We can no longer afford to take that which was good in the past and simply call it our heritage, to discard the bad and simply think of it as a dead load which by itself time will bury in oblivion. The subterranean stream of Western history has finally come to the surface and usurped the dignity of our tradition. This is the reality in which we live.
—Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism[1]
Just before 3:30 p.m. on August 31, 2021, President Joe Biden stepped into the White House State Dining Room to deliver a speech. Over the prior two and a half weeks, the United States and its allies had staged a massive airlift, moving more than 120,000 people out of Afghanistan, including soldiers, contractors, diplomats, aid workers, other civilians, and thousands of Afghans whose safety in their home country could no longer be ensured. It had been almost exactly twenty years since George W. Bush promised to wipe the Taliban off the face of the earth, but in February 2020, Donald Trump negotiated a peace deal with the group, promising the withdrawal of American troops within fourteen months in exchange for the Taliban’s commitment to preventing Afghanistan from becoming a staging ground for terrorist attacks. In the spring of 2021, with America appearing to be dragging its feet vis-à-vis withdrawal, the Taliban launched a stunning military offensive, overrunning the country on the way to Kabul, where they quickly deposed a government that had been lavished with U.S. aid and support for years. By mid-August, Kabul Airport was the only way out of the country. The other border crossings were all under Taliban control. As enormous C-130 and C-17 military planes took off with hundreds of people in their cargo holds and returned to take on hundreds more, twenty-four hours a day, U.S. embassy workers rushed to destroy the classified documents they could not take with them, and tens of thousands of Afghans scrambled to secure places on the departing aircraft for their friends, their relatives, and themselves.
President Biden characterized the airlift as a triumph. “More than 120,000 people evacuated to safety—that number is more than double what most experts thought was possible,” he said. “No nation has ever done anything like it in all of history. Only the United States had the capacity and the will and the ability to do it, and we did it today.” Several days earlier, 13 American military personnel, along with at least 170 others, had died when a suicide bomber attacked Kabul Airport, and once again a president reminded Americans that they were going to default on the blood debt they had been continually refinancing for nearly two decades: “We owe them and their families a debt of gratitude we can never repay.” He said that no one could have expected the U.S.-backed government to fall so quickly in the face of a Taliban assault, much less that the country’s president, Ashraf Ghani, would fill his pockets with cash and then flee the country in a helicopter.[2] But it was part of the American genius to be prepared for the unexpected, and Biden did his best to spin the hasty and chaotic retreat as a win for the U.S. military’s logistical acumen. He wasn’t so brazen as to literally claim that America had won the war, but that was the gist of the message. “Remember why we went to Afghanistan in the first place?” he asked. “Because we were attacked by Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda on September 11th, 2001, and they were based in Afghanistan. We delivered justice to bin Laden on May 2nd, 2011—over a decade ago….Then we stayed for another decade. It was time to end this war.” He didn’t spend any time dwelling on what America had been up to during the ten years that followed bin Laden’s death—what would the point have been? The important thing was that the longest military conflict in American history was coming to an end. “I was not going to extend this forever war,” Biden said.[3]
That last part wasn’t just spin. In some ways, the war on terror really did come to a close under President Biden. One could even argue that it had ended sometime during the Trump administration, although not in terms of America’s global military posture, which remained expansive. What changed under Trump was the war’s centrality to the country’s political life. Even as Trump polished up his image as commander in chief by overseeing campaigns against ISIS in Syria and Iraq, and even though one of his first major acts as president was to ban immigration from seven Muslim-majority countries, the war on terror steadily faded even further into the background under his administration. The new center of political life was Trump himself—his tweets, his lies, his grotesque and ever-changing cast of staffers and cabinet officials—and beginning in 2020 it was the COVID-19 pandemic, Black Lives Matter, and Trump’s efforts to remain in the White House despite losing his reelection bid that dominated Washington politics. The media didn’t bother to pay much attention to America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan until things began to go wrong, and even then many commentators saw the chaos at Kabul Airport as an acceptable price to pay for the end of a war that had outlived its usefulness by at least a decade. Most major outlets published at least a few editorials arguing that failure in Afghanistan had long been inevitable, and that withdrawing was the only reasonable course of action.
That didn’t mean everybody was happy with the withdrawal. Some politicians and commentators delivered righteous condemnations of the airlift. They said that by leaving, the United States had betrayed the people of Afghanistan, especially the thousands of Afghans who worked for American soldiers, corporate contractors, NGOs, and journalists. They said Biden had made it more likely that extremist groups would proliferate and one day regain the strength to mount an attack inside the United States. They said the United States had made it harder for allies to trust that America would honor its military commitments. They tended not to say what Biden should have done instead, and nobody expended much effort arguing that Biden should have ripped up Trump’s negotiated settlement with the Taliban and maintained America’s troop presence indefinitely. But they made it clear that Biden should have done something differently, anything that would have prevented the protracted national humiliation that was now broadcasting on television screens around the world. In the days after the withdrawal began, the evacuation’s failures were emphasized to the point of fetishization. When reports circulated that a number of dogs owned by U.S. military contractors had been left behind in Kabul, the New York Post portrayed it as a stain on America’s honor, with the president of a humane society describing herself as “devastated” that the Army could have abandoned “brave U.S. military contract working dogs to be tortured”—tortured!—“and killed at the hands of our enemies.”[4] The chief foreign correspondent for MSNBC, who once wrote in his memoir about reporting on the Iraq War that “Iraq was a land where careers were going to be made,” went on television to call the withdrawal “the worst capitulation of Western values in our lifetimes.”[5]
It wasn’t difficult to trace this note of hysteria back to its roots: The end of the occupation of Afghanistan reminded people of Vietnam, which stood alongside September 11 as postwar America’s great humiliation. Once again, the United States had failed to replace a hostile government with one more amenable to its interests, even after more than a decade of trying. Once again, the foreign politicians it had ushered into the halls of power had proved to be unpopular and corrupt, turning tail at the first sign of physical danger. And once again, America’s soldiers had been defeated by an army they massively outnumbered and outgunned. The wars had even ended in the same way, with airlifts undertaken in desperate haste as the two countries’ respective capital cities fell to enemy forces. Many Americans could still remember the news footage of a single helicopter perched on top of an apartment building in the heart of what would soon be renamed Ho Chi Minh City, with a line of dozens of people stretching down a stairwell in the hope of securing a place on board. “It was swarms of helicopters,” one American pilot said. “That’s the only way you could describe it.” Deck space became so limited on the two aircraft carriers from which these helicopters were dispatched that some of the choppers were simply pushed overboard, millions of dollars of the most sophisticated military hardware in the world dumped into the South China Sea.[6] Now people had to watch the same thing happen in Kabul, with the main difference being that fixed-wing aircraft had replaced the helicopters.
The similarities between Vietnam and the war on terror should not be overstated, though. Vietnam discredited overt American militarism for fifteen years. Street protests against both the draft and America’s involvement in the conflict roiled the country’s politics, from the 1967 March on the Pentagon through the 1968 Democratic National Convention riots, the 1969 Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam, and the 1970 killing of four student protesters at Kent State University. Congress also put constant pressure on the executive branch beginning in the late 1960s (the Watergate hearings were driven in part by congressional anger over Nixon’s constant maneuverings to exclude the legislature from foreign policy decision making). In 1971, the Cooper-Church Amendment cut off all funding for American ground forces in Cambodia, and in the summer of 1973 Congress voted to stop funding any U.S. military involvement in Indochina.[7] The year 1973 also saw the passage of the War Powers Resolution over Nixon’s veto. The law stipulated that a president could send American troops into action only when Congress made a declaration of war, except in cases of “a national emergency created by attack upon the United States.” In addition, Congress successfully pressured President Ford into issuing a ban on government assassinations, and the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act mandated that all federal government domestic surveillance operations be supervised by the courts. As we’ve seen, all of these reforms were either dismantled or circumvented by the executive branch in the early twenty-first century, but at the time they constituted the most significant rebalancing of government powers in several decades.
