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cold war
Trump Is Desperately Dusting Off the Cold War Playbook
Trump and the GOP are betting that calling Democrats “communists” will matter to enough voters to overshadow their concerns about the cost of food, gasoline, housing and healthcare.
Jul 11, 2026
President Donald Trump is a desperate man. With the midterms on the horizon and his approval ratings under water, he doesn’t want to talk about affordability. Nor does he want to talk about his war with Iran. And he certainly doesn’t want to talk about Jeffrey Epstein.
What does he want to talk about? Communists.
Over the last two weeks, Trump has ratcheted up his overheated rhetoric in response to democratic socialists’ victories in primary elections in Colorado, New York, Washington, DC, and elsewhere.
During a speech to Christian conservatives at a Faith and Freedom Coalition convention in Washington on June 26, he called democratic socialists “animals” and said, “We have to stop this horrible threat of cancer that’s permeating our country called communism.” He went on to say that the “godless” communists in the Democratic Party pose a particular risk for Christians. “They will close your churches in this country,” he warned. “They will kill your people. And that’s what they’re about.”
It’s not as if Trump and his fellow Republicans haven’t hurled the communist epithet before, but over the past six months they have upped the ante.
Heading into the 250th birthday celebration on the National Mall, Trump continued his tirade. Speaking at Mount Rushmore on July 3, he not only besmirched Democrats, but immigrants as well. “There is now a resurgence of the communist menace in our land, including from newcomers to our country who embrace ideas totally opposed to our way of life and our great success,” he said. “...You can be a communist or you can be a patriot. You cannot be both.” He made no secret that he is trying to salvage Republican candidates’ chances in November. “America will never be a communist country,” he said. “We can only lose the midterms if we allow ourselves to lose the midterms if we are foolish, stupid, and unwise.”
Trump was only slightly more restrained on July 4 at the National Mall. After introducing a handful of World War II veterans and lauding them for their heroism, Trump ahistorically declared: “Our warriors did not fight communism on battlefields across the world, only to have that menace rear its ugly head right back here in America. We’re not going to let it happen.” (In fact, American troops, along with troops from Great Britain and communist Soviet Union, defeated fascism in World War II.)
The GOP’s Red-Baiting Tradition
It’s not as if Trump and his fellow Republicans haven’t hurled the communist epithet before, but over the past six months they have upped the ante. According to a recent Washington Post analysis of statements, social media posts, and podcasts, from January to June, they applied the word “communist” or “communism” to Democrats an average of 626 times per week, 43% more than during the same time frame in 2025.
Right-wing pundits have entered the fray, too. Megan McArdle, a self-described “right-leaning libertarian” columnist at The Washington Post, recently wrote that democratic socialist victories represent “a heady moment for the left, because socialism’s tainted brand has recovered from the vivid failures of the Soviet Union.”
Likewise, historian Arthur Herman, writing for Fox News, disingenuously equated democratic socialists’ policy agenda with that of the Soviet Union in a July 3 column. “In June, Marxist radicals calling themselves democratic socialists swept the New York City primaries...” he wrote. “...Communist-style socialism has brought poverty, mass starvation, and subsistence misery to tens of millions worldwide.”
Such attacks are nothing new. Republicans denounced Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal as “socialism” and even “communism.” In 1961, then General Electric spokesman Ronald Reagan warned that government health insurance would lead to socialism. Over the following decades, however, Republicans largely abandoned that mantra in favor of attacks on “big government” and the welfare state.
Trump is a throwback to an earlier time. In his 2020 State of the Union address, Trump attacked socialism, claiming it “destroys nations.” Like Reagan before him, he specifically denounced a “Medicare for All” proposal endorsed by Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), and 130 other members of Congress at the time, calling it a “socialist takeover of our healthcare system.”
During the last election, Trump often called Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris a “Marxist,” tying her to her father’s economic perspective on markets and inequality. More recently, he labeled New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist, a “communist,” and dubbed Janeese Lewis George, a democratic socialist who won last month’s Washington, DC, Democratic mayoral primary, a “Communist adherent.”
Democratic socialists in the Democratic Party are not communists. If they are a member of any organization, it likely would be the Democratic Socialists of America, which does not function as a party. Communist organizations still exist in the United States, but they are politically marginal and have no representation in Congress or in any state legislature.
Americans Support Democratic Socialist Policies
Likewise, democratic socialism is not synonymous with Soviet communism, which fell apart 35 years ago. The countries that democratic socialists in America hold up as models can be found in Western Europe. They are multiparty democracies with market economies, strong unions, and robust social safety programs that include universal healthcare. Their economic models are nothing like the one-party command economy of the Soviet Union and, as I pointed out in detail in a December 2025 essay, they do a much better job of ensuring their citizens live long, healthy, and prosperous lives than the United States does.
While only about 17% of Americans have a favorable view of democratic socialist politicians, their policies are quite popular. For example:
- According to a new Economist-YouGov poll, 52% of Americans support eliminating private health insurance companies and replacing them with a national health plan. Only 30% oppose the idea.
- Public support for a higher federal minimum wage has remained strong for years. A 2021 Pew survey found that 62% of Americans supported raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour, while a 2019 Pew survey found support at 67%.
- A February Pew survey found that 69% of Americans favor requiring employers to provide paid family leave. Even 59% of Republicans support it.
- Finally, 63% of Americans favor raising taxes on large corporations, according to a March 2025 Pew poll, and 58% favor raising taxes on households earning more than $400,000 annually.
Perhaps what is holding democratic socialists back is how they identify themselves. The term “socialist” just may have too much baggage. After all, many Americans still associate the word with the Soviet Union, whose official name was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, even though it was a communist dictatorship.
New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a democratic socialist, told The Washington Post earlier this week that political labels should not be an issue. “What matters is the legislation, your proposals, the ideas before us,” she said. “How a person identifies in their economic view of the world is less important to people than if we’re making their groceries more affordable.”
Maybe. But Trump and the GOP are betting that calling Democrats “communists” will matter to enough voters to overshadow their concerns about the cost of food, gasoline, housing and healthcare. November will reveal whether that Cold War strategy still works.
This article first appeared at the Money Trail blog and is reposted here at Common Dreams with permission.
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We Must End the Global Nuclear Arms Race Before It Ends Us
The question is no longer what is politically possible, but what is virtually guaranteed if we refuse to pursue the “impossible.”
Feb 12, 2026
On February 5, with the expiration of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or New START, the only bilateral arms control treaty left between the United States and Russia, we are guaranteed to find ourselves ever closer to the edge of a perilous precipice. The renewed arms race that seems likely to take place could plunge the world, once and for all, into the nuclear abyss. This crisis is neither sudden nor surprising, but the predictable culmination of a truth that has haunted us for nearly 80 years: Humanity has long been living on borrowed time.
In such a context, you might think that our collective survival instinct has proven remarkably poor, which is, at least to a certain extent, understandable. After all, if we had allowed ourselves to feel the full weight of the nuclear threat we’ve faced all these years, we might indeed have collapsed under it. Instead, we continue to drift forward with a sense of muted dread, unwilling (or simply unable) to respond to the nuclear nightmare. In a world already armed with thousands of omnicidal weapons, such fatalism—part suicidal nihilism and part homicidal complacency—becomes a form of violence in its own right.
Given such indifference, we risk not only our own lives but also the lives of all those who would come after us. As Jonathan Schell observed decades ago, both genocide and nuclear war are distinct from other forms of mass atrocity in that they serve as “crimes against the future.” And as Robert Jay Lifton once warned, what makes nuclear war so singularly horrifying is that it would constitute “genocide in its terminal form,” a destruction so absolute as to render the Earth unlivable and irrevocably reverse the very process of creation.
Yet for many, the absence of such a nuclear holocaust, 80 years after the US dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, is taken as proof that such a catastrophe is, in fact, unthinkable and will never happen. These days, to invoke the specter of annihilation is to be dismissed as alarmist, while to argue for the abolition of such weaponry is considered naïve. As it happens, though, the opposite is true. It’s the height of naïveté to believe that a global system built on the supposed security of nuclear weapons can endure indefinitely.
Nuclear weapons are human creations, and what is made by us can be dismantled by us.
That much should be obvious by now. In truth, we’ve clung to the faith that rational heads will prevail for far too long. Such thinking has sustained a minimalist global nonproliferation regime aimed at preventing the further spread of nuclear weapons to so-called terrorist states like Iraq, Libya, and North Korea (which now indeed has a nuclear arsenal). Yet, today, it should be all too clear that the states with nuclear weapons are, and have long been, the true rogue states.
