Grayson Scott: I wanted to start with Homeland’s ending—it’s not what you expect. In a literal sense, it’s ambivalent. There is a strongly optimistic appeal made by this panorama of American failure: Vietnam, Afghanistan. But then you’re broadening out to talk about the hostility with China, something that’s become bipartisan consensus in terms of policy, and the war against Gaza. But soon you’re talking about Standing Rock, the Stop Cop City movement, Black Lives Matter, and that’s finally where you locate possibility, rather than in reformist proposals. But I can imagine a reader who finds that a little millenarian: this idea that we’re going to have to make America collapse, or allow it to, before any change happens.

Richard Beck: The end of the book isn’t supposed to be apocalyptic. I’ve heard the book’s worldview described as bleak with respect to the United States, and that probably is fair. Part of the reason that I have found a lot to admire in protests like Standing Rock, and especially the protests that have broken out since October 7 against Israel’s war on Gaza, was that for so long, starting with Occupy Wall Street and continuing, to a large extent, up through Black Lives Matter, the activist left failed to take up internationalism in a real way. I don’t think there are meaningful prospects for the left’s success in the United States that don’t have internationalism as a core component.

The mainstream of the Democratic Party—Biden, Harris, Pelosi—I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that axis would prefer Trump serve a second term than have Sanders-style progressivism take over the party. I see this rhetoric all the time, and I’m sure you’ve seen it too, that keeps describing the right as this organization that’s rapidly devolving into fascism under Trump, and that’s the engine of all the bad stuff the US is doing. Then you will also see the Democrats described as totally hapless. And they’re described as hapless because they keep passing up this easy opportunity to totally crush the Republican Party, which would be to adopt a democratic socialist platform. They wouldn’t even have to take on the whole thing: A Democratic Party that came out in a unified and full-throated way for an arms embargo on Israel and for Medicare for All wouldn’t lose a national election for another 20 years.

The fact that they’re not doing that is not that they’re like Charlie Brown always getting the football pulled out from under him—it’s because they don’t want to do that. That’s something I also try to focus on in the book, because there’s this discourse around polarization and the idea that the two parties are just further apart politically than they ever have been in modern American history. And I think that argument breaks down to a significant extent once you start to look at foreign policy: The War on Terror is as thoroughly a bipartisan project as there could possibly be, and it was the most important thing the country was doing from 2001 to 2016.

I wish that some of the attention, this kind of obsessive attention that gets paid to the right—even the most obscure, esoteric figures on the right have whole podcasts dedicated to them—would start getting applied to liberalism, because this idea that they’re just clueless losers is a total failure of analysis.

GS: You wrote a piece called “Bidenism Abroad” for this year’s March/April issue of the New Left Review. It’s a blunt and sincere reckoning with the Biden foreign policy regime and its continuity with the Trump, Obama, and even Bush administrations. It also demonstrates a thesis of your book: We were told that the War on Terror was started to make sure that everything in America stayed exactly the same, that no disruptions or challenges to American primacy would be permitted. But the war also changed everything.

RB: I was hoping that when Biden ended his election campaign, that piece would stop being relevant. I certainly hoped that Harris would understand that part of departing from Biden would have to involve departing from some of his policies. Harris has made it very clear that she is taking up the Biden agenda, as far as I can tell, without modification. So, unfortunately, I still stand by everything in that piece.

If Trump wins a second term, in terms of foreign policy, it’ll be chaotic and destructive, as it was in his first term. But also—and this is something that can’t be emphasized enough—Trump does not give a shit about geopolitics. He does not have a long-term strategy. He isn’t weighing the pros and cons of engagement in the Middle East versus confronting China. He’s not thinking about “What does it mean for American power in Europe if Putin can defy NATO?” In terms of foreign policy, he made a big show out of saying, “No, no, I’m not Obama—everything’s going to be different.” And the first gesture he made was to torpedo the Trans-Pacific Partnership. But he didn’t take a different approach to China: He just blew up the thing that Obama could take credit for, and then he said, “Well, it’s going to be trade war instead.” But Obama was the one who inaugurated this pivot to Asia, and Trump didn’t deviate from that in the slightest.

It’s not just the Obama administration but the national security and foreign policy establishment of the United States that started to say, “OK, if we’re going to take on China, that means we cannot spend so much time and money directly supervising the Middle East. We need to normalize things between Israel and Saudi Arabia so that we can hand off those supervision responsibilities. We’ll have this reactionary axis that can keep the region in line.” Trump didn’t depart from that; he pushed through the Abraham Accords. Biden got into office, and he and Jake Sullivan and the rest of the State Department guys were like, “Yeah, that sounds pretty good to us. We’re going to try and build on that.” I don’t think that Trump has the desire—or the political savvy, or the organizational capacity—to change the direction of US foreign policy in a medium- to longer-term way. He could stumble into some big disasters very easily, not least because he’s such an uninterested idiot, but more likely because a Rex Tillerson type becomes secretary of state. But he’s not going to execute some grand plan that’s going to deviate in a significant way from what the Democrats are trying to do anyway.

