Category: US Foreign Relations

The Chief Legacy of 9/11

25 Years Later, A War of Terror Persists with No End in Sight

BILL ASTORE

SEP 09, 2026

The chief legacy of 9/11 is as obvious as it is tragic: a state of permanent warfare in the United States, both abroad and in the “homeland” (a term not used in normal discourse before the 9/11 attacks), with millions dead and displaced for no defensible reason.

If you’re 25 years old or younger in America, you’ve never known a time when your country wasn’t at war. “Peace” is no longer seen as desirable, let alone possible. War is seen as America’s natural state; a land of warriors are we, imbued with a “warrior ethos” that applauds kicking other countries when their down and beating the snot out of them just because we can.

Meanwhile, in the “homeland,” surveillance grows ever more intrusive by the day as agents of ICE kick down doors and haul people away to detention centers that are being rapidly expanded. Personal privacy is increasingly a thing of the past as the government wraps itself in a shroud of secrecy that makes oversight and accountability well-nigh impossible. 

The global war on terror has become a war of terror. War begets more war, with no end in sight.

Re-reading the Atlantic Monthly 150th anniversary issue from November 2007, I came across this gem of a quote from America’s 9/11 mayor, Rudolph Giuliani:

We’ve got to be patient and committed [in Iraq], but we’ve got to multitask … We’ve got to talk about Iran—Iran is more dangerous than Iraq—and we have got to get the job done in Afghanistan and in Pakistan.

That was Giuliani in July of 2007 when he ran as a Republican presidential candidate. In America, that’s how you get treated as a “serious” candidate for the presidency—by urging for war not just with Iraq and Afghanistan but with Pakistan and Iran as well. We can “multitask” our wars! Truly a sign of American greatness.

Well, Giuliani’s dream has come true—we are talking a lot about Iran today.

Back in 2007, Ron Paul had a different take on 9/11 and America’s state of forever war, but he was roundly booed for asking Americans to exercise just a bit of empathy by asking why “they” hate us:

That “crazy” Ron Paul, talking about blowback for America’s wars in the Middle East. He obviously didn’t know about America’s peace-making bombs and freedom-bringing missiles. Didn’t he know as well that “they” hate us for our freedoms?

Wars Are Protean and Dangerous Beasts

We Should All Hate War

BILL ASTORE

AUG 31, 2026

Wars are protean and dangerous beasts. Even when necessary, which is rare, it is well that we remember the horrifying costs of them.

The Russia-Ukraine War is in its fifth year with no clear end in sight. Suffering on both sides has been extreme. Trump’s war with Iran is in its sixth month with no clear end in sight. Hopes of a quick and low-cost regime-change war, encouraged by Israeli propaganda directed at Trump, have proven illusory. With Trump refusing to admit defeat, further escalation and dramatic economic consequences seem likely.

Certainly, Ukraine could not have sustained its military efforts without massive support from the U.S., NATO, and the EU. From the Russian perspective, they likely see this as a Ukraine/US/NATO/EU effort to weaken Russia. I blame Russia for invading. I blame the USA for exploiting that invasion for its own purposes (the Nordstream pipelines didn’t blow themselves up). I continue to worry that this war could widen leading to the use of nuclear weapons. I favor diplomatic efforts to end the war on terms Ukraine and Russia can accept.

The costs of war (Western Front, 1917)

I lament the costs of war, all the dead and wounded on both sides, and the continued destruction of Ukraine’s environment. I lament the damage war does to liberty, freedom, and truth. War always exacts a toll.

Whether the toll of the war is “worth it” for Ukraine or Russia to pay is not my decision. Only the people of Ukraine and Russia can say. Many have voted with their feet, leaving their respective countries, or the affluent pay bribes to avoid military service. This is hardly surprising. Affluent Americans paid bribes in the U.S. Civil War to avoid military service, or they hired substitutes to serve in their place.

Too often, wars are fought by the poor for the rich. Inequities in demands are obscured when wars are glorified as national wars of liberation.

