In May 2026, the White House released a new counter-terrorism strategy, "driven by the principle that America is our homeland." It further inflated the definition of "terrorist," folding in drug dealers, transnational gangs, and "violent left-wing extremists, including anarchists and anti-fascists."
A quarter of a century has passed since 9/11. The machine George W. Bush assembled back then — the Department of Homeland Security and its ICE branch (now funded through 2036), the Patriot Act (slightly amended but intact), the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (still in effect), Section 702 of FISA warrantless surveillance — has hardened into permanent infrastructure.
The US military budget has doubled, from roughly $300 billion a year in the 1990s to over $1 trillion. Intelligence spending has nearly tripled, from about $37 billion in 2001 to more than $100 billion. The alternation of parties from Bush to Trump did not interrupt this process; it accelerated it.
Richard Beck's Homeland sets out to answer a question: why did a military operation initially directed at a particular terrorist organization become a global war that has now lasted a quarter of a century? And why did it change America itself?
Tom Mertes, in his NLR 159 review, offers this verdict: Beck has written a book with totalizing ambitions; its central thesis is the most insightful part of it — but there is also a key gap.
The Activation of the Frontier Myth
Beck's most original cultural argument runs as follows: 9/11 did not activate a new narrative; it activated the oldest narrative — the frontier myth.
9/11 was the last event the American public collectively experienced on television. Its core emotion was "impotent spectatorship" — watching one's own nation be humiliated in real time. To make sense of this humiliation, an ancient imagery was activated: Boone, Crockett, Custer — those "taciturn leaders," willing, in the face of a "savage" enemy, to abandon all norms, "to visit any quantity of violence upon the enemy necessary to annihilate him." The popular culture of the 2000s supplied new avatars: Batman and Iron Man — ordinary men equipped with high technology, mirroring Rumsfeld's vision of a leaner, more high-tech, more mobile military.
The operation to kill Osama bin Laden was code-named "Geronimo" — a reminder that the Indian Wars still lie at the bottom of the American revenge myth.
Beck refuses to treat torture (Abu Ghraib) as "a few bad apples" or "a top-down legal memo." He refuses even more firmly Jane Mayer's version — which treats torture as a departure from American habit. He points out that the American military has never fought solely by conventional means — from the Indian Wars of the nineteenth century to the Philippines to Vietnam, the use of "unconventional means" against "unconventional adversaries" has been the rule, not the exception.
Anti-Muslim bias was baked in from the very start of the war... What Abu Ghraib revealed was that it was no longer useful to go on pretending it did not exist.
The force of this argument lies in how it de-exceptionalizes the war on terror. It is not an anomalous deviation from American values; it is one expression of them — the oldest kind.
One Project, Two Faces of Violence
The most striking thesis in Beck's book — and the part Mertes most admires — is this:
Police violence against poor Black people at home, military violence against poor people abroad, and the ever-widening global wealth inequality that is the necessary consequence of America's continuing asset-price Keynesianism are one and the same project, one and the same larger effort — the preservation of American hegemony at the expense of the global poor.
The underlying framework for this thesis comes from Giovanni Arrighi. Arrighi describes the cycle of hegemony as three seasons: a spring of accumulation through trade and production, a summer of economic and geographic expansion, and an autumn — of declining vitality, financialization, and increasing reliance on coercion. After the Second World War, the United States created overseas consumer markets to absorb its surplus capacity (the Marshall Plan, support for Japan, the dollar as reserve currency), but the revival of German and Japanese industry produced chronic overcapacity and a structural decline in the profit rate.
Following Robert Brenner, Beck identifies the profitability crisis of the 1970s in manufacturing as the starting point of a long downturn. When the US could no longer revive sustained accumulation, it could at least manage the crises produced by its absence. Beck draws on Mike Davis's Planet of Slums: terrorism is one symptom of a world brimming with informal employment, migrant flows, and urban surplus populations. Terrorists are usually not the poorest, but their social milieu is characterized by thwarted development, insecurity, and political exclusion.
The war is "a tool for managing the surplus populations that the end of American-led prosperity has helped create — those whom America now finds itself unable and unwilling to help."
The occupation of Iraq furnished corroborating evidence. L. Paul Bremer sought to remake Iraq as "a model of free-market liberalism" — privatizing state assets, lifting capital controls, suspending tariffs — while Iraqis did not even have electricity, fuel, or water. Al-Qaeda's choice of 9/11 targets (Congress/the White House, the Pentagon, the World Trade Center — the three seats of political, military, and economic power) showed that their understanding of the system was remarkably precise.
Iraqi sovereignty "was an obstacle to be removed, not a democratic right to be secured."
Obama: A Change of Rhetoric, Not of Machinery
Beck's treatment of Obama is one of the most clear-eyed parts of the book.
Obama campaigned as a critic of the Iraq War and promised to end torture and close Guantánamo. What did he do in office? He revoked the "enhanced interrogation" memos but kept the legal framework of the Authorization for Use of Military Force. He withdrew from Iraq but surged in Afghanistan (the "good war"). Ground forces shrank, but drone strikes increased tenfold. Remote war reduced American casualties, sparing the public the pain of seeing flag-draped coffins — making the war easier to ignore at home, even as it intensified from Pakistan to Yemen to Somalia.