A nuclear-armed Israel has, after all, been committing genocide in Gaza and has bombed many of its neighbors. Russia continues to devastate Ukraine, which relinquished its nuclear arsenal in 1994, and its leader, Vladimir Putin, has threatened to use nuclear weapons there. And a Washington led by a brazen authoritarian deranged by power, who has declared that he doesn’t “need international law,” has stripped away the fragile façade of a rules-based global order.
Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and the leaders of the seven other nuclear-armed states possess the unilateral capacity to destroy the world, a power no country should be allowed to wield. Yet even now, there is still time to avert catastrophe. But to chart a reasonable path forward, it’s necessary to look back eight decades and ask why the world failed to ban the bomb at a moment when the dangerous future we now inhabit was already clearly foreseeable.
Every City Is Hiroshima
With Hiroshima and Nagasaki still smoldering ruins, people everywhere confronted a rupture so profound that it seemed to inaugurate a new historical era, one that might well be the last. As news of the atomic bombings spread, a grim consensus took shape that technological “progress” had outpaced political and moral restraint. Journalist Norman Cousins captured the zeitgeist when he wrote that “modern man is obsolete, a self-made anachronism becoming more incongruous by the minute.” Human beings had clearly fashioned themselves into vengeful gods, and the specter of Armageddon was no longer a matter of theology but a creation of modern civilization.
In the United States, of course, a majority of Americans greeted the initial reports of the atomic bombings of those two Japanese cities in a celebratory fashion, convinced that such unprecedented weapons would bring a swift, victorious end to a brutal war. For many, that relief was inseparable from a lingering desire for retribution. In announcing the first atomic attack, President Harry Truman himself declared that the Japanese “have been repaid many fold” for their strike on Pearl Harbor, which inaugurated the official American entry into World War II. Yet triumph quickly gave way to a more somber reckoning.
As the scale of devastation came into fuller view, the psychological fallout radiated far beyond Japan. The New York Herald Tribune captured a growing unease when it editorialized that “one forgets the effect on Japan or on the course of the war as one senses the foundations of one’s own universe trembling a little… it is as if we had put our hands upon the levers of a power too strange, too terrible, too unpredictable in all its possible consequences for any rejoicing over the immediate consequences of its employment.”
Some critics of the bombings would soon begin to frame their concerns in explicitly moral terms, posing the question: Who had we become? Historian Lewis Mumford, for example, argued that the attacks represented the culmination of a society unmoored from any ethical foundations and nothing short of “the visible insanity of a civilization that has ceased to worship life and obey the laws of life.” Religious leaders voiced similar concern. The Christian Century magazine typically condemned the bombings as “a crime against God and humanity which strikes at the very basis of moral existence.”
As the apocalyptic imagination took hold, others turned to a more self-interested but no less urgent question: What will happen to us? Newspapers across the country began running stories on what a Hiroshima-sized bomb would do to their downtowns. Yet Philip Morrison, one of the few scientists to witness both the initial Trinity Test of the atomic bomb and Hiroshima after the bombing, warned that even such terrifying projections underestimated the danger.
Deaths in the hundreds of thousands were, he insisted, far too optimistic. “The bombs will never again, as in Japan, come in ones or twos. They will come in hundreds, even in thousands.” And given the effect of radiation, those who made “remarkable escapes,” the “lucky” ones, would die all the same. Imagining a prospective strike on New York City, he wrote of the survivors who “died in the hospitals of Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Rochester, and Saint Louis in the three weeks following the bombing. They died of unstoppable internal hemorrhages… of slow oozing of the blood into the flesh.” Ultimately, he concluded, “If the bomb gets out of hand, if we do not learn to live together… there is only one sure future. The cities of men on Earth will perish.”
One World or None
Morrison wrote that account as part of a broader effort, led by former Manhattan Project scientists who had helped create the bomb, to alert the public to the newfound danger they themselves had helped unleash. That campaign culminated in the January 1946 book One World or None (and a short film). The scientists had largely come to believe that, if the public had their consciousness raised about the implications of the bomb, a task for which they felt uniquely responsible and equipped, then public opinion might shift in ways that could make policies capable of averting catastrophe politically possible.
Scientists like Niels Bohr began calling on their colleagues to face “the great task lying ahead,” while urging them to be “prepared to assist in any way… in bringing about an outcome of the present crisis of humanity worthy of the ideals for which science through the ages has stood.” Accepting such newfound social responsibility felt unavoidable, even if so many of those scientists wished to simply return to their prewar pursuits in the insulated university laboratories they once inhabited.
The opportunity to ban the bomb before the arms race took off was squandered not because the public failed to recognize the threat, but because the government refused to heed the will of its people.
As physicist Joseph Rotblat observed, among the many forms of collateral damage inflicted by the bomb was the destruction of “the ivory towers in which scientists had been sheltering.” In the wake of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that rupture propelled them into public life on an unprecedented scale. The once-firm boundary between science and politics began to blur as formerly quiet and aloof researchers spoke to the press, delivered public lectures, published widely circulated articles, and lobbied members of Congress in an effort to secure some control over atomic energy.
Among them was J. Robert Oppenheimer, director of the Los Alamos Laboratory where the bomb was created, who warned that, “if atomic bombs are to be added as new weapons to the arsenals of a warring world… then the time will come when mankind will curse the names of Los Alamos and Hiroshima,” a statement that left some officials perplexed. Former Vice President Henry Wallace, who had known Oppenheimer as both the director of Los Alamos and someone who had directly sanctioned the bombings, recalled that “he seemed to feel that the destruction of the entire human race was imminent,” adding, “the guilt consciousness of the atomic bomb scientists is one of the most astounding things I have ever seen.”
Yet the scientists pressed ahead in their frantic effort to avert future catastrophe by preventing a nuclear arms race. They insisted that there was no doubt the Soviet Union and other powers would acquire the weapon, that any hope of a prolonged atomic monopoly was delusional, and that espionage was incidental to such a reality, since the fundamental scientific principles needed to build an atomic bomb had been established by 1940. And with Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the secret that a functioning bomb was possible was obviously out.
They argued that there would be no effective defense against a devastating atomic attack and that the US, as a highly urbanized society, was uniquely vulnerable to such “city killer” weapons. With vast, exposed coastlines, they warned that such a bomb, not yet capable of being delivered by a missile, could simply be smuggled into one of the nation’s ports and lie dormant there for years. For the scientists, the implications were unmistakable. The age of national sovereignty had ended. The world had become too dangerous for national chauvinism, which, if humanity were to survive, had to give way to a new architecture of international cooperation.
Teaching Us to Love the Bomb
Such activism had its intended effects. Many Americans became more fearful and wanted arms control. By late 1945, a majority of the public consistently supported some form of international control over such weaponry and the abolition of the manufacturing of them. And for a brief moment, such a possibility seemed within reach. The first resolution passed by the new United Nations in January 1946 called for exactly that. The publication of John Hersey’s Hiroshima first as a full issue of the New Yorker and then as a book, with its intense portrayal of life and death in that Japanese city, further shifted public sentiment toward abolition.
Yet as such hopes crystallized at the United Nations, the two global superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, were already preparing for a future nuclear war. Washington continued to expand its stockpile of atomic weaponry, while Moscow accelerated its work creating such weaponry, detonating its initial atomic test four years after the world first met that terrifying new weapon. That Soviet test, followed by the Korean War, helped extinguish the early promise of an international response to such weaponry, a collapse aided by deliberate efforts in Washington to ensure that the United States grew its atomic arsenal.
In that effort, former Secretary of War Henry Stimson was coaxed out of retirement by President Truman’s advisers who urged him to write one final, “definitive” account defending the bombings to neutralize growing opposition. As Harvard president and government-aligned scientist James Conant explained to Stimson, officials in Washington feared that they were losing the ideological battle. They were particularly concerned that mounting anti-nuclear sentiment would prove persuasive “among the type of person that goes into teaching,” shaping a generation less inclined to regard their decision as morally legitimate.
Stimson’s article, published in Harper’s Magazine in February 1947, helped cement the official narrative: that the bomb was a last resort rooted in military necessity that saved half a million American lives and required neither regret nor moral examination. In that way, the opportunity to ban the bomb before the arms race took off was squandered not because the public failed to recognize the threat, but because the government refused to heed the will of its people. Instead, it sought to secure power through nuclear weapons, driven by a paranoid fear of Moscow that became a self-fulfilling prophecy. What followed were decades of preemptive escalation, the continued spread of such weaponry globally, and, at its height, a global arsenal of more than 60,000 nuclear warheads by 1985.
Forty years later, in a world where nine countries—the US, Russia, China, France, Great Britain, India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea—already have nuclear weapons (more than 12,000 of them), there can be little doubt that, as things are now going, there will be both more countries and more weapons to come.