By comparison, congressional opposition to the war on terror has been toothless, and no similar rebalancing of government forces seems likely in the near future. In his speech, Biden singled out Afghanistan as a theater in which military conflict had outlived its usefulness while continuing to endorse the larger premises of the war on terror. “The threat from terrorism continues in its pernicious and evil nature,” he said. “It’s changed, expanded to other countries….We will maintain the fight against terrorism in Afghanistan and other countries. We just don’t need to fight a ground war to do it.”[8] Biden also indicated that even if the war on terror was ending in some larger sense—and he did refer to “ending an era”—the new goal was to repurpose American militarism rather than dismantle any aspect of it. “We have to shore up America’s competitiveness to meet these new challenges in the competition for the 21st century,” he said—“take on new threats that are here now and will continue to be here in the future.” In case people didn’t know off the top of their heads what these “new threats” were, Biden spelled them out: “There’s nothing China or Russia would rather have, would want more in this competition, than the United States to be bogged down another decade in Afghanistan.”
The war on terror may be winding down, but its legacy flourishes in America’s refusal to see the world as something other than a battlefield. Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine in early 2022, for example, is already a humanitarian catastrophe, and it is unlikely to produce major strategic gains for Russia. Though Russia’s annexation of some part of Ukraine through an eventual negotiated settlement would seem to be the likeliest outcome as of December 2023, it is not clear that the benefits of this territorial expansion will outweigh the costs of ruined relations with Europe and the United States. The invasion is also undoubtedly a criminal war of aggression. At the same time, it is worth noting that during the first two years of the war, America’s response has been to escalate the conflict at every opportunity. Diplomacy has been used almost exclusively to expand the ranks of those countries fueling the war with money and weapons, and the Biden administration and Congress have lavished Ukraine with military aid while simultaneously looking to expand NATO’s membership, a provocative decision given that anticipated NATO expansion contributed to Putin’s original decision to invade. Meanwhile, commentators such as Anne Applebaum, Jeffrey Goldberg, and Timothy Snyder have decided to emulate Andrew Sullivan after September 11, describing America’s support for Ukraine as a transhistorical defense of “civilization” and insisting that Vladimir Putin, like Osama bin Laden, is motivated solely by a hatred of freedom. The current situation is one that demands restraint, serious diplomatic engagement, and caution, especially given Putin’s recent decision to revoke Russia’s ratification of the global ban on nuclear weapons tests. That decision looks insane at first blush, but it is not without a logic. While the United States signed on to the treaty in 1996, Congress never ratified it, an outrageous blunder that has now made it possible for Putin to claim that Russia’s withdrawal from the treaty is just an attempt to restore strategic parity with the United States.
But instead of calls to the negotiating table, America’s response to the war is being shaped by Republicans, on the one hand, who would be happy to see Russia’s Trump-friendly imperial autocrat humiliate western Europe’s complacent parliamentarians, and Democrats, on the other, for whom the preferred outcome appears to be the collapse of the Russian state. More constructive requests to combine assisting Ukraine in its self-defense with diplomacy have been treated as so much Nazi appeasement. In October 2022, thirty progressive members of Congress sent a letter to President Biden. After praising Biden’s support for “Ukraine’s legitimate struggle against Russia’s war of aggression,” affirming their own continued commitment to “various appropriations of military, economic and humanitarian aid,” and recognizing the “courageous fighting and heroic sacrifices” of the Ukrainian people, the authors urged Biden to undertake a “proactive diplomatic push” as well, so as to avoid prolonging the war any further. “If there is a way to end the war while preserving a free and independent Ukraine,” they wrote, “it is America’s responsibility to pursue every diplomatic avenue to support such a solution that is acceptable to the people of Ukraine.” The response was furious, with the founder of a progressive news site accusing the representatives of “making common cause with Lauren Boebert, Marjorie Taylor Green [sic], JD Vance, and the rest of the MAGA crowd.”[9] The letter’s signatories published a retraction within twenty-four hours. The result of this militarized intransigence may well be several years of grinding, useless, stalemated conflict that fails to improve Ukraine’s position when it inevitably negotiates a ceasefire.
The United States is also methodically escalating what could be an even more serious conflict with China, whose stunning economic ascent over the past several decades has reanimated the specter of great-power competition and increased the likelihood that the twenty-first century, just like much of the twentieth, will be dominated by a lengthy cold war. Similar to the war on terror, China is yet another example of domestic policy consensus across party lines in the United States even in the broader context of intensifying political polarization. Donald Trump has made criticism of China a staple of his political career since his first presidential campaign in 2016, and the Biden administration’s National Security Strategy, published in October 2022, identifies China as America’s “only competitor with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to do it.”[10] For at least the next ten years, the U.S. foreign policy establishment’s highest priority will be to prevent China from replacing the United States as the world’s primary superpower.
During this century’s first decade, that replacement seemed to be inevitable. No country was better positioned than China to take advantage of the dramatic liberalization of global trade in the late twentieth century. As companies from wealthy nations sought to capitalize on liberalized trade rules by outsourcing production to places with cheaper labor than what was on offer in the affluent north, they found that China had a labor pool that was not just enormous but relatively high-skilled as well. Chinese manufacturing exploded, and the proceeds from the huge volumes of cheap exports that China sold to the United States and other countries allowed the Chinese government to rapidly invest in the country’s infrastructure. Between 1990 and 2020, Chinese per capita GDP growth, which had previously increased by less than $230 total over thirty years, jumped by an average $336 per year, rising from $318 to $10,409.[11] And between 2000 and 2011, total annual GDP growth never came in below 8 percent.[12] The projected date on which China’s economy would officially become larger than America’s seemed to get pushed up with each passing year.
The picture got more complicated after the global financial crisis. The resulting depression put a serious dent in Chinese export growth, the source of its enormous financial reserves and the foundation of its manufacturing expansion. As a result, China’s central bank began to run up debt in order to keep infrastructure investment from drying up, and the government had to tighten its capital controls in order to keep private investors from sending their money abroad in search of higher returns. Over the past several years, this debt increase has caused a number of problems for the Chinese economy, not least in its overinflated real estate sector, and the country’s economic growth, though still higher than the rest of the developed world on average, has been steadily slowing since 2008.[13] In 2007, China looked like a country preparing itself to take the reins of the global economy from the United States, perhaps as early as 2030. Now it looks more like any other country struggling to muddle through the persistent problems of overcapacity in manufacturing, high debt burdens, and slowing growth.
Nevertheless, the economic momentum of the “Chinese miracle” has not fully dissipated, and China retains several forward-looking advantages over the United States, including its still-inexpensive (though less so than before) and highly skilled workforce, its capacity for the rapid construction of infrastructure, and its deepening trade relations with countries across the global south. But at the moment it looks as though China’s ascent was spurred by a happy historical coincidence—its possession of an enormous and inexpensive labor force—rather than any ability to lay the foundations for a new, qualitatively different wave of global expansion. This means that China and the United States will have to fight it out on the same playing field, navigating similar sets of economic difficulties while competing for slivers of relative advantage in a number of areas.
