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.
How Reagan-Bush Era Shaped America's War on Terror
The interventions of the Reagan-Bush period were rehearsals.
Mark
Why does Frakes think the 1980s and early 1990s matter so much to understanding what happened after 9/11?
Mimi
Because those interventions—Libya, Panama, Desert Storm—taught Washington that it could and should use military force against states that broke the rules. Each success reinforced the lesson.
Mark
But couldn't you say the same thing about earlier American interventions? Why is this period specifically the origin point?
Mimi
The difference is that during the Reagan-Bush years, the Cold War framework was collapsing. These weren't proxy fights anymore. They were direct assertions of American will in a world where the old rules no longer applied. That's when the rogue state concept crystallized.
Mark
So the war on terror wasn't a new invention after 9/11?
Mimi
Not really. The intellectual framework was already there. 9/11 provided the trigger, but the gun had been loaded for years.
Mark
Does Frakes suggest this was inevitable? That once you start thinking about rogue states this way, you're locked into a certain kind of response?
Mimi
He shows how the logic developed and hardened through practice. Whether it was inevitable is a different question—but once you've bombed Libya and invaded Panama and they didn't blow back catastrophically, the next step becomes easier to justify.
Mark
What would have been different if those earlier interventions had failed?
Mimi
That's the counterfactual Frakes doesn't quite explore. But the point is they didn't fail, at least not in the short term. That success shaped how Washington saw its options.
Il Polso
- The standard story of the war on terror begins with the attacks of 9/11, but Frakes argues that the real origin story starts much earlier — in the strategic lessons drawn from Reagan-era military operations.
- Each intervention — the Libya bombing, the Panama invasion, Desert Storm — reinforced Washington's conviction that forceful confrontation with defiant states was not just permissible but necessary.
- The 'rogue state' framework that emerged was not merely rhetorical; it became a formal doctrine organizing American foreign policy around terrorism sponsorship, WMD proliferation, and regional destabilization as triggers for action.
- By September 12th, 2001, policymakers did not need to invent a new playbook — they already had one, tested and refined through repeated use over two decades.
- Frakes's analysis lands as a challenge to the idea of rupture: the post-9/11 era was less a revolution in American strategy than an expansion of a framework already deeply embedded in the national security apparatus.
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.
Matthew Frakes has written a history that redraws the timeline of American militarism. His central claim is both simple and unsettling: the global war on terror did not begin on September 11th, 2001. It began earlier, in the conflicts and crises of the Reagan and Bush years, where a particular logic of power was forged and tested.
The evidence Frakes marshals is concrete. The 1986 bombing of Libya marked a direct military strike against a state Washington held responsible for terrorism. The 1989 invasion of Panama was another assertion of American will beyond its borders. Operation Desert Storm in 1991 demonstrated that the United States possessed both the capacity and the appetite to project overwhelming force in defense of international order. Taken together, these episodes taught Washington a durable lesson.
Out of that experience emerged the doctrine of the 'rogue state' — a category reserved for nations that refused the constraints binding responsible members of the international community. Whether through terrorism sponsorship, drug trafficking, or the pursuit of weapons of mass destruction, these states were defined by defiance. And defiance, the doctrine held, required confrontation.
What makes Frakes's argument significant is its insistence on continuity. The rhetoric of the post-9/11 era was new, the scale was vastly larger, and the targets multiplied — but the underlying logic had been in place for years. American policymakers in 2001 were not improvising. They were applying a framework they had already rehearsed, one that told them which states were dangerous, why force was appropriate, and how the rules could be rewritten when necessity demanded it.
In complicating the standard narrative of rupture, Frakes asks readers to look backward as well as forward — to understand that the interventions of the Reagan-Bush period were not isolated episodes but precedents, rehearsals for something larger that was still taking shape.
Historian Matthew Frakes has written a book that traces a direct line from the military interventions of the Reagan and Bush administrations through to the global war on terror that would define American foreign policy after September 11th. His argument is straightforward but consequential: the crises and conflicts of the 1980s and early 1990s taught Washington a lesson about power and order that would shape everything that came after.
The evidence Frakes examines is concrete. There was the 1982 conflict over the Falkland Islands, which demonstrated that regional powers could still challenge the international system. There was the 1986 bombing of Libya, a direct military strike against a state Washington deemed a sponsor of terrorism. There was the 1989 invasion of Panama, another forceful assertion of American will. And there was Operation Desert Storm in 1991, the massive military campaign that expelled Iraq from Kuwait and showed that the United States possessed the capacity and willingness to project overwhelming force to defend the rules of international order.
These events, taken together, crystallized a particular way of thinking about the world. Washington began to see certain states—those it labeled rogue states—as fundamentally different from others. These were nations that refused to play by the established rules. Some sponsored terrorist organizations. Others trafficked in drugs or destabilized their regions. Still others pursued weapons of mass destruction. The common thread was defiance: a refusal to accept the constraints that bound responsible nations.
What Frakes demonstrates is that this framework did not emerge suddenly on September 12th, 2001. It had been developing for years, hardened through experience and reinforced by each successful military operation. By the time the Twin Towers fell, American policymakers already possessed a well-developed doctrine about when and how to use force against states that broke the rules. They had practiced it repeatedly. They believed it worked.
The significance of Frakes's analysis lies in what it reveals about continuity. The war on terror, often presented as a radical break from previous American foreign policy, was in fact the culmination of thinking that had been taking shape throughout the previous two decades. The scale expanded dramatically after 9/11, the rhetoric changed, the targets multiplied. But the underlying logic—that certain states posed such a threat to international order that they must be confronted forcefully, that American military power was the appropriate tool, that the rules of engagement could be rewritten when necessary—this logic was already in place.
Frakes's work matters because it complicates the standard narrative. It suggests that understanding the post-9/11 era requires looking backward, not just at the attacks themselves but at the intellectual and strategic foundations that had been laid in the years before. The interventions of the Reagan-Bush period were not isolated incidents. They were rehearsals. They established precedents. They normalized a particular way of thinking about American power and its proper use in the world.
Citazioni salienti
These events persuaded Washington that it needed to deal forcefully with so-called rogue states—those that broke the basic rules of international order— Matthew Frakes's analysis
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