My Next Book!: A WAR FOR OUR TIMES: THE UNITED STATES IN THE AGE OF TERROR
My new two-year project, and how this newsletter will help me write it
When I returned to this newsletter in the spring, I alluded to the many projects I have been working on that prevented me from giving “Warfare and Welfare” my full attention. One of those projects was a co-written book with my good friend Van Jackson titled The Rivalry Peril: How Great-Power Competition Threatens Peace and Weakens Democracy, due out in January 2025 with Yale University Press. (Pre-order will be coming soon, I hope!). The other major project was my third book, a history of the War on Terror, which now has a title and a publisher. The book is—tentatively—titled A War for Our Times: The United States in the Age of Terror, and I am very pleased that Grove Atlantic will be publishing it once the manuscript is done (in about two years).
This is my first foray into trade press publishing—up until now, all my books have been with university presses— and I am excited that the book will reach a broad audience. I am also thrilled that the book will be available and sold in actual bookstores as opposed to most people buying it through the online behemoth that starts with an “A” and that shall not be named.
I've been thinking about writing a history of the War on Terror since I gave up on my book about Hubert Humphrey. Indeed, the conceptualization of the book has been years in the making. The book proposal went through many iterations (thanks again to my agent Lisa Adams at The Garamond Agency for her help), and took many months—about a year, actually—to write. The book aims to reexamine the War on Terror as a thirty-year period of history, from 1993-2023. I’m arguing that the War on Terror is not a war, or a series of wars, but an epoch. The book is inspired by my teaching at Yale—my students, many of them born after 9/11, think about or consider the War on Terror as history—and by Spencer Ackerman’s Reign of Terror. Spencer’s book helped me think of the War on Terror as an era, something that seems obvious yet elusive. I’m hoping this book will do what Spencer’s book did for me, and for many who read it: help us better understand United States and international history after the Cold War.
I had A War for Our Times in the back of my mind when I created “Warfare and Welfare.” Over the next two years, “Warfare and Welfare” will feature research findings, ideas, and historical episodes related to the book. I’ll also write longer pieces on material that can’t fit in the book but deserve to be shared. This is going to take a lot of time and effort, so I am planning for these posts to be for paid subscribers only. So if you want to read these posts, and want to stay updated on the book and my progress, feel free to sign up as a paid subscriber. I’d appreciate it.
But, for now, I would like to share an excerpt from the book proposal for all subscribers. This was a difficult proposal to write, and I’m proud of it, so I think it deserves an audience beyond a few people. This section of the proposal also provides a synopsis of the book and my current thinking about the project. I’m sure my approach to the book will change as I do more research and writing, but this is where I stand at the moment. Here is the excerpt, and, as always, thanks for your support:
Prior to 1993, the United States (alongside its European allies) sought to manage the threat of Islamic terrorism in nations in the Global South. Terrorist attacks in Pakistan, Lebanon, and other Middle Eastern countries during the 1970s and 1980s worried policymakers, but terrorism had yet to come home to the United States. Yousef’s attack proved that terrorists had infiltrated America’s borders and might do so again. The U.S. focused its foreign policy—and aspects of its domestic policy—on finding the terrorists who planned the attack and on preventing future threats. President Bill Clinton created task forces to capture Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan, bombed Iraq and Afghanistan to “deny terrorists safe haven,” and prosecuted terrorists captured by American authorities in foreign countries.
During his presidency, from 1993-2001, Clinton carried out what I have called a “war on terrorism,” where the United States pursued terrorist leaders abroad, launched targeted airstrikes in Middle Eastern countries, and policed its borders.”
September 11th transformed Clinton’s war on terrorism into what we know as the “War on Terror.” The difference is more than semantic. After 9/11, President George W. Bush believed that terrorism—as a phenomenon—needed to be wiped off the face of the earth.
Bush made fighting terrorism a way of life for Americans. It was not enough to target individual terrorists; the violence of terrorism needed to be extirpated from the earth. This was Bush’s goal, and it distinguished the War on Terror from the earlier “war on terrorism.”
The War on Terror lasted from 2001-2021. It created new governments in the Middle East, enlisted authoritarian nations like Russia and Pakistan, and expanded surveillance and policing in the United States. There were three phases: an era of nation building from 2001- 2009, an era of drone warfare from 2009-2017, and an era of pullback from 2017-2021. Bush launched the War on Terror, Obama remade it, and Donald Trump and Joe Biden gave it its coda.
A War for Our Times: The United States in the Age of Terror, argues that together, the “war on terrorism” and the “War on Terror” comprise a 30-year “Age of Terror” that profoundly and permanently changed life in the US. It expanded the reach of America’s global power to the detriment of our democracy and to the future health of the United States. The book tracks the origins, watershed moments, and points of no return of the Age of Terror, drawing new connections between the past and the present, and showing how the alternatives to “endless war” failed to materialize in ways that imperiled our democracy, our history. The unrealized moments, those lost opportunities to remake—and even end—the Age of Terror, created tangled afterlives that shape our democracy today.
