Terrorist threat as a factor in the propaganda support of quasi-authoritarian political transit in western democracies at the turn of the XX-XXI centuries

The article reveals the information and propaganda technologies used at the end of the XX century and in the second decade of the XXI century by the US political elite to justify foreign military expansion into Eurasia (Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yugoslavia, deployment of a network of military bases in the Central Asian republics). The reason, but not the cause of restriction of civil liberties, according to the author, has become the threat of the international terrorist organization “Al-Qaeda” (outlawed in Russia) which has carried out a series of acts of terrorism against the objects and citizens of the USA in 1998-2001. International terrorism has served as a major shaping of the global “enemy image” that a fraction of a percent of a US military operation outside of a state has to be revoked. Subsequently, such information technology was used in connection with the emergence of the “Islamic State” organization (banned in Russia) to justify American intervention in the affairs of the Syrian Arab Republic in order to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad. Using the systematic method, historical-genetic method and the method of analyzing local situations (case-study), the author comes to the conclusion that the political regimes of Western democracies, primarily the United States, transited at the turn of the century to quasi-authoritarian regimes that were looking for a political pretext for deploying aggression in the new colonial redistribution of the world. Such an occasion was terrorist attacks by Al-Qaeda, and then by IS/ISIS.