Background and Historical Context

Since the 1970s, Washington has been secretly funding some of the worst terrorists in the Middle East. America has supported extremists with money and hardware, including enemies such as Bin Laden. The Pentagon's willingness to make alliances abroad have seen the war coming home with inevitable consequences: by funding, training, and arming jihadist elements in Afghanistan, Syria, and Libya since the Cold War and waging wars of regime change and interventions that gave birth to the Islamic State. Such action has lead to a blow back effect at home: a security crisis that has seen the catastrophe of 9/11 and other terrorist threats as well as the rise of an islamophobic ethnonationalism.

In The Management of Savagery, Blumenthal excavates the real story behind America's dealing with the world and shows how the extremist forces that now threaten peace across the globe are the inevitable flowering of America's imperial designs of a national security state. And shows how this had a direct influence on the rise of the Trump presidency.