How The Empire Of War Survives Its Victories | Prof. Phil Hammond

The end of a long-standing enemy does not automatically mean peace; it can produce an anxious void that powers a new machinery of conflict. That is the central provocation emerging from the recorded conversation with Prof. Phil Hammond: when the Cold War collapsed, Western political culture and media found themselves bereft of a usable adversary and set about inventing new moral narratives to fill the gap. Those narratives — replaying World War II’s moral drama, repackaging force as humanitarian rescue, and managing public perception through staged visibility — have sustained an “empire of war” even when victory should have rendered war obsolete. The result is not merely a change in targets but a transformation of legitimacy, sovereignty, and the very grammar by which violence is justified. ## How Western Media Represents War The conversation underscored how representation is not incidental to military action; it increasingly became central to decision-making. Media image and presentation came to matter so much that political and military actors began to anticipate how operations would be seen and to tailor them accordingly. The image of interventionism as virtuous is not a spontaneous public reading of events; it is partly engineered. Newsrooms, filmmakers, politicians and NGOs all participate in shaping wartime narratives, and in the post–Cold War landscape those narratives tilt toward moral certitude: heroes and villains, rescuers and victims. Prof. Hammond emphasizes that this is more than the familiar propaganda function of wartime reporting. With bipolar ideological certainties gone, Western media had to supply a new set of meanings. Cultural products — from blockbuster films to news packages — recycled the grammar of earlier conflicts. The cinematic turn to terrorism and the frequent invocation of World War II analogies in news frames are not accidental. They are part of a broader cultural work that re-enchants military action as moral performance, transforming localized crises into epic clashes between civilization and barbarism. ## Enemy Deprivation Syndrome: The Search for a New Purpose “Enemy deprivation syndrome” is the phrase that captures the post–Cold War predicament: a political system that had long defined itself against a coherent adversary suddenly found itself directionless. That vacuum mattered because enemies had been a way of producing collective meaning and mobilizing publics. Without a rival superpower, the questions “What do we stand for?” and “Why should we act?” grew pressing. Rather than accept a routinized peacetime order, elites and institutions sought new purposes. Prof. Hammond locates three broad attempts to fill the void: humanitarian intervention, the war on terror, and, in a different register, global initiatives like climate action. The first two both turn back to war as a source of meaning. Humanitarian intervention offered a moral mission — to rescue suffering populations and vindicate human rights — while the war on terror supplied a new existential threat that could be narrated as a fight for civilization’s survival. Both strategies answered the need for drama and purpose in a world suddenly lacking an adversary who could be held up as the antithesis of Western values. This hunger for purpose explains the repetitive tendency to recast new opponents as iterations of Hitler or Nazism. Small-scale, complex regional conflicts were elevated to cosmic struggles through analogy and rhetoric, producing a moral clarity that domestic politics could not. The danger in that move is also obvious: it flattens history, elides local grievances, and legitimates force by transforming ambiguity into cinematic moralism. ## Reagan's Prophecy: The Rise of Humanitarian War 00: 21:35 Was This Narrative Shift a Conscious Choice? A revealing moment in the conversation is the citation of Ronald Reagan’s 1992 Oxford speech, where he diagnosed the West’s loss of “uplifting common purpose” and proposed that the military become “a steel fist in a humanitarian velvet glove.” Whether intentionally prophetic or opportunistically rhetorical, this formulation foreshadowed the humanitarian-military complex that would define much of the 1990s and beyond. The transformation toward humanitarian war was not only rhetorical but operational. The crises of the early 1990s — the Kurdish plight after the Gulf War, Somalia, Bosnia and Kosovo — were framed as moral emergencies requiring armed intervention. In the conversation, Prof. Hammond draws a line from Reagan’s framing to the NATO bombing of Kosovo, which was explicitly justified in humanitarian terms. This is not to deny that suffering occurred or that humanitarian impulses motivated some actors. Rather, the important analytic point is that humanitarianism became a vehicle for using force under the mantle of moral authority. Was this change deliberate? The recorded exchange suggests a mixed answer. There were