Illiberalism in its Epoch: Modern Illiberalism as a Consequence of the Global War on Terror

When the new Trump administration announced that it was sending so-called “illegal immigrants” to Guantanamo Bay in January, it wasn’t just another grim headline in the news cycle. Rather, it was the clearest sign yet that the worst legacies of the Global War on Terror (GWOT) are not confined to history—they’re alive, mutating, and turning inwards.

Guantanamo, once the most explicit symbol of America’s lunge into illiberalism—during its fight against alleged foreign terrorists—is now being repurposed for use against migrants, asylum seekers, and refugees. This is exactly the kind of transformation my thesis predicted: the ideological and physical machinery built for the GWOT has helped pave the way for a new epoch of global illiberalism, knocking the world off its liberal democratic axis. This is an epoch where states of exception are becoming or have already become states of normative rule.

What is an “epoch” of illiberalism?

By invoking the language of “epoch” I am not grandly suggesting that we’re living in some new, distinct, historical era, Rather, my claim is that looking at global events through the lens of an “epoch of illiberalism,” describing illiberalism as “epochal,” attunes us to the fact that modern illiberalism has characteristics that are unique and specific to the time and space of its formation. In the German historian Ernst Nolte’s book The Three Faces of Fascism, he writes:

Nolte, referencing Mussolini’s March on Rome of 1922, asks how it is possible not to look at fascism as relating to an epoch, as emerging from and even forming its own era, shaped, influenced, and defined by the historical events of preceding eras. In common with modern global illiberalism, Nolte goes on to say that even though fascism still exists after the “epoch of fascism,” its lack of prominence serves as a natural demarcation.

Of course, illiberalism, as we experience now, existed before the “epoch of illiberalism.” But the point of demarcation here rests on the fact that at no time since 20^th-century fascism has illiberalism been so dominant a phenomenon in the West.

By considering the current era to be an epoch of illiberalism, we can employ a flexible framework to explain how the space for this epoch emerged. Furthermore, we can explain why modern illiberalism, despite its constituent projects having many dissimilarities, has a distinctly similar ideological flavor in essential areas.

From George Bush to Donald Trump? 

The inciting incident that birthed this epoch of illiberalism was the GWOT, both as an ideologically and practically (though unintended) facilitative factor and as an event, or set of events, that remade world order or recalibrated its prevailing ideological composition.

What we are witnessing in the United States, just weeks into the inauguration of the Trump II administration, is what I refer to as the procession of illiberalism. I argue that this procession has taken its current form in illiberal states and movements largely because of the way the Bush administration waged the GWOT. The repurposing of Guantanamo Bay by the Trump administration for the detention of “illegal migrants” is more than just a pragmatic coincidence. It is part of a process that has played out across the world where illiberal governments have also repurposed the ideological narratives and structures of the GWOT for the purposes of illiberalization.

Immediately after the unprecedented attack on the US on 9/11, the Bush administration attempted to create a global security state based on its model and following its lead. As the political scientists Scott Romaniuk and Emeka Njoku put it, the policies that the Bush administration enacted in the wake of 9/11 constituted “the largest national security realignment in US history since the National Security Act of 1947.”

Many will be familiar with US policies, now imfamous, aimed at fighting the GWOT, such as the USA PATRIOT Act and the Homeland Security Act, which created the Department for Homeland Security (DHS). Such policies restructured the country’s national security apparatus by centralizing counterterrorism efforts and expanding surveillance of both domestic and international groups or individuals suspected of financing, planning, or promoting terrorist activities, while also broadening the definition of terrorism.

The US adopted openly illiberal policies, particularly through extraordinary rendition—the unlawful abduction of legally ambiguous “unlawful enemy combatants” by the CIA. These individuals were transferred to third-world regimes where torture was legal and routine, ostensibly to extract intelligence. Many of those abducted were never charged with any crime.

Scholars like Kim Lane Scheppele and Giorgio Agamben argue that this practice reflected a “state of exception,” a concept from Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt, where governments suspend the rule of law during emergencies—risking unchecked sovereign power. In the “state of exception,” the sovereign claims the power to decide when the law no longer applies in order to protect the state itself. Schmitt believed that this power to decide on the exception is the true essence of sovereignty. In his view, legal norms are secondary to the sovereign’s ability to act decisively in times of crisis, even if that means bypassing or violating the law.

