DeepSummary
The episode features an interview with Spencer Ackerman, a national security reporter who has covered the war on terror since its inception. Ackerman discusses his new book 'Reign of Terror' which examines how the 9/11 era destabilized America and paved the way for Donald Trump's rise. The conversation delves into the neoconservative and paleoconservative factions' roles in shaping the war on terror and the domestic climate that enabled Trump's brand of nativism.
Ackerman analyzes how the war on terror exempted the threat of white supremacist violence, which he argues is America's oldest and most enduring form of terrorism. He critiques the mainstream media and political establishment's refusal to grapple with the historical context and American policies that precipitated 9/11, instead framing it as an ahistorical event requiring an open-ended military response.
The discussion touches on the moral depravity of the CIA's torture program under the guise of the war on terror, as well as the Obama administration's attempts to repackage and institutionalize many of the Bush-era policies. Ackerman argues that despite Trump's anti-interventionist rhetoric, his presidency represented a continuation and intensification of the war on terror's nativist underpinnings.
Key Episodes Takeaways
- The US government's framing of the 'war on terror' as an ahistorical, civilizational struggle against Islamic extremism enabled rampant militarism, torture, and the erosion of human rights at home and abroad.
- While purportedly aimed at al-Qaeda and 'Islamic terrorism,' the war on terror systematically exempted and overlooked the pernicious threat of domestic white supremacist extremism and violence.
- The neoconservative and paleoconservative factions pursued a symbiotic division of labor that stoked nativism and imperial hubris, laying ideological foundations for Trumpism.
- Though critiqued by Trump for being wasteful 'stupid wars,' the national security establishment's embrace of lawlessness and violence in prosecuting the war on terror mirrored and enabled Trump's own authoritarian impulses.
- Despite the catastrophic human toll and strategic failures of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, the political establishment remains unable or unwilling to fully reckon with or learn from the policy disasters of the war on terror era.
- Obama's attempts to repackage and institutionalize key aspects of the war on terror framework, including torture and drone warfare, exemplified the bipartisan elite's commitment to American militarism and empire.
- While Trump claimed to represent a departure from the 'stupid' and wasteful wars abroad, his administration continued many of the war on terror's most destructive practices while channeling its xenophobic undercurrents inward.
- The war on terror's notional conclusion in Afghanistan heralds not its abolition but rather its metamorphosis into a new driving civilizational conflict against rising powers like China.
Top Episodes Quotes
- “I wrote the book because, like, around 2018, it was driving me a little bit nuts to see how all of the available explanations on offer for Trump, some of them very good and historically rooted, others superficial and unsatisfying, all of them just ignored the fact that the United States had been consistently in an agonizing war for an entire generation, and that had to have had some effect.“ by Spencer Ackerman
- “By canceling Sontag, by saying history doesn't apply to this event, we don't have to consider the violent dominating and the extractive policies of the United States in the arab world, specifically in the muslim world more broadly, that have created an appetite for the psychotic vengeance fantasies and geopolitical grandiosity of a billionaire.“ by Spencer Ackerman
- “The neocon prescription is that ultimately american domination is for the benefit of this benighted people to get them out of their backward condition and ultimately America's violent exercise of power is a gift to them.“ by Spencer Ackerman
- “Trump recognizes that there is a constituency that wants all of the violence of the war on terror and turned up to eleven, and also recognizes that Karl Rove is correct when he observes very early on that the war on terror is something we can take to the country. What he means by that, and what Trump understands him to have meant by that, is that the war on terror is a mechanism to seize political power and to sweep away opponents.“ by Spencer Ackerman
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Episode Information
Know Your Enemy
Matthew Sitman
9/15/21