W.J. Astore

Time to Make America Sane–Again?

I started blogging in 2007 for TomDispatch.com. Tom Engelhardt, the mastermind of that indispensable site, saw something in an article I sent him on saving the U.S. military from itself. That is, from its own vainglory, its own global ambitions for power and dominance, its own illusions of being number one, both the world’s toughest military and also the world’s freedom-bringers. Certainly, the megalomania and Messiah-like fantasies weren’t a military mindset alone; it was even more pronounced among the neocons who orbited the Bush/Cheney administration and who still largely define U.S. foreign policy in the Biden/Harris administration. Things are so bad that some (wrongly) believe Trump/Vance offer a more moderate, far less warlike, alternative, when Trump’s record suggests little of the sort.

Anyhow, this is my 108th article for TomDispatch in the 17 years I’ve been writing for the site, a mark of persistence that suggests a certain folly on my part, and considerable patience on Tom’s part. 

During World War II, American leaders proudly proclaimed this country the “arsenal of democracy,” supplying weapons and related materiel to allies like Great Britain and the Soviet Union. To cite just one example, I recall reading about Soviet armored units equipped with U.S. Sherman tanks, though the Soviets had an even better tank of their own in the T-34 and its many variants. However, recent news that the United States is providing yet more massive arms deliveries to Israel (worth $20 billion) for 2026 and thereafter caught me off guard.  Israel quite plainly is engaged in the near-total destruction of Gaza and the massacre of Palestinians there.  So, tell me, how over all these years did the self-styled arsenal of democracy become an arsenal of genocide?

Israel, after all, couldn’t demolish Gaza, killing at least 40,000 Palestinians in a population of only 2.1 million, including thousands of babies and infants, without massive infusions of U.S. weaponry. Often, the U.S. doesn’t even sell the weaponry to Israel, a rich country that can pay its own bills. Congress just freely gifts body- and baby-shredding bombs in the name of defending Israel from Hamas. Obviously, by hook or crook, or rather by shells, bombs, and missiles, Israel is intent on rendering Gaza Palestinian-free and granting Israelis more living space there (and on the West Bank). That’s not “defense” — it’s the 2024 equivalent of Old Testament-style vengeance by annihilation.

As Tacitus said of the rampaging Romans two millennia ago, so it can now be said of Israel: they create a desert — a black hole of death in Gaza — and call it “peace.” And the U.S. government enables it or, in the case of Congress, cheers on its ringleader, Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu.

Of course, anyone who knows a little American history should have some knowledge of genocide. In the seventeenth century, Native Americans were often “satanized” by early colonial settlers. (In 1994, a friend of mine, the historian David Lovejoy, wrote a superband all-too-aptly titled article on exactly that topic: “Satanizing the American Indian.”) Associating Indians with the devil made it all the easier for the white man to mistreat them, push them off their lands, and subjugate or eradicate them. When you satanize an enemy, turning them into something irredeemably evil, all crimes become defensible, rational, even justifiable. For how can you even consider negotiating or compromising with the minions of Satan?

Growing up, I was a strong supporter of Israel, seeing that state as an embattled David fighting against a Goliath, most notably during the Yom Kippur War of 1973. Forty years later, I wrote an article suggesting that Israel was now the Goliath in the region with Palestinians in Gaza playing the role of a very much outgunned and persecuted David. An American-Jewish friend told me I just didn’t get it. The Palestinians in Gaza were all terrorists, latent or incipient ones in the case of the infants and babies there. At the time, I found this attitude uncommon and extreme, but events have proven it to be far too common (though it certainly remains extreme). Obviously, on some level, the U.S. government agrees that extremism in the pursuit of Israeli hegemony is no vice and so has provided Israel with the weaponry and military cover it needs to “exterminate all the brutes.” Thus, in 2024, the U.S. “cradle of democracy” reveals its very own heart of darkness.

Looking Again at the World Wars That Made America “Great”

When considering World Wars I and II, we tend to see them as discrete events rather than intimately connected. One was fought from 1914 to 1918, the other from 1939 to 1945. Americans are far more familiar with the Second World War than the First. From both wars this country emerged remarkably unscathed compared to places like France, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom, China, and Japan. Add to that the comforting myth that America’s “greatest generation” pretty much won World War II, thereby saving democracy (and “Saving Private Ryan” as well).