Such a global arms race must, however, be ended before it ends the human race. The question is no longer what is politically possible, but what is virtually guaranteed if we refuse to pursue the “impossible.” Nuclear weapons are human creations, and what is made by us can be dismantled by us. Whether that happens in time is, of course, the question that now should confront everyone, everywhere, and one that history, if there is anyone around to write or to read it, will not excuse us for failing to answer.
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Donald Trump Is a Real Life Scrooge McDuck—But Not Even a Little Funny
Mar-a-Lago is his Money Bin, and the world is his playground for schemes to add another billion or two to his and his family’s growing fortune.
Jan 22, 2026
Writers often try to gild their tawdry times or dignify their flawed leaders with lofty literary analogies—notably, America as the New Jerusalem; Lincoln as Moses leading his people through the wilderness of the Civil War; the Kennedy White House as an incarnation of King Arthur’s “Camelot“; or Lyndon Johnson living his last years as a latter-day King Lear, cast off by his ungrateful children into the moors of south Texas.
But what are we going to do with Donald Trump? Wouldn’t his vanity, his vulgarity, and his relentless pursuit of money and minerals in every corner of the globe turn any literary analogies into soggy clichés? Like the showman P.T. Barnum, Trump is an American original, whose true metaphors can be found only in comic books (America’s one true art form), not literature. As Ariel Dorfman reminded us once upon a time in How to Read Donald Duck, that classic guide to US cultural imperialism in Latin America, there was always more to a Disney comic book than gags.
To understand Trump’s America, we need our own comic guidebook to his global misadventures, which might be titled something like “How to Read Scrooge McDuck.” After all, in case you never had the pleasure of his acquaintance, Scrooge McDuck was the predatory billionaire in Disney comics, who was amazingly popular among teenagers in Cold War America. In that era when American corporations scampered around the global economy extracting profits wherever they saw fit, Scrooge McDuck put a friendly face on US imperialism, making covert intervention and commercial exploitation look benign, even comic.
From 1952 to 1988, a period coinciding almost precisely with the Cold War, the comic’s creator, illustrator Carl Barks, filled the country’s magazine racks with more than 220 comic books celebrating Scrooge’s schemes to accumulate ever more billions by dispatching Donald Duck and his triplet nephews (Huey, Dewey, and Louie) to scour the world for riches—gems, minerals, oil, and lost treasure. No place on the planet was too remote, not even the Arctic or the Amazon, and no people too poor or obscure, not even Hondurans and Tibetans, to escape his tight-fisted grasp. And yet in that innocent world of the comic book, every adventure, no matter how twisted the plot, always ended with a light laugh for those duckling heroes and the diverse peoples they encountered on their global travels.
Just as Scrooge McDuck scoured the world in a relentless, even ruthless search for wealth, so our real-life Donald has made mineral deals everywhere on the planet his top presidential priority.
Let’s visit a few of my favorite comic books from my Cold War childhood, starting with the 1954 story “The Seven Cities of Cibola.” Its initial panels show a butler showering the billionaire duck with coins while he swims around in his Money Bin’s “three cubic acres” of cash. At first, Scrooge McDuck seems content as he gloats about making money from “about every business there is on Earth” (from “oil wells, railroads, gold mines, farms, factories”).
Suddenly, however, saddened by the realization that he’s exhausted every possible domestic path to profit, Scrooge decides to lead his nephew Donald and the triplets into the desert borderlands between Mexico and the US. There, they come upon a lost Eldorado, a towering, multitiered city with gold-paved streets and a cistern filled with opals and sapphires. But caution intrudes when Huey, Dewey, and Louie discover that the whole edifice is poised dangerously atop a spindly stone pillar. Then, at their moment of near triumph, the ducks are denied any treasure by Scrooge’s recurring nemesis, the comically criminal Beagle Boys, who break in and grab the city’s bejeweled idol, triggering a hidden mechanism that fractures the pillar. As those fabled cities collapse into a heap of rubble, our duckling heroes escape unharmed, ready for their next adventure.
The first panel in a 1956 comic book, the “Secret of Hondorica,” shows Scrooge McDuck pointing to a map of the Caribbean as he dispatches Donald Duck and his three nephews deep into tropical jungles near—yes, how sadly appropriate almost seven decades later—Venezuela to recover his lost deeds to the region’s rich oil wells. After crossing steep mountains and crocodile-infested creeks, the Ducks happen upon a Mayan temple filled with spear-carrying “savages” arrayed around their idol. By translating the “picture writing” on the temple walls with the help of their handy encyclopedic “Junior Woodchuck Guidebook,” the nephews deceive the natives with incantations in their own language and escape with the idol’s crown of gold.
President Donald Trump is, of course, our real-life Scrooge McDuck. Mar-a-Lago is his Money Bin. And the world is his playground for schemes to add another billion or two to his and his family’s growing fortune. Just as Scrooge McDuck scoured the world in a relentless, even ruthless search for wealth, so our real-life Donald has made mineral deals everywhere on the planet his top presidential priority—rare earths from Ukraine, oil from the Middle East, and (someday perhaps) a frozen treasure trove of minerals in Greenland. And just as Scrooge dispatched Donald Duck on a mission to recover his lost oil wells from the jungles of “Hondorica,” so our real Donald did indeed send US special forces to capture President Nicolás Maduro and win yet more of Venezuela’s oil fields for American companies.
Back to the Reality of the Old Cold War
Alas, my innocent childhood is long gone. The world is no backdrop for comic book adventures, and imaginary heroes don’t flit from frame to frame to amusing endings. In the real world of 2026, we are already deep into a “new Cold War” against nuclear-armed powers, and President Donald J. Trump’s comedic foreign policy is dragging us toward a dismal defeat.
First, let’s snap back to reality by taking stock of the world we’ve actually been living through all these years and review how we got here. During the real Cold War, the global conflict that lasted from 1947 to 1991 (when the Soviet Union collapsed), the one I describe in my new book, Cold War on Five Continents, Washington’s geopolitical strategy was brilliantly ruthless in its basic design. After fighting quite a different global conflict, World War II, for four years with the aim of defeating the Axis powers (Germany, Italy, and Japan) entrenched at both ends of Eurasia, America’s leaders of General (and future president) Dwight D. Eisenhower’s generation knew instinctively that geopolitical control over that vast continent was indeed the key to global power.
If Washington’s strategy for waging the Cold War was a successful exercise in geopolitics, its use of “unipolar” power in the decades to come was... much less so.
Guided by that fundamental strategic principle (which had, in fact, held true for the last thousand years or so), Washington’s early Cold War leaders worked hard to “contain” the Sino-Soviet communist bloc behind an “Iron Curtain” that stretched for 5,000 miles around the rim of Eurasia. With the armed forces of its NATO alliance securing that continent’s Western frontier and five bilateral military pacts ranging along the Pacific littoral from Japan to Australia for its eastern border, Washington bottled up the communist superpowers. That strategy freed the US to make the rest of the planet into its very own “free world.” In exchange for open access to the markets and minerals of the countries in much of that free world, the US distributed a few development dollars of aid to the emerging nations of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, which often served to fatten up the bank accounts of their nominally “democratic” dictators.
After two decades of being locked up inside Eurasia, however, Beijing and Moscow tried to break out of their geopolitical isolation by arming allies for revolutionary warfare on Cold War battlegrounds stretching from South Vietnam across the Middle East and through southern Africa, all the way to Central America.
To counter that gambit and push those communist powers back behind the Iron Curtain, the US sometimes sent in its own troops, whether successfully to the Dominican Republic in 1965, or disastrously to South Vietnam from 1965 to 1973. But most of the time, Washington dispatched individual CIA operatives armed with impunity to do whatever—and I do mean whatever—they wanted to deflect Moscow and Beijing’s gambits and secure contested terrain. Usually misfits, even oddballs at home, those surprisingly significant historical actors, whom I’ve come to call “men on the spot,” often proved quite successful abroad. Using the cruelest instruments in the toolkit of modern statecraft—assassinations, coups, surrogate troops, torture, and psychological warfare—those covert operatives fought for control of foreign capitals as diverse as Kinshasha, Luanda, Saigon, Santiago, San Salvador, Tegucigalpa, and Vientiane. And then, with the Soviet Union significantly “contained” geopolitically within its borderlands, Washington could just sit back and wait for Moscow to make a strategic blunder.
That blunder came in 1979 in one of those classic military misadventures that often hasten the deaths of empires in decline. When Moscow sent 100,000 troops to occupy Afghanistan, Washington sent just one CIA operative, Howard Hart, to defeat that occupation. Acting as Washington’s “man on the spot,” he used the agency’s millions of dollars to form a guerrilla army of 250,000 Afghan fighters. By the time the Red Army was bled dry and left Afghanistan a decade later, defeated and demoralized, Moscow’s satellite states in Eastern Europe were erupting in mass anti-communist protests. With the Red Army generally unable or unwilling to intervene, the Soviet bloc broke apart as the Soviet Union broke up, ending the Cold War with an unqualified US victory.
