American Terror After 9/11

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0:00:07.5 Trevor Burrus: Welcome to Free Thoughts. I’m Trevor Burrus. Joining me today is Spencer Ackerman, a long-​time national security journalist for many outlets. His Substack is Forever Wars. His new book is “Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Error Destabilized America and Produced Trump”. Welcome to the show, Spencer.

0:00:24.6 Spencer Ackerman: Thanks for having me, Trevor.

0:00:27.4 Trevor Burrus: What does the phrase, or maybe concept, War on Terror mean to you?

0:00:33.6 Spencer Ackerman: So a couple of things. Programmatically, we mean something that has to do not just with the very high profile military operations of the War on Terror, Iraq, Afghanistan, then adjunct or additional military conflicts in Pakistan, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, Mali, Niger. But also a set of transformative institutional relationships between the state and the citizen that happen at home. The NSA, the CIA, the FBI, the NYPD, the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, the military, all of these institutions of American hard power transform in a way that removes legal and political and bureaucratic inhibitions on their ability to both use violence, surveil citizens, prosecute and increasing web of association, criminalizing organizations not that engage in acts of violence, but organizations that fund organizations that have adjuncts that engage in acts of violence and so forth. Beyond that, terrorism in the era of the War on Terror goes from a thing that many different people do, which is to say political violence, and changes culturally and then operationally and politically into focusing on something that some people are.

0:02:25.5 Spencer Ackerman: So the phrase War on Terror that we started hearing very early on after 9/11 represents something of the social compromise, something that doesn’t name an enemy, and in so doing has certain pretenses to ecumenicism, that it’s not in fact focusing on any one particular form of terrorism or terrorist organization and so forth, but this hasn’t been a war against the IRA. So there was also, from the start, a kind of immediate social discomfort, both on the far left and the far right about the euphemism behind the term War on Terror, whereby there are elements in the far right that understand the War on Terror as a war against a marauding version of Islam and demands a response that not just works toward a goal of repressing that supposed civilizational onslaught, but that names it specifically as responsible for all of these violent acts. Doing so also inevitably has the effect of saying that other forms of terrorism are not as bad here or are not the main issue here. And on the left, it’s a euphemism for how an extractive empire cloaks itself in innocence in order to achieve its violent quest for hegemony.

0:04:12.6 Spencer Ackerman: And this circumstance metastasizes over the course of the last 20 years in really uncomfortable ways, not least of which, the degrees to which politics take on this air of militancy, and once done so, focus… This happens fairly early after 9/11, it’s not a more recent phenomenon, but it is an intensified phenomenon toward those at home who are viewed as not just political opponents, but enemies and potentially violent enemies. And the tools of all of that state apparatus, all of that state security infrastructure, remain in place 20 years after 9/11. And you can see the temptations in many cases manifested in recent administrations. I tend to look at Trump’s actions in the summer of 2020. A lot of people on the right are looking at Biden’s actions post January 6th and wondering about the degree to which they are the next to have the War on Terror used against them. And I would just argue that’s an exceptionally dangerous circumstance to be in.

0:05:34.2 Trevor Burrus: Yeah. Reading your book, I was thinking about the infamous phrase of you’re either with us or against us as was uttered by George Bush. But in some ways that phrase by itself, depending on who utters it, defines the era of the last 20 years, that you’re either Trump and the MAGA people would definitely echo that but they have a different category of the people who are either with us or against us. But it seems like that the era itself got us into that kind of bifurcational thinking where everything is just sort of Manichean and people are either on one side or another side. Would you just sort of say that’s, maybe not the inevitable product of 9/11, but where America ended up going, is that type of thinking?

0:06:19.7 Spencer Ackerman: Yeah. It’s certainly where America ended up going. I think people with memories of the national and elite politics of the 1990s might offer that 9/11 doesn’t introduce a culture war into American politics. What it does is it melds extremely well with one and provides very volatile opportunities to a country that’s already trying to cope with what its politics look like in an era of unipolar hegemony, in an era in which neoliberalism is now without a geopolitical alternative and competitor, a geoeconomic competitor as well, and try to figure out what that looks like. Quickly, politics in America, for a variety of reasons, turn on itself and then 9/11 grass grafts itself onto those circumstances. Ironically, there was a period after 9/11 where a lot of elite liberals in particular appealed to spirits of patriotism after 9/11 as a way to try and sort of call a halt to a culture war that they didn’t sort of wanna examine for having any material basis to it, because they benefit from that certain set of circumstances, whereas you see pretty immediately from the figures around the Bush administration, they argue that 9/11 is a political opportunity for not just the Republican party but a certain faction within the Republican Party to achieve dominance and then achieve a sustained period of political success.