Though not a pacifist, I’m strongly antiwar and very skeptical of justifications for the same, especially by “our” government. Just think of Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, and so on. I’m not an isolationist (an impossibility given how the world is interlinked, along with America’s 750-800 foreign military bases). But we’ve got to downsize the empire and make major cuts to Pentagon spending.

A major problem with war is that it fosters authoritarianism and abridgments of liberty. Even wars allegedly for liberation can be contrary to liberty. War also fosters the most Orwellian language. I’ve run across “justifiable repression” to explain away the authoritarianism of the Zelensky government in Ukraine. Forced conscription in Ukraine is explained away as “a regrettable but justifiable limitation of personal freedom.”

War is intoxicating and a powerful disturber of clear thinking. It corrodes intellectual honesty — while killing lots of people and destroying the earth.

As a retired military officer, I come back to Ike and his charge that we must be alert and knowledgeable citizens committed to democracy and individual liberties. Yet we seem immersed in a system designed to keep us somnolent and ignorant, or, put more plainly, lazy and dumb.

Ike said he hated war as only a soldier could hate it with all its waste and brutality. We would all do well to hate war and find ways to settle differences through diplomacy. The problem is that too many powerful entities actually love war because it makes them money and because it supports authoritarian agendas and because there are always megalomaniacs willing to sacrifice others for power.

Telling Headline at the New York Times

Trump Is the Real Victim of Gaza and the Iran War?

BILL ASTORE

AUG 11, 2026

Caught this headline at the New York Times this morning (8/11):

Top News

Trump Wants to Move On From the Middle East. It’s Not Letting Him.

President Trump is eager to declare success in Iran and Gaza, but he is struggling to impose his will in either conflict.

*****

Poor Donald Trump! He “wants to move on” from his violent illicit affair with Iran and the Middle East, but his mistress won’t let him. He just has to keep pummeling Iran until she sees sense and lets him go.

The mainstream media always presents war as something inflicted on U.S. presidents, a weighty burden over which they have no control, their iron cross to bear. It’s ludicrous and loathsome.

Mary McCarthy

It reminded me of what Mary McCarthy said about the American press during the Vietnam War—the way that war was framed as a burden LBJ had to carry and for which he should earn our sympathy. Disgusting, right?

Back in 2009, I wrote about that for TomDispatch; here’s an excerpt.

Even now, we speak too often of “Bush’s war” or, more recently, “Obama’s war.” Before we start chattering mindlessly about Iraq and Afghanistan as American tragedies, we would do well to recall what McCarthy had to say about the war in Vietnam: “There is something distasteful,” she wrote, “in the very notion of approaching [Vietnam] as an American tragedy, whose protagonist is a great suffering Texan [President Lyndon Baines Johnson].”

Yes, there is something distasteful about a media that blithely refers to Bush’s or Obama’s war as hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans suffer. For American troops, after all, are not the only ones paying the ultimate price when the U.S. fights foreign wars for ill-considered reasons and misguided goals.

If only U.S. presidents like LBJ and Trump could do something to stop these terrible wars! They want to move on, they want peace, but Southeast Asia or the Middle East or some other foreign region just won’t let them.

Right … What U.S. presidents really learn is that it’s far far easier to start wars than to end them, that other peoples have a say as well, and that imposing one’s will (nice euphemism for bombing Iran and facilitating genocide in Gaza) is difficult because other countries and peoples do object to being bombed and murdered.

P.S. Note how Gaza is framed as a “conflict.” Note the conceit that Trump is actually trying to impose his will there to end the “conflict,” even as Zionist Israel pursues a genocide and land grab there with total support from Trump.

