We’re Living in the World the War on Terror Built

How the politics of the 9/11 era produced Donald Trump.

I’m Ezra Klein, and this is “The Ezra Klein Show.” My guest today is somebody I’ve known almost as long as I’ve been in journalism. Spencer Ackerman is a leading national security reporter. He’s the author of the newsletter “Forever Wars,” he’s a contributing editor at The Daily Beast, and he’s a member of the Pulitzer Prize-winning team that reported on Edward Snowden’s surveillance revelations. But now he’s out with a new book, his first book, “Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump.”

The core premise of “Reign [of] Terror” is that the policies and the politics of the 9/11 era, they didn’t only wreak havoc on the Middle East, but they transformed America itself. And they transformed us so profoundly that we’ve stopped seeing the way they’ve reshaped our country and culture. Now it’s just the water we swim in. In Spencer’s telling, the core of the war on terror itself was this narrative, a narrative of fear.

America faces an existential threat from an undefined, though implicitly brown immigrant Muslim enemy that must be defeated at all costs. America is innocent in this threat. They hate us for our freedom. They hate us for what makes America America. And they are not just trying to defeat us. They are trying to change us. We are in a war of values, a civilizational conflict.

Now you have the neoconservatives in the Bush administration who thought they could harness this fear, this fear of the other to power a very specific geopolitical agenda while keeping a lid on its most toxic manifestations at home. But then it spun way out of their control. And you get these anti-Sharia law bills and you get birtherism and you eventually get Donald Trump, which, of course, splits the neocons, too.

But then it’s not just the right here. Many of these central premises of the war on terror also get accepted by liberals. In Spencer’s view, even though Obama runs as an opponent of the Iraq War, even though he is, in certain ways, the antithesis of post-9/11 xenophobic flag pin politics, his actual policies in his administration end up accepting key premises of the war on terror and giving them a bipartisan seal in internal processes within administrations that’s made them, if not effectively permanent, much harder to see and to criticize and to fight.

So there is a lot in here. But at its core — and I want to frontload this idea — is that we still live in the world the war on terror built. And that if we are going to question its premises and move on from it, we have to see that. We have to see that lineage. As always, my email, ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.

Spencer Ackerman, welcome to the show.

Spencer Ackerman
Ezra, it’s great to talk to you. Thank you for having me.

Ezra Klein
So I want to begin with birtherism, which is the soil that Donald Trump rooted his 2016 campaign in. And it mostly gets talked about now as a racist appeal. But it’s more than that too. Can you talk about its roots in post-9/11 politics?

Spencer Ackerman
Absolutely. Birtherism, as you say, is often seen through what, understandably, is most, you know, conspicuous from the label anti-Black racism. And then somewhat off to the side in the distance, I think, the popular understanding of birtherism has also emphasized the foreignness of, you know, in this case, Barack Obama, the target of the claim. But it’s something else as well.

The reason why it’s a specific claim about Obama not simply being a Kenyan — which I think everyone who listens to this podcast, but we should still say, understands is not true — he’s not simply a foreigner. He is described by birtherism as a Muslim. And the reason why that’s significant is because it comes eight years or so after 9/11 in an atmosphere in which the United States is waging an open-ended, disastrous at that point, and unconstrained geopolitically, militarily against an enemy that isn’t defined very precisely, but is always Islamic. Its relationship to its own identity is described and understood in America after 9/11 not in terms of its political agenda, what it seeks in terms of the United States retrenching from military and proxy activity that occurs in the Muslim world often violently, but in terms of the fact that it is Islamic.

All of that together creates an atmosphere of emergency whereby, as birtherism would have it, it’s not just that Barack Obama is alien from the white American population that birtherism targets, but threatening to it. And it’s threatening to it because the war on terror exists. It would not appear on its face necessarily dangerous that, again, as birtherism would have it, it’s a giant lie, that Barack Obama is a Kenyan Muslim — not that there’s any problem with Kenyan Muslims.

But because of the 9/11 era, because of the war on terror, that context that by 2008 is so overwhelming as to be practically invisible, the background noise of American life, the very violent soundtrack of American life. Birtherism manifests itself to say that this man threatens you; this man does not just not have your interests at heart, but this man wants you dead. This man is an enemy of yours. And that often doesn’t get typically understood as the work that birtherism performs.

Ezra Klein
So I want to try to get at something here, which is that there are two major things happening in the war on terror. And one is the set of policies we would think of as the war on terror — the wars, the surveillance, the torture, the — all of it. And then there’s also the political force — rage, fear — that powers it.

