensure that the argument is supported by reliable evidence.

Writing an effective thesis statement

The thesis statement is the cornerstone of any essay, a thesis statement should clearly and concisely state the main argument of the essay. It should also be specific and clearly identify the focus of the essay.

When writing a thesis statement for a war essay, we should consider the scope of the essay. The thesis statement should be broad enough to cover all the elements of the essay, but not so broad that it becomes vague or unfocused.

It is also important to take a stance on the issue. The thesis statement should make a clear and unambiguous argument. It should not be vague or open-ended.

By writing an effective thesis statement, it is possible to set the stage for a powerful and compelling narrative of the Russia Ukraine War 2022.

Structuring the essay: outlining and introduction, body, and conclusion

Once the thesis statement has been written, structure the essay into an introduction, body, and conclusion. The introduction should provide an overview of the essay, as well as a brief explanation of the thesis statement.

The body of the essay should include evidence to support the argument, as well as an analysis of the sources used. It should also include a discussion of the implications of the war.

The conclusion should tie together all the elements of the essay and provide a brief summary of the argument. It should also include a call to action, if applicable.

By outlining the essay and structuring it into an introduction, body, and conclusion, it is possible to create a powerful narrative of the Russia Ukraine War 2022.

Strategies for researching and presenting the evidence for the essay

In order to write a compelling war essay, it is important to research the subject thoroughly and present the evidence in a clear and concise manner.

When researching for the essay, we need to use a variety of sources, including primary and secondary sources. Primary sources, such as news articles, are direct sources of information about the war. Secondary sources, such as books and academic journals, provide an in-depth analysis of the conflict.

When presenting the evidence, it is important to be clear and concise. Evidence should be presented in a logical order, with each point supporting the argument. Also don’t forget to cite all sources used in the essay.

By following these strategies for researching and presenting the evidence, it is possible to create a compelling narrative of the Russia Ukraine War 2022.

Writing and editing the essay

Once the research has been completed and the evidence has been presented, it is time to write the essay. Our essay should be clear and concise. The argument should be well-structured, with each point building on the previous one.

It is also important to use language that is appropriate for the subject matter. The tone of the essay should be appropriate for the topic, and the language should be clear and concise.

Once the essay has been written, the final step in writing a war essay is editing and proofreading. Editing involves making changes to the structure, tone, and content of the essay. Proofreading involves checking essay for any errors in grammar, punctuation, and spelling.

By writing and editing the essay, it is possible to craft a powerful narrative of the Russia Ukraine War 2022.

Reviewing the essay before submission

Before submitting the essay, we need to review it carefully. It is important to make sure that the essay is well-structured and that the argument is clear and concise. The used sources are reliable and accurate. Essay is within the word limit and that it follows the instructions provided by the instructor.

By reviewing the essay before submission, it is possible to ensure that the essay is of the highest quality.

Writing a compelling war essay about the Russia Ukraine War 2022 requires a deep understanding of the conflict and its implications.

While crafting a compelling war essay, it is necessary to understand the elements of a powerful narrative and to analyze and evaluate the sources used. It is also necessary to write an effective thesis statement and structure the essay into an introduction, body, and conclusion. Author should research and present the evidence in a clear and concise manner. Finally, a complete review the essay before submission.

Writing a powerful narrative of the Russia Ukraine War 2022 can be a daunting task, but it is possible with the right approach. By following the tips outlined in this blog article, it is possible to craft a compelling war essay that captures the essence of the war.

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How to Write War Essay: Russia Ukraine War

Understanding the Purpose and Scope of a War Essay

A condition of armed conflict between nations or between groups living in one nation is known as war. Sounds not like much fun, does it? Well, conflicts have been a part of human history for thousands of years, and as industry and technology have developed, they have grown more devastating. As awful as it might seem, a war typically occurs between a country or group of countries against a rival country to attain a goal through force. Civil and revolutionary wars are examples of internal conflicts that can occur inside a nation.

Your history class could ask you to write a war essay, or you might be personally interested in learning more about conflicts, in which case you might want to learn how to write an academic essay about war. In any scenario, we have gathered valuable guidance on how to organize war essays. Let's first examine the potential reasons for a conflict before moving on to the outline for a war essay.

Economic Gain - A country's desire to seize control of another country's resources frequently starts conflicts. Even when the proclaimed goal of a war is portrayed to the public as something more admirable, most wars have an economic motivation at their core, regardless of any other possible causes.
Territorial Gain - A nation may determine that it requires additional land for habitation, agriculture, or other uses. Additionally, the territory might serve as buffer zones between two violent foes.
Religion - Religious disputes can stem from extremely profound issues. They may go dormant for many years before suddenly resurfacing later.
Nationalism - In this sense, nationalism simply refers to the act of violently subjugating another country to demonstrate the country's superiority. This frequently manifests as an invasion.
Revenge - Warfare can frequently be motivated by the desire to punish, make up for, or simply exact revenge for perceived wrongdoing. Revenge has a connection to nationalism as well because when a nation has been wronged, its citizens are inspired by patriotism and zeal to take action.
Defensive War - In today's world, when military aggression is being questioned, governments will frequently claim that they are fighting in a solely protective manner against a rival or prospective aggressor and that their conflict is thus a 'just' conflict. These defensive conflicts may be especially contentious when conducted proactively, with the basic premise being that we are striking them before they strike us.

How to Write War Essay with a War Essay Outline

Just like in compare and contrast examples and any other forms of writing, an outline for a war essay assists you in organizing your research and creating a good flow. In general, you keep to the traditional three-part essay style, but you can adapt it as needed based on the length and criteria of your school. When planning your war paper, consider the following outline:

Introduction

Definition of war
Importance of studying wars
Thesis statement

Body Paragraphs

Causes of the War
Political reasons
Economic reasons
Social reasons
Historical reasons
Major Players in the War
Countries and their leaders
Military leaders
Allies and enemies
Strategies and Tactics
Military tactics and techniques
Strategic planning
Weapons and technology
Impact of the War
On the countries involved
On civilians and non-combatants
On the world as a whole
Summary of the main points
Final thoughts on the war
Suggestions for future research

If you found this outline template helpful, you can also use our physics help for further perfecting your academic assignments.

Begin With a Relevant Hook

A hook should be the focal point of the entire essay. A good hook for an essay on war can be an interesting statement, an emotional appeal, a thoughtful question, or a surprising fact or figure. It engages your audience and leaves them hungry for more information.

Follow Your Outline

An outline is the single most important organizational tool for essay writing. It allows the writer to visualize the overall structure of the essay and focus on the flow of information. The specifics of your outline depend on the type of essay you are writing. For example, some should focus on statistics and pure numbers, while others should dedicate more space to abstract arguments.

How to Discuss Tragedy, Loss, and Sentiment

War essays are particularly difficult to write because of the terrible nature of war. The life is destroyed, the loved ones lost, fighting, death, great many massacres and violence overwhelm, and hatred for the evil enemy, amongst other tragedies, make emotions run hot, which is why sensitivity is so important. Depending on the essay's purpose, there are different ways to deal with tragedy and sentiment.

The easiest one is to stick with objective data rather than deal with the personal experiences of those who may have been affected by these events. It can be hard to remain impartial, especially when writing about recent deaths and destruction. But it is your duty as a researcher to do so.

However, it’s not always possible to avoid these issues entirely. When you are forced to tackle them head-on, you should always be considerate and avoid passing swift and sweeping judgment.

Summing Up Your Writing

When you have finished presenting your case, you should finish it off with some sort of lesson it teaches us. Armed conflict is a major part of human nature yet. By analyzing the events that transpired, you should be able to make a compelling argument about the scale of the damage the war caused, as well as how to prevent it in the future.

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Russia Ukraine War

Russian President Vladimir Putin started the Russian invasion in the early hours of February 24 last year. According to him. the Ukrainian government had been committing genocide against Russian-speaking residents in the eastern Ukraine - Donbas region since 2014, calling the onslaught a 'special military operation.'

The Russian president further connected the assault to the NATO transatlantic military alliance commanded by the United States. He said the Russian military was determined to stop NATO from moving farther east and establishing a military presence in Ukraine, a part of the Soviet Union, until its fall in 1991.

All of Russia's justifications have been rejected by Ukraine and its ally Western Countries. Russia asserted its measures were defensive, while Ukraine declared an emergency and enacted martial law. According to the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the administration's objective is not only to repel offensives but also to reclaim all Ukrainian land that the Russian Federation has taken, including Crimea.

Both sides of the conflict accuse the other of deploying indiscriminate force, which has resulted in many civilian deaths and displacements. According to current Ukraine news, due to the difficulty of counting the deceased due to ongoing combat, the death toll is likely far higher. In addition, countless Ukrainian refugees were compelled to leave their homeland in search of safety and stability abroad.

Diplomatic talks have been employed to try to end the Ukraine-Russia war. Several rounds of conversations have taken place in various places. However, the conflict is still raging as of April 2023, and there is no sign of a truce.

World War II

World War II raged from 1939 until 1945. Most of the world's superpowers took part in the conflict, fought between two military alliances headed by the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union, and the Axis Powers, led by Germany, Italy, and Japan.

If you'd like to explore it more in-depth, consider using our history essay service for a World War 2 essay pdf sample!

After World War II, a persistent political conflict between the United States, the Soviet Union, and their allies became known as the Cold War. It's hard to say who was to blame for the cold war essay. American citizens have long harbored concerns about Soviet communism and expressed alarm over Joseph Stalin's brutal control of his own nation. On their side, the Soviets were angry at the Americans for delaying their participation in World War II, which led to the deaths of tens of millions of Russians, and for America's long-standing unwillingness to recognize the USSR as a genuine member of the world community.

Vietnam War

If you're thinking about writing the Vietnam War essay, you should know that it was a protracted military battle that lasted in Vietnam from 1955 to 1975. The North Vietnamese communist government fought South Vietnam and its main ally, the United States, in the lengthy, expensive, and contentious Vietnam War. The ongoing Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union exacerbated the issue. The Vietnam War claimed the lives of more than 3 million individuals, more than half of whom were Vietnamese civilians.

American Civil War

Consider writing an American Civil War essay where the Confederate States of America, a grouping of eleven southern states that seceded from the Union in 1860 and 1861, and the United States of America battled each other. If you're wondering what caused the civil war, you should know that the long-standing dispute about the legitimacy of slavery is largely responsible for how the war started.

The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

After over a century, the Israel-Palestine conflict has evolved into one of the most significant and current problems in the Middle East. A war that has claimed the lives of tens of thousands of people destroyed their homes and gave rise to terrorist organizations that still hold the region hostage. Simply described, it is a conflict between two groups of people for ownership of the same piece of land. One already resided there, while the other was compelled to immigrate to this country owing to rising antisemitism and later settled there. For Israelis and Palestinians alike, as well as for the larger area, the war continues to have substantial political, social, and economic repercussions.

The Syrian Civil War

Pro-democracy protests broke out in southern Deraa in March 2011 due to upheavals against oppressive leaders in neighboring nations. When the Syrian government employed lethal force to quell the unrest, widespread protests calling for the president's resignation broke out.

The country entered a civil war as the violence quickly increased. After hundreds of rebel organizations emerged, the fight quickly expanded beyond a confrontation between Syrians supporting or opposing Mr. Assad. Everyone believes a political solution is necessary, even though it doesn't seem like it will soon.

Russia-Ukraine War Essay Sample

With the Russian-Ukrainian war essay sample provided below from our paper writing experts, you can gain more insight into structuring a flawless paper.

Why is there a war between Russia and Ukraine?

Final Words

To understand our past and the present, we must study conflicts since they are a product of human nature and civilization. Our graduate essay writing service can produce any kind of essay you want, whether it is about World War II, the Cold War, or another conflict. Send us your specifications with your ' write my essay ' request, and let our skilled writers help you wow your professor!

Having Hard Time Writing on Wars?

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How to Write a Policy Analysis Paper Step-by-Step

How to Win Wars: The Role of the War Narrative

First Online: 10 May 2017

Cite this chapter

Tone Kvernbekk 3 &
Ola Bøe-Hansen 4

Part of the book series: Argumentation Library ((ARGA,volume 31))

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One might think it is obvious in a military conflict who has won and who has lost. But is it? It seems to be commonly accepted that the Americans actually lost the Vietnam War, even though they won all or most of the actual battles on the ground. Wars, modern military theory states, are not won on the battlefield – they are won in people’s minds, in the cognitive domain. To secure the support of the population for participating in military operations a government must therefore present good, persuasive reasons. Such reasons have come to be called “war narratives”. A war narrative can be seen as a reason whose job it is to bolster the conclusion that participation in a war, often far away from home territory, is legitimate and right. In this chapter we discuss the content and function of war narratives: what they say; why they arise; the audiences they are aimed at, and how they fare over time. This latter issue is particularly important, we suggest, because war narratives may erode if or when counter-evidence piles up as military events unfold. If that happens the narrative becomes a liability to its narrator. The audience becomes skeptical and retracts its support – the narrative fails to persuade and the war might be lost.

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Kvernbekk, T., Bøe-Hansen, O. (2017). How to Win Wars: The Role of the War Narrative. In: Olmos, P. (eds) Narration as Argument. Argumentation Library, vol 31. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-56883-6_12

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“The Art of War” by Sun Tzu Essay

Introduction, book report, works cited.

The Art of War was a book written by Sun Tzu during the year 610 BC. The author tried to provide the knowledge and skills on military strategies which could be applied across various fields and in the day to day activities of various groups of individuals. The targeted groups include those in the military, the businessmen and sportsmen. The book has gained popularity over the many years and has been used for various applications in the Western society (Tzu, p. 14).

Sun Tzu is also known to have written the book, The Lost Art of War, which is related to the first book. He has been accepted as a historical figure of his time. He can also be considered as a politician since he ruled under the king as a military general. Through his occupation, it would be correct to say that Tzu is in a position and is qualified to advice on military strategies and other related skills.

The sources from which the author derives his ideas are very reliable since he talks out of experience. He was a qualified scholar who wrote a lot on military activities. He was also known to have had a successful career in military since he successfully applied his theories in war.

The book is organized into 13 chapters and has been described as a formal and logically written discourse on the subject of Chinese military. It was written during the 6 th Century BC. It has since been translated into many languages but was first translated into the French language in 1782. Each chapter of the book gives a detailed explanation of a particular feature of warfare.

Sun Tzu wrote a total of thirteen essays in his book. The first essay is on estimates (Tzu, p. 44). It describes war as a vital tool in a state and outlines the five constants that are critical in a person’s thoughtfulness. The second essay is on waging war. The theme emphasizes on speed and cost. Sun also talks of the offensive strategy. This shows the strategies employed in winning without the need of fighting or shedding blood.

The forth essay, dispositions, talks about the use of wisdom and knowledge to conquer (Tzu, p. 54). It outlines the skills of defense and how not to make mistakes. The other essay on energy emphasizes on management and organization through numbers. Tzu also identifies the first group that arrives at the battle field as being stronger and this requires the group to be swift. The other essays are on terrain, marches, attacking by fire and the employment of secret agents.

The book does not only have influence on military strategy and tactics but also on business tactics (Tzu, p. 121). This can be seen by the way some fights were not necessarily accomplished through battles. This book has found applications outside military and has become a training guide for various groups of people in the society. There are actually various business books that have been written and several strategies employed from Sun’s book. Some corporate strategies and methods of handling some issues of the office have also been devised from the book. In some companies in Japan, it has been made a prerequisite for executives to read through the book.

The Art of War has also gained popularity in many Western countries concerning the subject of business management. Its usefulness has been seen in the way the information within may be used as an inspiration as it provides good advice on the way to gain success in tough situations in business. The information in Sun’s book has also seen its way in the marketing field especially in competitive advantage. Before the book was translated, the Chinese version was basically a mathematical analysis of competitive advantage and other business ideas.

Though the translation was in military terms, the original information could be directly translated into business marketing terminologies. A number of ideas on ethical issues on business can also be picked from the text in the book. Tzu gives vital information on how to behave in an ethical manner when it comes to business and also provides information on how to succeed in a competitive environment. The battle that he describes gives a picture of the competitive battles that occur among business men and women. He does not support such battles since they always lead to the overuse and waste of money. He believes that this is not worthwhile. Sun believes that making profits from such an activity is almost impossible.

The author addressed his purpose clearly and pointing out mistakes (if any) from his work is difficult or impossible. The author agrees with the limited knowledge that I have on the subjects of military arts and business strategies. The author’s writing style is impressive and adds flavor to the book since it gets interesting with every page.

The book by Sun Tzu has a variety of audiences and does not apply to a particular group only. This makes it a useful tool for many in the society. The first group of people is the military. The book offers useful tips on military tactics. The book may also be useful to business people or students pursuing business related courses. The book also offers useful tips to sports persons.

The book, The Art of War, is a book that has caught the attention of many and has gained popularity in many nations of the world. The knowledge gained from the book helps many groups of individuals in the society as they are able to apply it in their various fields. Most of all, it is a handy tool for students who are seeking to face challenges head on.

Tzu, Sun. The Art of War . Trans. Samuel B. Griffith. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963. Print.

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Bibliography

IvyPanda . "“The Art of War” by Sun Tzu." January 14, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-art-of-war-by-sun-tzu/.

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05 Fiction as Reconstruction of History: Narratives of the Civil War in American Literature

Even after more than 140 years the American Civil War continues to serve as a major source of inspiration for a plethora of literature in various genres. While only amounting to a brief period in American history in terms of years, this war has proved to be one of the central moments for defining the American nation since the second half of the nineteenth century. The facets of the Civil War, its protagonists, places, events, and political, social and cultural underpinnings seem to hold an ongoing fascination for both academic studies and fictional representations. Thus, it has been considered by many the most written-about war in the United States.

The War That Never Goes Away: The Significance of the Civil War for the Cultural Imagination in the United States

Despite the overwhelming body of academic work on the Civil War produced in the United States (and beyond) most of the American public (as well as the international audience) has been exposed to it through cultural texts such as novels, poems, songs, motion pictures, TV series, and documentaries. Hence the Civil War has been regarded “A War that Never Goes Away,” as most convincingly suggested by American historian James McPherson in his ground breaking studies on the Civil War and its significant impact on American society. Even a cursory glance at the presence of the Civil War in both public and academic discussions in the past century reveals that the growing temporal distance to this historical event itself has increasingly resulted in ongoing controversies about the representation and evaluation of this war as a fundamental matrix for the self-perception of American society.

On the one hand, the rapidly growing number of publications about this event in academic disciplines such as history as well as in literary fiction and literary criticism since the 1980s is indicative of the particular relevance of the Civil War in the present cultural discourse. On the other hand, visual media have provided important impulses for an intense public conversation about the Civil War as the conflict that was decisive for the political, social and cultural past of he United States. Documentaries such as The Civil War (1990) by Ken Burns or TV series like North and South (based on John Jakes’ 1982 novel) as well as movies like Summersby (1995) and Cold Mountain (2003) have contributed to renew and broaden the interest in the Civil War. Moreover, headlines such as “Revising the Civil War” ( Newsweek, October 8, 1990), “The Crossroads of Our Being” ( The Nation, December 3, 1990) and “The Civil War Comes Home” ( Time , October 8, 1990) on the front covers of national magazines like Newsweek , The Nation and Time in response to Burns’ documentary are manifestations of this widespread interest. At the same time, these headlines demonstrate the direction that the more recent discussion has taken, namely a reconsideration of the Civil War in the light of crucial issues related to a redefinition of cultural and national identity at the backdrop of shifting political, social and cultural configurations in American society. It is in this context of a prevailing interest in the American Civil War that literary texts take a prominent place in terms of quantity—since the 1980s the number of Civil War novels has steadily risen—and more importantly, in terms of offering fictional projections that speak to the contemporary public interest in reevaluating the war as a symbol of reaffirming political and social ideals of America.

Yet the abundance of print and visual texts published before, during and after the end of the Civil War has been met with a longstanding critique of its quality. For decades historians and literary critics have more or less adhered to Walt Whitman’s observation in his Specimen Days (1882) that “the real war will never get in the books . . . .” As a result this dictum about the Civil War as an “un-written war” (as Daniel Aaron echos Whitman in his study The Unwritten War: American Writers and the Civil War [1962]) has contributed to an unbalanced perception of this part of American literature by critics, and has led to the fact that Civil War literature was widely marginalized from or located at the edges of the literary canon. More recent studies have demonstrated, however, that the war triggered an enormous body of war-related texts that have rarely been explored such as poetry, sentimental stories, sensational war novels, war humor, adolescent stories, war songs, and anecdotes. As Alice Fahs in The Imagined Civil War: Popular Literature of the North and South, 1861–1865 (2001) conclusively elaborates, these war-related texts were often either overlooked or dismissed by critics due to their nature as popular texts. Their impact on shaping the cultural politics of the war, however, was remarkable as they were easily available to readers in the North and South via various formats, e.g. newspapers, weeklies and monthlies, pamphlets, song sheets, and cheap weekly “story papers.”

In the final analysis, the contradiction between the positions advanced by Aaron and Fahs is obviously grounded in different conceptions of the literary canon, with Fahs strongly advocating an opening of narrow boundaries of canonization. Moreover, the different views on canon restrictions reflect a more principal discrepancy in the theoretical assumptions underlying the reading of Civil War literature. In order to understand this discrepancy a closer look at the major theoretical approaches seems to be useful since it will not only help to explain the epistemological positions that have informed the debates about the relationship of literature and history in general but also shed light on the methodological implications relevant for exploring the problem of fiction as reconstruction of history.

Based upon a fundamental critique of traditional hierarchies of histories about literature, Hayden White, Michael Foucault and Stephen Greenblatt in particular have put forward concepts that suggest a radical revision of the practice of historical criticism. In his essay “What Is an Author?” (1997), Michael Foucault introduces a model that conceptualizes history as discursive practice that discards the notion of history as “direct mimesis” and instead views history as a construct which evolves through successive forms of discourses. In a similar direction Hayden White in The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (1987), radically revises traditional concepts of history by proposing a view that defines history itself as a narrative or a narrative sequence.

These arguments not only have had a lasting impact on the critical debates on the writing of history per se but have been highly influential on literary studies as well. In an effort to apply these ideas to the discipline of literary criticism, Stephen Greenblatt has further advanced the concept by suggesting that if history is to be theorized as representation of language, then literature as narrative—by taking interpretation beyond mere formalist aesthetics—also needs to be read in the context of power relations and cultural coordinates. Consequently, a conception of history as discourse dismisses the notion of a hierarchy of history over literature as both are perceived as products of language manifesting themselves likewise as narrative constructs.

The theoretical assumptions of this radical revision of the relationship of history and historicity of literature have particularly influenced the premises of new historicism, a critical movement founded by Stephen Greenblatt in the early 1980s ( Genre 15, 1982). In his own studies of the English Renaissance, Greenblatt substantiates the critical practice of new historicism by situating the literary text in its “historical matrix” and thereby uncovering the interdependencies of literary and historical dimensions in an effort to demonstrate “how collective beliefs and experiences were shaped, moved from one medium to another, concentrated in manageable aesthetic form, offered for consumption [and] how the boundaries were marked between cultural practices understood to be art forms and other, contiguous, forms of expression” (Greenblatt, 5).