Toward a New Cold War
If Washington’s strategy for waging the Cold War was a successful exercise in geopolitics, its use of “unipolar” power in the decades to come was, as I also argue in Cold War on Five Continents, much less so. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Washington stood astride the globe like a Titan of Greek legend—the sole superpower on Earth, at least theoretically capable of remaking the world as it wished. Convinced that “the end of history” would make its free-market democracy the future of all mankind, America’s leaders, “drunk with power,” advanced sweeping plans for a new world order, grounded in a globalized economy that served their short-term interests but would have deleterious long-term consequences for their global hegemony.
Only a decade after the Cold War ended, Washington started facing serious strategic challenges across the Eurasian continent, which, then and now, has been the epicenter of geopolitical power. In the heady aftermath of its Cold War victory, the US attempted some bold strategic gambits that would soon prove to be distinctly ill-advised. Above all, Washington’s leaders believed that they could co-opt Beijing’s rising power by recognizing China as an equal trading partner. In a parallel attempt to curb any of Moscow’s future imperial ambitions, the US also presided over NATO’s expansion until that alliance surrounded Russia’s western borders, sparking security concerns in Moscow. Such ill-fated initiatives, combined with ill-considered military interventions in Afghanistan and also Iraq, created conditions for the revival of a great-power rivalry that, since Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, many observers have called “the new Cold War.”
For over a century, the Caribbean region had consistently experienced the most brutal, least benign aspects of US foreign policy and now that reality has only worsened.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union and its socialist economy in 1991, Washington seemed to feel its post-Cold-War globalization would both promote democracy there and integrate that country into an emerging American world order, perhaps as a secondary power supplying cheap commodities, including oil, to the global economy. For the Russians, however, such globalization produced the dismal decade of the 1990s that would be marked by what economist Jeffrey Sachs has called a “serious economic and financial crisis” and a privatization of state enterprises “rife with unfairness and corruption,” creating a coterie of predatory Russian oligarchs.
When Vladimir Putin became prime minister amid the post-Soviet malaise of the late 1990s, he reverted to Russia’s centuries-old imperial mode. He found his vision for the country’s revival as a “great power” in the sort of geostrategic thinking that Washington’s leaders seemed to have forgotten in the afterglow of their great Cold War victory. Following a 2005 address calling the collapse of the Soviet Union the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century,” Putin set about systematically reclaiming much of the old Soviet sphere—invading Georgia in 2008 when it began flirting with NATO membership; deploying troops in 2020-2021 to resolve an Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict in favor of a pro-Moscow regime in Baku; and dispatching thousands of Russian special forces to Kazakhstan in 2022 to gun down pro-democracy protesters challenging a loyal Russian ally.
Concerned above all with securing his western frontier with Europe, Putin pressed relentlessly against Ukraine after his loyal surrogate leader there was ousted in the 2014 Maidan “color revolution.” First seizing Crimea, next arming separatist rebels in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region adjacent to Russia, and finally invading Ukraine in 2022 with nearly 200,000 troops, he would spark a protracted war that has yet to end.
At first, as Kyiv fought the Russians off, Washington and the West reacted with a striking unanimity by imposing serious sanctions on Moscow, dispatching armaments to Ukraine, and expanding NATO to include all of Scandinavia. Moreover, Ukraine showed a formidable flair for unconventional operations—clearing Russian ships from the Black Sea with naval drones and sabotaging that country’s massive gas pipeline under the Baltic Sea.
As Russia’s war on Ukraine reverberated across Eurasia and beyond, geopolitical tensions also rose in the Western Pacific, sparking a renewed great power rivalry that became worthy of the phrase “the new Cold War.” In a striking parallel with the 1950s, in February 2022, just before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Beijing and Moscow forged a multi-faceted economic and strategic alliance that they claimed had “no limits.” In an eerie reprisal of the early Cold War years, Russia and China were in that way united against a Western alliance, once again led by Washington with its military forces still deployed in Western Europe and East Asia.
After two years of continuous combat in Ukraine, however, cracks began to appear in the West’s anti-Russian coalition. Most critically, American domestic support for Ukraine started to falter under partisan political pressures, amplified by a rising populist opposition in both the US and Europe to the globalized economy and its military alliances. After successfully rallying NATO to stand with Ukraine, President Joseph Biden opened America’s arsenal to Kyiv until Republican legislators, at Donald Trump’s behest, delayed military aid throughout much of 2024.
President Trump’s Second Term
Following his second inauguration in January 2025, President Trump’s initial foreign policy initiative was a unilateral attempt to negotiate an end to the Russia-Ukraine war—an effort that would be complicated by his underlying hostility toward NATO and his sympathy for Russian President Putin. On February 12, Trump launched peace talks through a “lengthy and highly productive” phone call with the Russian president, agreeing that “our respective teams start negotiations immediately.” Within days, Defense Secretary (or do I mean Secretary of War?) Pete Hegseth announced that “returning to Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders is an unrealistic objective,” and Trump added that NATO membership for Kyiv was no less unrealistic—in effect, making what a senior Swedish diplomat called “very major concessions” to Moscow before any talks even began.
At month’s end, those tensions culminated in a televised Oval Office meeting in which Trump berated Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, saying: “You’re either going to make a deal or we’re out, and if we’re out, you’ll fight it out. I don’t think it’s going to be pretty.” That unilateral approach not only weakened Ukraine’s ability to defend itself, but also degraded NATO, which had, for the previous three years, supported Ukraine’s resistance to Russia. Recoiling from the “initial shock” of that utterly unprecedented breach, Europeans quickly appropriated $160 billion to build up their own arms industry in collaboration with both Canada and Ukraine, thereby reducing their dependence on US weaponry.
Although it has little chance of success, Trump’s attempt at a tricontinental grand strategy will likely leave a residue of ruin—alienating allies in Latin America, weakening NATO’s position in Western Europe, and ultimately corroding Washington’s global power.
For the rest of the year, Putin continued to work on Trump. He even scored a state visit and meeting with the American president in Alaska, without making any concessions whatsoever. In the process, he reduced US envoys to messenger boys for his unyielding demands, while using disinformation to drive a wedge between Washington and Kyiv. Even if the Trump administration does not formally withdraw from NATO in the years to come, the president’s repeated hostility toward it, particularly its crucial mutual-defense clause, may yet serve to weaken, if not eviscerate the alliance.
Amid a torrent of confusing, often contradictory foreign policy pronouncements from the White House, the design of Trump’s de facto geopolitical strategy soon took shape. Instead of focusing on mutual-security alliances like NATO in Europe or NORAD with Canada, Trump seems to prefer a globe divided into three major regional blocs, each headed by an empowered leader like himself—with Russia dominating its European periphery, China paramount in Asia, and the United States controlling the Americas. That aspiration to hemispheric hegemony lent a certain geopolitical logic to Trump’s otherwise quixotic strikes on Venezuela (and his capture of its president and his wife), as well as his overtures to claim Greenland, reclaim the Panama Canal, and even to make Canada the 51st state.
Last November, formalizing that approach, the White House released its new National Security Strategy, which proclaimed a “Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine” aimed at achieving an unchallenged “American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere.” Think, of course, the Donroe Doctrine. To that end, the US will reduce its “global military presence to address urgent threats in our Hemisphere,” deploy the US Navy to “control sea lanes,” and use “tariffs and reciprocal trade agreements as powerful tools” to make the Western Hemisphere “an increasingly attractive market for American commerce.” In essence, “the United States must be preeminent in the Western Hemisphere as a condition of our security and prosperity.”
For over a century, the Caribbean region had consistently experienced the most brutal, least benign aspects of US foreign policy and now that reality has only worsened. Not only has Trump reverted to the gunboat diplomacy of Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, but he’s done so with a caricatured cruelty—sinking boats in the Caribbean in the name of drug interdiction and sending troops to invade Venezuela, a sovereign state.
Just as Theodore Roosevelt used the Navy to seize land from Colombia for the Panama Canal, so Trump sent Special Forces into Venezuela to gain control over its oil. “We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies… go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country,” Trump said at a January 3 press conference just hours after President Maduro’s capture. “We’re gonna rebuild the oil infrastructure, which will cost billions of dollars. It will cost us nothing. It’ll be paid for by the oil companies directly.” Such a caricatured assertion of economic interest is likely to inflame resentment in a region where anti-imperialist sensibilities remain strong.