The 2008 FISA Amendments Act (which Senator Obama voted for) permitted the warrantless wiretapping of foreigners and the "incidental" collection of Americans' communications. Beck points to a delicate mechanism: while it is technically illegal for the federal government to surveil citizens directly, it can buy their information from telecom and IT companies — the marketization of the surveillance state.
Snowden's 2013 disclosures prompted Obama's Justice Department to prosecute him for espionage. The whistleblower was punished; the surveillance state was protected.
Trump Is Not a Betrayal; He Is the Logical Endpoint
This is Beck's most provocative political judgment:
Whatever Trump did to damage democracy between 2016 and January 6, 2021... what the Bush administration and the rest of the federal government did to launch the war on terror was worse.
Trump is not an anomalous by-product of the war on terror but its logical endpoint. His election was owed in large part to public discontent with elite impunity. His political record reflects a political culture already accustomed to cruelty, executive prerogative, contempt for the media, and the criminalization of dissent. His Muslim ban is of a piece with the post-9/11 biases.
Mertes adds a key observation here: the Occupy movement and Black Lives Matter were more successful than the antiwar mobilization of 2003 because they targeted the primary symptoms of the long downturn — on the one hand, rising inequality and precarious employment; on the other, the racialized policing of those left behind. They are "the first protest movements of the twenty-first century to identify and target the real foundations of the war on terror."
Mertes's Critique: Missing Mechanisms
But Mertes also points to a key gap in Beck's framework.
Beck argues persuasively for the link between "surplus populations" and the war on terror, but he is weak in connecting counterinsurgency to overcapacity and inter-state competition through concrete mechanisms. This weakness traces back to his eclectic use of Arrighi and Brenner — both converge on slowing growth and financialization, but they diverge on the causal mechanism: Arrighi treats financial expansion and military overreach as cyclical signals of systemic transition; Brenner focuses on the profit rate and competitive pressure at the core of capitalism.
Beck's account lacks concrete intermediate links — alliance coordination, weapons transfers, trade agreements — to connect economic distress with grand strategy.
The most glaring example is Israel. Beck calls the Jewish state "indispensable" to America's Middle East strategy, a model client, suggesting Washington's affinity for a "kindred settler colonizer." But he does not discuss the domestic political incentives behind this special relationship — whose utility in advancing American interests is far from self-evident. Mertes's counter is sharp:
For the young Egyptians and Saudis who flew planes into buildings, America's imperial plunder on Muslim lands — its support for Israeli expansionism — mattered far more than the socioeconomic structural stagnation of Middle Eastern societies. Bin Laden himself was radicalized at fourteen by television footage of American troops in Lebanon, weeping.
This is not to say Beck's economic framework is entirely wrong — it is to say that geopolitics, religion, and ideology have a momentum of their own, and cannot be wholly reduced to "the management of surplus populations."
A War Without an Endpoint
Beck's most disturbing judgment comes at the end: it would be wrong to regard the war on terror as a betrayal of American values.
In many ways, it has embodied them. With every passing year, every new border fence raised, every new surveillance database built, every drone strike and every Special Forces raid, it becomes one degree less likely that our descendants will use the word "American" to describe the solution they eventually find.
The Vietnam War at least produced institutional correctives — the War Powers Resolution (1973), the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (1978). And the war on terror?
By contrast, congressional opposition to the war on terror has been feeble, and a similar rebalancing of power is unlikely to emerge in the foreseeable future.
After Vietnam, at least one generation was wary of military adventurism. After the war on terror, no corrective mechanism has been left behind. Biden withdrew from Afghanistan, but he has been sharpening his blade over Taiwan and gives his full support to Israel as it destroys Gaza. The repression of the Palestine solidarity movement reuses precisely the Bush-era toolbox: speech restrictions, accusations of disloyalty, the equation of dissent with extremism.
Mertes says one judgment in Beck's book needs revising — it "misreads the relationship between managing the global order and managing its dispossessed; after all, that is the job of the local police state." This revision is precise. Beck wants to fold everything into a single "project" — overseas military violence and domestic police violence are one and the same thing. They are related, but they are not the same thing. Managing the global order is one thing; managing, through violent discipline, those cast off by that order is another. The latter is a consequence of the former, not a component of it.
But Beck's main line of argument needs no revision. The war on terror is not a particular military operation that needs to be "ended" — it is a permanent building. A building for managing the consequences of empire during a long downturn. You do not "end" a building. You can only tear it down — but tearing it down requires tearing down the order it serves. Until then, there it sits. Renewing its budget every year, inflating its definitions every year, stuffing new groups into the ever-expanding category of "terrorist" every year.
The 2026 counter-terrorism strategy folds "violent left-wing extremists, including anarchists and anti-fascists" into the terrorist category. A quarter of a century ago, that category contained only al-Qaeda. The building's tenants are being expanded.