Moreover, during the GWOT, the Bush administration’s counterterrorism policies—shaped by the Wolfowitz Doctrine and the neoconservative vision of US-led global security—curtailed civil society organizations (CSOs) and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Using tools like the PATRIOT Act and executive orders, the government could freeze their assets and prohibit associations based on mere suspicion of terrorism.

While the US did not threaten to descend into tyranny or illiberalism under the Bush administration and during the GWOT, its actions set a dangerous precedent—one that many now argue is bearing bitter fruit across the country.

Most recently, the Trump administration deported more than 200 Venezuelans (some of whom are permanent residents of the US) with no due process, under dubious claims that they belong to the criminal gang Tren de Aragua (TdA). The Venezuelans will be deported to a literal prison labor camp in El Salvador, itself under the rule of illiberal President Nayib Bukele. Trump deported the Venezuelans from the US by invoking the Alien Enemies Act, last used during WWII to intern Japanese Americans in the wake of Pearl Harbor.

Illiberal regimes across the world have adopted similar practices, erasing legal protections for individuals deemed threats, particularly immigrants and political opponents.

Although the US retained its democratic character in the immediate aftermath, its reliance on extraordinary measures—such as detaining “terrorism suspects” without trial at Guantanamo Bay, employing torture, and outsourcing abuse to illiberal regimes through extraordinary rendition—undermined its moral authority. These practices complicated efforts to promote a liberal, rights-based model of global security and made it difficult for the US to distinguish its counterterrorism leadership from the illiberal abuses it tacitly endorsed.

Globalizing the State of Exception

If the US inadvertently flirted with Schmitt’s illiberal state of exception during the GWOT, other states began to fully embrace such thinking. 

When the US called for the world to get behind the GWOT, the international reply was, as Romanuik puts it, “new points of consensus followed by waves of Orwellian counterterrorism laws”—all too often with conveniently flexible definitions of how governments define what constitutes terrorism and how far governments can exercise their power in response to threats to the state and national security.

Eastern Europe, and particularly the countries once behind the Iron Curtain, are of particular interest when it comes to modern illiberalism. It was the rapid democratization of these states, following the fall of Communism, that led the US and the West to champion the quiet hubris of what the historian Timothy Snyder called “politics of inevitability.” This is further defined by him as “a sense that the future is just more of the present, that the laws of progress are known, that there are no alternatives, and therefore nothing really to be done.”

History, as Francis Fukuyama famously declared in his 1991 book, had ended, in the sense that liberal democracy had triumphed ideologically and physically with the collapse of Marxism-Leninism. The US, as well as entities like the European Union, could forge ahead with the socioeconomic blueprints for what George H.W. Bush called a “new world order” of liberal democracy and economic prosperity.

Orbán’s Hungary is therefore the best example of how the opposite of “the politics of inevitability” played out, with the country being perhaps the first and only true example of a liberal democracy devolving into an illiberal state. But it was through the GWOT that Orbán’s Hungary had a unique opportunity to create its own state of exception. Orbán enacted PATRIOT Act-style counterterrorism laws and established DHS-like organizations, all the while eroding the checks and balances typical of liberal democracies.

While such measures are contentious even in robust democracies due to the potential for abuse, in Hungary they have directly bolstered Orbán’s illiberal democracy and been used to persecute regime opponents. As Sohini Chatterjee and Péter Krekó observe, Orbán has leveraged counterterrorism laws to “sustain Fidesz’s power and pass restrictive legislation that aims to silence or marginalize opposition factions.”