The first and most important of these areas, tech, is the one sector of the economy that policy makers around the world still believe could provide a solution to slowing growth, even though it has failed to do so thus far. When I say “tech” in this instance, I’m not referring to cryptocurrencies, the metaverse, or any of the other venture-capital-funded products for which “overpromise and underdeliver” seems to constitute the underlying business model. Instead, I’m referring to semiconductors, the tiny microchips that power everything from iPhones and the visual displays in automobiles to weapons systems and “smart” refrigerators. Semiconductors are now so vital to many of the world’s goods and manufacturing processes that some commentators have started describing them as the “oil” of the twenty-first century, an analogy that doesn’t work in all respects but still efficiently conveys their perceived importance to the modern economy. The United States is leaning hard on confrontation in the competition for semiconductor dominance, both to preserve the advantages it currently holds and to establish new ones in the future, and its attacks on China’s economy have sharpened in recent years. As president, Donald Trump imposed hefty tariffs on Chinese exports in an effort to lessen America’s trade deficit. The gesture was too scattershot to be effective, but it communicated a U.S. hostility to China’s economic success that is now shared across party lines. Since taking office, Biden has ratcheted up the pressure even further, and his tactics are much less haphazard. The Biden administration has placed export restrictions on advanced semiconductors and other technologies in an attempt to slow the development of China’s technology industry, a policy one analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies described as “strangling with an intent to kill.”[14]
Tensions have also sharpened over the island of Taiwan, which China has sought to reabsorb ever since the Communist Party’s 1949 victory over Chiang Kai-shek and his defeated Kuomintang party ended the Chinese Civil War. Taiwan is home to the most advanced semiconductor manufacturing plants in the world, and both China and the United States hope to secure control over that manufacturing capacity for decades to come. To that end, the United States agreed, in forming its new AUKUS partnership with the U.K. and Australia in 2021, to share nuclear submarine propulsion technology with the Australians, whom the United States hopes will serve as a check on China’s ambitions to control regional shipping routes. Donald Trump also revived the Quad, a diplomatic project among the United States, Australia, Japan, and India, to counter Chinese influence in the Indo-Pacific, and Biden organized the first meeting of all four countries’ leaders in 2021. Although the Biden administration has made some progress in improving relations with China following President Trump’s untrammeled belligerence, the United States is unmistakably preparing itself for war. In early 2023, The New York Times published a guest op-ed by an analyst claiming that war between the United States and China is now more likely than at any time since World War II,[15] and a four-star general with the Air Force predicted that war would begin in 2025.[16]
Such a war would not only be devastating in terms of the immediate human and social costs. Another area in which China and the United States now find themselves at odds is the green transition, the complex of raw materials, manufactured goods, and energy distribution systems that will be required to move the world economy away from fossil fuels. The world is already well behind the reductions in carbon emissions that would be required to keep global warming at or below 1.5 degrees Celsius. To retain even the slightest hope of meeting that target, drastic action and close cooperation among all of the world’s industrial powers are required, starting immediately. Together, China and the United States account for more than 40 percent of global carbon emissions, and China controls a high percentage of the raw materials required for the manufacture of crucial green-transition technologies, such as lithium-ion batteries. Should China retaliate against Biden’s semiconductor export controls by imposing restrictions of its own on materials such as lithium, nickel sulfate, synthetic graphite, cobalt, and manganese—and as of November 2023 the Chinese government has announced policies to reduce exports of graphite—it will further slow a transition that is already hopelessly behind schedule.
Unlike terrorism or immigration, climate change really is an existential threat to everyone, and it is a problem that cannot be addressed at all without international cooperation. Instead, the United States and China are moving steadily toward a military confrontation that would make any meaningful cooperation impossible for years and possibly decades. Such a failure would all but guarantee that some of the worst effects of climate change will be realized in our lifetimes. By prioritizing its own continued economic supremacy over a just transition away from fossil fuels for everyone, the United States is pushing the planet toward a series of climate disasters that could render large swaths of the earth uninhabitable and destroy the lives of billions of people.
Finally, Israel’s 2023 war on Palestine has revealed the extent to which America’s relationship to the Middle East remains a dangerously militarized one. On October 7, Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups fired several thousand rockets and successfully breached the barrier separating Israel and Gaza, killing around 1,200 Israelis (including at least 845 civilians) and taking some 250 hostages. In response, Israel launched what is already one of the deadliest bombing campaigns in history, obliterating much of Gaza’s northern half over six weeks, agreeing to a brief ceasefire that allowed for a prisoner exchange, and then starting work on destroying Gaza’s southern half at the beginning of December. Israel has carried out a ground invasion of Gaza as well. More than 15,000 Palestinians have been killed as of early December 2023, with another 40,000 wounded. The dead include 250 health workers, more than 60 journalists and media workers, and at least 6,600 children.[17] With much of Gaza reduced to rubble, rescuers relying on little more than their bare hands to dig in search of casualties, and Israel making no genuine effort to avoid killing civilians, the real death toll is undoubtedly higher. Those who survive (for now) face a lack of clean water, insufficient food, a health-care system that has been largely destroyed, and no way out of the war zone.
Though the stated goal of Israel’s war is to destroy Hamas and oversee the installation of a new political authority in Gaza, Israel’s leaders are well aware that eliminating Hamas through military force is an impossibility. Hamas is fully embedded within the civilian population, its elaborate network of tunnels has at least some capacity to shield its fighters from the bombing, and Palestinians view the plausible replacements (such as the West Bank’s governing Palestinian Authority) with disdain. Israel’s actions since October 7 leave no doubt that its real goal falls somewhere between ethnic cleansing and genocide. This is not speculation. In mid-November, the finance minister for the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right government explicitly called for ethnic cleansing, urging Palestinians to leave Gaza for other countries. “The State of Israel will no longer be able to accept the existence of an independent entity in Gaza.”[18] And in early December, an Israeli newspaper reported that Netanyahu had asked one of his aides to “explore ways to ‘thin out’ Gaza’s population.”[19] This “thinning out” might be accomplished by driving Palestinians across the border with Egypt, but bombs can get the job done as well. Either way, Israel’s campaign constitutes exactly the kind of war crime that international courts were established in order to prosecute. A professor of Holocaust and genocide studies has called Israel’s campaign “a textbook case of genocide, unfolding in front of our eyes.”[20]
The American government’s support for Israel’s campaign has been explicit and enthusiastic. The White House national security spokesperson John Kirby has affirmed on multiple occasions that the United States is “not drawing red lines” when it comes to Israel, and the United States also rejected a nonbinding resolution calling for a ceasefire at the United Nations. In addition to this rhetorical and diplomatic support, the United States has provided Israel with staggering amounts of military aid, totaling some $158 billion worth of equipment since the country’s founding in 1948. Biden also promised that additional aid would be sent to Netanyahu’s government after October 7. Without the weapons and diplomatic cover that Israel receives from its patron, it would never be able to maintain such a belligerent stance toward the Palestinians whose lives it controls, nor toward its neighbor countries in the region. “We need three things from the US,” Netanyahu recently told a group of officials: “munitions, munitions, munitions.”[21] So far, that is what Netanyahu is getting.
Within the United States, this support has provoked furious protests and increased the likelihood that Donald Trump will regain the White House in 2024. (Though Muslims and Arabs constitute just 1 percent of the country’s population, they proved crucial to Biden’s winning coalition in 2020, particularly in the Midwest. Support for Biden has plummeted among those groups since October 7.) It has also prompted concerns from anonymous officials within the Biden administration that Israel could ignite a broader and even deadlier conflagration across the region. Yemen’s revolutionary Houthi group has begun launching drone and missile strikes at U.S. warships and commercial vessels, U.S. forces have been targeted by rockets in Syria and Iraq, and Israel’s defense minister has suggested expanding the conflict to fight the Iran-backed group Hezbollah in Lebanon. “We should feel angry about how Netanyahu has literally put our reputation on fire to advance his personal political agenda,” one State Department official said. “The collateral effects to American security are extremely consequential.” Another official criticized news articles that tried to portray the United States as urging caution and restraint on the Israelis, saying, “It just feels like patting ourselves on the back while it increasingly seems like the IDF [Israel Defense Forces] are waging a campaign of ethnic cleansing.”[22]
The campaign has also revealed the ease with which some of the social and political dynamics that characterized the peak years of the war on terror can come rushing back to the surface. In the years after September 11, for example, FBI informants and paranoid university administrators made it all but impossible for Muslim student associations to participate in political debate. In November 2023, Columbia University suspended Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace, student groups that had protested Israel’s war without ever engaging in violence. After September 11, critics of the Bush administration were accused of supporting terrorism and actively undermining America. After October 7, commentators, politicians, and news organizations have routinely portrayed pro-Palestinian protests as antisemitic, falsely portraying antiwar activists as bigoted thugs roaming America’s cities in search of Jews to harass and intimidate. After September 11, attempts to discuss the political roots of the attacks (for example, by Susan Sontag) were demonized as unthinking and reflexive anti-Americanism. After October 7, the House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a resolution declaring that anti-Zionism—a political stance opposed to the legitimacy of a colonial state founded on one religious group’s interpretation of its own scriptures—is the same thing as antisemitism. After September 11, officials and pundits exaggerated the scale of the domestic terrorist threat so as to maintain support for government surveillance of Muslim Americans, NSA bulk surveillance, and a psychotically aggressive foreign policy. And since October 7, the Israeli government has repeatedly disseminated false information about atrocities committed by Hamas, circulating stories about beheaded infants, fetuses ripped from their mothers’ wombs, a systematic program of sexual violence, and the mass burning of children that it has consistently failed to substantiate with evidence. One might have thought that hundreds of murdered civilians would be outrageous enough on its own. Apparently not.