This theoretical approach proves to be particularly productive for exploring fictional reconstructions of history since it enables a reading of texts that locates fictional narratives in a broader cultural context and thus understands literature as historically situated practice.

The Unwritten War? The American Civil War as a Theme in American Literature

At the backdrop of this theoretical discussion, a closer look at selected narratives of nineteenth and twentieth-century American literature will serve as a context for discussing major characteristics of the literary representation of the Civil War. Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage (1895) and Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain (1997) will serve as the central texts here as they reveal in a remarkable way fictional constructions of history as a discourse on the respective cultural situation of American society. The specific interest informing my reading of these two texts addresses the following question: In which way do these texts thematize the sectional conflict of the Civil War as constitutive for definitions of cultural self-perceptions of the United States, e.g. how do these texts stage literary narratives in terms of reconstructions of a usable past? While primarily fictionalized as a just war against slavery in the first Civil War novels, published in the period during and immediately after the war, it became a “tragic mistake” in the majority of texts printed in the last decades of the nineteenth century.

This shift in the fictional discourses on the conflict from a highly sentimental representation of the antebellum South as a society of grace and cultural superiority (as manifested, for instance, in Thomas Nelson Page’s In Ole Virginia, 1887) is accompanied by thematic aspects of reconciliation of the divided nation as early as the late 1860s. John William De Forest’s novel Miss Ravenel’s Conversion from Secession to Loyalty (1867), for example, stages such a model in a fascinating way. The novel takes the sectional conflict as a starting point for a reflection about the national status quo and offers an imagery of the conflictual parties by constructing the two central characters—Union army officer Colbourne and Southern lady Lillie Ravenel—as representatives of the national divide. Their initial problematic relationship—staged in the text by various melodramatic narrative elements—eventually ends in marriage. Whereas on the narrative level the plot of the novel appears to be rather predictable employing narrative strategies of the historical novel, the thematic level establishes the marriage as a symbolic gesture of reconciling the antagonism of the national conflict. Thus the Civil War is ficitonalized as a crucial moment of regeneration of the American nation (Fluck, 160), as an opportunity for a new political and cultural beginning that in the novel’s logic is grounded in a strong belief in civilizational progress.

The human suffering caused by the war is foregrounded in powerful and drastic images in De Forest’s text for the first time and since then has proved to be one of the immanent aspects of thematizing the Civil War in nineteenth- century American literature. Earlier, Walt Whitman, in his poems “The Wound-Dresser” and “Cavalry Crossing a Ford” (1865) as well as “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” (1865/66), had made an attempt to describe the nature of the war and its psychological impact on the American people without questioning the legitimacy of the war itself. Quite contrarily, Whitman as an enthusiastic proponent of the Unionist idea and strong opponent of slavery most forcefully called on America’s men (in the North) to participate in the war, as is manifested in his collection of poems “Drum-Taps” (1861).

Like Whitman, American short story author Ambrose Bierce used his own experience as a soldier to write about the war. A collection of stories entitled Tales of Soldiers and Civilians was published in 1891—thirty years after Whitman’s Civil War poems. Immediately after the outbreak of the war, Bierce joined the Union army as a volunteer. Yet Bierce’s literary representation of the war differs from Whitman’s in decisive ways. His images of the war construct the conflict between the Northern and Southern States not only as a contradiction in rhetorics of the political camps but speak to the bloody reality of the war. In his short story “Chickamauga,” collected in the volume Tales of Soldiers and Civilians , Bierce articulates this scepticism about the purpose of the war (and life in general) in shocking images of soldiers cruelly disfigured after battles.

In contradistinction to these war images, Southern authors of this period treat the Civil War in a completely different manner. Authors such as John Esten Cooke and Sidney Lanier, in their novels Surrey of Eagle’s Nest (1866) and Tiger-Lillies (1867), obfuscate the reality of the Civil War to a great extent by adhering to nostalgic and romantic images of the (old) South and its military and political representatives. These novels particularly employ narrative patterns of traditional historical fiction (as in J. F. Cooper’s novels, for instance).

In summary, a list of major themes depicted in nineteenth and twentieth-century American literature about the Civil War would include the subsequent topics:

the Civil War as a tragic mistake that resulted in the decline of a superior (Southern) society (Thomas Nelson Page)
the Civil War as “the red business” (Walt Whitman)
the Civil War as a chance for a new beginning (Margaret Mitchell)
the Civil War as a trauma for the South (William Faulkner)
the Civil War as ending the horrors of slavery (William Styron)
the Civil War as destructive to individual physical and psychological well-being (Stephan Crane, Charles Frazier)

(Re)Writing the Brotherly War: Selected Narratives of the Civil War

If the Civil War as a literary theme in American literature in the nineteenth century seems to be underrepresented, Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage: An Episode of the American Civil War (1895) certainly stands out as an exception. This text is remarkable for two major characteristics that result in a narrative of fictionalizing history which differs from earlier literary representations of the war in many ways.

First of all, Crane’s story fictionalizes the Civil War as an event possessing symbolic relevance by distancing the plot from the actual conflict of 1861–1865. Thus the text does not construct the war as an event of the now but of the past in an attempt to reconstruct the war as a paradigm of searching for meaning and orientation in the America of the Gilded Age.

By doing both: investing the Civil War with symbolic capital and refraining from thematizing the war as an epochal conflict between two different stages of civilization, the text exhibits a narrative strategy that departs from the genre conventions of the traditional historical novel. Instead it makes use of literary modes that primarily serve to reveal intense emotional responses and, more generally, the psychological state of individuals. Hence, what we get in Crane’s story is not a description of the war as a grand struggle of the North against the South but the intimate and subjective world of thought of the young protagonist Henry Fleming as he searches for an explanation of a war that supposedly was to make him a man and hero.

The novel by Stephen Crane, then 24 years of age, was published at a time when the Civil War in the American public discourse was primarily celebrated as a heroic commitment and sacrifice of the veterans, and the battles of the war were reevaluated as an opportunity to overcome national separation. As Nancy Kaplan convincingly argues, this reinterpretation is particularly informed by the fact that in the post-reconstruction period after 1877 the evaluation of the war advocated in historiography as well as in domestic fiction contributed to banning the political nature of the conflict from the collective memory of American society (Kaplan, 80).

Such an evaluation also served to disguise social tensions of the Gilded Age caused by economic and social contradictions after the Civil War. It coated them with rhetorics of national unity on the one hand, and redefined international and external conflicts that America had to face in the following decades as national challenges on the other. Crane’s text, however, questions such an interpretation of the war and dismantles its distorted value system through the character of Henry Fleming. Whereas this character is first introduced as an adolescent enthusiastically volunteering to fight in the Union army, this eagerness gradually vanishes as he goes through a profound crisis in terms of his belief in the ideals of the war as postulated by society. The images of the war battles created in the text projecting a “singular absence of heroic poses” (Crane, 86) are devoid of any notions of heroism and chivalry as commonly staged in popular fiction—and degrade the significance of the war as it was propagated in the Gilded Age:

Presently he began to feel the effects of the war atmosphere—a blistering sweat, a sensation that his eyeballs were about to crack like hot stones. A burning roar filled his ears.Following this came a red rage. He developed the acute exasperation of a pestered animal, a well-meaning cow worried by dogs. He had a mad feeling against his rifle, which could only be used against one life at a time. He wished to rush forward and strangle with his fingers . . .

Buried in the smoke of many rifles his anger was directed not so much against the men whom he knew were rushing toward him as against the swirling battle phantoms which were choking him, stuffing their smoke robes down his parched throat. He fought frantically for respite for his senses, for air, as a babe being smothered attacks the deadly blankets. (Crane, 85)

In addition, the war scenes do not evoke any associations of the battles as holy memories such as Alan Trachtenberg in his book The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (1982) claims to be valid for war photography. Quite the contrary: Crane’s images of the war and the battle dead in The Red Badge of Courage recall a trauma of the past that seems to have vanished from the national consciousness.

The scenes in which Henry encounters dead soldiers most powerfully reveal these images:

He lay upon his back staring at the sky. He was dressed in an awkward suit of yellowish brown. The youth could see that the soles of his shoes had been worn to the thinness of writing paper, and from a great rent in one the dead foot projected piteously. And it was as if fate had betrayed the soldier. In death it exposed to his enemies that poverty which in life he had perhaps concealed from his friends. (Crane, 70)

Near the threshold he stopped, horror-stricken at the sight of a thing. He was being looked at by a dead man who was seated with his back against a columnlike tree. The corpse was dressed in a uniform that once had been blue, but was now faded to a melancholy shade of green. The eyes, staring at the youth, had changed to the dull hue to be seen on the side of a dead fish. The mouth was open. Its red had changed to an appalling yellow. Over the gray skin of the face ran little ants. One was trundling some sort of a bundle along the upper lip. (Crane, 101)

Crane’s text strongly undermines commonly held views of the Civil War as reflected in popular Civil War novels of the 1880s and 1890s by rejecting any gestures of harmonizing or resolving the sectional conflict. In contrast to earlier Civil War novels that sketch subplots in order to establish fictional sites for reconciling opposing interests, Crane ignores such narrative moves in favor of questioning swift reconciliatory gestures, as the following scene underlines. Here, Henry Fleming makes the acquaintance of a soldier of the Confederate army:

At one part of the line four men had been swooped upon, and they now sat as prisoners . . . . One of the prisoners was nursing a superficial wound in the foot . . . . Another, who was a boy in years, took his plight with great calmness and apparent good nature . . . . The third captive sat with a morose countenance. He preserved a stoical and cold attitude . . . . The last of the four was always silent and, for the most part, kept his face turned in unmolested directions. From the views the youth received he seemed to be in a state of absolute dejection. Shame was upon him, and with it profound regret that he was, perhaps, no more to be counted in the ranks of his fellows. The youth could detect no expression that would allow him to believe that the other was giving a thought to his narrowed future, the pictured dungeons, perhaps, and starvations and brutalities, liable to the imagination. All to be seen was shame for captivity and regret for the right to antagonize. (Crane, 205–06)

Of course, the badge of courage takes a central place in the literary conception of the novel. As a visible wound acquired in the battlefield this “red badge” symbolizes courage and masculinity both major constituents of the moral value system dominating the society that Henry Fleming was brought up in. This badge was considered an award achieved through a brave and manly act of patriotism that ensured the unanimous acknowledgment by the community. Henry Fleming, Crane’s adolescent protagonist (referred to in the text as “the youth”) is eager to meet these expectations of society by complying with this ritual of initiation into manhood, and he eventually “earns” his “red badge,” albeit in a different manner. He does not receive his wound in the battlefield but rather accidentally when he escapes from the battle and hides in the woods nearby. By constructing such an ironic reversion, the text drastically undermines the idealized value orientations of the heroic soldier that dominated the public discourse on the Civil War in late nineteenth-century America.

The specific narrative design of the text is the key for fictionalizing history as a critical discourse about the present (not the past) state of American society at the close of the nineteenth century. In this imagery, the Civil War is a metaphor of political and ideological contradictions that have been substituted by a patriotic conformism in the service of strengthening the national unity of the country. Crane’s brilliant literary strategy enacts sequences of sensory impressions of his main character Henry Fleming which in the end evolve into a remarkable image of an individual’s existentialist experience of war. Consequently, the text emphasizes the emotional and reflective responses and reactions to the war rather than the physical action in the battlefield. This particular depiction of experience is achieved through placing the protagonist in a specific position vis-à-vis the plot: Henry’s longing “to see,” to perceive the reality of the war with his senses as well as his continuous reflections about his own place and role in this war make him an observer rather than an agent. Such a construction of the literary character moves the act of observing to the foreground and indeed elevates it to the actual subject matter of literary discourse.

Stringing together the highly subjective impressions of his protagonist in building the literary architecture, the text ultimately results in a fictional account that completely refrains from providing a coherent explanation. Rather, deciphering the war is limited to the individual perceptions and interpretations of the protagonist that are primarily directed to question the validity of central moral values about the war that his community and society sanctioned.

In fictionalizing topical societal issues of Crane’s America, The Red Badge of Courage employs a narrative model of decontextualizing that abstains from providing a concrete temporal and local setting in order to address the discontinuities and contradictions in American cultural self-definitions in the Gilded Age.

As mentioned in the introductory remarks above, the Civil War indeed takes a prominent thematic place in twentieth-century American literature, particularly since the 1980s. This claim might be surprising at first glance, since the Civil War as an historic event then already dated back more than 110 years. The prevailing significance of the war in American literary discourse can be explained by the far-reaching changes in the political, social, and cultural premises that have informed the reception of the Civil War both in scholarly and public discussions in the U.S. since the 1960s. First of all, in the 1960s, American historiography began to reconceptualize its scholarly interests in and theoretical approaches to the Civil War and the era of Reconstruction by addressing new issues, such as the role of abolition, the significance of slavery, and questions of race and gender—issues that were growing out of larger critical debates in the fields of cultural and literary studies. Secondly, as late as in the 1980s this new interest in the Civil War was additionally spurred by revisionist projects in disciplines such as historiography, cultural studies and literary criticism that scrutinized earlier readings of American history in the context of a critical deconstruction of the canon and in an effort to include hitherto marginalized voices in the study of the war.

At the backdrop of the political and social movements of emancipation, particularly the Civil Rights Movement, American literature at the same time (re)discovered the Civil War as a central cultural conflict in American history and society. As a result, fictional texts of the Civil War from then on offer more complex discourses of reevaluating this profound conflict of the past in the framework of the controversial debates about definitions of American culture(s) in the present.

Before the 1980s, American literature had produced relatively few novels (and with varying degrees of literary quality) that specifically thematized the Civil War. A list of better known examples of such novels would include Margaret Mitchell’s best seller Gone with the Wind (1936; Pulitzer Prize 1937), MacKinley Kantor’s Andersonville (1955; Pulitzer Prize 1955), Shelby Foote’s Shiloh (1952) and The Civil War: A Narrative History (1958, 1963, 1974) as well as Robert Penn Warren’s Wilderness: A Tale of the Civil War (1961), William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), and Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels (1973). Since the 1980s, however, new Civil War novels have been published on an annual basis, including, among others, highly praised titles such as Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All by Allan Gurganus (1989), The Black Flower: A Novel of the Civil War by Howard Bahr (1997), By Blood Possessed by Elena Santangelo (1999), and The Other Side: A Novel of the Civil War by Kevin McColley (2000) as well as E. L. Doctorow’s The March (2005). Cold Mountain (1997; National Book Award in 1997) by Charles Frazier certainly belongs to an outstanding group of contemporary Civil War novels. It shall serve as a case study here for exploring the question of how twentieth-century literary fiction constructs narratives about history. In his novel, Frazier tells the story of Inman, a carpenter from the South, who is treated in an army hospital in Virginia for severe injuries that he received in the battle of Petersburg in 1864. His experience as a soldier fighting for the Confederate army in the battlefields of the Civil War as well as the bleak prospect of having to go back to the war after convalescence cause him to leave the hospital illegally and thus to desert the army.

Fuelled by a strong longing for his native country, Inman begins the journey back to his home at Cold Mountain, a mountain region in North Carolina. Still suffering from the pain of his injury, he walks through the South a few months prior to the end of the war and encounters various groups of people: escaped slaves and treks of displaced whites, chased away from their farms by the Union army, as well as marauding gangs and head-hunters of the home guard searching for deserters on behalf of the Confederate army. At the end of his long and dangerous escape, Inman reaches Cold Mountain and is reunited with Ada, the woman he fell in love with shortly before he went to war. They spend a few days of happiness together before Inman leaves again, this time for the North, to hide until the end of the war. On his way, however, he is caught by the home guard and shot dead while attempting to flee. At the backdrop of this plot, Frazier constructs powerful images that run counter to the myths about the Old South—myths that are sustained, for instance by Margaret Mitchell’s novel Gone with the Wind and the film based on the novel, and that since the 1930s have prevailed as stereotypes in the American public consciousness (and beyond) until today.

Similarly to Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, Frazier’s novel uses a narrative strategy of individualizing war experience in order to stage a discourse that deconstructs idealized moral concepts of the war and its combatants. There is, however, a decisive difference between Frazier’s protagonist Inman and the Union army soldier Henry Fleming with regard to the attitude towards these moral values: While Henry does grasp the contradictory nature of these values, he still submits to them, even though his initiation to become a heroic soldier and man is based upon a lie. In contrast, Inman appears as a literary character that is thoroughly disillusioned due to his gruesome experience in the war and hence deliberately chooses to desert the war altogether, thus taking an active stance against the ideology of false patriotism and nationalism.

The images of the war in this novel, sketched as retrospective fragments of Inman’s reflections about the war and the South, forcefully dismantle any positive values about the war whatsoever on three levels of discourse. On the first level, theses images evoke highly impressive reflections of the battles and the shocking brutality committed by human beings under the conditions of war:

The wounded Federals moaned and keened and hummed between gritted teeth on the frozen field and some called out the names of loved ones. To this accompaniment, the poorly shod of Inman’s party climbed over the wall to yank the boots off the dead. Though his own boots were in fair shape, Inman made a late-night foray onto the field simply to see what the day’s effort had accomplished . . . . Later, many hours after midnight, Inman looked into one of the houses scattered about the field . . . . Inman walked through the house and out the back door and saw a man killing a group of badly wounded Federals by striking them in the head with a hammer. The Federals had been arranged in an order, with their heads all pointing one way, and the man moved briskly down the row, making a clear effort to let one strike apiece do. (Frazier, 8–9)

The second level of literary discourse deconstructs various myths about the political and military leaders on both sides of the war. They are shown as despots rather than wise father figures. At the same time, this disenchantment of the legendary heroic generals is linked to the question of how collective moral values are being politically instrumentalized:

Old Lee, not to be outdone, said it’s a good thing war is so terrible or else we’d get to liking it too much . . . . Even back then, early in the war, [Inman’s] opinion differed considerably from Lee’s, for it appeared to him that we like fighting plenty, and the more terrible it is the better. And he suspected that Lee liked it most of all and would, if given his preference, general them right through the gates of death itself. What troubled Inman most, though, was that Lee made it clear he looked on war as an instrument of clarifying God’s obscure will. Lee seemed to think battle—among all acts man might commit—stood outranked in sacredness only by prayer and Bible reading. (Frazier, 8)

Finally, on a third level, the text establishes a notion that goes beyond the idea of the Civil War as a singular historical event and that questions war in general:

It was simple enough to tell fortunes if a man dedicated himself to the idea that the future will inevitably be worse than the past and that time is a path leading nowhere but a place of deep and persistent threat. The way Inman saw it, if a thing like Fredericksburg was to be used as a marker of current position, then many years hence, at the rate we’re going, we’ll be eating one another raw. (Frazier, 16)

Inman fared on through this territory, criticizing its every feature. How did he ever think this to be his country and worth fighting for? Ignorance alone would account for it. All he could list in his mind worth combat right now was his right to exist unmolested somewhere on the west fork of the Pigeon River drainage basin, up on Cold Mountain . . . . (Frazier, 65)

In addition to these imageries of the war, Cold Mountain delineates an extensive panorama of the social and political contradictions as well as the decay of the South at the time of the Civil War.

By staging Inman’s escape from the war as a long and agonizing journey with encounters of people of different racial, ethnic, socio-economic and educational background, Frazier enacts a plot structure that offers differentiated insights into the history, culture, and moral state of Southern society at the close of the Civil War depicted through literary images of individual experience. In this way, the text creates metaphors that evoke vivid associations of the symptoms of the political and cultural dissolution of the Old South as a social system.

Besides Inman, the character of Ruby is exemplary for Frazier’s narrative strategy of individuation that assigns genuinely distinctive dimensions to representatives of the South. Raised in a poor white family, Ruby displays the personality of a pragmatic and self-reliable woman that exposes the highly cultivated and sophisticated manners of Ada, her Southern aristocratic counterpart, as artificial and meaningless, as the following scene demonstrates:

Money’s not it, Ruby said. Like I said, I’m not exactly looking to hire out. I’m saying if I’m to help you here, it’s with both of us knowing that everybody empties their own night jar. Ada started to laugh but then realized this was not meant to be funny. Something on the order of equality, was Ruby’s demand. It seemed from Ada’s point of view an odd one. But on reflection she decided that since no one else was lined up to help her, and since she had been tossing her own slops all summer, the request was fair enough. (Frazier, 52)

In the final analysis, the story of Inman in Cold Mountain enacts a discourse about the South that reconceptualizes the social and cultural coordinates of Southern society in terms of their significance for the individual. The historic event of the Civil War, however, serves as the triggering moment in the narrative for exploring individual notions of identity as well as for inquiring moral concepts of a past society through the lens of contemporary America.

As manifested in the readings of the selected novels, the Civil War continues to take a significant role in fictional reconstructions of history. This role is primarily based on the nature of this fratricidal war as an epochal conflict in American society that radically revealed the contradictions and discrepancies in regard to national self-definitions. It is in this sense that the Civil War can be read as constitutive for conceptualizing American culture in the past and present. The fictional narratives of the Civil War in nineteenth and twentieth-century American literature thematize the shifts in societal discourses about this conflict at the backdrop of the respective cultural concepts and thus invent unique stories about history that reflect the continuities and discontinuities inherent in the contemporary controversies about defining America.

Works Cited

Aaron, Daniel. The Unwritten War: American Writers and the Civil War. New York: Knopf, 1962.

Bierce, Ambrose. Tales of Soldiers and Civilians . San Francisco: E. L. G. Steele, 1891.

Crane, Stephen. The Red Badge of Courage. New York: D. Appleton, 1895.

Fahs, Alice. The Imagined Civil War: Popular Literature of the North and South, 1861–1865. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2001.

Foucault, Michel. “What is an Author?” In Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, 124 – 27. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977.

Fluck, Winfried. “Realismus, Naturalismus, Vormoderne.” In Amerikanische Literaturgeschichte, ed. Hubert Zapf, 154–217. Stuttgart, Weimar: Metzler, 1997.

Frazier, Charles. Cold Mountain. New York: The Atlantic Monthly Press, 1997.

Greenblatt, Stephen. Shakespearean Negotiation: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988.

Kaplan, Nancy. “The Spectacle of War in Crane’s Revision of History.” In New Essays on The Red Badge of Courage, ed. Lee Clark Mitchell, 77–108. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

Newsweek. October 8, 1990, 58 – 64.

The Nation. December 3, 1990, 695 – 96.

Time. October 8, 1990, 78.

White, Hayden. The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987.

Select Bibliography

Archer, Jules. A House Divided: The Lives of Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee . New York: Scholastic, 1995.

Brinkley, Alan. The Unfinished Nation: A Concise History of the American People. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1993.

Davis, Kenneth C. Don’t Know Much About The Civil War. New York: Avon, 1996.

Donald, David, ed. Why the North Won the Civil War. New York: Collier, 1960.

Faulkner, Harold Underwood, and Tyler Kepner. America: Its History and People. Part 1. War Department Education Manual 218. Washington: Harper & Brothers, 1944.

Foote, Shelby. The Civil War: A Narrative. 3 vols. New York: Random House, Vintage, 1958, 1963, 1974.

Hacker, Andrew. Two Nations: Black and White; Separate; Hostile and Unequal. New York: Ballantine, 1993.

