Chapter 12 examines how the terrorist threat after September 11 redirected constitutional war powers toward foreign enemies as well as domestic governance. It argues that the early 2000s produced not a single wartime settlement but a sequence of competing claims, authorizations, and constraints shaped by evolving assessments of danger. The chapter traces how the Bush Administration advanced expansive claims of presidential authority to use force preemptively against terrorist groups and hostile states. Yet those claims were never squarely tested, because Congress enacted sweeping authorizations in 2001 and 2002 that delegated extraordinary discretion over targets, geography, and duration. Once war was authorized, the most consequential constitutional disputes concerned how it could be waged. Detention, interrogation, surveillance, military commissions, and targeted killing became focal points for interbranch conflict and judicial intervention. Congress and the courts rejected assertions that wartime authority was immune from legal limits, even as they accepted a long-term war framework. The result was a system of war powers marked by broad delegation and continuing uncertainty about how extraordinary authorities can be narrowed or brought to an end.

Chapter 11 examines how constitutional war powers functioned in the late Cold War and early post–Cold War period. It argues that disputes in the 1980s and 1990s unfolded without domestic mobilization pressures and instead reflected competing views about how the United States should wield force as a Cold War superpower and later as the sole superpower. Under President Reagan, the Executive advanced expansive interpretations of presidential authority in Lebanon and the Persian Gulf to support its rollback strategy, while Congress used process, including War Powers Resolution reporting and funding leverage, to shape and sometimes constrain operations. In Nicaragua, Congress went further by blocking covert action through the Boland Amendments, prompting administration allies to press a significant theory of inherent presidential power to wage covert warfare. After the Cold War, presidents carried these practices into a unipolar era. In the 1991 Gulf War and humanitarian interventions of the 1990s, presidents alternated between asserting broad authority and acknowledging limits, while UN mandates carried diplomatic but little constitutional weight. Taken together, the chapter depicts war powers evolving through sustained interbranch bargaining rather than decisive constitutional settlement.

This chapter examines the lead-up to the 2003 United States invasion of Iraq as a prime illustration of two distinct motives for insincere coercion: mobilizing the support of a key ally and making an example of a target. Following the September 11 attacks, the Bush administration shifted from a strategy of containment to one of preventive war and regime change. Although the United States had already formalized a foreign policy objective of regime change in Iraq, President George W. Bush pursued coercive diplomacy through the United Nations to secure Security Council Resolution 1441. The chapter argues that this diplomatic effort was not a genuine attempt to disarm Iraq peacefully but an instrumental maneuver to help British Prime Minister Tony Blair overcome domestic opposition and secure the United Kingdom’s diplomatic and military support. Furthermore, the chapter details how the US administration utilized the destruction of the Iraqi regime to make an example, aiming to deter other rogue nations, including Libya and North Korea, from pursuing weapons of mass destruction. Ultimately, the Iraqi case demonstrates how intentional coercion failure may be used as an instrumental step towards brute force war.

This chapter explores post-conflict diplomacy in the Iraq War by introducing the idea of “inter-conflict diplomacy,” or how the United States interacted and negotiated with different Iraqi power brokers while building an Iraqi state from the ground up and participating in ongoing military conflict. In contrast to claims that the United States “imposed” democracy there, it argues that US concerns over Iraqi sovereignty, as well as Iraqis’ assertions of their national sovereignty, limited the United States’ ability to reshape Iraqi politics and society. It provides case studies on the making of the Iraqi Constitution from 2003 to 2005 and the negotiations over the continued US role in Iraq after 2008 to illustrate this argument. Finally, it examines how the concept of “intra-conflict diplomacy” might usefully illuminate other US interventions where the boundaries of war, peace, sovereignty, and legitimate authority are disputed and fluid.

The Taliban insurgency happened because they enjoyed a permissive environment: safe haven in Pakistan, state failure in Afghanistan, and an America increasingly focused on Iraq. In turn, most of those had common roots in the Bush administration’s decisions in 2001: to define the conflict as a “War on Terror” best waged with a light footprint and to conflate the Taliban and al-Qaida. Some of those decisions made sense in 2001, but none of them bore scrutiny as the situation in Afghanistan changed, and the Bush administration failed to adapt quickly enough.

Having accomplished its immediate objectives, the spring of 2002 was an ideal moment for the administration to pause and reassess its strategy, goals, and purpose in Afghanistan. Rather than grapple with the newfound complexity, a sense of inertia, drift, and inattention took over. There was, of course, a sense of urgency and a serious debate starting in the spring of 2002, but it was not about Afghanistan. As the year wore on, the administration became almost wholly consumed with preparations for the war in Iraq. Counterintuitively, the drift and inattention could occasionally work to Afghanistan’s benefit. The Bonn Process unfolded as planned and was widely seen as a success with only loose oversight by policymakers in DC and more leadership from the UN. Unfortunately, Bonn would prove to be the easy part. While the political process unfolded, the international community tried, and, absent American leadership, failed to mount the most ambitious reconstruction and stabilization operation since World War II.

We are currently in the era of great power competition, and many states are grappling with how the future may unfold. Coalition warfare will be a key consideration in any flare-up. This chapter analyses the complexity of coalition warfare in the twenty-first century through the prism of the British Army’s experiences in the United Kingdom–led Multi-National Division (South East) and in Basra in the Iraq War. Any future wars in which Australia participates will most likely be as part of a coalition effort. Australia is unlikely to be the leading partner and will need to assess how best it will serve as a supporting participant in future coalitions.

