Center on National Security Director Karen Greenberg’s latest book Subtle Tools: The Dismantling of American Democracy from the War on Terror to Donald Trump was featured in an article in The Nation discussing the aftermath of 9/11.
A republic that wages unending war beyond its frontiers sets itself up for decline and fall. Its intractable military skirmishing is like the drip-drip-drip of water slowly eroding the sturdy foundations of an edifice before it collapses. Buffoons soon take their turns as mob rulers, coarsening and dividing a once-free society, before a barbarian horde tries to topple it.
Or so goes the “Roman narrative,” an old story of imperial decline that has instructed generations of politicians and political theorists seeking to stave off a similar fate.
…
Both [Ackerman and Greenberg’s] books raise the question of whether the Roman tale of liberty spurned is the right one, while also suggesting the more disconcerting possibility that the pathologies were there all along. Ackerman at one point cites the observation of Aimé Césaire that unfreedom “oozes, seeps, and trickles” from “every crack” of an empire, including those found within its metropole: What happens abroad is only a manifestation of unfreedom at home. If this is true, then Ackerman’s and Greenberg’s focus on how the War on Terror led to Trump’s rise and reign—the Roman narrative applied to recent American history—is not necessarily wrong. But starting with the War on Terror and ending with Trump also isolates both from their genuine sources. It also distracts from how Joe Biden–who called in illegal air strikes in February and promised amid the fiasco of the pullout from Afghanistan to sustain counterterrorist operations—is continuing our war, not ending it.
…
Karen Greenberg, a national security expert at Fordham Law School, has also been a precious resource, especially on the War on Terror’s legal machinations. The author of an indispensable study on America’s Guantánamo Bay prison, she has become one of the country’s leading experts on the perverse legal changes brought about by counterterrorism policy and the surveillance state. Like Reign of Terror, her new book draws from this experience to show how the “subtle tools forged out of the wreckage of 9/11”—the government’s use of euphemism, flexibility, and secrecy—worked for two decades to “smother the good out of a democracy in turmoil” and pave the way for some of the most infamous episodes of Trump’s presidency.
Ackerman and Greenberg hardly deny the excesses and ravages of our wars abroad. But their interest here—something the last president’s term and the current anniversary marking two decades (so far) of counterterrorism make pressing—is in what these excesses and ravages have done to America itself. And Trump, far from representing a deviation from the War on Terror, epitomized it. He “brought aspects of the war home,” Ackerman contends, even if “fundamentally the war was always home.” As Greenberg adds, Trump exploited existing “tools, already destructive, and sharpened them into weapons.” The boomerang of counterterrorism policy, invented to attack foreign enemies, ended up permanently disfiguring American life once it struck home.
Both authors sweep across the past two decades before reaching the age of Trump, and in doing so they help periodize the entire experience of the War on Terror. For Ackerman and Greenberg, the two pivotal moments in the evolution of America’s counterterrorism age were the early months of George W. Bush’s presidency and the early months of Barack Obama’s.