And one of the reasons I think birtherism is interesting and Donald Trump picking it up is interesting is that it always strikes me that there’s a way in which Trump understood the politics of the war on terror much better than the people who actually launched those politics. They thought they could harness this kind of fear of the other and then use it in a very calculated way to power a geopolitical agenda, power specific policies, get support for specific wars.

And Trump understood that what was powering it was much bigger than that. And you could actually cleave it from at least some of the policies and still maintain its energy. And so then you have this strange spectacle of a lot of the Never Trump Republicans are like the initial neocon war on terror crew. But they don’t like where Trump goes with it. So can you talk a little bit about what Trump splits off from the war on terror, what he understands about it, and then where he diverges from it?

Spencer Ackerman
Absolutely. Trump understands that what’s right below the surface of all the policies and operations that make up the war on terror is this aggrieved, vengeful patriotism that opens a doorway to power to all of the ugliest currents in American history, all of the most brutal currents, the forms that say we should not only confront an enemy, we should dominate that enemy. And that enemy is defined not by what they do, but by what they look like, by what they believe, by what people who seem in superficial ways like the people we say are enemies also operate as.

So there isn’t any binding specificity there in terms of the operative level of the war on terrorism. But in terms of the culture of the war on terror, Trump understands exactly what that is. He understands that it’s not what elites who architect and then maintain and carry out the war on terror say it is.

It is, in fact, the impulse that says immigration is a national security threat, that says the people who have come inside the United States on a civil misdemeanor are, in fact, threatening the United States, not only in a direct material way, but in a larger spiritual way. That long before we get white supremacists marching in the streets of Charlottesville saying that white replacement is underway, we have powerful figures, both in power in the Republican Party and on the margins of it, that say that Sharia law, Islamic law is replacing American law and American identity.

Very often throughout the last 20 years that I’ve been a national security reporter, the people who husband national security — the intelligence agencies, the military, law enforcement, and then kind of beyond that, State Department, White House and Justice Department officials — never want to confront that subtext, even as the operations of the war on terror inevitably fuel it. They want to talk only about operations that occur overseas or specific law enforcement practices that occur at home, and rarely ever surveillance practices that occur in both places. Never do they want to confront that another cost of the war on terror is this slow, but urgent unraveling of American democracy and also the rise of nativism that seeks to sort real Americans from conditional Americans and act against them accordingly.

Ezra Klein
I think the thesis of the book — and I think it’s pretty straightforward — [is] that the war on terror, the forever wars, create our politics now. And on some level, it’s clearly true. But I also wondered reading it whether the war on terror and Donald Trump simply have the same base foundation in our politics. That the 9/11 attacks activated, made salient this fear of external threat. It allowed a long-running American strain of xenophobia and fury and a belief in its own innocence to come to the fore.

And Trump is, in certain ways, a product of that. Although he also runs, arguing George W. Bush was terrible and the Iraq war was a bad idea. But maybe he’s not so much a product of it as they are both just moments and actors and events that harnessed what is always a powerful strain of American politics and that takes different shapes depending on who the enemy of the moment is.

Spencer Ackerman
Well, the way I put it in the book is that the war on terror doesn’t create anything. In, perhaps, the banal technological sense, it certainly does in terms of surveillance. But really what the war on terror is is a door. It’s a door into American history to allow the forces that Trump harnessed to not only run through and seize power, but do so at a moment of national urgency, at a moment of sustained emergency, at a moment of sustained disaster. So I’m not really sure how far apart those two propositions you outline are. It’s not simply the case that the war on terror is monocausal explanation for Donald Trump.

That’s absurd. It was more that, first off, the war on terror, in this context of emergency, allows for all of the other explanations to rush through, take power, and claim that they are necessary. Remember, from the very first moment Trump descends at Trump Tower, he is talking about how the American experience of war has been a humiliation. We never win any more. We have nothing to show for these wars. But only when we unleash greater brutality, even less tethered to a specific enemy, then can these wars be redeemed. And “only I can fix it.”

Even just in that moment at Trump Tower, what’s hovering in the background? What is he repeatedly bring up in between talking about how Mexicans are rapists and so on and so forth? He brings up the so-called Islamic State.

He brings it up again and again. He brings it up to out that these elites who have plunged you into these stupid wars have now gotten you into such a precarious position because they refuse to name the enemy. And you risk losing America unless I save you.

Ezra Klein
Let’s talk about one of the, as you put it, technical legacies of the war on terror. So you describe in the book the rise of the surveillance state and the way that 9/11 coincides with these technological changes that allow for a stunning expansion and change in how surveillance is conducted. So let me ask it this way. We had the internet in 2000. I was on it. We had a C.I.A. and an N.S.A. and an F.B.I. Describe to me how different the surveillance that I face as an American is now than it was then.

