In part, I agree with Spencer Ackerman’s concluding criticism of his own book — that Reign of Terror, a much-anticipated work on the ways that the war on terror has influenced American politics over the past 20 years by one of its premier chroniclers, is in some ways a “We Didn’t Start the Fire” version of the forever war.

It is always a little disappointing when a book by some prominent journalist comes out and the best revelations have already been excerpted in newspaper article. In the case of Reign, most of the reporting was already in newspaper articles. The book is thoroughly researched and clearly written, but unlike a Bob Woodward special, there are no shocking on-deep-background revelations from the rooms where it happened.

Ackerman’s book is at its best when it steps from chronicles of events and engages in analysis — how a generation of military leaders and security state apparatchiks turned the Forever Wars into career builders; the rise of military leaders like Jim Mattis into the lauded “adults in the room” and into MAGA favorites like Michael Flynn; the trend of trying to “de-troop” political opponents by claiming their military service did not count.

But there is value, too, in the laundry list. The War on Terror, after all, did not happen behind closed doors nearly as often as those who fought it would have wished.

“In retrospect, any failure — especially by the war’s architects, stewards and chroniclers — to see the War on Terror was seeding the ground for a figure like Trump testifies to the power of American exceptionalism, which is nothing more than white innocence applied globally,” Ackerman writes in the introduction. His argument is that the facts were all there to see where this lead, and that many refused to look. Ackerman’s frustration with this failure burns through every page as he lays out what the public knew when.

Dara Lind, the fantastic immigration journalist who receives a note of appreciation in Ackerman’s acknowledgements, called Reign a second draft of history — not a journalistic first draft, and not exactly history, either, but a review of what we already know in light of what we later learned. Following the news is often like scrutinizing pointillist artwork, knowing generally that each dot of color connects to its neighbors in a meaningful way but being unable to pick out the figures. Especially as the longest, but by no means the last, chapter of the forever war draws to a close, Reign serves as a step back to see the painting as a whole.