You remember. It was supposed to be twenty-first-century war, American-style: precise beyond imagining; smart bombs; drones capable of taking out a carefully identified and tracked human being just about anywhere on Earth; special operations raids so pinpoint-accurate that they would represent a triumph of modern military science. Everything “networked.” It was to be a glorious dream of limited destruction combined with unlimited power and success. In reality, it would prove to be a nightmare of the first order.

If you want a single word to summarize American war-making in this last decade and a half, I would suggest rubble. It’s been a painfully apt term since September 11, 2001. In addition, to catch the essence of such war in this century, two new words might be useful: rubblize and rubblization. Let me explain what I mean.

In recent weeks, another major city in Iraq has officially been “liberated” (almost) from the militants of the Islamic State. However, the results of the U.S.-backed Iraqi military campaign to retake Mosul, that country’s second largest city, don’t fit any ordinary definition of triumph or victory. It began in October 2016 and, at nine months and counting, has been longer than the World War II battle of Stalingrad. Week after week, in street to street fighting, with U.S. airstrikes repeatedly called in on neighborhoods still filled with terrified Mosulites, unknown but potentially staggering numbers of civilians have died. More than a million people — yes, you read that figure correctly — were uprooted from their homes and major portions of the Western half of the city they fled, including its ancient historic sections, have been turned into rubble.

This should be the definition of victory as defeat, success as disaster. It’s also a pattern. It’s been the essential story of the American war on terror since, in the month after the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush loosed American air power on Afghanistan. That first air campaign began what has increasingly come to look like the full-scale rubblization of significant parts of the Greater Middle East.

By not simply going after the crew who committed those attacks but deciding to take down the Taliban, occupy Afghanistan, and in 2003, invade Iraq, Bush’s administration opened the proverbial can of worms in that vast region. An imperial urge to overthrow Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein, who had once been Washington’s guy in the Middle East only to become its mortal enemy (and who had nothing whatsoever to do with 9/11), proved one of the fatal miscalculations of the imperial era.

So, too, did the deeply engrained fantasy of Bush administration officials that they controlled a high-tech, precision military that could project power in ways no other nation on the planet or in history ever had; a military that would be, in the president’s words, “the greatest force for human liberation the world has ever known.” With Iraq occupied and garrisoned (Korea-style) for generations to come, his top officials assumed that they would take down fundamentalist Iran (sound familiar?) and other hostile regimes in the region, creating a Pax Americana there. (Hence, the particular irony of the present Iranian ascendancy in Iraq.) In the pursuit of such fantasies of global power, the Bush administration, in effect, punched a devastating hole in the oil heartlands of the Middle East. In the pungent imagery of Abu Mussa, head of the Arab League at the time, the U.S. chose to drive straight through “the gates of hell.”

Rubblizing the Greater Middle East

In the 15-plus years since 9/11, parts of an expanding swathe of the planet — from Pakistan’s borderlands in South Asia to Libya in North Africa — were catastrophically unsettled. Tiny groups of Islamic terrorists multiplied exponentially into both local and transnational organizations, spreading across the region with the help of American “precision” warfare and the anger it stirred among helpless civilian populations. States began to totter or fail. Countries essentially collapsed, loosing a tide of refugees on the world, as year after year, the U.S. military, its Special Operations forces, and the CIA were increasingly deployed in one fashion or another in one country after another.

Though in case after case the results were visibly disastrous, like so many addicts, the three post-9/11 administrations in Washington seemed incapable of drawing the obvious conclusions and instead continued to do more of the same (with modest adjustments of one sort of another). The results, unsurprisingly enough, were similarly disappointing or disastrous.

Despite the doubts about such a form of global warfare that candidate Trump raised during the 2016 election campaign, the process has only escalated in the first months of his presidency. Washington, it seems, just can’t help itself in its drive to pursue this version of war in all its grim imprecision to its increasingly imprecise but predictably destructive conclusions. Worse yet, if the leading military and political figures in Washington have their way, none of this may end in our lifetime. (In recent years, for example, the Pentagon and those who channel its thoughts have begun speaking of a “generational approach” or a “generational struggle” in Afghanistan.)