Perhaps, however, we should imagine those years of conflict, 1914-1945, as a European civil war (with an Asian wing thrown in the second time around), a new Thirty Years’ War played out on a world stage that led to the demise of Europe’s imperial powers and their Asian equivalent and the rise of the American empire as their replacement. Germanic militarism and nationalism were defeated but at an enormous cost, especially to Russia in World War I and the Soviet Union in World War II. Meanwhile, the American empire, unlike Germany’s Second and Third Reichs or Japan’s imperial power, truly became for a time an untrammeled world militarist hegemon with the inevitable corruption inherent in the urge for near-absolute power.

Vast levels of destruction visited upon this planet by two world wars left an opening for Washington to attempt to dominate everywhere. Hence, the roughly 750 overseas bases its military set up to ensure its ultimate global reach, not to speak of the powerful navy it created, centered on aircraft carriers for power projection and nuclear submarines for possible global Armageddon, and an air force that saw open skies as an excuse for its own exercises in naked power projection. To this you could add, for a time, U.S. global economic and financial power, enhanced by a cultural dominance achieved through Hollywood, sports, music, and the like.

Not, of course, that the United States emerged utterly unchallenged from World War II. Communism was the specter that haunted its leaders, whether in the Soviet Union, China, or Southeast Asia (where, in the 1960s and early 1970s, it would fight a disastrous losing war, the first of many to come, in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia). Here, there, and everywhere, even under the very beds of Americans, there was a fear of the “commie rat.” And for a while, communism, in its Soviet form, did indeed threaten capitalism’s unbridled pursuit of profits, helping American officials to create a permanent domestic war state in the name of containing and rolling back that threat. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 erased that fear, but not the permanent war state that went with it, as Washington sought new enemies to justify a Pentagon budget that today is still rising toward the trillion-dollar mark. Naturally (and remarkably disastrously), it found them, whether in Afghanistan, Iraq, or so many other places in the case of the costly and ultimately futile Global War on Terror in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.

And eternally losing (or at least not winning) its wars raised the question: What will replace it? What will happen as imperial America continues to decline, burdened by colossal debt and strategic overreach, and crippled from within by a rapacious class of oligarchs who fancy themselves as a new all-American aristocracy. Will that decline lead to collapse or can its officials orchestrate a soft landing? In World Wars I and II, Europeans fought bitterly for world dominance, powered by militarism, nationalism, racism, and greed. They suffered accordingly and yet did recover even if as far less powerful nations. Can the U.S. manage to curb its own militarism, nationalism, racism, and greed in time and so recover similarly? And by “racism,” I mean, for example, reviving the idea (however put) of China as a “yellow peril,” or the tendency to see the darker-skinned peoples of the Middle East as violent “terrorists” and the latest minions of Satan.

And then, of course, there’s always the fear that, in the future, a world war could once again break out, raising the possibility of the use of nuclear weapons from global arsenals that are always being “modernized” and the possible end of most life on Earth. It’s an issue worth highlighting, since the U.S. continues to “invest” significant sums in producing yet more nuclear weapons, even as it ratchets up tensions with nuclear powers like Russia and China. Though a winnable nuclear war among the great powers on this planet is inconceivable, that hasn’t stopped my country from pushing for a version of nuclear superiority (disguised, of course, as “deterrence”).

Making America Sane Again

The world wars of the previous century facilitated America’s global dominance in virtually all its dimensions. That, in fact, was their legacy. No other nation in history had, without irony or humility, divided the globe into military combatant commandslike AFRICOM for Africa, CENTCOM for the Middle East, and NORTHCOM here at home. There are also “global” commands for strategic nuclear weapons, cyber dominance, and even the dominance of space. It seemed that the only way America could be “safe” was by dominating everything everywhere all at once. That insane ambition, that vainglory, was truly what made the U.S. the “exceptional” nation on the world stage.

Such a boundless pursuit of dominance, absurdly disguised as benefiting democracy, is now visibly fraying at the seams and may soon come apart entirely. In 2024, it’s beyond obvious that the United States no longer dominates the world, even if its military-industrial-congressional complex (MICC) does indeed dominate its national (in)security state and so increasingly the country. What an irony, in fact, that defeating European militarism in two world wars only accelerated the growth of American militarism and nationalism, making the world’s lone superpower for so many decades the scariest country for all too many peoples outside its borders.

