US national security targeting has oscillated between nationality-based and ideology-based threat framing.

Evidence

From the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, the racial threat posed by ”Asians” was disarticulated from this broad category into specific nationalities, such as Chinese and Japanese. Nationality was also disarticulated in the case of the imagined threats of communism and anarchism; in targeting ”radical aliens,” the Palmer Raids of 1919–21 defined a foreign threat as a non–American ideology rather than as a particular non–American national group. The red scare is analogous to the amorphous War on Terror, in which Al-Qaeda represents a non-state actor. — Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims, 204

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the shift from place-based to ideology-based enemy framing seen in Cold War histories and in the ‘War on Terror’ literature.