deliberate acts of image-making and staging — from timed landings designed to produce powerful television to the invitation of journalists to be part of the spectacle — but also an element of reactive opportunism. Leaders and media read the anxieties of the moment and seized them. In other words, the humanitarian mantle was both engineered and emergent: deliberately deployed by some actors, yet also the product of broader social and institutional needs for meaning. ## From Vietnam to 'Embedding': Evolving Media-Military Relations 00:39: 25 Media Self-Awareness During the Iraq War The evolution of media-military relations from the Vietnam era to the Iraq War illustrates the changing balance between exposure and control. Vietnam’s uncensored coverage contributed to public disillusionment and shifted political outcomes. The response in later decades was not to surrender the narrative to independent journalists but to incorporate them into new modes of access management. Embedding journalists with military units during the Iraq War is one such innovation. It created intimate, sympathetic portrayals of soldiers and constrained critical distance by controlling proximity and access. Embedding functioned as both logistical support and narrative management: journalists were given unprecedented front-line access, but within a framework that favored military oversight and narrative coherence. The result was coverage that often amplified the soldier-as-hero frame while muting broader questions about policy and strategy. Yet the conversation also underscores the role of journalists as co-creators of the savior narrative. Many reporters and NGOs came to see themselves as moral witnesses whose testimony could spur action. That conflation of witnessing and advocacy contributed to a media ecosystem in which the visibility of suffering created moral imperatives that translated into political pressure for intervention. The feedback loop between images, public sentiment and policy became stronger — and more difficult to disentangle. ## Undermining Sovereignty: From Colonialism to R2P One of the conversation’s most unsettling threads is the continuity between colonial practices of intervention and contemporary doctrines like Responsibility to Protect (R2P). Humanitarian language masks a more profound claim: that sovereignty can be conditional, its protections contingent on a state’s behavior. Where colonialism once justified intervention in the name of civilization, contemporary humanitarianism justifies intervention in the name of rights. This discursive shift carries real consequences. Once sovereignty is framed as conditional, the door opens to external actors deciding when and how to intervene. The 1990s and 2000s saw a proliferation of such judgments — often by coalitions led by Western powers — that reconfigured international norms. Prof. Hammond’s reflections make clear that even well-intentioned humanitarian impulses can become vehicles for power projection. The tension is stark: protect

How The Empire Of War Survives Its Victories | Prof. Phil Hammond What happens when a superpower loses its arch-nemesis? After the Cold War, the West faced an "enemy deprivation syndrome," a desperate search for meaning that led to replaying WWII against every new foe and the invention of "humanitarian" war. But was this narrative shift deliberately manufactured? To unpack this, I’m talking to Dr. Phil Hammond, an Emeritus Professor of Media & Communications at London South Bank University. He is the author of various books, among them “War Games: Memory, Militarism and the Subject of Play” and “Screens of Terror: Representations of War and Terrorism in film and television since 9/11.” We trace the journey from adversarial journalism in Vietnam to today's embedded reporting, exploring the rise of "humanitarian militarism," the calculated dismantling of national sovereignty, and why the return of a multipolar world might just offer a surprising reason for optimism about the future of global politics. Links: Phil’s Work: https://linktr.ee/phil.hammond Neutrality Studies substack: https://pascallottaz.substack.com Goods Store: https://neutralitystudies-shop.fourthwall.com Timestamps: 00:00:00 Preview & Introduction 00:01:23 How Western Media Represents War 00:03:36 The Post-Cold War 'World Without Meaning' 00:07:01 Enemy Deprivation Syndrome: The Search for a New Purpose 00:10:58 The 'New Hitler': Replaying WWII in Modern Conflicts 00:15:52 Reagan's Prophecy: The Rise of Humanitarian War 00: 21:35 Was This Narrative Shift a Conscious Choice? 00:26:42 Journalists as Co-Creators of the 'Saviour' Narrative 00:29:18 From Vietnam to 'Embedding': Evolving Media-Military Relations 00:39: 25 Media Self-Awareness During the Iraq War 00:42:04 Is the West's 'Good vs. Evil' Framing Inevitable? 