Book Review – Osamah F. Khalil, A World of Enemies: America’s Wars at Home and Abroad from Kennedy to Biden. Cambridge (MA) and London: Harvard University Press, 2024.
Munich (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – “When you say working, are they stopping the Houthis, no. Are they going to continue, yes.” This was US President Joe Biden’s answer to a journalist in January 2024, when asked about the US strikes against the Houthis in Yemen. Washington had initiated the military operation earlier that month to restore trade in the Red Sea, deeply affected by the Houthi attacks against ships since the beginning of Israel’s war on Gaza in October 2023. US strikes on Yemen would go on until Trump’s inauguration and be later re-started by the Republican president. They were stopped in May 2025, without the US having gotten any closer to its objectives in Yemen.
It is only pertinent that Osamah F. Khalil, a historian at Syracuse University, quotes Biden’s revelatory statements in his book “A World of Enemies: America’s Wars at Home and Abroad from Kennedy to Biden.” In the pages of his latest work, Khalil argues that the last decades of US foreign policy have been an exercise in implementing demonstrably failed policies hoping for positive results. As US national interests have been defined ever so broadly, few regions of the world have remained untouched by Washington’s foreign policy. The book brings us to many different theaters, from the Horn of Africa to the Middle East, Colombia, and Southern Africa. Although the vast reach of “World of Enemies” must be appreciated, some readers might find that the author should have focused on fewer case studies, as we often move from one scenario to another before we have had the opportunity to become familiar with them.
Khalil begins his book with the Vietnam War. He considers the conflict a watershed moment for US foreign policy because it marked a whole generation that drew on the Vietnam experience to formulate their perspectives. Vietnam introduced fears that the US might be in decline. At the same time, many US foreign policymakers thought that the withdrawal from Vietnam emboldened Washington’s enemies around the world (at that time, mainly the USSR and its Communist allies) as it signaled US vulnerability. This became a common theme in the coming decades.
There is no clear evidence sustaining the link. And yet, after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, there were plenty of political commentators and academicians who suggested that the US withdrawal from Afghanistan the previous year had led Putin to move against Ukraine. Similarly, multiple voices are arguing that military support for Ukraine is key to preventing China from invading Taiwan.
Vietnam did not only inaugurate an era in which US withdrawal from any corner of the world was assumed to embolden US enemies elsewhere around the globe. Vietnam, argues Khalil, was the departing shot towards a closer connection between US foreign and domestic policy. Some of the tactics used against the Vietnamese insurgency, such as the surveillance and infiltration of suspected groups, were imported into the so-called War on Crime or the repression of the anti-war and Civil Rights movements.
“Domestic and foreign policies are not distinct spheres”, writes Khalil.[1] The common thread between challenges at home and abroad is that they are both dealt with a militaristic approach. The response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 was throwing weapons at the problem by arming the Mujahideen, with long-term negative consequences for the region and US domestic security. Meanwhile, at home, problems connected to drug abuse and violent crime were not met by more expenditure on social policy but on increasingly heavy-armed police forces. With longer penalties for both petty and serious crimes, America’s prisons filled up. Minority groups were particularly likely to end up in jail.
Today, according to the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, the US is the first country in the ranking of annual number of deaths from drug use disorders per 100,000 people. In the US, there are 19.5 deaths due to drug use disorders per 100,000 people. The next country on the list is Canada, with 8.9 deaths per 100,000 people. Meanwhile, the US has the fifth highest incarceration rate in the world. With 541 incarcerated persons for 100,000 people, only El Salvador, Cuba, Rwanda, and Turkmenistan have a higher rate. 46% of those sentenced to federal prison were convicted of drug offenses.
Khalil provides some key examples showing how the distance between foreign and domestic policies collapses at the service of a militaristic agenda. One of the most illustrative examples is the use in 1983 of U-2 spy planes (normally deployed to surveil Soviet missile bases) to identify marijuana-growing zones in California. The U-2 spy planes were accompanied by combat helicopters full of heavily armed National Guard and local law enforcement personnel. Every U-2 flight cost $500,000 and was an annoying intrusion for local inhabitants, but the raids did not lead to a reduction of marijuana-growing zones.
Under George W. Bush, domestic and foreign policy became even more intertwined. As Khalil notes, “the Bush administration deliberately sought to conflate Iraq with the September 11 attacks to justify an invasion”.[2] The US projected its new fears into the world. Whereas the Plan Colombia to assist the Colombian military in its fight against the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrilla was originally conceived in 1999 as part of the War on Drugs, the focus changed after 9/11. Khalil writes that “the relationship between Iraq and Colombia was not merely rhetorical. Indeed, Plan Colombia increasingly emphasized counterinsurgency and counterterrorism rather than counternarcotics…As in Iraq, paramilitary groups benefited from and exacerbated the violence.”[3]
Despite their differences, both Barack Obama and Donald Trump reached the White House promising significant changes in US foreign policy. They abandoned power having been responsible for more continuity than breaks with the past. Obama, for instance, dealt with the criticism against the US indefinite detention policy. But instead of closing Guantánamo as he had promised, he scaled up the country’s drone program, with the result that high-value targets were not imprisoned but directly killed. Meanwhile, Trump campaigned both in 2016 and 2024 on “ending endless wars”. However, as Khalil remarks, under Trump, the Pentagon adopted new rules of engagement that resulted in higher civilian casualties. 2018, for instance, was the year with the highest figure of civilians killed in Afghanistan in almost a decade.
Stephen Wertheim, the author of “Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy”, notes that “to get serious about stopping endless war, American leaders must do what they most resist: end America’s commitment to armed supremacy and embrace a world of pluralism and peace.” Neither Obama nor Trump (so far) have taken the path recommended by Wertheim.
Khalil concludes with some recommendations for US policymakers both at home and abroad. The author states that, during the War on Drugs, the US has traditionally put too much emphasis on supply-side measures such as interdiction, eradication, and counterinsurgency. This is based on the idea that demand for “hard drugs” will decrease if prices increase, but this is far from being the case. Khalil favors an approach that focuses on reducing demand, such as the one implemented in Portugal.
In the Iberian country, since the early 2000s, drug policy has been formulated on the belief that drug addiction is not a crime, but an illness. Whereas trafficking is criminalized, possession for personal use is not. In Portugal, consumption rates for most drug types are considerably below the European average. Still, the Portuguese case shows how important it is for decriminalization to be accompanied by consistent public spending. As public funds for treatment decreased during Portugal’s economic crisis, the number of users grew again.
Regarding America’s wars abroad, Khalil writes that the US has suffered from an “overreliance on force”.[4] “From crimes to drugs to terror, there have been consistent attempts to claim that force will quickly resolve problematic situations. Instead, it has made resolutions more difficult and complex”, notes Khalil.[5] The author proposes to give diplomacy a chance, also in Ukraine, even while being aware that a diplomatic approach cannot be the panacea to complex problems. The readers will find in “World of Enemies” a well-researched and fundamental contribution to the critical debate on America’s preference for militarized approaches to domestic and foreign challenges.
[1] Osamah F. Khalil, A World of Enemies: America’s Wars at Home and Abroad from Kennedy to Biden (Cambridge (MA) and London: Harvard University Press, 2024), p. 296.
[2] Ibid., p. 197.
[3] Ibid., p. 225.
[4] Ibid., p. 302.
[5] Ibid.
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