(MENAFN- Live Mint) Two decades after he helped define America's post-9/11 foreign policy, former Vice President Dick Cheney has turned his fire inward - against the political movement that many argue grew from the seeds he once planted. By backing Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in 2024, Dick Cheney wasn't just rejecting Donald Trump; he was, in a sense, repudiating the very strain of fear-driven nationalism that his own presidency helped legitimise.

When history closes its book on Dick Cheney, the legacy it leaves will be one of paradoxes. The former US vice president - who died today at 84 - helped define America's post-9/11 order, a world shaped by fear, force, and the steady expansion of presidential power.

Yet in his final years, Dick Cheney became one of the fiercest critics of Donald Trump and the populist movement that now dominates the Republican Party he once helped command.

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That contradiction is not accidental; it is the essence of Cheney's story. The man who spent decades fortifying the American presidency ultimately lived long enough to watch his own party wield that power in ways he could no longer defend. The man who preached unyielding nationalism abroad found himself denouncing it at home.

The architect of a new American order

In the wake of the September 11 attacks, Cheney emerged as the most influential vice president in modern history - the shadow executive who shaped America's“war on terror.” His worldview was simple and absolute: the United States must strike before it is struck. It was Cheney who championed the invasion of Iraq, authorized expanded surveillance powers, and defended the use of“enhanced interrogation techniques” that the rest of the world called torture.

His policies reshaped not only US foreign policy but its political DNA. The Cheney doctrine of pre-emptive power and moral certainty normalized a new kind of politics - one defined by suspicion of dissent, executive secrecy, and the primacy of“us versus them.” In this new world, strength was measured not by restraint but by dominance.

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That atmosphere of permanent emergency - cultivated in the name of security - became fertile ground for something darker. The populist authoritarianism that Cheney would later decry was, in many ways, the logical end point of his own political project.

The birth of Trumpism from the ashes of the war on terror

Dick Cheney's“unitary executive” philosophy gave presidents extraordinary power to act unilaterally, often bypassing Congress and the courts. Two decades later, Donald Trump would inherit that machinery - using it not for national security but for personal grievance and political theater.

The politics of fear that Cheney deployed against foreign enemies became Trump's tool against domestic ones: immigrants, journalists, political opponents. The same anti-institutional anger that had fueled support for the Iraq War's architects now turned on Washington itself.

In trying to safeguard the American state, Cheney had built the framework for its internal siege.

The break from his own creation

And yet, to his credit, Cheney recognized that danger. When much of the Republican establishment fell in line behind Trump's strongman politics, Cheney - once the party's enforcer - refused. His daughter, former congresswoman Liz Cheney, became one of the few Republicans willing to confront Trump directly, and her father stood squarely beside her.

In one of his final public statements, Cheney called Trump“a coward” and“the greatest threat to our republic” in the nation's history. Coming from the man who once embodied the American right's toughest edge, the words carried moral weight - and no small irony.

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Dick Cheney's late-life break with Donald Trump was not a political rebranding; it was a reckoning. He had helped build a system that rewarded absolutism, demanded loyalty, and punished nuance. Trump merely replaced the language of national security with the language of vengeance.

The paradox of the patriot

For all his ruthlessness, Cheney was never a demagogue. He believed in hierarchy, secrecy, and control - not chaos. He saw the world as a dangerous place requiring strong men to make impossible choices. But he also believed in the endurance of American institutions. That, perhaps, is where Trump's movement broke from him entirely.

In death, Cheney's legacy forces a deeper question: how much of the present crisis in American democracy was inevitable once fear became the organizing principle of its politics? Was Trumpism a betrayal of Cheneyism - or its culmination?

History may conclude that Cheney, in trying to save America from its enemies, inadvertently taught it to fear itself.

A legacy of contradictions

It is tempting to see Dick Cheney's final years - his endorsement of Joe Biden in 2024, his open criticism of Trump, his unwavering defense of constitutional norms - as a moral redemption arc. But perhaps it is more honest to view it as a late recognition of cause and effect.

The empire he helped construct - the surveillance state, the imperial presidency, the zero-sum politics - became the foundation for a new era of domestic strongmen. Cheney spent his final years trying to put the genie back in the bottle.

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There was, ultimately, something tragic about him: a man of immense conviction who lived long enough to confront the unintended consequences of his own power.

The final irony

In life, Dick Cheney embodied the American century - its military might, its moral contradictions, its boundless faith in the power of command. In death, he stands as a warning of what happens when the tools built to defend democracy are turned against it.

For a man who once believed that strength alone could preserve the republic, his final years proved a quieter truth: that unchecked strength can just as easily destroy it.

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