00:48:47 Undermining Sovereignty: From Colonialism to R2P 00:55:41 A Hopeful Outlook: The Return of Multipolarity 00:57:53 Conclusion #Guest Ronald Reagan. In 1992, he came to Oxford University and gave a speech in which he said, “The end of the Cold War has robbed the West of its uplifting common purpose.” But he added, “Don’t worry, because I think I’ve found a solution.” And that is that the Western military—obviously he meant the American military, but others could join in—would be, he said, a steel fist in a humanitarian velvet glove. #Pascal Hello everybody, this is Pascal Lottaz from Neutrality Studies, and today I'm talking to Dr. Phil Hammond, Emeritus Professor of Media and Communication Studies at London South Bank -- 1 of 16 -- University. He's the author of various books, among them *War Games: Memory, Militarism and the Subject of Play*, and *Screens of Terror: Representations of War and Terrorism in Film and Television since 9/11*. Phil, welcome. #Guest Nice to be here. Thanks for inviting me. #Pascal Well, thank you very much for agreeing to this, because you’ve researched how war has been represented and shown to us for a long time. And by “us,” I mean especially in Western film and media. Could you maybe give us the gist of what you’ve found out, or how you judge this representation up to now? #Guest Well, that's quite a big question. So, yeah. You know, I suppose a lot of what I've written about is fairly well-worn territory—the way the media work propagandistically in wartime. There's nothing particularly new or surprising about that. The thing I did try to approach somewhat differently, at a certain point, was to understand what had changed in the post–Cold War era in the representation of war, and why media image and presentation had become—even more than before—almost overridingly important. To the extent that it seemed to be a fundamental consideration, even at the level of policymaking or operational decisions, about military actions. The question in the back of the minds of the people making those decisions was, you know, “How is it going to look? How is it going to play out in the media?” So I got quite interested in that. In a nutshell, I suppose I put that down to the political changes that happened at the end of the Cold War. And I’m thinking of how war and conflict changed in the 1990s and early 2000s as a consequence of those political changes. #Pascal 2 So what were those? How do these political changes fit together with the representation? #Guest Well, I wrote a book called *Media, War and Postmodernity*, which is all about that. And if you want to put it in a nutshell, you'd say it was the end of left and right, the end of left-right politics. Perhaps that doesn't seem terribly impressive as an explanation. Everyone’s kind of used to the idea that the old politics of left and right aren’t the same as they used to be, even though we keep using those terms. But really, what happened, I think, as a consequence of the end of the Cold War, was what the French international relations theorist Zaki Laïdi calls “a world without meaning.” -- 2 of 16 -- We were left in a world without a kind of horizon of meaning, without any sort of forward-looking project or prospect for where society was heading. It’s a kind of—you might perhaps think of it as similar to Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history,” or rather the abused “end of history” thesis. It’s a similar idea, that something epochal happened around the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall at the end of the 1980s. And yeah, I think there’s a good argument to be made—I tried to make it in that book—about the consequences of that for international relations and for war, and, as part of that, the role that the media play in war. #Pascal By the end of that period, that horizon for understanding the world—you mean the end of the bipolarity, of these two systems that were in struggle—and the idea that, oh, now everything is different, now there’s a unified understanding of the world. Is that what you mean? #Guest Yes. And indeed, if you look back at the moment when that happened, the assessments of it were actually quite upbeat. In fact, that’s putting it mildly—they were, in retrospect, kind of wildly over- optimistic. The talk back then was about how we were going to have a peace dividend, that the UN would finally work properly without the kind of stalemate of the U.S. versus the Soviet veto. Not long after, the first President Bush—Bush Sr.