The analogy has limits, of course. The current climate of fear in the United States is still less intense than what prevailed in the fall of 2001; airports, for example, have not further tightened their security procedures because of Hamas. With that said, today’s social and political climate is different only in degree, not in kind. In both cases, the people cheering on the slaughter drape their bloodlust in a hysterical rhetoric of civilizational defense against a horde of savages. In both cases, those who object to the killing are accused of being apologists for rape, murder, and torture. In both cases, the gap between public opinion and the government’s rhetoric and actions is vast (as of early December, more than three-quarters of self-identified Democrats, and more than 60 percent of all voters, support a permanent cease-fire). Then and now, the goal would seem to be to recast a complex political question—in the current case, how to build peace between a nation of settler colonists and the people whose land they have occupied for decades—as a dark fairy tale, a morality play in which the only path to “peace” is the total displacement or annihilation of an ancient enemy.
Why would Biden be willing to risk the end of his presidency and the return of President Donald Trump to support a war that is so unpopular among his own supporters? One answer might be found in accepting as authentic Biden’s self-presentation as someone who puts the national interest ahead of his personal success or party politics. As an ally, Israel can often seem to be more trouble than it’s worth, but in the eyes of America’s foreign policy establishment, it is indispensable. As Biden said in 1986 and repeated after October 7, “Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel.” To be more specific, a belligerent Israel is a crucial component of America’s strategy for the Middle East. It is an effective guarantor of American control in the region precisely because of its aggression. Its nuclear arsenal (one of the worst-kept secrets in the world) and potential willingness to use it constitute America’s plan B should the United States fail to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. Its intelligence agencies regularly assassinate members of Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in Iran, Hamas, and other groups that the United States is unable to engage directly. It is a snarling dog whose chain America threatens to loosen whenever some regional actor seems at risk of opposing the United States too strenuously. America has other regional allies, of course, including the autocratic governments of Egypt and Saudi Arabia. But it can never have full confidence in Egyptian or Saudi Arabian support, not least because of the popular discontent that the rulers of those countries must always be careful to suppress (most of the September 11 hijackers were Saudi Arabian, after all). Only with Israel, a fellow settler colony and a nation utterly dependent on American largesse, can the United States be sure it has an ally that will be there in good times and bad. It is the contemporary world’s paradigmatic example of a client state.
Officially, the United States is also very concerned about the plight of the Palestinians, who for their part might be considered the contemporary world’s paradigmatic example of a surplus population. Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank are among the most surveilled, policed, imprisoned, exploited, and brutalized people on earth, subjected both to an Israeli occupation that is almost universally recognized as illegal (except by Israel and the United States) and, in the West Bank, to the predations of settlers who are always looking for an opportunity to encroach on Palestinian land, destroy the olive trees on which many Palestinians rely to make a living, and take possession of Palestinian homes. For decades, the United States has said it supports a two-state solution, meaning the formation of a Palestinian state along the borders that existed immediately preceding Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War of 1967. Biden has reiterated his support for a two-state solution since October 7, and while there is no reason to doubt the personal sincerity of that support, U.S. rhetoric on the subject has long rung hollow in the ears of Palestinians and the rest of the Middle East. Israel has never negotiated in good faith to work toward an independent Palestinian state, and the United States has never pushed Israel to do so. The concrete proposals that have previously received American backing have all fallen well short of what Palestinians might reasonably consider justice, whether through an unfair division of land, the failure to affirm the right of Palestinian exiles to return to their homes, or an unwillingness on the part of Israel to grant Palestinians full sovereignty and self-governance.
American government concern for the Palestinians has had a similarly hollow ring to it since October 7. Following several weeks of unrestrained carnage, some government officials began to change their tune on whether there is a limit on Israel’s right to “self-defense,” persuaded by some combination of political protest in the United States, expressions of disgust from other world leaders (particularly in the global south), and the cumulative effects of spending day after day looking at images of death and destruction. Though continuing to resist calls for a ceasefire, Biden said on November 1 that he thought there should be a “pause” in the fighting so as to allow some amount of humanitarian aid to reach those trapped inside Gaza. Several weeks after that, following the humanitarian pause and subsequent resumption of hostilities, Vice President Kamala Harris visited the Middle East and announced that “under no circumstances” would the United States permit Israel to carry out the forced relocation of Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank. Secretary of State Antony Blinken also said that Israel must have a “clear plan in place that puts a premium on protecting civilians.” This rhetoric, however, has not been backed up with actions such as putting conditions on the military aid the United States provides to Israel.
As for Biden’s insistence that “we need to renew our resolve to pursue this two-state solution,” there are good reasons not to be optimistic, even beyond America’s record of bias and insincerity in attempting to guide prior rounds of negotiations. Israel has a long history of establishing “facts on the ground” even when it knows the United States might not approve of its actions—a good pre–October 7 example is its relentless expansion of settlements in the West Bank—and then waiting patiently for the United States to decide that it can live with those facts after all. How much can a weeklong humanitarian pause matter if those who receive the aid are then immediately subjected to new rounds of bombing? What is the point of demanding that Israel have a “plan in place” for “protecting civilians” when any honest observer can see that Israel’s plan is to subject the Palestinians to collective punishment? What good is insisting that the forced relocation of Palestinians will not be permitted when it is already clear that thousands of Palestinians will choose to flee rather than attempt to survive in a place that has been reduced to rubble and ash? Until the United States either threatens Israel with material consequences (such as the end of free weapons and other equipment) or attempts to extract real concessions from the Israeli government (such as the removal of its violent and fanatical settlers from the West Bank), all such rhetoric should be viewed as attempts to save face, not as constructive political engagement.
Indeed, until October 7, Biden’s official plan for Palestine was to ignore it. This is yet another line of continuity between Trump and his successor. In 2020, the Trump administration finalized the Abraham Accords, an agreement under which Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates agreed to formally recognize and establish diplomatic relations with Israel (in exchange for increased arms sales from the United States). Biden tried to build on this achievement upon taking office, tending to America’s relationships with the Abraham signatories and attempting to persuade Saudi Arabia to recognize Israel as well. The hope was that by establishing productive diplomatic and trade relations among Israel and the more reactionary Arab states, the United States would be able to supervise the region from afar rather than directly. As one commentator explained, “Biden began to make good on the ‘drawdown’ promised by his predecessor—executing the pullout from Afghanistan while reducing troops and military assets in Iraq, Kuwait, Jordan and Saudi Arabia.”[23]
The success of this plan depended, however, on the world’s willingness to forget about Palestine as the United States, Israel, and its new allies enjoyed the fruits of their relationship. Rockets might still occasionally find their way from Gaza into Israel, and IDF soldiers might still “clash” with Palestinians along the border fence, but Palestinians would eventually submit to permanent occupation, and the Israelis would manage their wards judiciously, inflicting punishment when necessary but avoiding anything that might cause an international political crisis. That is the situation that Hamas exploded with its October 7 attack. And although one shouldn’t underestimate America’s ability to persuade the rest of the world to start looking the other way again, at the moment it would seem that there is no going back. Arab populations in the Middle East and Southeast Asia, along with South American countries such as Brazil, have reacted to the war with outrage and disgust. Bahrain, Jordan, Turkey, South Africa, Colombia, Chile, and other countries have either recalled their ambassadors to Israel or cut off diplomatic relations entirely. A significant and potentially irreparable rift has opened up between the mainstream of the Democratic Party and its left wing, and Israel itself will find it difficult or impossible to establish working relationships with its neighbors going forward. All of this has occurred because Palestinians refused to be abandoned to the occupation while the rest of the region pretended not to notice them and prepared to receive the next shipment of American military hardware. If things really are different going forward, if the fractures opened up by this war force the United States to put real pressure on Israel, for once—if and only if the ultimate result of this conflict is a just settlement for the Palestinians, then October 7 and all the carnage that followed might not have been for nothing.