Although it has little chance of success, Trump’s attempt at a tricontinental grand strategy will likely leave a residue of ruin—alienating allies in Latin America, weakening NATO’s position in Western Europe, and ultimately corroding Washington’s global power. From a strategic perspective, a staged US retreat from its military bastion in Western Europe would end its long-standing influence over Eurasia, which remains the epicenter of geopolitical power in this new Cold War era, just as it was in the old one. Such a retreat, at the very moment when Russia and China are expanding their influence over that strategic continent, would be tantamount to a self-inflicted defeat in this era of a new and intensifying Cold War.
To return to those Donald Duck comic books for an appropriate analogy: Just as that bungled grab for a bejeweled idol collapsed the spindly stone pillar holding up the “Seven Cities of Cibola,” so the Trump administration’s inept foreign policy is potentially destabilizing a fragile world order with dangerously unpredictable consequences for us all. And count on one thing, unlike in the comic books, it won’t be even a little bit funny.
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Why February 6 Could Bring Us Closer to Nuclear Annihilation
When a key treaty expires on February 5, Russian and American leaders will face no barriers whatsoever to the expansion of their nuclear arsenals or to any other steps that might increase the danger of a thermonuclear conflagration.
Jan 12, 2026
For most of us, Friday, February 6, 2026, is likely to feel no different than Thursday, February 5. It will be a work or school day for many of us. It might involve shopping for the weekend or an evening get-together with friends, or any of the other mundane tasks of life. But from a world-historical perspective, that day will represent a dramatic turning point, with far-reaching and potentially catastrophic consequences. For the first time in 54 years, the world’s two major nuclear-weapons powers, Russia and the United States, will not be bound by any arms-control treaties and so will be legally free to cram their nuclear arsenals with as many new warheads as they wish—a step both sides appear poised to take.
It’s hard to imagine today, but 50 years ago, at the height of the Cold War, the US and Russia (then the Soviet Union) jointly possessed 47,000 nuclear warheads—enough to exterminate all life on Earth many times over. But as public fears of nuclear annihilation increased, especially after the near-death experience of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, the leaders of those two countries negotiated a series of binding agreements intended to downsize their arsenals and reduce the risk of Armageddon.
The initial round of those negotiations, the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks I, began in November 1969 and culminated in the first-ever nuclear arms-limitation agreement, SALT-I, in May 1972. That would then be followed in June 1979 by SALT-II (signed by both parties, though never ratified by the US Senate) and two Strategic Arms Reduction Treaties (START I and START II), in 1991 and 1993, respectively. Each of those treaties reduced the number of deployed nuclear warheads on US and Soviet-Russian intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarine-launched ballistic missiles, and long-range bombers.
In a drive to reduce those numbers even further, President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev signed a New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) in April 2010, an agreement limiting the number of deployed nuclear warheads to 1,550 on each side—still enough to exterminate all life on Earth, but a far cry from the START I limit of 6,000 warheads per side. Originally set to expire on February 5, 2021, New START was extended for another five years (as allowed by the treaty), resetting that expiration date for February 5, 2026, now fast approaching. And this time around, neither party has demonstrated the slightest inclination to negotiate a new extension.
After the expiration of the New START agreement, neither Russia nor the United States will be obliged to limit the numbers of nuclear warheads on their strategic delivery systems, possibly triggering a new global nuclear arms race with no boundaries in sight and an ever-increasing risk of precipitous nuclear escalation.
So, the question is: What, exactly, will it mean for New START to expire for good on February 5?
Most of us haven’t given that a lot of thought in recent decades, because nuclear arsenals have, for the most part, been shrinking and the (apparent) threat of a nuclear war among the great powers seemed to diminish substantially. We have largely escaped the nightmarish experience—so familiar to veterans of the Cold War era—of fearing that the latest crisis, whatever it might be, could result in our being exterminated in a thermonuclear holocaust.
A critical reason for our current freedom from such fears is the fact that the world’s nuclear arsenals had been substantially diminished and that the two major nuclear powers had agreed to legally binding measures, including mutual inspections of their arsenals, meant to reduce the danger of unintended or accidental nuclear war. Together, those measures were crafted to ensure that each side would retain an invulnerable, second-strike nuclear retaliatory force, eliminating any incentive to initiate a nuclear first strike.
Unfortunately, those relatively carefree days will come to an end at midnight on February 5.
Beginning on February 6, Russian and American leaders will face no barriers whatsoever to the expansion of those arsenals or to any other steps that might increase the danger of a thermonuclear conflagration. And from the look of things, both intend to seize that opportunity and increase the likelihood of Armageddon. Worse yet, China’s leaders, pointing to a lack of restraint in Washington and Moscow, are now building up their own nuclear arsenal, only adding further fuel to the urge of American and Russian leaders to blow well past the (soon-to-be-abandoned) New START limits.
A Future Nuclear Arms Race?
Even while adhering to those New START limits of 1,550 deployed nuclear warheads, both Russia and the United States had taken elaborate and costly steps to enhance the destructive power of their arsenals by replacing older, less-capable intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs), and nuclear bombers with newer, even more capable ones. As a result, each side was already becoming better equipped to potentially inflict catastrophic damage on its opponent’s nuclear retaliatory forces, making a first strike less inconceivable and so increasing the risk of precipitous escalation in a crisis.
The Russian Federation inherited a vast nuclear arsenal from the former Soviet Union, but many of those systems had already become obsolete or unreliable. To ensure that it maintained an arsenal at least as potent as Washington’s, Moscow sought to replace all of the Soviet-era weapons in its inventory with more modern and capable systems, a process still underway. Russia’s older SS-18 ICBMs, for example, are being replaced by the faster, more powerful SS-29 Sarmat, while its remaining five Delta-IV class missile-carrying submarines (SSBNs) are being replaced by the more modern Borei class. And newer ICBMs, SLBMs, and SSBNs are said to be in development.
At present, Russia possesses 333 ICBMs, approximately half of them deployed in silos and the other half on road-mobile carriers. It also has 192 SLBMs on 12 missile-carrying submarines and possesses 67 strategic bombers, each capable of firing multiple nuclear-armed missiles. Supposedly, those systems are currently loaded with no more than 1,550 nuclear warheads (enough, of course, to destroy several planets), as mandated by the New START treaty. However, many of Russia’s land- and sea-based ballistic missiles are MIRVed (meaning they’re capable of launching multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles) but not fully loaded, and so could carry additional warheads if a decision were ever made to do so. Given that Russia possesses as many as 2,600 nuclear warheads in storage, it could rapidly increase the number of deployed nuclear weapons at its disposal beginning on February 6, 2026.
That Russia is keen to enhance the destructive capabilities of its strategic arsenal is evident from Moscow’s drive to augment its existing nuclear weapons by developing new, longer-range ones. Those include the Poseidon, a nuclear-powered, intercontinental-range, giant nuclear torpedo to be carried by a new class of submarines, the Belgorod, meant to hold up to six of them. Reportedly, the Poseidon is designed to detonate off the coasts of American cities, rendering them uninhabitable. Following a round of tests now underway, it is scheduled to be deployed by the Russian Navy in 2027. Another new weapon, the Avangard hypersonic glide vehicle, is being installed on some of Russia’s existing SS-19 ICBMs. After being boosted into space by the SS-19, the Avangard should be able to travel another 2,000 miles by skimming along the atmosphere’s outer surface while evading most missile-tracking radars.
The United States is engaged in a comparable drive to modernize its arsenal, replacing older weapons with more modern systems. Like Russia, the US maintains a “triad” of nuclear delivery systems—land-based ICBMs, submarine-launched SLBMs, and long-range bombers, each of which is now being upgraded with new warheads at an estimated cost over the next quarter century of approximately $1.5 trillion.
The existing New START-limited US nuclear triad consists of 400 silo-based Minuteman-III ICBMs, 240 Trident-II SLBMs carried by 14 Ohio-class submarines (two of which are assumedly being overhauled at any time), and 96 strategic bombers (20 B-2s and 76 B-52s) armed with a variety of gravity bombs and air-launched cruise missiles. According to current plans, the Minuteman-IIIs will be replaced by Sentinel ICBMs, the Ohio-class SSBNs by Columbia-class ones, and the B-2s and B-52s by the new B-21 Raider bomber. Each of those new systems incorporates important features—greater accuracy, increased stealth, enhanced electronics—that make them even more useful as first-strike weapons, were a decision ever made to use them in such a fashion.
When initiated, the US nuclear modernization project was expected to abide by the New START limit of 1,550 deployed nuclear warheads. After February 5, however, the US will be under no legal obligation to do so. It could quickly begin efforts to exceed that limit by loading all existing Minuteman-IIIs and future Sentinel missiles on MIRVed rather than single-warhead projectiles and loading the Trident missiles (already MIRVed) with a larger number of warheads, as well as by increasing production of new B-21s. The United States has also commenced development of a new delivery system, the nuclear-armed sea-launched cruise missile (SLCM-N), supposedly intended for use in a “limited” regional nuclear conflict in Europe or Asia (though how such a conflagration could be prevented from igniting a global holocaust has never been explained).
