Falling Out: The Politics of Generation GWOT

The essay below is from Van, originally posted in his Un-Diplomatic Newsletter. Shared here since is bears directly on the raison d’etre for the Bang-Bang Podcast. ✌️

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I’m part of a war-addled subset of Millennials the media now calls “Generation GWOT.” I came of age professionally during the Global War on Terror (GWOT), joining the US Air Force a little over a year before the attacks of 9/11.

It’s hard to explain to my elders how profoundly transformative—and disillusioning—it is to have your entire existence molded by two decades of dummy-patriotism, war crimes, and ineptly conceived military operations spanning the globe while most Americans scarcely acknowledged anything was happening at all. To be perfunctorily told at home that you’re a hero—as if it were obvious and scarcely worthy of comment—then to go overseas and find out that you’re hated. To be spit on. To experience random foreigners trying to beat the shit out of you in Seoul while you’re just trying to go see Turandot, because you thought that it was time to grow up and experience an opera for once and you liked “Nessun Dorma” from the soundtrack of The Sum of All Fears.

That last bit was maybe unique to me.

One of many reasons I find it therapeutic to host Bang-Bang with a fellow Generation GWOT vet, Lyle Jeremy Rubin, is that we get a chance to relay our experiences with violence and war culture to larger themes about the folly of war—and who has to pay for it. Our social democratic, anti-imperialist politics owe much to what we witnessed, read, watched, and took part in post-9/11.

But not everyone in our cohort seeks redemption in a politics of peace, democracy, and equality. Trump’s cabinet nominees, Pete Hegseth and Tulsi Gabbard, as well as Trump’s vice president, JD Vance, are also Generation GWOT.

They, too, are disgusted by US foreign policy, albeit selectively, yet choose to embrace what some might call fascism—at a minimum ethnonationalism—which is a mutated extension of GWOT, not a repudiation of it.

What, then, does it mean to be part of Generation GWOT? The Wall Street Journal has a story that at once shines a light on the question of what Generation GWOT believes and focuses perhaps too credulously on what the likes of Hegseth, Gabbard, and Vance have to say about foreign policy:

After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, a generation of young Americans enlisted to fight the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT)—a sprawling conflict from the Middle East to Africa. What began as a battle to dislodge al Qaeda from Afghanistan expanded to Iraq and then spiraled into what critics came to call “the forever wars.” Now, Generation GWOT is set for the first time to take over some of the most powerful positions in the U.S. government. President-elect Donald Trump is preparing to hand over major military and intelligence posts to people whose experience in that conflict has made them deeply skeptical of America’s security role abroad.

It’s important to acknowledge that disillusionment and alienation with American militarism comes in left and right variants, and the WSJ piece only looks at the right-wing variant because it’s a ruling-class newspaper concerned with the ruling-class drama of who’s involved in Washington’s Game of Thrones.

But the piece, and much of the discourse around Generation GWOT, fails to grapple with the grandest of the many implications of having a generation grow up in the shadow of the forever wars: It is the death knell of American primacy as we have known it.