Promise Peace, Deliver War

Of Presidential Betrayal

BILL ASTORE

AUG 10, 2026

U.S. presidents since Lyndon B. Johnson, if not before then (think here of Woodrow Wilson’s false promises in 1916 to keep America out of the Great War, known now as World War I), always promise peace, especially while running for office. Trump is the most recent example here. Yet whether Democrat or Republican, as soon as they become president, it’s war and more war. LBJ led America into the disastrous Vietnam War; Trump led America into the ongoing disaster of the Iran War; and the overseas wars just never seem to end, whether George W. Bush is issuing the orders or Barack Obama.

LBJ lacked the courage to resist the siren call of war

I had this thought as I re-read a comment from Mike Murry, a frequent Bracing Views contributor and an astute student of U.S. political and cultural history. Murry, a Vietnam War veteran, had this to say back in 2018:

Then, in the first semester of my senior hear in 1964, JFK’s successor as President: Lyndon Johnson, started his campaign for re-election, promising not to send us American boys to fight a war in Asia that Asian boys could fight themselves. He sounded just like Donald Trump did last year [January 2017], before assuming office. Johnson beat Goldwater in a landslide. The American people did not want another Korean War and made that overwhelmingly clear. But President Johnson betrayed us all, the way all U.S. Presidents now regularly do. Every one of them without exception preaches peace to win election. Then they invariably give their generals the wars that they demand. It happens every time. The stunning cynicism of that betrayal by President Johnson, I think, severed once and for all time any sense of “patriotism” that I might once have felt for the “America” of my youth. From that point on, I became an alien in my own land. My government would later send me abroad for the worst possible reasons, to do the most unnecessary and shameful of things. That same me never came home again. Someone else did. A damaged, but better man, I think. But much less an “American” one.

Today, the most important act to restore America is to end these needless and disastrous wars overseas. And not just overseas but here at home, as Trump promotes the malicious and mendacious notion of an enemy within, often labeled as the “radical left” with “terroristic” tendencies.

Nothing, I think, is more important to America’s health now and in the future than ending wars that waste so much, that kill and destroy so many, and that estrange our own citizen-soldiers from their country.

Random Sunday Thoughts

On Long Wars, the DSA, Aborigines, and Democracy in America

BILL ASTORE

AUG 09, 2026

On a very warm and humid Sunday morning, here are a few random thoughts for today:

1. It’s rather amazing that the U.S./Israel War against Iran has entered its six month with no end in sight. Remember when the Trump administration suggested it would last no longer than eight weeks? The war is holding the world economy hostage, apparently for “greater Israel” and continued U.S. dominance of trade in fossil fuels. I say “apparently” because the war doesn’t make much sense to most Americans, who are in the main against it. The only selling point Trump keeps repeating is that Iran must not be allowed to have a nuclear weapon, even as Israel is allowed to have up to 300 of them. His own intelligence chief told Trump that Iran was not working to field a nuclear weapon, but the Israelis told him otherwise, and we know who Trump is most obeisant toward.

2. Patrick Lawrence has a great piece on the DSA, the Democratic Socialists of America, and how they want to abolish ICE and possibly the presidency itself while defunding the police, the Pentagon, and other instruments of authority and coercion. One sympathizes, but it’s neither a practical nor a winning political message. So I wrote this comment at his site:

Echoing George McGovern, “Come home, America.” You can’t abolish or dismantle everything. But we can downsize the imperium and reinvest in America rather than “investing” in more wars and Zionist Israel.

If the DSA wants to make a contribution, it should focus on that — downsizing the empire, putting the American people first, rather than dreaming of abolishing everything. For what will replace it?

Make the lives of average Americans better, more affordable, more livable. Clean up our environment. And forget the magical thinking and empty posturing.

Come home, America. Come home from wanton, wasteful, and immoral wars.

3. I was breezing through “The Devil’s Dictionary” by Ambrose Bierce and stumbled on his acerbic definition of “Aborigines”:

1. Persons of little worth found cumbering the soil of a newly discovered country. They soon cease to cumber; they fertilize.