0:08:23.3 Spencer Ackerman: And that becomes the great political hope throughout the course of the War on Terror, where Republicans tend to be comfortable playing the politics of 9/11, a very paranoid and a very violent politics that calls for the most punitive of solutions, shall we say, to real phantom problems, problems that the United States very often engenders through its seeking of retribution in such violent and exploitative ways. Whereas you see among Liberals this corresponding fear that if they roll back this thing too much, then they will suffer the flip side, the sustained political marginalization that they have really searing experiences of from the post-​Vietnam phase of the Cold War without putting together the role of embracing the catastrophic Vietnam War and the mindset of hyper-​acceleration inside a Cold War context that led to that circumstance.

0:09:37.4 Spencer Ackerman: So Liberals embrace and try and make the War on Terror technocratic, a tambourine mode that they are most comfortable with. And, accordingly, by the time Trump comes along, they are… Even though Barack Obama is in many ways elected to end the Iraq war, Liberals and Democrats become associated with the War on Terror as it has become a sustained catastrophe, rather than Liberals and Democrats achieving power by arguing that it is time to end the catastrophic War on Terror.

0:10:15.4 Trevor Burrus: The War on Terror at the time, I was a young man and remember 9/11 and what came after, but I say it made sense in the abstract, at least. None of us at that time after 9/11 would have bet that there would not have been another significant terrorist attack within the next few years. And so that fear that you described especially from the Democrats who didn’t wanna maybe use the same rhetoric as the Bush administration, but also didn’t want to be overseeing a government that had another 9/​11-​style attack. So it’s interesting… When I’m reading your book, I was like, “Okay. Does he think that the entire thing doesn’t make sense, that nothing that they did made sense whatsoever, and none of it was worth it, or were there some amount of increased surveillance security or something that could even retroactively be seen as worth it?”

0:11:10.4 Spencer Ackerman: I would argue none of it is worth it, especially because when you question what worth it means, on the one hand, we’re looking at the absence of other terrorist attacks as an abstraction, a counterfactual that we can’t answer. Whereas, if we look at the world we inhabit right now, the War on Terror killed, according to Brown University’s Costs of War projects, at least 900,000 people. It generated tens of millions of refugees. I don’t really think there’s a circumstance in which you can say, when considering the real human atrocities that the War on Terror has yielded, that something here is worth it. I think what the question fairly gets at is, is there a sense in which…

0:12:05.6 Spencer Ackerman: It wouldn’t have been quite as all or nothing as I might be making it out, right? And the way I would address that is that when you look at what the War on Terror isn’t, you see more clearly what a response to 9/11 could have been. And then when I… After I outline that, I wanna look at why that didn’t happen. So first, what might have been. Well, when you look at the authorization to use military force, the principal authorization that comes in response to 9/11 that establishes the War on Terror, it’s specific only about one thing, which is that the president gets to decide who any of this stuff is aimed against, provided they can tell some acceptable narrative whereby there’s some connection to not necessarily the 9/11 attacks itself, but the people who knew the people who knew the people responsible for 9/11. So right there, we’re talking about an enemy that, by design, is sprawling and not specific, and in state that can’t be achieved, and in state that in its place is the prerogative of whoever is elected president.

0:13:32.1 Spencer Ackerman: And I would argue that, conceptually, right there is where the War on Terror is doomed to failure, because you are no longer talking about retribution for a particular thing that was done against the specific people that did it, you’re talking about building out something whereby the sustained application of American military power and all of the adjuncts that go with it, all across the world for all time, is set up. So I think right there, you take this moment where you sort of see what… Imagine if 9/11 is responded to with exactly what the dominant forces at the time said… Would have been the most awful circumstance possible, a law enforcement approach, whereby those who committed, materially committed and then materially assisted, planned and so forth, the attacks of 9/11 would be captured and put to trial.