In the meantime, however, Palestine, China, and Russia all indicate that the slow breakdown of the America-led world order is continuing. This is not to suggest that the United States will be out of the international power politics game in twenty-five, fifty, or even a hundred years. Nobody should blithely assume that Putin will succeed in restoring the Russian Empire to its former glory, nor that China will ever become the world’s predominant superpower, nor that Palestine will have a nation to call its own by 2050. But the events unfolding in any one of these three parts of the world would be ominous for America’s global standing on their own. All together, they make it hard to avoid the conclusion that America’s grip on international affairs is loosening for good, that its ability to function effectively as an empire might have degenerated beyond repair. In order to retain their power over other countries, empires need to maintain their legitimacy. And in order to maintain their legitimacy, they need to be able to persuade the people who inhabit colonies and client states that the benefits of imperial exploitation and control outweigh the costs, even if those costs are high. Who could now call that an accurate description of America’s relationship with the Middle East? To be sure, the benefits of empire remain obvious to Israel’s colonists and the basket of autocrats who head up Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Bahrain, and other authoritarian states. But for the quarter of Egyptians who live in poverty, the migrant workers who keep Saudi Arabia’s economy going, and the millions of Palestinians who live under Israeli rule, the United States today can be viewed as little more than a guarantor of their continued misery. The American empire may persist for many years to come, but its imperial legitimacy is quickly passing into the void of history. Even the dollar, one of the U.S. empire’s most important instruments of power, isn’t the behemoth it used to be. Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva recently called on the world’s developing countries to conduct their trade in their own currencies instead, a shift that would meaningfully diminish America’s power to impose its will via economic sanctions. “Who was it that decided that the dollar was the currency after the disappearance of the gold standard?” he asked in a speech at the New Development Bank in Shanghai.[24] Ending the dollar’s reserve currency status is not a realistic proposition in the short term, but it is not something a politician like Lula could have dreamed of suggesting twenty years ago.
An important caveat: Just as a nation state’s ascent from aspiring geopolitical heavyweight to imperial hegemon never unfolds along a smooth and always upward-sloping path, one should not expect a declining hegemon to gently slip back into the middle strata of world power politics at a regular, even rate. There are inevitably ups and downs along the way, moments when an ascending state will appear to have lost the plot and missed its chance at great power status, and moments when a declining power will have appeared to put the ship back on course. These “moments” can last for many years. The last time the global economic order broke down and reconstituted itself around a new leading power, it took three decades for World War II to complete the work that began with World War I, and the premonitions and consequences of that revolution in global affairs unfolded for decades on either side of that thirty-year period. With the United States posting strong GDP growth figures in 2021 and avoiding a recession entirely in 2023 despite the challenges posed by high inflation, it can be tempting to believe that the COVID-19 crisis inadvertently helped America to crack the code of twenty-first-century economic success: revitalized industrial policy focused on tech and renewable energy, tight labor markets, and monetary policy that keeps a firm hand on the reins of an economic expansion without panicking and driving interest rates high enough to stop that expansion in its tracks.
That conclusion, however, would be premature, because the central issues that have driven America’s economic decline since the 1970s remain unresolved. Manufacturing overcapacity around the world is already causing difficulties for the green transition, with China’s mammoth investments into electric vehicle production threatening to lower profitability for other manufacturers and discourage investment. The United States economy also remains dangerously reliant on asset price inflation, with home prices and rents increasing dramatically since the bottom of the 2020 downturn and the stock market overly reliant on a tiny handful of tech industry giants. In addition, the American empire cannot succeed on the back of domestic economic success alone. As superintendent of a global capitalist economy, the United States needs to fuel global economic activity, but the very policies that have strengthened the American economy over the past few years have only exacerbated the zero-sum dynamics of slowing global growth. Efforts to “decouple” America’s economy from Chinese manufacturing have been a drag on China, the world’s fastest-growing economy over the past twenty years, and the federal government’s subsidies for green manufacturing at home have made green investment in Europe comparatively less attractive, with ominous implications for Europe’s growth potential going forward. In short, even if some combination of green industrial policy, a slightly higher baseline level of inflation, and hard-nosed economic diplomacy makes it possible for the United States to maintain or even enlarge its own slice of the global economic pie, it will do nothing to change the fact that for the rest of the world, the pie is either shrinking or not growing fast enough. That leaves the United States where it was back in the early 2000s, increasingly relying on the military to manage crises and prop up autocrats around the world.
For the first time in a generation, the United States is looking around and finding itself part of a multipolar world, one that will be impossible to navigate without a concerted emphasis on mutually beneficial diplomacy. But the United States is not putting an emphasis on diplomacy, on discovering constructive ways to adapt to the coming end of its hegemony. Instead, it is rushing into a new cold war without the key economic advantage that secured its victory in the last one: its ability to fuel and coordinate global economic growth. Rather than exploring the productive roles it might play in this multipolar world order, America is doubling down on war on terror belligerence. For fifteen years, the war on terror defined the terms in which American politicians allowed themselves to think. Their apparent inability to start thinking in different terms now that the war has ended bodes poorly for the rest of the twenty-first century.
In epilogues to books like this one, authors are sometimes expected to propose a few reforms, to offer their readers hope that the problems they have just wrestled with for several hundred pages could be addressed with a few well-targeted laws and changes to the country’s system of governance. In a book on America’s declining life expectancy, a writer might advocate for the implementation of government-funded health care. In a book on gun violence, they might call for a ban on assault weapons and the imposition of universal background checks. A book on economic inequality would highlight increased union membership and higher income, wealth, and estate taxes as part of a potential solution. Since this is a book about the war on terror, the obvious way for me to meet this expectation would be to demand that Congress revoke its Authorization for Use of Military Force, stringently apply the provisions of the War Powers Act to the executive branch, shut down the intelligence community’s mass surveillance operation, hold trials for anyone who participated in torture or extrajudicial assassination, ban the sale of military equipment to domestic law enforcement agencies, pay reparations to the immigrant families who were targeted by the FBI, and reduce the military’s federal budget by at least 50 percent. If I also wanted to include a few more unlikely proposals in order to expand people’s conception of what is possible, I might suggest that a Department of Peace be made a cabinet-level office within the executive branch. I would point out that some Americans have been advocating for such a department since 1793, when Benjamin Rush, who signed the Declaration of Independence, made the proposal in an almanac. In doing so, I would demonstrate that the solutions to America’s problems can already be found in a neglected corner of American history, and that with a little publicity and organizational effort, those solutions might help to put the country back on the just and prosperous course its founders envisioned nearly 250 years ago.
I would be thrilled to see any and all of the above come to pass. Unfortunately, I don’t believe that policy wish lists are adequate to the historical moment in which we’re all currently living, and I don’t think the answers to America’s problems lie in America’s past. In order to publish such a wish list, you have to believe that the government is capable, or could be capable in the future, of actually enacting the necessary reforms. I don’t. Washington is a place where progressive reform is difficult even under the best of circumstances, and we have not been living under the best of circumstances in the twenty-first century so far. The Senate, which grants each state equal representation no matter the size of their respective populations, puts a heavy finger on the Republican side of the scale, giving the half a million conservative residents of Wyoming the same legislative clout as twenty million New Yorkers. Mitch McConnell, Senate leader of the Republican Party since 2007, has used his time in office to pack the federal courts with conservative justices, building a sturdy judicial firewall against any reforms that might happen to find their way through the legislature. Gerrymandering at the state level tips the scales even further toward reaction. And with power so concentrated in the executive branch, particularly power over foreign policy and military decision making, citizens have little to no say on issues such as where America’s troops will go next. When people took to the streets and demanded reforms starting in 2015, conservatives took one of the words the protesters used to define their aspirations—“woke,” meaning the awareness that systemic social injustices need to be addressed—and turned it into a slur. One prominent Republican governor with aspirations to national office has said he would like to turn his state into a place “where ‘woke’ goes to die.”