—proclaimed a new world order. It seemed quite an optimistic moment, but it didn’t last very long. I think one thing that’s quite striking, again, if you look back at the time when it happened and how events were discussed, is this curious idea they called “enemy deprivation syndrome.” It’s an odd thing to say—you’d think it would be good not to have any enemies. But in fact, it was problematic for them not to have a clear enemy. Because, you know, during that whole long Cold War era, it was very clear who the good guys were and who the bad guys were—at least, that’s how people thought about it. You knew who was on whose side. You knew what the West stood for, even if it was only defined in a kind of negative way—against what the West was opposing. And all of a sudden, that collapsed. So without a clear adversary, without a clear alternative, what did the West actually stand for? What, for example, was NATO for? What was its purpose? And so there’s this search that starts in the 1990s for new ways of managing international affairs and new ways of giving them some sense of meaning and purpose. One of the main ways that was attempted was precisely through war and conflict. #Pascal I think this is a very important observation, and I think it’s one that will strike all of us in the West, who were also showered with the cultural output of Hollywood and so on, which makes it intuitively very understandable. In the ’90s and the 2000s, you suddenly have all these spy movies that -- 3 of 16 -- basically say, “Wasn’t the time better when we had the Soviets?” There are tons of those, right? And you can see how James Bond flips from being anti-Soviet to being anti-terrorist, even hunting at some point the North Koreans with a laser beam they were trying to destroy the world with, and stuff like that. But the Soviets were gone, right? The Cold War was gone. Do you think that actually, through the representation in media and culture, there was a kind of feedback loop in how the media started representing world affairs? #Guest Uh, yeah. I mean, if you're thinking about, um, kind of fictional representations—yes. And that, you know, there are, as you say, attempts to find some new plausible enemies. I think probably the prime candidate is Arabs and Islamists; they’re the primary go-to alternative villains. But the point I’ d make about it is that it’s more far-reaching than just what Hollywood scriptwriters come up with. It's also a question of what those in the media—dealing with news and current affairs, journalists— how they interpret the world for their audiences. And even more fundamentally, how do politicians and leaders understand this new world? You see repeated attempts through the nineties to resolve that issue and to find new enemies. And there's a tendency to hark back to the Second World War, to constantly want to replay World War II. So you have, you know, the first major example, I suppose, being Saddam Hussein in the 1991 Gulf War as the new Hitler. Not long after that, from 1992, we’re told that the Serbs in what was then Yugoslavia are the new Nazis, right? You know, it’s like there’s this sense that today’s kind of prosaic reality—of actually fairly small-scale, relatively speaking, conflicts—isn’t enough. And you have to present them as this sort of epic battle between good and evil. And why do you want to do that? You want to do that because it means you stand for something important. You’re not just interfering in somebody else’s local civil war; you’re standing for the Good with a capital G against Evil with a capital E. That’s the kind of, I think, narcissistic tendency that develops in Western politics and media presentation of war. #Pascal It’s a wonderful observation, because I don’t think that during the Cold War any world leader tried to link or liken the Soviets to the Nazis. Nobody made that argument. The Soviets were good enough as an enemy in their own right, their own category. They didn’t need to be recast as Nazis. Whereas after the Cold War, everybody’s being recast as Nazis—including Hamas as Nazis, including the Russians as Nazis. I mean, now they are. This Second World War analogy comes up time and again, especially the Munich 1938 argument: you cannot appease evil, you cannot appease the Nazis, therefore we must go to war. So, would you say this is something that’s decidedly post–Cold War? #Guest -- 4 of 16 -- Yeah, I think so. I mean, you could say, perhaps you could argue, that there’s a kind of equivalence made between the Soviets and the Nazis in the theory of totalitarianism. There was an attempt to say, well, you know, we’ll lump those two together—which is, I’m not, you know, it’s not a very convincing argument—but the argument was often made that they were both, in some way, versions of the same thing: a kind of repressive, authoritarian, totalitarian system, just with different faces. So that was a kind of Cold War–era idea. But that’s a little bit different from what I think happens after the end of the Cold War, which is this sense that there’s a kind of hollowness, a meaninglessness, in Western political life. And in that era, in the ’90s—really right through till, I would say, the mid-2010s, so relatively recently, about ten years ago or so—right up until then, the main problem Western elites were facing was that their publics were essentially not interested. There’s a kind of withdrawal from public life, a basic lack of interest. You see that reflected in lots of different ways—when people do opinion polls, for example, people are less and less interested in public affairs. There’s a turning away from the public sphere toward more private, indi