“The 'war on terror' was always a construct to be waged, never quite to be ended.” We discuss the origins and impacts of the global “war on terror,” launched by the U.S. government in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C., with Spencer Ackerman, author of Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump. “We saw, beginning at the very outset of the 'war on terror,' our leaders told us to understand 9/11 as an assault of a foreign civilization, one that had nothing to do with the consequences of American extractive and exploitative foreign policy in the Muslim world or its support for Israel.” Ackerman says the “war on terror” and its repercussions have extended past U.S. ground wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, to its current war on Iran, Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank and the development of extensive surveillance architecture and state repression of Muslim minority groups around the world. “A whole lot of regimes around the world, rising powers looking for their own advantage, saw what the United States was constructing and realized they wanted that for themselves,” he says.

[Spencer Ackerman]: “From the start, a nativist strain in American politics said that immigration was the handmaiden of terrorism and that the institutions that sought to restrict that response to evicting those immigrants, campaigns of surveillance and deportation, were essentially no better than the handmaidens of terrorism themselves, all of which contributed a great deal. It was almost like a hollowing out of American institutional capacity to inhibit nativism, that opened the door to people like Donald Trump.

And with all of the Trump and Maga movement’s rhetoric of violence, it was, I would argue, inevitable that while they postured themselves as critics of the “war on terror,” they would simply wage it more violently and more expansively. That’s exactly what we’re seeing in Iran right now, and it’s what we’re seeing on our streets with ICE, a creation of 9/11, that is acting essentially like a death squad.”