Conclusion

Abstract

Under the U.S. absolutist security agenda (ASA), the United States is held out as the singular means to obtain universal eudaemonia—that is, universal happiness, stability, purpose, and freedom—based on U.S. global security logic and precepts. Taken on its own terms, the ASA embodies a global security policy that is no longer overtly belligerent and imperialistic and that aggressively seeks to spread the benefits of freedom and democracy throughout the international system while concomitantly meeting the security needs of the United States. Security, however—domestic and foreign—is a profoundly complex state of affairs, tinctured with subjectivity and diversity and fragmented along sundry political, ideological, and sociocultural lines. Given this pervasive complexity, the U.S. ASA, as an “objective” and ubiquitous system of knowledge and truth, has profound negative consequences for the conduct of international affairs and notions of global security. This work has sought to identify and analyze the global security program articulated and pursued by the United States in a post-9/11 security context, particularly from 2001 to 2008. In a post-9/11 security context, global security has been articulated and promulgated by a single state that is primus inter pares in the international system. The United States, the world’s sole hyperpower, has for the past eight years actively and uncompromisingly implemented an ASA in order to procure an ideal zero-risk global security environment vis-à-vis elimination of polymorphous terror and its accoutrements.