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american exceptionalism
Hollywood Rediscovers the Bomb
Nuclear films have been canaries in the uranium mine; each resurgence has coincided with waves of nuclear escalation. What does it mean that top directors are tackling the subject again?
Oct 21, 2025
As the nuclear threat once again dominates the headlines, the nuclear blockbuster has returned to screens. Following the success of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, Kathryn Bigelow’s A House of Dynamite reminds us that the atomic bomb is not mere history. Equal parts political thriller and apocalyptic horror, the film compels viewers to imagine the unimaginable, refusing any illusion of security or assurance that catastrophe could not happen here.
There is no catharsis, no safe distance from which to retreat. What we confront on screen is not fiction but the collective madness of our current reality. The dread that Bigelow conjures does not dissipate with the closing credits; it follows us out of the theater, past the exit signs, and into a world where the possibility of instant annihilation remains stitched into everyday life.
Such films are hardly new, though their resurgence should give us pause. Since 1945, Hollywood has capitalized on the mix of fear and fascination unleashed by the atomic age. In response, studios have produced roughly 1,000 nuclear-themed films, a cinematic proliferation mirroring the buildup of nuclear arsenals (70,000 warheads by 1986). As scholar Jerome Shapiro observes, these works became “a statistically important part of the American filmgoer’s diet” for decades.
Yet atomic cinema has always been more than entertainment. It has served as both warning and witness, shaping a collective consciousness of the bomb. Within the secretive and anti-democratic architecture of the nuclear security state, these films often served as cultural critique and political resistance, piercing the veil of official classification, challenging the monopoly of defense experts, and democratizing a debate otherwise foreclosed to the public.
What we need now are stories that break the spell of American innocence.
Nuclear films have been canaries in the uranium mine. Each resurgence has coincided with waves of nuclear escalation. But they have also served as calls to action, catalyzing mass movements demanding disarmament. To understand what this revival signals, and what more is needed to reignite the anti-nuclear movement, it is worth revisiting the earlier cycles of Cold War filmmaking that were shaped by and informed nuclear and popular culture.
Dr. Strangelove and the Madness of Deterrence
The first major wave of atomic cinema emerged in the late 1950s and early 1960s. This was a time in which the United States had lost its temporary monopoly on nuclear force and both Washington and Moscow were producing, testing, and stockpiling weapons a thousand times more destructive than the now nearly obsolete fission bombs that had obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In less than a decade, the atomic bomb had evolved from a “city-killer” to a “nation-killer.”
The earliest films of this era confronted a growing public anxiety over radiation. They represented a response to official efforts to downplay the danger, as politicians prioritized the management of political fallout over the prevention of radioactive fallout. From the very beginning, there emerged attempts to trivialize radiation, none more infamous than General Leslie Groves’ 1945 remark that radiation poisoning was a “very pleasant way to die.”
By 1954, the Lucky Dragon incident had made the deadly consequences of nuclear contamination impossible to ignore. Science fiction movies such as Them! and Godzilla, both released that same year, translated these fears into monstrous allegories. Yet even as such films dramatized the terror of nuclear technology, official discourse worked to normalize it.
Kubrick’s dark satire exposed the Nazi-like madness underwriting “rational” deterrence, ridiculing mutual destruction while indicting the US for deepening the peril through its own policies.
Strategic war planners like Herman Kahn embodied the technocratic detachment of the emerging nuclear priesthood. By 1960, Kahn was publicly arguing that nuclear war was winnable and that even scenarios resulting in tens of millions of deaths would not ultimately preclude “normal and happy lives for the majority of survivors and their descendants.”
He also dismissed concerns about radiation, insisting that the numbers of children born “seriously defective” due to such exposure would rise by “only” 10%. Noting that there are still birth defects in peacetime, he concluded, “War is a terrible thing; but so is peace.” Such statements shocked the public, revealing the moral vacancy of those entrusted with preserving life and preventing death in the atomic age, fueling a growing fear that ordinary people might be sacrificed on the altar of Cold War credibility.
After the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, when the United States came to the brink of serving as ground zero of nuclear annihilation, many Americans fully awoke to the insanity. The public backlash, led by SANE and Women’s Strike for Peace, that followed the near catastrophe helped push President John F. Kennedy to sign the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963, a rare moment when popular and political pressure combined to produce tangible reform.
In response also came Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1964), one of the most indelible films of the Cold War. Drawing inspiration from figures such as Kahn, it confronted the suicidal nihilism of the defense intellectuals. Kubrick’s dark satire exposed the Nazi-like madness underwriting “rational” deterrence, ridiculing mutual destruction while indicting the US for deepening the peril through its own policies. These included stationing nuclear weapons in Turkey to attempting to overthrow Castro, actions that helped manufacture a crisis that threatened to extinguish the lives of as many as 200 million North Americans and even more Soviet citizens. This is not to mention the many millions dead attributed to what is perversely termed “collateral damage.”
Imagining The Day After
Two decades later, a new wave of films emerged amid another period of nuclear escalation. Their arrival in 1979 marked what many remember as the spark that reignited the anti-nuclear movement after more than a decade of dormancy. That year saw the rise of presidential candidate Ronald Reagan, whose rhetoric revived the language of nuclear confrontation, alongside two disasters that reawakened fears of radiation: the partial meltdown at Three Mile Island and the uranium mill spill at Church Rock, New Mexico. Together, these events rekindled public anxiety about the existential dangers of nuclear weapons and deepened fears surrounding nuclear power.
Reagan’s campaign and subsequent presidency again advanced the chilling notion that nuclear war might be winnable, even at the cost of millions of lives. This sentiment persisted despite scientists warning of “nuclear winter,” stressing that a nuclear exchange could devastate the atmosphere and result in “omnicide,” the death of all life on Earth. The mix of apocalyptic scientific doomsaying and bellicose political posturing sent fear soaring. By the early 1980s, polls showed that nearly half of Americans believed they might die in a nuclear war.
As historian Paul Boyer observed, even the most devastating portrayals inevitably fall short, since the only truly accurate nuclear war film, he wrote, “would be two hours of a blank screen.”
Released just 12 days before the disaster at Three Mile Island, The China Syndrome (1979) captured this mounting dread with eerie prescience. What began as a fictional thriller about a near meltdown quickly became a public relations catastrophe for nuclear power. The film’s portrayal of institutionalcorruption and bureaucratic negligence, alongside the industry’s efforts to dismiss it as propaganda, exposed official narratives on nuclear safety. In a post-Vietnam, post-Watergate America defined by cynicism and mistrust, the movie crystallized public anxieties about nuclear power and the broader dangers of corporate and governmental deceit.
Under Reagan, the popular energy unleashed by this moment coalesced into a mass movement. By 1982, anti-nuclear activism had reached its apex. On June 12, some 1 million demonstrators filled the streets of New York City for what remains the largest single protest rally in American history. Their message was unambiguous: The nuclear status quo was intolerable.
Their reach extended far beyond the streets. The Nuclear Freeze campaign mobilized communities across the country, while the 1983 ABC television film The Day After brought the horror of nuclear annihilation directly into American living rooms. More than 100 million people, including the president himself, watched as a bucolic Midwestern town of Lawrence, Kansas, emblematic of the American heartland, was reduced to a radioactive wasteland. The film remains one of the most searing depictions of nuclear war ever produced. Yet, as historian Paul Boyer observed, even the most devastating portrayals inevitably fall short, since the only truly accurate nuclear war film, he wrote, “would be two hours of a blank screen.”
But public pressure grew impossible to ignore. In a remarkable reversal, Reagan declared that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought,” beginning direct talks with Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev to pursue arms-reductions. This marked at least the second time that protests rendered potential nuclear weapons use not only morally unimaginable but also politically untenable (the other being the 1969 Vietnam Moratorium protests which helped dissuade President Richard Nixon from carrying out a contemplated nuclear strike against North Vietnam).
The Limits of the New Nuclear Films
The two major nuclear films of the past two years are significant cultural events. They have revived an apocalyptic imagination and a sense of nuclear consciousness that are essential if we are ever to confront the nuclear nightmare and end the arms race before it ends us. Yet they also fall short in critical ways, and risk being remembered as great films that stirred awareness but failed to inspire the resistance necessary to meet this perilous moment.
Oppenheimer, despite its cinematic brilliance, was a missed opportunity to reckon with Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Rather than compelling audiences to confront historical responsibility, it offered a familiar narrative of tragic necessity. The bomb had to be built; the bombings, though regrettable, were justified. The moral center of the story was not the victims in Japan but Oppenheimer himself, the tormented “American Prometheus.” The result was not reckoning but retreat into myth.
A House of Dynamite follows a similar trajectory. The film is powerful and unsettling, reminding viewers that any city, and the world, could be reduced to ashes within minutes. It captures the immediacy of the danger and the near impossibility of containing a “limited” exchange. Yet it ultimately retreats into American exceptionalism, reinforcing the comforting illusion that our nuclear arsenal exists only in a defensive posture to deter aggression while it is “our enemies” that recklessly endanger both us and the planet. In reality, the most perilous moments of the atomic age were less the product of foreign provocation than of American escalation.
To imagine the United States then as only a victim of a nuclear war is to obscure its role as the principal architect of prospective annihilation. For eight decades, Washington has held humanity hostage to the possibility of instant destruction, insisting that peace depends on the ever-present threat of total devastation, including in a US-initiated first strike. Moving beyond this suicidal logic of deterrence requires an honest reckoning with that history and the will to dismantle it.
What we need now are stories that break the spell of American innocence. The only sane position remains abolition, the dismantling of weapons for which there is no defense and whose risk to the continuity of human life is intolerable. Until that reckoning arrives, Oppenheimer and A House of Dynamite, and any other future films that fail to summon the courage to speak the full truth and mobilize resistance will stand as monuments to the mythology of American victimhood, stories about the terror of being attacked told by the most heavily armed nation on earth.
A House of Dynamite in limited theatrical release and will begin streaming on Netflix on October 24, 2025.
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Taking Stock of America's Violent Century
US hegemony, however frayed at the edges, continues to be taken for granted in ruling circles. What do we make of it these days?
Oct 13, 2025
[This essay is adapted from “Measuring Violence,” the first chapter of John Dower’s new book, The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War Two.]
On February 17, 1941, almost 10 months before Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, Life magazine carried a lengthy essay by its publisher, Henry Luce, entitled “The American Century.” The son of Presbyterian missionaries, born in China in 1898 and raised there until the age of 15, Luce essentially transposed the certainty of religious dogma into the certainty of a nationalistic mission couched in the name of internationalism.
Luce acknowledged that the United States could not police the whole world or attempt to impose democratic institutions on all of mankind. Nonetheless, “the world of the 20th century,” he wrote, “if it is to come to life in any nobility of health and vigor, must be to a significant degree an American Century.” The essay called on all Americans “to accept wholeheartedly our duty and our opportunity as the most powerful and vital nation in the world and in consequence to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit and by such measures as we see fit.”
Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor propelled the United States wholeheartedly onto the international stage Luce believed it was destined to dominate, and the ringing title of his cri de coeur became a staple of patriotic Cold War and post-Cold War rhetoric. Central to this appeal was the affirmation of a virtuous calling. Luce’s essay singled out almost every professed ideal that would become a staple of wartime and Cold War propaganda: freedom, democracy, equality of opportunity, self-reliance and independence, cooperation, justice, charity—all coupled with a vision of economic abundance inspired by “our magnificent industrial products, our technical skills.” In present-day patriotic incantations, this is referred to as “American exceptionalism.”
Clearly, the number and deadliness of global conflicts have indeed declined since World War II. This so-called postwar peace was, and still is, however, saturated in blood and wracked with suffering.
The other, harder side of America’s manifest destiny was, of course, muscularity. Power. Possessing absolute and never-ending superiority in developing and deploying the world’s most advanced and destructive arsenal of war. Luce did not dwell on this dimension of “internationalism” in his famous essay, but once the world war had been entered and won, he became its fervent apostle—an outspoken advocate of “liberating” China from its new communist rulers, taking over from the beleaguered French colonial military in Vietnam, turning both the Korean and Vietnam conflicts from “limited wars” into opportunities for a wider virtuous war against and in China, and pursuing the rollback of the Iron Curtain with “tactical atomic weapons.” As Luce’s incisive biographer Alan Brinkley documents, at one point Luce even mulled the possibility of “plastering Russia with 500 (or 1,000) A bombs”—a terrifying scenario, but one that the keepers of the US nuclear arsenal actually mapped out in expansive and appalling detail in the 1950s and 1960s, before Luce’s death in 1967.
