In the first major counter-terrorism speech of his second term, President Obama outlined guidelines for the use of drone strikes, laid out plans to close Guantanamo and sought to find a way to finally end the war on terror. “America is at a crossroads,” he said in an address at the National Defense University. “We must define the nature and scope of this struggle, or else it will define us, mindful of James Madison’s warning that ‘No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.'”The president even explicitly rejected the phrase “war on terror.” He said, “Beyond Afghanistan, we must define our effort not as a boundless ‘global war on terror’ — but rather as a series of persistent, targeted efforts to dismantle specific networks of violent extremists that threaten America.”
Naureen Shah, Associate Director, Counterterrorism and Human Rights Project at Columbia University and Tom Junod, writer at large at Esquire discuss the implications of the president’s address.