At the heart of the American political tradition is a contradiction that runs deeper than the claim to promote “equal opportunity” in an age of hedge funds and trillion-dollar tech firms. As a system of thought, Anglo-American liberalism presents itself as defending equality before the law and “fighting for the rights of every man” — both at home and abroad. But liberalism, in the end, is little different than fascism, feudalism, or any other system of rule. When tested, it is willing to compromise its own stated values to expand its power and preserve the global order it rules.
A nation’s true moral commitments are not revealed in how it treats allies, but in how it treats enemies. Few things better expose the gulf between America’s lofty liberal ideals and its actual state practices than the continued existence of the quasi-legal detention facility at Guantánamo Bay. A prison camp 500 miles off the coast of Florida, Guantánamo still houses “enemy combatants”, many of whom suffer from the long-term psychological effects of what the government once proudly called “enhanced interrogation techniques” — its euphemism for torture.
Before these techniques were officially banned by Congress in 2009, detainees at Guantánamo faced stress positions held for hours, alongside forced nudity and exposure to extreme temperatures. Security officers blasted loud music for hours on end, deployed bright lights, and used sensory deprivation to disorient prisoners. Some inmates were threatened with dogs, or else subjected to staged desecrations designed to degrade their Muslim identity.
Many detainees were moved repeatedly between cells in what was cynically dubbed the “frequent flyer programme”, a practice aimed at preventing sleep entirely. The International Committee of the Red Cross, FBI officials, and Pentagon personnel all began raising alarms as early as 2003. Reports documented that the cumulative effect of these techniques led to severe physical deterioration, hallucinations, and long-term trauma. Though the Military Commissions Act of 2009 explicitly barred the use of statements obtained through torture or cruel, inhumane, or degrading treatment, Guantánamo remains open. At least 15 detainees remain in custody, and who knows exactly what’s happening with the conditions of their stays.
Next week, in what could mark a morally clarifying moment, one long-detained terror suspect, Encep Nurjaman, is finally scheduled to receive his first pretrial hearing — more than two decades after his capture. First arrested in Thailand in August 2003, Nurjaman, better known by his nom de guerre, “Riduan Isamuddin”, or simply “Hambali”, has been held without trial at Guantánamo Bay since 2006. This first hearing is set to begin in two months. Before his transfer to Guantánamo, Hambali spent more than three years in undisclosed CIA black sites. It wasn’t until 2019 — 16 years after his capture — that Hambali was formally charged with a range of terror-related offences under the Military Commissions Act.
At first glance, Hambali may appear to be a soft-spoken man from West Java. But his calm demeanour is misleading. He has been described by geopolitical analysts as the “Osama bin Laden of Southeast Asia,” and is widely believed to have been the operational mastermind of Jemaah Islamiyah — a network blamed for the 2002 Bali bombings that killed more than 200 people, as well as a separate attack a year later on a hotel in Jakarta that took a dozen more.
Is Hambali a terrorist responsible for hundreds of deaths? Probably, and the same is likely true for many of the 700-800 detainees Guantánamo has held since its creation more than two decades ago. But the presumed guilt of individual detainees, even in the case of heinous crimes, doesn’t justify the existence of Guantánamo itself. Nor does it excuse the fact that, despite President Obama’s public efforts to close the facility, Guantánamo Bay remains open in 2025, still housing non-citizens designated as “enemies of the nation”.
The flexibility of that label has proven convenient. Once deemed an “enemy” — regardless of evidence, trial or charge — a detainee can remain locked in limbo for decades. It’s important to note that, unlike the infamous Alcatraz prison off the coast of San Francisco, Guantánamo Bay was not created to keep dangerous men from escaping. Rather, it was built to help America’s security agencies escape the rights-based legal framework they are supposedly sworn to uphold.
By placing the prison offshore, Guantánamo effectively sidesteps the constitutional guarantees afforded by the American legal system. Since none of the long-term detainees held there are US citizens, the logic goes, they are not entitled to the protections of the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment, the Sixth Amendment’s guarantee of a speedy trial, or even Article I’s privilege of habeas corpus.
After the shock of the World Trade Center towers collapsing on 9/11, a general consensus formed within US security forces that the old liberal framework of rights and due process had outlived its applicability to contemporary problems. Building off that perception, Guantánamo Bay, and the regime of coercion it came to represent, emerged as both a camp and a symbol. American intelligence agencies and the Pentagon top brass were not embarrassed when accounts of torture leaked to the public. On the contrary, it’s highly likely they intended for those details to become known — a deliberate move to signal that captured enemies would receive neither rights nor mercy.
For a country with hundreds of foreign military interventions under its belt since 1789, the spread of a dark warrior mentality among its security forces is hardly surprising. Under the Bush administration, though, the theatre of cruelty became a feature, not a bug, of American foreign policy in the post-9/11 world. What had once scandalised the military — the “search and destroy” excesses of Vietnam, made infamous by My Lai — slowly began to lose its taboo in the 21st century.