Spencer Ackerman
Before 9/11, surveillance in the national security arena operated under a constraint of law — always a compromise, never as robust as in the criminal arena, but, nevertheless, a belt of law that prevents the N.S.A. from not just collecting intelligence about a specific person who there is reason to believe is an agent of a foreign power.

But after 9/11, the N.S.A., along with the F.B.I. in a kind of downstream role, but the N.S.A. in particular under Michael Hayden, hero of the Never Trump resistance, opts to exercise an exception from the post-1978 surveillance architecture of law that has prevented the N.S.A. from spying en masse on American citizens. The way this happens is that a critical law from 1978 called the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act gets violated outright.

That law tells you that for national security surveillance, FISA, as it’s called, is the exclusive means through which such surveillance can be conducted. What that means is that someone from the N.S.A. or often through the F.B.I. who seeks to collect data on someone inside the United States — they don’t have to be an American citizen, they just have to be inside the United States — the government has to present specific information explaining why this person is a legitimate target for surveillance and that surveillance occurs only after, in this case, like I say, it’s a compromise, a panel of secret judges — who never have to explain themselves in public and don’t face an adversarial proceeding, much like a grand jury indictment — orders that the surveillance can proceed or far less frequently turns down the surveillance. Already, you can see that’s a compromised system.

But the N.S.A. just violates it outright instead and entirely in secret without any pretense of democratic consent. The N.S.A. begins collecting both the metadata — that is to say, your communications records that you leave every time you visit a website, send or receive an email, send or receive a text, make a phone call, particularly internationally, and as time will go on, involve yourself in social media. All of a sudden, the N.S.A. decides to collect all of that. They collect it not with any individual suspicion, but in bulk.

They collect it not pursuant to any judicial authority, but unilaterally. They keep it under rules that they set themselves. And the purpose of all of this is to do a very early and then eventually very sophisticated form of data mining, which is to say to search through all of these records, once assembled in bulk, to find connections between people who might be dangerous and the people they speak to and the people those people speak to and the people those people speak to, which is called three-hop surveillance.

And what we are talking about here is an astronomical, hitherto unimaginable amount of data being collected, oftentimes from people who do not know that they are giving it. This is eventually just simply the way the 21st century economy works. As we participate in that economy and as companies participate in that economy, we end up generating a tremendous amount of data through the signals we use, from the apps we use, from the devices we use. And all of that, before we often realize it, is commodified by companies, arbitraged.

Eventually the N.S.A. realized — and this is after it even gets legalized in some very vague manner — all of that becomes something the N.S.A. and then the F.B.I. piggybacks on. It gets to the point where surveillance is inextricable from 21st century capitalism, that the war on terror provides an atmosphere of emergency where the N.S.A. gets to, on the pretext of protecting America, conduct surveillance at insane astronomical scale, separating itself unilaterally from the legal constraints that an earlier generation of legislators put on it democratically until it achieves escape velocity and is now simply a part of how we live.

Ezra Klein
Tell me what strictures exist on that now and ... so let’s go back a couple of months to the Trump administration, or a couple of years. And I’m a member of the press. Donald Trump doesn’t really like the press. I’m a critic of Donald Trump. Donald Trump doesn’t really like critics. I do a lot of stuff on the internet. So what would stop Donald Trump or any president from weaponizing this against critics, using it to try to figure out who leakers are, using it to try to intimidate or get blackmail potential? Like what is still there to stop its misuse, if anything?

Spencer Ackerman
Honestly, not a tremendous amount. Very often, it comes down to people in positions of power who are or who are not willing to say no. You may recall shortly before Trump left office, he sent one of his former White House functionaries, a guy named Michael Ellis, to become, against all procedure and custom, the General Counsel of the N.S.A., the N.S.A.‘s senior attorney. And the very deep fear that happened at that point — this guy was allied with Devin Nunes in the so-called unmasking scandal that they generated to try and exonerate Michael Flynn and then gin up a kind of counter controversy that sought to explain Donald Trump’s Big Lie insistence that Obama ordered him surveil.

The big, big fear about putting someone like that in as astronomically powerful a position like the General Counsel of the N.S.A. is that that’s a prologue of what we’re going to see coming across the horizon, that we’ve seen versions of this already over the past 20 years with people whose loyalties are not necessarily to the law or to the Constitution, but to a political leader embedding themselves within the architecture of the national security state and then seeing how they act. And they won’t act in predictable fashions. This happens in subtler ways in previous administrations.

But basically, what I’m getting at is the longer the war on terror goes on, the longer these mechanisms, these tools exist, it’s a matter of time until there are people in these relevant positions who simply say, you know, particularly if I’m a senior lawyer at one of these agencies, I’ll come up with whatever pretext I need to come up with to say my operations are lawful.