2. Considerate persons who will not trouble the lexicographer of the future to describe them.

Bierce, a veteran of the U.S. Civil War, didn’t mince words here. There are always “persons of little worth” to oppressors who’d prefer that they leave or die. What was true of aboriginal peoples of the 19th and early 20th centuries is true of the Palestinians today: they are seen as obstacles to be overcome, even as terrorists to be exterminated.

4. Antiwar forces in America remain fragmented, and that’s partly by design. To oversimplify, you have the so-called radical left, which is antiwar, sometimes anti-military, often as critical of America as it is of empire, versus the “unpatriotic” (to Trump) right, which is anti-dumb wars, generally pro-military, and animated by putting “America first.” Left and right have much in common: they want less war, less militarism, and more investment and support for Main Street USA. If they could combine, they would make a formidable force against the MICC and incessant warfare. Which is why each side is encouraged to distrust and even hate the other, i.e. the “radical left” is told the right is racist and reactionary and the “unpatriotic right” is told the left is woke, arrogant, and un-American.

The MICC and “Deep State” know that these two groups must be kept divided. They must never be allowed to cooperate in meaningful ways.

5. Ike said only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry could tame and reduce the anti-democratic forces unleashed by the MICC. Note how Ike said nothing about the left or right. Being for democracy, freedom, and liberty isn’t a right or left issue. The same applies to being against war and killing and massively wasteful military budgets. These are human issues that should unite everyone irrespective of political allegiances.

Caveat: Any foolishness written above is on account of the heat, but fortunately I’ve been told global warming is a Chinese hoax. Stay cool, everyone.

The Militarized Insanity of this American Moment

A “Top Ten” List

BILL ASTORE

AUG 04, 2026

There’s so much militarized crazy in America today that it’s entirely overwhelming. Here’s a “top ten” list:

1. The illegal and unconstitutional war against Iran.

Remember when Trump told us he wouldn’t start wars? Remember when attacks on Iran began, the Trump administration told us they’d be over in a matter of days, perhaps a few weeks, ending in Iran’s total defeat? Instead, the U.S. government and military is engaged in yet another disastrous losing undeclared war that is unsupported by most Americans. As if our opinions matter!

2. The continued blanket support of Israel’s genocide against Gaza, pogroms in the West Bank, and demolition/seizure of land in Lebanon.

The Trump administration remains 100% committed to the project of a “Greater Israel,” no matter how many Palestinians suffer and die in the process.

3. The obscene $500 billion increase in military spending in FY2027.

The U.S. military hasn’t won a major war since 1945. It’s failed eight audits in a row. The “punishment” is a vast increase in military spending in the next fiscal year.

4. The escalatory and nearly impossible Golden Dome proposal.

The golden dome missile defense system is a golden boondoggle for weapons makers. It’s unlikely to work, and if it does, if only partially, it may make nuclear war more likely.

5. The unnecessary “modernization” of the nuclear triad at a projected cost of $2 trillion.

U.S. militarists still believe the nuclear triad is the Holy Trinity. It isn’t. Land-based ICBMs and nuclear bombers should be scrapped as obsolete. The Navy’s Trident-missile-firing submarines are all the U.S. needs for nuclear deterrence.

6. The continued headlong pursuit of artificial intelligence (AI) and the ongoing empowerment and enlargement of the surveillance state.

AI combined with ever-more intrusive cameras and digital monitoring is creating a dystopic “Big Brother” state. Imagine sweeping AI with a steroidal Homeland Security; now imagine the total disappearance of privacy.

7. The war against the ICC and UN and indeed any legal check on U.S./Israeli aggression.

As the U.S. and Israel engage in global aggression, they attack institutions such as the International Criminal Court and the United Nations that attempt to limit and stop that aggression.

8. Related to (7), the proposal to merge the U.S. military with Israel’s for research and development, intelligence sharing, and the like.

Incredibly, the Trump administration is proposing a merger between the U.S. and Israeli militaries that would compromise U.S. national security at the highest levels of classification. Obedient to Aipac and Israeli imperatives, Congress seems prepared ultimately to support it.