GS: My sense is that the Democrats have been paralyzed in realizing their grand foreign policy scheme—maybe “grand” is an overstatement; I’m imagining it was just to confront China, make some progress on climate—since the Ukraine war began in 2022.

RB: The thing that paralyzed this pivot was not Ukraine; it was Gaza. The Biden administration said, “Yeah, we can confront China and roll back Russia in Ukraine. We have the capacity to do that, so long as we can complete this relative disengagement from the Middle East.” But all of that was totally dependent on Saudi-Israeli normalization, and as soon as October 7 happened, that became impossible. Everything I’ve read suggests that it’s very likely that was part of the reason October 7 happened when it did. There was a recent piece in The Atlantic about Blinken meeting with Mohammed bin Salman. They quote MBS as saying, “If you want normalization with Israel to happen, I need quiet in Gaza.” And it’s very interesting that MBS, one of the closest people we have to an absolute autocrat, is saying this. As the conversation is reported, he’s very cognizant that there are limits to his legitimacy. He’s saying, “Look, I’m only 38 or 39 or whatever—70 percent of my population is younger than me. They didn’t really know about Israel and Palestine until this happened, and now they’re furious about it. We cannot have this war ongoing in Gaza if you want me to normalize with Israel.” At the same time, the US feels that it cannot afford to restrain Israel in a meaningful way. Israel’s belligerence toward Iran and America’s other enemies in the region is such a crucial part of the US ambition to leave regional supervision to others.

GS: Even when you’re reading good leftists on the War on Terror, such as Andrew and Patrick Cockburn or Seymour Hersh, veterans or former intelligence people or current members of the administration are all over their writing. Even people on the more liberal side, like Steve Coll, get their details from institutional sources. But Homeland doesn’t have those people. What it has are Iraqi voices, particularly from three blogs: Where Is Raed?, Baghdad Burning: Girl Blog From Iraq, and A Family in Baghdad. 

RB: I’m not a journalist, right? I’m a noncredentialed historian and critic. Someone like Steve Coll, and certainly someone like Andrew Cockburn—these journalists who were flying all over the world and had high-placed sources—I can’t do any of that. The point of Homeland was both to explain what the war did to life inside the United States and to sort of re-create the atmosphere, re-create what it felt like to live through it. When I found those blogs that Iraqis had written while Americans were occupying the country, I was just thrilled, because those Blogspot blogs—they’re so historically specific. It really is just one moment, and the stuff that people used to write on those blogs does not sound like the stuff that people write on Twitter, or in their Instagram captions, or even on Substack. Everyone now has been so trained by Twitter and Instagram to communicate. With those blogs, when you see how bad the websites are—how they aren’t spell-checked, and sometimes they’re aware that they’re addressing a larger audience, but sometimes they’re clearly not; the way that they kind of move back and forth between those registers without any self-consciousness about it—I was like, “Yes, that’s what this decade felt like.” That was an important part of following the news and being on the Internet during this time, and I wanted to get that into the book.

GS: I’m going to attempt a recapitulation of the economic argument you make in the middle of the book. It confronts two misunderstandings about the War on Terror: You refute the “blood for oil” explanation for the invasion of Iraq and also engage the cruder, vulgar version of the idea that all of this was done as a wealth transfer to defense companies. Then you propose your own account:  What was happening was 30 years of terminal economic decline under a system that the United States was superintending. That decline needed to be, if not reversed, then halted, if the United States was going to retain its primacy and continue deriving all the benefits that accrue from its hegemon status. Your argument is both very compelling and very commonsensical: Iraq was forced to accede to this international liberal order. This opened it to American investment—but also, since capital is global, the rest of the liberal world system needed access to Iraq, too. You cite Paul Bremer’s 100 Orders, some of which say, in essence, “You guys need to renovate your copyright law to bring it in line with Western standards,” or “You need some provisions about corporate governance.”