The “American Century” catchphrase is hyperbole, the slogan never more than a myth, a fantasy, a delusion. Military victory in any traditional sense was largely a chimera after World War II. The so-called Pax Americana itself was riddled with conflict and oppression and egregious betrayals of the professed catechism of American values. At the same time, postwar US hegemony obviously never extended to more than a portion of the globe. Much that took place in the world, including disorder and mayhem, was beyond America’s control.
Yet, not unreasonably, Luce’s catchphrase persists. The 21st-century world may be chaotic, with violence erupting from innumerable sources and causes, but the United States does remain the planet’s “sole superpower.” The myth of exceptionalism still holds most Americans in its thrall. US hegemony, however frayed at the edges, continues to be taken for granted in ruling circles, and not only in Washington. And Pentagon planners still emphatically define their mission as “full-spectrum dominance” globally.
Washington’s commitment to modernizing its nuclear arsenal rather than focusing on achieving the thoroughgoing abolition of nuclear weapons has proven unshakable. So has the country’s almost religious devotion to leading the way in developing and deploying ever more “smart” and sophisticated conventional weapons of mass destruction.
Welcome to Henry Luce’s—and America’s—violent century, even if thus far it’s lasted only 75 years. The question is just what to make of it these days.
Counting the Dead
We live in times of bewildering violence. In 2013, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff told a Senate committee that the world is “more dangerous than it has ever been.” Statisticians, however, tell a different story: that war and lethal conflict have declined steadily, significantly, even precipitously since World War II.
Much mainstream scholarship now endorses the declinists. In his influential 2011 book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker adopted the labels “the Long Peace” for the four-plus decades of the Cold War (1945-1991), and “the New Peace” for the post-Cold War years to the present. In that book, as well as in post-publication articles, postings, and interviews, he has taken the doomsayers to task. The statistics suggest, he declares, that “today we may be living in the most peaceable era in our species’s existence.”
Clearly, the number and deadliness of global conflicts have indeed declined since World War II. This so-called postwar peace was, and still is, however, saturated in blood and wracked with suffering.
It is reasonable to argue that total war-related fatalities during the Cold War decades were lower than in the six years of World War II (1939-1945) and certainly far less than the toll for the 20th century’s two world wars combined. It is also undeniable that overall death tolls have declined further since then. The five most devastating intrastate or interstate conflicts of the postwar decades—in China, Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and between Iran and Iraq—took place during the Cold War. So did a majority of the most deadly politicides, or political mass killings, and genocides: in the Soviet Union, China (again), Yugoslavia, North Korea, North Vietnam, Sudan, Nigeria, Indonesia, Pakistan-Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Angola, Mozambique, and Cambodia, among other countries. The end of the Cold War certainly did not signal the end of such atrocities (as witness Rwanda, the Congo, and the implosion of Syria). As with major wars, however, the trajectory has been downward.
Unsurprisingly, the declinist argument celebrates the Cold War as less violent than the global conflicts that preceded it, and the decades that followed as statistically less violent than the Cold War. But what motivates the sanitizing of these years, now amounting to three-quarters of a century, with the label “peace”? The answer lies largely in a fixation on major powers. The great Cold War antagonists, the United States and the Soviet Union, bristling with their nuclear arsenals, never came to blows. Indeed, wars between major powers or developed states have become (in Pinker’s words) “all but obsolete.” There has been no World War III, nor is there likely to be.
Such upbeat quantification invites complacent forms of self-congratulation. (How comparatively virtuous we mortals have become!) In the United States, where we-won-the-Cold-War sentiment still runs strong, the relative decline in global violence after 1945 is commonly attributed to the wisdom, virtue, and firepower of US “peacekeeping.” In hawkish circles, nuclear deterrence—the Cold War’s MAD (mutually assured destruction) doctrine that was described early on as a “delicate balance of terror”—is still canonized as an enlightened policy that prevented catastrophic global conflict.
What Doesn’t Get Counted
Branding the long postwar era as an epoch of relative peace is disingenuous, and not just because it deflects attention from the significant death and agony that actually did occur and still does. It also obscures the degree to which the United States bears responsibility for contributing to, rather than impeding, militarization and mayhem after 1945. Ceaseless US-led transformations of the instruments of mass destruction—and the provocative global impact of this technological obsession—are by and large ignored.
Continuities in American-style “warfighting” (a popular Pentagon word) such as heavy reliance on airpower and other forms of brute force are downplayed. So is US support for repressive foreign regimes, as well as the destabilizing impact of many of the nation’s overt and covert overseas interventions. The more subtle and insidious dimension of postwar US militarization—namely, the violence done to civil society by funneling resources into a gargantuan, intrusive, and ever-expanding national security state—goes largely unaddressed in arguments fixated on numerical declines in violence since World War II.
Beyond this, trying to quantify war, conflict, and devastation poses daunting methodological challenges. Data advanced in support of the decline-of-violence argument is dense and often compelling, and derives from a range of respectable sources. Still, it must be kept in mind that the precise quantification of death and violence is almost always impossible. When a source offers fairly exact estimates of something like “war-related excess deaths,” you usually are dealing with investigators deficient in humility and imagination.
If the overall incidence of violence, including 21st-century terrorism, is relatively low compared to earlier global threats and conflicts, why has the United States responded by becoming an increasingly militarized, secretive, unaccountable, and intrusive “national security state”?
Take, for example, World War II, about which countless tens of thousands of studies have been written. Estimates of total “war-related” deaths from that global conflict range from roughly 50 million to more than 80 million. One explanation for such variation is the sheer chaos of armed violence. Another is what the counters choose to count and how they count it. Battle deaths of uniformed combatants are easiest to determine, especially on the winning side. Military bureaucrats can be relied upon to keep careful records of their own killed-in-action—but not, of course, of the enemy they kill. War-related civilian fatalities are even more difficult to assess, although—as in World War II—they commonly are far greater than deaths in combat.
Does the data source go beyond so-called battle-related collateral damage to include deaths caused by war-related famine and disease? Does it take into account deaths that may have occurred long after the conflict itself was over (as from radiation poisoning after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or from the US use of Agent Orange in the Vietnam War)? The difficulty of assessing the toll of civil, tribal, ethnic, and religious conflicts with any exactitude is obvious.
Concentrating on fatalities and their averred downward trajectory also draws attention away from broader humanitarian catastrophes. In mid-2015, for instance, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees reported that the number of individuals “forcibly displaced worldwide as a result of persecution, conflict, generalized violence, or human rights violations” had surpassed 60 million and was the highest level recorded since World War II and its immediate aftermath. Roughly two-thirds of these men, women, and children were displaced inside their own countries. The remainder were refugees, and over half of these refugees were children.
Here, then, is a trend line intimately connected to global violence that is not heading downward. In 1996, the UN’s estimate was that there were 37.3 million forcibly displaced individuals on the planet. Twenty years later, as 2015 ended, this had risen to 65.3 million—a 75% increase over the last two post-Cold War decades that the declinist literature refers to as the “new peace.”
Other disasters inflicted on civilians are less visible than uprooted populations. Harsh conflict-related economic sanctions, which often cripple hygiene and healthcare systems and may precipitate a sharp spike in infant mortality, usually do not find a place in itemizations of military violence. US-led UN sanctions imposed against Iraq for 13 years beginning in 1990 in conjunction with the first Gulf War are a stark example of this. An account published in the New York Times Magazine in July 2003 accepted the fact that “at least several hundred thousand children who could reasonably have been expected to live died before their fifth birthday.” And after all-out wars, who counts the maimed, or the orphans and widows, or those the Japanese in the wake of World War II referred to as the “elderly orphaned”—parents bereft of their children?
Figures and tables, moreover, can only hint at the psychological and social violence suffered by combatants and noncombatants alike. It has been suggested, for instance, that 1 in 6 people in areas afflicted by war may suffer from mental disorder (as opposed to 1 in 10 in normal times). Even where American military personnel are concerned, trauma did not become a serious focus of concern until 1980, seven years after the US retreat from Vietnam, when post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) was officially recognized as a mental-health issue.
In 2008, a massive sampling study of 1.64 million US troops deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq between October 2001 and October 2007 estimated “that approximately 300,000 individuals currently suffer from PTSD or major depression and that 320,000 individuals experienced a probable TBI [traumatic brain injury] during deployment.” As these wars dragged on, the numbers naturally increased. To extend the ramifications of such data to wider circles of family and community—or, indeed, to populations traumatized by violence worldwide—defies statistical enumeration.
Terror Counts and Terror Fears
Largely unmeasurable, too, is violence in a different register: the damage that war, conflict, militarization, and plain existential fear inflict upon civil society and democratic practice. This is true everywhere but has been especially conspicuous in the United States since Washington launched its “global war on terror” in response to the attacks of September 11, 2001.
Here, numbers are perversely provocative, for the lives claimed in 21st-century terrorist incidents can be interpreted as confirming the decline-in-violence argument. From 2000 through 2014, according to the widely cited Global Terrorism Index, “more than 61,000 incidents of terrorism claiming over 140,000 lives have been recorded.” Including September 11th, countries in the West experienced less than 5% of these incidents and 3% of the deaths. The Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism, another minutely documented tabulation based on combing global media reports in many languages, puts the number of suicide bombings from 2000 through 2015 at 4,787 attacks in more than 40 countries, resulting in 47,274 deaths.
These atrocities are incontestably horrendous and alarming. Grim as they are, however, the numbers themselves are comparatively low when set against earlier conflicts. For specialists in World War II, the “140,000 lives” estimate carries an almost eerie resonance, since this is the rough figure usually accepted for the death toll from a single act of terror bombing, the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The tally is also low compared to contemporary deaths from other causes. Globally, for example, more than 400,000 people are murdered annually. In the United States, the danger of being killed by falling objects or lightning is at least as great as the threat from Islamist militants.
This leaves us with a perplexing question: If the overall incidence of violence, including 21st-century terrorism, is relatively low compared to earlier global threats and conflicts, why has the United States responded by becoming an increasingly militarized, secretive, unaccountable, and intrusive “national security state”? Is it really possible that a patchwork of non-state adversaries that do not possess massive firepower or follow traditional rules of engagement has, as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff declared in 2013, made the world more threatening than ever?
For those who do not believe this to be the case, possible explanations for the accelerating militarization of the United States come from many directions. Paranoia may be part of the American DNA—or, indeed, hardwired into the human species. Or perhaps the anticommunist hysteria of the Cold War simply metastasized into a post-9/11 pathological fear of terrorism. Machiavellian fear-mongering certainly enters the picture, led by conservative and neoconservative civilian and military officials of the national security state, along with opportunistic politicians and war profiteers of the usual sort. Cultural critics predictably point an accusing finger as well at the mass media’s addiction to sensationalism and catastrophe, now intensified by the proliferation of digital social media.
To all this must be added the peculiar psychological burden of being a “superpower” and, from the 1990s on, the planet’s “sole superpower”—a situation in which “credibility” is measured mainly in terms of massive cutting-edge military might. It might be argued that this mindset helped “contain Communism” during the Cold War and provides a sense of security to US allies. What it has not done is ensure victory in actual war, although not for want of trying. With some exceptions (Grenada, Panama, the brief 1991 Gulf War, and the Balkans), the US military has not tasted victory since World War II—Korea, Vietnam, and recent and current conflicts in the Greater Middle East being boldface examples of this failure. This, however, has had no impact on the hubris attached to superpower status. Brute force remains the ultimate measure of credibility.
The traditional American way of war has tended to emphasize the “three Ds” (defeat, destroy, devastate). Since 1996, the Pentagon’s proclaimed mission is to maintain “full-spectrum dominance” in every domain (land, sea, air, space, and information) and, in practice, in every accessible part of the world. The Air Force Global Strike Command, activated in 2009 and responsible for managing two-thirds of the US nuclear arsenal, typically publicizes its readiness for “Global Strike… Any Target, Any Time.”