9. Continued environmental damage due to war and military operations and the complete disregard of climate change.

Rarely in the U.S. do you hear any talk of how war and global military actions accelerate global warming and aggravate environmental damage. Check out the documentary by Abby Martin, “Earth’s Greatest Enemy,” and her interview with Chris Hedges.

10. The abandonment of the citizen-soldier tradition in the U.S., the embrace of a warrior ethos, and the increasing contempt for diversity within the military.

The last war America won (with serious help from allies like the Soviet Union) was World War II, also the last time America had a true citizen-soldier military. Since then, America has increasingly embraced a warrior ethos. And while diversity used to be a hallmark of the U.S. military, it is now under attack as “woke” by Pete Hegseth.

There you have it: ten signs of America’s increasingly militarized madness. Greater sanity would involve the reversal of all of these.

Retrograde Trump

And An Unconditional Congressional Surrender

BILL ASTORE

JUL 22, 2026

Odds and ends from my notebook:

  • Donald Trump’s vision as president is aggressively retrograde. He wants to make America more white, less diverse, more violent, less tolerant, more fearful, less accepting, again. In short, he wants to make America far less great.
  • When it comes to the U.S. Constitution, the Trump administration is assertively renegade.
  • The U.S. government has become something of a moral midget with a distastefully large military hammer. Under such conditions, what could possibly go wrong?
  • Authorizing war is supposed to be a Congressional act, an exercise of the people’s will. While Trump can’t get Iran’s unconditional surrender, he has certainly gained the unconditional surrender of Congress.
  • Maybe the Biden and Trump administrations’ blank-check support of Israel’s genocide in Gaza has something to do with the fact that America knows something about being a genocidal expansionist state that sees indigenous people as “savages.”
  • Data, data, everywhere, but intelligence, empathy, judgment and compassion are increasingly difficult to find.
  • Two or three times a year, I buy a couple of lottery tickets for fun. They are of course a regressive tax on the working classes. They represent the selling of (largely) false hope. And my state of Massachusetts has something like 100 or so lottery tickets you can buy with a face value from $1 to $50. Yes — $50 lottery tickets! Something about this is so wrong and exploitative. And of course now you have “Draft Kings” and all the “legal” betting on sports. It’s a system designed to impoverish workers and enrich the already rich, the reverse of what we should have. And it’s the working classes who get sent to die in America’s various illegal wars, also for the benefit of the rich, as the latter stay home with heel spurs and “other priorities.”
  • It’s fascinating that as oil and gas prices soar due to the Trump administration’s warmongering policies, there’s been absolutely no talk of conservation or cutting back on consumption of fossil fuels. It’s “drill, baby, drill” or even steal, baby, steal (as in commandeering oil tankers on the high seas).
  • I find it shameful that dead American troops are used to justify further attacks on Iran that might lead to yet more dead American troops. For what, exactly?
  • The proposed merger of the Israeli and U.S. militaries (Section 224, now 219, of the NDAA, and Section 1217 in the Senate) includes an Executive Agent who’d report directly to the Secretary of Defense, in this case Pete Hegseth, with no Congressional oversight. Once again, Congress willingly abdicates its responsibilities, this time to a foreign power. The U.S. military and intelligence agencies should not be intermingled with those of any foreign power, yet Congress is preparing to do exactly that with Israel.
  • Pete Hegseth testified the Iran War has cost roughly $38 billion so far. The true figure is closer to $100 billion. The self-styled Secretary of War can’t do basic math.
  • When escalation is seen as a way to end wars, whether with Iran or between Russia and Ukraine, my mind goes back to the Yom Kippur War of 1973 and the Israeli warning: An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. Deep penetrations will be met with deep penetrations. (That was the Israeli response to Egyptian incursions in the Sinai Peninsula.) Which brings me to an eye for an eye and pretty soon we’ll all be blind. 
  • Put differently, as David Bowie sang for the movie “Cat People,” it’s like putting out fire with gasoline. Or with Tomahawk and Hellfire missiles. It doesn’t work.