0:14:47.8 Spencer Ackerman: Well, there is no sense in which, A, we’re looking at the various legal and political and military alternatives that are on offer that wouldn’t have been preferable to the mass destabilization of entire regions of the globe, the imposition of enormous human suffering and then responsibilities upon the United States, for had it dispensed with this circumstance, that in the process completely, unilaterally and secretly rewire the relationship between the citizen and the state in terms of making the state, from a structural perspective, able to capture all of that citizen’s digital footprint, the basis of what the records and things to be seized mentioned in the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution, translate to in a contemporary context.

0:15:48.9 Spencer Ackerman: And in the course of development of such an extensive period of neither peace nor victory after that, a circumstance that survives even the killing of the person who designed 9/11, instead there’s only this sustained period of indecision, of suffering without conclusion. I just think that that is the circumstance that if you were to tell people right after 9/11 is the alternative, the path that will be taken, then I don’t think a single person would say that, “Oh, well, that sounds preferable to just like putting the people who actually did this on trial, denying the martyr status, denying them the status of world historical figures.” That would have been perhaps a world in which there is additional terrorism and certainly additional Jihadist terrorism.

0:16:53.2 Spencer Ackerman: But then it’s important to look at, and this gets us to why this didn’t happen, the circumstances that made 9/11 possible and the ways in which, when you look at what Al-​Qaeda and Osama bin Laden actually said, what they were trying to do, what they described doing in horrific and unjustifiable ways, is retaliating against an America that declared itself fit to dictate and do so violently and expropriatively outcomes for the Muslim world and specifically the Arab world. And what the United States has done ever since is, in order to deny that there was any relationship between US hegemony in the Middle East and 9/11, has been to simply say that that is a question that does not deserve a respectable hearing, and accordingly responded by accelerating all of the circumstances that Bin Laden cited to justify atrocities like 9/11.

0:18:02.7 Spencer Ackerman: And very early on after 9/11, what we would now, I think, recognize as a cancel culture, took hold whereby in the media, in politics, and especially even in emergent forms of media, not quite social media yet, but I remember, and you may as well, the post-​9/​11 blogosphere that really accelerated a lot of these censorious habits in this meter of righteous patriotic emergency. But people who argued, both on the socialist left and on the nationalist right, that there is a material basis to 9/11, it doesn’t excuse 9/11, but it does mean that without addressing it and redressing it, America is going to make this entire problem worse. And then on top of it, this accelerated imperial violent and anti-​democratic turn also makes everything a lot worse, both at home and abroad.

0:19:19.0 Trevor Burrus: I was actually thinking that too of the cancel culture. I like that analogy. In the libertarian sphere, you had Ron Paul having the audacity to suggest that maybe we had something to do with why we were attacked and he was shouted down. But I feel like in the course after that, that was 2008, in the years after that, that became a much more acceptable position, and it’s much more acceptable now in the sense that we did roll back some of the global War on Terror, or did we, I guess is a better question. Is it rolled back by Obama, is it rolled back because of some recognition that maybe we contributed to why we were attacked?

0:20:04.1 Spencer Ackerman: I think that’s a great question, and the answer is is that there are several roll backs, but in each of them, far more of the architecture of the War on Terror gets entrenched than is removed. So for instance, what’s gone from the War on Terror right now? Well, there’s no more military occupation of Afghanistan. That’s a big deal. There is no more CIA torture and black site programs, as far as we know. That’s a big deal. All of… There is one bulk surveillance program that Edward Snowden’s leaks uncovered in 2013, that is removed, but bulk surveillance not only remains the way of doing business that the intelligence agencies have. But we learned a couple of weeks ago that the CIA has been conducting its own bulk surveillance program, of that which we know extremely little, except that it amounts to a mass theft of Americans’ data and no one has really blinked an eye that hasn’t really moved the dial at all. And that’s the sort of thing that I’m talking about. The hyper-​militarization of American police is, in many ways, attributable to the way that the Department of Homeland Security operates as a slush fund to take public money and distribute it under an extremely fan pretext of relevance to counter-​terrorism needs to police departments around the country.