After returning to power in 2010, Orbán swiftly transferred authority for “preventing terrorism in Hungary” from the intelligence services to the newly formed, Fidesz-loyal Hungarian Counter-terrorism Center (TEK), which was modeled on the US DHS. Orbán justified TEK’s creation by invoking the 9/11 attacks and framing terrorism as Hungary’s primary security threat. Despite Hungary having barely any Muslim population, let alone Salafi jihadis or Islamic terrorists, TEK was established under the model and remit of the GWOT to combat terrorism. However, it has instead been used to target domestic opponents of the regime, with a particular focus on groups that help migrants. In Hungary, as in other illiberal regimes, the GWOT became a convenient tool to advance an illiberal ideological agenda. Rather than addressing any real threat from Salafi jihadi terrorism—of which there was none in Hungary—Orban’s government used the framework of counterterrorism to target liberal values and assert an aggressive, ethno-chauvinist, and homophobic vision of national sovereignty.

Throughout this procession, counterterrorism is expanded from its original remit of protecting the country from terrorism to its initial distortion into Islamophobia and conspiratorial opposition to immigration and multiculturalism and then further distorted to take aim at any group considered to be undermining the strength of the Hungarian “nation” and its Christian civilization. This includes everything from civil society NGOs that aid Muslim or non-white migrants to LGBT groups.

The GWOT combined domestic counterterrorism legislation—which, in many countries, was underregulated and passed without proper scrutiny—with a genuinely global security superstructure. This involved over half the world’s governments acceding to US-led security initiatives and endeavors that were often bereft of regulation. Though this is not in itself illiberal, the Hungarian government, along with today’s other illiberal forces and states, has seized the opportunity provided by the GWOT and the uptake of counterterrorism policy to take aim at CSOs, NGOs, and other groups that undermine their illiberal agendas. Romaniuk writes that these groups, in Orbán’s view are “Vehement adversaries of the Hungarian state’s authority” and are “foreign-funded advocacy campaigns.” As such, “Fidesz [Orbán’s ruling party] has placed civil society and the space in which CSOs maneuver in the crosshairs of security policy and CTMs [counterterrorism measures] … in the absence of any serious terrorist attack having taken place on Hungarian soil.” Orbán has used freezing of asset orders, police raids, and bans to stamp out hundreds of these groups, as well as enact crackdowns on academia and the few remaining independent media outlets in Hungary. 

Throughout all Orbán’s bolstering of Hungary’s pre-existing counter-terrorism legislation, including increasing defense spending mostly for border protection, his most prominent message is that he, as opposed to the insipid liberal democracies of the EU, “takes the war on terror seriously.” As Viktor Orban’s spokesman declared when defending Hungary’s policy of detaining all new migrants in camps, “liberty comes only after security.” But within modern illiberalism, what does “security” mean? To understand its centrality to illiberalization, we must look to its prominence during the GWOT and its deep ties to Islamophobia—a phenomenon connected to a militarized view of the nation and the sanctity of its borders.

Enemies, Old and New

Regimes like Orban’s have institutionalized a permanent state of exception, justifying indefinite illiberalism in the name of security. While anti-immigrant sentiment takes many forms among today’s illiberal movements, nearly all are united in opposing Muslim immigration—whether as refugees or asylum seekers.

Islamophobia predates 9/11 but became a politically viable discourse in much of Europe, America, and beyond in the GWOT era. As Francis Fukuyama notes in his book After the Neocons, the Bush administration’s rhetoric contributed to the conflation of Islam with “radical Islam,” a term often lazily applied to various political movements like Islamism and “political Islam.” During the GWOT, Bush’s supporters frequently claimed the threat came from “a version of the religion Islam…that is thoroughly unappeasable and anti-Western…and that is deeply and broadly rooted among the world’s more than one billion Muslims.”

The War on Terror’s fusion of partial truths, exaggerations, and prejudices allowed Islamic terrorism to be cynically framed as a broader civilizational threat. As such, concepts like multiculturalism and mass immigration became entangled with security policy. It’s not much of a stretch to see how, at the end of this process, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), the much-hated policy of the Trump administration and MAGA, is seen within the same “securitized” terms.

These alarmist narratives—combined with warnings about terrorist groups acquiring WMDs—normalized the portrayal of Muslims as “enemies within.” This paved the way for political exploitation and, ironically, further radicalization. The fusion of partial truths, exaggerations, and prejudices—often deployed to justify GWOT policies—allowed Islamic terrorism to be cynically framed as a broader civilizational threat. As such, concepts like multiculturalism and mass immigration became entangled with counterterrorism’s security policy.

