Reagan administration

The Reagan administration is invoked as a precedent for the later “war on terrorism,” linking the post-September 11 campaign to an earlier U.S. policy framework. In Noam Chomsky’s analysis, the connection exposes a central asymmetry: the state’s own official definitions of terrorism can describe methods used in state policy, yet public terminology commonly reserves the label for adversaries.

The Earlier Policy Precedent

Chomsky characterizes the Reagan administration’s campaign, twenty years before the later one, as a “war on terrorism.” He presents the recurrence not as an isolated choice of wording but as evidence that the later campaign reiterates an established political framework. The earlier administration is thus a point of comparison for considering how a declared war against terrorism relates to the conduct and doctrines of the state declaring it.

State Doctrine and the Definition of Terrorism

Chomsky argues that the United States officially conducts what it calls low-intensity warfare. He compares standard definitions of low-intensity conflict with the U.S. Code’s definition of terrorism, finding them nearly alike: both concern coercive means directed against civilian populations for political, religious, or other purposes. He uses the attacks on the World Trade Center as an example of terrorism under that definition, while stressing that the definition’s logic also implicates state action.

From this comparison, Chomsky draws a broader conclusion: in official definitions, terrorism is not solely an instrument of non-state actors but can be a component of state policy. The Reagan-era campaign matters to this argument as an earlier instance of a U.S. “war on terrorism,” set against a doctrine whose described methods, in Chomsky’s account, overlap with the official definition of terrorism. The contrast challenges the idea that the term can be applied consistently only to an enemy.

Naming, Responsibility, and Political Meaning

Chomsky distinguishes the literal meaning of terrorism from its propagandistic use for acts committed by enemies against the United States or its allies. He argues that the naming of violence shifts with political alignments: the same actions and actors can be condemned as terrorist and later described as freedom fighters, or the reverse. The Reagan administration’s earlier campaign belongs to this wider critique of how the language of counterterrorism can present state policy as categorically different from violence attributed to opponents.

This argument also informs Chomsky’s treatment of war as a label. He notes that U.S. actions have been described through terms such as “smart bombing” and “humanitarian intervention,” while a declared “war on terrorism” may function as propaganda if it does not actually target terrorism according to the government’s own definitions. In that framework, the Reagan administration’s precedent is significant less as a detailed institutional portrait than as evidence of continuity: the vocabulary of a campaign against terrorism recurs, while the question of how its standards apply to state conduct remains unresolved.