War Is Too Easy

We’ll End the War by Escalating It?

BILL ASTORE

JUL 18, 2026

War is too easy in America today. We’ve come to accept it as normal. Peace is now aberrant. As war grows ever easier, peace becomes ever harder.

“Escalation,” not diplomacy, is touted as the smart way to end wars. Logic doesn’t seem to matter. How do you end a war by launching more damaging and deadly strikes? How is killing even more people a way to peace?

President Trump now seems to believe that climbing the “escalation ladder” in the Iran War and in the Russia-Ukraine War is the best way to resolve these deadly conflicts. It reminds me of that Vietnam-era quip that waging war for peace is like screwing for virginity.

Journalist Aaron Maté’s piece today also cites Washington’s belief in escalation:

Shortly before returning to the White House for a second term, Donald Trump criticized the exiting president, Joe Biden, for letting Ukraine fire long-range US missiles into Russia. “Why are we doing that?” Trump complained. “We’re just escalating this war and making it worse.”

Just as his campaign pledge of “no new wars” gave way to a regime-change war on Iran, Trump’s professed aversion to a US-fueled escalation in Ukraine is no more. At this month’s NATO summit in Turkey, Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio endorsed Ukraine’s drone attacks deep inside Russia. With the Russians “finding it more difficult to defend their own airspace,” Rubio explained, this will “create the space now to negotiate the end of this war.” Added Trump: “It’s an escalation, but it’s also an escalation that could help lead to an end.”

How often do “escalations” help to end wars? Does anyone remember how escalation in Vietnam turned out?

Maybe if we truly seek to end a war, we should deescalate attacks, then engage in diplomacy. No, that makes too much sense.

Spock learns that logic often doesn’t apply to murder or war

There’s a great line in an old Star Trek episode, “Journey to Babel,” where Spock is advised he’d do well to “forget logic and devote yourself to motivations of passion and gain,” for “those are the reasons for murder” — and often for war as well.

Of course, these aren’t the only reasons for war, but logic often has little to do with how and why wars are waged. That much is obvious as “climbing the escalation ladder” is seen or sold by Washington as the best way to deescalate in Iran and in Russia and Ukraine.

America’s Dilemma at 250

A Budget of the Pentagon, By the Congress and For the War Profiteers

BILL ASTORE

JUL 13, 2026

Note to Readers: The short essay below represents a joint effort of the Eisenhower Media Network, or EMN, an organization of former military and government officials who seek a wiser course for America and a more peaceful world. I’ve been a member since EMN’s founding.

In Common Sense, Thomas Paine challenged Americans to question an institution that had long seemed beyond challenge. He wrote, “A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right.” Two hundred and fifty years later, those words apply just as well to America’s defense budget. What has become accepted through habit is neither sustainable nor accountable. Only the American people can change it.

The “defense of custom” now comes from the Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex that President Dwight Eisenhower warned against in his farewell address. Years earlier, in his famous “Cross of Iron” speech, Eisenhower observed: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed… Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”

More than seventy years later, Eisenhower’s warning has become reality. The United States spends more on its military than the next eight countries combined, most of them allies, while millions of Americans struggle with the costs of health care, child care, education, and housing.

The Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex thrives by portraying every international challenge as justification for ever-larger Pentagon budgets. Defense contractors finance political campaigns and employ armies of lobbyists who help shape the annual National Defense Authorization Act. Taxpayer dollars then flow back into executive compensation, shareholder dividends, stock buybacks, and continued political influence, creating a self-perpetuating cycle that rewards corporate profits rather than national security. Even maintenance contracts are often structured so that only the original contractor can repair the equipment, locking taxpayers into decades of additional costs. The troubled F-35 fighter program—billions over budget, years behind schedule, and only partially mission capable—has become a symbol of this dysfunction.