Bush’s uncaring cowboy posturing found its natural heir in Donald Trump. A carnival barker who urged rally-goers to rough-up protestors, he once lamented that the only true failure of the Iraq War was that the US didn’t “take the oil”. In one of his more repugnant moments, Trump casually dismissed former POW John McCain with the line that, “I like the war heroes who weren’t captured.”
As crass and cruel as Trump can be, though, his brand of unreconstructed masculinity has struck a chord across Middle America. Fittingly for a man with a decades-long history of dabbling in professional wrestling, Trump’s approach to war, punishment and diplomacy always signalled something beyond mere vulgarity. Like the Guantánamo torture facility that preceded it, Trump’s embrace of violence and unlawfulness marked the end of post-Second World War kayfabe.
A term derived from the professional wrestling circuit, “kayfabe” refers to the suspension of disbelief required to pretend that the pageantry and violence in the ring is real — that the characters really hate each other, that the outcomes aren’t scripted, and that justice will ultimately prevail. For much of the 20th century, this illusion was carefully maintained. “Babyface” heroes like Hulk Hogan battled villainous “heels” like the Iron Sheik in the name of truth, justice, and the American way. The audiences, however knowingly, played along.
It seems totally absurd in retrospect, but for decades on end, the idea that wrestling was a real sport was rigorously guarded by both wrestlers and promoters, hardly surprising when it raked in hundreds of millions of dollars. But by the mid-Nineties, the audience had grown restless. Hulk Hogan’s saccharine approach — telling kids to “say your prayers and eat your vitamins” — began to feel cartoonish, even to the audience it was designed for. After the fall of the Soviet Union, and Gen X’s discovery of irony, younger Americans simply couldn’t play along anymore.
In the age of goth and grunge, earnestness was no longer cool even in the low-brow world of professional wrestling. And so too in politics: whether on TV or their ballot papers, Americans wanted something “real”. Donald Trump, for all his orange-tinted fakery and comb-over theatrics, somehow managed to capture that yearning for authenticity. But it’s important to remember that it was George W. Bush, with his born-again frat-boy swagger, who paved the way.
Bush’s unapologetic good-versus-evil rhetoric acted as a bridge between the postwar kayfabe of solemn democratic ideals — and the bare-knuckled ruthlessness that Trump would later embody. Whether discussing the invasion of Iraq or waterboarding detainees at Guantánamo, Bush, like all his predecessors, stuck to the Wilsonian script, insisting that America’s intentions were pure. America merely felt compelled to protect weaker nations. The goal was to “make the world safe for democracy”, as Wilson put it at the start of America’s imperial era.
In practice, of course, Bush made no bones about the fact that America didn’t mind going it alone if the world “failed” to support his strategic aims. All the same, his administration made some effort to patch together a Potemkin coalition for the Iraq War, if only so the American public wouldn’t have to confront how little global legitimacy their “preemptive” campaign of aggression truly had abroad. Eventually, though, the bill came due. When Hurricane Katrina hit, all Bush’s institutional failures — at home and abroad — suddenly became impossible to deny.
Then, almost overnight, Barack Obama emerged as a redemptive hero for Americans desperate to restore the decorum of postwar liberal internationalism. The cowpoke-as-president act was over. Guantánamo would be closed and America would return to multilateralism. More to the point, the military-industrial complex’s insatiable desire for violence abroad could be dismissed as an aberration of the Bush years. Anglo-American liberalism, in short, was “back”, with Obama’s professorial cadence reassuring the establishment that politics-as-theatre could again be conducted in full sentences, and that kayfabe for people with college degrees was once more safe to enjoy.
Yet the moment Obama met America’s security machinery, the machinery won. After spending a year trying to shutter Guantánamo, he surrendered to institutional inertia, characteristically throwing up his hands and claiming he was powerless to do anything, even as he became an enthusiastic supporter of drone-striking America’s foes. After eight years of these contradictions, many voters were unsurprisingly ready to return to the unvarnished, self-interested “realness” that President Bush had teased during his doomed administration. Enter Trump, a town crier of a man who promised early and often during his 2016 run to restock the camp. Several times during his political ascent, Trump declared he’d “load Guantánamo up with lots of bad dudes — believe me.” Supremely untroubled by the precedent set by its rights-free detainees, Trump joyfully embraced the barbarism. And if most American voters opposed Guantanamo Bay, a majority of Republicans were in favour of keeping it open forever. And, ever since Trump began his venture into politics 10 years ago, he has embraced Guantanamo’s no-holds-barred approach, leaning into the schoolyard bully persona many GOP voters want. Never mind that it’s a deliberate performance — wrestling heel for the weak-kneed “libs”.
As part of that heel performance, Trump has taken Bush’s go-it-alone instincts several steps further. As a juvenile show of strength, Trump has never shown any real concern for America’s reputation abroad; he’s more WWE than UN. Shove your enemies, humiliate your allies, and welcome the boos. Trump openly mocks Nato allies, calling the alliance “obsolete,” while cosying up to autocrats like Kim Jong-un. International agreements, meanwhile, mean nothing to him. In one of his more recent displays of schoolyard bully duplicity, Trump dangled the prospect of a peace deal with Iran, floating photo-op summits and whispering sweet nothings about negotiation — all while greenlighting a pressure campaign designed to humiliate them to the highest degree possible.
