Blowback
Etymology
Literally the backward escape of gases from a gun or explosion, the term was adopted as intelligence jargon; it appears in a classified 1954 CIA report on the Iran coup. Chalmers Johnson popularized the political sense in his 2000 book "Blowback," describing the delayed costs of unacknowledged foreign operations.
noun · /BLOH-bak/
The unintended and harmful consequences of a covert action or policy that rebound on those who launched it.
What it names
A mental tool for tracing today’s crisis back to yesterday’s clever intervention — a reminder that secret meddling tends to return with interest.
Example
Arming those militias looked shrewd at the time, but the blowback arrived a decade later when the same weapons were turned on their former backers.
Related idea
A specific, adversarial case of second-order effects, the general idea that actions ripple beyond their first result; blowback stresses that the ripple comes back to strike the original actor, often after the trail has gone cold.