In 2015, the Department of Defense acknowledged maintaining 4,855 physical “sites”—meaning bases ranging in size from huge contained communities to tiny installations—of which 587 were located overseas in 42 foreign countries. An unofficial investigation that includes small and sometimes impermanent facilities puts the number at around 800 in 80 countries. Over the course of 2015, to cite yet another example of the overwhelming nature of America’s global presence, elite US special operations forces were deployed to around 150 countries, and Washington provided assistance in arming and training security forces in an even larger number of nations.
America’s overseas bases reflect, in part, an enduring inheritance from World War II and the Korean War. The majority of these sites are located in Germany (181), Japan (122), and South Korea (83) and were retained after their original mission of containing communism disappeared with the end of the Cold War. Deployment of elite special operations forces is also a Cold War legacy (exemplified most famously by the Army’s “Green Berets” in Vietnam) that expanded after the demise of the Soviet Union. Dispatching covert missions to three-quarters of the world’s nations, however, is largely a product of the war on terror.
Many of these present-day undertakings require maintaining overseas “lily pad” facilities that are small, temporary, and unpublicized. And many, moreover, are integrated with covert CIA “black operations.” Combating terror involves practicing terror—including, since 2002, an expanding campaign of targeted assassinations by unmanned drones. For the moment, this latest mode of killing remains dominated by the CIA and the US military (with the United Kingdom and Israel following some distance behind).
Counting Nukes
The “delicate balance of terror” that characterized nuclear strategy during the Cold War has not disappeared. Rather, it has been reconfigured. The US and Soviet arsenals that reached a peak of insanity in the 1980s have been reduced by about two-thirds—a praiseworthy accomplishment but one that still leaves the world with around 15,400 nuclear weapons as of January 2016, 93% of them in US and Russian hands. Close to 2,000 of the latter on each side are still actively deployed on missiles or at bases with operational forces.
This downsizing, in other words, has not removed the wherewithal to destroy the Earth as we know it many times over. Such destruction could come about indirectly as well as directly, with even a relatively “modest” nuclear exchange between, say, India and Pakistan triggering a cataclysmic climate shift—a “nuclear winter”—that could result in massive global starvation and death. Nor does the fact that seven additional nations now possess nuclear weapons (and more than 40 others are deemed “nuclear weapons capable”) mean that “deterrence” has been enhanced. The future use of nuclear weapons, whether by deliberate decision or by accident, remains an ominous possibility. That threat is intensified by the possibility that nonstate terrorists may somehow obtain and use nuclear devices.
What is striking at this moment in history is that paranoia couched as strategic realism continues to guide US nuclear policy and, following America’s lead, that of the other nuclear powers. As announced by the Obama administration in 2014, the potential for nuclear violence is to be “modernized.” In concrete terms, this translates as a 30-year project that will cost the United States an estimated $1 trillion (not including the usual future cost overruns for producing such weapons), perfect a new arsenal of “smart” and smaller nuclear weapons, and extensively refurbish the existing delivery “triad” of long-range manned bombers, nuclear-armed submarines, and land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles carrying nuclear warheads.
Creating a capacity for violence greater than the world has ever seen is costly—and remunerative.
Nuclear modernization, of course, is but a small portion of the full spectrum of American might—a military machine so massive that it inspired President Barack Obama to speak with unusual emphasis in his State of the Union address in January 2016. “The United States of America is the most powerful nation on Earth,” he declared. “Period. Period. It’s not even close. It’s not even close. It’s not even close. We spend more on our military than the next eight nations combined.”
Official budgetary expenditures and projections provide a snapshot of this enormous military machine, but here again numbers can be misleading. Thus, the “base budget” for defense announced in early 2016 for fiscal year 2017 amounts to roughly $600 billion, but this falls far short of what the actual outlay will be. When all other discretionary military- and defense-related costs are taken into account—nuclear maintenance and modernization, the “war budget” that pays for so-called overseas contingency operations like military engagements in the Greater Middle East, “black budgets” that fund intelligence operations by agencies including the CIA and the National Security Agency, appropriations for secret high-tech military activities, “veterans affairs” costs (including disability payments), military aid to other countries, huge interest costs on the military-related part of the national debt, and so on—the actual total annual expenditure is close to $1 trillion.
Such stratospheric numbers defy easy comprehension, but one does not need training in statistics to bring them closer to home. Simple arithmetic suffices. The projected bill for just the 30-year nuclear modernization agenda comes to over $90 million a day, or almost $4 million an hour. The $1 trillion price tag for maintaining the nation’s status as “the most powerful nation on Earth” for a single year amounts to roughly $2.74 billion a day, over $114 million an hour.
Creating a capacity for violence greater than the world has ever seen is costly—and remunerative.
So an era of a “new peace”? Think again. We’re only three-quarters of the way through America’s violent century and there’s more to come.
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Trump Plays Big Brother at the Smithsonian
The contemporary US is a far cry from Orwell’s Oceania. Yet the Trump administration is doing its best to exert control over the present and the past.
Aug 22, 2025
When people use the term “Orwellian,” it’s not a good sign.
It usually characterizes an action, an individual, or a society that is suppressing freedom, particularly the freedom of expression. It can also describe something perverted by tyrannical power.
It’s a term used primarily to describe the present, but whose implications inevitably connect to both the future and the past.
In his second term, US President Donald Trump has revealed his ambitions to rewrite America’s official history to, in the words of the Organization of American Historians, “reflect a glorified narrative… while suppressing the voices of historically excluded groups.”
If it is illegal to even speak of systemic racism, for example, let alone discuss its causes and possible remedies, it constrains the potential for, even prohibits, social change.
This ambition was manifested in efforts by the Department of Education to eradicate a “DEI agenda” from school curricula. It also included a high-profile assault on what detractors saw as “woke” universities, which culminated in Columbia University’s agreement to submit to a review of the faculty and curriculum of its Middle Eastern Studies department, with the aim of eradicating alleged pro-Palestinian bias.
Now, the administration has shifted its sights from formal educational institutions to one of the key sites of public history-making: the Smithsonian, a collection of 21 museums, the National Zoo, and associated research centers, principally centered on the National Mall in Washington, DC.
On August 12, 2025, the Smithsonian’s director, Lonnie Bunch III, received a letter from the White House announcing its intent to carry out a systematic review of the institution’s holdings and exhibitions in the advance of the nation’s 250th anniversary in 2026.
The review’s stated aim is to ensure that museum content adequately reflects “Americanism” through a commitment to “celebrate American exceptionalism, [and] remove divisive or partisan narratives.”
On Aug. 19, 2025, Trump escalated his attack on the Smithsonian. “The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was…” he wrote in a Truth Social post. “Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future. We are not going to allow this to happen.”
A screenshot is shown of President Donald Trump’s August 19, 2025 Truth Social post about the Smithsonian.
Such ambitions may sound benign, but they are deeply Orwellian. Here’s how.
Winners Write the History
Author George Orwell believed in objective, historical truth. Writing in 1946, he attributed his youthful desire to become an author in part to a “historical impulse,” or “the desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.”
But while Orwell believed in the existence of an objective truth about history, he did not necessarily believe that truth would prevail.
Truth, Orwell recognized, was best served by free speech and dialogue. Yet absolute power, Orwell appreciated, allowed those who possessed it to silence or censor opposing narratives, quashing the possibility of productive dialogue about history that could ultimately allow truth to come out.
As Orwell wrote in 1984, his final, dystopian novel, “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
Historian Malgorzata Rymsza-Pawlowska has written about America’s bicentennial celebrations that took place in 1976. Then, she says, “Americans across the nation helped contribute to a pluralistic and inclusive commemoration… using it as a moment to question who had been left out of the legacies of the American Revolution, to tell more inclusive stories about the history of the United States.”
This was an example of the kind of productive dialogue encouraged in a free society. “By contrast,” writes Rymsza-Pawlowska, “the 250th is shaping up to be a top-down affair that advances a relatively narrow and celebratory idea of Americanism.” The newly announced Smithsonian review aims to purge counternarratives that challenge that celebratory idea.
The Ministry of Truth
The desire to eradicate counternarratives drives Winston Smith’s job at the ironically named Ministry of Truth in 1984.
The novel is set in Oceania, a geographical entity covering North America and the British Isles and which governs much of the Global South.
Oceania is an absolute tyranny governed by Big Brother, the leader of a political party whose only goal is the perpetuation of its own power. In this society, truth is what Big Brother and the party say it is.
The regime imposes near total censorship so that not only dissident speech but subversive private reflection, or “thought crime,” is viciously prosecuted. In this way, it controls the present.
But it also controls the past. As the party’s protean policy evolves, Smith and his colleagues are tasked with systematically destroying any historical records that conflict with the current version of history. Smith literally disposes of artifacts of inexpedient history by throwing them down “memory holes,” where they are “wiped… out of existence and out of memory.”
At a key point in the novel, Smith recalls briefly holding on to a newspaper clipping that proved that an enemy of the regime had not actually committed the crime he had been accused of. Smith recognizes the power over the regime that this clipping gives him, but he simultaneously fears that power will make him a target. In the end, fear of retaliation leads him to drop the slip of newsprint down a memory hole.
The contemporary US is a far cry from Orwell’s Oceania. Yet the Trump administration is doing its best to exert control over the present and the past.
Down the Memory Hole
As part of efforts to purge references to gay people, US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered the removal of gay rights advocate Harvey Milk’s name from a Navy ship. (Photo: Screenshot/Military.com)
Even before the Trump administration announced its review of the Smithsonian, officials in departments across government had taken unprecedented steps to rewrite the nation’s official history, attempting to purge parts of the historical narrative down Orwellian memory holes.
Comically, those efforts included the temporary removal from government websites of information about the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the atomic bomb over Hiroshima. The plane was unwittingly caught up in a mass purge of references to “gay” and LGBTQ+ content on government websites.
Other erasures have included the deletion of content on government sites related to the life of Harriet Tubman, the Maryland woman who escaped slavery and then played a pioneering role as a conductor of the Underground Railroad, helping enslaved people escape to freedom.
Public outcry led to the restoration of most of the deleted content.
Over at the Smithsonian, which earlier in the year had been criticized by Trump for its “divisive, race-centered ideology,” staff removed a temporary placard with references to President Trump’s two impeachment trials from a display case on impeachment that formed part of the National Museum of American History exhibition on the American presidency. The references to Trump’s two impeachments were modified, with some details removed, in a newly installed placard in the updated display.
Responding to questions, the Smithsonian stated that the placard’s removal was not in response to political pressure: “The placard, which was meant to be a temporary addition to a 25-year-old exhibition, did not meet the museum’s standards in appearance, location, timeline, and overall presentation.”
Repressing Thought
Orwell’s 1984 ends with an appendix on the history of “Newspeak,” Oceania’s official language, which, while it had not yet superseded “Oldspeak” or standard English, was rapidly gaining ground as both a written and spoken dialect.
According to the appendix, “The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the worldview and mental habits proper to the devotees of [the Party], but to make all other modes of thought impossible.”
Orwell, as so often in his writing, makes the abstract theory concrete: “The word free still existed in Newspeak, but it could only be used in such statements as ‘This dog is free from lice’ or ‘This field is free from weeds.’ … political and intellectual freedom no longer existed even as concepts.”
The goal of this language streamlining was total control over past, present, and future.
If it is illegal to even speak of systemic racism, for example, let alone discuss its causes and possible remedies, it constrains the potential for, even prohibits, social change.
It has become a cliché that those who do not understand history are bound to repeat it.
As George Orwell appreciated, the correlate is that social and historical progress require an awareness of, and receptivity to, both historical fact and competing historical narratives.
This story is an updated version of an article originally published on June 9, 2025.
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Are You Ready Now to Solve the Problem Bigger Than Trump?
This isn't "I told you so." This is, "let's talk about where we go from here."
Nov 16, 2024
We could argue about what mistakes Democrats made this election. Of course they made mistakes because, obviously, they didn’t succeed in stopping the reactionary right. But how about instead of assigning blame we begin to find solutions?