This is exactly what happened during the Bush administration when an attorney named John Yoo and another named David Addington decided to essentially retcon the laws about torture and about surveillance to allow these things to happen. This happened in the Obama administration when attorneys named Marty Lederman and David Barron decided to manipulate and retcon the laws to permit the assassination of an American citizen. We see with Trump not discontinuity, but a whole lot of continuity in an uncomfortable way that I write this book to reckon with.

Ezra Klein
We’ve been talking here a lot about Trump both as a culmination and expression of this politics, then as somebody who uses some of these tools. But between 9/11 and the Bush administration and 2016 and Donald Trump is eight years of a Democratic presidency. And a Democratic president who runs very much, certainly against the War in Iraq, if not entirely against the war on terror, but does run explicitly at times against the mindset of the war on terror. How would you describe Barack Obama’s relationship to the policy architecture of the war on terror?

Spencer Ackerman
A deeply tragic missed opportunity that put millions of people in peril that entrenched lawlessness in American national security, and then from their American government, that told itself that it was lawful. And what I mean by that is it’s, as you mentioned, it’s eight years between George W. Bush and Donald Trump. And in those eight years, Barack Obama really makes the forever war forever, even as, like Donald Trump will do subsequently, posture as an alternative to the war on terror. Now, of course, there are many, many differences.

Trump does so cynically. And Barack Obama does so, shall we say, contemplatively, trying to, as he would describe it and many of his administration officials would describe it, find a way toward what I call in the book the “sustainable war on terror,” which is a borrowed term, a term that everyone in good upper middle class liberal circles is probably familiar with in terms of sustaining something so that it doesn’t go beyond its designated limits and then reach a point of destabilization. Well, in fact, under Barack Obama, the opposite occurs.

The N.S.A. grows more powerful, often by inertia, by allowing its tools not only to develop in sophistication, but now after a 2008 surveillance law that Barack Obama votes for knowing that he will very likely soon be president, the suite of tools for the N.S.A. expands and grows, as we see in a program called Prism, to become symbiotic with the social media and data giants that arise at that point in history. Obama, to his credit, ends torture by the C.I.A. but allows for some wiggle room on interrogation that permits extended isolation. And I think we know from other contexts, including criminal justice contexts, how isolation for prolonged periods of time in incarceration is torture.

Similarly, he escalates in Afghanistan, draws down having achieved nothing, fails to negotiate a way out of Afghanistan, in Iraq seeks to withdraw, slows his withdrawal down, ends up after the withdrawal occurs going back to war in Iraq when the so-called Islamic State takes power, starts an entirely new war that’s in Libya. The tragedy and horror of the Libya war is very quickly overshadowed by Benghazi.

And in American political contexts, that tends to be what we remember rather than that for the last 10 years, the United States has, along with its allies, destabilized Libya to a point where there are still very often military campaigns in those intervening 10 years by the United States and its allies and becomes, of course, synonymous with a tool that he views as an alternative to unacceptable ground invasions and occupations, but, in fact, becomes not just part of the continuity of the war on terror, but a new symbol of it, which is drone strikes, a kind of assassination that even kind of frustrates the term assassination because very often, the US kills people through drone strikes not because it knows who they are, but because it observes a pattern of life that it considers threatening. It doesn’t kill men, women, and children.

It kills potential combatants. In particular, it kills what it calls military age males, people between, essentially, the ages of 16 and 50-odd something. And the point I’m trying to drive at is that throughout all of this, not only does Obama expand the aperture and the operations of the war on terror while viewing himself as winding all of this down, but he does so through a particularly perilous way, which is to say that he empowers a lot of lawyers to set up belts of process that the previous administration, as well as the subsequent administration, don’t bother with.

And the idea behind the process that is going to be — through the deliberations of intelligence officials, military officers and attorneys — a sorting mechanism to come up with on the other end of the process, only the operations that the United States needs to keep itself safe. And while it views itself through those operations as being lawful, in fact, it’s accomplishing what I would argue is a usurpation of the judicial function. And I think that’s a profound legacy that I think a lot of people, particularly liberals, have yet to reckon with about the Obama administration.

Ezra Klein
So let’s use drones as the thing to explore here. Because one of the things that I think defines Obama — you put it as contemplative. The way I would describe him is that Obama is a balancer. He thinks of things in balancing competing interests almost always. And, you know, there are some questions where he does the balancing and comes out mostly on one side, so torture being one of them.

You do make the point that extended isolation remains within the sort of Obama era set of punitive measures. And I agree with you that isolation should be considered torture. But within American law, it usually is not. So he, I think, within where American law is, tries to move away from torture, draws a reasonably hard line, in part because he doesn’t think it works. And I think this is actually an important thing here.

