ABSTRACT
The half-century schism of global civil society into two entrenched camps during the Cold War induced salient ideological and institutional developments based on the structural concentrations of global power. Liberalism, at the ideational level, generated political and economic institutional apparatuses to confront a bipolar world. Emergent modes of warfare continue to rely on post-strategic warfare in the form of substituting one tactic over another rather than a set of tactics with an overall strategy to counter terrorism. This chapter explores the neo-liberal impulse to explicate foreign policy determinations to tackle transnational terrorism. Drone warfare is thus judged in terms of its efficacy as both a counterterrorism tactic and strategy while the political implications of intervention by way of America’s response to the Arab Spring in Libya and Syria under Obama’s leadership are called into question. These issues raise the specter as to whether security has an ethical component or if it is, rather, a matter of pure exigency.