Lowry, Thomas P. The Story the Soldiers Wouldn’t Tell: Sex in the Civil War. Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1994.

Meltzer, Milton, ed. Letters from the Civil War: A Documentary History of the Great American Conflict. New York: Thomas Y. Cowell, 1989.

Murphy, Jim. The Boy’s War: Confederate and Union Soldiers Talk about the Civil War. New York: Clarion Books, 1990.

McPherson, James M. For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.

Perman, Michael, ed. Major Problems in the Civil War and Reconstruction: Documents and Essays. 2 nd edition. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1998.

Potter, David M. Lincoln and His Party in the Secession Crisis. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1942.

Ray, Delia. Behind the Blue and Gray: The Soldier’s Life in the Civil War. New York: Scholastic, 1994.

Tindall, George B., and David E. Shi. America: A Narrative History. New York: Norton, 1989.

Doctorow, E. L. The March. New York: Random House, 2005.

Finseth, Ian Frederick. The American Civil War. An Anthology of Essential Writings. New York, London: Routledge, 2006.

Fletscher, William A. Rebel Private: Front and Rear. New York: Penguin, 1908, 1995.

Hansen, Joyce. I Thought My Soul Would Rise and Fly: The Diary of Patsy, A Freed Girl. New York: Scholastic, 1997.

Shaara, Michael. The Killer Angels. New York: Ballantine, 1974.

Literary Criticism

Aaron, Daniel. The Unwritten War: American Writers and the Civil War . New York: Knopf, 1962.

Fahs, Alice. The Imagined Civil War. Popular Literature of the North and South, 1861–1865 . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001.

Lively, Robert A. Fiction Fights the Civil War . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1957.

Madden, David and Peggy Bach, eds. Classics of Civil War Fiction . Tusccaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2001.

Wilson, Edmund. Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War . New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1962.

Andersonville . DVD. Directed by John Frankenheimer. 1996; Turner Home Entertainment, 2004.

Cold Mountain . DVD. Directed by Anthony Minghella. 2003; Miramax Home Entertainment, 2004.

Glory . DVD. Directed by Edward Zwick. 1989; Sony Pictures, 1998.

God & Generals . DVD. Directed by Ronald F. Maxwell. 2003; Warner Home Video, 2003.

Gone With the Wind . DVD. Directed by Victor Fleming. 1939; Warner Home Video, 2000.

Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All . DVD. Directed by Ken Cameron. 1994; Allumination 2004.

Ride With The Devil . DVD. Directed by Ang Lee. 1999; Universal Studios, 2000.

Suggested Citation

Introduction

Existing explanations for why the u.s. war in afghanistan ended, trauma, narratives, and war, the narrative emerges and settles in, the narrative peaks, the narrative declines, narratives and war: explaining the length and end of u.s. military operations in afghanistan.

Associate Professor of Politics and International Affairs and the Shively Family Faculty Fellow at Wake Forest University.

Supplemental material available at https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/82RNG7

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C. William Walldorf; Narratives and War: Explaining the Length and End of U.S. Military Operations in Afghanistan. International Security 2022; 47 (1): 93–138. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/isec_a_00439

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Why did the U.S. war in Afghanistan last so long, and why did it end? In contrast to conventional arguments about partisanship, geopolitics, and elite pressures, a new theory of war duration suggests that strategic narratives best answer these questions. The severity and frequency of attacks by al-Qaeda and the Islamic State across most of the 2000s and 2010s generated and sustained a robust collective narrative across the United States focused on combatting terrorism abroad. Audience costs of inaction generated by this narrative pushed President Barack Obama (2009) and President Donald Trump (2017) to not only sustain but increase troops in Afghanistan, against their better judgement. Strategic narratives also explain the end to the war. The defeat of the ISIS caliphate and a significant reduction in the number of attacks on liberal democratic states in the late 2010s caused the severity and frequency of traumatic events to fall below the threshold necessary to sustain a robust anti-terrorism narrative. As the narrative weakened, advocates for war in Afghanistan lost political salience, while those pressing retrenchment gained leverage over policy. Audience costs for inaction declined and President Joe Biden ended the war (2021). As President Biden seeks to rebalance U.S. commitments for an era of new strategic challenges, an active offshore counterterrorism program will be necessary to maintain this balance.

In May 2017, amid yet another intense national debate about increasing troops in Afghanistan, President Donald Trump asked Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), “How does this end?” Graham answered, “It never ends.” Soon after, Vice President Mike Pence implored Graham to give Trump an off-ramp, some kind of exit strategy. According to Bob Woodward, Graham responded, “It would never end.” 1

Until Trump's 2020 troop reduction and, especially, President Joe Biden's 2021 decision to end combat operations entirely, Graham's counsel seemed almost prophetic. Despite long-standing countervailing pressures at home (e.g., lobbying by advocates of restraint, public disdain for the war, as well as the pro-withdrawal sentiments of Biden and his two immediate predecessors), the United States stayed in Afghanistan for two decades. 2 What sustained this war for so long, and what allowed Trump to begin and Biden to complete the drawdown?

Conventional arguments in international relations about geopolitics, elites (e.g., “the Blob”), 3 and partisanship struggle to answer these questions. Given these shortcomings, this article turns to a new theory of war duration to explain the length and end of the U.S. war in Afghanistan. The approach centers, at the broadest level, on collective national will or purpose. It does so, more specifically, by focusing primary causal attention on a largely underappreciated yet historically important factor in U.S. foreign policy: strategic narratives. 4

I define strategic narratives as collective national or public-level stories that form out of and center around traumatic events for a group. These events come to be viewed in existential terms as a danger to the national way of life. By collective, I mean that narratives are properties of groups or social facts, like culture. For a nation-state, a narrative becomes collectively salient because it restores order by explaining the pain, assigning blame, and, most importantly, setting lessons going forward to avoid a return to the pain of the past. These lessons are often reflected in a simple mantra—such as “No More Vietnams” or “Stop Terrorism”—that takes on a life of its own in ways that determine national interests to pursue abroad and shape policy debates over time. 5

This article focuses on one especially important type of strategic narrative—the liberal narrative—in the history of U.S. foreign policy. A robust liberal narrative is distinguished by its lesson, notably the need to safeguard liberal political order abroad, “either by promotion (i.e., expanding democracy and liberal rights) or protection (i.e., preventing the spread of counter-ideologies to liberalism).” 6 The liberal narrative manifests in temporally unique variants such as the anti-fascist narrative of the 1930s and 1940s and the anti-communist narrative during the Cold War. With lessons to defend freedom and stop counter-ideologies from spreading, both shared a commitment to protect liberal political order, making them “liberal narratives.” 7

Historically, liberal narratives like these affect policy through the contested nature of democratic politics. At key decision points about the use of force, powerful narratives augment in predictable ways some voices over others in policy debates. Specifically, by tapping into or drawing upon the lessons of a prevailing narrative, agents gain influence by building policy discourses that increase leaders' perceived audience costs, which are defined as the “domestic political price” that leaders pay for choices that are at odds with strong public preferences. 8 Given a narrative's public salience, leaders fear potential electoral or policy losses and, in turn, tend to bring their decisions in line with these narrative-augmented discourses, sometimes against their better judgment. 9

This strategic-narrative argument helps explain the length and end of the U.S. war in Afghanistan. The severity of the September 11 terrorist attacks coupled with the frequency of follow-on attacks globally by al-Qaeda and the Islamic State (ISIS) into the late 2010s generated and sustained a powerful collective story across the U.S. body politic of missed opportunities by U.S. leaders and a lesson to combat terrorism abroad. This anti-terrorism narrative is the most recent variant of a robust liberal narrative in the U.S. policy process. At various decision points, the narrative created space for promoters of war (especially in the U.S. military) to generate discourses that raised audience costs of inaction and politically boxed in presidents to sustain or expand the U.S. war in Afghanistan. Concerns about looking “soft” and not measuring up to narrative standards shaped the decisions of both President Barack Obama and Trump (early in his term) to stay engaged militarily. In recent years, narrative measures show that as the severity and frequency of terrorist attacks receded (i.e., collapse of the ISIS caliphate, absence of severe al-Qaeda attacks), the anti-terrorism narrative also lost policy salience. Moderators (in this case, civilian leaders and policy experts) gained leverage, audience costs of inaction declined, and restraint gained traction in policy debates. Like event-driven narrative dynamics (i.e., following the killing of Osama bin Laden) that allowed Obama to withdraw from Iraq in 2011, the national sense of purpose in Afghanistan waned, creating political space for Trump to decrease troops and for Biden to end the war entirely.

The strategic-narrative argument builds upon and fills important gaps in existing scholarship. In contrast to standard rationalist accounts, it explores the social construction of audience costs and offers new insights into how narratives shape policy outcomes. The argument also turns to the framework of cultural trauma to explain strategic narratives more systematically. 10 In contrast to some accounts that focus primarily on influential agents to explain how narratives form and endure, trauma theory draws primary attention to the importance of events (e.g., September 11). When collectively viewed as existentially dangerous, these events spark new narratives such as the anti-terrorism narrative. Similar follow-on events over time re-traumatize the nation, helping maintain the salience of the narrative as a lodestar for foreign policy for years or even decades on end. Among other things, this trauma framework best accounts for the long-standing vitality of the anti-terrorism narrative in U.S. politics that other arguments about narratives struggle to explain.

This article turns first to conventional explanations, specifically arguments centered on potential changes in Afghanistan's geostrategic value to the United States, the shifting partisan preferences of different presidential administrations, variation in elite ideological or consensus-based pressures, and shifts in civil-military relations. The second and third sections detail the strategic-narrative argument and methods. Sections four through six present the Afghanistan case studies. The article concludes with policy implications.

The war in Afghanistan was the centerpiece of U.S. forever wars across the first two decades of the 2000s. Presidents Obama, Trump, and Biden conducted major policy reviews early in their administrations. The first two opted against withdrawal and increased troops instead—Obama by 30,000 in 2009 and Trump by 4,000 in 2017. Three years later, Trump began—and Biden completed—the withdrawal. What explains this change?

Standard explanations struggle to answer this question. Realists see no geostrategic value in nation-building wars like Afghanistan. Although the end of the war makes sense to realists, its duration does not. 11 Partisan arguments offer no clear explanation either—Obama (D) continued President George W. Bush's (R) policy that Trump (R) also initially followed before shifting to withdrawal, which Biden (D) elected to continue. 12 Elite-based arguments fare poorly, too. For those who focus on elite ideology, reduced elite ideological concerns about Afghanistan over the past decade (e.g., Obama on the overreaction to September 11 and talks of terrorism as nonexistential) should have meant that the United States ended the war years ago. Therefore, why the United States stayed so long and what changed to allow Biden to leave when others could not is puzzling. 13 This is not to say that ideology is irrelevant; it affects how narratives form, but in ways that the narrow focus in extant work on elites alone does not capture well. 14 Alternatively, some scholars argue that a powerful establishment consensus aimed at sustaining U.S. “liberal hegemony” explains U.S. wars in the Middle East. In short, elites want forever wars and get what they want. 15 But if this theory is correct, then how did Biden end the war? As a constant, establishment consensus cannot explain this, nor can it explain many other decisions for retrenchment, such as Obama's choice in 2011 to withdraw all troops from Iraq and his refusal to enforce the Syrian “red line” in 2014.

Finally, I suggest that the strongest conventional argument comes from the civil-military relations literature. When the military enters the political fray with dire public warnings of danger ahead for the nation, some scholars argue that civil-military relations tilt toward the military in ways that often lead to strategically suboptimal outcomes, such as continuing stalemated forever wars. In contrast, these kinds of wars result in retrenchment only when civilians regain the upper hand, especially by muzzling the military in public. 16

The problem with this argument is not that it is wrong. In fact, the strategic-narrative argument I develop here agrees that the balance between military leaders as powerful promoters of war and civilian leaders as moderators of war is important. Not surprisingly, then, when military leaders went public (or threatened to do so) in the Obama and Trump periods, civilian leaders capitulated, troops increased, and war continued. In the Biden period, however, civilians carried the upper hand, the military chose not to go public with its preferences to continue the fight, and the president ended the war. In a broad sense, the cases match civil-military expectations.

This argument's greatest shortcoming comes with explaining change, which is the main puzzle of this article. If the civil-military relations balance is critical to both the continuation of and the end to forever wars, such as the war in Afghanistan, why does that balance tilt one way or the other at different times? More specifically, why does the military go public sometimes and not others, why and how do the public appeals of the military generate pressure on civilian leaders, and under what conditions are civilians able to muzzle the military and, in so doing, gain more leverage over policy?

The politics of strategic narratives help answer questions like these. The civil-military balance generally favors the military when there is a robust liberal narrative—such as the anti-terrorism narrative from 2001 to 2018. The narrative gives military promoters (and their civilian supporters in government) an important political tool to build public pressure on civilian leaders in order to continue/expand war. Military leaders are most likely to go public (or threaten to do so) under such narrative conditions. Civilian leaders—fearful of the political costs of not measuring up to narrative standards (i.e., looking “weak” or “losing”)—capitulate to military pressure. But when a liberal narrative weakens, the civil-military balance often tilts toward the former. Military promoters find themselves on more tenuous ground in policy debates. In the absence of nationwide, narrative-driven fervor to intervene militarily in conflicts abroad, the military tends to hesitate about going public with its preferences for more force. As the public costs of looking weak recede with the weakened liberal narrative, civilians/moderators find more political space to assert themselves, both in internal debates and in public. Long wars such as the U.S. war in Afghanistan often come to an end.

In sum, the nexus between civil-military relations and strategic narratives provides deeper insights into why long wars endure and ultimately end. International relations scholars have shed a great deal of light on the former but not on the latter. For that reason, I now turn greater attention to the narrative side of this equation.

Narratives are not new to the field of international relations. The existing literature on narratives faces two primary shortcomings, though. 17 First, scholars offer no clear explanation for why and when narratives shape policy outcomes, like decisions to continue or end forever wars. My attention to audience costs corrects for this. Second, in explaining how narratives strengthen and weaken over time, existing scholarship gives primary attention to narrators—especially the president in the U.S. context. 18 Although narrators (and sometimes presidents, as such) are important, these arguments tend to overlook how events shape strategic narratives' content and strength across time. In the mid-2010s, President Obama tried to re-narrate and dampen terrorism worries in the United States, for instance. He largely failed because most U.S. citizens viewed Obama's new story as being out of touch amid a surge in ISIS terrorist attacks. The president told the wrong story at the wrong time. Events matter.

I start with scholarship on collective trauma, which draws attention to two particularly important concepts: the severity and the frequency of events. Neil Smelser defines cultural trauma as “a memory accepted and given public credence by a relevant membership group and evoking an event(s) or situation(s) which is a) laden with … affect, b) represented as indelible, and c) regarded as threatening a society's existence or violating one or more of its fundamental cultural presuppositions.” 19 Building off this definition, trauma involves three stages that leave behind marks on society, essentially new prevailing narratives. The strategic-narrative argument starts with identity, which determines what a community values most. Stage one involves severe events that are perceived as an attack on these values, an existential challenge making them traumatic. 20 This severity produces deep emotional reactions—“disgust, shame, guilt … or anxiety”—for a community, which leads quickly to stage two of trauma, notably a collective search for new “routines” and ways to “get by in the world.” 21 Above all else, the affected community looks to presumed wise figures in society for explanation and ways forward. 22

Stage three of trauma—the formation of new collective narratives—emerges from these explanations. Many enter the fray amid severity, often telling competing stories. Specific kinds of severity resonate with the injured group in ways that privilege some stories over others. 23 As a result of the disquiet generated by certain events, some stories become affirmed, validated, and collectively labeled as “good.” Storytellers gain a hearing, according to Jeffrey Alexander, when they “represent social pain as a fundamental threat to … [a group's] sense of who they are.” 24 If severe events repeat frequently, privileged stories resonate deeper and longer. High frequency re-traumatizes the collective, which makes the story indelible (i.e., “see, I told you so”) and helps sustain it over time as the new collective wisdom—or prevailing narrative—with new ways of being going forward. 25

This latter element—new directions toward repair—is a natural part of trauma-generated narratives. Effective storytellers repeatedly narrate ways for “defense and coping,” drawing attention to “mistakes and how they may be avoided in the future” (i.e., blame and lesson). 26 These lessons are often encapsulated in slogans such as “no more Vietnams,” “no more 9/11s,” or “who lost China?” (which helped propel intervention in Korea and Vietnam). Lessons and severe event(s) are intrinsically connected in narratives—the latter gives meaning to the former. 27

This trauma framework—centered on the severity and frequency of events—helps explain the emergence and cross-temporal strength of strategic narratives in U.S. foreign policy. 28 For this article, I grant special attention to one kind of trauma—external trauma—and the type of narrative that it tends to generate. Trauma theorists find that severe event(s) from some force outside a community leads to group unity around a story centered on protecting the ideals of the community—that is, “who we are”—as a means of defense or repair. 29 This external trauma helps explain the emergence and strength of liberal narratives (such as the anti-terrorism narrative) that centers on activism abroad to defend or promote liberal political order.

Liberal states (including the public in these states) view other states and developments in the international system through the ideological lens of their own regime type (i.e., identity)—they notice and worry about the plight of liberal order abroad because it threatens their own security. 30 The severe events most likely to spark stage one of trauma emerge when ideologically distant—in this case illiberal—rival(s) make strategic gains, especially through either a direct attack on the United States or a series of attacks on other kindred liberal or liberalizing states. Like the ideology literature in international relations, I argue that these kinds of strategic shifts are not objective, as realists expect. Instead, their impact on a polity is conditioned by state identity. 31 When these attacks produce civilian casualties and/or lead to the expansion of illiberal governments abroad, collective anxiety around existential danger to the national way of life rises exponentially. This sense of existential panic around high-severity events comes almost immediately after direct attacks (e.g., Pearl Harbor or September 11). 32 With indirect attacks on ideological kin, geographic distance from the target often means that it takes several accumulated attacks to generate the same collective sense of severity and, with that, collective trauma. 33

Whether their pathway is direct or indirect, high-severity attacks lead to stages two and three of trauma. Many of society's “wise figures” will engage in storytelling in stage two. External trauma privileges stories from agents who I call “promoters,” those who validate public fears of existential danger and the need to defend liberal order abroad. 34 If rival gains come via direct attack, promoter stories immediately prevail and the liberal narrative strengthens quickly. 35 If attacks are indirect, the slower growth of severity means that promoter stories gain acceptance more slowly, too. In stage three, repeated rival attacks/gains validate the promoter story, giving it collective strength. Finally, the frequency of events sustains narrative strength and salience over time. In a path-dependent way, the liberal narrative remains robust if an ideological rival regularly continues (i.e., at least every two or three years) to make gains, especially if it either directly or indirectly attacks other ideologically kindred (in this case, liberal or liberalizing) states. 36 In essence, frequent and severe challenges abroad perpetually re-traumatize the nation, giving a robust liberal narrative ongoing strength and vitality. 37

The dominant variant of the liberal narrative during the Cold War—the anti-communist narrative—offers a good example of the theory. In the 1940s, the U.S. public was traumatized by a cascade of Soviet ideological gains: communist advances in East-Central Europe, atomic bomb tests, an alliance with newly communist China, and support of the Korean War. This development shut out moderate voices, such as progressive Vice President Henry A. Wallace, and allowed promoters to establish a robust liberal narrative around stopping communism. For much of the forty years that followed, frequent demonstrations of communist-bloc strength (i.e., Sputnik, gains in Africa and Asia, the Cuban Revolution, and the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan) re-traumatized the United States, keeping the anti-communist narrative robust. 38

There are two potential pathways by which severity and frequency can weaken the liberal narrative. First, the narrative will weaken most profoundly and substantially when an ideological rival experiences a debilitating defeat or changes its ideology altogether. These kinds of positive events generate what Emile Durkheim calls “success anomie,” or a collective sense of lost purpose for the nation that makes the old narrative appear antiquated as a guide for policy. 39 Positive events profoundly weaken a temporal variant of the liberal narrative for years to follow—this becomes permanent if a rival fails to rebuild.

Second, narrative weakening could also occur when either trauma-generating strategic gains by an ideological rival cease for at least four years, or when a rival takes accommodating steps to reduce tension. This absence of negative events can also produce success anomie. When either scenario happens, the frequency and severity of traumatic events fall below the threshold necessary to sustain a robust liberal narrative. In these conditions, especially when marked by the positive event of a rival's debilitating defeat, a political opportunity space emerges for certain agents who I call “moderators” to engage in storytelling about reduced ideological danger and restraint abroad. U.S. presidents sometimes become moderators, but as Obama found out the hard way, their success as storytellers depends on the event-driven context. That is, they must tell the right story at the right time. 40 The liberal narrative weakens under these conditions of rival decline or absence of negative events; retrenchment settles in as the new lodestar for the polity. For example, the liberalization and eventual collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 initiated a major re-narration by moderators. As a result, the anti-communist narrative disappeared from discussions of U.S. foreign policy.

narrative discourses and war

Narratives shape policy outcomes—such as decisions to sustain or end wars—by raising audience costs. Standard accounts demonstrate that audience costs emerge when heads of state bind themselves by making a public commitment to action abroad. 41 Audience costs from strategic narratives form in a different way, however, notably through social construction. 42 At key decision points, agents (promoters or moderators) use strategic narratives to build discourses for or against war. These discourses generate different domestic political cost-benefit scenarios: high audience costs of action, or high audience costs of inaction. 43 While not required for these kinds of discourses to form, appeals by leaders with robust narratives as a justification for policy may help fuel these narrative-driven discourses and elevate audience costs. Leader pledges (i.e., the conventional audience-cost argument) can matter, then, but only if they are linked to prevailing narratives. Regardless of their contributions to the process, democratic leaders worry about future elections or their broader policy agendas (i.e., the potential political consequences of elevated audience costs) when facing robust, narrative-based discourses. Consequently, leaders usually bring policy in line with the narrative discourses that agents build around them.

For starters, I assume that at any major policy decision point, both promoters and moderators will be present to advocate their different positions. Liberal war continuation (and expansion) is most likely when a strong liberal narrative develops at key decision points in a conflict. Here, a robust liberal narrative (meaning, again, an elevated national passion to protect liberal order abroad) augments promoter arguments. This gives promoters a special hearing with the public and in policy debates generally. 44 Promoters know this and use the liberal narrative to create (or policymakers fear they will create) broad public movements, which raises audience costs of inaction. In wartime, military leaders are often also promoters, and strategic narratives tip the civil-military balance in their favor. Civilian leaders who do not support continuing or expanding military action fear losing future elections or policy goals, and thus some bring their policies in line with promoters' arguments. Others get “pushed to act” against their better judgment to continue or expand liberal wars.

