The second Trump Administration has added a new dimension to what was once widely termed the “War on Terror.” In designating suspected drug cartels and organized crime groups in Latin America as terrorists, the administration has targeted them with bombings and military raids with the same post-9/11 rationalizations normally reserved for jihadists. Concurrently, Trump’s advisors have labeled immigrant rights protestors in Minnesota as “domestic terrorists” for their demonstrations against intensified Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations this past spring, expanding the category even further.

Jason Burke’s authoritative new book chronicles the period from roughly 1967-1983 when individuals had to hijack commercial planes, kidnap diplomats, and bomb shopping centers to earn such a designation. One of the many merits of The Revolutionists is that it recognizes how protean and weaponized the term “terrorist” has always been, leading the author to adopt it primarily to describe a tactic rather than a person. The choice results not from sympathy for acts of political violence. Burke is clear on the brutality that militants in that period inflicted on civilians, infrastructure, and governments in Europe and especially the Middle East. He cites every lost life and never romanticizes his subjects. But he also understands that single-word descriptions of individuals oversimplify even the most murderous ideologues. Terrorism, he writes, “was not simply the unthinking product of a particular ideology but a tool that its users chose, often because they believed it to be an essential means of bringing about the radical and necessary transformation of society.”

In this book, Burke fuses into a single narrative waves of terrorism that have often been analyzed as distinct: the secular militants of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), the New Leftists in Germany and Japan, Iranian-backed Shia groups in Lebanon and elsewhere, and the Sunni Islamist forerunners of in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Afghanistan. Most significantly, he shows how the 1979 Revolution in Iran was a catalyst in the transition between these strains, reviving the attractiveness of grand displays of armed force among militants across the Middle East. Political activists and extremists turned to religion as a way of achieving societal transformation precisely because secular means and ideologies failed in doing so.

When mass air travel commenced in the late 1950s, it was advertised as being luxurious and glamorous, as comfortable as a first-class train ride through Central Europe, tens of thousands of feet in the air. But revolutionaries saw a novel method of demonstrating “propaganda of the deed,” as nineteenth-century Italian socialist Carlo Pisacane phrased it. Between 1969 and 1972, there were an astonishing 130 hijackings of U.S. aircraft alone. One couldn’t board a plane and be sure the destination would be the one listed on the ticket or somewhere else entirely.

The Revolutionists makes clear that the first wave of terrorism dissolved not because its practitioners’ grievances were satisfied—Palestinian refugees have not been repatriated, Germany and Japan are not ruled by the proletariat—but because European countries gradually landed on a strategy that contained their damage. But then militants made the United States their target, and Washington insisted on seeing state sponsors as the real engines behind militants’ attacks. That willful misapprehension led to disasters in Iraq and Afghanistan—and now, possibly, in Iran. While Tehran attempted to export its revolution abroad, as Burke makes clear, and certainly funded brutal attacks committed by Hamas and Hezbollah, it was never the hub of terrorism it was depicted as being by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Donald Trump. Hamas has deep support among many Palestinians independent of Iran’s machinations, and Al Qaeda never needed state support to fund and execute its terror campaigns.

The reality is that terrorism will always appeal to people who hope to achieve grand social and political change but lack the strength to directly confront their enemies in conventional warfare. That persistent allure means the best strategy the United States could employ against militants would involve not grandiose schemes to remake entire countries or regions, but rather a nuanced blend of homeland security, policing, intelligence, and the occasional, minimal use of force. Even better, Washington could simultaneously direct resources toward resolving the conflicts that fuel militants’ objections, marginalizing extremists within their own societies. That approach is imperfect, since it requires tolerating a degree of risk and damage. But it is far preferable to the situation that has unfolded in Iran—a debacle readers of this excellent book might have foreseen.

Burke is a veteran correspondent at The Guardian, covering South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Since 9/11, he has written several books of reportage on terrorism that are highly regarded for their sophistication and originality. In The Revolutionists, he turns to history, relying on both his own journalism and the work of scholars, diplomats, reporters, and participants. Burke has interviewed some of them and tapped sources in multiple languages to tell their story.

