It is now commonly admitted that the post–Cold War era and even more the war against terrorism since 9/11 have given birth to a permanent Western interventionism characterised by a spiral of military violence. There are, however, few scholarly studies on the socio-political conditions from which the diplomatic-military apparatuses make use of this violence and, above all, conceive of it as logical and instrumental despite the stalemates it has led to. By exploring the wars of influence within the NATO mission in Afghanistan†the ISAF, International Security Assistance Force†I aim to show the malleability of what is invested in these power struggles in terms of meaning and signification. The diplomatic-military domination of one group of actors (the Unites States’) over another (the Europeans’) is the result of logics of compromise characterised by irreducible multiplicities of significations. This plurality, entrenched in fierce multilateral negotiations related to all that is at stake concerning the running of war, is at the basis of a violence whose continuous use constitutes, in the end, the common denominator of the interventionist consensus. Far from being war machines that have become uncontrollable, these interventions are in fact the sociological product of struggles and agreements that rationalise the contemporary spirals of violence.