America’s descent into authoritarianism and fascism

BILL ASTORE

MAY 10, 2026

Can you win a war that isn’t really about the country you’re fighting? Where the aims keep shifting and the motivations are dishonest? We know from Secretary of State Marco Rubio that Israel more or less forced the Trump administration’s hand in attacking Iran. We know from Joe Kent’s testimony that Iran posed no imminent threat to the U.S. We know from President Trump himself that Iran’s nuclear program had been “obliterated” in previous strikes. So why wage war on Iran?

The way we label wars is illustrative of our confusion and dishonesty. “The Vietnam War”: more accurately, it was the U.S. government’s war on Vietnam. “The Iraq War”: again, the U.S. government’s war on Iraq. Same with Afghanistan. Same with Iran. America wages constant wars against other nations and peoples; these wars are really variations on a theme of militarism, imperialism, and profiteering.

Cui bono, who benefits, is always the question to ask. The answer is usually some combination of the military-industrial complex, U.S. oligarchical corporate interests, and, in the case of wars in the Middle East, Zionist Israel and fossil fuel interests.

By its nature, a constant state of warfare feeds authoritarianism and stifles freedom and democracy. Wars favor oligarchs and dictators and feed fascist tendencies. No nation can preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare, James Madison warned.

There is no “victory” to be had in these wars, not for the American people. This was true of the Vietnam War and it’s also true of the current war on Iran. America is losing and will lose because these wars weaken freedom and democracy while reinforcing authoritarian and fascistic elements.

America, as in people like us, can only “win” when these wars are ended.

All this has been on my mind as I recalled this review that I wrote (see below) on why the U.S. lost the Vietnam War. 

*****

American Reckoning: Why the U.S. Lost the Vietnam War

Written in 2015.

Christian G. Appy, professor of history at U-Mass Amherst, has written a new and telling book on the Vietnam War: American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity (New York, Viking Press). Reading his book made me realize a key reason why the U.S. lost the war: for U.S. leaders it was never about Vietnam and the Vietnamese people. Rather, for these men the war was always about something else, a “something else” that constantly shifted and changed. Whereas for North Vietnam and its leaders, the goal was simple and unchanging: expel the foreign intruder, whether it was the Japanese or the French or the Americans, and unify Vietnam, no matter the cost.

Appy’s account is outstanding in showing the shifting goals of U.S. foreign policy vis-à-vis Vietnam. In the aftermath of World War II, the U.S. first supported the French in their attempts to reassert control over their former colony. When the French failed, the U.S. saw Vietnam through a thoroughly red-tinted lens. The “fall” of a newly created South Vietnam was seen as the first domino in a series of potential Communist victories in Asia. Vietnam itself meant little economically to American interests, but U.S. leaders were concerned about Malaysia and Indonesia and their resources. So to stop that first domino from falling, the U.S. intervened to prop up a “democratic” government in South Vietnam that was never democratic, a client state whose staying power rested entirely on U.S. “advisers” (troops) and weapons and aid.

Again, as Appy convincingly demonstrates, for U.S. leaders the war was never about Vietnam. Under Eisenhower, it was about stopping the first domino from falling; under Kennedy, it was a test case for U.S. military counterinsurgency tactics and Flexible Response; under Johnson, it was a test of American resolve and credibility and “balls”; and under Nixon, it was the pursuit of “peace with honor” (honor, that is, for the Nixon Administration). And this remained true even after South Vietnam collapsed in 1975. Then the Vietnam War, as Appy shows, was reinterpreted as a uniquely American tragedy. Rather than a full accounting of the war and America’s mistakes and crimes in it, the focus was on recovering American pride, to be accomplished in part by righting an alleged betrayal of America’s Vietnam veterans.