Think, in fact, of the U.S. emerging from World War II with what might be thought of as victory disease. The last nearly 80 years of its foreign policy witnessed the remarkable progression of that “disease,” despite a lack of actual victories (unless you count minor escapades like the invasion of Grenada). Put differently, the U.S. emerged from World War II so singularly an economic, financial, and cultural juggernaut that subsequent military defeats almost didn’t seem to matter.

Even as America’s economic, financial, and cultural power has waned in this century, along with its moral position (consider President Obama’s curt “We tortured some folks” admission, along with support for Israel’s ongoing genocide), the government does continue to double-down on military spending. Pentagon budgets and related “national security” costs now significantly exceed $1 trillion annually even as arms shipments and sales continue to surge. War, in other words, has become big business in America or, as General Smedley Butler so memorably put it 90 years ago, a first-class “racket.”

Worse yet, war, however prolonged and even celebrated, may be the very definition of insanity, a deadly poison to democracy. Don’t tell that to the MICC and all its straphangers and camp followers, though.

Ironically, the two countries, Germany and Japan, that the U.S. took credit for utterly defeating in World War II, forcing their unconditional surrender, have over time emerged in far better shape. Neither of them is perfect, mind you, but they largely have been able to avoid the militarism, nationalism, and constant warmongering that so infects and weakens American-style democracy today. Whatever else you can say about Germany and Japan in 2024, neither of them is bent in any fashion on either regional or global domination, nor are their leaders bragging of having the finest military in all human history. American presidents from George W. Bush to Barack Obama have indeed bragged about having a matchless, peerless, “finest” military. The Germans and Japanese, having known the bitter price of such boasts, have kept their mouths shut.

My brother has a saying: no brag, just facts. And when we look at facts, the pursuit of global dominance has been driving the American empire toward an early grave. The “finest” military lost disastrously, of course, in Vietnam in the last century, and in Afghanistan and Iraq in this one. It functionally lost its self-proclaimed Global War on Terror and it keeps losing in its febrile quest for superiority everywhere.

If we met a person dressed in a military uniform who insisted he was Napoleon, boasted that his Imperial Guard was the world’s best, and that he could rule the world, we would, of course, question his sanity. Why are we not questioning the collective sanity of America’s military and foreign-policy elites?

This country doesn’t need to be made great again, it needs to be made sane again by the rejection of wars and the weaponry that goes with them. For if we continue to follow our present pathway, MADness could truly lie in wait for us, as in the classic nuclear weapons phrase, mutually assured destruction (MAD).

Another form of madness is having a president routinely implore God — yes, no one else! — to protect our troops. This is not a knock on Joe Biden alone. He’s just professing a nationalist piety that’s designed to win applause and votes. Assuming Biden has the Christian God in mind, consider the irony, not to say heresy, of functionally begging Christ, the Prince of Peace, to protect those who are already armed to the teeth. It’s also an abdication of the commander-in-chief’s responsibility to support and defend the U.S. Constitution while protecting those troops himself. Who has the biggest impact, God or the president, when it comes to ensuring that troops aren’t sent into harm’s way without a justifiable cause supported by the American people through a Congressional declaration of war?

Consider the repeated act of looking skyward to God to support military actions as a major league cop-out. But that’s what U.S. presidents routinely do now. Such is the pernicious price of pursuing a vision that insists on global reach, global power, and global dominance. America’s leaders have, in essence, elevated themselves to a god-like position, a distinctly angry, jealous, and capricious one, far more like Zeus or Ares than Jesus. Speaking of Jesus, he is alleged to have said, “Suffer the children to come unto me.” The militarized American god, however, says: suffer the children of Gaza to die courtesy of bombs and shells made here in the U.S.A. and shipped off to Israel at a remarkably modest price (given the destruction they cause).

To echo a popular ad campaign, Jesus may “get” us, but our leaders (self-avowed Christians, all) sure as hell don’t get him. I may be a lapsed Catholic, not a practicing one like Joe Biden, but even I remember my catechism and a certain commandment that Thou shalt not kill.