The story begins with Leila Khaled, a woman born in Haifa under the British Mandate, whose family fled to Lebanon in 1948 during what Palestinians call the Nakba. Drawn to the possibilities of armed resistance, she joined not Yasser Arafat’s Fatah but the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a rival group that was even less amenable to compromise with Israel. In 1969 in Rome, under the leadership of George Habash and Wadie Haddad, she hijacked an American passenger jet bound for Israel and took hostages, all with only a grenade and the assistance of a colleague. In exchange for getting the hostages released, Israel released dozens of Syrian and Egyptian soldiers captured in and after the occupation began in 1967. By the time the hijackers returned to Jordan weeks later, following a stopover and detention in Syria, Khaled was a global icon. She was revered not just among Arabs and Muslims but also among aspiring revolutionaries and groups from Japan to Germany.

Khaled’s act was novel and impactful. “There had been scores of hijackings over the previous decade, but most had taken place in the US and been undertaken either for money or to reach Cuba,” Burke writes. “Almost none had been carried out for political reasons.” They were instead the actions of ordinary criminals escaping law enforcement. Khaled’s skyjacking would change that track record. In addition, it occurred outside the Middle East, demonstrating Haddad’s and Habash’s strategy of internationalizing the Palestinian struggle. “When we hijack a plane, it has more effect than if we killed a hundred Israelis in battle,” Habash explained in a 1970 interview with a German newspaper. He wasn’t wrong, which explains why Palestinians increasingly turned to terrorism in their battle against Israel in the coming years. Nonviolent protests, appeals to international forums, and armed resistance against legitimate military targets in Israel got them nowhere. But the shocking terrorism also led Israel to engage in counterterrorism that was far more lethal and deployed on a larger scale.

Combined with Israel’s victory in the 1967 War against Egypt, Syria, and Jordan, and the infusion of U.S. diplomatic power in the region during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, these developments led Arafat and others in the 1970s to move toward a two-state solution that would create an independent Palestinian state alongside an Israeli state. Given that Arafat and others had intentionally killed Israeli civilians and were officially committed to liberating all Palestinian territory, Israel was understandably reluctant to reward the PLO in any way. But in refusing to grant any legitimacy to the PLO or the larger Palestinian struggle until the late 1980s—a delusion that has worsened under the Trump Administration—Israel also disincentivized Palestinians from pursuing more moderate solutions to their problem than the complete destruction of Israel. Netanyahu makes appearances in this book, beginning with his success in the Israel Defense Forces, but emerges as a leading purveyor of the myth that terrorist acts were motivated solely by bloodthirst and mayhem.

It wasn’t only radicalized Palestinians who were excited by the prospect of using spectacular acts of violence against civilians and civilian infrastructure to achieve their aims. A fringe group of young people in European countries sought to apply the logic and tactics developed in refugee camps in the Middle East to the posh centers of their home countries. Hailing from West Germany, France, Switzerland, and England, they trained alongside Palestinian guerrillas as part of the international front against imperialism. Although some of the hardened militants found the well-off youngsters ridiculous, disrespectful, and unruly, the legitimacy bestowed upon the far-left radicals from the West proved a powerful spur to terrorism.

Burke reserves his harshest words for the milieu that produced the Baader-Meinhof Gang, the German group that aimed to overthrow capitalism and replace it with the power of the proletariat. It was comprised of “drifters, pranksters, amateur orators, runaways, petty criminals, draft dodgers, deserters, potheads, avant-garde artists and the occasional genuine ideologue.” Notably, even the goals of the far-leftists in Germany, Japan, and other wealthy countries had no mass support, unlike the support for independent statehood among Palestinians. Radical intellectuals like Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, who embraced many violent anti-colonial revolts in what was then called the Third World, distanced themselves from Baader-Meinhof’s kidnappings and bombings. The Japanese Red Army proved even less popular among the people they claimed to be freeing from fascism and imperialism. (The same could be said of the Weather Underground, but because its members had few links to transnational groups, Burke largely leaves the young American militants outside his narrative.)

