In May 2026, the White House released its counter-terrorism strategy, ‘driven by the principle that America is our homeland’. Consistent with previous iterations, the document further expanded the category of terrorists to encompass narco-traffickers, transnational gangs and ‘Violent Left-Wing Extremists, including Anarchists and Anti-Fascists’. Over the quarter century since the collapse of the Twin Towers, such threat inflation—justified in the name of national emergency—has become the rule. Like its predecessors, the Trump Administration’s anti-terror toolkit reprises an apparatus first instituted under George W. Bush. This includes the Department of Homeland Security and its Immigration and Customs Enforcement wing, now funded through 2036, along with a vast penumbra of other agencies. The patriot Act has been lightly amended and some of its provisions voided by judicial rulings, but it continues to enable a sweeping domestic spying and financial compliance regime. Congressional review exerts scant constraint on presidential warmaking and the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force is still in effect, serving as the basis for detentions at Guantánamo and airstrikes in Iraq, Syria and Nigeria. Congress will doubtless reauthorize Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the legal framework for warrantless surveillance and bulk collection of telecommunications data. The us military budget, roughly $300 billion annually in the 1990s, had doubled by 2005 and is now set to exceed $1 trillion. Though the exact sums are not known, spending on the intelligence services has likewise doubled in real terms over the same period, from some $37 billion in 2001 to upwards of $100 billion today. For us citizens and for the rest of the world, the price tag of the Global War on Terror remains to be calculated in full.

Richard Beck’s Homeland proposes an ambitious reinterpretation of the causes of this war and its consequences for the United States, among them Trump’s upset victory in 2016. Raised in suburban Philadelphia, Beck was fourteen at the time of the Al-Qaeda attentats. ‘Born too early to think that permanent global war was normal’, he writes, ‘I could feel how much had been destabilized by September 11 and America’s response.’ After studying at Harvard, Beck joined n+1, where throughout the 2010s he produced a distinguished body of writing on Washington’s wars in the Middle East, an unillusioned appraisal of Obama’s record which set him apart from much of the American millennial left. His first book, We Believe the Children (2015), located the origins of today’s culture wars in the moral panics of the 1980s, synthesizing reportage, policy documents, cultural ephemera and firsthand testimony. Similar in method, Homeland shares with Beck’s previous work a scepticism towards alibis of national innocence and an impulse to separate myth from materialist reality.

Homeland is divided into four parts, oriented around a quartet of interlinked ‘crises’. First is the culture of militarism that pervaded and reconfigured American society during the first years of the twenty-first century. Fear of an ever-present terrorist threat led in turn to an ‘explosion of racism and xenophobia’, especially against Muslims. Economic stagnation and rising inequality provide the backdrop for this backlash, construed as a technique for managing global ‘surplus populations’. Finally, Beck examines the erosion of confidence in democracy and the meaning of citizenship amid warfare abroad and repression at home. His survey culminates in the 2016 election, which in his estimation marks if not the end of the War on Terror then at least its displacement from the ‘centre of political life’ in the United States, with a coda on Biden’s tenure.

For Beck, the shock of the 11 September attacks activated a national mythology forged on the settlers’ first contact with the Native Americans of the New World. The strikes on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were among the last events the us public experienced collectively on network television, before the proliferation of cable news channels and online media platforms. Its core sensation was impotent spectatorship, watching a disaster unfold in real time. To make sense of that humiliation, older tropes were ready to hand. Archetypes of the frontier—Indian fighters like Boone, Crockett and Custer; Fenimore Cooper’s ‘Hawkeye’, the guide and hunter Natty Bumpo—furnished a model of close-lipped leadership, ready to jettison norms in the face of the ‘savage’ practices of their foes. ‘Above all’, Beck writes, these pioneers were willing to administer violence ‘in whatever quantities are required to wipe the enemy off the face of the earth’. Homeland finds parallels in American popular culture of the new millennium. The superheroes of Hollywood franchises Batman and Ironman, ordinary men equipped with high-tech gadgets rather than supernatural powers, mirrored Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld’s plans to transform the us military into a leaner, more mobile fighting machine, fielding the latest technology and backed by devastating firepower. The code name bestowed on Osama bin Laden by the special operations team that planned his murder—‘Geronimo’—serves Beck as a reminder that the Indian Wars were still lurking in the background at the moment of America’s revenge.