It’s not much of a stretch to see how, at the end of this process, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), the much-hated policy of the Trump administration and MAGA, is seen within the same “securitized” terms, as weakening the nation and emboldening its shadowy enemies.

Orbán’s Hungary exemplifies how counterterrorism, radicalized by the GWOT, has morphed into explicit Islamophobia and militant opposition to Muslim immigration. Hungary has become a deportation machine, routinely breaking EU and international law by forcibly detaining and expelling Muslim refugees without regard for humanitarian principles. Echoing Agamben’s observations about the United States’ extraordinary rendition program—where “enemy combatants” were stripped of legal rights—Orbán has created a system where migrants are similarly rightless.

This is not to suggest Orbán directly copied extraordinary rendition. Rather, by leveraging counterterrorism legislation modeled on US policies, he transformed the 2015 Syrian refugee crisis into his own state of exception, legitimized by the security dynamics normalized during the GWOT. Unlike the Bush administration, however, Orbán entrenches this state with ideological conspiracy theories central to the illiberal right, such as the Great Replacement Theory (GRT) and its variant, “Islamization.”

Viktor Orbán’s embrace of GRT and Islamization reflects his repurposing of GWOT-era ideology to fortify his own power. Central to this strategy is an intensified focus on counterterrorism alongside the promotion of conspiracy theories about “globalism,” most notably targeting Hungarian-American billionaire and liberal activist George Soros.

In Orbán’s narrative, Soros wields immense—if not total—control over Brussels and even Washington. Within the ideology and demonology of modern global illiberalism, “Soros” has become a mythic figure, much like “Rothschild” was to the fascist illiberals of the 20th century. Soros embodies the antithesis of the illiberal political Weltanschauung, particularly through his Open Society Foundation (OSF), which promotes liberal democracy and civic activism in regions where these values are under threat.

Drawing on Ernst Nolte’s concept of “practical transcendence,” Soros represents for illiberals the forces of transnational liberalism, global governance, and social liberal values. Nolte described practical transcendence as a “social process which renders human relationships ever more abstract, disengages man from traditionalities, and increases the power of groups.” This captures how illiberals perceive Soros and the liberal project more broadly: as undermining traditional nation-states, national sovereignty, and rooted identities in favor of globalist abstraction.

For Soros and his supporters, this vision aligns with liberal internationalism—furthering European integration, open societies, freedom of movement, and transnational governance. Yet in Hungary and across Europe, OSF-funded NGOs and CSOs working with refugees are portrayed by Orbán’s regime as threats to national security, accused of aiding “terrorists” and undermining Hungary’s indigenous population. Hence, the conspiracy theory at the heart of Orbán’s narrative is simple: Soros, as the ultimate “arch-liberal,” funds groups that aid Muslim refugees, who are portrayed as synonymous with terrorism and cultural usurpation. This framing allows Orbán to depict Soros, and by extension his political opponents, as enemies of Hungary and Western civilization.

Ironically, Orbán himself once received funding from OSF during his earlier liberal phase. Whether he believes his conspiracy theories is unclear, but they have undoubtedly found a receptive audience among illiberals both in Hungary and worldwide including, most notably, Elon Musk, the billionaire oligarch who leads Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and who has been called the US’s “shadow president.”

In effect, Orbán has recast the actors of the GWOT for his own ends, creating new enemies that are tied to, but distinct from, older ones. While Islamophobic narratives remain central, al-Qaeda and Salafi jihadism have been sidelined. Soros now assumes the role of a Bin Laden-like mastermind, with Muslims depicted as mere foot soldiers in a broader plot to subvert Western Christian civilisation through mass migration. As Orbán declared in his 2018 victory speech:

In this respect, illiberalism has a counterhegemonic aspect. One might wonder, for example, how illiberalism could be related to the GWOT when, in the case of MAGA, so many of its proponents cite opposition to the Bush administration and the so-called “forever wars” as one of the appeals of Trump.

Orbán views his brand of illiberalism as both an escalation and a modification of what the United States initiated during the GWOT. He believes the liberal democratic West—from Brussels to Washington—should adopt his illiberal model to better defend Western civilization from existential threats. The key difference, however, is that while the US waged the GWOT to defend liberal idealism, Orbán has discarded liberal ideals altogether, replacing them with an illiberal ideology.