Sometimes, these reluctant leaders ironically help create the strong liberal discourses that later push them along. In the 1960 presidential campaign, President John F. Kennedy intentionally took a tough position against Fidel Castro's communist regime in Cuba to enhance his anti-communist credentials with voters. This stance helped Kennedy win the White House, but it also boxed him in once in office. As promoters in Congress built a robust discourse around anti-communism for a tough policy in 1961, the political costs of looking weak on communism proved too high for Kennedy to pursue his preferred course of normalizing relations with Castro's regime. The 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion followed. 45

Liberal wars end as liberal discourse weakens. Because of a national sense of lost purpose, moderator appeals (which often come from civilians in wartime) resonate more in policy debates as the liberal narrative weakens. Promoter arguments tend to appear odd, by contrast, maybe even extreme. Consequently, promoters often go quiet, especially in public. 46 In this scenario, leaders face lower audience costs of inaction, and they may in fact perceive higher audience costs of action given the absence of a national passion for war. In this latter scenario, leaders worry about the domestic political dangers of carrying on or expanding the war. As a result, a weak liberal discourse allows leaders who prefer ending a liberal war to do so, and it pushes those leaders who prefer to continue fighting to instead phase down or end military action. During the 1990s, moderators inside President Bill Clinton's administration repeatedly pointed to flagging public support for things like democracy building and humanitarian intervention (i.e., a weak liberal discourse). 47 This discourse constrained military options for Clinton, especially in the Balkans, throughout his administration. 48

I combine congruence and comparative case study methods to test the strategic-narrative argument in decisions for troop increases in Afghanistan by Obama (2009) and Trump (2017) against Biden's decision to withdraw (2021). 49 For space reasons and because Biden made the final decision, I devote less attention to Trump's 2020 pledge to withdraw. The cases are good for comparison, holding several background factors constant, such as war (Afghanistan) and period (post-9/11). The Obama-Biden cases are especially good for comparison because they share a common policy approach and party affiliation, but they lead to different outcomes. Outcome variation avoids sampling on the dependent variable.

Tautology is a pitfall for any ideational argument. To avoid this, I use a method of symbolic structuring of discourse to assess narrative strength and its component parts (i.e., severity and frequency) at time t-1, meaning independent of and prior to the decision-making process. 50 Narrative strength is measured in each case study using content analysis of newspaper editorials and the Congressional Record (see the online appendix), along with secondary sources and public opinion polls. Editorials reflect the collective national discussion across the country around specific events at specific points in time. Consequently, they are a well-established tool for measuring collective ideas, like narratives. Scholars find that patterns in the Congressional Record do the same—in a mutually constitutive way, authoritative actors both reflect and help reinforce prevailing narrative trends in any given period. 51

For the Afghan cases, I first scanned the historical record for geostrategic gains that were likely to reach the threshold of severity required to spark trauma and the initial narrative-making process. Most notably, examples include any attacks by an illiberal actor on the United States or other liberal states that caused civilian casualties or threatened to spread illiberalism. Second, and most importantly for the strategic-narrative argument in this article, I then scanned the historical record beyond the initial trauma for any similar follow-on severe attacks. If the strategic-narrative argument is correct, the above measures should demonstrate that a direct attack on the United States, or a series of indirect attacks on strategic partners (i.e., severity), open(s) space for promoters and generates a new liberal narrative centered on existential danger, blame, and a lesson to get active abroad against a specific foe. Likewise, these measures should also show that a follow-on attack (i.e., frequency) reinforces and sustains the narrative. Specifically, patterns of discourse in congressional and editorial commentary will typically show extensive references to existential danger and the need to get active, and they will link present severe events to those in the past, especially at the narrative founding. Secondary sources and polls will show the same pattern. 52

On the other hand, if severity and frequency are low in a given period—owing to the defeat of an ideological rival (i.e., positive event) or scarcity of direct/indirect attacks (i.e., absence of negative events) by a rival for at least two or three years—there should be less discussion in editorials and the Congressional Record about an ideological foe compared with periods marked by narrative robustness. Likewise, talk of existential danger, blame, and the lesson to protect liberal order abroad should be substantially less than in periods of a robust liberal narrative. Polls and scholarly or pundit assessments in secondary sources will validate this outcome.

Finally, using a singular type of congruence test, I explore narrative discourses and their impact (if any) on decisions to continue, expand, or end war. If the strategic-narrative argument is correct, assessments by pundits, memoirs, and the like should show how narrative-based discourses affected policy decisions in predicted ways. When the liberal discourse is robust, various actors (especially leaders) should talk about the domestic pressure to continue military action or the domestic costs of withdrawal. But when the discourse is weak, they should talk about domestic costs to maintain military action or political space to retrench from conflicts abroad. 53

The September 11 terrorist attacks dramatically reversed the weak liberal narrative environment of the early post–Cold War period. 54 “This week's frontal assault on America is a collective trauma unlike any other in any of our lifetimes,” observed the San Francisco Chronicle . 55 “A new narrative literally fell from the sky on September 11” and “became embedded in the popular imagination,” noted a pair of scholars. 56 Almost everyone became a promoter. As anticipated when external trauma arises from a direct attack, the story immediately saturated the public discourse—print media, television, members of Congress, and eventually in statements by President George W. Bush. The story included all standard parts of a national security narrative: detailing events existentially, assigning blame, and setting a way forward to repair (i.e., lesson). Members of Congress repeatedly framed events in existential terms, as an attack on “our laws, our cherished beliefs.” 57 “This is war,” declared House Majority Leader Dick Gephardt (D-MO), just after the attack. 58 Newspapers across the country echoed the same themes, as did polls in late September: 58 percent of Americans wanted “a long-term war”; 73 percent supported ground troops to “combat international terrorism.” 59

In the years that followed, the frequency of severe attacks remained high and reinforced the liberal narrative. Targets included, to name a few, Kuwait (2002), Bali (2002, 2005), Mombasa (2002), Riyadh (2003), Casablanca (2003), Istanbul (2003), Madrid (2004), London (2005), Algiers (2007), and countless bombings in Iraq and Afghanistan starting in 2004. 60 These events (especially against liberal or liberalizing allies in Europe and Iraq) sparked fervent national discussions in the United States.

Most specifically, the salience of promoter narratives about existential danger, parallels to 9/11, and the lesson to fight terrorism increased dramatically. Bush framed the 2005 London terrorist attack as an assault on “human liberty.” 61 Of Madrid, Secretary of State Colin Powell said that the bombing should “redouble everyone's efforts” to go after terrorists. 62 As anticipated by trauma theory, every congressional statement in the two weeks after the Madrid and London attacks described them in existential terms, which both reflected and revalidated the robust liberal narrative. “Americans were shocked and dismayed … when terror struck the capital of the United Kingdom, the cradle of Western liberty,” one said of London. 63 “The free nations of the world will … ensure that those who hate freedom and liberty will not succeed,” said another of Madrid. 64 Likewise, no one framed these as isolated, disconnected events, but instead linked them together as “reminders” and, with that, extensions of September 11 and the anti-terrorism narrative. Many talked of how Americans did and should look “through the prism” of September 11 to make sense of Bali, Madrid, London, Istanbul, and the like. “No American will ever forget the infamous day of 9/11,” a member of Congress said of Madrid. 65 Finally, promoters stressed that these events supported the lesson to press on in the fight against terrorism. It was like a drumbeat from political leaders: “stand firm against terrorism”; “renew our determination to eradicate terrorism”; “dismantle the al Qaeda network”; “remain defiant in the face of terrorism.” 66

Like the days after 9/11, promoter appeals resonated and echoed nationally, pointing to the continued strength and vitality of the anti-terrorism narrative into the late 2000s. This was evident in two ways. First, it showed up in newspapers across the country, from big cities to small towns. Content analysis of seventy-two editorials in the ten days after the Madrid bombings found that 54 percent of the papers described the attacks in existential terms related to democracy, liberty, freedom, or civilization; 64 percent drew parallels between the bombing and other recent terrorist attacks, especially 9/11; and 70 percent referenced the central lesson of the narrative to actively stamp out terrorism abroad. The same was the case with editorials following the London bombings: 63 percent were existential; 71 percent were connected to 9/11 or other terrorist attacks; and 73 percent referenced the lesson to remain or become more active abroad to fight terrorism. 67

Take a Wall Street Journal editorial, for instance, about Madrid. “So much for the illusion that the global war on terror isn't really a war,” noted the editors, “That complacent notion which has been infiltrating its way into the American public mind, blew up along with 10 bombs on trains carrying Spanish commuters yesterday.” The editors then listed eleven other attacks—including September 11—to draw attention to the existential danger that “terrorism remains the single largest threat to Western freedom and security.” 68 Headlines around the Madrid, London, and Bali bombings were similar: “This Week, ‘Madrid Became Manhattan’”; “Ground Zero, Madrid”; “Terror in London: A Reminder to the World that War of 9/11 Is Not Over.” 69 A total of 56 percent of Americans agreed that the London attacks showed that “it is necessary to fight the war against the terrorists in Iraq and everywhere else.” 70

A second indicator of narrative strength was the extent to which both Democrats and Republicans used the narrative as a political battering ram by the late 2000s. The Bush White House had long painted political opponents as weak on terrorism to win votes. 71 By 2006, with al-Qaeda gaining new ground in Iraq (where the United States was deeply invested in trying to build a liberal democratic government), Republicans doubled down on this message, saying that Democratic proposals for withdrawal from Iraq would aid terrorists. “If we were to follow the proposals of Democratic leaders,” said one Republican (GOP) House member in a 2007 debate on a resolution opposing the Iraq troop surge, “anarchy in Iraq would give al Qaeda and other extremists a haven to train and plot attacks.” 72 Thirty-nine other Republicans (73 percent of GOP speakers) echoed the same that day. Many senior Democrats also used the anti-terrorism narrative as a counterpunch. “Fighting terrorism, fighting extremism … is weakened by our being in Iraq,” said Representative Barney Frank (D-MA); “it has emboldened radicals everywhere.” 73 Others noted similarly how Bush “distracted us from the real war on terror” and “weakened our fight against al Qaeda.” 74

Afghanistan played a big part in these Democratic counterpunches around terrorism, especially after a 2007 National Intelligence Estimate showed that the Taliban/al-Qaeda had made significant gains there. Democratic calls to “refocus” the war on terrorism invariably meant moving attention to Afghanistan. 75 Senator and presidential candidate Barack Obama (D-IL) led the way. 76 “We must get off the wrong battlefield,” Obama charged in an August 2007 speech, before committing to send two additional divisions to Afghanistan. 77 The speech was intentional, meant to counter charges from Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY) in a July presidential primary debate that Obama was weak on foreign policy. Cognizant of how Bush successfully painted rival presidential candidate John Kerry as “weak” on terrorism in 2004, political strategist David Axelrod hatched the idea of the August speech. 78 “Outflanking Bush-Cheney with a serious, aggressive, intelligent campaign against Islamist terror?” said a pair of observers, “It's what the country wants. And it seems to be what Obama is offering.” 79

Overall, Obama's August 2007 move reflected the strength of the liberal narrative around terrorism in the late 2000s. It also fueled a narrative-based discourse that constrained Obama throughout his presidency.

obama's first troop surge

When President Obama took office in 2009, a request for additional troops for Afghanistan was on his desk. 80 Obama initially hesitated. “I have campaigned on providing Afghanistan more troops,” he said in a January 23 National Security Council (NSC) meeting, “but I haven't made the decision yet.” Supported by Vice President Joe Biden and other civilian moderators in the White House, Obama expressed doubts about escalation, blocked a move by military leaders to add troops without his approval, and commissioned former NSC staffer Bruce Riedel to conduct a review of Afghan policy, after which Obama would decide on troops. 81

Moderators failed, however. Animated by the cascade of narrative-validating terror attacks, a surging liberal discourse prevented Obama from maintaining this wait and see approach, pushing him to approve 17,000 more troops for Afghanistan in mid-February 2009, well before the completed review. Combined with the president's campaign pledges, public support for the troop request by promoters—like Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—ignited an expansive national discussion for more action. In editorials, 70 percent supported more troops, 85 percent discussed combating terrorism (i.e., the narrative's lesson), and 40 percent mentioned Obama's campaign pledges. 82 The Washington Post criticized Obama for waffling on his campaign promises: “The war on terrorism did not end on January 20 [Obama's Inauguration Day].” 83 Polls showed that 70 percent of respondents expected Afghanistan to fall under “the control of terrorists” if the United States left; 63 percent favored more troops. 84 Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications Ben Rhodes bemoaned the “political drama” and the fact that “the media started calling Afghanistan ‘Obama's War.’” 85 The White House saw costs of inaction rising.

Promoters inside the administration elevated these costs too. In the January 23 NSC meeting, General David Petraeus, commander of U.S. Central Command, said that failure was coming in Afghanistan and that al-Qaeda would gain ground: “we cannot achieve our objective without more troops.” Mullen echoed the same. 86 Obama knew the political risks. Just ten days prior, Senator Graham had warned Obama that Republicans would use failure in Afghanistan in the 2010 midterms. During a February 13 meeting, advisers gave Obama two options: wait on Riedel's report or add 17,000 troops. Promoters (including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton) harped on narrative themes: a “bloodbath” for al-Qaeda without more troops. 87 The domestic fallout of that happening was simply too high. “For practical and political purposes there really was no choice [italics added],” observed Bob Woodward. 88 Four days later, Obama publicly justified more troops as being vital to counterterrorism; 63 percent of the electorate approved. 89 Like Woodward, the New York Times concluded that Obama “had no choice” given what he said “during the campaign.” In short, Obama's opportunistic use of the anti-terrorism narrative during the 2008 presidential campaign fueled a robust liberal discourse and high audience costs of inaction that forced his hand in February 2009. 90

obama and the second troop surge

In June 2009, National Security Advisor James Logan Jones Jr. told General Stanley McChrystal, the head of military operations in Afghanistan, that the president wanted to “reduce U.S. involvement” and shift to an aid-based strategy. 91 Eight weeks later, McChrystal requested an additional 40,000 troops as part of a report assessing the situation in Afghanistan. When Secretary of Defense Robert Gates informed the president, “the room exploded” in opposition. 92 Moderators in the White House warned Obama that he had pledged to end the Middle East wars. 93 “I shared Joe's [Biden] skepticism,” Obama said as he pushed back against more troops. There “are no good options,” he noted in a September 12 NSC meeting. 94

In the end, moderators lost again. As in February, the president capitulated to the anti-terrorism narrative pressure. In early September 2009, promoters generated a robust liberal discourse for more troops, arguing that failure risked another September 11. Frustrated by Obama's hesitancy, military leaders—namely, Petraeus, Mullen, and McChrystal—played a critical role by going public to use the robust anti-terrorism narrative to their advantage (which augmented their position in policy debates, as the strategic-narrative argument expects). The move was calculated. In a late August meeting on handling White House resistance to more troops, Senator Graham (while on air force reserve duty in Afghanistan) told Petraeus and McChrystal that their messaging focused too much on the Taliban. “America is worried all about al Qaeda attacking,” he counseled, “Americans understand that the Taliban are bad guys, but what drives the American psyche more than anything else is, are we about to let the country that attacked us once attack us twice?” 95 In short, Graham counseled the generals to use the anti-terrorism narrative to their political advantage.

The generals complied, now focusing their message on al-Qaeda, new attacks, and the potential for “failure” without more troops. 96 Petraeus warned publicly that the Afghan government would collapse without a fully resourced counterinsurgency. 97 On September 15 (just three days after Obama's “no good options” comment), Mullen told Congress that success in Afghanistan required more troops. A few days later, the Washington Post reported on a leaked copy of the McChrystal report in a front-page article titled “McChrystal: More Forces or ‘Mission Failure.’” The sixty-six-page report mentioned “failure” or “defeat” fourteen times. 98 Finally, McChrystal said publicly that he rarely spoke directly with Obama and that another September 11 would come without additional resolve. 99 Obama looked weak and out of touch.

As expected, these moves fueled a powerful liberal discourse across the country for more troops in Afghanistan. From mid-September to mid-October, 71 percent of statements on Capitol Hill about Afghanistan mentioned comments by the generals, and 88 percent of supporters of more force warned of another September 11: “Afghanistan is where the attacks of 9/11 originated” and “the sacrifices we make overseas now will prevent another 9/11-style attack here at home.” 100 Promoters in Congress attacked Obama's hesitancy to uphold his March pledge to “disrupt, dismantle and defeat al Qaeda” following Riedel's review. 101 “Soft-peddling … in Afghanistan,” said one; Obama's “latest verbal wavering aided terrorists,” said another. 102

Editorials showed similar trends. In the two months prior to Obama's decision to send troops, 72 percent mentioned the generals, while nearly 80 percent commented on a liberal narrative of either avoiding another September 11 or fighting against terrorism in Afghanistan. “Afghanistan served as al-Qaeda's base,” noted one paper. 103 Fifty-eight percent endorsed more troops. 104 Many critiqued Obama for hesitating and accused him of “second thoughts,” “full retreat,” “Afghan rethink,” “blinking,” “appeasement,” and labeled him a “coward.” 105 Opinion polls reflected these narrative trends. In September and October 2009, 58 percent of editorials considered fighting in Afghanistan to be “necessary to protect Americans from having to fight terrorists on U.S. soil,” and 62 percent trusted the generals more than Obama. Obama's approval on Afghanistan fell to 36 percent, down from 63 percent in April. 106

For Obama, the liberal discourse elevated the costs of inaction, which drove his decision to increase troops. First, this discourse reinforced what he already knew: Politically, he could not afford to “lose” Afghanistan and risk another September 11. Promoters inside the government hammered this theme. “We were surprised once on 9/11,” Riedel told Obama, following his review (which endorsed more troops). “It's going to be pretty hard to explain what happened to the American people if we're surprised again,” he added. 107 Following a May briefing on al-Qaeda, Obama noted that even minor attacks would have “an extraordinarily traumatizing effect on the homeland.” 108

Costs of inaction were also evident in a September 12 NSC meeting, which was the first such meeting about McChrystal's report. The political implications of McChrystal's “failure” warning shaped the debate. Despite his hesitancy, Obama admitted that he could not “reject McChrystal's plan out of hand” because the “status quo was untenable” and that more time was needed to “root out al-Qaeda and its leadership.” 109 When Biden warned that Obama would politically own the war, the president snapped, “I already own it.” Thinking of his reelection timetable, Obama then asked if progress was possible within three years. 110 An aide noted that the broader narrative discourse—especially charges of waffling on terrorism—amplified political concerns like Riedel's warning that Obama alone would “take the blame for any bad outcomes.” 111 “Why is the whole thing framed around whether I have any balls?” Obama asked aides. 112 The robust liberal discourse was on his mind.

The discourse-generated costs of inaction also drastically narrowed Obama's options. Obama was keenly aware of the importance of the public discourse, saying that he wanted the decision to be made behind closed doors, away from “congressional politics and media grousing,” so that he could consider all options. He then became enraged at military leaders' public comments. Why? Because the warnings of failure and another September 11 reinforced the anti-terrorism narrative—what Obama referred to as the national “impulse after 9/11 to do whatever it took to stop terrorists”—in ways that “boxed him in.” 113 He talked about this repeatedly at the time and later admitted to feeling “jammed.” Obama told aides in early October, “They're about to ask for a game-changing number and they're going to the public and leaking it to trap us.” 114 Obama was stuck. Fearful of narrative-based pushback, he could not demote or fire the generals. In fact, just the opposite. Concerned about the political costs of doing otherwise, Obama included Petraeus in all NSC meetings on Afghanistan from late September onward. 115

Moderators knew that the liberal discourse reduced their traction. “It's going to be the lead story on the evening news … [and] double black headlines above the fold on every single newspaper,” said Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel about Mullen's September 15 congressional testimony. Emanuel also complained constantly to Gates about Obama feeling boxed in. Gates agreed, calling McChrystal's leaked report “a political bombshell” that narrowed Obama's options. 116 In the end, efforts by the White House to counter the liberal discourse failed. Rhodes confessed that amid the wave of “public pressure” generated by the military promoters, “it felt as though I had little ability to control anything other than the inevitable speech that Obama would give” on increasing U.S. troops in Afghanistan. 117

In October, Obama agreed to add troops. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director Leon Panetta set the course of a debate on October 9. A seasoned politician, Panetta noted the “political reality” created by the robust liberal narrative: “We can't leave, and we can't accept the status quo.” 118 He proposed increasing troops narrowly targeted at al-Qaeda, not nation-building. Gates agreed, saying that “the public and the politicians could easily understand” that mission, meaning that it fit well with the robust anti-terrorism narrative. 119 Obama capitulated. 120 His second decision to expand the U.S. war in Afghanistan was set. 121

The 2011 killing of al-Qaeda's leader, Osama bin Laden, was viewed across the United States as a major victory in the fight against terrorism (i.e., a positive event in the trauma framework). Combined with the quelling of terrorist activity in Iraq from the so-called Sunni Awakening (i.e., decreased negative events), the frequency and severity of trauma-generating events declined into the early 2010s. As expected by the strategic-narrative argument, the anti-terrorism narrative weakened, especially around Iraq. Counter to the interests of military leaders, President Obama found political space at home to summarily withdraw all forces from Iraq (a decision that 71 percent of Americans agreed with) and worked to re-narrate the terror challenge as nonexistential, something to which Americans had overreacted. 122

This initiative to change the narrative was largely ineffective, though, especially from mid-2014 onward when the swift rise of the Islamic State re-traumatized the United States. Mirroring the first decade of the 2000s, the liberal narrative again surged. The trauma began in June when ISIS forces seized Mosul (Iraq's second largest city) and Tikrit, declared a caliphate across Syria and Iraq, and later beheaded two U.S. journalists, James Foley and Steven Sotloff. Obama acknowledged the need to respond but also worked to calm the nation. 123

Consequently, other leading figures (mostly Republicans) began to refer back to the prevailing anti-terrorism story that proved the right fit for the event-driven context of external trauma. “The next 9/11 is in the making as I speak,” said Senator Graham in June. 124 More than half of congressional floor statements described ISIS in existential terms. 125 Many Democrats joined the chorus. “ISIS violates everything we believe in,” noted Representative James Moran (D-VA), “They are opposed to democratic governance and, certainly, to an inclusive society.” 126 Promoters in Congress nested the 2014 events within the larger story. More than half referenced September 11 and other attacks such as those in London and Madrid. The narrative's lesson was strong too; 76 percent of congressional speakers discussed the need to confront/destroy ISIS. “We need to do everything we can together to ensure that ISIS will be stopped,” said Senator Chris Coons (D-DE). 127 Blame was also evident. More than half of all congressional statements (and approximately 80 percent of GOP statements) criticized both the Iraq troop withdrawal as well as Obama calling ISIS the “jayvee [junior varsity] team” of terrorism and admitting that he had no strategy to counter ISIS. “President Obama is going back to a pre-9/11 mentality,” one member said. 128 Some implored Obama to not repeat the mistake of withdrawing forces from Iraq with a withdrawal from Afghanistan. 129

As expected, the story also showed up in other indicators. Editorials around the events from June to September reflected a robust anti-terrorism narrative. 130 For instance, 85 percent of editorials across approximately fifty newspapers rejected Obama's cautious language, framing the threat in existential terms (e.g., “Islamic extremism,” “nihilistic ideology”). The events “horrified the civilized world,” said one, calling ISIS “beyond anything that we've seen.” 131 More than 50 percent of editorials drew parallels to terrorist attacks since September 11. Another 84 percent echoed the lesson to get active, nearly half of which discussed or endorsed criticisms of Obama's policies. Polls also reflected this trend. Over 50 percent of respondents disapproved of Obama's handling of terrorism and considered the 2011 Iraq drawdown to be a mistake. 132

In the two years that followed the ISIS rise, the frequency of ISIS-inspired attacks—Sydney, Paris, Tripoli, Tunis, Yemen, Damascus, Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Turkey, Bangladesh, Brussels, Kabul, and Cairo—reinforced the anti-terrorism narrative. 133 Take, for example, the November 2015 Paris attacks that killed 130 people. “Everyone back home had lost their minds,” said Obama, who was abroad at the time. 134 Among the promoters in Congress, nearly 90 percent framed the Paris attacks in existential terms and advocated continued or expanded vigor to combat terrorism. Ninety editorials from sixty different U.S. newspapers found that 88 percent framed Paris in existential terms (“the urgency of defeating this nihilism,” “attack … on freedom”). 135 Fifty percent linked Paris to 9/11 or other similar events, and 83 percent called for continued vigilance (i.e., the narrative's lesson). 136

Finally, candidates for the White House in 2016 appealed to the narrative to woo voters. Trump promised more toughness: “Anyone who cannot condemn the … violence of Radical Islam lacks the moral clarity to serve as our president.” Trump blamed Obama for ISIS, pledging a quick victory if elected and a commitment to never give up “hard-fought sacrifices and gains” in places like Iraq with “a sudden withdrawal.” 137 He repeatedly linked his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, to Obama's policies. Clinton countered with her own narrative-based appeals, promising to use more force than Obama. 138 Overall, the jabbing back and forth testified again to narrative robustness. Much as the strategic narrative constrained Obama's options, it also affected Trump's policy on Afghanistan.

trump and the 2017 troop increase

As expected by the strategic-narrative argument, the mid-2010s surge in the anti-terrorism narrative shaped Obama's fall 2014 decision to recommit troops to Iraq and, fearing being blamed for “losing” Afghanistan, led him to abandon his plan for a full withdrawal from Afghanistan by the end of 2016. A poll found that 61 percent of respondents supported the move to pause the drawdown. 139 These same narrative-based constraints affected Trump early in his presidency.