0:21:55.6 Spencer Ackerman: The famous 1033 program that the Pentagon has to take excess spare material and other military hardware and give it to police departments. That’s a substantial program. The two Department of Homeland Security programs that do that are three times as large. So those are just small ways, institutional ways and ongoing ways, that the maintenance of the War on Terror has not just taken root, but is normalized and is increasingly not seen as such anymore, because once it is normalized, the tools that were once exceptional tools, that required exceptional grants of power, or in many cases, simply exceptional assertions of power not always done publicly for their creation, operation and maintenance are now distributed across government agencies for routine operational use. One of the famous documents that Edward Snowden leaked about the PRISM system of NSA surveillance talked about how some of the materials necessary for intelligence products that PRISM reaped had to do with things like concerns about Venezuela. We’re not talking about terrorism anymore, we’re not talking about Al-​Qaeda anymore, we’re talking about a useful series of technologies, operations, organizational, institutional, culture, bureaucratic rules and weak legal safeguards, they are very enticing to intelligence and law enforcement agencies.

0:23:53.4 Trevor Burrus: When George Bush talked about terrorism, and especially Islamic terrorism, he made a point to try… Usually try to say that this was not a war against Islam, that there was a… There was one group, sub-​section, people who are often… Have Islamic beliefs, but it’s a type of extremism that is not represented by the entire religion. How was that rhetoric… How has that rhetoric affected the progression of the War on Terror, because it seems that it’s still with us this discussion of, are we fighting Islam or not even though it’s 20 years later and it’s clear that we’re not fighting Islam, but it’s still an important question that especially Republicans care a lot about.

0:24:44.9 Spencer Ackerman: So to go back to what I was saying about how, from the start, the name War on Terror is a social compromise and a euphemism that shapes people who hear it, who are looking for something more direct about who in fact the enemy is, and then also the way in which that basic indecision of the concept of the War on Terror inhibits the ways in which that message that Bush is making about Islam will be received, that fundamentally there’s a mixed message here that Bush, after stumbling and falling on some language that he might have regretted about how the War on Terror would be a crusade, which of course has deeply religious overtones that have a lot of incendiary political connotations that go with it, then he goes and says, “Look, we’re not talking about Islam. “Islam is something else, American Muslims are American.” The trouble is, is that the architecture that he creates for the rationale that he accepts is going to give those who see the War on Terror as a war on Islam with every opportunity and technological possibility that they could possibly want. And within a couple months of Bush saying what he said, you had very important voices in American religion with constituencies on the right that were saying exactly the opposite, that they understood 9/11 in religious terms in understanding it in the history of political conflict between Islam and Christianity.

0:26:36.7 Spencer Ackerman: And to give one example, Chris Kyle, the American Sniper, writes one of the most… The highest selling books, a memoir of his… As my… As Matt Cole has a forthcoming book called Code Over Country, it goes into the ways in which Chris Kyle went into some mythology of himself and of being a sniper for the Navy SEALs. But what’s significant is that in his book that comes out nearly a decade after 9/11, Kyle is talking about the people he kills as savages and constantly contrasting Islam with Christianity in good guy, bad guy terms that, ultimately, you get the impression that what… It doesn’t matter so much to Kyle and to the people Kyle wants to leave them with this point, that the act of specific people are the issue here, but rather a clash of civilizations is taking place and it’s going to require people to be American snipers. So the implication there is, he’s really and sees himself as Jesus’ sniper. And that has a political legacy throughout the War on Terror that you can see right now with the ways in which discussions of “radical Islamic terror” take on this shibboleth quality in MAGA world, and… Maybe better to just sort of leave it there for now, ’cause I’ve probably talked a lot about that. But it’s a legacy that establishes itself very early and in contradistinction with this speech that Bush gives.

0:28:45.0 Trevor Burrus: Now when… I couldn’t pick up from the book what exactly… Maybe I wasn’t reading closely enough. But when Obama takes over, how… In terms of what… I guess we could guess what his own opinions were about what he wanted to keep doing or not keep doing with the War on Terror, but it seems like things changed pretty quickly, possibly mostly due to the security state, and that what he originally wanted, he doesn’t get to do or he’s convinced not to do, I’m not sure which one it is, by the security state and that apparatus, and so he’s still doing it throughout his entire presidency. But did it go differently than he thought it would?