I’ve argued for awhile in articles and books that the problem we face isn’t Trump. The problem and threat to our freedoms is the deeper, older movement that currently takes Trump as its figurehead.
The election result demonstrates that. If Trump was the problem, then the incessant mention of his many failings and absurdities would have led to a decline in his support. Trump is pathetic, delusional, and corrupt, and those traits would eliminate support for a leader, but Trump isn’t a leader. Trump is a figurehead. Nothing said about Trump changes the movement because the movement is not about Trump.
Easier said than done, but the doing of it is necessary. We have to show people the alternative.
Trump is the current focal point and spokesman of the right-wing American nationalist movement. There’s nothing new about Trump or in anything he’s ever said (well, except that “grab ‘em by the pussy” line). Trump’s divisive rhetoric rehashes the anti-immigrant and faux moral outrage propaganda that’s dominated American politics since the nation’s founding.
The American Right Wing
All right-wing movements seek to restore traditional power structures that restrict power to a small group, creating a two-tiered society of haves and have-nots. American nationalism’s right-wing ideology has two main components. One is the idea that America is exceptional and superior to other countries. The other is the idea that America’s exceptionalism can be maintained only by a two-tiered society concentrating power in white male Protestants; thus, giving power to nonwhite male Protestants corrupts the purity of America. When you understand these components of the American right wing’s ideology, everything they say and do makes more sense.
Trump didn’t invent American nationalism. Trump has never invented anything. He just slaps his name on things—buildings, planes, bibles, and American nationalism. He doesn’t care about anything or anyone but himself. If Trump has accomplished anything, it’s the con job of selling himself as a patriot to bilk people out of their money.
Ask the Correct Questions About the American Right Wing
Attacking Trump leaves America’s underlying right wing unscathed. Instead, address the causes. Ask why some Americans want a two-tiered society and why they think that makes America exceptional. Ask why those Americans want to keep power away from whole classes of other Americans.
Asking those questions gets to the core of the problem. Doing so will reveal why some Americans want Trump as their figurehead, why they don’t care about his crimes and boorish behavior, and why they believe his lies rather than the truth about him. They support Trump because he says he hates the same people they hate, and they believe he will relegate those people to being the have-nots in America’s two-tiered society.
It’s about acquiring meaning. People who support and even idolize Trump get feelings of importance and meaning from belonging to a movement. That’s common human behavior. People frequently join groups and/or become fans of public figures to gain a sense of importance and identity.
People gravitate to American nationalism to buttress their sense of self— a sense of meaning that comes at the cost of other people’s rights and sometimes lives. That’s what we are dealing with—that right-wing people get their senses of power and meaning from being American nationalists.
It’s not about Trump. The targets of our efforts to maintain freedom need to be to counter the American right wing movement and the millionaires using it as tools to gain more wealth and power. These realities are not grasped or talked about enough, including by the Democratic Party.
Smarter Opposition
The problem we face is the older, larger, deeper right-wing movement. That movement finds success because it is funded by big money corporate interests, and it sells a vision of a two-tiered America. The sales campaign succeeds by offering people a sense of meaning wrapped in the flag of American nationalism.
Defending freedom and equality for all Americans requires that we oppose the ideology of the American right wing. The Democratic Party’s strategy of attacking Trump and reaching out to moderate Republicans didn’t work, as if it ever could have. A better strategy is getting back to basics and dealing with people and their need for meaning.
We should talk about people voting against their own self-interest when they vote for right-wing politicians. But instead of talking down to them as being ignorant, we need to show how they can find meaning in the other America.
MAGA people support Trump because he says he hates the same people they hate. Other people will side with the right-wing agenda because they find something in it with which they can identify. We can’t expect to talk with or affect the MAGA followers, but we can offer the rest of the country an alternative to the American right wing.
What would that alternative be? We can start by acknowledging that there have always been two Americas.
The America that’s a nation of immigrants, and the America that demonizes immigrants.
The America that rewards hard work, and the America that rewards the wealthy at the expense of the working class.
The America that promises liberty and justice for all, and the America of slavery and segregation.
The America of universal suffrage, and the America of voter suppression.
The America that defends freedom, and the America that defends corporate interests.
Politics is about power, and the American right wing wants the America that concentrates power into a two-tiered society favoring one group over others. The wealthy, who benefit the most from that America, sell their right-wing agenda by offering people a sense of meaning even though they aren’t tangibly benefiting from the right-wing agenda.
A smarter opposition to the right wing is to offer people the alternative of the America of opportunity and freedom. Not just talk about that other America, build it, show to people that we’re serious by doing it.
Easier said than done, but the doing of it is necessary. We have to show people the alternative. We should talk about the Project 2025 agenda of an America that concentrates power in the rich elites. We also need to talk about the other America that circulates power among the people.
We should talk about people voting against their own self-interest when they vote for right-wing politicians. But instead of talking down to them as being ignorant, we need to show how they can find meaning in the other America.
When Project 2025 starts screwing over people, we need to have a better alternative agenda ready for them. It won’t help to tell them we told them so. If we remain tepid, or worse, hostile, they will stick with the right wing.
We need to solve a problem much deeper than Trump. We need to stand against that larger American right-wing agenda, but more importantly, work to help everyone else.
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The Problem With Complicity
The majority of Americans cannot accept their complicity because they cannot face the truth about the country to which their identity is so tightly bound.
Mar 04, 2024
There is a problem with accusing ordinary Americans with complicity in the consequences of their government’s foreign policy. The problem is not with the validity of the accusation. Although Americans have been repeatedly misled by the foreign policy establishment, their complicity in the immense suffering wrought by this establishment is indefeasible. First and foremost a moral accusation, aimed at rousing empathy and a sense of ethical obligation, the problem with complicity is that it is ineffective in catalyzing a critical mass of Americans to wake up and challenge the foreign policy status quo. The accusation has helped mobilize a moral minority, but it has not worked with the majority.
There are two principal reasons for this failure. First, in order to be motivated by charges of complicity we must feel empathy for those in whose suffering we are complicit. But these people (from Palestine to Iraq to Chile to East Timur) tend to live far away and often share little connection with ourselves. The capacity for empathy is here impeded by cultural distance. This is a universal impediment. But it is perhaps particularly acute in the United States, our immense power having long shielded us from the imperatives of cross-cultural empathy and understanding. There are many people who manage to overcome this impediment, their empathy towards the suffering of others driving them to incredible acts of protest and solidarity. Sadly, such people are in the minority.
The second reason that the charge of complicity is ineffective is that accepting complicity requires accepting the reality of what we are complicit in, viz., the enormity of suffering for which our country is, wholly or in part, responsible. Facing this responsibility can be incredibly painful. Trained from birth to believe in American exceptionalism and intrinsic goodness, most of us flee from the awful truth that the country we love has been, as often as not, a global chaos agent. When the reality of complicity becomes impossible to deny, the effect on the psyche can be truly catastrophic. To truly contemplate the extent of our complicity opens us to the tragic fate of airman Aaron Bushnell, whose final words before self-immolation were that he could ‘not remain complicit’ in America’s support for genocide.
The majority of Americans cannot accept their complicity because they cannot bridge this cultural distance and cannot face this truth about the country to which their identity is so tightly bound—a truth whose enormity, if acknowledged, threatens us with mental breakdown and despair. At some level sensing this possibility, most cannot face the steamroller of apocalypse that is the American foreign policy establishment. This is the steamroller that has already destroyed much of the Middle East; that is facilitating a genocide in Palestine (while escalating tensions towards a regional war); that is barreling towards catastrophic conflict with China; that has rolled back protections against nuclear war; that is destroying the credibility of international institutions like the UN; that has welcomed the utter devastation of Ukraine for the sake of “containing” (i.e., destabilizing) Russia. If we do not stop the steamroller soon, if we do not stamp out the American death cult before it turns truly suicidal, we will lose our country to the plutocratic fascism that is already gripping the national throat.
If moral appeals are insufficient to rouse Americans to the extreme threat posed by the steamroller, what might rouse them instead? The answer is self-interest. The appeal to self-interest is morally inferior to the charge of complicity. But it is more efficacious. Even if people cannot bring themselves to feel what Susan Sontag called “the pain of others,” even if they cannot accept responsibility for their government’s role in precipitating this pain, they can still be stirred if they sense that these policies are also harming themselves and those for whom they feel more intuitive empathy.
The self-interest of ordinary Americans is rarely invoked in debates over US foreign policy, however, save in vague claims about protecting our “freedom” or saving us from terror or the revanchism of Vladimir Putin (a man who, we are led to believe, will soon march, shirtless and saddled on a bear, from the Donbas to Krakow to London to West Virginia). Rarer still are frank discussions about the economic and security risks posed to ordinary Americans by their government’s foreign policy—ordinary Americans whose stock portfolios do not wax with war, who are not employed by the lobbying groups and think tanks funded by the arms industry, and who are on the hook for the more than $13 trillion spent this century on the American war machine.
The reasons for the minimization of self-interest in debates over foreign policy are obvious. For decades, the animating ideology of US global power has been liberal humanitarianism. This ideology works only insofar as its promoters can claim that rabid interventionism and war profiteering are in fact expressions of a selfless, almost millenarian desire to bring the world, by the barrel of a gun if necessary, towards liberal democracy. Thus we are saving the world from authoritarianism or terrorism, or we are making it safe for democracy or freedom or free trade. We are, in short, always working towards the salvation of the world. Lest anyone think that our motives are insincere, lest anyone suggest that only a privileged elite benefits from US interventionism, or that what appears as humanitarianism is in actuality a crusader complex—lest any such accusations arise, the foreign policy establishment must be able to pretend that its raison d’être is, first and foremost, the peace and prosperity of all humankind.
By centering foreign policy debates around such lofty ideals, the foreign policy establishment can avoid acknowledging the truth: the truth that we are poorer, less respected, less influential, and less safe today than we were, not only on September 6, 2001, but on December 31, 1991. Far from improving the lot of ordinary Americans, the immense sums spent on national “defense” have done little but destroy the lives of millions abroad while squandering so many possibilities for national renewal at home. As genocidal extermination continues in Gaza, as we reach an inflection point in the war in Ukraine, and as we sleep walk towards catastrophe in Asia and the Middle East, it is incumbent upon us to break through the conspiracy of silence on the subject self-interest: the self-interest of “real America,” of “the 99%.”
How do we do this? We do it by developing ever more persuasive arguments that highlight the immense damage that our foreign policy establishment has done to our economic well-being and national security. We do it by asking each other whether we wish to live in a country where the annual budget for national “defense” has exceeded $850 billion, even as as many as 13% percent of the population is “food insecure” (i.e., hungry), real wages have been stagnant for fifty years, wealth inequality has skyrocketed, longevity and educational achievement has declined, and deaths of despair have soared—including among veterans, who are killing themselves at a rate of nearly 17 people per day.
Finally, we need to ask our fellow Americans whether they wish to live in a world where their government is increasingly isolated on the world stage, is shredding the “rules based order” tenuously established after WWII, is increasing the threat of nuclear armageddon, and is flaunting the human and political rights of non-Americans (and sometimes of Americans themselves). We must ask these questions, and we must propose answers backed-up by reasoned argument and researched data. We must convince our fellow Americans, not of their (again, incontrovertible) complicity, but of the fact that an unchecked, unethical, and frankly psychopathic foreign policy establishment serves none of our own interests as Americans: our interests of living in a prosperous society, a respected nation, and a peaceful world.
One day, Americans will be forced to deal, en masse, with the tragic fact that, as Frederick Douglas once put it, “there is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States.” Until then, and if we wish to build a majoritarian movement that can put an end to these practices today, the appeal to self-interest is our best hope.
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A Truly 'Indispensable Nation' Would Bring the War on Gaza to an Immediate End
By providing immense quantities of ordnance to Israel, Biden ensures the war’s perpetuation and facilitates the continued slaughter of noncombatants.
Jan 04, 2024
Joe Biden is neither an original thinker nor a profound one. Granted, few if any figures laboring in the trenches of contemporary American politics can claim to be either. On that score, it would be unreasonable for us to hold Biden’s lack of depth and originality against him. He is, after all, just an Average Joe.
