Threat as the preceding chapter of crisis? The case study of US national security policy

The paper will look into what is constituted as a threat in the US national security policy? Further how threats are actualized possibly into crisis and how the response to them is argued in the policy documents. Crises can be defined as occasions threatening the constitutional order or the security of the state in other means.These threats could be “existential” or territorial. The paper will focus on the interrelation between crisis and threat and how these are pursued in the national security papers and policy documents in the United States. Nowadays, threats or crises that are national or international require new ways to respond. The temporal aspect as well as the intensity aspect will be taken into account when analyzing the threat as the preceding chapter of crisis or vice versa and their implications for policymaking. For a threat to become a crisis, an event triggering the crisis is often required. It could be also that there are crises such as the climate change without any particular event or actor, but rather certain conditions. The paper deals with the trichotomy of threat, event and crisis and how they are defined and conceptualized in the national security policymaking. This will also provide a way to look at what constitutes a national-security threat in the US and different standards of crisis and threats and their implications.