Before a coup, an invasion or an annexation, there is a story told to the public to justify it. Some of those stories were true. Many were not, or were not the whole truth. This book measures the distance between the story and the record.

In August 1939, SS men posing as Polish insurgents seized a German radio station at Gleiwitz. By the next morning, Germany had invaded Poland. In Tehran in August 1953, hired crowds filled the streets and Iran's prime minister fell, in a coup the CIA acknowledged sixty years later. In Berlin in 1884, the great powers sat down to write the rules for the scramble for Africa, in the language of commerce, civilisation and the end of slavery.

Across 28 chapters and four centuries, Manufactured Enemies traces how great powers have manufactured justifications for asserting power over other peoples' resources, territories and futures: the staged incident, the covert coup, the intelligence shaped to fit a decision already taken, the proxy war, and the long imperial game played behind humanitarian language.

• The classic false flags: the Gulf of Tonkin, Operation Northwoods, the Lavon Affair, the secret Suez protocol, Gleiwitz and the Soviet shelling of Mainila
• The covert empire: the coups in Iran and Guatemala, the murder of Patrice Lumumba, Chile and Indonesia
• Proxy wars: arming the Afghan mujahideen, Pakistan under Zia, Washington's support for Saddam Hussein against Iran, the disputed "green light" before the invasion of Kuwait, and Iran-Contra
• Manufactured intelligence: Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, Kosovo, Libya, Syria, the Moscow apartment bombings of 1999 and Yemen
• The imperial long game: the East India Company, the Berlin Conference, the Jameson Raid, the Balfour Declaration and Afghanistan

Each case separates what the record documents from what is alleged, and says which is which. Not every chapter is a false flag, and not every allegation is true. The argument is that the pattern is real, recurring and documented. More than 600 source notes, drawn from declassified files, official inquiries and the historians who have worked through them, let readers check the evidence for themselves.

For readers of history, intelligence and foreign policy who want to know how power justifies itself, and how to recognise the next pretext before it works.