I don’t think one should understand a drone strike, particularly one that kills an innocent civilian, as somehow less morally horrifying than torture. I mean, if you torture somebody, they can at least have a life after that. If you torture the wrong person, they can maybe get freed I’m not taking away from the trauma. I am saying that drone strikes in many ways are more horrifying to me.

But they keep them. And they keep them because, as I understand it — and this is not the area I cover — they believe they’re effective. They believe they are trying to strike some balance between keeping America safe, preventing not just another terror attack, but something oddly I think they think about a lot, which is the American aftermath to another terror attack, more wars, more sort of like overwhelming carnage.

And they believe, through the belt of process, as you put it, that they can make these safe enough, targeted enough, that they create the disposition matrix where a drone strike needs to be approved by all these different deputies and a very high, you know, certainty that it won’t kill civilians. But let me ask you about the balancing that comes out. Just putting everything else aside, do you think that drone war makes America safer? Is the problem with it that it is immoral, or that they are wrong about that or both?

Spencer Ackerman
Well, I would certainly argue that it’s immoral. I tracked down a survivor of Obama’s first drone strike, a Pakistani young man named Faheem Qureshi who was 13 years old when a strike incinerated his uncles, most of the elder males of his family, leaves him in a coma for 40 days, he loses an eye, he’s covered with burns for all of his — on much of his body.

And then when he emerges from the coma, he learns that he is now one of his family’s primary breadwinners. And he now has to force himself to do whatever kind of work his body can make itself perform in order to provide for his family. And I asked him, what do you think about the drone strikes? And he said, well, I don’t deny that sometimes the drone strikes killed dangerous people.

But they killed innocent people. They kill women. They kill children. I asked him what he thought about Obama. And he goes, Obama is a tyrant. I don’t know how else someone like that could possibly be willing to give Obama any more of the benefit of the doubt, having lived on the receiving end of a life-changing violent experience.

And it is well and good in policy circles to talk about a more precise way of metering violence against people you decide are America’s enemies. But in the final analysis, Faheem Qureshi’s voices and people like him never get heard. There’s nothing you can really say to argue away someone’s experiences like that. And that experience has happened to thousands of people just talking about Obama’s drone strikes.

There is no way you could, I believe, with the vantage point that we’re in now, look back right now and say, this or that drone strike made America safer. Do we feel safe yet? Have we reached a point where the war recedes? Or does each strike generate more and more people who are willing to kill Americans, or seek to, in order to avenge them.

The United States does not allow itself to think about how it generates its own enemies and how its operations against those enemies perpetuate that circumstance. That, I believe, is the most profound way in which, even were it not immoral, the drone strikes — and I would argue the broader war on terror that they represent as a spear point — endanger America.

Ezra Klein
This is a big thread in the book, this idea of America insisting on its own innocence for the threats that it faces. You talk a lot about the reaction that Susan Sontag gets after 9/11 for an essay she writes in The New Yorker suggesting that Al-Qaeda, whatever else you want to say about them, they’re not cowards, right? They have a set of grievances against America. And they are prosecuting them as a terrorist organization, but it’s not a cowardly act. She is trying to ask what America’s role in 9/11 is. And she gets drummed out of the conversation. And a bunch of people do. I mean, around this period, Bill Maher loses his show, which was on network back then — he wasn’t on HBO back then — I think for something similar, as I remember, saying that, you know, say what you will about Al-Qaeda, they’re not cowards. Like these people blew themselves up. And I’d like to hear you talk a bit about that. Because a lot of the architecture of the war on terror is built on a concept of how America becomes safe.

And I think, implicitly, it’s that America eventually kills enough of the people who want to harm it. But as you’re arguing it, there’s been a kind of consistently suppressed argument that America creates its own enemies through these kinds of policies, creates the Al-Qaedas of the future. And so it actually has misunderstood the nature of safety. So can you just talk a bit about the tensions around this question of how America views what will make it safe?

Spencer Ackerman
Well, first off, the culture of the war on terror is a cancel culture. I deal with what happens to Sontag in the book. I deal with what happens to Bill Maher, you know, go on and on, the Dixie Chicks, as one of the biggest country music acts in the country, experience an orgiastic public destruction of their CDs for saying something as anodyne as on the eve of the Iraq War that they’re ashamed to be Texans like George W. Bush.

The thing that undergirds — to speak to your broader question — this hysterical, aggrieved nature of American safety is nothing more than American exceptionalism. The idea that America — by virtue of its power and sometimes, as Joe Biden would like to say, the power of its virtue — does not have to abide by the terms of what it calls the rules-based international order, it sets them. America acts. It is not acted upon. That is what it means to be the world’s superpower.

