Insecure: Spencer Ackerman on How the War on Terror Destabilized America

Although President Biden has ended the war in Afghanistan, America's twenty-year global war on terror has not yet drawn to a close. Initiated by the Bush administration, and waged in various forms under four presidents, the war on terror has shaped not just US foreign policy, but many aspects of American life. This week, the Eurasia Group Foundation's Mark Hannah is joined by Spencer Ackerman, whose new book, Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump contends that the Trump administration was no aberration. Charting the war on terror through the Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations, Ackerman shows how this war inflamed America's nativist impulses and spurred authoritarian tools of domestic surveillance.

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Spencer Ackerman is the author of Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump and the Substack, Forever Wars. He is also a contributing editor at the Daily Beast, where he was a senior national correspondent from 2017 to 2021.