The collective fear of terrorism is rooted in the drive to uphold US hegemony and capitalism.

This security logic rested on the assumption that order was a necessary pre-condition for capitalism to thrive both domestically and globally. Modernisation programmes in the ‘developing world’ and the War on Poverty at home both relied on the intersection of economic development with security. W. W. Rostow, the eminent economist and national security advisor to Johnson, put it succinctly to Johnson in 1967 when he said: ‘I was much struck by the parallels between your formulation of domestic policy and those you have applied to foreign policy. At home your appeal is for law and order as the framework for economic and social progress. Abroad we fight in Vietnam . . . [to] build a future of economic and social progress.’39 Thus, developmentalism, policing and militarism became pillars for the advancement of capitalism and the restoration of a US-led global imperial order. This was the context for the rise of counter-insurgency doctrine, which rested on development plus force.40 As one expert put it, counter-insurgency is ‘armed social work’.41 Resistance to this order was organised by anti-colonial and anti-imperial forces in countries in the Global South, and by social movements domestically. From the Civil Rights and Black Power movements to the anti-Vietnam War movement, US domestic and foreign policy was called into question. These movements took a radical turn in the mid-1960s. As Gilmore explains, from the LA Watts uprising onwards radical, Black, Brown, Yellow and Red Power movements fought the ways the state organized poor peoples’ perpetual dispossession in service to capital. Radical white activists, students, wage workers, welfare rights agitators added to domestic disorders by aligning with people of color: they also launched autonomous attacks against symbols and strongholds of US capitalism and Euro-American racism and imperialism.42 In 1975, Samuel Huntington, drawing the lessons for the elite of these movements, would decry the ‘excess of democracy’, arguing that if the US could not control its domestic populations it would not be able to retain its status as the pre-eminent ‘hegemonic power in a system of world order’.43 The Trilateral Commission, an instrument of the liberal elite, which published Huntington’s essay, set out to address what it termed the ‘crisis of democracy’ by forming a global alliance of nations in North America, Western Europe and with Japan. The solution to the crisis involved intervention into various spheres of social and political life. One dimension was the use of counter-insurgency methods to suppress dissent. The US’s expanded policing capacities around the world coincided with incarceration domestically. As Stuart Schrader shows, the security experts who developed counter-insurgency doctrine and practices did so by drawing initially on insights from domestic cases, which they then applied abroad, learning lessons that were subsequently brought back home.44 Saigon and Los Angeles were but two points in an emerging global grand strategy designed to restore order and US economic and military hegemony. In their now classic analysis, Policing the Crisis, Stuart Hall and his co-authors first identified the turn towards an ‘exceptional state’ and the use of racism as a means to address structural crises. In the UK, black youth were criminalised and a moral panic generated around black ‘mugging’. Despite the lack of any real uptick in the type of crime called mugging, this new racial project became the pretext to enact authoritarian solutions and legitimate draconian policing. As they state, ‘[p]olicing the blacks’ became ‘for all practical purposes, synonymous with the wider problem of policing the crisis’.45And, if ‘mugging’ came to the UK from the US, ‘fully thematised and contextualized’ and ‘embedded in a number of linked frames’,46 ‘terrorism’ in its particular racialised form of ‘Arab terrorism’ and later ‘Islamic terrorism’ came to the US as a collaborative project between conservatives in Israel and the US. Together with urban crime, riots, feminist agitation, and anti-war protests, terrorism became part of a generalised moral panic that the national security state needed to subdue in order to restore order, the stability of capitalism and global imperial dominance.