Due to international policy and internal sociopolitical factors, America has been the primary target of international terrorism since the 1960s and is seen as a major obstacle to the goals of international terrorism. This article discusses key mistakes made by the Unites States that the author argues have strengthened and given rise to further terrorism, including (a) acceding to terrorists'demands; (b) funding freedom fighters who later became involved in terrorism against their former benefactors and allies; (c) misunderstanding foreign peoples and cultures and believing all terrorism must be state sponsored; (d) applying force selectively; (e) thinking in error that the United States is safe from terrorism; and (f) faulting U.S. media specifically, exacerbating the problem by inadvertently galvanizing sympathetic public opinion for acceding to terrorists'demands. The author discusses corrections to these mistakes.Although this article will be only a very general outline of the problem formulated in the title, I nevertheless hope that it contrives to touch on the most important issues. I also hope that this critique of U.S. policy will be regarded as neither a manifestation of anti-Americanism, so "fashionable" and popular today, nor a typical European willingness to teach or to advise "the Big Brother." My interest in American counterterrorism policy is propelled not by any ill will toward the United States but on the contrary, by my attraction to this country and the conviction that nothing else but America is the pillar of international order and security, and that without a safe and stable United States, there is no safe world.

The US reaction to 9/11 set off a chain of events leading to the raise of the most radical strain of revolutionary Salafism ideology incarnated by the Islamic State. The analysis of IS worldview allows one to observe its striking compatibility with the fundamental tenets of Terror Management Theory (TMT). The main proposition of this article is that the Islamic State’s worldview should be interpreted as a product of an ideological evolution triggered/amplified by the Global War on Terror (GWOT), leading towards reenergization of the revolutionary Salafi narrative and increasingly radical – and thus psychologically efficient but strategically flawed – terror management device.

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Since the democratic transition, Poland-United States relations have been framed by the Polish authorities as a strategic threat-management tool in the securitization process of Poland’s geopolitical position, particularly concerning the Russian Federation. We analyse the process of securitization regarding Poland-US relations through latent topic modelling of Polish parliamentary speeches in the years 1991–2017. We demonstrate that the discourse on Polish-US relations is heavily dominated by security topics, narrowly understood as military security. Furthermore, even when economic issues are discussed, they are frequently linked to military operations. Based on Floyd’s (2011, 2019) model of the moral rightness of securitization, we argue that the close relationship between securitizing moves (debates on Poland-US relations) and security practices (security events) suggests the basic sincerity of the securitizing actor, while the historical context reflected in the Polish collective memory strongly influences the audience’s frame of reference and strengthens the power of the securitizing actor. However, although the case fulfils Floyd’s (2019) criteria of morally right securitization, we have shown a historical disparity between the scope of securitizing moves with security practices and the existing level of threat. This demonstrates that the securitizing agent has been abusing securitization by exceeding the ‘least harmful option’, particularly due to the large asymmetry of power of the participants in the relationship, the securitization process stretched over a long period and the threat severity varying over time.