In short, after the expiration of the New START agreement, neither Russia nor the United States will be obliged to limit the numbers of nuclear warheads on their strategic delivery systems, possibly triggering a new global nuclear arms race with no boundaries in sight and an ever-increasing risk of precipitous nuclear escalation. Whether they choose to do so will depend on the political environment in both countries and their bilateral relations, as well as elite perceptions of China’s nuclear buildup in both Washington and Moscow.
The Political Environment
Both the United States and Russia have already committed vast sums to the “modernization” of their nuclear delivery systems, a process that won’t be completed for years. At present, there is a reasonably broad consensus in both Washington and Moscow on the need to do so. However, any attempt to increase the speed of that process or add new nuclear capabilities will generate immense costs along with significant supply-chain challenges (at a time when both countries are also trying to ramp up their production of conventional, non-nuclear arms), creating fresh political disputes and potential fissures.
Rather than confront such challenges, the leaders of both countries may instead choose to retain the New START limits voluntarily. Indeed, Vladimir Putin has already agreed to a one-year extension of this sort, if the United States is willing to do likewise. But pressures (which are bound to increase after February 5) are also building to abandon those limits and begin deploying additional warheads.
In Washington, a powerful constellation of government officials, conservative pundits, weapons industry leaders, and congressional hawks is already calling for a nuclear buildup that would exceed the New START limits, claiming that a bigger arsenal is needed to deter both a more aggressive Russia and a more powerful China. As Pranay Vaddi, a senior director of the National Security Council, put it in June 2024, “Absent a change in the trajectory of the adversary arsenal, we may reach a point in the coming years where an increase from current deployed numbers is required, and we need to be fully prepared to execute if the president makes that decision.”
February 6 is likely to bring us into a new era—not unlike the early years of the Cold War—in which the major powers will be poised to ramp up their nuclear war-fighting capabilities without any formal restrictions whatsoever.
Those who favor such a move regularly point to China’s nuclear buildup. Just a few years ago, China possessed only some 200 nuclear warheads, a small fraction of the 5,000 possessed by both Russia and the US. Recently, however, China has expanded its arsenal to an estimated 600 warheads, while deploying more ICBMs, SLBMs, and nuclear-capable bombers. Chinese officials claim that such weaponry is needed to ensure retaliation against an enemy-first strike, but their very existence is being cited by nuclear hawks in Washington as a sufficient reason for the US to move beyond the New START limits.
Russian leaders face an especially harsh quandary. At a moment when they are devoting so much of the country’s state finances and military-industrial capacities to the war in Ukraine, they face a more formidable and possibly expanded US nuclear arsenal, not to mention the (largely unspoken) threat posed by China’s growing arsenal. Then there’s President Donald Trump’s plan for building a “Golden Dome” missile shield, intended to protect the US from any type of enemy projectile, including ICBMs—a system which, even if only partially successful, would threaten the credibility of Russia’s second-strike retaliatory capability. So, while Russia’s leaders would undoubtedly prefer to avoid a costly new arms buildup, they will probably conclude that they have little choice but to undertake one if the US abandons New START.
Racing to Armageddon
Many organizations, individuals, and members of Congress are pleading with the Trump administration to accept Vladimir Putin’s proposal and agree to a voluntary continuation of the New START limits after February 5. Any decision to abandon those limits, they argue, would only add hundreds of billions of dollars to the federal budget at a time when other priorities are being squeezed. Such a decision would also undoubtedly provoke reciprocal moves by Russia and China. The result would be an uncontrolled arms race and a rising risk of nuclear annihilation.
But even if Washington and Moscow were to agree to a one-year voluntary extension of New START, each would be free to break out of it at any moment. In that sense, February 6 is likely to bring us into a new era—not unlike the early years of the Cold War—in which the major powers will be poised to ramp up their nuclear war-fighting capabilities without any formal restrictions whatsoever. That comfortable feeling we once enjoyed of relative freedom from an imminent nuclear holocaust will also then undoubtedly begin to dissipate. If there is any hope in such a dark prognosis, it might be that such a reality could, in turn, ignite a worldwide anti-nuclear movement like the Ban the Bomb campaigns of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. If only.
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Fears of Wider War Over Venezuela Oil as US Seizes Russian-Flagged Tanker
"That is a confrontation of Cold War proportions," warned one observer.
Jan 07, 2026
Update:
US forces have now boarded and seized control of the Russian-flagged oil vessel in the North Atlantic, the Associated Press reported Wednesday.
Earlier:
United States military forces on Wednesday attempted to board and seize control of a Venezuela-linked and Russian-flagged oil tanker after a weekslong pursuit across the Atlantic, sparking fears of a broader conflict stemming from US President Donald Trump's assault on the South American country.
Reuters reported that the US Coast Guard and military are leading the takeover operation, which came "after the tanker, originally known as the Bella-1, slipped through a US maritime 'blockade' of sanctioned tankers and rebuffed US Coast Guard efforts to board it." According to the Wall Street Journal, "Helicopters and at least one Coast Guard vessel were being used to take control of the tanker."
The vessel is reportedly being escorted by a Russian submarine, fueling concerns of a direct confrontation between two nuclear powers.
Video footage published Tuesday by RT purports to show US forces pursuing the tanker, whose name was recently changed to the Marinera.
BREAKING WORLD EXCLUSIVE: RT obtains FIRST footage of Russian-flagged civilian Marinera tanker being CHASED by US Coast Guard warship in the North Atlantic https://t.co/sNbqJkm5O5 pic.twitter.com/XtbBML3a6j
— RT (@RT_com) January 6, 2026
The New York Times reported that US forces first stopped the tanker in the Caribbean on December 21.
According to the Times:
The ship, which started its journey in Iran, had been on its way to pick up oil in Venezuela.
At the time, the United States said it had a seizure warrant on the vessel because it was not flying a valid national flag. But the Bella 1 refused to be boarded and sailed into the Atlantic, with the United States in pursuit.
Then came a series of moves to ward off the United States. The fleeing crew painted a Russian flag on the hull, the tanker was renamed and added to an official Russian ship database, and Russia made a formal diplomatic request that the United States stop its chase.
Observers voiced alarm over the tense and fast-moving situation.
"Don’t wish to be hyperbolic, but if—if—US special forces are intercepting and seeking to board a now Russian-flagged tanker, apparently with submarine escort, then that is a confrontation of Cold War proportions," warned British journalist Jon Sopel.
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Trump Is Just the Gilded Nail in the Coffin of the American Century
If the first 25 years of the 21st century have proved anything, it is that America was emotionally, morally, and intellectually incapable of acting as a global leader.
Dec 27, 2025
It is tempting to distill all the chaos, hatred, and blood spilled in 2025 into the small frame of one man: Donald Trump.
It is true that Trump richly deserves the accolade of being the worst, but also the most consequential president in modern US history.
This president has bombed Iran, allowed Israel to invade Southern Syria, finished the decimation of Gaza, and embarked on the annexation of the occupied West Bank. The Emirati-funded and armed ethnic cleansing of Sudan means little to him. A death toll of up to half a million Sudanese is of no consequence.
Three months after unveiling his "big beautiful peace plan," a reality is established on the ground in Gaza that is its parametrical opposite—an ugly, petty recipe for war without end.
Never has so much been expected of a mind that is truly so small.
Israel is not even content to leave over 2 million Palestinians in Gaza shivering and starving in tents. When storms flooded them out, Israelis cheered.
Killing Palestinians has become an Israeli national obsession.
Israel Katz, the defense minister, has just announced plans to settle northern Gaza permanently: “We are deep inside Gaza and we will never leave all of Gaza; there will be no such thing. We are here to protect and prevent what happened," Katz said.
So much for any hope of a full withdrawal envisaged by the Trump plan.
A 'Moral Collapse'
Bounced like a pinball between Moscow and Kyiv, Trump has been unable to secure in Ukraine in a year what he promised as a candidate to achieve within days.
When Bob Reiner, a Hollywood director and long-time critic, was killed along with his wife by his son, in a family tragedy so deep it should elicit sympathy from any parent, Trump’s bile could not contain itself.
Reiner’s death was his own fault because he had driven others "crazy" with his obsession with Donald Trump, the president declared on Truth Social.
This is the mentality of the man to whom every rich Arab state in the Middle East has paid good money and now looks to for salvation.
Never has so much been expected of a mind that is truly so small.
This is the man whom Syria expects to force Israel to stop arming the Druze in Sweida, as a Washington Post investigation disclosed.