This Age of Terror granted new powers to the federal government and loosened democratic restraints on unchecked executive power. It gave the president authority to deport immigrants under the guise of “national security,” to torture suspected terrorists in offshore prisons, to detain them in Guantanamo Bay indefinitely. It expanded the government’s surveillance of citizens, encouraged the bombing of innocent civilians, and launched needless “forever wars” in the Middle East. The decisions that led to these outcomes were justified as efforts to defend democracy, to preserve freedom from fear.
A War for Our Times is about a period of history that has no name yet. The last thirty-five years of history, from 1989 to 2024, is commonly referred to as the post-Cold War era—as if the Cold War is behind us. But the “post-Cold War era,” as the historian John Gaddis has said, is insufficient to describe our recent past. It makes history vague, allowing it to seem unorganized, unremarkable, devoid of salience. Too much has happened since 1991—too many mistakes made, countries reordered, lives lost, monies squandered, contingencies and unforeseen developments—to resign recent history to simply a “post-Cold War era.”
Recognizing that the era is important for being more than the period after the fall of communism, A War for Our Times attempts to give the 30-year period from 1993 to 2023 a name. I call it the "Age of Terror."
Understood as such, it becomes clear that the history of the era is a history of American power—how it was deployed abroad and at home, and who felt its effects. It also about the people who exercised it. That power, as it always does, took many forms; it took many people to wield it. But when it came to understanding what made American power possible, why it grew—and why presidents and policymakers relied on military force to express it—fighting terrorism (Islamic fundamentalists) is at the center of the story. A “war on terrorism” in the 1990s, then a “War on Terror” after 2001, defined American history—it unified the country around a singular threat. A generation of Americans are the products of this history.
In this sense, the Age of Terror had much in common with the Cold War. For over fifty years, America’s fight against communism—at home and abroad—defined the nation. The Cold War transformed America’s role in the world. The United States created military bases on all seven continents, stockpiled nuclear weapons, overthrew autocrats, and invaded countries in far-flung parts of the world in the interest of freedom. The Cold War also remade American politics. It made charges of “communist” and “socialist” against fellow Americans tantamount to treason—jobs and livelihoods were lost to such accusations. The Cold War both furthered and limited the civil rights movement and the cause of racial justice in the United States. Dwight Eisenhower sent the 101st airborne to protect Black students who integrated Central High School in Little Rock Arkansas in 1957 as a response to the “mouthpieces of Soviet propaganda in Russia” who benefited from the inequities and flaws in American democracy. But the Cold War also subjected Martin Luther King, Jr. to unconstitutional FBI surveillance, to charges by Republicans that he too was a communist— which limited whites ’support for the civil rights movement.
The Cold War was more than a war. It was an era that determined America’s vision for the world, its domestic enemies and fiscal priorities, its social and cultural attitudes. The Age of Terror did the same for Americans—it shaped America’s behavior abroad and at home.
Indeed, the Cold War era transitioned to an Age of Terror that justified wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; it launched a new form of warfare, drone warfare, that created individual deaths at a collective scale—and at the push of a button. The size of government expanded: new national agencies like the Department of Homeland Security were born and Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE), spawned from the Homeland Security Act, detained immigrants (including children), for years without due process.
The Cold War lived on in the “Age of Terror,” its “lessons” shaped decisionmakers in positions of power. Those lessons determined how the United States would wage wars abroad, but also how the country could function at home—how American foreign policy would reconfigure the relationship between the public and government. Fear of terrorism determined Americans ’perceptions of government, how they voted, their political beliefs, the jobs they obtained. Fear of terrorism created debates over how much money could be spent on bailing out banks versus bailing out homeowners after the 2008 financial crisis, whether we could deport Muslim-Americans, whether immigration to the United States should be restricted if not banned, if the purchase of AR-15s (the gun used by most mass shooters in the United States since the Columbine massacre) was necessary because they were “Americans' best defense against terror.” Like “communist,” the word “terrorist” was regularly bandied about like a political football. It was thrown at one’s enemies to discredit their beliefs, to shun them from public life, to imply they gave comfort to our enemies.
The Age of Terror, much more so than the Cold War, constrained social and economic progress in the United States. During the Age of Terror, the United States increasingly neglected racial, economic, and gender justice after the 1990s while sending tools of war into cities to address crime and potential terrorism. Clinton’s authorization of the 1033 program in 1996—which sent military equipment from the Department of Defense to police departments across American cities for “counterterrorism”—militarized the police and transformed police departments into small armies. George W. Bush criminalized Muslims—and Muslim communities—under the Patriot Act while ignoring a coming financial crisis that would undo the global economy and leave millions of Americans without housing or jobs. When protests broke out following the death of George Floyd in 2020, the tanks and military-grade equipment seen on American streets were a direct outgrowth of the War on Terror.
But while the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan in 2021 seemed to promise an end to the Age of Terror, the events of October 7th in the Middle East warn that it is not over, only altered.