From the start, Trump wanted out of Afghanistan. He called the war “a total disaster,” advocated withdrawal (on at least fifteen occasions during the campaign), and he exploded when the Pentagon requested more troops in 2017. 140 In the end, however, Trump did the exact opposite of what he wanted. On August 18, he agreed to send 4,000 more troops to Afghanistan. Why? The politics of strategic narratives help answer this question.

Throughout 2017, promoters built a robust liberal discourse around Afghanistan. Republicans in Congress, in particular, talked about the dangers of terrorism from Afghanistan and encouraged a tougher stance than Obama's. Many praised Trump for reversing “the unwise and unsound policies by the Obama administration” with early 2017 moves that included use of high-yield bombs against ISIS in Afghanistan and air strikes to punish Syria for using chemical weapons, the latter in contrast to Obama's response in Syria. 141 The liberal discourse also showed up in a Senate debate over ending the Authorization for Use of Military Force resolution passed by Congress in 2001. Critics of the measure relied on the terrorism theme: “Terrorist organizations continue to … promote a radical ideology to recruit new fighters and plot violent attacks as part of their jihad against the United States of America and all that we stand for,” said Senator John McCain (R-AZ). Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) echoed the same sentiment: “Sixteen years after the terrorist attacks of September 11, our enemies are not gone.” 142 The measure failed by a 61–36 margin. Overall, nearly 60 percent of congressional statements on Afghanistan in this period focused on the lesson to fight terrorism. 143

Other measures reveal the same strategic-narrative discourse. In summer 2017, 85 percent of newspapers supported more troops for anti-terrorism reasons. 144 More than half opposed a drawdown from Afghanistan or drew parallels to Obama's mistakes in Iraq. “He's right to broaden the U.S. role in Afghanistan,” noted a Chicago Tribune editorial, “Obama's troop withdrawal from Iraq in 2011 left that country in a state of chaos, and the Islamic State rose from the ashes of al-Qaida in Iraq.” 145 Polls in 2017 also captured the robust anti-terrorism discourse. While the war in Afghanistan was not generally popular, 76 percent of respondents agreed that “security here in the United States” depended upon Afghanistan, and 71 percent agreed that ISIS would strengthen if the United States were to withdraw. Consistent with the strategic-narrative argument, the public saw the war's value when it was tied to terrorism. 146

Internally, promoters pressed narrative themes, elevating costs of inaction. Though not public per se, this messaging from current and former military leaders mirrored that of the Obama period. As Afghanistan deteriorated in the spring, National Security Advisor Herbert Raymond “H.R.” McMaster and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Max Dunford repeatedly warned of another September 11. Promoters claimed that Obama's retreat was losing Afghanistan. They hammered themes such as the lost capacity to track al-Qaeda, a growing ISIS threat, and potential risks to the “civilized world” with another September 11. By early summer, McMaster proposed an additional 3,000–5,000 troops to carry out a new “counterterrorism-centric plan.” 147

As these events unfolded, promoters reminded Trump repeatedly of his narrative-based language on the campaign trail, intentionally playing on Trump's political concern to look tough. “We're losing big in Afghanistan,” Trump said, reflecting worries of looking weak, “It's a disaster.” Secretary of Defense James N. Mattis took advantage of this opportunity to challenge Trump's desire for withdrawal. “The quickest way out is to lose,” Mattis said, before pressing the need for increased troops. “I'm tired of hearing that,” Trump responded. 148

Not surprisingly, given his ties to the military, Senator Graham was aware of the debate inside the administration. He met with Trump in May and used the robust anti-terrorism narrative to reiterate costs of inaction. “Do you want on your resume that you allowed Afghanistan to go back into darkness and the second 9/11 came from the very place the first 9/11 did?” Graham said, “Listen to your generals. General Obama was terrible … General Trump is going to be no better.” 149 Graham knew that the pressure around terrorism and Obama could be effective. That spring, Trump took several steps to enhance his public image, such as striking al-Qaeda in Yemen, expanding action to “annihilate” (rather than just “contain,” in the words of Obama) ISIS, and launching “red line” strikes against Syrian chemical weapons that Obama refused to take. 150 “Obama, he's … weak,” Trump told Graham after the Syrian strike, “He would've never done that.” 151

The final decision to escalate came at a meeting with advisers on August 18, 2017, at Camp David. Costs of inaction for not falling in line with the anti-terrorism narrative played a determining role. Attorney General Jeff Sessions opened the meeting with an appeal for restraint. He proposed complete withdrawal. In a plan hatched by Sessions and former adviser Steve Bannon (a leading moderator), CIA Director Mike Pompeo detailed a strategy for increased covert operations in lieu of troops. In a move that frustrated his moderator cohorts, Pompeo ultimately and unexpectedly quashed the plan. Prior to the meeting, CIA officials told Pompeo that the covert-operations-only approach would likely fail and, more ominously, that he [Pompeo] would be held accountable. 152

Once Pompeo relented, promoters (e.g., McMaster, Dunford, and White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly) began to discuss how to prevent al-Qaeda from reaching the homeland. “I'm tired of hearing that,” Trump responded, “I want to get out.” Mattis argued that to leave would result in a “vacuum for al Qaeda to create a terrorist sanctuary leading to 9/11.” Mattis then highlighted audience costs of inaction: “What happened in Iraq under Obama with the emergence of ISIS will happen under you.” In the days prior to Camp David, Graham issued a similar warning. “It becomes Iraq on steroids … The next 9/11 will come from where the first was and you own it,” Graham said, “The question is are you going to go down the Obama road, which is to end the war and put us all at risk … ?” 153 The domestic costs of looking weak on terrorism were apparent to Bannon, who told reporter Bob Woodward that the generals briefed Trump repeatedly on the dangers of another 9/11, so that “if the threat materialized, they would leak to the Washington Post and New York Times that Trump had ignored the warnings.” 154 The political implications of that would be devastating for Trump, given elevated national concerns about terrorism and his campaign promises to be “tough.” The potential of a narrative-based public backlash hung over the entire debate.

Costs of inaction ultimately proved too much for Trump. “You're telling me I have to do this, and I guess that's fine,” Trump responded to Mattis on August 18, “but I still think you're wrong.” 155 Afterward, Trump called Graham to inform him of his decision—an indication of the domestic political dynamics that mattered most to Trump. 156 Three nights later, Trump leaned on narrative themes to explain the troop increase publicly. Admitting “his original instinct was to pull out,” Trump noted, his mind changed because “a hasty withdrawal would create a vacuum that terrorists … would fill, just as happened before September 11.” Trump then quickly pivoted to Obama: “And as we know, in 2011, America hastily and mistakenly withdrew from Iraq … We cannot repeat in Afghanistan the mistake our leaders made in Iraq.” 157 The speech resonated broadly: Fifty-one percent of Americans supported increased troops in Afghanistan, and 71 percent agreed that ISIS would gain if the United States withdrew. 158

An ideological rival's debilitating defeat and/or the absence of rival attacks on ideological kin for an extended period are the most likely events to cause a liberal narrative to weaken. In the late 2010s, both happened. As expected, the anti-terrorism narrative lost salience nationally, audience costs of inaction decreased, and political space opened for U.S. troop withdrawal from Afghanistan.

The centerpiece to narrative weakening in the late 2010s was the defeat of the ISIS caliphate in Iraq/Syria along with the continued weakening of al-Qaeda. By late 2018, the ISIS caliphate collapsed (i.e., positive event)—Raqqa and Rawa fell in 2017, ending ISIS territorial control in Iraq, and Hajin (the last ISIS-held town in Syria) fell in 2018. As of 2022, ISIS is a shell of its former self. Al-Qaeda is too, having suffered major setbacks after U.S.-led counterterrorism operations decimated its leadership. 159 The ISIS/al-Qaeda decline has also resulted in a major reduction in terrorist attacks. No ISIS-generated mass casualty events have occurred after 2016. Globally, terrorist attacks in 2019 were 59 percent lower than at their peak in 2014, and terrorism deaths fell in 2019 for the fifth consecutive year. 160

Neither terrorist organization is entirely gone, of course. Terrorist cells have migrated to other places, primarily in Yemen and parts of Africa. The focus of these groups is increasingly more regional than international, however, meaning that the United States and its Western democratic allies, in particular, have become much less of a target. 161 The theory would predict that a robust liberal narrative should have been sustained throughout the first decade of the twenty-first century, which the pattern in figure 1 shows was the case (see also the online appendix). In the 2000s, frequent/severe attacks capable of sustaining a robust liberal narrative were a function of how often (at least one attack every two or three years) instead of how many attacks occurred against liberal states. Moreover, an especially traumatic direct attack like September 11 extended the narrative-supporting effects in the years that followed. 162 Regarding the 2018–2021 period, the frequency of ISIS/al-Qaeda attacks against “free” states or the citizens of free states abroad substantially declined relative to the mid-2010s. While these attacks did not completely stop (i.e., Austria 2020, with four casualties), the trend toward reduced negative events, coupled with the even more impactful positive event of the ISIS defeat, marks a distinct shift below the threshold of severe/frequent events necessary to sustain a robust liberal narrative across time. In fact, the event-context of recent years resembles the early 2010s when Obama withdrew troops from Iraq and began withdrawal from Afghanistan. This period was marked by a major positive event—the killing of Osama bin Laden (2011)—and a reduction in negative events with the absence of any attacks on Western democracies from 2008 to 2014. 163

Isis and al-Qaeda Attacks on Free Countries, 2001–2021

SOURCE: Global Terrorism Index 2022: Measuring the Impact of Terrorism (Sydney: Institute for Economics and Peace, March 2022), Vision of Humanity, https://www.visionofhumanity.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/GTI-2022-web_110522-1.pdf ; and Cameron Glenn et al., “Timeline: The Rise.”

The decrease in severe/frequent events from the late 2010s onward affected the narrative landscape in predicted ways. As expected, it augmented moderator stories of restraint, which appeared in leading narrative indicators. From his bully pulpit as president, Trump was a leading moderator. The fall of Raqqa “represents a critical breakthrough in our worldwide campaign to defeat ISIS and its wicked ideology,” he said in 2018, “the end of the ISIS caliphate is in sight.” 164 He called for retrenchment and said it was “time to come home and rebuild.” 165 Trump repeated these themes through 2020. Democratic presidential candidates did too. In fact, during the 2020 campaign, no candidates aspired to look tough on terrorism, especially in ongoing Middle East wars. 166 Instead, both as a reflection of and a contributing factor to the weakened liberal narrative, candidates competed mostly over credit for reduced terrorist threats and the best strategy to bring troops home. “Trump's secret plan to defeat ISIS—you remember that—secret plan to defeat ISIS was just to keep doing what we [Obama-Biden administration] had put in place,” Biden claimed during an Iowa campaign stop. 167 Like others, he also repeatedly associated reduced threats and winding down U.S. wars in the Middle East. The need is to “end forever wars in Afghanistan and the Middle East, which have cost us untold blood and treasure,” Biden said. 168

At the time of these statements, many experts debated whether terrorism remained a major threat to the United States. Those who warned about the threat of terrorism carried little weight, though, which the strategic-narrative argument would expect. In times of reduced severity/frequency, promoters lose salience and moderators gain salience.

Not surprisingly, then, broad narrative measures indicate that moderator storytelling both fueled and reflected a general decrease in the anti-terrorism narrative starting in 2018. Core elements of the anti-terrorism narrative were almost completely absent among the discussions on Capitol Hill about the following major terrorism/Afghanistan events: the ISIS defeat (March 2019), the killing of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi (October 2019), the Afghan peace deal (February 2020), and Trump's October 2020 Afghanistan withdrawal pledge. 169 Collectively, in the weeks following these events, less than 5 percent of congressional statements mentioned existential dangers of terrorism, and only 15 percent connected current developments to those like September 11, at the heart of the anti-terrorism narrative. Only 35 percent openly advocated continued aggression abroad and/or continued troop deployments to protect against renewed terrorist strikes.

By contrast, moderator discourse abounded, as nearly 60 percent of congressional statements hailed the gains against terrorists. Many talked of the benefits to democracy and civilization, whereas others advocated full withdrawal from the Middle East. Finally, to the extent that the anti-terrorism story of old was being told at all, it was not being told that often. Collectively, there were only sixty-six congressional statements in the weeks and months following these events from 2019 to 2020 compared with eighty U.S. congressional statements (with strong storytelling on all narrative elements) in just five days after the 2015 ISIS attacks in Paris. 170

The effects of decreased severity/frequency on the anti-terrorism narrative showed up on editorial pages too. In each of the three years prior to Biden's April decision to withdraw from Afghanistan, references to “terrorism” on U.S. editorial pages declined by 21 percent (2018–2019), 40 percent (2019–2020), and 66 percent (2020–2021) relative to the annual average number of references over the nine-year period between April 2009 and April 2018, when the anti-terrorism narrative was especially robust. Editorial-page references to “Afghanistan” showed a similar pattern in 2020–2021, with a 60 percent decrease from the annual average between 2008 and 2018. Finally, combining these two terms, references in U.S. editorials to “Afghanistan and terrorism” decreased by 44 percent (2018–2019), 47 percent (2019–2020), and 86 percent (2020–2021) relative to the annual average across the 2008 to 2018 period. 171 This trend is significant: By April 2021, the nationwide discussion found on editorial pages about terrorism and Afghanistan had fallen to its lowest level since 2000, the year before the September 11 terrorist attacks.

More focused editorial surveys also confirm this narrative weakening. After the collapse of the ISIS caliphate and the death of al-Baghdadi, there were only sixteen editorials from ten U.S. newspapers in the month following each event. Compare that with the number of editorials in just ten days after the 2015 Paris (90) and 2008 London (100) terrorist attacks. 172 Moreover, the old anti-terrorism story of existential danger was replaced by the moderator theme of major victory or gains against terrorism (63 percent). The Chicago Tribune called the defeat of ISIS “a milestone in the long, arduous fight against post-9/11 extremism.” 173 Papers referred to al-Baghdadi's death as a “force disrupter,” “important victory for America's antiterror strategy,” and a “victory for civilization.” 174 While many (75 percent) supported continuing the fight against terrorism, a collection of editorials that spanned a greater time period showed that talk of the lesson of the anti-terrorism narrative was weak as well. In the sixteen months prior to Biden's troop-withdrawal announcement, only 32 percent of approximately 130 U.S. editorials about al-Qaeda or ISIS echoed the anti-terrorism narrative's lesson, to keep up fighting against terrorists. Furthermore, fewer than 1 percent in this broader array of editorials talked of terrorism as a present existential danger (i.e., a challenge to freedom, democracy, or civilization) and only 11 percent (all from the Wall Street Journal ) linked current events in a foreboding way to past events at the center of the anti-terrorism story. 175 Polls show the same trends. While Americans still worry about terrorism, a 2019 survey found that, relative to other challenges, only 1 percent considered terrorism or ISIS to be the greatest future threat to the United States. 176

Finally, these same patterns of liberal narrative weakness were evident around the question of Afghanistan specifically. Only ten editorials appeared in U.S. newspapers in the two months after the 2020 announcement of a peace deal and only fourteen in the three months after Trump's 2020 announced withdrawal. 177 With ISIS defeated and the frequency of attacks declining (see figure 1 ), the story came rarely to the fore. In 2009 and 2017, talk of a military drawdown in Afghanistan would have sparked a mighty narrative-based outburst: worries about another 9/11, dangers to Western democracy, and the like. But this did not occur in 2020. After Trump's 2020 announcement of withdrawal, no editorials framed events in existential terms, and only one of the twenty-four editorials connected the present development to past narrative-based events.

Instead, moderator themes dominated. While many noted the challenges to a peaceful settlement, eighteen of twenty-four editorials welcomed the Taliban peace deal, and more than a third unequivocally supported near-term or immediate withdrawal from Afghanistan. “The Trump administration was right to open negotiations with the Taliban and … reduce the number of U.S. forces,” noted the Los Angeles Times . 178 Another called the deal “a ticket out of Afghanistan for American troops who've been there far too long,” adding that “recognizing when a fight has become useless is the right thing to do.” 179 Many criticized Trump's approach, especially his push for a hasty 2020 withdrawal (nine of fourteen editorials opposed this approach, in fact). Reflecting the narrative moment, though, the reasons given included the need for a careful policy review first, potential damage to the peace process, or the need to leave the decision to Biden rather than to fight terrorism (i.e., the liberal narrative).

Polls also showed the narrative trends around Afghanistan policy. Figure 2 tracks the annual average of public opinion support for maintaining or increasing U.S. troops in Afghanistan from 2009 to 2021 (see the online appendix). Changes over time reflect what the strategic-narrative argument would expect. For the 2018–2021 period, as severity/frequency of events decreased because of ISIS/al-Qaeda's decline and reduced attacks on free countries, public support for troop presence in Afghanistan dropped substantially as well. Support fell below 50 percent in 2019—the year after the ISIS defeat and the second year of reduced attacks ( figure 1 )—then plunged to around 30 percent in 2020 and 2021. “Americans are in a sour mood,” the Wall Street Journal observed in 2020, “The desire to come home is understandable.” 180 In sum, at the same time that events weakened the anti-terrorism narrative, national support for the war in Afghanistan fell as well, in line with the strategic-narrative argument.

Public Opinion Support to Maintain or Increase Troops in Afghanistan

SOURCE: Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, iPoll Database (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University), https://ropercenter.cornell.edu/ipoll/ . See the online appendix for a list of specific polls.

Earlier trends in figure 2 also support the strategic-narrative argument. As discussed previously, amid a robust liberal narrative sustained by severe/frequent attacks, public support for troops in Afghanistan was close to 60 percent in 2009. Support remained around 50 percent through April 2011 (see 2011a in figure 2 ), before dropping sharply, as expected, following the May death of bin Laden (i.e., positive event) and reduced frequency of attacks into the early 2010s. After bin Laden's death, 55 percent said they were “not worried” that troop withdrawals from Afghanistan would make the United States “more vulnerable to terrorist attacks.” 181 Unsurprisingly for this narrative context, Obama announced a timetable in 2012 for a complete withdrawal of all troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2016. 182 As expected, opinion shifted again with the mid-2014 resurgence of the anti-terrorism narrative amid the severe/frequent attacks by ISIS. Change actually came mid-year, tracking closely (as expected) with the surge in the anti-terrorism narrative following ISIS gains in Iraq/Syria—support for troops in Afghanistan jumped from 29 percent in early 2014 to 53 percent by December. Poll numbers remained around 50 percent until 2019.

In general, the evidence presented here offers strong support for the strategic-narrative argument. Overall, by early 2021, the anti-terrorism narrative, with its worries of another September 11 stemming from Afghanistan, was largely gone, a casualty of de-traumatizing events. In its place was “public apathy,” according to commentators, meaning that regarding Afghanistan, “many Americans … lost track of what this war … is, or was, about.” 183

biden's 2021 withdrawal

President Biden's decision to withdraw troops from Afghanistan is not explained by a realpolitik calculation of the national interest. Biden's two immediate predecessors believed that the national interest dictated withdrawal. What allowed Biden to follow through in ways that Obama and Trump could not? The objective national interest argument cannot answer this puzzle. Narrative politics can, however.

When a liberal narrative weakens, the discourses that form around it tend to be weak as well. In turn, space opens up and pressure sometimes builds for greater military restraint and retrenchment—audience costs of inaction decline and costs of action rise. Such developments occurred in early 2021 around the U.S. policy in Afghanistan, helping explain Biden's decision for withdrawal.

After taking office, Biden did not face the liberal-narrative pressure that his two predecessors had experienced. There was little public discourse by promoters leading up to his decision on Afghanistan: only two statements (one prowar, one antiwar) in the Congressional Record , and just nine editorials (four from the Wall Street Journal ) on Afghan policy. 184 Talk of another September 11 or threats to democracy (i.e., narrative components) were nonexistent. Many pundits acknowledged popular sentiments to leave and, in bowing to that sentiment, endorsed doing so eventually. “Americans are understandably eager to move on,” conceded the traditionally hawkish Wall Street Journal , “The question is not whether the U.S. will leave Afghanistan but whether it will do so responsibly.” 185 In February 2021, 79 percent of Americans considered continued U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan mostly or very unfavorably. 186

In internal debates, military promoters continued to press for staying in Afghanistan. In late March meetings with the president, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair Mark Milley, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, and others issued a bleak post-withdrawal forecast, warning of Taliban and al-Qaeda resurgence and deriding “over-the-horizon” counterterrorism. 187 Unlike during the Obama and Trump years, military leaders did not plan to go public because they knew they had nothing to go public with. Senator Graham, the longtime promoter who worked closely with the military to orchestrate past narrative-based pressure campaigns, openly admitted in an interview that “I hate Joe Biden for this.” 188 He then added, “I think the Taliban is going to give safe haven to people that will come after us.” 189 Yet in sharp contrast to his advice to Petraeus and McChrystal in 2009, he conceded that the new political/narrative reality left him and other military promoters with no leverage. “The American people want us to come home,” Graham confessed, “People are tired.” 190

Milley admitted to the tipping effect that this narrative shift had on the civil-military balance. Biden would fire any military brass (“they're going to be gone”) 191 who went public, Milley said, which was a move that Obama was highly unlikely to have made (or threaten) in 2009, amid a different narrative context (and, thus, a different civil-military balance). 192 Milley further explained that because the military used tactics to expand what became a progressively unpopular war in Afghanistan early in the Obama administration, military leaders were subsequently excluded from major decisions (such as withdrawal from Iraq and troop reductions in Afghanistan). He wanted no repeat of that. “We don't box in a president,” he said. 193 Biden intentionally worked to avoid a repeat of this dynamic as well. He chose Austin as secretary of defense because, based on his service under Obama, Biden trusted Austin to keep promoters in the military from making public statements. Throughout the 2021 debate on Afghanistan, Austin prevented the Joint Chiefs of Staff from “going rogue,” according to one official. In the end, and in sharp contrast to 2009, no top military brass went public. 194 The weakened anti-terrorism narrative had left military promoters no other choice. In essence, a weak liberal discourse in public kept costs of inaction low, leaving Biden (and other civilian policy experts) more political space—something Obama preferred but never found—to choose a full withdrawal from Afghanistan.

