{"id":2572,"date":"2026-04-18T07:23:18","date_gmt":"2026-04-18T05:23:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thedefencenews.com\/?p=2572"},"modified":"2026-04-09T11:21:07","modified_gmt":"2026-04-09T09:21:07","slug":"why-ideology-matters-in-irregular-warfare","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thedefencenews.com\/?p=2572","title":{"rendered":"Why Ideology Matters in Irregular Warfare"},"content":{"rendered":"

By David Guenni<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Ideology matters, as I learned from surviving 18 years under the Chavista regime in Venezuela. The United States pretended otherwise for three decades, clinging to the \u201cend of history<\/a>\u201d and similar dreams. Today, with ideologically driven conflicts simmering around the world, it is time for America to integrate deterrence, defense, and a theory of victory across the so-called\u00a0gray zone<\/a>\u00a0of geopolitics. Doing so will require policymakers to start listening to what America\u2019s enemies have been saying for years about their ideological designs.<\/p>\n

In 2004, when questioned about whether a Venezuela-Cuba<\/a>\u00a0alliance was exporting communist revolution throughout the Western Hemisphere, the Venezuelan ambassador to the United States\u00a0averred<\/a>: \u201cIt is a thing outdated in time and it is not understanding the relationships that exist between the countries.\u201d That was a backhanded \u2018yes,\u2019 if there ever was one. The message was meant to assuage the busy, post-9\/11 national security community, diverting attention away from the\u00a0problems brewing<\/a>\u00a0south of the U.S. border. More than two decades later, the\u00a0annual warnings<\/a>\u00a0of USSOUTHCOM Combatant Commanders before Congress have finally been\u00a0heeded<\/a>\u00a0by the\u00a0White House<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Ideology has been slapping America in the face since the late 1990s. For this era of refocusing on state-based threats, it comes in these forms and many others: Beijing\u2019s obsession with employing \u201cunited front<\/a>\u201d organizations to silence dissidents overseas; Moscow\u2019s\u00a0obsession with Ukraine<\/a>, kicking off a murky war in 2014 that is now sustained conventionally; Tehran\u2019s obsession with\u00a0aiding and abetting<\/a>\u00a0proxy martyrs of the Islamic Revolution; Havana\u2019s and Caracas\u2019\u00a0shared obsession<\/a>\u00a0with waging \u201casymmetric war<\/a>\u201d on Western powers (which included flooding the American homeland with\u00a0illicit narcotics<\/a>); and Pyongyang\u2019s obsession with\u00a0subverting<\/a>\u00a0Seoul\u2019s political processes and civic life. All these gray-zone efforts have an ideology at the heart. Their ideologies, variously rooted in Marxism, religion, and revanchism, drive the leaders of these states to employ irregular warfare tactics without any remorse and at any cost to civilians in the West or anywhere else. You will not find high degrees of intellectual coherence between these\u00a0constructs<\/a>;\u00a0shared hatreds<\/a>\u00a0and collectivist doctrines and dogmas are cohesive enough for what now amounts to an anti-Western coalition.<\/p>\n

Anti-Western adversaries became\u00a0sneakier<\/a>\u00a0when strategizing and aligning with those espousing similar worldviews. They also became more convinced of their moral superiority. The U.S. national security community makes arbitrary distinctions between geopolitics and ideology. These distinctions obfuscate reality, which is already tough to comprehend, and lead to poor policymaking. Nowhere is this weakness more prominent than in the domain of\u00a0irregular warfare<\/a>. How did ISIS carve out its domain between Iraq and Syria, for instance, if not through the aid of its\u00a0ideology<\/a>?<\/p>\n

