Almost a quarter of a century on, is the US still being shaped by 9/11? Richard Beck thinks so, despite all the other shocking and pivotal events there since the 2001 attacks, from the financial crisis to the twin election victories of Donald Trump. In this long, ambitious book, which aims to be an “alternative national history”, encompassing politics, popular culture, consumerism, policing, the use of public spaces and even trends in parenting, Beck argues that 9/11 turned the US into a more aggressive, angry and anxious place, with Trump’s ascendancy only one of the consequences.
Beck depicts the “war on terror” that his country launched in response to al-Qaida’s surprise assault as a continuing, almost limitless military operation, which in its first two decades alone caused “900,000 deaths”, including those of “nearly 400,000 civilians”. His account of interventions and atrocities in countries such as Iraq, Yemen and Afghanistan is clear and powerful, switching smoothly between strategic objectives and individual victims, yet much of it will be familiar to anyone who even casually follows US foreign policy.
The book is more original when it lays out the war’s less obviously lethal but profoundly malign effect on America itself. A presidency with massively expanded powers; increased surveillance of US citizens; innocent people arrested and detained on vague “national security” grounds; a greater readiness to use torture; and the thickening of the Mexican border into a militarised zone a hundred miles deep – in these and many other ways, the American state has become more authoritarian and intolerant since 9/11. Meanwhile, US society, Beck says, has followed a similar path, making it increasingly difficult for Muslims and other minorities considered suspicious to lead full political lives, or even appear safely in public during the frequent periods of mass panic about terrorism or triumphalism about its supposed vanquishing.
From all this bleak, carefully collated evidence, Beck draws a striking and timely conclusion: “If September 11 had not occurred, Donald Trump could never have become president.” Nor, the book suggests, could he rule in such a draconian and crudely nationalistic manner while retaining so much public support. The desire for revenge after the horror and humiliation of 9/11, conscious or unconscious, remains so huge that it will take many more years to sate. Superpowers that considered themselves wronged do not forget.
George W Bush, a reckless rightwing Republican by the standards of his day, if not now, was president when 9/11 happened, and reacted with characteristic illiberalism and overconfidence, establishing much of the secretive bureaucracy and elastic legal framework of the “war on terror”, and disastrously invading Afghanistan and Iraq. Then, the much more revered Barack Obama – who turns out to be one of Beck’s main targets – stealthily continued the war, at times appearing to be winding it down with troop withdrawals and conciliatory speeches, while in reality replacing Bush’s macho “shock and awe” displays of force with drone strikes and other assassinations. On the war’s home front, Beck points out, Obama also “tripled the budget” of the Department of Homeland Security’s infamously tough immigration and customs enforcement agency, “deported some three million people”, and further blurred the line between immigrants and terrorists in the public mind.
Why did a supposedly liberal president, who had opposed the Iraq war as a state senator, end up continuing the “war on terror”? For Beck, there is a grand, systemic explanation for the militarism of every US government since 9/11. “With the United States unable to muster the economic strength to maintain [its] hegemony around the world,” he writes, “militarism is the next best option for managing discontents abroad and at home.” In other words, the “war on terror” has never really been about terrorism, but about maintaining America’s global supremacy and internal status quo, threatened not just by radical Islamism but the rise of other superpowers, and growing domestic and foreign discontent with the US economic model.
It’s a compelling thesis. Yet Beck doesn’t connect its many elements closely enough to make it absolutely convincing. His book seems to want to be both a rigorous geopolitical analysis in the style of New Left Review and a work of novelistic nonfiction, informed by the doomy American panoramas of Don DeLillo. In places, he pulls off this tricky fusion, and the pages hum with unsettling facts and conclusions. But elsewhere the book is too broad-brush.
For all its epic sweep, sometimes plunging far back into America’s violent history, the account also omits at least one important precursor to the “war on terror” era. Ronald Reagan’s 1980s presidency, shortly after the US defeat in Vietnam, was also driven by vengeance and intense nationalism, and featured an ever-expanding and authoritarian government campaign against a supposedly vast global threat, the “war on drugs”.
Reagan is now widely remembered as a charming old conservative, rather than a ruthless enforcer of American privilege. This bold and outspoken book, despite its flaws, could help ensure that the domineering ways of the post-9/11 presidents are better understood.
• Homeland: The War on Terror in American Life by Richard Beck is published by Verso (£30). To support the Guardian and the Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