This position of imperial overmight, what the French in the 1990s call hyperpower, exists long enough, certainly after the Cold War, but during the post-World War II construction of the current international order, or at least the part of it by the United States and its proxies, as this story of America coming into its natural position, a global manifest destiny. And, accordingly, what America does is right, what its enemies do is wrong, even if that behavior is fundamentally similar. That is where the American sense of imperiled safety after 9/11 emerges from.

And it also explains why it can never be satisfied. The only way it can actually be satisfied is a position that can’t exist, which is an unchallenged imperial superstructure. Those superstructures all throughout history generate their own challenges. But America chooses after 9/11, and continues through the past 20 years, to interpret those challenges as pathological, and very often, civilizationally pathological, that we have to invade the Middle East, we have to invade the Muslim world in order to teach them, as was often expressed in explicit language after 9/11, civilized standards of behavior. Which is to say the United States reserves the right to inflict limitless violence and, in a limitless way, inhibit everyone else’s freedom in order to make someone else act in a civilized way.

Ezra Klein
So let me try to give voice to the critique of the position that I’m drawing out from you here, which is, oh, it’s all well and good for, you know, you pundits or, you know, you young liberals and leftists to sit here and say that if America were nicer, the world would be nicer too it. But the world is a cruel and harsh place. And America is only kept safe by people who are willing to accept that. And so I’ll use this as the example you sometimes get.

Let’s say you do have like true intelligence that there is a gathering of people who do mean to commit harm to America, a gathering of people who are planning a terrorist attack. In that condition, what would you have America do? What is the moral thing to do if there is real reason to think that, you know, the people at this gathering are planning some kind of violent act against the country and are not going to be dissuaded, in the near term at least, by a gentler foreign policy?

Spencer Ackerman
I would argue, if I have to go within the framework that you outline, that in the case of an actual imminent attack, it is justified to find and arrest such people. It is not justified in the absence of other circumstances, certainly as a first resort, to kill those people. It’s certainly not justified to do what America actually does when it thinks that it sees such an attack. It doesn’t, in practice, describe the circumstance that you outlined. In practice, what it does is it defines an imminent attack extremely broadly.

Under Eric Holder’s Justice Department, it redefines imminence to mean nothing at all like the common sense understanding of imminence, but rather an inherent danger from a set of people. It doesn’t seek to understand that plot that you outline. It seeks to prevent such a plot from happening. It seeks to prevent the stage at which such germination could, in fact, happen. That becomes the operating ethic of the war on terror long after there’s a George W. Bush around to articulate a doctrine of prevention. What instead happens is the entire architecture of the national security state is marshaled to make sure that people who they believe seem like people who might at some point threaten the United States do not get in a position to do so.

This happens through kidnapping operations. This happens through torture. This happens through missile strikes and then drone strikes. And, ultimately, this happens by invasion and occupation. And what happens when that happens? You can’t pacify millions of people, particularly when a foreigner comes in and does it at the barrel of a gun. What you can only do is inspire resistance. What you can do in that circumstance is then be in a permanent circumstance, until the occupation ends, of having to defend yourself from attacks from people you can’t distinguish from the general civilian population.

That’s really much more like the circumstance we actually confront in national security circles, though it is always framed in the way that you have framed it. I don’t mean to pick on you, of course. But the reason why it’s important to frame in these terms is because so much of national security is both hidden from actual democratic accountability, such as democracy exists in the United States, but also under a strict veil of secrecy patrolled by people in uniform whom the culture of 9/11 tells you to give deference toward, that the people behind the curtain know what’s really happening.

And if only you knew how dangerous the world really was, you would understand how abandoning brutality is a naive and hopeless concept. You should just go along with our missile strikes, our invasions and so on and so forth. I would just say to anyone who, you know, finds this or that circumstance that will reflect the template that you outlined is, OK, it’s been 20 years, how has it worked out?

Ezra Klein
Well, this is where you get the Bush people say it worked out great. I mean, you cite a RAND study in the book that found that in the decade after 9/11, Americans saw levels of terrorist violence that were 15 to 20 times lower than they did in the ‘70s. And that’s even counting foiled post-9/11 plots as incidents. One of the things you’ll hear on the — particularly the neocon right, is that the war on terror has worked.

And, look, the evidence is there has not been another 9/11. And one reason I think, taking the thought experiment seriously — although I take your point that they don’t describe most of the actual acts — is important is because people always work backwards from what is moral to do under the clear circumstances and begin finding ways to push the line into murkier circumstance.

So one of the things I think you then get into is this question of even if it did make you safer, is it still right? Even if that RAND study is a way to say there has been at least some success here, you can say there’s a counterfactual with somewhat more terror. Is a cost we’ve imposed on the world and other kinds of security and geopolitics worth it? And I’m curious how you think about or how you think other people should think about those trade-offs.