Globalizing Counter-hegemony

Orbán’s vision is reflexive and counter-hegemonic, positioning himself as a vanguard defender of Western civilization. At CPAC, the premier conservative conference in the US, he declared, “I’m here to tell you that we should unite our forces,” framing his struggle as a global battle shared with the MAGA-aligned American right. His illiberalism presents itself as a universal model—portable and applicable across national contexts—anchored in border walls, conspiracy theories, and claims of victimhood at the hands of “globalists.”

Orbán has been remarkably explicit about his intentions. In a 2014 speech at the XXV Bálványos Summer University, he openly declared his aim to construct an “illiberal state” to make Hungary “competitive” arguing that “liberal democratic societies cannot remain globally competitive.” He portrayed liberal democracy as inherently corrupt and morally decadent, claiming “liberal values today incorporate corruption, sex, and violence.” He accused Western Europe of forgetting “the white working class,” a populist trope that recasts majorities—specifically white Europeans—as victims. At its core, Orbán’s illiberalism is counter-hegemonic, opposing the transnational, multicultural order of liberal democratic hegemony. It promotes ethnonationalism, majoritarianism, and segregation as the foundation of civilization.

This counter-hegemonic space has also been exploited by Putin’s Russia, which has successfully aligned itself with the global illiberal movement. Across this landscape, illiberals embrace radicalized, cynical versions of GWOT-era counterterrorism strategies, even as they reject the US-led globalism of the Bush and Obama years.

This counter-hegemonic aspect of global illiberalism is why Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was subject to one of the most surreal ambushes in diplomatic history by President Donald Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance, where their ideological allegiance to Putin’s Russia against Ukraine and Europe was put on global display via live television.

It’s why, in the space of the few months since Joe Biden handed over power to Trump, the US presidency and its official and unofficial mouthpieces have now become one of the premier sources of praise for Putin and tacit if not outright support for his own “war on terror” against Ukraine.

How could it be that those who support “America First” and “Make America Great Again” so slavishly support a regime, such as Putin’s, that sees the US’s global hegemony as the main enemy? The Trump administration and the wider MAGA movement see in Putin’s Russia, and Orbán’s Hungary, ideological allies against the “globalists” and, borrowing language from Eastern European illiberals, the “deep state” that are committed to upholding America’s adherence to the “globalism.”

This alleged “globalism” is precisely what is deliberately stopping the US, in the eyes of Trump and MAGA, from not being great, and is an ideology that deliberately does not put America First.

It is therefore of no surprise that the relationship between Trump-MAGA and Putin is one of mutual admiration and support. Putin has very deliberately cultivated this relationship, coming to definitively advertise Russia as the counter-hegemon to the excesses of the global order of American-led liberal democracy. In doing so, Putin has simultaneously supported and adapted the GWOT narrative to fit his own foreign policy goals and argued that Russia’s definitive turn toward military expansionism (what I term “illiberal military interventionism”) is a necessary reaction to the Bush administration’s violations of international law during the GWOT.

Putin’s Russia was a very early and zealous supporter of America’s GWOT, embracing the new global landscape and the predominance of its “security regime,” while being embraced by America and the liberal democratic West. However, this informal entente cordiale only lasted until 2007, when Putin made a definitive break with the West and began Russia’s course of expansive illiberalism in a quest to assert its post-Soviet hegemony. However, in this break we see a perfect example of the GWOT providing a functionally transformative era wherein illiberalism could attain a status of counter-hegemony, allowing its ideals to thrive in the face of a liberal order severely weakened by US conduct during the GWOT. 

At the time of 9/11, Vladimir Putin was waging a brutal war in Chechnya and cynically embraced the GWOT to advance his agenda. Mere hours after the attacks, Putin was the first world leader to call President Bush, offering sympathy and support. Just a year earlier, the Clinton administration had sharply criticized Russia’s conduct in Chechnya, accusing it of war crimes and ethnic cleansing. Yet, in stark contrast, George W. Bush, speaking at the White House just over a year after 9/11, praised Putin as a “partner in the war on terror,” celebrated the “common values” between their nations, and described Russia under Putin as being in a “hopeful moment of transition … reaching for its democratic future.” By attaching Chechnya to 9/11, al-Qaeda, and the GWOT, the Russians were able to turn a war motivated by three centuries of Russian attempts to subjugate Chechnya into yet another noble front in the GWOT.