The Afghan debate was extensive—four NSC and ten deputy-level meetings—with much attention centered on the terror threat from Afghanistan. 195 Biden and his closest advisers eventually concluded that the threat was “relatively small” or “manageable” (in fact, back to pre-9/11 levels) for the foreseeable future. 196 Regarding the strategic-narrative argument, Biden deemed it unlikely that severe or frequent attacks (i.e., those capable of re-traumatizing the nation and increasing politically damaging costs of inaction) would develop any time soon. According to officials, Biden talked often about the “lessons of Iraq” under Obama. Specifically, Biden concluded that the weak Afghan terror threat meant that offshore methods were sufficient to avoid a repeat of the domestic political damage that Obama faced with the rise of ISIS after the 2011 Iraq drawdown. For Biden, potential low severity and frequency moving forward meant a weak liberal discourse moving forward as well. With low future costs of inaction, Biden found, again, more space for withdrawal. In fact, as opinion crystalized around modest future threats from terrorism, Biden focused increasingly on his campaign promises, reminding his advisers that like his two predecessors, he pledged to end the war in Afghanistan. 197

As the strategic-narrative argument expects, Biden felt (again, in a way that his predecessors did not) that he would also face considerable audience costs of action if he chose not to fulfill his campaign pledge to leave Afghanistan. The Taliban curtailed all attacks on U.S. forces after the February 2020 peace deal, resulting in no U.S. casualties in Afghanistan in the year before Biden's inauguration. The administration concluded that staying in Afghanistan after May 1, with no plan to leave, would inevitably mean a resumption of fighting and increased casualties. A senior official noted that “if we break the May 1st deadline negotiated by the previous administration with no clear exit plan, we will be back at the war with the Taliban.” 198 If so, Biden would then need to go one step further and increase troops because 3,000 was, according to expert opinion, insufficient to fight the Taliban. 199 For a president who not only promised to end the war but also now faced (unlike his predecessors early in their terms) narrative-driven public opposition to the war, costs of action were simply too high. “New U.S. casualties after a one-year hiatus under Trump could be a political disaster,” noted an insider, “That was the last thing Biden wanted.” 200 It would mean “staying in Afghanistan forever,” said one Biden aide, alluding to the dangers of these costs. 201

Finally, it is worth noting that, in sharp contrast to the Obama/Trump cases, moderators (all civilians) played an outsized role under Biden. According to administration sources, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan—both longtime aides of Biden and critics of the war (especially Sullivan)—were “truly running the Pentagon,” with the “Pentagon [i.e., promoters] not making these decisions.” According to a lawmaker familiar with the process, “The civilian leaders essentially overruled the generals on this.” 202 Such an outcome is to be expected in a policymaking context marked by a weak liberal discourse.

In an April 14 public statement, Biden explained his decision in narrative-based terms that the nation understood. “Our reasons for remaining in Afghanistan are becoming increasingly unclear,” Biden said, “We went to Afghanistan because of a horrific attack that happened twenty years ago. That cannot explain why we should remain there in 2021.” 203 Editors at the Washington Post called Biden's decision to leave the “easy way out of Afghanistan.” 204 They were right. When a long-standing liberal narrative collapses as a lodestar for costly endeavors like war, politicians often choose the easy way. They leave. To do otherwise simply costs too much.

For nearly two decades, U.S. foreign policy was locked in the iron cage of a robust liberal narrative, centered around anti-terrorism. Born out of the trauma of September 11 and sustained by terrorist attacks in the years after, the narrative and politics around U.S. foreign policy kept audience costs of inaction high, which prevented withdrawal from Afghanistan and brought U.S. forces back to Iraq and into Syria. Presidents Obama and Trump calculated that withdrawal was rational or strategic, but the pressure of narrative politics foreclosed that option. From 2018 to 2021, the severity/frequency of terrorist attacks declined significantly, the anti-terrorism narrative weakened, audience costs of inaction declined, and costs of action rose. Only in these narrative-driven conditions did Trump (late in his presidency) and Biden find space to draw down from Afghanistan. In sum, the strategic-narrative argument offers a strong account for both the length and end of the war in Afghanistan, especially against other leading arguments in international relations.

For the United States (and its allies) moving forward, these findings point to two important strategic implications—one in the direction of continued vigilance abroad, the other in the direction of restraint. First, as the United States shifts attention away from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and focuses more on great power competition (i.e., China and Russia), U.S. policymakers cannot turn their backs on terrorism. 205 Doing so risks a resurgence of ISIS/al-Qaeda that will re-traumatize the U.S. public, reanimate the anti-terrorism narrative, and create the kind of costs-of-inaction politics that led to the decades-long, overly expansive U.S. military engagements in the Middle East. Continued vigilance against terrorism is vital, then, to keep the home front quiet and, with that, to avoid strategic overstretch (such as the wars in Afghanistan or Iraq) and to maintain focus on the more pressing matter today of great power politics.

Second, the findings here also point to new standards that the United States should apply to counterterrorism operations going forward. When it comes to narrative-animating terrorist strikes—the kinds that are most likely to push U.S. leaders toward expansive military action—U.S. citizens do not care about any and all forms of terrorism. In fact, they are quite discriminating. As a recent example, consider the ISIS-K (Islamic State-Khorasan Province) attack at the Kabul airport during the U.S. evacuation in August 2021. The attack caused a major uproar across the United States, contributing to the negative opinion that most U.S. citizens had of Biden's handling of the withdrawal from Afghanistan. But, as polls demonstrated, that Kabul attack (and other developments, like the Taliban victory in Afghanistan) did not generate a resurgence in the anti-terrorism narrative and with that a reversal of Biden's drawdown decision. 206 The reason? ISIS-K is almost exclusively a local threat, focused on Afghanistan primarily. It has no capacity (or will, for that matter) to strike the United States or its liberal democratic allies, especially those in the West. U.S. citizens understand this. U.S. policymakers need to do the same, and on this basis, show greater restraint in developing counterterrorism policy.

To this end, terrorists of global reach—meaning those with both the will and the means to strike liberal states beyond the territories that they currently occupy—can and should become the central focus of U.S. counterterrorism policy. These kinds of terrorists represent the real threats to U.S. security, both materially and in their narrative-generating potential. The global-reach standard is at the center of President Biden's post-Afghan over-the-horizon counterterrorism strategy. The same standard needs to be applied more broadly.

There is much work to do. Global-reach terrorist organizations are fewer and far less potent than they were in the early 2010s. The decimation of the central leadership of al-Qaeda and ISIS has resulted in a decentralization of both organizations, which includes turning away from global objectives and targets and focusing more on “parochial grievances and the promotion of … local interests,” according to one study. In sum, “The deck is heavily stacked against transnational jihadi groups.” 207

Unfortunately, U.S. policy has not fully adjusted to this reality. Above all else, too little distinction is made today in U.S. policy circles between local and global terrorists. Consequently, the United States finds itself involved in an expansive web of relatively low-level counterterrorism operations across Africa, the Middle East, and Asia that involve everything from special forces raids to joint military exercises and air/drone strikes. 208 Some of this activity—such as repeated strikes against al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula in the 2010s and perhaps even against ISIS in Syria in 2022—is justified by global-reach standards. Much of it is not, however. For all its brutality, Boko Haram in Nigeria, for instance, is a terror organization with local interests only. This does not mean, of course, that the United States should ignore Boko Haram and others like it—after all, local threats can sometimes become global. Surveillance, intelligence sharing, and sometimes counterterrorism training with local partners and governments are important. But the United States should pare back its direct use of force against local terrorist groups. In these instances, force contributes little to U.S. security and runs the risk of escalation in ways that (like in Afghanistan) drain valuable strategic resources. 209

The lessons learned from a deeper understanding of strategic narratives point to the need for a robust counterterrorism program today, that is, by the same token, far less expansive and militaristic than that of the past two decades. Striking this counterterrorism balance—that is, not too little, not too much—will help manage narrative politics at home and, in turn, allow the United States to not only maintain its own security but also contribute in positive ways to order and stability in a world marked by the exigencies of renewed great power competition.

The author appreciates comments from Mark Haas, John Owen, and the anonymous reviewers, as well as research support from Megan Kilduff. The online appendix for this article is available at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/82RNG7 .

Cited in Bob Woodward, Fear: Trump in the White House (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2018), pp. 121–122.

On restraint, see Barry R. Posen, Restraint: A New Foundation for U.S. Grand Strategy (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2014); and Stephen M. Walt, The Hell of Good Intentions: America's Foreign Policy Elite and the Decline of U.S. Primacy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018).

Walt, The Hell of Good Intentions , p. 18. Walt attributes the label “the Blob” for the U.S. foreign policy establishment to former Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes.

On collective ideas and narratives, see Ronald R. Krebs, Narrative and the Making of U.S. National Security (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Andrew Yeo, Activists, Alliances, and Anti-U.S. Base Protests (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Nina Tannenwald, The Nuclear Taboo: The United States and the Non-use of Nuclear Weapons since 1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); and Martha Finnemore, The Purpose of Intervention: Changing Beliefs about the Use of Force (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003).

C. William Walldorf Jr., To Shape Our World for Good: Master Narratives and Regime Change in U.S. Foreign Policy, 1900–2011 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2019), pp. 5–14.

The liberal narrative and grand strategies—like liberal internationalism—are distinct social phenomena. Leaders may consider narratives in building grand strategies, but those narratives are not, in and of themselves, grand strategies. See ibid., pp. 5–13.

The absence of this narrative does not imply an “illiberal” narrative space for the United States; rather, it means that the nation values less those policies that actively advance or protect liberal order abroad, meaning that the nation is more exemplarist than vindicationist, to use Jonathan Monten's description. Jonathan Monten, “The Roots of the Bush Doctrine: Power, Nationalism, and Democracy Promotion in U.S. Strategy,” International Security , Vol. 29, No. 4 (Spring 2005), pp. 112–156, https://doi.org/10.1162/isec.2005.29.4.112 .

Michael Tomz, “Domestic Audience Costs in International Relations: An Experimental Approach,” International Organization , Vol. 61, No. 4 (2007), p. 821, https://doi.org/10.1017/S002081_8307070282 .

James D. Fearon, “Domestic Political Audiences and the Escalation of International Disputes,” American Political Science Review , Vol. 88, No. 3 (1994), pp. 577–592, https://doi.org/10.2307/2944796 .

Jeffrey C. Alexander et al., Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).

Stephen M. Walt, “How Not to Leave Afghanistan,” Foreign Policy , February 23, 2021, https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/02/23/how-not-to-leave-afghanistan/ ; and Walt, The Hell of Good Intentions , pp. 255–292.

Charles A. Kupchan and Peter L. Trubowitz, “Dead Center: The Demise of Liberal Internationalism in the United States,” International Security , Vol. 32, No. 2 (Fall 2007), pp. 7–44, https://doi.org/10.1162/isec.2007.32.2.7 . Other counterarguments (e.g., economic strength, COVID-19, and the Iraq surge) also fare poorly.

Ronald R. Krebs, “Pity the President,” National Interest , No. 148 (March/April 2017), p. 37, https://www.jstor.org/stable/26557376 ; and Jeffrey Goldberg, “The Obama Doctrine: A New ‘Global War on Terror,’” Atlantic , April 2016, p. 75.

For an extended discussion, see Walldorf, To Shape Our World for Good , pp. 17–19, 226 n. 57.

Walt, The Hell of Good Intentions ; and Patrick Porter, “Why America's Grand Strategy Has Not Changed: Power, Habit, and the U.S. Foreign Policy Establishment,” International Security , Vol. 42, No.4 (Spring 2018), pp. 9–46, https://doi.org/10.1162/isec_a_00311 .

For a survey, see Peter D. Feaver, “The Right to Be Right: Civil-Military Relations and the Iraq Surge Decision,” International Security , Vol. 35, No. 4 (Spring 2011), pp. 90–97, https://doi.org/10.1162/ISEC_a_00033 .

For a more expanded discussion, see Walldorf, To Shape Our World for Good , pp. 19–24.

Krebs, Narrative and the Making of U.S. National Security , pp. 31–65, 269–274; and Stacie E. Goddard and Ronald R. Krebs, “Rhetoric, Legitimation, and Grand Strategy,” Security Studies , Vol. 24, No. 1 (2015), pp. 5–36, https://doi.org/10.1080/09636412.2014.1001198 .

Neil J. Smelser, “Psychological Trauma and Cultural Trauma,” in Alexander et al., Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity , p. 44.

Ibid., pp. 36, 44; and Jeffrey C. Alexander, “Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma,” in Alexander et al., Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity , pp. 1, 10. These kinds of challenges to national identity, values, and events—whether big (an invasion) or small (a bombing in a café)—can traumatize a nation.

Jennifer Mitzen, “Ontological Security in World Politics: State Identity and the Security Dilemma,” European Journal of International Relations , Vol. 12, No. 3 (2006), pp. 342, 345–346, https://doi.org/10.1177/1354066106067346 .

Alexander, “Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma,” p. 10. Agents may include authoritative figures such as politicians, priests, intellectuals, policy elites, or moral activists.

Ibid., p. 10; and Sidney Tarrow, Power in Movement: Social Movements, Collective Action, and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 118–123, 130.

Alexander, “Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma,” p. 11.

Ibid., p. 15; and Smelser, “Psychological Trauma and Cultural Trauma,” pp. 41–42, 45.

Arthur G. Neal, National Trauma and Collective Memory: Major Events in the American Century (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 1998), pp. 5, 23, 201; and Smelser, “Psychological Trauma and Cultural Trauma,” pp. 38–53.

Ron Eyerman, “Cultural Trauma: Slavery and the Formation of African American Identity,” in Alexander et al., Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity , p. 63.

On trauma theory and nation-states, see Emma Hutchison, “Trauma and the Politics of Emotion: Constituting Identity, Security, and Community after the Bali Bombing,” International Relations , Vol. 24, No. 1 (2010), p. 66, https://doi.org/10.1177/0047117809348712 .

Neal, National Trauma and Collective Memory , pp. 17, 22, 69–71; and Neil J. Smelser, “Epilogue: September 11, 2001, as Cultural Trauma,” in Alexander et al., Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity , p. 270.

Michael W. Doyle, “Liberalism and World Politics,” American Political Science Review , Vol. 80, No. 4 (December 1986), p. 1161, https://doi.org/10.2307/1960861 .

John M. Owen IV, The Clash of Ideas in World Politics: Transnational Networks, States, and Regime Change, 1510–2010 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010), pp. 31–52; and Mark L. Haas, The Ideological Origins of Great Power Politics, 1789–1989 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2005), pp. 4–40.

See, for example, Smelser, “Epilogue: September 11, 2001.”

Social psychologists and others call this “distant survivor syndrome.” See Robert Jay Lifton, “Americans as Survivors,” New England Journal of Medicine , Vol. 352, No. 22 (2005), p. 2263, https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMp058048 .

Threat involves geopolitics plus identity, similar to what is found in Haas, The Ideological Origins of Great Power Politics ; Owen, The Clash of Ideas ; and Stephen M. Walt, The Origins of Alliances (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1987), pp. 1–50.

Liberal narratives may focus on protection against counter-ideologies or promotion of liberal order, similar to Haas, The Ideological Origins of Great Power Politics .

Indirect attacks here gain immediate salience because of an already robust narrative, such as in Hutchison, “Trauma and the Politics of Emotion,” pp. 73–80.

Paul Pierson, “Increasing Returns, Path Dependence, and the Study of Politics,” American Political Science Review , Vol. 94, No. 2 (2000), pp. 251–267, https://doi.org/10.2307/2586011 .

Walldorf, To Shape Our World for Good , pp. 109–114.

Émile Durkheim, Suicide: A Study in Sociology (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1951), p. 246.

Presidents can be important promoters, too, in the right event-driven conditions. For example, see Walldorf, To Shape Our World for Good , pp. 83–87.

Fearon, “Domestic Political Audiences,” p. 583.

On the narrowness of the executive-commitment framework, see Jack Snyder and Erica D. Borghard, “The Cost of Empty Threats: A Penny, Not a Pound,” American Political Science Review , Vol. 105, No. 3 (2011), pp. 437–456, https://doi.org/10.1017/S000305541100027X .

On discourses, see Stephen Ellingson, “Understanding the Dialectic of Discourse and Collective Action: Public Debate and Rioting in Antebellum Cincinnati,” American Journal of Sociology , Vol. 101, No. 1 (1995), p. 107, https://doi.org/10.1086/230700 .

On ideas augmenting agents, see Stacie E. Goddard, “The Rhetoric of Appeasement: Hitler's Legitimation and British Foreign Policy, 1938–39,” Security Studies , Vo. 24, No. 1 (2015), pp. 95–130, https://doi.org/10.1080/09636412.2015.1001216 .

Jim Rasenberger, The Brilliant Disaster: JFK, Castro, and America's Doomed Invasion of Cuba's Bay of Pigs (New York: Scribner, 2011), p. 92. The narrative made Kennedy's campaign pledge salient—no narrative discourses, no audience costs.

For more on these choices, see Walldorf, To Shape Our World for Good , pp. 35–36.

Julian E. Zelizer, Arsenal of Democracy: The Politics of National Security—From World War II to the War on Terrorism (New York: Basic Books, 2012), pp. 386–390, 401–405, 422–425.

Sarah E. Kreps, “The 1994 Haiti Intervention: A Unilateral Operation in Multilateral Clothes,” Journal of Strategic Studies , Vol. 30, No. 3 (2007), pp. 449–474, https://doi.org/10.1080/01402390701343441 .

Derek Beach and Rasmus Brun Pedersen, Causal Case Study Methods: Foundations and Guidelines for Comparing, Matching, and Tracing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016), pp. 227–301.

Jeffrey K. Olick, The Politics of Regret: On Collective Memory and Historical Responsibility (New York: Routledge, 2007), p. 22.

For example, see Jeffrey W. Legro, “Whence American Internationalism,” International Organization , Vol. 54, No. 2 (2000), p. 256, https://doi.org/10.1162/002081800551172 ; Krebs, Narrative and the Making of U.S. National Security , pp. 195–197; and Walldorf, To Shape Our World for Good , pp. 48–52. Unless otherwise noted, editorial (upwards of sixty different newspapers nationwide) and Congressional Record surveys span ten days after major events. See the online appendix.

Because the point at which public opinion polls capture collective ideas such as narratives is uncertain, I follow the lead of other ideational scholars and use polls in tandem with established measures of collective ideas (e.g., editorials). See Olick, The Politics of Regret , p. 22; Legro, “Whence American Internationalism,” p. 280; Goddard, “The Rhetoric of Appeasement,” pp. 121, 125; and Krebs, Narrative and the Making of U.S. National Security , pp. 135–136.

Beach and Pedersen, Causal Case Study Methods , pp. 286–287.

Walldorf, To Shape Our World for Good , pp. 167–198.

“Time Out to Deal with Trauma,” San Francisco Chronicle , September 13, 2001.

Amy Zalman and Jonathan Clarke, “The Global War on Terror: A Narrative in Need of a Rewrite,” Ethics and International Affairs , Vol. 23, No. 2 (2009), p. 101, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1747-7093.2009.00201.x .

Congresswoman Lee (D-CA), speaking on H.J. Res 64, 107th Cong., 1st sess., 2001, Vol. 147, pt. 12, p. 16774.

Representative Gephardt (D-MO), speaking on H.J. Res. 64, 107th Cong., 1st sess., 2001, Vol. 147, pt. 12, p. 16763.

“Harris Interactive Survey #07: Terrorism,” Harris Interactive, September 27–28, 2001, iRoper Center, https://ropercenter.cornell.edu ; and “Wirthlin Worldwide Poll: September 2001,” Wirthlin Worldwide, September 21–26, 2001, iRoper Center, https://ropercenter.cornell.edu .

“Timeline—Major Attacks by al Qaeda,” Reuters, May 2, 2011, https://www.reuters.com/article/idINIndia-56711920110502 . Several bombs targeted commuters on the London transit system, killing more than 50 and injuring approximately 700. The Madrid bombings occurred on four commuter trains, killing nearly 200 and injuring approximately 1,800.

“Terrorists Win If We Give into Fear,” Cincinnati Enquirer , July 8, 2005.

“Editorial,” Journal and Courant [Indiana], March 16, 2004.

Congressman Hyde (R-IL), 109th Cong., 1st sess., Congressional Record , Vol. 151 (July 13, 2005), p. H5766.

Congressman Linder (R-GA), 97th Cong., 2nd sess., Congressional Record , Vol. 150 (March 11, 2004), p. E354.

Congresswoman Jackson Lee (D-TX), 97th Cong, 2nd sess., Congressional Record , Vol. 150 (March 16, 2004), p. H1906.

Congressman Gingrey (R-GA), Congressman Lantos (D-CA), and Congressman Royce (R-CA), 109th Cong., 1st sess., Congressional Record , Vol. 151 (July 13, 2005), pp. H5746 and H5766; and Senator McConnell (R-KY), 109th Cong., 1st sess., Congressional Record , Vol. 151 (July 11, 2005), p. S7946.

ProQuest search, “Madrid AND bomb∗,” March 11–21, 2004, N572, 37 newspapers; and ProQuest search, “London AND bomb∗,” July 7–17, 2005, N5100, 53 newspapers. See the online appendix.

“Spain's 3/11: A Horrifying Reminder that the War on Terror Is Not Over,” Wall Street Journal , March 12, 2004.

“This Week, ‘Madrid Became Manhattan,’” San Antonio Express , March 13, 2004; “Ground Zero, Madrid,” New York Times , March 12, 2004; and “Terror in London: A Reminder to the World that War of 9/11 Is Not Over,” San Francisco Chronicle , July 8, 2005.

“Fox News Poll: July 2005,” Fox News , July 13–15, iRoper Center, https://ropercenter.cornell.edu .

Peter Baker, Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House (New York: Anchor, 2013), pp. 428–430.

Congressman Westmoreland (R-GA), speaking on H. Con. Res. 63, 111th Cong., 1st sess., Congressional Record , Vol. 153 (February 16, 2007), p. H1797.

Congressman Frank (D-MA), H. Con. Res. 63, 111th Cong., 1st sess., Congressional Record , Vol. 153 (February 16, 2007), pp. H1797–1798.