The Republican Party is by no means some kind of unstoppable juggernaut. It has struggled with internal divisions since the failure of the Iraq War and the election of Barack Obama. The policy positions it most relies on to mobilize its base in primary elections, particularly the criminalization of abortion, are deeply unpopular among the wider public. Its last two presidents both took office after losing the national popular vote. Committed to a policy platform that cannot hope to win at the ballot box, the GOP now more or less consciously understands itself as a minoritarian political movement, one that must devote itself to restricting access to the vote and sowing doubt about the legitimacy of the electoral process whenever that process doesn’t produce the desired result. Its standard-bearer is well past retirement age and facing multiple criminal indictments, and the pool of talent that might replace him is extremely shallow. The party is vulnerable, and those vulnerabilities are only going to increase over the coming years.
In terms of the war on terror, however, none of the above matters all that much, because the militarization of America’s relationship to the rest of the world is one of the only remaining policy areas on which both major parties largely agree. (Republicans are now tired of funding Ukraine’s self-defense and would be more or less content to see Russia come out of the war with some extra territory, but that position is not the product of any principled antimilitarism, as evidenced by some prominent Republicans’ belief that the United States should combat drug smuggling by bombing or even invading Mexico.) The war on terror can help us to see the limitations of analyzing American politics in terms of “polarization.” The most important political story of the past two decades isn’t the intensifying conflict between Republicans and Democrats. It is the story of an empire, a world-spanning political and economic system, that clawed its way to the top of the global power hierarchy and is now determined to imprison and kill as many people as it needs to in order to stay there. If that sounds like hyperbole to you, take it up with the Afghans, Iraqis, Yemenis, Pakistanis, Somalis, Palestinians, Muslim and Arab Americans, and activists who have found themselves in the crosshairs of the war on terror over the past twenty years. During that time, both parties managed at some point to win control of the White House along with both chambers of Congress, but there have been no major reversals of America’s ongoing militarization of the world. In the eyes of the government as a whole, there is no other choice. It is wedded to an economic system that is increasingly unable to provide most people with a stable material life, but it governs a population that demands unlimited and uninterrupted access to inexpensive consumer goods. It is America’s privileged position at the head of that economic system that makes that access possible. As the global economy slows down and swells the ranks of the world’s surplus population—and despite recent flashy growth figures in the United States, global growth continues to weaken—the United States has sent in troops and launched drones to manage them while drawing on its own racist mythologies in order to justify their deaths. When Americans have protested against the worsening conditions they see wherever they turn, the government has used militarized police forces to terrorize and beat them into submission. And as capital continues to spew carbon into the atmosphere and degrade the planet’s habitability, the United States, as capital’s chief political representative, will send its armies, cops, and surveillance technologies after the millions of refugees who are soon likely to find themselves wandering the earth in search of dry land. This response to climate migration is already a conscious part of the government’s future plans: The Pentagon and the White House have been discussing climate change as a “national security threat” for more than fifteen years.[25]
It is an unpleasant fact of politics that the good intentions of individuals are decisively constrained by the systems in which they work. The American imperial system, which structures, guides, and restricts the lives of countless people abroad as well as its own citizens, is not interested in reforming itself. Indeed, its continued survival depends on its not reforming itself. Most people do not want to live in a militarized, surveillance-intensive world that has been rendered uninhabitable so that profit margins can be sustained at acceptable levels, but the American system that organizes the world is not primarily concerned with what most people want. Like all political-economic systems, and like all empires, it will come to an end eventually, but there is no way of knowing when, or how, or what exactly the decisive spark will be. What can be said of our moment is that we are living in a period of deep and widespread crisis, a situation the Italian thinker Antonio Gramsci defined as one in which “the old is dying and the new cannot be born.” That is a tough spot to inhabit. In the short to medium term, the likeliest outcome for the United States and for much of the rest of the world is that things are going to get significantly worse—politically, economically, socially, and ecologically—before they begin to get better. Even if carbon emissions were to permanently drop to zero today, temperatures would continue to increase for some time, sea levels would keep rising for centuries, and it could well take a thousand years or more for temperatures to return to their preindustrial levels. That reality raises what I think is a sobering but unavoidable question for our shared historical moment: How should a person think and live in a world that offers hope, but potentially not for you?
One way to begin answering that question is to remember another phrase Gramsci liked: “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.” In other words, do not trick yourself into seeing things as better than they are, but behave and act as though justice were within reach. Over the past decade, activists have been our exemplary practitioners of optimism of the will. I’ve already talked in this book about the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, and Black Lives Matter, but there is also a fourth protest movement that emerged during the Obama years, one I’ve not yet mentioned, which may prove to have a deep historical resonance. In December 2014, a Texas oil company called Energy Transfer Partners filed a federal application to build a twelve-hundred-mile pipeline. The proposed Dakota Access Pipeline would carry oil down from North Dakota to Illinois. Along the way, it would cross underneath Lake Oahe, which served as the primary source of drinking water for the Cheyenne River and Standing Rock Sioux nations. Indigenous leaders also objected on the grounds that the pipeline’s construction would likely destroy several sacred burial sites. When those objections fell on deaf ears, a coalition of Standing Rock and other indigenous communities established a camp to block the pipeline’s construction. As the Kul Wicasa scholar Nick Estes wrote in his book on the protests, it was the first time in more than a century that “all seven nations of Dakota-, Nakota-, and Lakota-speaking peoples” had gathered in one place to work toward one goal. And when North Dakota’s governor, Jack Dalrymple, declared a state of emergency in August 2016 to defeat the protests and ensure the pipeline’s completion, the camp began to attract supporters, indigenous and otherwise, from around the country and the world. “At its peak,” Estes writes, “the camp was North Dakota’s tenth-largest city. Its population surpassed 10,000 people, possibly reaching as many as 15,000.”[26] The protesters called themselves “water protectors.”
The Dakota Access protests took inspiration from Occupy, BLM, and the Arab Spring in focusing on occupying physical space for as long as possible (they held out for about eleven months). The war on terror had destroyed many of the country’s public spaces and made it difficult for people to gather in the ones that remained, and protesters responded by conjuring new public spaces into being, places where people could speak, learn, care and be cared for, and collectively work toward discovering better ways to live. The people who lived at Oceti Sakowin fed thousands every day, handed out clothing, prayed together, provided medical treatment to the injured, trained new arrivals in protest tactics, and even established a school for children. The protest also drew a bright line connecting the concerns of local communities to the larger fate of the biosphere. The Dakota Access Pipeline specifically threatened the water on which the Sioux nations depended, but all fossil fuel pipelines are threats to the future habitability of the planet, no matter what part of the land they traverse. The Dakota Access protesters took that threat seriously. In doing so, they put up the stiffest resistance yet seen to the further expansion of the U.S. fossil fuel industry, and they also modeled the kind of society that might exist in a world no longer determined to burn itself to ash.