Spencer Ackerman
The thing that the RAND study really reveals is not that there is a lower incidence of terrorism after 9/11, but that all of the era after 9/11 just simply does not feature as much terrorism as the United States had, in living memory, experienced. I think beyond that, you have an additional problem of not permitting, in the culture of 9/11, to see safety occurring outside the context of counterterrorism, that you don’t permit — and this is the lesson of canceling Susan Sontag. Sontag isn’t canceled because she says that the hijackers were not cowardly. She’s canceled because she says, look at the history of the United States in the Muslim world and consider why there is a constituency for such violent reprisal. That’s never allowed. That’s allowed to some degree in the discourse. It’s never allowed to shape American policy. That is considered a radioactive thing.

That is considered a lack of moral clarity, which is to say, it’s an insistence on an American exceptionalist understanding of what violence and what domination is that excludes us and implicates everyone we consider an enemy. That does not make America safe. That is a circumstance that creates permanent enemies, permanent emergency and permanent opportunities to both export death and entrench a deep material and real erosion of American freedom.

Ezra Klein
But it does seem to me there is now a faction, not just outside the Democratic Party capable of organizing, but inside the Democratic Party in key positions that is giving voice to not just sort of liberal foreign policy, but a more left one. I center that around Bernie Sanders, but I think you see it with the Squad. I think we see it with the effort on Yemen from Ro Khanna and Sanders a little bit back. There are more emergences now of an ability to sort of question some of these ideas in a full-throated way that I just — it seems to me — although foreign policy is not what I primarily cover — that it is different than where things were 15 years ago, presumably as a consequence of the war on terror.

Even with the Israel-Palestine conflict we just saw, the space for criticism of how Israel acts is very different than what I saw when I came to D.C. in 2005. So to ask this more sharply, do you think the center of gravity in the Democratic Party itself is changing, in the elected Democratic Party? Is there a caucus now that is able to exert weight in a way that wasn’t there before that is meaningful?

Spencer Ackerman
We have seen over the last several years not just a revived democratic socialist left in this country, but we have seen it expand its aspirations and its strength into the realm of foreign policy and national security. I think we are in a very early stage of skirmish between those forces and the Biden administration to see whether it can be satisfied through action like Biden’s less-than-meets-the-eye pledge to end the Yemen war, his less-than-meets-the-eye withdrawal from Afghanistan. This is coming. This fight is something that has to happen within the extremely flawed and dissatisfying vessel known as the Democratic Party. And there are reasons for optimism if you are someone who believes that the war on terror and American global hegemony have to go, for reasons both material and moral.

But we have to understand that this is a long, long struggle in which the battlefield is tremendously asymmetrical and all of the people who have power, inside the Biden administration and more broadly, view continuity in a what they would consider diminished war on terror to be the appropriate pragmatic response to a still dangerous world and then over their shoulder worried that they will be portrayed as weak or defeatist or so forth. And it’s particularly ominous to see the way in which the early post-9/11 desire, particularly amongst liberals and centrists, to use this horrible tragedy of 9/11 into an opportunity to reunite America, recapitulate itself as the Biden administration essentially entrenches and ratifies the Trump administration’s Cold War with China.

Ezra Klein
Let me end on the cold war with China, a point you brought up. Because something I am observing in Washington and in legislative strategy in particular, which has me unnerved: it’s always very telling when people, even on very diverse issues, decide that as long as they can frame what they’re doing as against some common enemy, that is maybe the path to bipartisan support in a divided Congress. And I’m seeing this on everything now. Like there is a gold rush to frame whatever it is you want as some way of blocking China. R&D investment, like all of it.

And that signals how much this idea that we are now in a decades-long competition to blunt China is going to shape policymaking, but then beyond the kind of stretch arguments — to get my pet project in through that — is going to shape the national security state. And the war on terror architecture in theory was for asymmetric warfare and all these different things. But particularly if it gets moved over there, I think that’s very unnerving. So I guess that’s my question for you. What does this policy architecture and this set of ideas, applied to a cold war-ish state with another superpower, look like? What happens when it jumps that line from smaller groups to something like China?

Spencer Ackerman
Well, on one level, it will look like a 21st century version of imperial competition over resources, both manufactured ones like semiconductors and then the raw materials necessary to manufacture them. It will as well look like what we saw the F.B.I. do throughout the 9/11 era, which is to say, construct an apparatus of suspicion around Chinese people and then people who might not even be Chinese, but who are Asian. Because the U.S. government is — in particular, the security services are — rarely particularly interested in drawing deeper distinctions than that, in which an atmosphere of collective suspicion will be something that innocent people have to live under.