The Iranian Revolution, in which the secular Shah was overthrown and replaced eventually with a hardline Islamist government, heralded the shift from secular terrorism in the Middle East to religious-based violence. In November 1979—the same month that hundreds of students conquered the U.S. embassy in Tehran, with Ayatollah Khomeini’s assent—about 200 armed and devoutly Islamic men occupied a Saudi mosque that is considered the holiest site in Islam and held off police and even the military for two weeks. “It suited a significant proportion of observers to believe that the attack on the Great Mosque in Mecca was a local affair,” Burke writes. But the region’s movement toward a revival of political Islam was underway. Osama bin Laden frequented the Mosque often and was inspired by the willingness of devout men to die in the name of their faith to rid themselves of the illegitimate Saudi government, he said later. When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan the following month, he was well-positioned and eventually enthusiastic to fund the Mujahideen in liberating the sacred Muslim land from the infidels. The United States was equally eager to do so, for very different reasons. The CIA never directly funded bin Laden, as some would later claim, but it did recklessly boost the Islamist cause, which boomeranged when a select group of emboldened Islamists set their sights on the United States a few years later.

Burke helpfully guides readers through some of the strategies and thinking that emerged in Western governments as terrorism went global. A main example is the Reagan Administration’s often forgotten attempt to depict the Soviet Union as the wellspring of virtually all terrorism around the world, a remarkably wrong-headed misunderstanding of the causes of the hijackings and bombings that mushroomed beginning in the 1960s. More favorably, Burke cites Brian Jenkins, an expert at the RAND Corporation, who observed that “a declaration of war against an unspecified terrorist foe, to be fought at an unknown place and time with weapons yet to be chosen” would be problematic and long because politicians would “struggle to persuasively claim victory.”

This sensible advice, of course, went unheeded after 9/11. One hears little about the “War on Terror” anymore, but that’s not exactly because the United States won, although it has decimated Al Qaeda. Rather, policymakers and the public seem to understand, after profound failures in Afghanistan and Iraq, that excising hostile regimes is bloody, costly, and does little to reduce terrorism. Indeed, when the United States replaced Saddam Hussein with civil war and instability in Iraq, it made space for what became the Islamic State, which neither Barack Obama nor Donald Trump entirely destroyed (despite the latter’s first-term claims to the contrary) and which operates now as the biggest source of anti-American terrorism in the world.

At one point near the end of the book, Burke explains that by the mid-1980s, some Western countries had evolved toward “the most positive example of what might be achieved in the fight against domestic extremist violence.” West Germany and Italy utilized international cooperation, refused to make short-term concessions that would reward terrorism, and engaged in “careful if sometimes questionably constitutional use of legal process.” But that also meant accepting a degree of risk for the sake of maintaining a free society. Together, this multi-faceted strategy didn’t so much smash the threat of far-left terrorism as simply dilute and then outlast it. Among Burke’s many thoughtful observations is the idea that those alienated from society gravitated away from Marxism-Leninism toward environmentalism, Indigenous and LGBTQ+ rights, and causes that have more mainstream appeal but are less enthralled with revolutionary violence.

In the Middle East, things were different, and they remain so. There, the grievances that inspired people to pick up arms against civilians were never addressed. Even worse, leaders in Libya, Iraq, Iran, and Syria “used terrorism as a tool of statecraft.” The one drawback in Burke’s otherwise sound analysis is that he fails to question why the Middle East has for 75 years been the primary source for global terrorism. After all, Latin America and especially sub-Saharan Africa exist in equally dire conditions, and yet, people like Venezuelan-born Carlos the Jackal had to join forces with Palestinian groups in Jordan to find decent training for a career in bombings and hijackings. In dispelling myths about the supposedly nihilist or Islamist nature of political violence aimed at civilians, The Revolutionists simply opens the door to other conundrums.

Still, as Burke suggests, the European approach to combating terrorism, developed through trial and error over decades, presents a much better way forward than an endless war filled with state-building and changes to regimes. As long as technology offers some angry individuals and organizations attractive opportunities to inflict suffering on the people they see as their oppressors, terrorism will remain a problem for free societies, an inescapable by-product of modern life. But at least Burke’s thorough new book is instrumental in getting us to the most fundamental strategy in warfare: Know your enemy.