Somewhat more problematic is Biden’s penchant for appropriating the words of others without attribution. The habit has not enhanced his reputation. Yet to be fair, when the President recently described the United States as the “indispensable nation,” he did credit the origin of that phrase to his “friend” Madeleine Albright.
Such honesty is commendable. Even so, wary Americans might find Biden’s resurrection of Albright’s several decades-old phrase to be more than a little troubling.
The provenance of the expression is worth noting. Speaking on national television in 1998, then Secretary of State Albright had used the occasion to articulate an Albright Doctrine of sorts. “If we have to use force,” she declared with sublime confidence, “it is because we are America; we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future.”
In Albright’s defense, she issued this grandiose pronouncement at a moment when American elites were enjoying a prolonged post-Cold War victory lap. In political circles, chest-thumping triumphalism had become the lingua franca. Had not the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 ostensibly brought history itself to its intended conclusion? A mere decade later, had not Operation Desert Storm definitively affirmed history’s verdict? By the 1990s, America was on a roll, destined, it seemed, to remain the world’s number one in perpetuity.
Soon enough, however, all of this came to seem like so much hot air. First came the terrorist attacks of 9/11, with the follies of the Global War on Terrorism following in short order. The epic failure of the Afghanistan War in tandem with costly and bungled efforts to “liberate” Iraq left America’s reputation for peering into the future in tatters. Sundry other missteps demolished claims that the United States possessed some special knack for anticipating what comes next. Then came the election of Donald Trump, unforeseen by those ostensibly in the know.
If remembered at all, the Albright Doctrine survived as a sort of punchline — the equivalent of “Mission Accomplished” or “We got him!”
Today the future to which Albright had confidently alluded in 1998 has become our own immediate past. Events since have brought us to where we are today. They provide a backdrop and frame of reference for the exercise of American power. That Biden has chosen our present moment to resuscitate the Albright Doctrine is, to put it mildly, disconcerting. It suggests someone badly out of touch with reality.
Albright had credited the United States with the ability to “see” and by implication to shape the future course of world history. Today, with the nation’s ability to sustain its own democracy beyond the upcoming presidential election up for debate, we may question the Biden administration’s ability to see beyond next Thursday.
Yet let us take Biden at his word, as a true believer in American indispensability, advised by a cadre of like minded civilian and military officials. Even today, their collective confidence in American global primacy is undiminished, as if events since 1998 either didn’t happen or don’t matter.
Today challenges to the nation’s erstwhile indispensability premier abound: the rise of China, a stalemated conflict in Ukraine, porous borders at home, the pressing existential threat posed by climate change. Yet none poses a more urgent test than the ongoing war in Gaza. Here, more than anywhere else, events summon the United States to affirm its claim to primacy. Right now, without delay.
Doing so would mean employing U.S. power and influence to bring this wretched war to an immediate end.
As measured by actions rather than rhetorical gestures, however, the Biden administration has done just the opposite. By providing immense quantities of ordnance to one side, it ensures the war’s perpetuation and facilitates the continued slaughter of noncombatants. By vetoing UN Security Council efforts to force a ceasefire, it stands virtually alone in defiance of world opinion. While American diplomats travel hither and yon, their efforts cannot be rated as other than ineffectual.
On a recent trip to the Middle East, national security adviser Jake Sullivan remarked, “We’re not here to tell anybody, ‘You must do X, you must do Y’.” How this accords with any meaningful conception of indispensability is not clear.
My guess is that Madeleine Albright would be embarrassed. Joe Biden should be as well.
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What’s So Exceptional About the US Military?
Are we truly getting what we pay so dearly for—the bestest, finest, most exceptional military ever? And even if we are, should a self-proclaimed democracy really want such a thing?
Aug 08, 2023
In his message to the troops prior to the July 4 weekend, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin offered high praise indeed. “We have the greatest fighting force in human history,” he tweeted, connecting that claim to the U.S. having patriots of all colors, creeds, and backgrounds “who bravely volunteer to defend our country and our values.”
As a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel from a working-class background who volunteered to serve more than four decades ago, who am I to argue with Austin? Shouldn’t I just bask in the glow of his praise for today’s troops, reflecting on my own honorable service near the end of what now must be thought of as the First Cold War?
Yet I confess to having doubts. I’ve heard it all before. The hype. The hyperbole. I still remember how, soon after the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush boasted that this country had “the greatest force for human liberation the world has ever known.” I also remember how, in a pep talk given to U.S. troops in Afghanistan in 2010, President Barack Obama declared them “the finest fighting force that the world has ever known.” And yet, 15 years ago at TomDispatch, I was already wondering when Americans had first become so proud of, and insistent upon, declaring our military the world’s absolute best, a force beyond compare, and what that meant for a republic that once had viewed large standing armies and constant warfare as anathemas to freedom.
Leaving that boast aside, Americans could certainly brag about one thing this country has beyond compare: the most expensive military around and possibly ever.
In retrospect, the answer is all too straightforward: We need something to boast about, don’t we? In the once-upon-a-time “exceptional nation,” what else is there to praise to the skies or consider our pride and joy these days except our heroes? After all, this country can no longer boast of having anything like the world’s best educational outcomes, or healthcare system, or the most advanced and safest infrastructure, or the best democratic politics, so we better damn well be able to boast about having “the greatest fighting force” ever.
Leaving that boast aside, Americans could certainly brag about one thing this country has beyond compare: the most expensive military around and possibly ever. No country even comes close to our commitment of funds to wars, weapons (including nuclear ones at the Department of Energy), and global dominance. Indeed, the Pentagon’s budget for “defense” in 2023 exceeds that of the next 10 countries (mostly allies!) combined.
And from all of this, it seems to me, two questions arise: Are we truly getting what we pay so dearly for—the bestest, finest, most exceptional military ever? And even if we are, should a self-proclaimed democracy really want such a thing?
The answer to both those questions is, of course, no. After all, America hasn’t won a war in a convincing fashion since 1945. If this country keeps losing wars routinely and often enough catastrophically, as it has in places like Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, how can we honestly say that we possess the world’s greatest fighting force? And if we nevertheless persist in such a boast, doesn’t that echo the rhetoric of militaristic empires of the past? (Remember when we used to think that only unhinged dictators like Adolf Hitler boasted of having peerless warriors in a megalomaniacal pursuit of global domination?)
Actually, I do believe the United States has the most exceptional military, just not in the way its boosters and cheerleaders like Austin, Bush, and Obama claimed. How is the U.S. military truly “exceptional”? Let me count the ways.
The Pentagon as a Budgetary Black Hole
In so many ways, the U.S. military is indeed exceptional. Let’s begin with its budget. At this very moment, Congress is debating a colossal “defense” budget of $886 billion for FY2024 (and all the debate is about issues that have little to do with the military). That defense spending bill, you may recall, was “only” $740 billion when President Joe Biden took office three years ago. In 2021, Biden withdrew U.S. forces from the disastrous war in Afghanistan, theoretically saving the taxpayer nearly $50 billion a year. Yet, in place of any sort of peace dividend, American taxpayers simply got an even higher bill as the Pentagon budget continued to soar.
Recall that, in his four years in office, Donald Trump increased military spending by 20%. Biden is now poised to achieve a similar 20% increase in just three years in office. And that increase largely doesn’t even include the cost of supporting Ukraine in its war with Russia—so far, somewhere between $120 billion and $200 billion and still rising.
Colossal budgets for weapons and war enjoy broad bipartisan support in Washington. It’s almost as if there were a military-industrial-congressional complex at work here! Where, in fact, did I ever hear a president warning us about that? Oh, perhaps I’m thinking of a certain farewell address by Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1961.
There’s now a huge pentagonal-shaped black hole on the Potomac that’s devouring more than half of the federal discretionary budget annually.
In all seriousness, there’s now a huge pentagonal-shaped black hole on the Potomac that’s devouring more than half of the federal discretionary budget annually. Even when Congress and the Pentagon allegedly try to enforce fiscal discipline, if not austerity elsewhere, the crushing gravitational pull of that hole just continues to suck in more money. Bet on that continuing as the Pentagon issues ever more warnings about a new cold war with China and Russia.
Given its money-sucking nature, perhaps you won’t be surprised to learn that the Pentagon is remarkably exceptional when it comes to failing fiscal audits—five of them in a row (the fifth failure being a “teachable moment,” according to its chief financial officer)—as its budget only continued to soar. Whether you’re talking about lost wars or failed audits, the Pentagon is eternally rewarded for its failures. Try running a “Mom and Pop” store on that basis and see how long you last.
Speaking of all those failed wars, perhaps you won’t be surprised to learn that they haven’t come cheaply. According to the Costs of War Project at Brown University, roughly 937,000 people have died since 9/11/2001 thanks to direct violence in this country’s “Global War on Terror” in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and elsewhere. (And the deaths of another 3.6 to 3.7 million people may be indirectly attributable to those same post-9/11 conflicts.) The financial cost to the American taxpayer has been roughly $8 trillion and rising even as the U.S. military continues its counterterror preparations and activities in 85 countries.
No other nation in the world sees its military as (to borrow from a short-lived Navy slogan) “a global force for good.” No other nation divides the whole world into military commands like AFRICOM for Africa and CENTCOM for the Middle East and parts of Central and South Asia, headed up by four-star generals and admirals. No other nation has a network of 750 foreign bases scattered across the globe. No other nation strives for full-spectrum dominance through “all-domain operations,” meaning not only the control of traditional “domains” of combat—the land, sea, and air—but also of space and cyberspace. While other countries are focused mainly on national defense (or regional aggressions of one sort or another), the U.S. military strives for total global and spatial dominance. Truly exceptional!
Strangely, in this never-ending, unbounded pursuit of dominance, results simply don’t matter. The Afghan War? Bungled, botched, and lost. The Iraq War? Built on lies and lost. Libya? We came, we saw, Libya’s leader (and so many innocents) died. Yet no one at the Pentagon was punished for any of those failures. In fact, to this day, it remains an accountability-free zone, exempt from meaningful oversight. If you’re a “modern major general,” why not pursue wars when you know you’ll never be punished for losing them?
Indeed, the few “exceptions” within the military-industrial-congressional complex who stood up for accountability, people of principle like Daniel Hale, Chelsea Manning, and Edward Snowden, were imprisoned or exiled. In fact, the U.S. government has even conspired to imprison a foreign publisher and transparency activist, Julian Assange, who published the truth about the American war on terror, by using a World War I-era espionage clause that only applies to American citizens.
And the record is even grimmer than that. In our post-9/11 years at war, as President Barack Obama admitted, “We tortured some folks”—and the only person punished for that was another whistleblower, John Kiriakou, who did his best to bring those war crimes to our attention.
And speaking of war crimes, isn’t it “exceptional” that the U.S. military plans to spend upwards of $2 trillion in the coming decades on a new generation of genocidal nuclear weapons? Those include new stealth bombers and new intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) for the Air Force, as well as new nuclear-missile-firing submarines for the Navy. Worse yet, the U.S. continues to reserve the right to use nuclear weapons first, presumably in the name of protecting life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And of course, despite the countries—nine!—that now possess nukes, the U.S. remains the only one to have used them in wartime, in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Finally, it turns out that the military is even immune from Supreme Court decisions! When SCOTUS recently overturned affirmative action for college admission, it carved out an exception for the military academies. Schools like West Point and Annapolis can still consider the race of their applicants, presumably to promote unit cohesion through proportional representation of minorities within the officer ranks, but our society at large apparently does not require racial equity for its cohesion.
A Most Exceptional Military Makes Its Wars and Their Ugliness Disappear
Here’s one of my favorite lines from the movie The Usual Suspects: “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he did not exist.” The greatest trick the U.S. military ever pulled was essentially convincing us that its wars never existed. As Norman Solomon notes in his revealing book, War Made Invisible, the military-industrial-congressional complex has excelled at camouflaging the atrocious realities of war, rendering them almost entirely invisible to the American people. Call it the new American isolationism, only this time we’re isolated from the harrowing and horrific costs of war itself.