When the tools exist and they persist and they’re normalized, it’s incredibly simple to just pivot them to the next enemy and do so in an atmosphere of not just the righteous emergency that we had after 9/11, but now a kind of way to move beyond the 9/11 era and re-knit the country back together after all of this unpleasantness with January 6 and the Trump administration and on the right, the Obama administration and the Biden administration and so on, toward common purpose against this external enemy.

And I think it’s very significant that most of us, when we start learning about politics and start learning about foreign policy, we hear very often that tyrants find external enemies, and often those external enemies are peoples inside their own borders, to marshal their control of their own populace, particularly when facing shaky social, economic and political foundations, to both accumulate and wield their power and entrench it. And that’s not something that only tyrannies do. That’s something the United States does. It doesn’t just do it after 9/11.

But it certainly does do it after 9/11 and persisted doing it for the last 20 years. And that doesn’t seem to be diminishing. And one of the reasons I believe it’s not diminishing is not just the material and historical circumstances that undergird the congealing cold war against China, but also a kind of anxiety of American power in decline that elites want to ensure doesn’t kind of come to a breaking point on their watch.

Ezra Klein
I think that’s a good place to come to an end. So always our final question, what are three books you would recommend to the audience? And because it’s you and I know your proclivities, if you want to add in some graphic novels to that, you’re welcome to do it.

Spencer Ackerman
So I want to pick two nonfiction books that I’ve recently read and a fiction book that I read a couple of years ago, but I believe is the best piece of fiction yet to emerge from the war on terror. And that’s Omar El Akkad’s “American War,” a novel that I believe expands the moral imagination, a novel that permits — in a culture that treats the targets of the war on terror as all but subhuman — with dignity, with empathy, with understanding, and allows a voice of frustrated resistance to the apparatus to emerge and enforce.

And it’s not an accident that Omar El Akkad was a journalist covering the war on terror. And then I would pick Vincent Bevins’s excellent book “The Jakarta Method,” which is a story of how Cold War anticommunism in the hands of the C.I.A. in particular becomes a campaign of extermination starting in Indonesia in the mid-1960s, but then very quickly throughout Central and South America. It is an excellent book, a real masterpiece of reporting and of connections drawn between very often siloed foreign policy atrocities.

And I’ve also just read Kate Aronoff’s excellent book “Overheated,” which is a book not just about climate change and not just about the capitalist acceleration of climate change, but also about the ways in which capitalism will sell you a greening planet, because capital has to live here as well, while recapitulating and entrenching the very unequal and violent economy that brought us to a point of human emergency, as well as asking and outlining what a real and urgent alternative looks like. Now we get to talk about comic books. Thank you, Ezra. I think the one graphic novel that everyone should have unfortunately costs $150 because it is just a massive, massive omnibus by the greatest creator ever to touch comics, Jack Kirby, and his magnum opus with “The New Gods.” So you can find that in fine comic in bookstores. “New Gods” is an incredible work of imagination.

He does this for DC Comics. It is one of the first comics stories that’s told through multiple and varying perspectives, from children, from adults, from at some points villains, from people who are trying to escape this war between, basically, space gods. And in the course of it, you will also see how Kirby basically sketches the blueprint for modern pop culture. To take just one example, there is no Luke Skywalker without Jack Kirby’s Mark Moonrider.

Next is my favorite comic currently being published. Image Comics publishes this. It’s Greg Rucka and Michael Lark’s series “Lazarus.” Start with the first collection. “Lazarus” is a story set in the near future in which neoliberalism completes its descent into neofeudalism. We live now in the world of “Lazarus,” in a world in which various companies essentially replace governments.

And those companies increasingly are controlled by families. And what do they do? They breed superheroes called Lazari to essentially fight for them, sometimes instead of, but, you know, like the drone strikes, really as an extension of broader and very disastrous geopolitical conflict.

And then, finally, my friend Evan Narcisse has an absolutely just like absurdly good year one story, basically the first year of operations for a character, called “Rise of the Black Panther,” in which Evan’s love for and deep familiarity of the Black Panther jumps off the page. It has — I won’t spoil it — but one of the greatest and most breathtaking first pages of any comic book I have ever read.

If you like Black Panther from the movies and want to see, told through one of the best Black Panther storytellers, an imagining of what the first year of the Black Panther’s career was like, you have to get it. “Rise of the Black Panther,” that’s the Marvel one I’ll mention.

Ezra Klein
Spencer Ackerman, your book is “Reign of Terror.” Thank you very much.

Spencer Ackerman
Thank you so much, Ezra.

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Posted originally on The New York Times on Aug. 10, 2021.