The government’s response to Standing Rock was overwhelming. The last time the State of North Dakota had mobilized so many law enforcement and military personnel, it was to massacre nearly three hundred Lakota at Wounded Knee in 1890. Law enforcement from seventy-six separate jurisdictions traveled to Standing Rock, along with members of the National Guard and private contractors working for TigerSwan, a firm that got its start assisting U.S. military personnel in Iraq. Kitted out with surplus military equipment provided by the Defense Department’s 1033 Program, the cops menaced protesters with assault weapons and MRAP vehicles. Using rubber bullets and beanbag rounds, they injured some two hundred protesters, and many had to be treated for hypothermia after being doused in pepper-spray-laced water in freezing temperatures. When law enforcement finally cleared the encampment in February 2017, they had arrested 832 people, and a few were sentenced to years in prison.[27]
More recently, in 2021, a group of activists inspired by Standing Rock’s example began protesting the construction of a $90 million police training facility in the Atlanta forest. Calling themselves “forest defenders” and marching under the banner “Stop Cop City,” these protesters tried to expand on the work done at Standing Rock by linking the fight against climate change to the struggle against America’s militarized police forces. As Standing Rock pointed out that the threats from climate change scale all the way up from the local to the planetary, Atlanta’s forest defenders have understood that a successful struggle to preserve the earth will have to run through the police powers the state mobilizes to protect fossil fuel extraction. Earlier in this book, I talked about Major Ralph Peters, who concluded in his 1996 article on the coming era of urban combat that “building realistic ‘cities’ in which to train would be prohibitively expensive.” That conclusion turned out to be premature. The plans for Cop City, which is officially named the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center, include not just classrooms and a shooting range but also a whole model city, where police trainees will be taught how to suppress the kinds of urban protest movements that have exploded all over the country in the past decade. The forest defenders saw this clearly, too, and mobilized to shut down the project before it had a chance to get off the ground. This time the police response was even more extreme. The police arrested dozens of protesters in late 2022 and early 2023, and the State of Georgia eventually charged forty-two of them with “domestic terrorism,” a crime that carries a thirty-five-year prison sentence. In January 2023, they also shot and killed the twenty-six-year-old activist Manuel “Tortuguita” Terán. The police claimed that Terán fired first. When Terán’s autopsy report was finally made public three months after his death, it revealed that the police shot him fifty-seven times. A special prosecutor with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation supported the officers’ version of events in an October 2023 report, but the state has refused to release the evidence on which the report’s conclusions are based, a decision described by one civil rights attorney as “unique and chilling.”[28] It was the first time in modern American history that police had killed an environmental activist.[29] It will not be the last. As people mobilize in the coming years to prevent climate change from forcing hundreds of millions into permanent homelessness, law enforcement in the United States and around the world will be waiting, armed with the training, heavy weaponry, and free rein to inflict violence that the war on terror provided to them.
What made the Standing Rock protest different from its immediate predecessors was the way it thought about sovereignty. Occupy Wall Street and (to a certain extent) the first iteration of Black Lives Matter articulated most of their demands as appeals for help from the U.S. government. Occupy asked the government to raise taxes on the wealthy, reverse the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. FEC, and get big money out of the political process. Black Lives Matter asked federal, state, and municipal governments to ban abusive practices such as stop and frisk, require police officers to wear body cameras, and in some cases pull police officers off the streets entirely. Black Lives Matter included more radical actions as well, but both movements fundamentally believed that their goals could not be achieved unless the U.S. government was willing to cooperate. Standing Rock framed the situation in a different way. It is one thing to ask the government you recognize as legitimate to refrain from building any more oil pipelines. It is another to assert that the government never had the right to build any pipelines because it stole the land from your ancestors. In his book on the protests, Nick Estes quoted something his grandfather wrote in a history of the Kul Wicasa: “My people were civilized before the white man came and we will be civilized and be here after the white man goes away, poisoned by his misuse of the land and eaten up by his own greed.”[30] Standing Rock didn’t just dispute the wisdom of building a pipeline; it disputed the United States’ claim to the land itself. It disputed the assumption on which the whole U.S. project rests, which is that the North American continent exists for the economic benefit of European settlers who built themselves a country out of the dispossession of the land’s original inhabitants. “How can settler society, which possesses no fundamental ethical relationship to the land or its original people, imagine a future premised on justice?” Estes wrote. “Whatever the answer may be, Indigenous peoples must lead the way.” At Standing Rock, they led by example, strengthening and publicizing a way of life that sees the water on which their community depends as a living part of that community rather than a resource to be exploited. “If the water, a relative, is not protected,” Estes wrote, “then the river is not free, and neither are its people.”[31] In the final chapter of his book, Estes posed a question. “Indigenous resistance is not a one-time event,” he wrote. “It continually asks: What proliferates in the absence of empire?”[32]
I’m not claiming here that Standing Rock is a literal, practical model for how people will put their societies and ecosystems back on a sustainable path. The National Guard and various law enforcement agencies were able to bring the occupation to an end once they put their minds to it, and they are more than prepared to do it again if other occupations emerge. There is no one model for change, no single example for everyone to imitate, no skeleton key that will unlock a better future. Intellectually, however, to see and hear Standing Rock’s vision not just articulated but realized, however briefly, opened up spaces for thought that hadn’t previously been available, and it was personally clarifying to me as I struggled to understand the war I have lived through for a majority of my time on earth.
My public school civics education was basically founded on two premises. The first, as I’ve already discussed, was that history had ended: Humans had tried many different kinds of government over several thousand years, and U.S.-style capitalism and liberal democracy had turned out to be the best. Whatever happened going forward, it wasn’t going to involve the kinds of revolutions and upheavals that characterized the past. The second premise was that the United States was something more than a country. Yes, it had a certain structure of government and a particular set of economic arrangements, but it also embodied an ethics, a belief in universal equality, a vision of human freedom—everything evoked by the famous seventeenth-century sermon about “a city upon a hill” and the moving opening words of the Declaration of Independence. September 11 disabused me of the first premise, but the second proved to be more tenacious. It’s not that I believed the whole story about America’s shining moral example. I knew about slavery and racism, segregation and sexism, My Lai and nuclear weapons, Japanese internment camps and the federal government’s homophobic response to AIDS. But I had been taught to understand these things as mistakes, deviations from what the country actually stood for. In the early years of the war on terror—that is, during my adolescence—this was a common way for liberals and progressives, among whom I counted myself, to understand what was going on. When the investigative reporter Jane Mayer published her book on the Bush administration’s torture program, its subtitle called the war on terror a “war on American ideals.” That book came out in 2008, several months before Barack Obama won the presidency. At the time, I shared all of the assumptions embedded in that subtitle.
After the Democrats took control of both Congress and the White House in 2008, however, those assumptions made understanding the war more difficult. If torture violated America’s commitment to universal human dignity, why wasn’t Obama’s Justice Department prosecuting anyone who had built the torture program? If the Iraq War violated principles of national sovereignty, why didn’t Obama withdraw America’s troops? If surveillance violated constitutional protections against unreasonable searches, why did the Obama administration facilitate an expansion of government surveillance? By 2012, I was so upset with Obama’s expansion and institutionalization of the war that I couldn’t bring myself to vote for his reelection. I was driving through Texas on Election Day, traveling from Los Angeles to Miami to conduct research for another book. I spent the day in a foul mood, listening to news on the radio as I worked my way east on Interstate 10 from El Paso to Austin. That night I stayed with a high school friend and accompanied him and a few other people to a bar to watch the results come in on CNN. I didn’t tell any of them about not voting. I knew it was a useless gesture, and I also knew it didn’t really matter, so why was it making me feel so bad? I didn’t know why I had done it, and I didn’t know what else I could have done instead.
The conclusion that I now believe I was avoiding back in 2012 is that it drastically oversimplifies things to say that the war on terror betrayed America’s values. In many respects, it embodied them. Part of the reality that needs to be faced going forward is that notions of American ideals will not be sufficient to guide us through the rest of the century. As Richard Slotkin wrote, it is “through myths [that] the psychology and world view of our cultural ancestors are transmitted to modern descendants,” myths that allow people to understand the values and ideals of the country in which they live.[33] Even a cursory look at the figures and characters who inhabit American mythology reveals a darker set of ideals than universal liberation and individual dignity. The “pioneers” who set out west in their covered wagons embodied ideals of unlimited economic expansion, internal imperialism that turned external once it gathered sufficient strength, and an economy so dynamic as to render the old constraints of time and space all but irrelevant. In James Fenimore Cooper’s Hawkeye, we find a hero so proficient, skilled, and self-sustaining—whether hunting, tracking, or surviving off the land—that he has no real need of community. And in the cowboys, roughriders, and Indian fighters of the American West, we find a people for whom violence is not just a duty but a pleasure, a means of spiritual renewal, a bloody wellspring of national genius. At the end of his first book on American mythology, Slotkin stepped back and surveyed America’s myth figures as a group. From a distance, he wrote, they “have an air of simplicity and purity that makes them seem finely heroic expressions of an admirable quality of the human spirit.”