All the while, Trump has brought the logic of War on Terror violence back home — deploying masked ICE agents to round up undocumented immigrants. As at Guantánamo, detainees are frequently stripped of habeas corpus and other standard liberal protections. Even more shocking, Trump has deported hundreds of immigrants to El Salvador’s CECOT prison, a horror show operating well outside liberal democratic norms. And, last month, Trump and his allies unironically started promoting the idea of an “Alligator Alcatraz”. A Florida detention site, surrounded by giant snakes and carnivorous reptiles, its fate is ultimately being hashed out in the courts. But whatever happens there, it feels grimly appropriate that Guantánamo is just a few hundred miles across the Straits of Florida.
Outside of, say, Viktor Orbán, it’s hard to imagine any other leader of a wealthy democratic country embracing something as juvenile and bloodthirsty as an alligator-ringed prison island. Not just because alligators and pythons aren’t present in the waterways of Berlin or Brussels, but because most other Western democracies, even in their most aggressive elements, long ago abandoned such macho displays.
Still, that “civilised” restraint comes with its own blind spots. For its part, the European establishment is currently doing everything in its power to hubristically pave the way for the eventual triumph of their own Trump-like strongmen. Earlier this month, virtually every mainstream German party in Cologne publicly committed to avoid linking immigration to “negative social developments such as unemployment or threats to domestic security”. That leaves only the AfD willing to address the rising concerns of German citizens, with the political consequences predictable and forthcoming.
To what lengths should a country go to preserve its way of life — and, with it, its political culture? What happens when terrorists seek to destroy that culture, or when large numbers of newcomers arrive with little intention of conforming to its established norms? Donald Trump, while certainly no intellect, instinctively understands that every regime, liberal or not, is ultimately just another system of rule. Yes, the Anglo-American tradition offers some humane values and democratic ideals. But without borders, hierarchies and limits there’s no sustaining it.
“Donald Trump instinctively understands that every regime, liberal or not, is ultimately just another system of rule.”
“Alligator Alcatraz” might be a grotesque caricature of national security. And, no matter what happens to Hambali and his fellow inmates, Guantánamo will remain a permanent stain on the American political tradition. But the motivations behind these excesses reflect the same impatience that saw the American public both re-elect Bush and see-saw back to Trump — an impatience with political kayfabe and the fiction that liberal democracies only ever rule through consent, not coercion.
Trump’s break from this postwar tradition is essential to understanding his appeal. He and his supporters no longer feel the need to lie about the nature of the liberal project, which helps explain why yesterday Trump signed an executive order to change the name of the Department of Defense to the far more accurate — but infinitely less polite — “Department of War”, as it was previously called in the first half of the 20th century.
Reflectively, in 1947, at the dawn of America’s world dominance, the name was changed because it no longer reflected how the military wished to portray itself to the world. But now that the sun is setting on American hegemony, Trump and his acolytes wish to nostalgically revisit the glory days of the nation’s unabashed — and unashamed — power. To put it bluntly, they want to reveal the liberal state in its truest light. Not as a utopia, but as an empire, one that in the final analysis mainly protects and enriches its own citizens. That it’s currently failing at both, except for the wealthiest tenth of the population, is, in a way, beside the point. The performance has changed, and the liberal myths Guantánamo laid bare have now also been all but abandoned rhetorically.
As for the Cuban camp itself, its continued existence, after two presidential promises to close it, reveals just how unaccountable the American security state has now become. Despite Trump’s promise to take on the deep state, indeed, it now works with him to abandon all pretence of upholding the old liberal myths of procedural justice and universal rights. The War on Terror long ago faded from the headlines, but its institutional architecture endures — executive secrecy, legal improvisation and extrajudicial killings.
Earlier this week, Trump boasted that US forces had destroyed a “narco-terrorist” vessel off the coast of Venezuela. The administration quickly framed the strike, which killed 11 people, as a counterterrorism operation, invoking the same playbook that justified the indefinite detention of “unlawful enemy combatants” at Guantánamo. A drone video, shared triumphantly by the President himself, shows a small boat framed in a military targeting scope before being blasted by a missile strike.
To make the moment even more dystopian, Venezuela’s government immediately denounced the footage as “AI-generated propaganda”. Perhaps the images were AI-altered to make the appearance of the strike look even more devastating, but that’s more or less irrelevant. Because the deeper truth is that the President of the United States is proudly deploying lethal force in legal grey zones, somewhere between war and policing, without congressional oversight, much less public approval.
Just like Guantánamo, bombing the Venezuelan boat was an act designed not only to punish, but to perform. The difference is that what was once hidden is now blasted on social media for likes and shares. If, in short, Guantánamo started as a loophole, 20 years on we must now understand it as a laboratory — for testing the bounds of the liberal project, and for showing up the brutal calculations that underpin all politics, no matter their ostensible ideology.