If anything, so many years after it was launched, the war on terror shows every sign of continuing to expand and rubble is increasingly the name of the game. Here’s a very partial tally sheet on the subject:

If you’re looking for fairy tales that are on the grim (not Grimm) side, things that once might only have been in dystopian fiction, look no further than our present planet at our present moment. What about, for instance, that trillion-metric-ton iceberg — yes, “trillion” is not a misprint — that broke loose last week from the Antarctic Peninsula and just floated away. It was larger than the state of Delaware, capable of filling an estimated 462 million Olympic-sized swimming pools, its volume twice that of Lake Erie. If you want to think in movie terms, then consider this eerie event a trailer for the main feature on its way to screens globally. If significant parts of Antarctica destabilize in the future, you can expect movie titles (given rising sea levels) like So Long, Miami; Zai Jian Shanghai; Ta-ta London; Dag Amsterdam.

Honestly, we’re now in a fairy tale world, if by modern fairy tale you happen to mean Game of Thrones after not “winter” but “summer” comes to Westeros. So in the week after Antarctica changed its shape perceptibly, it seems appropriate to turn to TomDispatch regular John Feffer, our expert in global dystopian futures and author of the novel Splinterlands, which we recently published in our new book line. Today, in a rare TD plunge into fiction, he offers a fairy tale from 2050 (the year in which Splinterlands is set). His “Grimm” sister is Rachel Leopold, the wife of famed “geo-paleontologist” Julian West. (They have both appeared at TomDispatch before.) In 2020, he was the one who so presciently predicted the way a rising tide of nationalism led by right-wing populists like our own president, when combined with climate change and other factors, would splinter the international order and create a new, ever more desperate world. With that in mind, let me just mutter, “Once upon a time, in 2017…” Now, close your eyes and imagine the unimaginable, because soon enough that will be our world.

I was 12. It was 1956. I lived in New York City and was a youthful history buff. (I should have kept my collection of American Heritage magazines!) Undoubtedly, I was also some kind of classic nerd. In any case, at some point during the Suez crisis of that year, I can remember going to the U.N. by myself and sitting in the gallery of the General Assembly, where I undoubtedly heard imperial Britain denounced for its attempt to retake the Suez Canal (in league with the French and Israelis). I must admit that it was a moment in my life I had totally forgotten about until historian Alfred McCoy, whose new Dispatch Book, In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, is due out in September, brought it to mind again. And I certainly hadn’t imagined that Suez might have any applicability to this moment. But almost 16 years after this country’s disastrous “war on terror” was launched and with yet another major Middle Eastern city in rubble, we are undoubtedly witnessing a change in the balance (or imbalance) of power on this unruly planet of ours — and who better to make sense of it than historian McCoy?

Think of him as a modern Edward Gibbon, writing in the twenty-first century on the decline and fall of a great empire. However, unlike Gibbon, who wrote his classic book on Rome centuries after its empire had disappeared from the face of the earth, McCoy has no choice but to deal with American decline contemporaneously — in, that is, the very act of its happening.

I had a canny friend who assured me a couple of decades ago that when European countries finally started saying no to Washington, I’d have a signal that I was on another planet. So we must now be on Mars. I was struck, for instance, by a recent piece in the Guardian describing the G20 summit as “the ‘G1’ versus the ‘G19.’” In other words, it’s increasingly Donald Trump’s Washington against the world, which is the definition of how not to make an empire work. Since imperial decline may, in fact, have been a significant factor in bringing Donald Trump to power, think of him as both its harbinger and — as McCoy so vividly describes today — its architect.

My childhood was a nuclear one and I’m not talking about the nuclear family. I’m thinking of those duck-and-cover moments when, with air raid sirens screaming outside, we went under our school desks, hands over head, to test out our readiness for a Cold War nuclear exchange and the coming of the end of the world. Even at that young age, I suspect, we understood just how pathetic those desks and our hands were as defenses against an atomic blast, but that mattered little. It was so in the spirit of the era — and not just when it came to children either.

I’ve never, for instance, forgotten an illustration from Paul Boyer’s classic book, By the Bomb’s Early Light, on the American nuclear fallout (of a cultural sort) that followed the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as World War II ended and the subsequent Cold War nuclear arms race began. Boyer found that illustration in How to Survive an Atomic Bomb, a 1950 book that caught the spirit of its moment. It showed a natty-looking man wearing one of the signature fedoras of that time, its brim partially over his eyes. The caption for it went: “If you are caught outdoors in a sudden attack, a hat will give you at least some protection from the ‘heat flash.’” Women were similarly urged to wear stockings and long-sleeved dresses just in case their day happened to be interrupted by a Russian nuclear strike.

