“When I was coming up, it was a dangerous world, and you knew exactly what they were. It was us versus them, and it was clear who them was” (vi). Presidential candidate George W. Bush’s addled Cold War nostalgia serves as the inspiration for Douglas Little’s study of the post–Cold War confrontation between the U.S. and radical Islam. Little picks up on a theme—Americans’ perennial need for a “them”—raised in the third edition of his previous book, American Orientalism: The United States and the Middle East since 1945 (2008). In Us versus Them: The United States, Radical Islam, and the Rise of the Green Threat, he contributes extensive new research and analysis on the foreign policies of the four most recent U.S. presidents to explain how the “Green Threat” of radical Islam replaced the “Red Threat” of Soviet communism as America’s “other” and larger-than-life enemy. In an engagingly written, compact book consisting of an introduction and six chapters, Little places the war against radical Islam into long-term patterns of U.S. history. Recent Islamophobia, he notes, “echoed xenophobic tales from the distant and not-so-distant past exaggerating the malevolent intentions and diabolical powers of Native Americans, African slaves, Nazi spies, and Bolshevik revolutionaries eager to do ‘us’ harm” (13). Citing examples extending back to the Puritan war against the Wampanoags, Little convincingly argues that “the notion of a virtuous America endangered by wicked and violent enemies was not new at all” (15). The Cold War set the terms for America’s confrontation with radical Islam. Not only did the U.S. support Islamist states, including Saudi Arabia and groups such as the Afghan mujahidin as anti-communist allies, but the Cold War would also provide useful precedents for architects of the war on terror. A prime example is NSC-68, the 1950 charter for globalizing the Cold War under Harry Truman, which neoconservatives in the George W. Bush administration invoked as a model for mobilizing American society against a putatively existential threat.