RB: I have a small regret about that explanation, because when I talk about what Bremer was trying to do with the 100 Orders, it was to turn Iraq into the kind of country that can be integrated into the US-led economic system. But what I didn’t talk about is that one salutary effect of doing that would be creating another ally, like Israel, in the region. Though Iraq doesn’t have the strength or capacity on its own to, say, defeat Iran, it is certainly strong enough to be an effective counter to Iran. If you had a rock-solid, allied-with-the-US Iraq that was willing to take direction from the State Department and from the US president because it understood that the economic benefits of taking that direction were so huge, that’s a way to neutralize Iran. Really, though, the opposite happened: Iranian influence over Iraq increased dramatically. So that was one really concrete sense in which the invasion of Iraq failed—not just in terms of it being an obvious humanitarian failure. It’s criminal in many ways; it’s a moral catastrophe—but from a strategic perspective, that was one of the major failures of the Iraq War.

GS: Something I was really struck by was the way you engage the argument about a “surplus population” with reference to Mike Davis. You cite this astonishing statistic: That in 2018, there were 2 billion people—60 percent of the world’s workers—in the informal economy. But you don’t make the familiar move, which is to say, “The jihadis are the most dispossessed of the global order.”

RB: Right, because they aren’t.

GS: Anyone who looks at them can see they’re middle-class, and they’re educated enough to know they’re fucked. And that would make anyone angry. It’s a political grievance.

RB: The version of that explanation I really liked was the idea that the people who are most likely to become jihadis are those educated enough and who have enough money to know what the political process is, and who feel, correctly, that they should be able to intervene in it. But because they haven’t been given a real economic opportunity to do anything with their education, that’s where that resentment starts.

GS: You also point out that the American military knew this, because they were publishing papers—you cite one written by retired Lt. Col. Ralph Peters in the Army War College’s journal—acknowledging it.

RB: That Ralph Peters paper might be my favorite thing I found in the entirety of my research. He essentially says the future of warfare is going to involve American soldiers fighting in all of these mega-slums that now exist across the world. It’s a very dystopian piece of writing, actually. It’s my favorite kind of source. I read that Joan Didion said or wrote that she doesn’t like doing interviews. She much prefers documents or archival materials, because the problem with an interview is that the person you’re interviewing knows they’re being interviewed, and they change how they sound and how they talk because they know that you’re interviewing them. But something like that Ralph Peters paper, because it was written for the journal of the Army War College… I like these documents that are semipublic. It’s not a private conversation; it’s publicly available. But when Peters wrote it, he was like, “This is only for people who think like me.” In a paper like that, you can hear America’s military strategists thinking aloud to themselves.

GS: You say in the book, “The war on terror never ‘came home.’ It started there.” I think you say it about the, basically, pogroms and race riots that began immediately after 9/11, but the frontier is a common figure in Homeland, too.

RB: Greg Grandin says that once there’s no more frontier to keep pushing further out, to realize the colonial project, America starts looking inward instead. But that line, “It started here,” was because I wanted to emphasize that the hostility toward Arab Americans and Muslim Americans started immediately and that it was institutional. It’s not just that you’ve got, in Chicago, a mob surrounding a mosque for like three consecutive nights. It’s not just these sporadic attacks by drunk vigilantes. The FBI started rounding people up right away.

If you start reading progressive or leftist accounts of foreign policy, you inevitably come across this idea called the “boomerang effect.” It’s the idea that the things America tests out on overseas populations will eventually make their way back home. And that theory, I don’t know if I have a critique of it, but it’s always annoyed me, politically and morally. It supposes that it’s bad to wage war on Iraq because eventually that militarism will impact the people who really count: Americans. So there seems to be a moral hierarchy in that that I’m not comfortable with. However, when it comes to something like the War on Terror, it just doesn’t apply. It’s not like we invaded Afghanistan, then invaded Iraq, then that started to go badly, and then we started up with the security theater and all the hysterics back home. It all happened everywhere, at the same time. The War on Terror has, for its duration, been almost as much an internal project as it has been a foreign policy project.

GS: Let’s take a moment to talk about the election, since the Democrats have gotten a new candidate since your piece in the New Left Review was written. Every poll puts Harris and Trump in a dead heat, and there’s a significant part of the voting public, especially in the swing states, that will not vote for her while she supports Israel’s war against Gaza and now Lebanon.

RB: Between the two of them, it’s obvious that one would rather have Kamala Harris in the White House than Donald Trump. Again, that said, I don’t know how anyone could have the balls to say a fucking thing to anyone who says, “I can’t vote for Kamala because of Gaza.” I’m not someone who believes that all political parties are the same. But if someone asks you to explain to them how Kamala is going to be better for the Palestinians than Trump, what could you possibly have to say in reply to that?

We’ve had eight years now of really obsessive, and sometimes valuable, and certainly exhaustive micro-analysis of the right wing, and all its permutations and variations over the last several decades in American politics. And people need to start training that lens on the Democrats instead. Because it seems clear to me that the Democratic Party’s theory of its own political future is focused on disciplining the left wing as ruthlessly as possible.