The American response to 9/11 has always been an exercise in paradox: a war fought in the name of freedom that steadily eroded civil liberties; a national trauma meant to unite the country that instead produced two decades of division and decline. Richard Beck’s Homeland: The War on Terror in American Life, newly released by Verso, is not so much a history of that war as an archaeology of its aftershocks, how the logic of counterinsurgency migrated from the deserts of the Middle East to the streets, schools, and shopping malls of the United States.
Beck’s central claim is devastating: the War on Terror did not stay “over there.” It changed American life in ways both subtle and grotesque. He tracks the militarisation of police forces, the omnipresence of surveillance, and the pop-cultural mythology of the “warrior” class, showing how they created what he calls impunity culture, in which state violence is assumed to be inevitable and justified. Whether in the airport security queue or on the television screen, the message is the same: vigilance is the price of safety, but safety is never clearly defined.
Beck’s book finds an apt counterpoint in Lewis Lapham’s Age of Folly, a scathing indictment of America’s descent from Cold War superpower to decadent plutocracy. If Beck’s Homeland meticulously documents how the War on Terror transformed domestic life through surveillance and militarisation, Lapham’s Age of Folly situates these changes within the broader historical and ideological collapse of American democracy. While Beck examines the way war remade everyday life in the United States, Lapham looks at the imperial delusions that sustained it. He describes post-9/11 America as desperate to sustain the illusion of omnipotence long after it lost the reality. The War on Terror, in his telling, was not just about countering threats but about maintaining an image of righteous force. “The damage done to America’s reputation abroad,” he writes, “is extensive, but not as extensive as the damage done to American democracy at home.”
Impunity
Beck’s discussion of impunity culture is among the book’s strongest sections. He traces how the logic of preemptive violence, justified abroad in the name of security, was absorbed into domestic institutions. Police forces that once relied on community engagement now resembled paramilitary units. The same surplus equipment used in Iraq turned up in Ferguson, Missouri, where armoured vehicles and sniper teams were deployed against protesters. SWAT teams became a routine presence in American law enforcement, their expansion justified by vague fears of terrorism.
But Homeland is not just about policy shifts or institutional drift. Beck is equally attuned to the psychological and cultural shifts that accompanied them. He shows how the War on Terror’s logic of necessary violence filtered into American self-conception, not just in government rhetoric, but in popular entertainment, in how police officers saw themselves, in how citizens learned to accept surveillance as a fact of life. The American state did not become more authoritarian overnight; rather, it made security a performance that everyone, willingly or otherwise, participated in.
Style and Retreat
Beck’s writing is fluid and direct, moving between historical analysis, cultural critique, and personal reflection. His prose carries a quiet urgency, never slipping into polemic but also never losing sight of the stakes. His discussion of post-9/11 journalism, for instance, is particularly sharp: traditional media outlets struggled to capture the Bush administration’s radicalism, while the rise of political blogging, with its informality, anger, and lack of decorum, seemed better suited to the moment. Beck’s own style reflects this shift: while carefully structured, it is also willing to engage in moments of irony, frustration, and dark humour.
What sets Homeland apart is its refusal to reduce 9/11 to mere spectacle. Beck acknowledges that while the attacks were instantly transformed into image—planes, smoke, falling towers—they were not just visual events. They were political, cultural, and historical ruptures, shaping everything from foreign policy to collective memory. His writing moves between these layers, showing how 9/11 was not just a moment to be watched but a turning point that reshaped America’s sense of itself. He traces this through security policy, media narratives, and even the physical changes to the urban landscape, the bollards, barriers, and permanent sense of vulnerability that now define American cities.
Lapham, by contrast, is a performer. His essays mix historical analogy with biting satire, his sentences rolling with the rhythm of an orator who has delivered too many eulogies for American democracy. He deftly illustrates how post-9/11 militarism and the illusion of American omnipotence not only undermined the nation’s international credibility but also hollowed out its domestic institutions, turning democracy itself into spectacle. If Beck reads like a cultural historian taking stock of a world transformed by war, Lapham reads like an old-world intellectual watching the empire collapse with a knowing, sardonic gaze. His critique is sweeping, rhetorical, sometimes almost biblical in its denunciations. His coalition of the willing is not an alliance but a punchline, a diplomatic invention that concealed the weakness of American leadership.
Coalition
Lapham’s critique of Bush’s coalition of the willing is particularly scathing. The phrase, he argues, was a way to give unilateral war the illusion of broad support. The presence of Dutch or Polish troops in Iraq did not change the course of the war, but it allowed the U.S. to claim that it was not acting alone. The coalition was never about military strength, it was about optics.
That the phrase has resurfaced in recent months, with Keir Starmer invoking it to rally European support for Ukraine, reveals how drastically the balance of power has shifted. Twenty years ago, the coalition of the willing was a means of legitimising American coercion. Now, it is a European project, a desperate attempt to build unity in the absence of U.S. leadership. Trump, leaning ever closer to Putin, has signalled his hostility to NATO in ways that would have been unthinkable even a decade ago. Starmer’s invocation of the phrase is an eerie echo of the past, except this time, it is Europe, not Washington, that must scramble to form an alliance.
Beck’s argument about America’s declining role takes on an added resonance in the wake of Trump’s return to power. Macron warns that Europe must achieve “strategic autonomy,” while Germany embarks on its largest military expansion since the Cold War. If the first coalition of the willing was a spectacle meant to cloak U.S. unilateralism, Starmer’s invocation of the phrase now speaks to something else: Europe’s realisation that it can no longer depend on Washington.
Aftermath
The War on Terror was once America’s justification for reshaping the world in its own image. Two decades later, its logic remains, not as a grand imperial project but as a series of decaying institutions, from militarised police forces at home to outsourced wars abroad. Even its rhetoric has been repurposed: the coalition of the willing, once used to mask American dominance, now emerges as Europe scrambles to defend Ukraine without U.S. support.
Beck and Lapham suggest that America’s post-9/11 trajectory was never just about foreign policy. The war was an ideological project, one that altered how the country saw itself, first as a righteous avenger, then as a permanent victim, and finally, perhaps, as something closer to what it once opposed.
If Beck leaves us with the unsettling sense that we are still living in the shadow of 9/11, Lapham offers an even bleaker possibility: that the shadow has become the landscape itself, and that America, once the world’s great architect of war, is no longer its master, but its hostage.
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