Think of these as 1950s fashion tips for the apocalypse as American fears of a nuclear conflagration grew in those years. As a Federal Civil Defense Agency pamphlet of the time typically suggested, if a nuclear blast occurred, you could “jump in any handy ditch or gutter… drop flat on ground or floor… to lessen the chances of being struck by falling and flying objects, flatten out at the base of a wall, or at the bottom of a bank.” Or you could simply “bury your face in your arms.” Whatever you did, however, the one thing you weren’t to do, the agency suggested, was “lose your head” — and whatever bureaucrat offered that pungent advice undoubtedly didn’t mean it literally.

In those years, when it came to the apocalypse, you might say that this country did indeed lose its head. One witness to that was retired Air Force lieutenant colonel and TomDispatch regular William Astore. He spent significant parts of his military career in the late 1980s locked inside a mountain (so much better than a ditch or gutter if you were seriously thinking about making it through the end of life as we knew it). He’s never forgotten his professional experience of the nuclear mindset in this country and, in a later lockdown moment filled with rising apocalyptic fears, he naturally finds himself thinking about it again.

One small note, however, on Americans and doomsday: when it comes to the apocalypse, we turn out not to be equal-opportunity employers. Against nuclear war and the apocalyptic terror attacks of our national fantasy life, we’ve been all too ready to lock ourselves down over the years in stunning ways. Against another potential kind of apocalypse, however, we’re not even willing to take the simplest actions. Quite the opposite, when it comes to climate change — what we used to call “the weather” and now “extreme weather” — our new president and his crew are unlocking doors everywhere and welcoming doomsday to take up residence in our land, our streets, our houses.

Dystopian, yes. Unimaginable, no. In fact, a version of our present moment was imagined more than eight decades ago by novelist Sinclair Lewis who wrote a still readable (if now fictionally clunky) novel, It Can’t Happen Here. Its focus: the election as president of a man we might today call a right-wing “populist,” but who, in the context of the 1930s, was simply an American fascist. Lewis gave him the fabulous name Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip and, unlike our president of the moment, he wasn’t a billionaire from New York but a politician from the Midwest.

As we all know, fascism didn’t come to America in the 1930s. Still, in his instant bestseller, Lewis caught the essence of an American tendency that hasn’t left us. And if you read his book now, you can’t help but be struck by certain passages that have the eerie ring not of 1935 but of 2017. Take Lewis’ description of the journalistic Svengali, Lee Sarason (think: Steve Bannon), who wrote his fictional president’s single famous book: “Though he probably based it on notes dictated by Windrip — himself no fool in the matter of fictional imagination — Sarason had certainly done the actual writing of Windrip’s lone book, the Bible of his followers, part biography, part economic program, and part plain exhibitionistic boasting, called Zero Hour — Over the Top.”

Exhibitionist boasting? Sound faintly familiar? Or take this passage about a U.S. Army major general who leads a militaristic show of support for Windrip at the political convention that nominates him: “Not in all the memory of the older reporters had a soldier on active service ever appeared as a public political agitator.” Though Michael Flynn (the “lock her up” guy) was a retired lieutenant general when he strutted his stuff at the 2016 Republican convention, doesn’t it sound uncannily familiar? Or to pick another example, at one point in Windrip’s ever more authoritarian presidency, the book’s protagonist, journalist Doremus Jessup, has these thoughts, which have a distinctly Trumpian feel to them: “He simply did not believe that this comic tyranny could endure. It can’t happen here, said even Doremus — even now.” Admittedly, the ability to tweet was still 70 years away, but comic nightmare, dystopian revelry, a nation slipping further into a militarized state of autocracy?

These days, all of us, it seems, are Doremus Jessups, facing both the increasingly grim and bizarrely comic aspects of the Trump era and all of us have to deal with them in our own lives in our own ways. With that in mind, we’ve turned to TomDispatch regular Frida Berrigan (and her children) for both inspiration and a striking meditation on the dystopian world of Donald Trump and how to face it.