Americans invaded Afghanistan and Iraq during the “War on Terror” following 9/11. Because the Taliban gave sanctuary to al Qaeda, the United States attacked Afghanistan in October 2001. Within months, Osama bin Laden had fled, and the Taliban took refuge in Pakistan. However, the Taliban launched an offensive in 2006. Despite Allied efforts, the Taliban gained control of Afghanistan. In 2020, Trump agreed to a peace plan that would remove all Allied troops from Afghanistan in 2021. Biden carried out Trump’s capitulation. Like Vietnam, the fighting ended in American surrender by withdrawal in a chaotic evacuation. Justified by faulty rationale, Americans invaded Iraq in 2003. After a quick victory in the conventional attack, Iraqi resistance transformed into an insurgency that brought the Americans to the brink of defeat. In December 2006, Bush authorized the Surge, increasing the number of troops and instituting a new counterinsurgency strategy. The Surge proved successful, and Obama reasonably extracted all American combat troops by December 2011. The treatment of detainees during the War on Terror began with Bush abandoning humane guidelines. Abu Ghraib strikingly revealed American abuses. But with the Surge, detainee operations emphasized rehabilitation and release to increase trust among the Iraqi population.

Chapter six deals with the period after the Cold War. Social theory describes this era in terms of uncertainty. Such accounts overlook the prevalence of ontologies of certainty in politics, the steady advancement of technologies of predictability and how the current security situation was produced by acts of omission and commission. After 1991, liberal teleologies dominated Western strategy. The seeming ‘end of history’ and triumph of liberalism appeared to close off the future and justify strategies that sidestepped international institutions of predictability. Russia reacted by further undermining institutions and norms that created predictability. This downward spiral has culminated in the current security climate. Russian political world views of the period emphasize eternal political laws, conspiracies and a hostile world. The chapter analyses the starting phases of the Russo-Ukrainian war of 2022. Paradoxically, Western societies are increasingly regular and predictable in numerous ways but reproduce discourses of uncertainty. These trends feed off each other – the more regular everyday life is, the more shocking and disturbing exceptions and surprises become.

The Epilogue examines how trends from the 1990s continued to develop in the following decade. These included the growing civil–military gap, even as the American public lauded the troops as heroes; tensions between notions of the soldier as a male warrior and more inclusive visions of soldiers might be; and the question of what roles soldiers might be asked to take on. First, it explores how soldiers began to talk about themselves as ‘Spartans’, referencing their separate status as a warrior caste. It also examines how popular culture and the military itself began to increasingly venerate Special Forces ‘operators’, using these images to sell products as diverse as video games, fitness regimes and coffee blends, but also to reinforce notions of American soldiers as quasi-supermen, capable of incredible feats. Finally, it examines a cultural phenomenon that cut against the grain of ‘Spartan’ and ‘operator’ images: the ‘Fobbit’ – a term that refers to the personnel deployed to Forward Operating Bases but who avoided combat by remaining at the base, a description that then broadened to describe all sorts of personnel who deployed overseas but didn’t face the prospect of combat.

This chapter compares the values, beliefs, and policy actions of the Clinton administration after the end of the Cold War and those of the George W. Bush administration after the events of September 11, 2001.

Since 9/11, a striking number of Shakespeare productions have appropriated the distinctive colours of desert camouflage. The print – marked by faded tones and an overall impression of dry and earthy environs – has become almost the standard choice for productions of Macbeth, Othello, and Henry V. Yet there has been little, if any, discussion of desert camouflage as a costuming decision. Examining productions ranging across two decades – from Nicholas Hytner’s Henry V (2003) to Max Webster’s Henry V (2022) – this essay argues that the use of the print synopsizes the ways in which productions refract contemporary understandings of global conflict. Camouflage costuming ignites a nexus of Shakespearean meanings around the brutality of the protagonist, war-crimes, PTSD, veteran-ship, and spectacular violence. The newly cynical readings that result render irrelevant traditional debates about the pro- or anti-war stance of Shakespearean theatre. In representing – via desert camouflage – a new kind of warfare, theatre in the post-2001 era envisages conflict as self-defeat. Finally, then, these productions speak to incompleteness, irresolution, regret, and a never-ending cycle of global violence.

In this interview, Maria Aberg gives a detailed account of her production of Days of Significance, which premiered at the Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, on 10 January 2007 and then toured to the Tricycle Theatre in London and to other venues across the UK. Aberg explains how her production highlighted a pervasive presence of violence connected to the kind of masculinity allowed and fostered in young men at home that then has enormous consequences when these same men are sent into armed conflict abroad. She also explains how the fact that Days of Significance was loosely inspired by Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing had a significant impact on how differently her production was interpreted and reviewed in Stratford-upon-Avon and elsewhere, where most members of the audience were not aware (and were not made aware) of the Shakespearean connection. In this respect, Aberg’s interview reinforces the realization shared by most of the contributors to this collection that the significance of ‘wartime Shakespeare’ is often complex and context-dependent.

This essay gives a fresh account of a pivotal moment in the events that led to the outbreak of the Iraq War in March 2003, when Lieutenant Colonel Tim Collins addressed his troops – the Royal Irish Regiment – paraphrasing off-the-cuff the speech that Shakespeare’s Henry V gives to his men on the eve of the battle of Agincourt. In this essay, Collins reflects on the power of Shakespeare’s language to move not only his audiences in theatres around the world but also soldiers on the battlefield. He explains how important it is for a military leader to be able to inspire his troops into action, especially when the reasons for going to war and the complexities of a conflict like the Iraq War can prove problematic and divisive.

This interview with Nicholas Hytner concentrates on his 2003 production of Henry V at the National Theatre, which opened a few months after the US–UK coalition invasion of Iraq in March 2003. Hytner reflects on the production decisions that responded to the immediacy of the conflict and the strong public opposition to it witnessed in the historic 15 February protests. The interview considers whether theatre can influence public opinion during wartime and how our use and understanding of Shakespeare’s plays has changed over time and through different conflicts.