This is intercepted.

I'm Jeremy Skahill coming to you from the intercept in New York City and this is a special bonus episode of intercepted.

We live in an era where information is spread quickly via social media. Complex developments are distilled into 280 character summaries or observations and they can go viral without any editing or fact checking.

But it's a two-edged sword. On the one hand, social media can circumvent the historic monopoly of large media corporations over the means of disseminating news and information and on the other, it has the ability to spread disinformation rapidly.

The rise of social media has also encouraged systemic oversimplification and a historical analysis. Today on the show, we're going to take a step back from this framework and take an in-depth look at one of the most consequential eras of modern history, the late 1980s and early 1990s.

The Berlin Wall fell in 1989 as the Soviet Union crumbled. The Russian occupation of Afghanistan had just come to an end thanks in no small part to the covert and overt involvement of the United States in backing foreign fighters, including some who would just a decade later organize the 9-11 attacks.

The retreat of Soviet military power from Afghanistan is complete. The last of Russia's regular army invasion force is out. Fear and uncertainty were mixed with joy today as the commander of Soviet troops followed the last of his men across the border, leaving the communist Afghan regime alone to face victorious resistance fighters.

In the United States, Bill Clinton brought an end to 12 years of Republican rule, defeating the former CIA director, George H.W. Bush, and with Clinton's two terms in office, came a new spin on U.S. militarism across the world, the notion of liberal, so-called humanitarian intervention.

Our mission is clear to demonstrate the seriousness of NATO's purpose, so that the Serbian leaders understand the imperative of reversing course, to deter uneven blood-air offensive against innocent civilians in Kosovo, and if necessary, to seriously damage the Serbian military's capacity to harm the people of Kosovo.

In short, if President Milosevic will not make peace, we will limit his ability to make war.

The propaganda pitch was that the United States would use its military force as a sort of global police operation, whose violent actions were wrapped in the justification that U.S. missiles and bombs and troop deployments were serving a greater good.

Nowhere was this more boldly asserted than in the wars in Yugoslavia, which stretched from the early 1990s all the way through 2008, when the U.S. officially recognized the independence of the Serbian province of Kosovo.

The years that ushered in the declaration of the end of the Cold War would have a significant impact on global relations and war-making to this day.

The scholar Daryl Lee has written a meticulously documented book that seeks to understand the trends that emerged from this era, with a focus on putting into context the movement of foreign fighters from country to country.

The book is called the Universal Enemy, Jihad, Empire, and the Challenge of Solidarity.

In its simplest form, this book is an anthropological study about a group of experienced foreign fighters who volunteer to fight for the Bosnian Muslims in the Yugoslav Civil War.

They fought against the forces of the more powerful republics of Serbia and Croatia.

And while Lee Pancy complex and very human picture of what motivated these fighters, the book takes on a much broader swath of history and geopolitics.

What is perhaps most interesting about this book is that Lee does not only write about the Jihadists, Islamist militants, or Al-Qaeda operatives as foreign fighters.

He also describes the most well-armed and powerful foreign fighters on the planet, the soldiers sent by the United States and other major powers, who intervene under the banner of humanitarian intervention or national security.

Lee highlights the parallels between transnational Jihadists, UN peacekeeping missions, and socialist non-alignment, and he examines the relationship between Jihad and US Empire.

In doing this, Darro Lee strips away the US narrative of itself as the great defender of human freedoms and subjects it to a sharp critical analysis where it is judged by its actions and not its own hagiography or propaganda.

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