Welcome to Current Affairs. My name is Nathan Roberts. I am the editor in Chief of Current Affairs Magazine. Today I'm joined by Osama Khalil. He is a history professor at Syracuse University. He's also the author of the new book, A World of Enemies, America's Wars at Home and Abroad,

from Kennedy to Biden, available from Harvard University Press.

Professor Khalil, thank you for joining us and turn of praise today.

Thanks for having me. It's great to be here.

So you do something a little unusual in this

book, which is hinted at there in the subtitle, which is we are used to thinking about America's

wars abroad and America's wars at home separately in different domains. We talk about the history of, you know, from Vietnam to Afghanistan and Iraq, or we might talk about the war on drugs.

But you put it all together.

You see it as one kind of unified history, domestic and foreign.

And perhaps you could tell us why you think we need to consider America's wars to be one category that includes domestic and foreign.

Well, again, thanks for having me. And that's a great question. So, you know, one of the things that, you know, I struggled with is, is we tend to think of these as two distinct and separate spheres, right? The domestic sphere and the foreign policy. And really what I wanted to get across was

how much domestic politics and policy not only influenced foreign policy, but foreign policy

has come home and influenced our own domestic politics and policy. And so I wanted to trace that

out from the Vietnam War era to the present. And one of the challenges was, where do you begin

this story? And I could have started in 45,

but what I really, what struck me about these intersections between the wars on crime,

drugs, and terror was how influential that period was, particularly with the baby boomers.

You know, if you think about the United States in 1945 or even in 1959, the idea that American power was unbounded,

that the American dream would be fulfilled for generations to come, that this was the American

century. And so much of that is embodied in Kennedy's inauguration speech. And as I talk about

in the book, you have a whole generation of baby boomers who come into government service,

whether it's State Department, CIA, DOD, or even running for elected office. They're inspired

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