Congressman Waxman (D-CA) and Congresswoman Clarke (D-NY), H. Con. Res. 63, 111th Cong., 1st sess., Congressional Record , Vol. 153 (February 16, 2007), pp. H1810, H1812.

Congressman Becerra (D-CA), H. Con. Res. 63, 111th Cong., 1st sess., Congressional Record , Vol. 153 (February 16, 2007), p. H1797.

Derek Chollet, The Long Game: How Obama Defied Washington and Redefined America's Role in the World (New York: Public Affairs, 2016), p. 68; and Barack Obama, A Promised Land (New York: Crown, 2020), pp. 48, 83–89. Terrorism connected with voters, Obama said.

Dan Balz, “Obama Says He Would Take Fight to Pakistan,” Washington Post , August 2, 2007.

Ben Rhodes, The World as It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House (New York: Random, 2018), pp. 8, 12–15.

Tim O'Brien and S. Writer, “The Blog House,” Star Tribune [Minneapolis], August 4, 2007.

Bob Woodward, Obama's Wars (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010), p. 70.

Ibid., pp. 79–89.

ProQuest search, “Afghanistan,” January 20–February 22, 2009, N520, 20 newspapers.

“The Afghan Challenge,” Washington Post , January 29, 2009.

Lymari Morales, “Americans See Afghanistan as Still Worth Fighting,” Gallup , February 19, 2009, https://news.gallup.com/poll/115270/Americans-Afghanistan-War-Worth-Fighting.aspx ; and “Barack Obama and Congress/Economy/War on Terrorism,” CNN , February 18–19, 2009, iRoper Center, https://ropercenter.cornell.edu .

Rhodes, The World as It Is , p. 62.

Woodward, Obama's Wars , p. 80.

Ibid., pp. 96–98; and Robert M. Gates, Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War (New York: Vintage, 2015), pp. 337–340.

Woodward, Obama's Wars , p. 96.

Karen DeYoung, “Obama Ok's Adding Troops in Afghanistan,” Boston Globe , February 18, 2009; and “Barack Obama and Congress/Economy/War on Terrorism,” CNN , February 18–19, 2009, iRoper Center, https://ropercenter.cornell.edu/ .

“Salvaging Afghanistan,” New York Times , February 20, 2009.

Woodward, Obama's Wars , pp. 134–135.

Gates, Duty: Memoirs , pp. 349–350.

This pledge was not linked to the robust liberal narrative; hence, there were no audience costs and little policy salience.

Obama, A Promised Land , pp. 432–433; and Woodward, Obama's Wars , pp. 167–169.

Woodward, Obama's Wars , pp. 155–156.

Ibid., p. 156.

Michael Gerson, “In Afghanistan, No Choices but to Try,” Washington Post , September 4, 2009.

Bob Woodward, “McChrystal: More Forces or ‘Mission Failure,’” Washington Post , September 21, 2009.

Woodward, Obama's Wars , pp. 158, 172, 180–181, 193.

Senator Lieberman (D-CT), 113th Cong., 1st sess., Congressional Record , Vol. 155 (September 6, 2009), p. S9471; and Congressman Stearns (R-FL), speaking on Cong. Res. 155, 113th Cong., 1st sess., Congressional Record , Vol. 155 (September 22, 2009), p. H9742.

“President Obama's Remarks on a New Strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan,” New York Times , March 27, 2009.

Congressman Johnson (D-TX), speaking on Cong. Res. 155, 113th Cong., 1st sess., Congressional Record , Vol. 155 (September 23, 2009), p. H9810; and Senator Bond, 113th Cong., 1st sess., Congressional Record , Vol. 155 (September 24, 2009), p. S9766.

“Let Mission Dictate,” Orlando Sentinel , October 8, 2009.

Only 19 percent opposed additional troops. ProQuest search, “Afghanistan,” August 1–October 15, 2009, N595, 55 newspapers.

“Wavering on Afghanistan?” Washington Post , September 22, 2009; “Obama and the General,” Wall Street Journal , October 7, 2009; “Not Just ‘More Troops,’” St. Louis Post-Dispatch , October 7, 2009; and “Our View: Peace Laureate Must Rethink War,” Santa Fe New Mexican , October 10, 2009.

“Fox News Opinion Dynamics,” Fox News , September 15–16, 2009, https://www.foxnews.com/projects/pdf/092109_poll1.pdf ; “NBC News/Wall Street Journal Poll,” NBC/Wall Street Journal , October 2–4, 2009, iRoper Center, https://ropercenter.cornell.edu ; “A Year Out, Widespread Anti-Incumbent Sentiment,” Pew Research Center, November 11, 2009, https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2009/11/11/a-year-out-widespread-anti-incumbent-sentiment/ ; “4/27: Majority Approves of Obama's Job Performance,” Marist Poll , April 27, 2009, http://maristpoll.marist.edu/427-majority-approves-of-obamas-job-performance/ ; and Woodward, Obama's Wars , p. 248.

Cited in Woodward, Obama's Wars , pp. 105–106.

Cited in ibid., p. 123.

Ibid., pp. 161–163; and Obama, A Promised Land , p. 433.

Cited in Woodward, Obama's Wars , pp. 161–168.

Rhodes, The World as It Is , pp. 66–67.

Ibid., p. 76.

Obama, A Promised Land , pp. 433, 436.

Woodward, Obama's Wars , p. 195. See also Gates, Duty: Memoirs , p. 378; and Goldberg, “The Obama Doctrine,” p. 75.

Woodward, Obama's Wars , p. 186.

Gates, Duty: Memoirs , pp. 368–369.

Rhodes, The World as It Is , pp. 73–75.

Woodward, Obama's Wars , p. 247; and Leon Panetta, Worthy Fights: A Memoir of Leadership in War and Peace (New York: Penguin, 2015), pp. 253–255.

Cited in Gates, Duty: Memoirs , p. 375.

Woodward, Obama's Wars , p. 224.

Ibid., pp. 224–420.

“Gingrich Is New Fave, Voters Approve of Iraq Withdrawal, President Beats All Comers,” PublicMind Poll , Fairleigh Dickinson University, December 7, 2011, http://publicmind.fdu.edu/2011/newfave/ ; and Krebs, “Pity the President,” p. 37.

Barack Obama, “Statement by the President on ISIL,” statement on the state floor in Washington, D.C., September 10, 2014, White House, Office of the Press Secretary, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2014/09/10/Statement-president-isil-1 ; and Goldberg, “The Obama Doctrine,” p. 75.

Senator Graham (R-SC), 115th Cong., 2nd sess., Congressional Record , Vol. 160 (June 12, 2014), p. S3630.

ProQuest search, “Islamic State,” “ISIS,” “ISIL,” June 11–22, 2014 (rise of ISIS) and September 1–October 1, 2014 (journalist beheadings), N5199.

Congressman Moran (D-VA), 115th Cong., 2nd sess., Congressional Record , Vol. 160 (September 10, 2014), p. H7550.

Senator Coons (D-DE), 115th Cong., 2nd sess., Congressional Record , Vol. 160 (September 10, 2014), p. S5534.

Senator Graham (R-SC), 115th Cong., 2nd sess., Congressional Record , Vol. 160 (June 17, 2014), p. S3692.

Ibid. Many argued that Obama's decision to completely withdraw troops from Iraq in 2011 opened the door for instability and the rise of ISIS, which put the United States and its allies at risk. They claimed that the lesson of Iraq, then, was to leave troops in Afghanistan.

ProQuest search, “Islamic State,” “ISIS,” “ISIL,” June 11–22, 2014, and August 20–September 12, 2014, N591, 37 newspapers.

“The Time for Action Is Now,” Daily Press [Newport News], August 21, 2014; and “A Necessary Response to ISIS,” New York Times , August 25, 2014.

“June Poll—Bowe Bergdahl/Benghazi Attack/Healthcare Services for Veterans,” June 25–27, 2014, Gallup , iRoper, https://ropercenter.cornell.edu/ .

Cameron Glenn et al., “Timeline: The Rise, Spread, and Fall of the Islamic State” (Washington, D.C.: Wilson Center, 2019), https://www.wilsoncenter.org/article/timeline-the-rise-spread-and-fall-the-islamic-state .

Cited in Goldberg, “The Obama Doctrine,” p. 82.

“The Price of Fear,” New York Times , November 21, 2015; and “Our View: West Needs Unity to Fight Terrorists,” Santa Fe New Mexican , November 18, 2015.

ProQuest search, “Paris” and “terror,” November 14–24, 2015; and ProQuest search, “Brussels” and “terror,” March 22–April 1, 2016, N549. After Brussels, thirty newspapers demonstrated the same pattern: 69 percent existential, 73 percent post-9/11 narrative events, and 65 percent lesson.

Donald Trump, “Full Text: Donald Trump's Speech on Fighting Terrorism,” Politico , August 16, 2016, https://www.politico.com/story/2016/08/donald-trump-terrorism-speech-227025 .

“Comparing Hillary Clinton's and Donald Trump's Different Approaches to ISIS,” PBS News Hour , August 16, 2016, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/comparing-hillary-clintons-donald-trumps-approaches-isis .

Rhodes, The World as It Is , pp. 296–313; Carter Malkasian, The American War in Afghanistan: A History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), pp. 395–396; and “Fox News Poll: March 2015,” Fox News , iRoper Center, https://ropercenter.cornell.edu/ .

Anonymous, A Warning (New York: Twelve, 2019), pp. 46–47; Senator Paul (R-KY), speaking on H.R. 2810, 117th Cong., 1st sess., Congressional Record , Vol. 163 (September 12, 2017), p. S5199; Peter Bergen, Trump and His Generals: The Cost of Chaos (New York: Penguin, 2019), pp. 128, 132, 147–148, 150; and Woodward, Fear: Trump and the White House , pp. 115–125, 221–222.

Senator Barrasso (R-WY), 117th Cong., 1st sess., Congressional Record , Vol. 163 (April 27, 2017), p. S2572.

Senator McCain (R-AZ), speaking on H.R. 2810, 117th Cong., 1st sess., Congressional Record , Vol. 163 (September 13, 2017), p. S5263; and Senator McConnell (R-KY), speaking on H.R. 2810, 117th Cong., 1st sess., Congressional Record , Vol. 163 (September 13, 2017), p. S5244.

ProQuest Congressional, “Afghanistan,” January 20 and September 15, 2017, N531.

ProQuest search, “Trump AND Afghanistan AND troop∗,” June 1–August 31, 2017, N541, 29 newspapers.

“Why Afghanistan Matters,” Chicago Tribune , August 22, 2017.

Dana Blanton, “Fox News Poll: 27 Percent Favor Senate GOP Health Care Plan, as Vote Gets Delayed,” Fox News , June 28, 2017, https://www.foxnews.com/politics/fox-news-poll-27-percent-favor-senate-gop-health-care-plan-as-vote-gets-delayed ; Dana Blanton, “Fox News Poll: Candid? Yes. Presidential? Not So Much. Voters Describe Trump,” Fox News , September 19, 2017, https://www.foxnews.com/politics/fox-news-poll-candid-yes-presidential-not-so-much-voters-describe-trump ; and Dana Blanton, “Fox News Poll: Tax Reform Important to Voters, but Most Doubt It Will Happen,” Fox News , September 25, 2017, https://www.foxnews.com/politics/fox-news-poll-tax-reform-important-to-voters-but-most-doubt-it-will-happen .

Bergen, Trump and His Generals , pp. 133–140; and Woodward, Fear: Trump and the White House , pp. 115–121.

Woodward, Fear: Trump and the White House , pp. 124–126.

Ibid., p. 122.

Bergen, Trump and His Generals , pp. 111–115, 118; and Woodward, Fear: Trump and the White House , pp. 51–73, 146–150. With each of these policy steps, Trump wanted to appear tougher than Obama.

Cited in Woodward, Fear: Trump and the White House , p. 151.

Ibid., pp. 256–258; and Bergen, Trump and His Generals , p. 157. Steve Bannon left the White House in mid-August.

All cited in Woodward, Fear: Trump and the White House , pp. 255–256.

Ibid., p. 254.

Cited in ibid., pp. 256–257.

Ibid., p. 259.

Donald Trump, “Full Transcript: Trump's Speech on Afghanistan,” speech at Fort Myer military base in Arlington, Virginia, New York Times , August 21, 2017.

John Merline, “Trump's Approval Rating Climbs after ‘Terrible’ August; Most Say Confederate Statues Should Stay: IBD/TIPP Poll,” Investor's Business Daily , September 5, 2017, https://www.investors.com/politics/trump-approval-rebounds-from-lows-after-charlottesville-harvey-confederate-statues-ibdtipp-poll/ .

Glenn et al., “Timeline: The Rise.”

Global Terrorism Index 2020: Measuring the Impact of Terrorism (Sydney: Institute for Economics and Peace, November 2020), Vision of Humanity, https://visionofhumanity.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/GTI-2020-web-1.pdf .

Al-Qaeda attacks in Iraq (not in figure 1 because Freedom House does not code Iraq as “free”) mattered, too, given the heavy U.S. investment in a liberalizing mission there. These attacks in Iraq totaled fifteen (2005), twenty-two (2007), and twenty-one (2008).

The three attacks in 2010 and 2011 occurred in Mali, a non-Western democracy, which coupled with the Osama bin Laden killing made them less impactful on the anti-terrorism narrative. Unlike Iraq, the United States was not actively engaged in a democracy-building mission in Mali, and thus those attacks garnered almost no U.S. news coverage.

Gordon Lubold and Jessica Donati, “Trump Orders Big Troops Reduction in Afghanistan,” Wall Street Journal , December 20, 2018.

Michael Crowley, “Trump's Campaign Talk of Troop Withdrawals Does Not Match Military Reality,” New York Times , October 11, 2020. Reflecting the weakened narrative, this public posturing about terrorism was intentional and meant to appeal to voters.

Stephen Gruber-Miller, “‘Trump Sold Them Out’: Joe Biden Hits the President over Syria Troop Withdrawal in Iowa Speech,” Des Moines Register , October 16, 2019.

Crowley, “Trump's Campaign.”

ProQuest search, “ISIS,” “Islamic State,” or “ISIL,” March 23–April 30, 2019; ProQuest search, “Al-Baghdadi,” or “Al Baghdadi,” October 27–November 30, 2019; ProQuest search, “Afghanistan,” February 28–April 30, 2020; and ProQuest search, “Afghanistan,” October 7, 2020–January 19, 2021. See the online appendix for search details.

ProQuest search, “ISIS,” “Islamic State,” or “ISIL,” March 23–May 15, 2019, and October 27–November 30, 2019; and ProQuest search, “Afghanistan,” February 28–May 31, 2020, and October 7, 20202–January 19, 2021. See the online appendix for search details.

ProQuest search, “Afghanistan,” annually from April 13, 2009, through April 13, 2021; ProQuest search, “terrorism,” annually from April 13, 2009, through April 13, 2021; and ProQuest search, “Afghanistan and terrorism,” annually from April 13, 2009, through April 13, 2021.

ProQuest search, “Islamic State,” “ISIS,” or “ISIL,” March 23–April 30, 2019; and ProQuest search, “Al Baghdadi,” October 27–November 27, 2019. See the online appendix for search details.

“Islamic State's Caliphate Is Dead. The Threat Endures,” Chicago Tribune , March 29, 2019.

“The U.S. Delivers Justice to al-Baghdadi,” Chicago Tribune , October 28, 2019; “The Lessons of Baghdadi,” Wall Street Journal , October 28, 2019; and “The Death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi,” USA Today , October 29, 2019.

ProQuest search, “Al-Qaeda,” “Islamic State,” “ISIS,” or “ISIL,” December 1–April 13, 2021, N5132, 25 newspapers.

Laura Silver, Kat Devlin, and Christine Huang, “U.S. Views of China Turn Sharply Negative Amid Trade Tensions,” Pew Research Center, August 13, 2019, https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2019/08/13/u-s-views-of-china-turn-sharply-negative-amid-trade-tensions/ . Twenty-four percent of respondents cited China or Russia.

ProQuest search, “Afghanistan,” February 28–April 30, 2020, N510, 8 newspapers and October 7, 2020–January 19, 2021, N514, 10 newspapers.

“Deal with the Taliban the Price to Pay,” Los Angeles Times , February 29, 2020.

“A War Without Winners Winds Down,” New York Times , March 2, 2020.

“The Afghan Withdrawal Deal,” Wall Street Journal , March 1, 2020.

Jeffrey M. Jones, “In U.S., Fears of Terrorism after Afghanistan Pullout Subside,” Gallup , June 29, 2011, https://news.gallup.com/poll/148331/Fear-Terrorism-Afghanistan-Pullout-Subside.aspx .

Malkasian, The American War , pp. 395–396. Again, as expected, Obama reversed this with the rise of ISIS.

Sarah Kreps and Douglas Kriner, “In or Out of Afghanistan Is Not a Political Choice,” Foreign Affairs , March 22, 2001, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/afghanistan/2021-03-22/or-out-afghanistan-not-political-choice ; and Charles Lane, “An Afghan Exit with Shades of Vietnam,” Washington Post , December 3, 2020.

ProQuest search, “Afghanistan,” January 20–April 13, 2021, N59, 6 newspapers.

“Leaving Afghanistan the Right Way,” Wall Street Journal , February 10, 2021.

Mohamed Younis, “China, Russia Images in U.S. Hit Historic Lows,” Gallup , March 1, 2021, https://news.gallup.com/poll/331082/china-russia-images-hit-historic-lows.aspx .

Bob Woodward and Robert Costa, Peril (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2021), pp. 377–379.

Cited in ibid., p. 389.

Ibid. Going back to at least the Obama administration, Lindsey Graham was always in close contact with military leaders, especially the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Woodward and Costa, Peril , p. 335.

Ibid., pp. 386–387.

Ibid., p. 387.

Lara Seligman et al., “How Biden's Team Overrode the Brass on Afghanistan,” Politico , April 15, 2021, https://www.politico.com/news/2021/04/14/pentagon-biden-team-overrode-afghanistan-481556 .

Karen DeYoung and Missy Ryan, “With Afghanistan, Biden Restores Foreign Policymaking Process that Trump Abandoned,” Washington Post , April 18, 2021; David Ignatius, “History Will Cast a Shadow over Biden's Decision to Withdraw from Afghanistan,” Washington Post , April 13, 2021; and Jennifer Rubin, “Afghanistan Requires More Humility—from Everyone,” Washington Post , April 14, 2021.

Rubin, “Afghanistan Requires More Humility”; Seligman et al., “How Biden's Team Overrode”; and Missy Ryan and Karen DeYoung, “Biden Will Withdraw All U.S. Forces from Afghanistan by September 11, 2001,” Washington Post , April 13, 2021.

Stephen Collinson and Maeve Reston, “Biden Starts to Execute on Policies Trump Abandoned by Crossing off Another Campaign Promise,” CNN , April 15, 2021, https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/15/politics/joe-biden-afghanistan-troop-withdrawal/index.html .

Ryan and DeYoung, “Biden Will Withdraw All.”

“The Way Forward in Afghanistan,” Wall Street Journal , March 15, 2021. The Afghan Study Group recommended an increase of troops.

Woodward and Costa, Peril , p. 384.

Ignatius, “History Will Cast a Shadow.”

All cited in Seligman et al., “How Biden's Team Overrode.”

Joe Biden, “Remarks by President Biden on the Way Forward in Afghanistan,” remarks from the Treaty Room, White House, April 14, 2021, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2021/04/14/remarks-by-president-biden-on-the-way-forward-in-afghanistan/ .

“Biden Takes the Easy Way Out of Afghanistan. The Likely Result Is Disaster,” Washington Post , April 13, 2021.

Eric Schmitt and Helene Cooper, “How the U.S. Plans to Fight from Afar after Troops Exit Afghanistan,” New York Times , September 28, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/15/us/politics/united-states-al-qaeda-afghanistan.html . Biden appears keen to the fact that vigilance against terrorism is important.

Ted Van Green and Carroll Doherty, “Majority of U.S. Public Favors Afghanistan Troop Withdrawal; Biden Criticized for His Handling of Situation,” Pew Research Center, August 31, 2021, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/08/31/majority-of-u-s-public-favors-afghanistan-troop-withdrawal-biden-criticized-for-his-handling-of-situation/ .

Barak Mendelsohn and Colin Clarke, “Al-Qaeda Is Being Hollowed to Its Core,” War on the Rocks , February 24, 2021, https://warontherocks.com/2021/02/al-qaeda-is-being-hollowed-to-its-core/ .

Stephanie Savell, United States Counterterrorism Operations, 2018–2020 (Providence, R.I.: Watson Institute, Brown University, 2021), https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/papers/2021/US%20Counterterrorism%20Operations%202018-2020%2C%20Costs%20of%20War.pdf .

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How to write a narrative essay | Example & tips

How to Write a Narrative Essay | Example & Tips

Published on July 24, 2020 by Jack Caulfield . Revised on July 23, 2023.

A narrative essay tells a story. In most cases, this is a story about a personal experience you had. This type of essay , along with the descriptive essay , allows you to get personal and creative, unlike most academic writing .

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What is a narrative essay for, choosing a topic, interactive example of a narrative essay, other interesting articles, frequently asked questions about narrative essays.

When assigned a narrative essay, you might find yourself wondering: Why does my teacher want to hear this story? Topics for narrative essays can range from the important to the trivial. Usually the point is not so much the story itself, but the way you tell it.

A narrative essay is a way of testing your ability to tell a story in a clear and interesting way. You’re expected to think about where your story begins and ends, and how to convey it with eye-catching language and a satisfying pace.

These skills are quite different from those needed for formal academic writing. For instance, in a narrative essay the use of the first person (“I”) is encouraged, as is the use of figurative language, dialogue, and suspense.

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Narrative essay assignments vary widely in the amount of direction you’re given about your topic. You may be assigned quite a specific topic or choice of topics to work with.

Write a story about your first day of school.
Write a story about your favorite holiday destination.

You may also be given prompts that leave you a much wider choice of topic.

Write about an experience where you learned something about yourself.
Write about an achievement you are proud of. What did you accomplish, and how?

In these cases, you might have to think harder to decide what story you want to tell. The best kind of story for a narrative essay is one you can use to talk about a particular theme or lesson, or that takes a surprising turn somewhere along the way.

For example, a trip where everything went according to plan makes for a less interesting story than one where something unexpected happened that you then had to respond to. Choose an experience that might surprise the reader or teach them something.

Narrative essays in college applications

When applying for college , you might be asked to write a narrative essay that expresses something about your personal qualities.

For example, this application prompt from Common App requires you to respond with a narrative essay.

In this context, choose a story that is not only interesting but also expresses the qualities the prompt is looking for—here, resilience and the ability to learn from failure—and frame the story in a way that emphasizes these qualities.

An example of a short narrative essay, responding to the prompt “Write about an experience where you learned something about yourself,” is shown below.

Hover over different parts of the text to see how the structure works.

Since elementary school, I have always favored subjects like science and math over the humanities. My instinct was always to think of these subjects as more solid and serious than classes like English. If there was no right answer, I thought, why bother? But recently I had an experience that taught me my academic interests are more flexible than I had thought: I took my first philosophy class.