Afghanistan, where special forces began to deploy at the end of September 2001, was the first proving ground in what Bush called ‘a conflict without battlefields or beachheads’. Congress and the media combined to foster a climate of patriotic conformity. Three days after 9/11, legislators approved the Authorization for Use of Military Force with California Representative Barbara Lee casting the lone dissenting vote, conferring on the President broad authority to pursue those deemed responsible for the attacks. The resolution would subsequently be invoked to justify a sequence of military operations across the globe, while a separate authorization for Iraq—already under discussion within the Bush Administration—followed in October 2002. As Beck notes, this ‘voluntary abdication’ of congressional authority constituted the founding charter for what would be called the ‘forever war’. The press fell in line, applauding the Afghan expedition—‘a counterattack against terror’, as the New York Times editorial board had it—and working to manufacture consent for the upcoming assault on Baghdad. Liberal interventionists at the nyt and elsewhere differed from the Republican right in their evaluation of the style and salesmanship of the White House’s case for war but not its underlying premises.

In the aftermath of 9/11, Bush exhorted Americans to keep shopping, so as not to ‘let the terrorists win’. Meanwhile, however, the spectacle of security extended to almost every corner of public life. Airports and sports stadiums introduced invasive screening and monitoring rituals, contributing to an atmosphere of alarm without any measurable success in detecting or deterring threats. Everyone knew the bollards and surveillance booths that sprang up across the country’s cities were useless, Beck notes. With the terrorist threat wildly exaggerated, he suggests, their only remaining rationale was to monitor the public itself. Corporations tapped into the prevailing mood, hawking desert-camo pickup trucks and military-style suvs to anxious suburbanites. Gun sales surged. Federal, state and local law enforcement acquired sweeping new powers under the patriot Act, passed through Congress with bipartisan support and signed into law at the end of October; of the 1,200 ‘suspects’ detained in the ensuing roundup, not one was convicted on terrorism-related charges. Beck catalogues this wave of repression with wry precision, showing how the fbi relied on tried-and-true methods of entrapment, encouraging gullible targets to embark on plots for which the Bureau itself supplied both the means and opportunity. Men of Middle Eastern and South Asian origin were singled out for scrutiny and harassment in what he calls ‘one of the most shameful episodes in the country’s history’.

While the police and intelligence services asserted that a state of exception justified enhanced powers and extra-legal actions domestically, the us military applied the same logic in Afghanistan and Iraq. Photos documenting torture and abuse inflicted on Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, made public in spring 2004, unmasked the cruelty of the occupation and the Islamophobia that coloured many soldiers’ perception of their adversaries. These digital trophies also exposed the contradiction at the core of the Bush Administration’s agenda in the Middle East, where Muslims figured simultaneously as victims to be rescued from autocracy and barbarians to be destroyed. tv shows like 24 glorified the lengths to which their protagonists would go to protect the nation and the fantasy that ‘heroes can do evil things without compromising their moral integrity, so long as they are forced to do them’. Beck rejects both the ‘few bad apples’ apologia and top-down explanations of excesses centred on legal memoranda. Contra Jane Mayer’s depiction of torture as a break with American custom, he observes that from the nineteenth-century wars of westward expansion through to the Philippines and Vietnam, us forces had long fought irregular adversaries by irregular means. The dehumanization of enemy combatants was essential to enabling the scale and violence of the global campaign against ‘terror’. ‘Anti-Muslim bigotry had been baked into the war from the beginning’, Beck contends, ‘and it was Abu Ghraib that revealed the uselessness of trying to pretend otherwise.’