War for Our Times

Before the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, terrorist attacks in the U.S. were met with police and FBI investigations, not the use of military force to root out and detain terrorists in Middle Eastern countries like Afghanistan or Pakistan. But the 1993 event changed how the United States confronted terrorism. Officials in the Bill Clinton administration prepared to meet terrorism as a national security threat rather than a police matter, repurposing America’s Cold War military to confront the global threat of terror. It would wage a war on terrorism, rather than communism. George Bush escalated these efforts into a War on Terror that Barack Obama would remake, and Donald Trump and Joe Biden would eventually bring to an end.

Over the course of the thirty years from 1993 to 2023, terrorism came to be seen as a global problem that could only be solved through force. Understanding the period as an era – an Age of Terror – reveals how this shift shaped America at home and abroad. As defeating terrorism became the focus of American foreign policy and the country’s national purpose, the worst aspects of the Cold War were renewed.  As that happened, the U.S. set aside any efforts to make progress on civil rights, women’s rights, and economic prosperity for the working class. The legacies of these decisions shape the country we live in today.

By dating the start of the war on terror much earlier than 9/11, historian Michael Brenes  argues that the post-Cold War world and its anxieties engendered a useless fight that still shapes how the United States interacts in the world.  Accessing newly declassified materials and archives from the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations, as well private archives and personal interviews, A War for Our Times: The United States in the Age of Terror defines this era, in order to understand how it lives on in the present.