Before I entered the classroom, I was skeptical. I waited outside with the other students and wondered what exactly philosophy would involve—I really had no idea. I imagined something pretty abstract: long, stilted conversations pondering the meaning of life. But what I got was something quite different.

A young man in jeans, Mr. Jones—“but you can call me Rob”—was far from the white-haired, buttoned-up old man I had half-expected. And rather than pulling us into pedantic arguments about obscure philosophical points, Rob engaged us on our level. To talk free will, we looked at our own choices. To talk ethics, we looked at dilemmas we had faced ourselves. By the end of class, I’d discovered that questions with no right answer can turn out to be the most interesting ones.

The experience has taught me to look at things a little more “philosophically”—and not just because it was a philosophy class! I learned that if I let go of my preconceptions, I can actually get a lot out of subjects I was previously dismissive of. The class taught me—in more ways than one—to look at things with an open mind.

If you want to know more about AI tools , college essays , or fallacies make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples or go directly to our tools!

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If you’re not given much guidance on what your narrative essay should be about, consider the context and scope of the assignment. What kind of story is relevant, interesting, and possible to tell within the word count?

The best kind of story for a narrative essay is one you can use to reflect on a particular theme or lesson, or that takes a surprising turn somewhere along the way.

Don’t worry too much if your topic seems unoriginal. The point of a narrative essay is how you tell the story and the point you make with it, not the subject of the story itself.

Narrative essays are usually assigned as writing exercises at high school or in university composition classes. They may also form part of a university application.

When you are prompted to tell a story about your own life or experiences, a narrative essay is usually the right response.

The key difference is that a narrative essay is designed to tell a complete story, while a descriptive essay is meant to convey an intense description of a particular place, object, or concept.

Narrative and descriptive essays both allow you to write more personally and creatively than other kinds of essays , and similar writing skills can apply to both.

Cite this Scribbr article

If you want to cite this source, you can copy and paste the citation or click the “Cite this Scribbr article” button to automatically add the citation to our free Citation Generator.

Caulfield, J. (2023, July 23). How to Write a Narrative Essay | Example & Tips. Scribbr. Retrieved April 9, 2024, from https://www.scribbr.com/academic-essay/narrative-essay/

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Home — Essay Samples — Literature — The Art of War — Mastering the Art of War: A Comprehensive Analysis

Mastering The Art of War: a Comprehensive Analysis

Categories: The Art of War

About this sample

Words: 953 |

Published: Mar 1, 2019

Words: 953 | Pages: 3 | 5 min read

Introduction, historical context and significance, key principles of the art of war, the enduring relevance of the art of war, works cited.

Chen, C. (2010). The Art of War: Military Strategy and Tactics in Ancient China. Journal of Military History, 74(1), 265-283.
Coetzee, J. M. (2003). The Art of War. London Review of Books, 25(20), 12-15.
Griffith, S. B. (2019). The Art of War: Sun Tzu's Timeless Strategic Wisdom. Military Review, 99(2), 92-100.
Lorge, P. A. (2006). War, Politics and Society in Early China. The Journal of Military History, 70(1), 157-159.
Sawyer, R. D. (2012). The Seven Military Classics of Ancient China. Basic Books.
Sondhaus, L. (2010). The Art of War in the Modern World. Oxford University Press.
Sun, T., & Giles, L. (2005). The Art of War. TarcherPerigee.
Sun, H. (2011). Sun Tzu: The Art of War for Managers; 50 Strategic Rules Updated for Today's Business. Adams Media.
Xie, Y. (2017). The Art of War in Ming China: Strategy, Warfare, and Conflict Resolution. Lexington Books.
Zhang, P., & Peng, W. (2018). The Art of War: Ancient Wisdom for Contemporary Business. HarperBusiness.

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Short Story - War

Short Story

My ears are throbbing from the sound of raindrops hitting the outside world. I hear them but don’t see them. I’m not exactly sure where I am. My head is groaning from this unbelievable pain. I cannot move I can only feel what is beneath my perspiring fingers. The bedding is course, layered with my dry blood and probably many others. The buzzing surrounds my insane state, voices are muffled and foreign. I have been attempting to move my broken body for so long, but it will not obey. The date and time mean nothing to me; they are irrelevant when all hope is gone. Bodies float and sway regularly around me. As the nurse arrives to complete her hourly routine; all I have is the comfort of her footsteps, the only familiar sound that I know of. But is this all my sub conscience deceiving me? My brain tricking me into believing that I could actually still survive this pain. Survive what though exactly? You see I don’t really remember it anymore – the accident that is, thoughts keep flashing into my mind but none of them piece together. Vivid images of my random memory keep coming back to haunt me. Sometimes I see a small child with no face; just a torn red coat, that reminds me of fairytales, which I could once believe in. When I attempt to remember my past she appears. She seems so happy, like an innocent child should be. But what use is this when I feel like I will never live again? What happened, how did I get to this stage? Was I taken prisoner, shot at in the street or maybe it was all the effect of my own stupidity? I can feel I’ve been foolish. My mind is getting closer to this horrific event...

* * * * *

This is a preview of the whole essay

Sitting in this dingy, uninviting place with the heat swarming past my nose, carrying the stench of old rotting bodies. I am not fazed by the distant sounds of gunshots, followed by the desperate screams of an innocent bystander, just another gruesome affect of the ugly war. Talk passes between me and Thao, a man that has recently become my only outlet for decent conversation. Although we have such different beliefs and views, we somehow manage to accept each other. Somehow our topic of conversation always returns to the war that currently rages between here and America. That is another thing that we will never agree on, his views always contradict mine. Today I must have had more guts than before, as I tried to share with him a belief I have carried for a while; “I feel sorry for America, my sympathy lies only with them as their country isn’t killing innocent people that have no business in the war. Whereas ours kills them without a second thought.” The shock on his face said it all, as his eyes stare into mine with a hideous frown, confusing me as to what I had said wrong. “Don’t you ever mention that again! You could be slaughtered for making such a comment. You’re lucky only I heard!” Awkward silence immediately fills the room, as our conversation seems to be cut short by his rude arrogance. That silence is soon overpowered by military men marching, stomping towards their next destination, probably being ordered from higher rankings. I wanted to leave but not into their company. My mind raced through ideas, so I decided to leave through the back route, not knowing entirely which way to go – I just had to get out from there. I needed to get clear from that place without being seen by the dreaded soldiers.

I’m walking along the backstreets, clinging to their inviting shadows, hiding me away from the reality of what a mess I am in. Voices enter my mind, making me more aware - more nervous. As I look up, hoping to see a blue clear sky, I realise I should be nervous. I’m being chased by helicopter. Their speed indicates their final objective – to kill me. As I turn to face an alleyway, this seems to be the perfect spot to lay low. My knees ache as I sub consciously fall to the ground, my intention being to sit. I reach into my pocket and pull out the crumpled photo that has become my most prized possession. My attention draws first towards my little girl Sophia, I will never forget her, she was always so full of life, chatty, and enthusiastic. In the photo she is smiling – the happiness on her face is glowing. She is wearing her unforgettable red coat as always. My peaceful thoughts are interrupted abruptly by scuffles of rubber soles on the floor behind me. I rise to my blistered feet and stagger away – the noises decrease in intensity as I get further into the bleak darkness.

I emerge from the formidable alleyways, hoping that I am far enough across the city. I hear nothing. Instead of a relief the silence makes me uneasy, there is never such peace on the streets of Vietnam. Around me windows are smashed and blown out, glass sections scatter the ground, making it harder to walk in my bare feet. I pace to the centre of the road, hoping to get a better view, checking for soldiers. All of a sudden, I hear guns loading and armed men surrounding me. I’m trapped. I jump from foot to foot, the possibility of them catching me increasing slowly. They close in on me, faces taught and ready to arrest. Turning in circles trying in vain to keep an eye on everyone of them. As they get closer one pushes me towards another, all of them pushing. I get grabbed from behind and wrestled into what I assume to be handcuffs, men coming at me from all angles. My eyes blur as the pressure of what might happen gets to me. I feel a cold item being pressed to just above my eye. I want to scream that it wasn’t my fault; I meant nothing by my comment. The world is rotating around me as I get more and more giddy. I collapse to the floor, words and images all making my head hurt more. I can feel my eyelids getting heavy, as they beg me to close and simply give in to the pain I am feeling, to let the solace of the darkness help me. Soldiers pull me one way and another, but the only thought entering my mind, as I let sleep consume me, is if this mistake Theo has made could in due course prevent me from ever seeing my beautiful girl in her battered red coat?

I wake with a jolt, my previous pain haunting me almost as bad as the current. I call out for anyone to assist me. Sweat takes over my body, soaking the sheets beneath me, my heart pounds, desperate for air that I have somehow been deprived of. So long seems to pass before doctor’s swarm at my sides, more than I need. I divulge all my questions at once, eager for them to be answered. But they don’t come out as I wish for them to sound because the doctors just stare in confusion at my rambling mouth. I beg and plead for them to understand as they produce a needle, persuading me that I need to calm down. I don’t care about being calm I just need to see her; I need to see my Sophia. Words must not matter anymore as against my will, I am forced into slumber.

As the man that would seem to many a violent brute slips into his peaceful dreams, doctors watching over him sighing, a small girl stands on tip-toes, peering over the chequered window into the man that previously was deemed in helpable. She struggles to see in, but she must, she’s missed him so much. Her red coat hangs off her shoulders, looking much too small, as she mumbles to herself and the adult laying in the hospital bed. “Papa, get better soon”

Document Details

Word Count 1372
Page Count 3
Subject English

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Guest Essay

José Andrés: Let People Eat

A woman wearing a head scarf sits on a cart next to a box of food marked “World Central Kitchen.”

By José Andrés

Mr. Andrés is the founder of World Central Kitchen.

In the worst conditions you can imagine — after hurricanes, earthquakes, bombs and gunfire — the best of humanity shows up. Not once or twice but always.

The seven people killed on a World Central Kitchen mission in Gaza on Monday were the best of humanity. They are not faceless or nameless. They are not generic aid workers or collateral damage in war.

Saifeddin Issam Ayad Abutaha, John Chapman, Jacob Flickinger, Zomi Frankcom, James Henderson, James Kirby and Damian Sobol risked everything for the most fundamentally human activity: to share our food with others.

These are people I served alongside in Ukraine, Turkey, Morocco, the Bahamas, Indonesia, Mexico, Gaza and Israel. They were far more than heroes.

Their work was based on the simple belief that food is a universal human right. It is not conditional on being good or bad, rich or poor, left or right. We do not ask what religion you belong to. We just ask how many meals you need.

From Day 1, we have fed Israelis as well as Palestinians. Across Israel, we have served more than 1.75 million hot meals. We have fed families displaced by Hezbollah rockets in the north. We have fed grieving families from the south. We delivered meals to the hospitals where hostages were reunited with their families. We have called consistently, repeatedly and passionately for the release of all the hostages.

All the while, we have communicated extensively with Israeli military and civilian officials. At the same time, we have worked closely with community leaders in Gaza, as well as Arab nations in the region. There is no way to bring a ship full of food to Gaza without doing so.

That’s how we served more than 43 million meals in Gaza, preparing hot food in 68 community kitchens where Palestinians are feeding Palestinians.

We know Israelis. Israelis, in their heart of hearts, know that food is not a weapon of war.

Israel is better than the way this war is being waged. It is better than blocking food and medicine to civilians. It is better than killing aid workers who had coordinated their movements with the Israel Defense Forces.

The Israeli government needs to open more land routes for food and medicine today. It needs to stop killing civilians and aid workers today. It needs to start the long journey to peace today.

In the worst conditions, after the worst terrorist attack in its history, it’s time for the best of Israel to show up. You cannot save the hostages by bombing every building in Gaza. You cannot win this war by starving an entire population.

We welcome the government’s promise of an investigation into how and why members of our World Central Kitchen family were killed. That investigation needs to start at the top, not just the bottom.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said of the Israeli killings of our team, “It happens in war.” It was a direct attack on clearly marked vehicles whose movements were known by the Israel Defense Forces.

It was also the direct result of a policy that squeezed humanitarian aid to desperate levels. Our team was en route from a delivery of almost 400 tons of aid by sea — our second shipment, funded by the United Arab Emirates, supported by Cyprus and with clearance from the Israel Defense Forces.

The team members put their lives at risk precisely because this food aid is so rare and desperately needed. According to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification global initiative, half the population of Gaza — 1.1. million people — faces the imminent risk of famine. The team would not have made the journey if there were enough food, traveling by truck across land, to feed the people of Gaza.

The peoples of the Mediterranean and Middle East, regardless of ethnicity and religion, share a culture that values food as a powerful statement of humanity and hospitality — of our shared hope for a better tomorrow.

There’s a reason, at this special time of year, Christians make Easter eggs, Muslims eat an egg at iftar dinners and an egg sits on the Seder plate. This symbol of life and hope reborn in spring extends across religions and cultures.

I have been a stranger at Seder dinners. I have heard the ancient Passover stories about being a stranger in the land of Egypt, the commandment to remember — with a feast before you — that the children of Israel were once slaves.

It is not a sign of weakness to feed strangers; it is a sign of strength. The people of Israel need to remember, at this darkest hour, what strength truly looks like.

José Andrés is a chef and the founder of World Central Kitchen.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

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Even now, economic sanctions on Russia do not seem to making a dent

Business analysis.

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Onus should be on reaching a peace deal rather than just focus on sanctions

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The Russia-Ukraine war bears a resemblance to the events depicted in Leo Tolstoy's ‘War and Peace’, which revolves around Napoleon Bonaparte's defeat in his war against Russia in the early 19th century.

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The current conflict is swiftly evolving into a full-fledged confrontation between Russia and NATO countries, heralding what could be a global catastrophe with unpredictable and devastating consequences. Recent developments in the war's progression - particularly the encirclement of Russia through economic sanctions and efforts to precipitate its economic collapse - are a continuation of the earlier focus on weakening its currency, the ruble.

After more than two years, the outcomes proved to be entirely counterproductive. Despite the sanctions, the Russian economy experienced robust growth last year, boasting one of the higher growth rates in Europe and the world, exceeding 3 per cent. Russian oil and gas revenues surged significantly, increasing by 90 per cent to $14.2 billion in March compared to a year ago.

This indicates the ineffectiveness of the mechanism set to determine the ceiling for Russian oil sales at $60 per barrel. Currently, Russian oil is being sold at higher rates than this ceiling in international markets.

India, China stick with Russia oil

Major importers such as China and India have not adhered to this European-imposed ceiling. Efforts to pressure countries into compliance have failed. Eric van Nostrand, US Assistant Secretary for Economic Policy at the Department of Treasury, remarked in New Delhi that "Washington did not request India to reduce its oil purchases from Russia.” This emphasizes that India would not comply even if asked. India, alongside China, remains one of the largest buyers of Russian oil.

The EU countries’ demand for refined Russian oil products is on the rise. For instance, Germany's gasoline consumption increased for the third consecutive year, reaching 17.3 million tonnes in 2023, which is 416,000 tonnes higher than in 2022, as reported by the German Economic Office.

Germany and other EU nations are importing refined Russian products via Asian countries, benefiting from exemptions from sanctions. Additionally, Russian LNG shipments to Europe have seen an increase, as reported by Bloomberg, despite a decline in shipments via pipelines through Ukraine and the Baltic Sea.

These developments and others signify a significant shift in the nature of the Russian-Western conflict, carrying profound strategic, political, military, and economic implications. We briefly touch upon the economic aspect, where these transformations pose a threat to the status of the US dollar as a global reserve currency.

Diminishing the dollar

Last year, the volume of trade between China and Russia reached record levels, surpassing $200 billion, and it is anticipated to be $300 billion by 2030.

Prior to the war, most of these transactions were conducted in dollars. Since then, approximately 90 per cent of these transactions have transitioned to utilising Chinese and Russian currencies, following the abandonment of the dollar. This trend has also extended to the transactions of numerous countries, including India, South Africa, Egypt, Brazil, and GCC countries, in their trade with Russia.

Not seeing the writing on the wall

The other side of this transformation reveals the emergence of a new global economic alliance, positioning itself as a formidable competitor to the longstanding dominance of the West, which has dictated regulations, laws, and trade dynamics for over a century.

Traditionally, the Western economic alliance held sway over global economic conditions, shaping regulations and trade exchanges. Since the onset of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, its influence has markedly waned. This shift is steadily advancing towards global multipolarity, not solely in economic terms but also across political and military domains. This economic pluralism marks a novel phenomenon in international relations.

As NATO countries feel this strongly, the past few months have witnessed a perilous escalation aimed at ramping up pressure on Russia to secure some gains. However, what sanctions and economic boycotts have failed to achieve, we doubt can be attained through military means, particularly with a nation boasting significant strategic nuclear capabilities and vast natural resources.

This underscores that the path to peace remains the sole viable option to avert a catastrophe globally, as rightly referred to by Pope Francis.

The writer is a specialist in energy and Gulf economic affairs.

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The war narrative is meant to fit the relevant features and pressing issues of the situation; to answer the urgency and speak to the significance and magnitude of the events. ... The historical text as literary artifact. In The writing of history, ed. R.H. Canary and H. Kozicki, 41-62. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Google Scholar ...
"The Art of War" by Sun Tzu
Sun Tzu wrote a total of thirteen essays in his book. The first essay is on estimates (Tzu, p. 44). It describes war as a vital tool in a state and outlines the five constants that are critical in a person's thoughtfulness. The second essay is on waging war. The theme emphasizes on speed and cost. Sun also talks of the offensive strategy.
Fiction as Reconstruction of History: Narratives of the Civil War in
The Boy's War: Confederate and Union Soldiers Talk about the Civil War. New York: Clarion Books, 1990. McPherson, James M. For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977. Perman, Michael, ed. Major Problems in the Civil War and Reconstruction: Documents and Essays. 2 nd edition. Boston ...
Narratives and War: Explaining the Length and End of U.S. Military
The dominant variant of the liberal narrative during the Cold War—the anti-communist narrative—offers a good example of the theory. In the 1940s, the U.S. public was traumatized by a cascade of Soviet ideological gains: communist advances in East-Central Europe, atomic bomb tests, an alliance with newly communist China, and support of the ...
Full article: The Power of Narratives in Conflict and Peace: The Case
A number of approaches within the field have focused on deconstructing conflict promoting narratives and fostering more inclusive narratives that might serve to foster peace and reconciliation between groups (Kelman 1990, Burton 1987, Saunders 1999, 2003, Fisher 2001 ). However, while we certainly recognise the importance of such approaches ...
Narrative Essay On Vietnam War
The Vietnam War Essay. In the 1950's, the United States had begun to send troops to Vietnam and during the following 25-year period, the ensuing war would create some of the strongest tensions in US history. Almost 3 million US men and women were sent thousands of miles to fight for what was a questionable cause.
War Narratives
War Narratives is a tightly packed and provocative book containing a series of connected essays on the many competing narratives—both fiction and nonfiction—that are used to explain recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, how those narratives are perceived through preexisting social, political, and literary lenses, and how they often fall ...
How to Write a Narrative Essay
Interactive example of a narrative essay. An example of a short narrative essay, responding to the prompt "Write about an experience where you learned something about yourself," is shown below. Hover over different parts of the text to see how the structure works. Narrative essay example.
PDF Postmodernism Narrative and the Cold War Sense of an Ending
Derrida is writing in 1984, and the devastation from a full-blown thermonuclear exchange by this time is more fully and widely understood than ever. Thus we have w/th nuclear war "the possibility of an irreversible destruc ... Postmodernism, Narrative, and the Cold War 327 Cold War (Weart 235). But of course as Michael McCanles has pointed out ...
Cold War and New Cold War Narratives
reservation—at the start of a New Cold War, essentially the same script and same narrative, but some of the roles are played by different actors, wearing different costumes. British historian Niall Ferguson, for instance, describes a "Cold War II," where "the roles [between China and the original Soviet Union] have been reversed.
Mastering The Art of War: a Comprehensive Analysis
Conclusion. In conclusion, The Art of War, with its historical significance, key principles, and enduring relevance, stands as a masterpiece of strategy and leadership. Rooted in the chaos of ancient Chinese warfare, it offers timeless insights into the art of strategy and the pursuit of success. As we navigate the complexities of the modern ...
Impact Of Wars On Human Life: Free Essay Example, 501 words
Topic: Effect of War. Pages: 1 (501 words) Views: 374. Grade: 5. Download. Wars have a devastating impact on human life, causing immense suffering, loss, and long-lasting consequences for individuals and communities. This essay will explore the profound effects of wars on human life, examining the physical, emotional, and social tolls of armed ...
Short Story
Short Story - War. Short Story. My ears are throbbing from the sound of raindrops hitting the outside world. I hear them but don't see them. I'm not exactly sure where I am. My head is groaning from this unbelievable pain. I cannot move I can only feel what is beneath my perspiring fingers. The bedding is course, layered with my dry blood ...
Opinion
Guest Essay. José Andrés: Let People Eat. April 3, 2024. ... They are not generic aid workers or collateral damage in war. Saifeddin Issam Ayad Abutaha, John Chapman, Jacob Flickinger, Zomi ...
World War 1 Narrative Essay
World War 1 Narrative Essay. My name is Katherine and I am going to write to you about what my family went through during World War 1. The war began on July 28, 1914 and lasted until November 11, 1918. My family was very scared. My dad served as a soldier and unfortunately lost his life while trying to save our country.
Essay
Definitions John Locke's 1690 An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. The word essay derives from the French infinitive essayer, "to try" or "to attempt".In English essay first meant "a trial" or "an attempt", and this is still an alternative meaning. The Frenchman Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) was the first author to describe his work as essays; he used the term to characterize these as ...
Even now, economic sanctions on Russia do not seem to making a dent
Onus should be on reaching a peace deal rather than just focus on sanctions The Russia-Ukraine war bears a resemblance to the events depicted in Leo Tolstoy's 'War and Peace', which revolves ...

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Essays About War: Top 5 Examples and 5 Prompts

1. War Is Not Part of Human Nature by R. Brian Ferguson

5. ​​Is war a pre-requisite for peace? by Anna Cleary

4. The Psychosocial Impacts of War and Armed Conflict on Children by Iman Farajallah, Omar Reda, H. Steven Moffic, John R. Peteet, and Ahmed Hankir

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Writing a Compelling War Essay: Crafting a Powerful Narrative of the Russia Ukraine War 2022

Understanding the conflict between Russia and Ukraine

Historical context of the Russia Ukraine War and its implications

Crafting a powerful narrative: Elements of a compelling War Essay

Analyzing and evaluating the sources used in the essay

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Structuring the essay: outlining and introduction, body, and conclusion

Strategies for researching and presenting the evidence for the essay

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How to Write War Essay: Russia Ukraine War

Understanding the Purpose and Scope of a War Essay

How to Write War Essay with a War Essay Outline

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“The Art of War” by Sun Tzu Essay

05 Fiction as Reconstruction of History: Narratives of the Civil War in American Literature

The War That Never Goes Away: The Significance of the Civil War for the Cultural Imagination in the United States

The Unwritten War? The American Civil War as a Theme in American Literature

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5. Is war a pre-requisite for peace? by Anna Cleary