The American response to 9/11 sharpened the hostility between the two main antagonistic regional blocs and all but eliminated the possibility that either Iran or Syria might retreat from the hegemonic strategy of maintaining an ‘Axis of Resistance’ in favour of pursuing rapprochement with the West. The George W. Bush administration’s Global War on Terror (GWoT), launched in the wake of the attacks, promised assistance to authoritarian regimes that would join the United States in confronting an amorphously defined ‘terrorism’ in the Middle East and beyond. Three central dynamics underpinned regional order in the Middle East during the first decade of the new millennium. The first was the contestation between Iran and Saudi Arabia for Western favour. The second was the Arab–Israeli conflict, in which non-Arab Iran had become a central protagonist. The third was a competitive dynamic for Western support between between Turkey and Egypt. The chapter considers each of these dynamics in turn.

Chapter 12 evaluates Israeli foreign policy amid the 9/11 attacks and the ensuing US-led global war on terror. The chapter contributes to the literature by demonstrating how, amid the global war on terror, Israel pursued a foreign policy that amounted to a frontal attack on engagement, which reflected the collapse of the domestic support in Israel for this foreign policy stance. Accordingly, the Sharon government offered virtually no response to the Arab peace initiative, which was launched by the Arab League in March 2002. The chapter ends by unearthing how the global war on terror engendered a shift in the role, played hitherto by the USA, in the Arab-Israeli conflict. US foreign policy would no longer hinge on mediation. Instead, it would be based on the principles guiding its global war on terror, namely, transformative diplomacy, regime change, and democratization.

This concluding chapter draws The Law of the List together and is structured in three parts. First, the key arguments of the book are reiterated by providing a brief summary of each chapter. Second, six original contributions the book brings to the study of global security law and governance are highlighted. These include: (i) studying global law empirically as an assemblage of relations and practices, (ii) studying ‘the global’ through local structure-making sites rather than from international institutions (like the Security Council), (iii) mapping the politics of expertise in global law-making, (iv) studying technologies of governance as devices that assemble legal and political relations and that have performative effects, (v) analysing how preemptive security produces novel rearrangements of law and governance that require empirical study, and (vi) rethinking global emergency governance as something assembled from mundane practices, rather than an effect of sovereign power. The chapter closes by arguing that the Law of the List, first introduced as a temporary preventive measure by the Security Council, is now a permanent feature of the global security law landscape. This book is an experiment in strategic knowledge production and an invitation for further socio-legal studies of global security law to come.

This chapter argues that what appears to be a break in the US policy towards its GC III obligations is really a change in emphasis from positive reciprocity to negative reciprocity. The multi-actor setting of US policy decision making made such a change possible. The chapter begins by examining the period from the end of the Vietnam War through to the USA-led NATO bombing campaign against Yugoslavia. It demonstrates how a split emerged, one that had not existed previously, between US policy makers and the military in attitudes towards reciprocity and IHL obligations. It then analyzes three key decisions: (i) to use military commissions to try detainees for IHL violations, (ii) to deny POW status to detainees, and (iii) to use “enhanced interrogations techniques” when questioning detainees. It argues that logic of appropriateness explanations cannot fully explain US policy decisions towards the treatment of detainees in the GWOT. In each of the three policy decisions examined, concerns with specific negative reciprocity are necessary to understand fully the US decision not to apply GC III.

This chapter serves three main purposes. First, it outlines the book’s central argument for why the expectation of reciprocity continues to be an important consideration for states when they decide how to respond to violations of IHL. Second, it describes the methodology used to analyze the role played by such expectations in the decision making of states regarding their IHL obligations. Finally, it provides an overview of the remainder of the book.

Beginning with Harry Truman and the Korean War, America’s so-called “first limited war,” too often US leaders have refused to admit that the US is at war, been unclear about what they want, and failed to seek victory. Helping drive this is broken ideas about limited war that intertwine all US thinking about war and poisoned the US ability to fight any war. We need a clear foundation for critically analyzing our wars. The only thing that provides this is the political aim. Do we seek regime change, or something less than this? Anything less is a limited political aim. Our definitions of and ideas about limited war are generally based upon the military means used, something too subjective to provide a basis for analysis. You must understand the aim to understand the nature of the war. If you don’t understand the nature of the war, it is hard to figure out how to win it. Cold War works on limited war also taught us to not seek victory, which injured the US ability to do just this. If you aren’t trying to win the war, you aren’t trying to end it. This leaves us with “forever wars.”