From the War on Drugs to the War on Terror

• In Event: War and Peace Studies Caucus: Global Emergencies, U.S. Interventions, and Prehistories of the War on Terror

Abstract

The popular concept of the U.S. War on Drugs tends to revolve around Presidents Nixon, Reagan, and their successors and centers around militant policing at home and U.S. intervention in Central and South America. But U.S. police authorities were fighting the dope menace in several corners of the globe well before Nixon and Reagan declared war on drugs and turned their eyes to the southern border.

The drug war first became an American global enterprise in the years following World War II. Led by U.S. Commissioner of Narcotics Harry J. Anslinger, the Federal Bureau of Narcotics—the nation’s first drug enforcement agency—was deeply skeptical of public health strategies to control the spread of addiction and frustrated with faltering diplomatic attempts to limit the global supply of narcotics. Anslinger and his early drug warriors were convinced that international policing and source control, led by U.S. federal agents, was the only hope for containing the spread of addiction and winning the nascent drug war.

With U.S. geopolitical ascendance following WWII and the onset of the Cold War, Anslinger got his change and the FBN soon began to depict drug control as a global clandestine military conflict. Their efforts to police the global drug trade began, not in South America, but in Europe and the the Mediterranean and from there spread to the Middle East and East Asia before migrating back to the Western Hemisphere. In their efforts to pry open locations of crucial strategic importance around the world, the FBN both anticipated and mirrored the logic of a hegemonic U.S. national security and a Pax Americana and imparted the logic of drug control and containment with striking similarities. In the process, they also anticipated many of the core strategic assumptions that would come to define the Global War on Terror—ultimately revealing how consistently U.S. policymakers have assumed that security at home could only be achieved through hegemony abroad.

Author

• Matthew R. Pembleton, American University