Epoch of Illiberalism, Age of Monsters

At the start of this article, I described the war on terror as knocking the world off its liberal democratic axis. Whether it was ever truly on that axis is debatable—but before 9/11, the US was widely seen as the liberal democratic hegemon, the “benign global hegemon,” with its power grounded in liberal democratic ideals. International law, human rights, and liberal interventionism were considered the pinnacle of global governance. The Responsibility to Protect (R2P), endorsed by every UN member, embodied this belief in a collective duty to prevent atrocities by military means.

The GWOT didn’t destroy this order outright, but it fractured it—opening space for others to wage their own “wars on terror,” complete with new enemies, states of exception, and rejections of international law.

This work considers the Age of Illiberalism to be not dissimilar, in terms of the navigation of world order, to the Age of Empire in the 18^th, 19^th, and early 20^th centuries, where different hegemonic forces were often as capable of opprobrium towards one another as they were to collaboration. 

This is why Donald Trump can openly state his designs to annex Canada as America’s 51^st state, unilaterally declare the Gulf of Mexico to be the Gulf of America, and threaten Denmark over its lack of willingness to “sell” Greenland to the US. It’s why he can casually float the idea of ethnically cleansing the Palestinian population of Gaza and building a luxurious riviera out of the heaps of rubble Israel has made of that doomed enclave. It’s why he can so blatantly attempt to shakedown Zelensky with a neo-imperial “minerals” deal that would see the US economically annex the country’s mineral wealth in return for the vaguely defined “promotion” of the “safety, security and prosperity of Ukraine.”

The most terrifying part of this dizzying remaking of world order is the lack of opposition to it. The center, to evoke a cliché and borrow from Yeats’s famous poem, cannot hold. While Trump, as one example, might propose the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the now almost entirely destroyed Gaza Strip, it was the centrists, those who are meant to protect world order from genocide, who provided Israel the physical and diplomatic wherewithal to wreak such destruction.

Similarly, while Trump might end up forcing a “peace” deal on Ukraine that basically means surrender to Putin and one that turns the rump Ukraine into an American quasi-colony, it was the liberal Obama and Biden administrations, as well as left, center, and right proponents of liberal democracy in Europe, that for too long failed to provide Ukraine with the kind of support that could’ve ended the war before Trump came to power.

Much like during the War on Terror, the rise of illiberalism is not solely the work of its architects, but also a tragedy made possible by the bystanders—those whose inaction, silence, and complacency have smoothed the path for an emerging illiberal world order.

Much like during the War on Terror, the rise of illiberalism is not solely the work of its architects, but also a tragedy made possible by the bystanders—those whose inaction, silence, and complacency have smoothed the path for an emerging illiberal world order. It’s almost certainly true that modern illiberalism would have emerged beyond the fringes without the GWOT, but the nature of the GWOT hastened its emergence as a truly global force. A force that now sits confidently in the White House.

Though the GWOT, and its perpetrators, are seen solely through the lens of demonology by most, the politics they, at least in the beginning, attempted to forge were the politics of transcendence. The Bush administration believed that the US, as the benign global hegemon, was in a unique position to eliminate all threats to the post-Cold War liberal democratic order—the means, even if they included monstrous illiberal lunges and a lack of nuance as to the causes of terror, justified the ends.

What has now been birthed is not just an epoch of illiberalism, but an age of monsters.

Sam Hamad is a historian and writer specialising in 20th-century fascism, the political history of illiberalism, and the modern history of the Middle East and North Africa. He is currently a senior news editor and writer for The New Arab. In addition to The New Arab, his writing has appeared in The Daily Beast, TRT World, and the International Business Times. He has also contributed essays and entries to several books and journals. 

Image made by Aaron Irion using “Vladimir Putin,” by Mitya Aleshkovsky licensed under CC Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic. All other images used are in the public domain.