America is a nation perpetually at war, yet most of us live our lives with little or no perception of this. There is no longer a military draft. There are no war bond drives. You aren’t asked to make direct and personal sacrifices. You aren’t even asked to pay attention, let alone pay (except for those nearly trillion-dollar-a-year budgets and interest payments on a ballooning national debt, of course). You certainly aren’t asked for your permission for this country to fight its wars, as the Constitution demands. As President George W. Bush suggested after the 9/11 attacks, go visit Disneyworld! Enjoy life! Let America’s “best and brightest” handle the brutality, the degradation, and the ugliness of war, bright minds like former Vice President Dick (“So?”) Cheney and former Secretary of Defense Donald (“I don’t do quagmires”) Rumsfeld.
Did you hear something about the U.S. military being in Syria? In Somalia? Did you hear about the U.S. military supporting the Saudis in a brutal war of repression in Yemen? Did you notice how this country’s military interventions around the world kill, wound, and displace so many people of color, so much so that observers speak of the systemic racism of America’s wars? Is it truly progress that a more diverse military in terms of “color, creed, and background,” to use Secretary of Defense Austin’s words, has killed and is killing so many non-white peoples around the globe?
Even when government actions kill children, lots of children, it’s for the greater good. If this troubles you, go to Disney and take your kids with you.
Praising the all-female-crewed flyover at the last Super Bowl or painting rainbow flags of inclusivity (or even blue and yellow flags for Ukraine) on cluster munitions won’t soften the blows or quiet the screams. As one reader of my blog Bracing Views so aptly put it: “The diversity the war parties [Democrats and Republicans] will not tolerate is diversity of thought.”
Of course, the U.S. military isn’t solely to blame here. Senior officers will claim their duty is not to make policy at all but to salute smartly as the president and Congress order them about. The reality, however, is different. The military is, in fact, at the core of America’s shadow government with enormous influence over policymaking. It’s not merely an instrument of power; it is power—and exceptionally powerful at that. And that form of power simply isn’t conducive to liberty and freedom, whether inside America’s borders or beyond them.
Wait! What am I saying? Stop thinking about all that! America is, after all, the exceptional nation and its military, a band of freedom fighters. In Iraq, where war and sanctions killed untold numbers of Iraqi children in the 1990s, the sacrifice was “worth it,” as former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright once reassured Americans on 60 Minutes.
Even when government actions kill children, lots of children, it’s for the greater good. If this troubles you, go to Disney and take your kids with you. You don’t like Disney? Then, hark back to that old marching song of World War I and “pack up your troubles in your old kit-bag, and smile, smile, smile.” Remember, America’s troops are freedom-delivering heroes and your job is to smile and support them without question.
Have I made my point? I hope so. And yes, the U.S. military is indeed exceptional and being so, being #1 (or claiming you are anyway) means never having to say you’re sorry, no matter how many innocents you kill or maim, how many lives you disrupt and destroy, how many lies you tell.
I must admit, though, that, despite the endless celebration of our military’s exceptionalism and “greatness,” a fragment of scripture from my Catholic upbringing haunts me still: Pride goeth before destruction and a haughty spirit before a fall.
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Ukraine and The Tunnel at the End of the Light
China’s Belt and Road Initiative is a dizzyingly ambitious plan to connect Asia and more than 100 nations with 21st Century economic infrastructure, everything from highways and high-speed rail lines to power generation, energy pipelines, communication systems, cities, ports, and more.
Feb 26, 2023
“Light at the end of the tunnel” was an iconic phrase used by the warmongers who kept the U.S. in Vietnam long after the War had been lost. The implication was that insiders could see through the fog of war and know that things were getting better. It was a lie.
In January 1966, long before the military height of the War, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara told President Johnson that the U.S. had a one-out-of-three chance of winning on the battlefield. But Johnson, like Eisenhower and Kennedy before him, and Nixon after him, didn’t want to be the first American president to lose a war. So, he ginned up a simplistic lie and “soldiered on.”
The lie was blown by the Tet Offensive in January 1968. More than 100 U.S. military installations were attacked in a simultaneous nationwide assault that stunned the U.S. The broadcaster, Walter Cronkite, then “the most trusted man in America,” bellowed on national television, “I thought we were supposed to be winning this damned thing.” It was the beginning of the end of the U.S.’ murderous and failed occupation.
We’re now facing another light-and-tunnel event, this time in Ukraine. Only now, it’s not the light at the end of the tunnel. It’s the tunnel at the end of the light. What do we mean by that?
Until now, it’s been all light. Remember when the scrappy Ukrainian forces were kicking the barbarian Russian hordes’ asses? When every development betrayed the Russians’ clod-footed strategy, its soldiers’ bad morale, its army’s poor provisioning and worse leadership, and the perilous political situation for Putin back home? The testosterone was flowing. The bravado was intoxicating. The exceptionalism was sublimely seductive. It was only a matter of time and pluck and determination before Ukraine would bloody the bully’s nose and show it what the West was made of.
Remember?
No more.
You can prosecute a war for only so long on the strength of smoke and mirrors, delusions and illusions, lies and press releases. Eventually, however, reality catches up with you. The thuggishly propagandized American citizenry couldn’t know it, but that catching up began in the first weeks of the War and has only accelerated since.
Within the first week of the War, Russia had destroyed Ukraine’s air force and air defenses. By the second week, it had taken out most of Ukraine’s armories and weapons depots. Over following weeks and months, it systematically demolished artillery shipped in from former Warsaw Pact, now NATO, countries in Eastern Europe. It dismantled the country’s transportation and fuel supply systems. It has recently taken out most of the country’s electrical infrastructure.
The Ukrainian army has lost an estimated 150,000 troops, a pace more than 140 times the rate of U.S. losses in Vietnam. This, at a time when 10 million of its formerly 36 million people have fled the country. The military is down to dragooning 16-year-old boys and 60-year-old men to man the barricades. It cannot get replacement ammunition. Russia has knocked out some 90% of Ukraine’s drones, leaving it largely sightless. Delivery times for the tanks that are the hoped-for “game changer” are running into months and years. Not that that will matter.
Remember all the other failed “game changers”? The M777 howitzers and the Stryker armored fighting vehicles? The HIMARS multiple rocket launchers and the PATRIOT air defense systems? All were going to turn the tide at one time. All have proven impotent to stop Russia from seizing 20% of Ukraine’s territory and annexing it and its people to Russia.
The U.S. lost the economic war, as well. Remember Joe Biden’s delusional prediction that the U.S. would see that “the ruble will be reduced to rubble”? And that “the most stringent sanctions regime in history” was going to “weaken” Russia, perhaps even leading to Putin’s overthrow? Most of it backfired, badly. Last year, the ruble reached its highest exchange rate in history. Russia’s 2022 trade surplus of $227 billion was up 86% from 2021. The U.S.’ trade deficit over the same period rose 12.2%, and is approaching $1 trillion.
As a result of all of the above and more, the tide of insider opinion has turned against the War. Senior officials in Europe are talking openly about how the losses are unsustainable and they need to get back to security architectures that prevailed before the poisoned CIA-supported coup in Maidan in 2014. Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently let slip that “It will be very, very difficult to eject the Russians from all of occupied Ukraine in the next year. The Washington Post warned recently that Ukraine faced a “critical moment” in the war, belaboring the fact that U.S. support was not limitless and would soon be reached. Hint. Hint.
The Rand Corporation, one of the U.S.’ best-connected strategic whisperers, just published a report stating that “The consequences of a long war far outweigh the benefits.” It explicitly states that the U.S. needs to husband its resources for its more important upcoming conflict with China. Newsweek headlined that “Joe Biden Offered Vladimir Putin 20 Percent of Ukraine to End War.” It also revealed that “Nearly 90 percent of the world isn’t following us on Ukraine.” Vast swaths of Latin American, Africa, and Asia refuse to support the U.S. in its demand for sanctions against Russia.
These are not “Light at the end of the tunnel” divinations. Quite the contrary. If there’s a common thread running through it all it is the sickening recognition that the war is lost, militarily, economically, and diplomatically, that there is no plausible scenario in which those losses will be turned around by soldiering on, and that what is needed now is a hide-the-loss, get-out-any-way-you-can, face-saving exit strategy.
That will not be available, either. That’s where the tunnel at the end of the light comes into play.
Even before the U.S. and its NATO puppets undertook the War, the rest of the world—and that means most of the world—was congealing itself into an anti-Western economic and security bloc. Led by China and its strategic ally, Russia, that bloc includes more than a dozen trade and security organizations. Those include the BRICS confederation of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, working explicitly to devise multi-polar institutions to stand up to the U.S.’ unipolar hegemonic model.
It includes the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a security compact made up of leading nations from east, central, and south Asia, including China, Russia, India, and soon, Iran, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia. It is explicitly working to devise measures to prevent the kind of predatory military assaults the U.S. carried out against Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, and Afghanistan.
The organizing economic engine behind these efforts it is China’s Belt and Road Initiative. BRI is a dizzyingly ambitious plan to connect Asia and more than 100 nations with 21st Century economic infrastructure, everything from highways and high-speed rail lines, to power generation, energy pipelines, communication systems, cities, ports, and more. It is critical to understand why BRI poses such daunting challenges to U.S. supremacy in the world.
Infrastructure is so powerful because it spins off a vast, unimaginable array of secondary, and tertiary economic benefits. It was the railroads in the nineteenth century that bound the U.S. together as the world’s first continental-scale market. Manufacturers could produce for a larger market, and, therefore, at larger scale, and, therefore, at lower cost, than could producers anywhere else on earth.
The railroads made the U.S. the largest market in the world for iron, steel, machine tools, grading equipment, farm equipment, and scores of other commercial and industrial products essential to a modern industrial economy. The U.S. began the 1800s with 1.5% of the world’s GDP. It ended the century with 19% of a four-times larger number, making it the largest economy in the world.
Similarly, automobiles. People think it was Henry Ford and mass production that made the Twentieth Century “The American Century.” In fact, it was the build-out of millions of miles of roads and, later, interstates, without which automobiles would have remained expensive playthings of the wealthy. Those roads stitched the country together into an asphalt network that allowed individual mobility, by virtually anybody, anywhere, down to every street address in the country. The world had never seen anything like it.
The secondary and tertiary economic effects were astounding, everything from the world’s largest markets for steel, glass, plastics, and rubber, to gasoline, diesel, highway construction on a continental scale, repair shops and drive-ins, to the entire panoply of culture we know of as suburbia. The Twentieth Century was the Century of the Automobile. The infrastructure the U.S. built to make it possible was the major reason—at least economically—that the U.S. led the world for most of that century.
China is now proposing to do the same for Asia in the Twenty-First Century, but on a much larger scale. It is leading an infrastructure build-out that will dwarf Eisenhower’s Interstate highway system. It will serve most of the five billion people in Eurasia, thirty TIMES more than the 150 million people Eisenhower’s project helped.
Wisely, China has ensured that all of the 100+ nations joining BRI are enriched by their participation, whether building themselves up domestically, or extending their reach internationally. It is the largest, most compelling, geographically extensive, nationally inclusive, mutually enriching economic enterprise in the history of the world. The U.S. is not part of it.
Finally, there is the matter of the dollar. Since the Bretton Woods Agreement of 1944, the global economy has used the dollar as the primary currency of international trade. This has given the U.S. an “exorbitant privilege” in that it can essentially write an unlimited stream of hot checks to the world, because countries need dollars to be able to conduct international commerce. The U.S. “sells” them dollars by issuing Treasury debt, which is a universally fungible international medium of exchange.
One of the consequences of this arrangement is that it has allowed the U.S. to spend far beyond its means, running up $32 trillion of debt since 1980, when its national debt stood at a mere $1 trillion. The U.S. uses this debt to, among other things, fund its gargantuan military with its 800 military bases around the world, which it uses to do things like destroy Serbia, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Somalia, and a host of lesser predations on other countries. All the world sees this and is repulsed by it.
The world sees how dollar hegemony underwrites the U.S.’ ability to carry out or attempt coups in Honduras, Venezuela, Peru, Bolivia, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Myanmar, Belarus, Egypt, Syria, and, of course, Ukraine, among others. And these are just those in the past two decades.
The same dollar hegemony underwrote U.S. predations in the latter part of the Twentieth Century against Iran, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Vietnam, Nicaragua, Cuba, Chile, Congo, Brazil, Indonesia, and dozens of other countries. Again, the rest of the world sees this. U.S. citizens, rapturously oblivious in their hermetically sealed media bubble, do not.