But their apparent independence of time and consequence is an illusion; a closely woven chain of time and consequence binds their world to ours. Set the statuesque figures and their piled trophies in motion through space and time, and a more familiar landscape emerges—the whale, buffalo, and bear hunted to the verge of extinction for pleasure in killing and “scalped” for fame and the profit in hides by men like Buffalo Bill; the buffalo meat left to rot, till acres of prairie were covered with heaps of whitening bones, and the bones then ground for fertilizer; the Indian debased, impoverished, and killed in return for his gifts; the land and its people, its “dark” people especially, economically exploited and wasted; the warfare between man and nature, between race and race, exalted as a kind of heroic ideal; the piles of wrecked and rusted cars, heaped like Tartar pyramids of death-cracked, weather-browned, rain-rotted skulls, to signify our passage through the land.[34]
This is a horrifying description of what America “stands for,” one that I imagine most Americans would rather reject or ignore. And yet reading it helps to make sense of the war on terror, and without denying the consolations of looking away and plugging one’s ears, they cannot compete with the consolation of being able to see the world as it is. In the figure of Buffalo Bill, killing indiscriminately for pleasure and fame, one sees a reflection of the Navy SEAL Chris Kyle, the sniper who insisted that every single one of the dozens of Iraqis he personally killed deserved to die by his hand. In the exaltation of race war as “a kind of heroic ideal,” one can hear Christopher Hitchens and the satisfaction he took in the prospect of “a war to the finish between everything I love and everything I hate.” And the blasted landscape that concludes Slotkin’s vision, scattered with mechanical wreckage and buffalo skulls, recalls news footage of Baghdad, Fallujah, Kabul, Mogadishu, and all of the other cities that have been visited by America’s armies over the past twenty years. Keeping these images in mind as authentic representations of America’s values also helps to clarify why it is that those Americans who excused or endorsed the worst abuses of the war on terror also have the easiest time understanding themselves as patriots. Why is it that people who supported the invasion of Iraq are also the most eager to embrace the flag? Why is it that those who endorsed or excused indefinite detention, extraordinary rendition, and torture also chant “U-S-A” the loudest? Why is it that the people who are quickest to identify themselves as pro-America are also more likely to think that Islam is incompatible with being American? For much of the war, I was told again and again that those people were simply deluded about what patriotism is and what American ideals are. The likelier explanation is that those people weren’t deluded at all.
There are two issues at work here. One is nationalism, people’s emotional and intellectual identification with their own country and its interests, especially to the exclusion or detriment of people living in other countries. The second is imperialism, which is how nationalism tricks itself into believing that its own interests are those of the whole world. Nationalism has had different associations, valences, and politics over time, but in the twenty-first century, and particularly in the imperial United States, it is an impediment to solving the global problems that confront us. There is no version of American nationalism that can help to solve the climate crisis (the quintessentially global issue), and there is no version of empire that can help us lessen America’s military footprint around the world or do justice to the millions of climate refugees who will leave their homes in search of safety over the coming decades. The problem is not only that America’s national and imperial interests are served by drone campaigns, special ops raids, and economic policies that exploit those living outside America’s borders. It is that nationalism makes it harder to see that politicians’ insistence on dividing the problems they confront into matters of foreign policy and domestic policy is based on a false separation. As the United States moves further into the twenty-first century, Americans are going to make the painful discovery, again and again, that the problems they face at home and the problems they confront abroad are actually parts of the same problem.
In that light, the recent protests against Israel’s war on Gaza have been remarkable. For more than a decade, America’s major protest movements (and its most prominent progressive politicians) have been laser focused on the domestic, from Occupy Wall Street’s obsession with Citizens United, to Bernie Sanders’s “millionaires and billionaires,” to the refusal by Black Lives Matter to notice that policing at home and U.S. militarism abroad are components of the same project. These blind spots were understandable in groups of activists trying to teach themselves how to protest almost from scratch, but they had to be overcome: Activists living in a country that is also an empire cannot afford the luxury of only trying to influence what happens inside their own borders, nor can they afford to think only in terms of what America’s actions mean for Americans. With the protests against Israel, twenty-first-century American activists have become internationalist for the first time. While support for Israel and its war on Gaza is undoubtedly in America’s strategic national interest, these protesters have decided that their own interests lie elsewhere, that they do not identify with their country’s imperial ambitions, that their lives and those of the Palestinians are tied together, and that the barbarism in Gaza is an extension of the brutal treatment of surplus populations that harms their own communities (consider the chant “NYPD, KKK, IDF you’re all the same”).
The acuity of their insight may be measured by the viciousness with which much of the American government and many of the country’s key institutions have responded. Prominent CEOs have vowed that their companies will not hire people who criticize Israel. Student activist groups have been banned from campuses, their members falsely accused of antisemitism, and the media seems to have accepted the lie that protesting on behalf of besieged Palestinians amounts to calling for the extermination of the world’s Jews. In late November 2023, a white man approached three college students of Palestinian descent on the street in Vermont, two of whom were wearing keffiyehs, and shot them. Meanwhile, university presidents testify before Congress and fall over themselves in agreeing that the alleged antisemitism of student protesters is the real problem menacing student life. The same groups that have spent recent years cynically ringing the alarm about the death of free speech in the United States now advocate for repression in defense of impunity for America’s most valued client state.
It is by no means a certainty, but there is a real chance that by the time this book is published, Israel will have completed its ethnic cleansing of Gaza and the West Bank. It is almost a certainty that we will blow past the 1.5-degree threshold for warding off the worst consequences of our industrial recklessness. In my lifetime, we are likely to see small island nations and great coastal cities vanish beneath the waves, their inhabitants searching frantically for refuge. No one who has been paying attention can be surprised if the next fifty years bring intensifying conflicts between autocrats and insurgents, eruptions of violence as people fight for drinkable water, and a global right wing that continues to gather strength as it fortifies the border walls. For all their ingenuity, commitment, and courage, today’s activists may see their goals thwarted, find that the moment of opportunity never arrives, that the political space they need in order to build something new simply refuses to open. But even if all that comes to pass, it will not diminish the importance of the work being done in our own time. Every thought, argument, protest, and occupation lays another stone in the foundation on which others will eventually stand. Each social movement that fails to achieve its goals in the near term still emerges with experience and knowledge that could not have been gained in any other way. Each frustrated effort to seek justice communicates something indispensable to the people who make the next effort. And the writing of history is not only an attempt to make the past intelligible to the present; it is an effort to turn the present into something the future can use. One day, the political space people need is going to open. By keeping that day in mind, and in working now to assist those who will seize the opportunities it presents, we can entertain the hope that our descendants will look back on us with something other than anger and shame.
There are many millions of people living in the United States who don’t want to make war on Arabs, Muslims, or China to preserve America’s economic privileges. They don’t want to see protesters and refugees beaten, demonized, jailed, and killed. They don’t want fossil fuels to lay waste to what remains of our biosphere, and they don’t want the world’s working poor to be sacrificed on the altar of unending American supremacy. In the decades to come, some of those people are going to find ways of changing and living in society that don’t require a militarized world of SWAT teams, armored police vehicles, fortified borders, surveillance, night raids, secret prisons, and bombs, if only because they have no other choice. Today, it is impossible to say exactly what those solutions will look like, but we do know that they will not be imperial, for empire today can function only as a means of exploiting one half of the world for the benefit of the other. We also know (whether we want to or not) that with each passing year, each new border fence, each surveillance database, each drone strike, and each Special Forces raid, it becomes less likely that our descendants will use the word “American” to describe the solutions they eventually find.