Born in 1911 in Illinois, Ronald Reagan rose to prominence first as a Hollywood actor and later as a political figure, serving as governor of California from 1967 to 1975. His anti-communist stance, cultivated during his time as president of the Screen Actors Guild during the time of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communist purges, would heavily influence his later foreign policy approach. By the time he assumed the presidency in 1981, Reagan had cemented his image as a committed Cold Warrior, ready to confront the Soviet Union and reassert American strength on the global stage. His foreign policy was guided by a belief in American exceptionalism, a deep mistrust of communism, and the conviction that the United States should actively promote democracy and capitalism abroad. He rejected the policy of détente favored by previous administrations and instead pursued a more aggressive stance, famously dubbing the Soviet Union the “evil empire.” This confrontational rhetoric and his funding of the mujahedeen in the Afghanistan war makes Reagan a particularly vital part of the developing relationship between Muslim identity and American foreign policy. Through Reagan’s relentless quest to defeat the Soviet Union, he helped to fund, train, and radicalize a generation of Islamic militants whose resentment of America eventually redounded onto the United States in the form of 9/11.

One of the most significant and controversial episodes of Reagan’s presidency was the Iran-Contra Affair, which erupted publicly in 1986 and which Mamdani uses to illustrate the contradictions of American foreign policy. This complex political scandal stemmed from two separate covert operations that were illegally intertwined. On one side, the Reagan administration was secretly selling arms to Iran—then under an arms embargo—in hopes of securing the release of American hostages held by Hezbollah in Lebanon, even while being opposed to Iran’s particular form of Islamic nationalism. On the other side, profits from these arms sales were funneled to fund the Contras—right-wing rebel groups fighting the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua. This support directly violated the Boland Amendment, a congressional prohibition on US assistance to the Contras. The revelation of this dual operation ignited a firestorm in Washington, leading to multiple investigations and televised hearings that captured the attention of the American public. While Reagan himself maintained that he had no knowledge of the diversion of funds to the Contras, the scandal severely damaged his credibility and raised questions about his leadership and oversight. The lack of consequences for Reagan himself (in contrast to the way in which the Watergate scandal ended Richard Nixon’s presidency), Mamdani suggests, indicates a broad, cross-party acceptance of Reagan’s foreign policy positions.

Despite the controversy, Reagan’s foreign policy legacy has had a profound and lasting influence on American political discourse and strategy, giving rise to the term “Reaganite.” Throughout the book, Mamdani uses this term as shorthand for the emergent political sentiment of the neoconservatism era. The term encapsulates a particular vision of assertive American global leadership, an unwavering commitment to military strength, and a belief in the moral clarity of American values in global affairs. Reaganism in foreign policy championed the use of hard power to confront authoritarian regimes, promote free markets, and roll back perceived threats to American interests. In the post-Cold War world, this doctrine was echoed in the policies of later administrations, Mamdani suggests, particularly those of George W. Bush, whose “War on Terror” drew from Reaganite themes of moral dichotomy and interventionism. Even Democratic presidents like Bill Clinton, though differing in style and emphasis, adopted elements of Reagan’s strategic posture, such as the promotion of liberal democracy and the use of military force in humanitarian or strategic interventions.

Mahmood Mamdani uses the example of Osama bin Laden as a central case study to expose the deep contradictions and long-term consequences of American foreign policy during and after the Cold War. Mamdani does not excuse bin Laden’s actions, but presents them as an example of blowback, a term referring to the unintended negative consequences of covert operations. Bin Laden’s rise, Mamdani argues, was not the result of an inherent clash between Islam and the West, but the direct outcome of a US foreign policy that weaponized religious extremism for strategic purposes and then disowned it once it became politically inconvenient.

Osama bin Laden was born in 1957 in Saudi Arabia into a wealthy and well-connected family. His father, Mohammed bin Laden, was a Yemeni immigrant who became a construction magnate closely linked to the Saudi royal family. Osama received a religious education and studied business administration, but his life changed in the 1980s with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Like many young men in the Muslim world, bin Laden saw the war as a call to defend fellow Muslims from foreign occupation. He traveled to Afghanistan and became a financier, recruiter, and fighter in the US-backed jihad against the Soviets. During this period, he formed key relationships with other militants and intelligence networks, laying the groundwork for what would eventually become al-Qaeda.

Mamdani emphasizes that bin Laden’s emergence as a political actor cannot be separated from the geopolitical context of the Cold War. The US viewed the Soviet Union as its primary global rival and was willing to support any group that opposed Soviet influence, even if those groups held reactionary or fundamentalist views. In Afghanistan, this meant that the US, through the CIA and with the help of Pakistani intelligence (ISI), poured billions of dollars into training and arming the mujahideen. This policy did not merely tolerate extremism; it cultivated it. Mamdani notes that bin Laden’s role in Afghanistan, while not directly coordinated by the CIA, was part of a broader ecosystem of militant networks that the US and its allies helped create. After the war ended and the Soviets withdrew, the US abandoned the region, leaving behind a fractured country and a generation of fighters without a cause but full of anti-Western sentiment.

This abandonment, coupled with US military presence in the Middle East—particularly in Saudi Arabia during and after the Gulf War—radicalized bin Laden. He came to view the US not just as a foreign occupier, but as a corrupting force that supported authoritarian regimes and repressed Muslim populations. Mamdani uses this shift in bin Laden’s worldview to argue that terrorism is not a cultural phenomenon rooted in Islam, but a political one rooted in modern imperial dynamics. When bin Laden turned against the United States in the 1990s, he was not changing his ideology; he was redirecting the very tools and networks that had been mobilized during the Cold War. The attacks of 9/11 were, in Mamdani’s analysis, a form of blowback, an echo of past American decisions coming home to roost. As such, Mamdani challenges the Bush administration’s narrative that Islamic terrorism emerged in a vacuum or out of religious hatred alone. Instead, he invites readers to consider how Western interventions, alliances with repressive regimes, and short-term strategic thinking laid the foundation for the global terror networks that emerged in the 1990s and 2000s. In Mamdani’s account, Bin Laden is a symptom of a broken system of global politics shaped by Cold War logic, racialized ideology, and the militarization of religion.