0:29:27.6 Spencer Ackerman: Everything about this went differently than Obama thought it would. So from the start, there is this tension within Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, because the only way that it can succeed is to knock off Hillary Clinton. Obama does so by identifying her with an Iraq war that he opposed and that the base of the Democratic party is furious at its leadership for supporting, including people like Hillary Clinton, like Joe Biden, like John Kerry, basically the generation of contemporary Democratic leaders. And as Obama finds this line of attack to be succeed… As Obama succeeds with this line of attack, he obscures how he is not talking about abolishing the entire War on Terror. Instead he starts talking about… Because he’s going to face John McCain, who’s like the War on Terror on horseback, a right-​wing vision of what a more noble War on Terror might look like, a more confident War on Terror… And here, Obama’s trying to inoculate himself against attacks from McCain of weakness by situating a trade-​off. You ended the Iraq War so you can duly focus on the necessary War on Terror, that War on Terror needs to be constrained in important ways so that it doesn’t endanger the United States through excesses, look at something like the Iraq war and so forth, and that will be how the Obama administration sees its role in the War on Terror and approaches it.

0:31:22.3 Spencer Ackerman: Now, notice a couple of things there. First, very importantly, this is not an abolitionist perspective. Despite a lot of hysteria that Obama was greeted with both on the right and within the security agencies, Obama is talking about meeting out the War on Terror at a kind of lower altitude than the Bush administration had, but not landing the plane. Secondly, that requires Obama to make compromises with the entities that are going to be carrying out his War on Terror. So if you need the CIA to do drone strikes, you can’t prosecute it for torture. If you need the NSA to intercept everyone’s data in bulk for allegedly suspicions of who might possibly detonate a bomb in the United States, then you can’t not… You can’t even turn those programs off. Obama famously, in the months before taking office, votes to institutionalize warrant-​less surveillance during an important April 2008 vote in the Senate. You want the US military to withdraw from Iraq, you give the military ultimately a wider berth than Obama sought to do in Afghanistan to escalate.

0:32:52.7 Spencer Ackerman: So Obama isn’t an abolitionist, and in doing so, there’s this sort of third element to it, which is that you start defining what abuse is in the War on Terror as a deviation from the thing rather than the thing itself. And there is where a great shock is experienced by Obama’s more left-​wing supporters at the beginning of the administration, when they see that taking root in the course of the first year of Obama’s presidency, and then especially in the second where Obama is consolidating the War on Terror more than he’s getting rid of it, and then ultimately wielding it and taking it into new frontiers, whether it’s drone strikes or whether it’s an undeclared war in Libya.

0:33:47.1 Trevor Burrus: By the time… The interesting connection here is that, in your book, is getting to Trump, and the connections you make to Trump. And it seems that the predominant narrative about the Obama years, and this is true for a lot of things, such as immigration, is that he was a weak on immigration, he was weak on the War on Terror, even though he did, as you pointed out, fight a war in Libya… Sorry. I’m sorry. Not a war, a kinetic military action…

0:34:16.8 Spencer Ackerman: Yes, indeed.

0:34:17.9 Trevor Burrus: Probably the most Orwellian thing that I’ve… Phrase I’ve experienced in the last 10 years. But the perception of him being weak, even though he deported more people than any president ever, there’s still…

0:34:28.7 Spencer Ackerman: More than Trump did.

0:34:30.1 Trevor Burrus: More than Trump. There’s still multiple perceptions that seemed to bring Trump into, at least a claim and the stuff that he starts saying to get prominence, that he’s just weak. And so it was just maybe that Obama didn’t say the right things even though behind the scenes, he was doing all these things.

0:34:48.7 Spencer Ackerman: Well, I don’t think you can really neglect the ways in which the fact of the Obama presidency prompts just enormous right-​wing rejection is not necessarily because of stuff Obama did, but because of who Obama was. And look at something like birtherism, which launches the modern phase of Donald Trump’s political career. The War on Terror is all through birtherism, because it’s not just that Obama isn’t an American citizen, it’s not just that he’s Kenyan, it’s that he’s a secret Muslim. And the War on Terror has spent nearly in the past decade telling you that this sort of person is not your political opponent, this sort of person is your enemy, this sort of person is here to kill you, kill your family, subvert and replace your constitution, and now he’s the President of the United States and what are you going to do? And this is what is perhaps a lesser appreciated factor animating birtherism. Trump takes this like he takes a whole lot of other nativist subtexts and path dependencies of the War on Terror and makes it really explicit. And he does it in a way that no longer… Unlike every other Republican leader, no longer pays lip service to this idea that the wars are valuable or are anything other than a disaster.