This is the man whom Turkey hopes will force the Kurds to join the as-yet nonexistent national armed forces of Syria; the man whom Qatar hopes will install an international stabilization force on the borders of Gaza, the man from whom Saudi Arabia wants a nuclear reactor, the man on whom the leader of Egypt—most likely the next Arab leader to fall—depends on for his very survival.
The only power that profits from this chaos is the power that is not involved: The meta story of 2025 is the confirmation of China as crown prince, as a world leader in waiting—a rise that has been handed to it on a silver plate.
More valuable to China than all its own strategic patience, planning, and thinking added together has been the moral collapse of America. All China has had to do is weather Trump’s tariff tantrums and watch the US collapse unprompted under its own weight.
Turning Victory Into Defeat
How did the US pluck defeat from the jaws of victory? Arrogance, hubris, the belief that as the last man standing, we were the only man standing, are all part of the story.
So the outgoing liberal elites of America and Europe, who have been in power for so long, are surely deluding themselves if they ascribe the chaos of 2025 to the rise of the extreme right at home and abroad.
We are not only seeing out one terrible year, but the first quarter of the century. It has been a terrible start.
The wars fought in defense of democracy destroyed all belief in the system at home.
If you compare how powerful America and the West were in Christmas 1991, when I watched the Soviet flag descend on the building of the Russian Supreme Soviet and chart a course to where they are now, you can only come to one conclusion: that when America had the chance to become the world’s uncontested leader, it blew it.
In 1991, America held the monopoly over the use of force abroad. Today, there are as many drone attacks as there are state actors or non-state actors who own them.
In 1991, Russia was on its knees. Today, its forces menace not just Ukraine but the whole of Western Europe.
In 1991, the streets of Russia were so pro-Western that there was a debate in the media as to whether they should continue using the word West, as Russia was now part of it.
Today, they are prepared to sacrifice a whole generation of Russian youth in a war that is framed in Moscow as a war with America.
Losing wars is another part of the jigsaw.
The Pentagon and NATO headquarters in Brussels should really have asked themselves a long time ago, why Western alliances "of the willing" have not won a war since Kosovo in 1998.
Interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, and Syria have all been defeats. Whether those interventions were declared or undeclared, whether they were led from the front or from behind closed doors, the result was the same.
The quick thrill of toppling regimes was followed in each country by the sober reality of insurgency, civil war, and ultimately military withdrawal.
Imagined Foes
Ideology also played its part. I do not mean the ideology of "radical Islam," but the ideology that made the US and its allies such an aggressive world force.
It goes far beyond 19th-century imperialism, which, by comparison, was fairly limited in its ambitions.
It is the belief that at any one time in history, Western liberal democracy is faced by an implacable, transnational, and existential foe.
During the Cold War, it was communism. After it, al-Qaeda became a world threat. Then came Daesh, or the so-called Islamic State.
Today, it is the Muslim Brotherhood; and soon, it will be Islam itself.
Even though these imagined foes have nothing in common with each other, they are given the same characteristics.
During the Vietnam War, it was the Domino theory, a theory that warned if the dominoes of Southeast Asia were allowed to fall to communism, Australia would be next.
In the days of al-Qaeda, this was replaced by "the crescent of crisis," which stretched from Iraq to Somalia.
This ideology preexisted major events like the attacks on the Twin Towers in 2001, and helped transform what should have been a limited anti-terrorist operation into an all-out "war on terror."
It was critical to this project that the West did not define the enemy.
Hence, Vladimir Putin’s first bloody war as prime minister and later president of Russia, the war he launched on Chechnya, was merrily folded into George W Bush’s "war on terror."
The then-British Prime Minister Tony Blair was duly sent by Washington to invite Putin to meet Queen Elizabeth II, as the horrors of Russian counterinsurgency were tried out on the Chechens 22 years before the same techniques were applied to the Ukrainians.
But what did it matter, Western intelligence calculated. They were only Muslims.
Now, 25 years on, America seems congenitally incapable of learning from its mistakes.
Terminal Decline
When Dick Cheney, the former vice president and the architect of the war on terror, died recently, the tributes came in thick and fast.
Former President Bill Clinton extolled Cheney's "unwavering sense of duty," while former Vice President Kamala Harris called him a "devoted public servant" who gave "so much of his life to the country he loved.” CNN's front-page story lauded him for helping "his daughter stand up to Trump."
They praised a man who constructed an elaborate double lie as a pretext for the invasion of Iraq: that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and that he had links with al-Qaeda.
We only need a real financial collapse to recreate the conditions of the 1930s.
In 2004, Cheney said: "I continue to believe, I think there's overwhelming evidence [of a]… connection between al-Qaeda and the Iraqi government."
There have been many attempts to assess the human cost of the Iraq war. The latest in 2023 by Brown University researchers, using United Nations data, concluded that the invasion of Iraq and related "war on terror" campaigns killed more than 4.5 million people.
This figure includes about 1 million direct deaths and 3.5 million indirect deaths. The wars also killed 7,000 US troops and 8,000 contractors, according to the study.
There is something in the psyche of an imperial power in terminal decline that blocks out the obvious truth: The wars fought in defense of democracy destroyed all belief in the system at home.
Even before a new generation of ideologues assumed power in Washington, the old regime of liberal Zionists, like Joe Biden, had armed and allowed Israel to do most of the killing in Gaza, the West Bank, south Lebanon, and Syria.
So, the collapse of moral governance is truly a bipartisan achievement. The year 2025 capped 25 years of failure.
A New Leadership
What happens next? It is alas very far from being goodbye to all that, because all of the unfinished business in the Middle East and Ukraine will keep on coming back to haunt the retreating West.
You can only keep on supporting Israel by blinding yourself to the daily reality of what Israel is doing in the West Bank.
Even if Israel changes its prime minister and slows down its settlement scheme, it will become evident that the Palestinian state recognised as a sovereign nation by 157 of the 193 UN member states is impossible to create.
It is to the West Bank, not Gaza, that all eyes should be turning in 2026.
Israel’s mission to annex the West Bank can be as clearly seen through Christian eyes as it is through Muslim ones, as Middle East Eye's Lubna Masarwa and Peter Oborne report on how Christians in Bethlehem face an existential threat.
The pressure on governments by their people will grow. They will do their best to outlaw demands for Palestinian justice. But the more they seek to oppress, the more of a domestic civil rights issue Palestine will become.
The real sin of British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s government has not so much been to keep as close to Washington as possible on Israel, but to establish the infrastructure of an authoritarian government that will be fully used by his potential successor, Nigel Farage.
The late Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s refusal to grant "special category status" to the 1981 Irish hunger strikers is being replicated today, even though her response led to the death of 10 men, including the MP Bobby Sands, and a government capitulation on the core demand.
No matter.
Lord Timpson, the UK's prisons minister, is intrepidly following in Thatcher's footsteps in the way he is dealing with the hunger strike by youths on remand for taking part in direct action on behalf of Palestine Action.
Timpson said: "We are very experienced at dealing with hunger strikes. Unfortunately, over the last five years, we have averaged over 200 hunger strike incidents every year, and the processes that we have are well-established and they work very well—with prisons working alongside our NHS [National Health Service] partners every day, making sure our systems are robust and working—and they are."
We will see in 2026 how long that confidence in the system lasts if one of those hunger strikers dies. We will also see the divide that has opened up between Israel and the Jewish diaspora getting wider.
If 2025 was the year when the fig leaf around Israel’s true genocidal character dropped away, the first years of the next quarter of this century will be dominated by more Jews in America demanding and creating an entirely different political leadership.
The ideologues of "Israel First" are fighting an ugly and vicious losing battle, and they know it.
This is supposed to be America’s century. If the first 25 years have proved anything, it is that America was emotionally, morally, and intellectually incapable of acting as a global leader.
At the moment that failure is leading to the rise of the extreme right all over the West and potentially the rise of fascists. We only need a real financial collapse to recreate the conditions of the 1930s.
If that, in turn, spurns a new generation of leaders capable once again of governing with authority, morality, and modesty, then it will have been a lesson worth waiting for. But at what price?
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Spending More Money on New Nukes Is a Moral Obscenity
The world remains on even more of a nuclear hair-trigger, the pistol loaded and cocked to our collective heads, just waiting for news that will push us over the edge.
Dec 02, 2025
It’s been 20 years since I retired from the Air Force and 40 years since I first entered Cheyenne Mountain, America’s nuclear redoubt at the southern end of the Front Range that includes Pikes Peak in Colorado. So it was with some nostalgia that I read a recent memo from General Kenneth Wilsbach, the new chief of staff of the Air Force. Along with the usual warrior talk, the CSAF vowed to “relentlessly advocate” for the new Sentinel ICBM, or intercontinental ballistic missile, and the B-21 Raider stealth bomber. While the Air Force often speaks of “investing” in new nukes, this time the CSAF opted for “recapitalization,” a remarkably bloodless term for the creation of a whole new generation of genocidal thermonuclear weapons and their delivery systems.
