Why America Perceives a "World of Enemies" (w/ Osamah Khalil)

Current Affairs

This episode originally aired on October 10, 2024. Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs!

Osamah Khalil of Syracuse University is the author of A World of Enemies: America’s Wars at Home and Abroad from Kennedy to Biden, a vital history of the wars of the last 50 years. Prof. Khalil shows how, from the Vietnam war to the present day, American leaders (and American pop culture) conjured a "world of enemies" in which force was preferable to diplomacy. A cast of rotating villains (from Ho Chi Minh to Saddam Hussein to Hamas) are treated as existential threats to freedom and democracy, and because they are monstrous they cannot be negotiated with and can only be destroyed. Prof. Khalil joins today to discuss his work, which argues that our militaristic attitude toward the rest of the world has also come to characterize domestic political discourse.

"American militarism has not been limited to foreign battlefields. Politicians and policymakers have insisted that Americans are engaged in an existential struggle against foes seen and unseen, foreign and domestic. Thus, militarism has seeped into everyday American life as the United States has not settled for defeat or victory but for war as a permanent state." - Osamah F. Khalil

Those who value this conversation will also probably want to check out The Myth of American Idealism, out now from Penguin Random House.