Discussing rival-state ideology in the Departments of State, Defense, and Homeland Security seems to generate discomfort despite some strides to understand\u00a0strategic cultures<\/a>. It started with the spectacular triumphs of 1991. After Saddam Hussein\u2019s defeat in the First Gulf War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, international relations\u2019 ideological variables have been marginalized in the Federal Government. The American bureaucrat could finally put \u2018Sovietology\u2019 to rest, and, with it, anything to do with alternatives to liberal internationalism. The term \u2018Great-Power Competition\u2019 continues the delusion; \u2018strategic-ideological struggle\u2019 captures reality much better.<\/p>\n

Disclaimer: Ideologies are messy. Their study requires incredible levels of nuance, subtlety, cultural awareness, philosophical skill, and extensive interpretive room. It is not a field of expertise attuned nor prone to engineering solutions or\u00a0linear responses<\/a>, making it politically dangerous to confront ideological challengers. Bringing up ideology always risks alienating a group and hurting its feelings. Hence, American political leaders and senior officials have scarcely breathed a word about state-centric ideological conflict since the demise of the USSR.<\/p>\n

This problematic approach is a vestige of America\u2019s long-gone \u201cunipolar moment.\u201d Through mirror imaging, it takes our attention away from elements that the Western world\u2019s rivals thrive on. Several foes of the West have developed highly complex\u00a0irregular warfare doctrines<\/a>, intelligently focusing on the types of operations that some of these actors can excel in, and backing off from the type of war that they know they cannot win. Because\u00a0illegality<\/a>\u00a0is the common denominator to all irregular warfare activities coming from any type of challenger, ideological zeal and fervor are absolute strategic imperatives to the leaders of these revanchist entities. Indeed, during the Global War on Terror, we recognized it as an essential enemy\u00a0warfighting capability<\/a>. Ideology is the glue that authoritarians, totalitarians, and other extremists apply to bind together the domestic constituencies that they rely on for control and aggression. In ideology, those leaders find the corpus of thought and the narratives required to\u00a0morally justify<\/a>\u00a0atrocities committed in pursuit of greed, territorial expansion, or a simple clinging to power.<\/p>\n

Acknowledgement is growing that defeating mere symptoms of its rivals\u2019 irregular warfare campaigns cannot bring American\u00a0strategic victory<\/a>\u00a0or even achieve deterrence in the \u201cgray zone.\u201d Looking back at the U.S.-led quagmires of Afghanistan and Iraq, more observers have called for defeating root ideologies, rather than just crushing the fighters who currently espouse a certain ideology\u2019s flavor-of-the-moment (e.g., Taliban, al-Qaeda, ISIS, Hezbollah, Boko Haram, al-Shabaab, FARC, ELN, etc.).<\/p>\n

Defeating our enemies must include defeating their ideologies. This no longer\u00a0demands<\/a>\u00a0global wars in the traditional (conventional) military sense. To defeat regime ideologies, whole-of-government efforts require dusting off forgotten or atrophied competencies that America\u00a0used to cultivate<\/a>, including the \u2018dark arts\u2019<\/a>\u00a0of U.S. foreign policy. Washington needs to articulate once again what it believes in, beyond vague notions of stability, and bring like-minded allies to our side.<\/p>\n

David Guenni is completing his doctorate with Missouri State University\u2019s Graduate School of Defense & Strategic Studies. His research focuses on nation-states\u2019 employment of narcotrafficking as an irregular warfare modality. He is a Venezuelan political asylum seeker in the United States, having spent many years in the struggle against the Chavista regime in Caracas. His opinions are his own and no one else\u2019s.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By David Guenni Ideology matters, as I learned from surviving 18 years under the Chavista regime in Venezuela. The United States pretended otherwise for three decades, clinging to the \u201cend […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2919,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[488,489],"class_list":["post-2572","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-opinions","tag-ideology","tag-warfare"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thedefencenews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/IDEOLOGY.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thedefencenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2572","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thedefencenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thedefencenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thedefencenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thedefencenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2572"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/thedefencenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2572\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2920,"href":"https:\/\/thedefencenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2572\/revisions\/2920"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thedefencenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2919"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thedefencenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2572"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thedefencenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2572"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thedefencenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2572"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}