In the Reagan years, as Appy writes, American veterans, not the Vietnamese people, were:

portrayed as the primary victims of the Vietnam War. The long, complex history of the war was typically reduced to a set of stock images that highlighted the hardships faced by U.S. combat soldiers—snake-infested jungles, terrifying ambushes, elusive guerrillas, inscrutable civilians, invisible booby traps, hostile antiwar activists. Few reports informed readers that at least four of five American troops in Vietnam carried out noncombat duties on large bases far away from those snake-infested jungles. Nor did they focus sustained attention on the Vietnamese victims of U.S. warfare. By the 1980s, mainstream culture and politics promoted the idea that the deepest shame related to the Vietnam War was not the war itself, but America’s failure to embrace its military veterans.” (p. 241)

Again, the Vietnam War for U.S. leaders was never truly about Vietnam. It was about them. This is powerfully shown by LBJ’s crude comments and gestures about the war. Johnson acted to protect his Great Society initiatives; he didn’t want to suffer the political consequences of having been seen as having “lost” Vietnam to communism; but he also saw Vietnam as a straightforward test of his manhood. When asked by reporters why he continued to wage war in Vietnam, what it was really all about, LBJ unzipped his pants, pulled out his penis, and declared, “This is why!” (p. 82).

Withdrawal, of course, was never an option. As Appy insightfully notes,

LBJ and most of the other key Vietnam policymakers never imagined that withdrawal from Vietnam would be an act of courage. In one sense this moral blindness is baffling because these same men prided themselves on their pragmatic, hardheaded realism, their ability to cut through sentiment and softhearted idealism to face the most difficult realities of foreign affairs. They could see that the war was failing. But they could not pull out. A deeper set of values trumped their most coherent understandings of the war. They simply could not accept being viewed as losers. A ‘manly man’ must always keep fighting.” (p. 84)

A few pages later, Appy cites Nixon’s speech on the bombing of Cambodia, when Nixon insisted the U.S. must not stand by “like a pitiful, helpless giant,” as further evidence of this “primal” fear of presidential impotence and defeat.

Even when defeat stared American leaders in the face, they blinked, then closed their eyes and denied what they had seen. Beginning with Gerald Ford in 1975, America shifted the blame for defeat onto the South Vietnamese, with some responsibility being assigned to allegedly traitorous elements on the homefront, such as “Hanoi Jane” (Fonda). As Appy writes, “Instead of calling for a great national reckoning of U.S. responsibility in Vietnam, Ford called for a ‘great national reconciliation.’ It was really a call for a national forgetting, a willful amnesia.” (p. 224)

As a result of this “willful amnesia,” most Americans never fully faced the murderous legacies of the Vietnam War, especially the cost to the peoples of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Instead, our leaders and government encouraged us to focus on America’ssuffering. They told us to look forward, not backward, while keeping faith in America as the exceptional nation.

Appy notes in his introduction that America needs “an honest accounting of our history” if we are “to reject—fully and finally—the stubborn insistence that our nation has been a unique and unrivaled force for good in the world.” (p. xix) American Reckoning provides such an honest accounting. But are Americans truly ready and willing to put aside national pride, nurtured by a willed amnesia and government propaganda, to confront the limits as well as the horrors of American power as it is exercised in foreign lands?

Evidence from recent wars and military interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere still suggests that Americans prefer amnesia, or to see other peoples through a tightly restricted field of view. Far too often, that field of view is a thoroughly militarized one, most recently captured in the crosshairs of an American sniper’s scope. Appy challenges us to broaden that view while removing those crosshairs.

*****

Addendum (2026): Self-styled Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has already floated the lie that Democrats (and a few Republicans) are betraying the country by seeking to constrain the Trump administration in its disastrous war on Iran. What Hegseth is saying, essentially, is that Congress is committing treason in attempting to exercise its constitutional duties.

Always when the warmongers lose a war, they resort to the hoary “stab-in-the-back” myth. Rare indeed is someone like Robert McNamara, who admitted decades after the Vietnam War that he had been wrong, terribly wrong, to prosecute that war.

Usually in America, those who are most unrepentant about war are the ones hired to comment on or wage the next one.