An Air Force general described the F-35 (top) as a Ferrari, meaning it’s ultra-expensive, less than reliable, and overall less effective than the two F-16s also shown in the photo (Official AF photo)

Yet despite these enormous expenditures, America’s recent military record raises serious questions about whether ever-increasing budgets produce better outcomes. Since World War II, the United States has rarely achieved the political objectives it set out to accomplish in major conflicts, despite possessing the world’s largest military establishment and one of the most geographically secure nations on Earth.

Even more troubling, the Pentagon remains unable to account for how it spends taxpayer money. It has repeatedly failed the financial audits required by law, something every other federal department has managed to complete. Nevertheless, it is now requesting a budget approaching $1.5 trillion. Asking taxpayers to approve such an increase before explaining where previous funding went reflects a level of fiscal irresponsibility that would be unacceptable anywhere else in government—or in any American household.

Thomas Paine understood that institutions derive their power not only from force but from unquestioned assumptions. Britain’s empire appeared invincible in 1776 until Americans decided its authority no longer deserved their consent. Today, questioning the continual expansion of military spending may seem equally unfashionable, but history reminds us that accepted practices are not always wise ones.

A $1.5 trillion Pentagon budget represents more than $9,000 per taxpayer. As America marks its 250th anniversary, we should ask whether endless increases in military spending truly make us more secure, or whether they come at the expense of the investments that strengthen our nation at home. The courage required today is not to defeat an empire abroad, but to confront the entrenched interests of the Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex and reclaim a government that serves the American people rather than the economics of perpetual war.

The Real Enemy Is War

For Democracy to Prosper, America’s Wars Must End

BILL ASTORE

JUN 24, 2026

To democracy, the real enemy is war. Almost any excess, any use of power, any abridgment of rights, is justifiable in the name of winning a war.

War, as Randolph Bourne said, is the very health of the state. A state’s apparatus of coercion and control grows ever more powerful whenever wars are prosecuted. Coercive power is of course anathema to democracy and the exercise of liberty.

Many wise people have noted this. Early in the 19th century, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America that war is “the surest and shortest means” to “destroy the liberties of a democratic nation.” Even earlier, James Madison wrote in 1787 that

Constant apprehension of War has the … tendency to render the head too large for the body. A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty. The means of defense against Foreign danger, have been always the instruments of tyranny at home. 

How true is it today that the U.S. government’s “head” has grown too large for the American body politic, and that the Executive branch, as represented by men like Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth, is both overgrown and an unsafe companion to liberty.

Arguably the most pressing matter our nation finds before it today is its permanent state of war. It has driven the creation of the so-called national security state, America’s unofficial fourth branch of government and arguably its most powerful. It certainly gobbles up the lion’s share of federal discretionary spending. This colossus is mainly represented by the Pentagon, Homeland Security, and eighteen(!) intelligence agencies. Like Topsy, it keeps growing as presidents as diverse as Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Donald Trump keep feeding it more and more money.

The result has been a series of disastrous wars of choice, completely unnecessary, whether in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Iran. Among other deleterious effects, these wars have grievously wounded democracy in America; indeed, the constant hammer blows of these wars have perhaps already proven fatal to democracy.

The only solution here is to stop. Stop waging wars across the planet. Downsize the imperial apparatus. Make major cuts to the budgets of the Pentagon, Homeland Security, and the Intelligence “community.”

The price of liberty is a willingness to turn away from war, to dismantle a wildly overgrown and increasingly oppressive “security” state, while still recognizing the world can be a dangerous place, and that therefore a defensive military posture and presence is still needed.

For my entire life, my country has been at war. Those wars have profited the few at the expense of the many. Even worse, those wars have enlarged the state and enabled self-styled warriors and warfighters to enforce their vision of security through massive spending on weapons and mass killing.

Peace is what America is most in need of. No more war! Sadly, so much of our country is now centered on war, dependent on war, intoxicated by war, that charting a peaceful path that reinvigorates and restores our democracy seems like the longest of long shots.

To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, we must disenthrall ourselves from war, and then we shall save our country.