0:36:31.8 Spencer Ackerman: So there’s a whole lot of just uncomfortable… You see it really in the Romney campaign, you see it with the Tea Party. You get both a reflection of an exhaustion with the operations overseas of the War on Terror, with the ways in which they seem to impose uncomfortable and expensive and open-​ended obligations upon the United States when it’s supposed to have been this valorous exercise of American might. And the ways in which those express themselves in conservative politics around this time, like right before than during Trump, is through embracing both civilizational rhetoric about them, like there is a tower in Lower Manhattan that’s gonna be a monument to 9/11 that the Muslims are setting up or they’re trying to replace the Constitution with their Sharia law.

0:37:33.6 Spencer Ackerman: And then by the time Trump runs for president, you’ll remember from the golden escalator speech, how many times Trump is talking about ISIS, as ISIS represents here this ultimate failure of the people who have been telling us that the War on Terror is this epic, if not quite crusade, necessary task. And look what we’ve gotten from it, we’ve got nothing from it. And there is this [0:38:06.7] ____ that gets set off that makes Trump look, ironically, given that he lies about everything, as more of a truth teller than the euphemistic and highly political ways that the rest of the Republican field and on the left in the Democrats with Hillary Clinton are explaining these failures away and trying to sort of posture them as that they’re in fact not failures, they’re wisdom. They’re the right ways that the rules-​based international order requires in order to safeguard the prosperity and freedom of us all. And all of this seems both abstract and absurd to a lot of people who don’t see what they actually got out of all of this.

0:38:49.0 Spencer Ackerman: And Trump has explanations for it. He says that what’s happened instead is that the weakness of our hated political opponents has now infected the War on Terror and what you need to do is not get yourself so entrenched in the operations of foreign overseas wars, but all you do is you just ramp up the violence in all of them and get less discriminating about how you go about doing that. And that becomes, when you look at what the Trump administration’s actual record on the War on Terror was, much more of a accurate map to what the MAGA error of the War on Terror thus far is actually good.

0:39:29.3 Trevor Burrus: By that you mean that by just sort of talking about the brutalism and the need for just expanding the brutalism of the War on Terror, they’re at least describing it more accurately than the Obama administration did? Is that what you meant?

0:39:44.8 Spencer Ackerman: No, no, no. Sorry, what I mean by that is when you look at Trump’s four years in charge of the War on Terror, the picture that actually emerges, which wasn’t always the media narrative about him, is a narrative very often of acceleration. Acceleration of drone strikes. Somalia, especially, becomes, to Trump, what Yemen or Libya was… Well, Trump doesn’t… Let’s make it Yemen, ’cause Obama doesn’t start that war, Trump doesn’t start Somalia. But much as Obama turns the dial up to 11 on war on Libya, Trump does the same thing in Somalia. Most surveillance activities under Trump, despite Trump talking endlessly about the perfidies of national security surveillance when applied to him and his coterie, surveillance on everyone else in America accelerates, it does not in fact constrict. And on and on in that vein, the War on Terror under Trump, just like under Obama, does not in fact experience a withering away or even a substantial restriction, despite the ways in which the perfidies of the War on Terror operated as a rallying cry to either of their respective constituencies.

0:41:10.0 Trevor Burrus: It’s always struck me that one of the parts about being an American that colors so much of our foreign policy, is that we feel that we can kick anyone’s ass on any… In a militaristic sense, that we have to feel that way, and that… So simultaneously, we fight wars and we wanna fight them all with one hand tied behind our back, but we all… But there’s a belief in the back of the head that says if we ever really did fight it all the way, that we would just be able to steamroll anyone essentially, and that we have to believe that about ourselves as Americans. And it seemed to me that that had a huge factor in the way that Trump talked about what needed to be done, it was just that we can do it, we just have to do it. We’re America, we won World War II and this kind of stuff, just to sort of return that sense of greatness to the American psyche, which is where, of course, so much of this brutalism comes from.

