Co-authored with Christopher Gelpi
The Global War on Terror has dominated the past two decades of U.S. national security policy. Despite an absence of major jihadist attacks since 9/11—and an almost total inability by such groups to effectively target the United States—American public opinion remains strikingly concerned about terrorism. Moreover, public support for the War on Terror has been surprisingly resilient against enormous costs, considerable U.S. combat deaths, and disastrous failures overseas.
We argue that for many Americans, the fixation on jihadist terrorism is actually meeting a powerful psychological need: The management of generalized anxiety. Seeing terrorism as a grave threat—which can in turn be combated by the War on Terror—allows individuals to recast an unpredictable landscape full of unknown dangers into a simpler, resolvable narrative. We find evidence that an individual’s ability to manage anxiety plays a major role in shaping attitudes about terrorism—and that reducing anxiety over unrelated issues (like COVID-19) reduces both fear of terrorism and support for the War on Terror. These findings offer new insights into how emotions shape attitudes about foreign policy, suggesting that scholars may benefit by shifting from measuring “anxiety” itself to the ways in which individuals manage that anxiety.
Christopher W. Ray 