Long before the smoke cleared over lower Manhattan, the architecture of America's response was already being built. Historian Matthew Frakes traces how a series of military interventions across the 1980s and early 1990s — from Libya to Panama to the Persian Gulf — quietly forged a doctrine that sorted the world into rule-keepers and rule-breakers, and assigned American force as the instrument of correction. What appeared after September 11th as a radical departure was, in Frakes's telling, the maturation of a logic decades in the making.