Empire–terrorist threat in the War on Terror

The relation between Empire and the terrorist threat in the War on Terror turns on a political reversal: the more the enemy is treated as invisible, without a clearly identifiable center, the more power can present exceptional and preemptive measures as necessary defense. In the account, this logic does not merely answer a threat. It helps produce a permanent emergency, narrows the space for political alternatives, and makes the power claiming to protect democracy increasingly difficult to distinguish from the danger it names.

The Enemy as a Condition of Emergency

The argument begins from a broader account of power. Political authority is not separated cleanly from violence: public law depends on an obscene supplement of coercion, while supposedly nonpolitical relations of command can embody earlier political struggles and decisions. The relation between Empire and its enemy therefore cannot be understood as a pure, lawful authority confronting an external disturbance. Power already contains violence, and its public account of order can conceal the force that sustains it.

The modern form of that relation is a threat displaced outward. Rather than relying only on its own capacity to command, power invokes an external Enemy whose presumed reach and potential danger can hold subjects in a state of alarm. Fascist appeals to a Jewish conspiracy and Stalinist appeals to the class enemy are examples of this political structure; the War on Terror gives it a contemporary form. The threat remains effective partly because it is not fully specified: the absence of a visible, bounded danger leaves room for fantasy to supply what might happen.

This is the link between the invisible enemy and permanent emergency. If the danger is defined as virtual, waiting for it to become actual can be represented as already too late. The logic of preemptive strike follows: action must come before the threatened event, against a possibility that cannot be conclusively located or exhausted. Emergency thus ceases to be a temporary response to a completed crisis and becomes a rationale for ongoing action against potential enemies.

Preemption and the Reversal of Defense

The account distinguishes this pattern from the Cold War model of threat. There, the possibility of mutual nuclear destruction had to remain a threat; the feared strike was most effective as something not carried out. In the War on Terror, by contrast, the spectral threat prompts an incessant actualization of measures against itself. The response, not the imagined attack, becomes continuous: potential terrorists are met by repeated strikes and protective actions justified as defense.

That change matters because the measures undertaken in the name of protection may themselves endanger the principles they claim to defend. The argument identifies the visible protective apparatus as a more immediate threat to democracy and human rights than the unseen danger invoked to legitimate it. A power that depicts itself as continually endangered, and as merely defending itself, can present its own actions as morally innocent while assigning hostile intentions to its adversary. Drawing on Friedrich Nietzsche’s analysis of defensive morality, the book treats this posture as a form of ressentiment and political hypocrisy, not as a neutral description of security.

The pattern also reveals a structural resemblance between the Empire and the terrorist threat. In the discussion’s terms, Terror becomes the constitutive outside of democracy: the antagonistic Other against which internal differences can be temporarily subordinated. The appeal to a common threat shifts democratic agonism among plural political options toward antagonism organized around equivalence, in which differences are set aside in the name of unity against the enemy. The comparison with the Enlightenment’s struggle against superstition sharpens the point: the Empire and fundamentalist Terror can each claim universality, even as they define one another as the absolute opposite.

The Law, Humanitarianism, and Exclusion

The relation is not confined to security policy. The discussion of humanitarian intervention shows how a politics presented as an antipolitical defense of innocent individuals can also advance a specific political and economic program. The United States’ overthrow of Saddam Hussein was justified in terms of ending Iraqi suffering, but the account also identifies other interests, including oil, and an intended future organized around Western liberal democracy, private property, and integration into the global market. Under the language of preventing suffering, a particular model of social transformation can be installed while the possibility of an alternative collective project is implicitly prohibited.

The legal status of Guantánamo prisoners gives the emergency logic a further consequence. One defense of their treatment held that they had been missed by the bombs: because they had survived a legitimate military operation, their subsequent fate was presented as preferable to death. The book argues that this reasoning effectively treats them as already dead in law while biologically alive, placing them in the position of Homo sacer, whose life no longer counts under the law. At the same time, the authorities exercising power over them occupy a corresponding legal ambiguity: their actions take place in an empty space that remains within the domain of law, but is no longer effectively constrained by it.

This is the paradox of sovereign exception. The universal rule of law is sustained by a power that reserves the ability to suspend the rule in its name. The exception is not simply outside the legal order; it is an excess through which the order protects its own authority. In this reading, the treatment of prisoners and the broader politics of preemption expose how a declared defense of law can rely on a zone where legal protections are withheld.

The Spectral Threat and the Reflexive Reversal

The War on Terror differs from earlier twentieth-century conflicts because its enemy is spectral rather than identified with a clearly bounded state such as the actually existing Communist empire. Lacking a visible center, the threat can appear omnipresent; that very indeterminacy supports the claim that the emergency cannot safely end. Yet spectralization produces a reflexive reversal. When no distinct enemy can be conclusively named, the United States, acting as protector against the threat, can itself emerge as the principal enemy.

The analogy to Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express underscores this reversal: when the whole group of suspects is implicated in the murder, the victim himself turns out to be the criminal. The comparison does not erase the distinction between Empire and terrorist violence. Instead, it makes the political consequences of an all-encompassing enemy concept legible: a power that organizes itself around the threat may become implicated in the danger it claims to contain. The relation is therefore self-undermining. Permanent defense can weaken the democratic and legal order invoked to justify it, while the enemy’s invisibility makes that weakening harder to recognize as a consequence of power itself.