The world saw how the U.S. stole $300 billion of Russian funds that were held in Western banks, part of its sanctions regime against Russia for its role in the Ukraine war. They’ve seen how the U.S. has carried out similar thefts against dollar-denominated funds of Venezuela, Afghanistan, and Iran. It sees how the Federal Reserve’s raising of interest rates to take care of U.S. needs makes capital flow out of other countries, and how it makes their currencies fall, forcing inflation on them. Not a single country in the world is left untouched.
The cumulative impact of these facts is that many countries would rather not be held hostage to the implicit and explicit negative consequences of dollar hegemony. They also want to remove the “exorbitant privilege” that they believe the U.S. has abused to their individual and collective detriment.
They have begun—again, led by Russia and China—to build an international finance and trading system that doesn’t rely on dollars, that uses countries’ local currencies, gold, oil, or other assets to trade. This received special impetus last year when Saudi Arabia announced it would begin accepting Chinese yuan in exchange for its oil. Oil is the world’s most valued internationally-traded commodity, so the perception is that a dam is beginning to break.
It will take years before an equally functional substitute for the dollar is devised but what began a few years ago as a trickle has gained momentum and urgency as a consequence of U.S. actions in Ukraine. When the dollar is no longer the world’s international reserve currency and nations don’t need dollars to trade with each other, the U.S. will no longer be able to fund its massive budget and trade deficits by writing hot checks. The withdrawal will be agonizing and will greatly circumscribe the U.S.’ role as global hegemon.
U.S. actions in Ukraine have driven together its two greatest adversaries, Russia and China. They, joined by India, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iran and dozens of other countries, are carrying out a Mackinder-feared Eurasian integration that will leave the U.S. outside of the world’s largest and most dynamic trading bloc.
The U.S.’ military failure has advertised, once again (after Iraq and Afghanistan), the relative impotence of U.S. military solutions. Yes, it can still destroy small, defenseless countries like Serbia, Libya, Afghanistan, and Iraq. But against a peer competitor that has chosen to stand up to it, the U.S. has, frankly, been handed its ass. All the world can see it.
Events have shown the hollowness of U.S.-led economic and financial systems, as well, especially compared to China. China’s economic performance has far surpassed that of the U.S. It has lifted more people out of poverty more quickly than any country in the history of the world. Its growth has made it the largest economy in the world in purchasing power parity terms. While average inflation-adjusted incomes in the U.S. are little higher than they were 50 years ago, incomes in China are up more than 10 TIMES over the same period. And it has done this without brutalizing and pillaging other nations that refuse to bend to its hegemonic will.
And, the War has betrayed, as nothing else possibly could, the diplomatic isolation of the U.S., with the vast majority of the world’s people refusing to implement U.S.-demanded sanctions against Russia. Its destruction of the Nord Stream gas pipeline is recognized as the greatest act of state-sponsored terrorism in history, easily surpassing 911 in terms of the hundreds of millions of people it will hurt. And this, to one of its putative allies, Europe. Imagine what happens to its enemies.
This is the tunnel at the end of the light, a multi-polar as opposed to a unipolar world. It means increasing isolation of the U.S. from the rest of the world, the closing in of options, the narrowing of opportunities, the loss of strategic primacy that once graced the greatest power in the history of the world. It will mean dramatically reduced power and influence vis-à-vis the U.S.’ strategic adversaries, and markedly constrained ability to operate militarily, economically and financially in the world, what with the hot checkbook soon to be taken away.
In twenty or thirty years, the U.S. will still be a substantial regional power, perhaps like Brazil in South America, Iran in West Asia, or Nigeria in Africa. But it will not be the global hegemon it once was, able to project and inflict power in the world as it has done for the last century. The U.S. abused its providential anointment as the exceptional nation. That abuse has been recognized, called out, and is now being acted against by most of the other nations of the world. The future will be very different for the U.S. than it has been for the past 80 years, since the end of World War II when it towered over the rest of the world like a giant among pygmies. Ukraine will prove to have been the turning point in this transformation, the tunnel at the end of the light.
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We're Exceptional! And It's Horrible to Witness
Given what America excels at—from gun deaths each year to not providing paid sick or family leave—wouldn't it be wonderful if we were just a little less exceptional?
Jan 09, 2023
Let me start with a confession: I no longer read all the way through newspaper stories about the war in Ukraine. After years of writing about war and torture, I’ve reached my limit. These days, I just can’t pore through the details of the ongoing nightmare there. It’s shameful, but I don’t want to know the names of the dead or examine images caught by brave photographers of half-exploded buildings, exposing details — a shoe, a chair, a doll, some half-destroyed possessions — of lives lost, while I remain safe and warm in San Francisco. Increasingly, I find that I just can’t bear it.
And so I scan the headlines and the opening paragraphs, picking up just enough to grasp the shape of Vladimir Putin’s horrific military strategy: the bombing of civilian targets like markets and apartment buildings, the attacks on the civilian power grid, and the outright murder of the residents of cities and towns occupied by Russian troops. And these aren’t aberrations in an otherwise lawfully conducted war. No, they represent an intentional strategy of terror, designed to demoralize civilians rather than to defeat an enemy military. This means, of course, that they’re also war crimes: violations of the laws and customs of war as summarized in 2005 by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).
The first rule of war, as laid out by the ICRC, requires combatant countries to distinguish between (permitted) military and (prohibited) civilian targets. The second states that “acts or threats of violence the primary purpose of which is to spread terror among the civilian population” — an all-too-on-target summary of Russia’s war-making these last 10 months — “are prohibited.” Violating that prohibition is a crime.
The Great Exceptions
How should war criminals be held accountable for their actions? At the end of World War II, the victorious Allies answered this question with trials of major German, and Japanese officials. The most famous of these were held in the German city of Nuremberg, where the first 22 defendants included former high government officials, military commanders, and propagandists of the Nazi regime, as well as the banker who built its war machine. All but three were convicted and 12 were hanged..
The architects of those Nuremberg trials — representatives of the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and France — intended them as a model of accountability for future wars. The best of those men (and most of them were men) recognized their debt to the future and knew they were establishing a precedent that might someday be held against their own nations. The chief prosecutor for the United States, Robert H. Jackson, put it this way: “We must not forget that the record on which we judge the defendants today is the record on which we will be judged tomorrow.”
Indeed, the Nuremberg jurists fully expected that the new United Nations would establish a permanent court where war criminals who couldn’t be tried in their home countries might be brought to justice. In the end, it took more than half a century to establish the International Criminal Court (ICC). Only in 1998 did 60 nations adopt the ICC’s founding document, the Rome Statute. Today, 123 countries have signed.
Russia is a major exception, which means that its nationals can’t be tried at the ICC for war crimes in Ukraine. And that includes the crime the Nuremberg tribunal identified as the source of all the rest of the war crimes the Nazis committed: launching an aggressive, unprovoked war.
Guess what other superpower has never signed the ICC? Here are a few hints:
- Its 2021 military budget dwarfed that of the next nine countries combined and was 1.5 times the size of what the world’s other 144 countries with such budgets spent on defense that year.
- Its president has just signed a $1.7 trillion spending bill for 2023, more than half of which is devoted to “defense” (and that, in turn, is only part of that country’s full national security budget).
- It operates roughly 750 publicly acknowledged military bases in at least 80 countries.
- In 2003, it began an aggressive, unprovoked (and disastrous) war by invading a country 6,900 miles away.
War Crimes? No, Thank You
Yes, the United States is that other Great Exception to the rules of war. While, in 2000, during the waning days of his presidency, Bill Clinton did sign the Rome Statute, the Senate never ratified it. Then, in 2002, as the Bush administration was ramping up its “global war on terror,” including its disastrous occupation of Afghanistan and an illegal CIA global torture program, the United States simply withdrew its signature entirely. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld then explained why this way:
“…[T]he ICC provisions claim the authority to detain and try American citizens — U.S. soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines, as well as current and future officials — even though the United States has not given its consent to be bound by the treaty. When the ICC treaty enters into force this summer, U.S. citizens will be exposed to the risk of prosecution by a court that is unaccountable to the American people, and that has no obligation to respect the Constitutional rights of our citizens.”
That August, in case the U.S. stance remained unclear to anyone, Congress passed, and President George W. Bush signed, the American Servicemembers Protection Act of 2002. As Human Rights Watch reported at the time, “The new law authorizes the use of military force to liberate any American or citizen of a U.S.-allied country being held by the [International Criminal] Court, which is located in The Hague.” Hence, its nickname: the “Hague Invasion Act.” A lesser-known provision also permitted the United States to withdraw military support from any nation that participates in the ICC.
The assumption built into Rumsfeld’s explanation was that there was something special — even exceptional — about U.S. citizens. Unlike the rest of the world, we have “Constitutional rights,” which apparently include the right to commit war crimes with impunity. Even if a citizen is convicted of such a crime in a U.S. court, he or she has a good chance of receiving a presidential pardon. And were such a person to turn out to be one of the “current and future officials” Rumsfeld mentioned, his or her chance of being hauled into court would be about the same as mine of someday being appointed secretary of defense.
The United States is not a member of the ICC, but, as it happens, Afghanistan is. In 2018, the court’s chief prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, formally requested that a case be opened for war crimes committed in that country. The New York Times reported that Bensouda’s “inquiry would mostly focus on large-scale crimes against civilians attributed to the Taliban and Afghan government forces.” However, it would also examine “alleged C.I.A. and American military abuse in detention centers in Afghanistan in 2003 and 2004, and at sites in Poland, Lithuania, and Romania, putting the court directly at odds with the United States.”
Bensouda planned an evidence-gathering trip to the United States, but in April 2019, the Trump administration revoked her visa, preventing her from interviewing any witnesses here. It then followed up with financial sanctions on Bensouda and another ICC prosecutor, Phakiso Mochochoko.
Republicans like Bush and Trump are not, however, the only presidents to resist cooperating with the ICC. Objection to its jurisdiction has become remarkably bipartisan. It’s true that, in April 2021, President Joe Biden rescinded the strictures on Bensouda and Mochochoko, but not without emphasizing this exceptional nation’s opposition to the ICC as an appropriate venue for trying Americans. The preamble to his executive order notes that
“the United States continues to object to the International Criminal Court’s assertions of jurisdiction over personnel of such non-States Parties as the United States and its allies absent their consent or referral by the United Nations Security Council and will vigorously protect current and former United States personnel from any attempts to exercise such jurisdiction.”
Neither Donald Rumsfeld nor Donald Trump could have said it more clearly.
So where do those potential Afghan cases stand today? A new prosecutor, Karim Khan, took over as 2021 ended. He announced that the investigation would indeed go forward, but that acts of the U.S. and allies like the United Kingdom would not be examined. He would instead focus on actions of the Taliban and the Afghan offshoot of the Islamic State. When it comes to potential war crimes, the United States remains the Great Exception.
In other words, although this country isn’t a member of the court, it wields more influence than many countries that are. All of which means that, in 2023, the United States is not in the best position when it comes to accusing Russia of horrifying war crimes in Ukraine.
What the Dickens?
I blame my seven decades of life for the way my mind can now meander. For me, “great exceptions” brings to mind Charles Dickens’s classic story Great Expectations. His novels exposed the cruel reality of life among the poor in an industrializing Great Britain, with special attention to the pain felt by children. Even folks whose only brush with Dickens was reading Oliver Twist or watching The Muppets Christmas Carol know what’s meant by the expression “Dickensian poverty.” It’s poverty with that extra twist of cruelty — the kind the American version of capitalism has so effectively perpetuated.
When it comes to poverty among children, the United States is indeed exceptional, even among the 38 largely high-income nations of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). As of 2018, the average rate of child poverty in OECD countries was 12.8%. (In Finland and Denmark, it was only 4%!) For the United States, with the world’s highest gross domestic product, however, it was 21%.
Then, something remarkable happened. In year two of the Covid pandemic, Congress passed the American Rescue Plan, which (among other measures) expanded the child tax credit from $2,000 up to as much as $3,600 per child. The payments came in monthly installments and, unlike the Earned Income Credit, a family didn’t need to have any income to qualify. The result? An almost immediate 40% drop in child poverty. Imagine that!
