War & Peace Quote by Mac Thornberry

Thornberry’s line does a neat bit of strategic reframing: it takes a frightening, indefinite military campaign and repackages it as something both grander and more manageable - a “War of Ideas.” That shift isn’t just rhetorical polish. It’s an attempt to solve a political problem the post-9/11 era never quite escaped: how do you sell a war with no clear endpoint, no single battlefield, and no tidy victory photo?

Calling terrorism “one of the tactics” does two things at once. It shrinks the act (not an enemy in itself, but a method) while enlarging the conflict (the real fight is ideological). That’s useful language for a legislator trying to justify long-term policy commitments: surveillance, foreign interventions, counter-radicalization programs, and alliances built around shared “values,” not just shared interests. If the battlefield is belief, then everything from schools to satellite channels becomes strategically relevant, and the scope of legitimate government action subtly expands.

The subtext is a rebuttal to critics who saw the “Global War on Terror” as a category error - fighting an emotion (“terror”) or a tactic (“terrorism”) as if it were a nation-state. Thornberry concedes the critique without surrendering the mobilizing power of war talk. It’s also a preemptive defense against “root causes” framing: by centering ideas, he implies the engine of violence is doctrine and persuasion, not primarily material grievance. In that sense, the phrase doesn’t just describe a conflict; it disciplines the debate around it.