0:42:09.5 Spencer Ackerman: So one of the things that I try and focus on in the book is the ways in which Trump… When he talks about the War on Terror as a presidential candidate, he hits, I think, an under-​appreciated emotional theme, which is what he’s saying when he says we don’t win anymore. There was a mythical time in which America was constantly winning, not just from an economic perspective, but from a martial perspective, and we know it’s in us, we just have to turn this franchise around like it was a sports team. And that no less than the way liberals talk about war as a humanitarian enterprise and a necessary enterprise to maintain global stability in order, that speaks to… These are both tributaries from the same fantastical river of American exceptionalism. And without addressing the ways in which American exceptionalism operates as a narcotic to American policy makers and as well to American capital, then we’re going to be stuck in this horrific cycle, because the path dependencies of having this extractive and brutal hegemonic footprint over the world are such that you always have to deal with challenges to it, those challenges are very often violent…

0:43:43.3 Spencer Ackerman: Your leads will demand a response in kind. There will be destabilizing impacts on the people that have to suffer through this in the backyards where they do it. It’s just a horrific cycle that left to its own devices, can escalate just by inertia. And it is in that spirit that I wrote this book, to call attention to the ways in which all of these really ugly factors feed on one another and grow strength from one another and require active measures to unravel them.

0:44:18.0 Trevor Burrus: Now, Biden is a long-​time veteran of fighting the War on Terror and being involved, of course, as a Senator and then as vice president under Obama. Does he have the same old school views? Ending Afghanistan is much of a sort of botched, at least in how they did it, was at least doing something different from the last 20 years, or do you expect, or currently what happening, just the same old, same old because of the milieu that he has come from?

0:44:50.9 Spencer Ackerman: With Biden, there’s a repetition of the same impulse that we saw when Obama was elected, that the enterprise itself is ultimately still valorous, but its excesses have to be trimmed off. And once you do that, then you can appropriately address what the… As they like to call it, the counter-​terrorism threats of today and tomorrow, rather than the counter-​terrorism threats of yesterday. You saw also an echo of Obama in the way which… When Biden was withdrawing from Afghanistan, he used maximal abolitionist rhetoric about the War on Terror to achieve a minimal, from the perspective of abolitionist, result. An important one, but still minimal. It is very significant when you look at what the withdrawal from Afghanistan has been, that first when he was conducting it, he reserves upon the United States the right to bomb Afghanistan as need be, which implies a right to surveil Afghanistan as need be. And then since the US withdrew from Afghanistan, the Biden administration has engineered what can only be described as a human rights atrocity in destroying the institutions of Afghan finance, making a famine in Afghanistan vastly, vastly worse and ultimately deploying against the people of Afghanistan a sanctions regime that should be more properly understood as an inflation weapon.

0:46:39.5 Spencer Ackerman: And an inflation weapon works not against the people in power, who the sanctions are theoretically predicated against, but by making everything worse for the people on the theory that enough horror inflicted on the people will prompt them to oust the regime. If this is what the rules-​based international order in fact is, then it has to be looked at as a threat to people’s lives and freedom. And I think that is something that not just the Biden administration is not prepared to come to terms with, but the entire US foreign policy establishment has proven itself throughout the War on Terror, not able to come to terms with.

0:47:23.6 Trevor Burrus: I would describe… In the… Since what you just said and just overall, is your book, when you… At the end of your book, I would describe it as pessimistic in terms of where this is going. We have… I think the most interesting observation in your book is what I mentioned about the kind of brutalism of American politics that I think you rightly put in 9/11 and the aftermath. But it just seems like the brutalism is going to continue, and unless we adopt a less brutalistic mindset, it’s not gonna get much better.

0:48:00.0 Spencer Ackerman: Well, I try not to put things in terms of optimism and pessimism. I try and view things in terms of obligation. So America created the War on Terror. I think that makes it American’s obligation to end it, not just for the lives, livelihoods and freedom of people around the world, but for our own to the point where if we stop and think about it, perhaps we don’t want American politics to become militarized at home while it’s so deeply and very sharply divided. And perhaps we might think about the ways in which where the mechanisms of the state that the War on Terror has entrenched really, really in such a context threatened Americans primarily, and more and more Americans, larger spheres of them, for different purposes. And the more in which… The longer that they’re entrenched, the more normal that’s going to just seem and become. And that I think is a very ominous prospect for America no matter where you are on the political spectrum. And I think once that realization occurs and takes room, then you actually have the roots of something very optimistic and positive, which is the prospect of a politics of solidarity that can come together to end a mutual threat. And perhaps that is a way in which something that if you wanna put it in these terms, optimistic can emerge out of something pessimistic.

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0:50:00.1 Speaker 3: Thanks for listening. If you enjoy Free Thoughts, make sure to rate and review us in Apple podcasts or in your favorite podcast app. Free Thoughts is produced by Landry Ayers. If you’d like to learn more about Libertarianism, visit us on the web at lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org.