Given such success, you might think that keeping an expanded child tax credit in place would be an obvious move. Saving little children from poverty! But if so, you’ve failed to take into account the Republican Party’s remarkable commitment to maintaining its version of American exceptionalism. One of the items that the party’s congressional representatives managed to get expunged from the $1.7 trillion 2023 appropriation bill was that very expanded child tax credit. It seems that cruelty to children was the Republican party’s price for funding government operations.
Charles Dickens would have recognized that exceptional — and gratuitous — piece of meanness.
The same bill, by the way, also thanks to Republican negotiators, ended universal federal public-school-lunch funding, put in place during the pandemic’s worst years. And lest you think the Republican concern with (extending) poverty ended with starving children, the bill also will allow states to resume kicking people off Medicaid (federally subsidized health care for low-income people) starting in April 2023. The Kaiser Family Foundation estimates that one in five Americans will lose access to medical care as a result.
Great expectations for 2023, indeed.
We’re the Exception!
There are, in fact, quite a number of other ways in which this country is also exceptional. Here are just a few of them:
- Children killed by guns each year. In the U.S. it’s 5.6 per 100,000. That’s seven times as high as the next highest country, Canada, at 0.8 per 100,000.
- Number of required paid days off per year. This country is exceptional here as well, with zero mandatory days off and 10 federal holidays annually. Even Mexico mandates six paid vacation days and seven holidays, for a total of 13. At the other end of the scale, Chile, France, Germany, South Korea, Spain, and the United Kingdom all require a combined total of more than 30 paid days off per year.
- Life expectancy. According to 2019 data, the latest available from the World Health Organization for 183 countries, U.S. average life expectancy at birth for both sexes is 78.5 years. Not too shabby, right? Until you realize that there are 40 countries with higher life expectancy than ours, including Japan at number one with 84.26 years, not to mention Chile, Greece, Peru, and Turkey, among many others.
- Economic inequality. The World Bank calculates a Gini coefficient of 41.5 for the United States in 2019. The Gini is a 0-to-100-point measure of inequality, with 0 being perfect equality. The World Bank lists the U.S. economy as more unequal than those of 142 other countries, including places as poor as Haiti and Niger. Incomes are certainly lower in those countries, but unlike the United States, the misery is spread around far more evenly.
- Women’s rights. The United States signed the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women in 1980, but the Senate has never ratified it (thank you again, Republicans!), so it doesn’t carry the force of law here. Last year, the right-wing Supreme Court gave the Senate a helping hand with its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization to overturn Roe v. Wade. Since then, several state legislatures have rushed to join the handful of nations that outlaw all abortions. The good news is that voters in states from Kansas to Kentucky have ratified women’s bodily autonomy by rejecting anti-abortion ballot propositions.
- Greenhouse gas emissions. Well, hooray! We’re no longer number one in this category. China surpassed us in 2006. Still, give us full credit; we’re a strong second and remain historically the greatest greenhouse gas emitter of all time.
Make 2023 a (Less) Exceptional Year
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we were just a little less exceptional? If, for instance, in this new year, we were to transfer some of those hundreds of billions of dollars Congress and the Biden administration have just committed to enriching corporate weapons makers, while propping up an ultimately unsustainable military apparatus, to the actual needs of Americans? Wouldn’t it be wonderful if just a little of that money were put into a new child tax credit?
Sadly, it doesn’t look very likely this year, given a Congress in which, however minimally and madly, the Republicans control the House of Representatives. Still, whatever the disappointments, I don’t hate this country of mine. I love it — or at least I love what it could be. I’ve just spent four months on the front lines of American politics in Nevada, watching some of us at our very best risk guns, dogs, and constant racial invective to get out the vote for a Democratic senator.
I’m reminded of poet Lloyd Stone’s words that I sang as a teenager to the tune of Sibelius’s Finlandia hymn:
“My country’s skies are bluer than the ocean
And sunlight beams on cloverleaf and pine
But other lands have sunlight, too, and clover,
And skies are somewhere blue as mine.
Oh, hear my prayer, O gods of all the nations
A song of peace for their lands and for mine”
So, no great expectations in 2023, but we can still hope for a few exceptions, can’t we?
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COP15 Biodiversity Summit Highlights 'Deadly' US Attitude Toward the World
"While others play by the rules, the most powerful nation refuses," writes George Monbiot. "If this country were a person, we'd call it a psychopath. As it is not a person, we should call it what it is: a rogue state."
Dec 09, 2022
With a global biodiversity summit underway in Montreal, Guardian columnist George Monbiot on Friday took aim at the United States for its "active, and deadly, cavalier attitude" toward the rest of the world, "an example other nations follow."
"Its refusal to ratify treaties such as the Convention on Biological Diversity provides other nations with a permanent excuse to participate in name only."
Although U.S. President Joe Biden recently appointed Monica Medina as the first special envoy for biodiversity and water resources, and his administration is participating in the 15th Conference of the Parties (COP15) of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), the United States is notably not a party to the treaty, which was drafted in 1992.
In fact, the United States is the only United Nations member state not to ratify the treaty. The other 192 U.N. countries, the European Union, Cook Islands, Niue, and Palestine are all parties to the CBD--leaving the U.S. in the company of just the Holy See, the government of the Roman Catholic Church.
Former President Bill Clinton signed the treaty in 1993, but U.S. ratification requires 67 votes in the Senate--in which Democrats secured a 51-seat majority with Sen. Raphael Warnock's runoff victory on Tuesday, only to have Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona leave the party and declare herself an Independent on Friday.
As Monbiot highlighted:
This is one of several major international treaties the U.S. has refused to ratify. Among the others are crucial instruments such as the Rome Statute on international crimes, the treaties banning cluster bombs and landmines, the convention on discrimination against women, the Basel Convention on hazardous waste, the Convention on the Law of the Sea, the nuclear test ban treaty, the Employment Policy Convention, and the Convention on the Rights of Persons With Disabilities.
In some cases, it is one of only a small number to refuse: The others are generally either impoverished states with little administrative capacity or vicious dictatorships. It is the only independent nation on Earth not to ratify the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Perhaps this is because it is the only nation to sentence children to life imprisonment without parole, among many other brutal policies. While others play by the rules, the most powerful nation refuses. If this country were a person, we'd call it a psychopath. As it is not a person, we should call it what it is: a rogue state.
Monbiot argued that "through its undemocratic dominance of global governance, the U.S. makes the rules, to a greater extent than any other state. It also does more than any other to prevent both their implementation and their enforcement. Its refusal to ratify treaties such as the Convention on Biological Diversity provides other nations with a permanent excuse to participate in name only. Like all imperial powers, its hegemony is expressed in the assertion of its right not to care."
"The question that assails those who strive for a kinder world is always the same but endlessly surprising: How do we persuade others to care?" he continued. "The lack of interest in resolving our existential crises, expressed by the U.S. Senate in particular, is not a passive exceptionalism. It is an active, proud, and furious refusal to care about the lives of others. This refusal has become the motive force of the old-new politics now sweeping the world. It appears to be driving a deadly, self-reinforcing political cycle."
After outlining an example of destructive farming practices in the Netherlands, Monbiot stressed the urgency of the current moment, writing that due to years of failures, "we now approach multiple drastic decision points, at which governments must either implement changes in months that should have happened over decades, or watch crucial components of civic life collapse, including the most important component of all: a habitable planet."
Scientists continue to raise alarm about the intertwined climate and biodiversity crises, warning that immediate, ambitious action must be taken on the global scale--including transforming agricultural and energy systems--to limit dangerous temperature increases and species loss.
"As we rush towards these precipices, we are likely to see an ever more violent refusal to care," Monbiot wrote. For example, rich nations have the "twin duties of care and responsibility" to accept refugees fleeing climate and ecological breakdown, but doing so "could trigger a new wave of reactive, far-right politics" that "would cut off meaningful environmental action."
"In other words, we face the threat of a self-perpetuating escalation of collapse," he concluded. "This is the spiral we must seek to break. With every missed opportunity--and the signs suggest that the Montreal summit might be another grave disappointment--the scope for gentle action diminishes and the rush towards drastic decisions accelerates. Some of us have campaigned for years for soft landings. But that time has now passed. We are in the era of hard landings. We must counter the rise of indifference with an overt and conspicuous politics of care."
The column comes as attendees and experts warn COP15 represents "the make-or-break moment" for the variety of life on Earth, given the rate at which species are disappearing--largely driven by "deforestation, overfishing, corporate agribusiness megafarming, and extraction of natural resources"--with major implications for humanity.
As Common Dreams reported earlier this week, advocates are pushing for a post-2020 global biodiversity framework (GBF) that includes:
- Protections for at least 30% of lands and waters by 2030;
- Policies to prevent or reduce invasive species by 50%;
- The elimination of plastic waste;
- The reduction of pesticides in the environment by at least two-thirds;
- The recognition of Indigenous peoples' rights and central role in protecting biodiversity; and
- At least $100 billion in annual funding for developing countries to protect wildlife, provided by wealthy governments.
While some are preparing for the Chinese-hosted conference in Canada to be another disappointment--one advocacy group on Monday published a report exposing corporate capture of not only the developing framework but all work related to the treaty over the past three decades--rich nations, including and especially the United States, are still facing pressure to step up.
Will Gartshore, World Wildlife Fund's senior director for government affairs and advocacy, said Monday that "WWF will continue advocating for the virtues of the U.S. joining the convention. But in the meantime, there is much that the U.S. can do to align itself with the goals of the agreement and ensure the success of the COP15 negotiations" and resulting framework.
Pointing to the "America the Beautiful" plan unveiled last year, Gartshore said that "the Biden administration has sent important signals about its commitment to halting and reversing nature loss by proposing to conserve 30% of U.S. lands and waters by 2030 and by launching new initiatives to protect global forests, account for nature's economic value, and mobilize nature-based solutions to climate change."
"And by appointing the first-ever U.S. special envoy for biodiversity and water resources, the president has elevated the issue and put nature firmly on America's diplomatic agenda, alongside climate change," he continued. "All of these moves signal to other countries that the U.S. is in the game even if it is not directly at the negotiating table, and that they should strive for ambitious outcomes knowing the U.S. is taking commensurate actions of its own."
Gartshore added that "the other critical role the U.S. can play to further positive outcomes at COP15 and beyond is by mobilizing increased resources for the implementation of a global biodiversity framework and influencing other countries to do the same. As Congress works to finalize a U.S. government funding bill by the end of the year, WWF is making the case that it should include significant new resources to support the conservation of nature, particularly in developing countries that house much of our planet's remaining biodiversity."
Writing Thursday for Project Syndicate, former U.S. Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) also noted the Biden administration's recent envoy appointment and embrace of the 30x30 goal, and called for the U.S. to positively contribute to what "may be the world's last best chance to reverse biodiversity loss."
According to Feingold:
Although the U.S. itself is not a party to the CBD--owing to bipartisan divisions and opposition from various interest groups--its heavyweight status affords it ample opportunities to contribute, including by influencing the debate over the final language of the framework.
Moreover, the U.S. can help build partnerships, influence key decision-makers, and create new incentives for conservation efforts around the world. It can advocate stronger incentives for country-specific commitments to achieve the most urgent conservation goals. It can help to secure the financing and funding pledges needed to support low- and middle-income countries' efforts to achieve global conservation goals and protect their local ecosystems. And it can integrate conservation into its international development policies, thus helping to offset the cost of biodiversity conservation in these countries.
While Monbiot declared in a tweet about his column that "the U.S. is leading by example--the worst possible example in an ecological emergency," Feingold suggested that "the Biden administration's recent initiatives could redefine America's conservation movement, enabling the U.S. to lead by example and set the standard for conservation on the continent."
"It is a country that can use its enormous power and global influence--be it economic, cultural, or political--to help the world shape a new and desperately needed global biodiversity framework," he added. "Despite divisions over other issues, the U.S. can achieve an internal consensus on the need to protect its great natural heritage, and to support the global conservation agenda through funding commitments and capacity-building initiatives. That consensus cannot come soon enough. With the clock ticking down, COP15 must be seen as an urgent wake-up call."
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