(Take a moment to think about that word, “creation,” applied to weapons of mass destruction. Raised Catholic, I learned that God created the universe out of nothing. By comparison, nuclear creators aren’t gods, they’re devils, for their “creation” may end with the destruction of everything. Small wonder J. Robert Oppenheimer mused that he’d become death, the destroyer of worlds, after the first successful atomic blast in 1945.)
In my Cheyenne Mountain days, circa 1985, the new “must have” bomber was the B-1 Lancer and the new “must have” ICBM was the MX Peacekeeper. If you go back 20 to 30 years earlier than that, it was the B-52 and the Minuteman. And mind you, my old service “owns” two legs of America’s nuclear triad. (The Navy has the third with its nuclear submarines armed with Trident II missiles.) And count on one thing: It will never willingly give them up. It will always “relentlessly advocate” for the latest ICBM and nuclear-capable bomber, irrespective of need, price, strategy, or above all else their murderous, indeed apocalyptic, capabilities.
At this moment, Donald Trump’s America has more than 5,000 nuclear warheads and bombs of various sorts, while Vladimir Putin’s Russia has roughly 5,500 of the same. Together, they represent overkill of an enormity that should be considered essentially unfathomable. Any sane person would minimally argue for serious reductions in nuclear weaponry on this planet. The literal salvation of humanity may depend on it. But don’t tell that to the generals and admirals, or to the weapons-producing corporations that get rich building such weaponry, or to members of Congress who have factories producing such weaponry and bases housing them in their districts.
So, here we are in a world in which the Pentagon plans to spend another $1.7 trillion (and no, that is not a typo!) “recapitalizing” its nuclear triad, and so in a world that is guaranteed to remain haunted forever by a possible future doomsday, the specter of nuclear mushroom clouds, and a true “end-times” catastrophe.
I Join AF Space Command Only to Find Myself Under 2,000 Feet of Granite
My first military assignment in 1985 was at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado with Air Force Space Command. That put me in America’s nuclear command post during the last few years of the Cold War. I also worked in the Space Surveillance Center and on a battle staff that brought me into the Missile Warning Center. So, I was exposed, in a relatively modest way (if anything having to do with nuclear weapons can ever be considered “modest”), to what nuclear war would actually be like and forced to think about it in a way most Americans don’t.
Each time I journeyed into Cheyenne Mountain, I walked or rode through a long tunnel carved out of granite. The buildings inside were mounted on gigantic springs (yes, springs!) that were supposed to absorb the shock of any nearby hydrogen bomb blast in a future war with the Soviet Union. Massive blast doors that looked like they belonged on the largest bank vault in the universe were supposed to keep us safe, though in a nuclear war they might only have ensured our entombment. They were mostly kept open, but every now and then they were closed for a military exercise.
I was a “space systems test analyst.” The Space Surveillance Center ran on a certain software program that needed periodic testing and evaluation, and I helped test the computer software that kept track of all objects orbiting the Earth. Back then, there were just over 5,000 of them. (Now, that number’s more like 45,000 and space is a lot more crowded—perhaps too crowded.)
It angers me that all of us, whether those like me who served in uniform or your average American taxpayer, have sacrificed so much to create genocidal weaponry and a distinctly world-ending arsenal.
Anyhow, what I remember most vividly were military exercises where we’d run through different potentially world-ending scenarios. (Think of the movie War Games with Matthew Broderick.) One exercise simulated a nuclear attack on the United States. No, it wasn’t like some Hollywood production. We just had monochrome computer displays with primitive graphics, but you could certainly see missile tracks emerging from the Soviet Union, crossing the North Pole, and ending at American cities.
Even though there were no fancy (fake) explosions and no other special effects, simply realizing what was possible and how we would visualize it if it were actually to happen was, as I’m sure you can imagine, a distinctly sobering experience and not one I’ve ever forgotten.
That “war game” should have shaken me up more than it did, however. At the time, we had a certain amount of fatalism about the possibility of nuclear war, something captured in the posters of the era that told you what to do in case of a nuclear attack. The final step was basically to bend over and kiss your ass goodbye. That was indeed my attitude.
Rather than obsess about Armageddon, I submerged myself in routine. There was a certain job to be done, procedures to be carried out, discipline to adhere to. Remember, of course, that this was also the era of the rise of the nuclear freeze protest movement that was demanding the US and the Soviet Union reach an agreement to halt further testing, production, and deployment of nuclear weapons. (If only, of course!) In addition, this was the time of the hit film The Day After, which tried to portray the aftermath of a nuclear war in the United States. In fact, on a midnight shift in Cheyenne Mountain, I even read Tom Clancy’s Red Storm Rising, which envisioned the Cold War gone hot, a Third World War gone nuclear.
Of course, if we had thought about nuclear war every minute of every day, we might indeed have been cowering under our sheets. Unfortunately, as a society, except in rare moments like the nuclear freeze movement one, we neither considered nor generally grasped what nuclear war was all about (even though nine countries now possess such weaponry and the likelihood of such a war only grows). Unfortunately, that lack of comprehension (and so protest) is one big reason why nuclear war remains so chillingly possible.
If anything, such a war has been eerily normalized in our collective consciousness and we’ve become remarkably numb to and fatalistic about it. One characteristic of that reality was the anesthetizing language that we used then (and still use) when it came to nuclear matters. We in the military spoke in acronyms or jargon about “flexible response,” “deterrence,” and what was then known as “mutually assured destruction” (or the wiping out of everything). In fact, we had a whole vocabulary of different words and euphemisms we could use so as not to think too deeply about the unthinkable or our possible role in making it happen.
My Date With Trinity
After leaving Cheyenne Mountain and getting a master’s degree, I co-taught a course on the making and use of the atomic bomb at the Air Force Academy. That was in 1992, and we actually took the cadets on a field trip to Los Alamos where the first nuclear weapon had largely been developed. Then we went on to the Trinity test site in Alamogordo, New Mexico, where, of course, that first atomic device was tested and that, believe me, was an unforgettable experience. We walked around and saw what was left of the tower where Robert Oppenheimer and crew suspended the “gadget” (nice euphemism!) for testing that bomb on July 16, 1945, less than a month before two atomic bombs would be dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, destroying both of them and killing perhaps 200,000 people. Basically (I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn), nothing’s left of that tower except for its concrete base and a couple of twisted pieces of metal. It certainly does make you reflect on the sheer power of such weaponry. It was then and remains a distinctly haunted landscape and walking around it a truly sobering experience.
And when I toured the Los Alamos lab right after the collapse of the other great superpower of that moment, the Soviet Union, it was curious how glum the people I met there were. The mood of the scientists was like: hey, maybe I’m going to have to find another job because we’re not going to be building all these nuclear weapons anymore, not with the Soviet Union gone. It was so obviously time for America to cash in its “peace dividends,” and the scientists’ mood reflected that.
Now, just imagine that 33 years after I took those cadets there, Los Alamos is once again going gangbusters, as our nation plans to “invest” another $1.7 trillion in a “modernized” nuclear triad (imagine what that means in terms of ultimate destruction!) that we (and the rest of the world) absolutely don’t need. To be blunt, today that outrages me. It angers me that all of us, whether those like me who served in uniform or your average American taxpayer, have sacrificed so much to create genocidal weaponry and a distinctly world-ending arsenal. Worse yet, when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, we didn’t even try to change course. And now the message is: Let’s spend staggering amounts of our tax dollars on even more apocalyptic weaponry. It’s insanity and, no question about it, it’s also morally obscene.
The Glitter of Nuclear Weapons
That ongoing obsession with total destruction, ultimate annihilation, reflects the fact that the United States is led by moral midgets. During the Vietnam War years, the infamous phrase of the time was that the US military had to “destroy the town to save it” (from communism, of course). And for 70 years now, America’s leaders have tacitly threatened to order the destruction of the world to save it from a rival power like Russia or China. Indeed, nuclear war plans in the early 1960s already envisioned a massive strike against Russia and China, with estimates of the dead put at 600 million, or “100 Holocausts,” as Daniel Ellsberg of Vietnam War fame so memorably put it.
Take it from this retired officer: You simply can’t trust the US military with that sort of destructive power. Indeed, you can’t trust anyone with that much power at their fingertips. Consider nuclear weapons akin to the One Ring of Power in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Anyone who puts that ring on is inevitably twisted and corrupted.
Freeman Dyson, a physicist of considerable probity, put it well to documentarian Jon Else in his film The Day After Trinity. Dyson confessed to his own “ring of power” moment:
I felt it myself. The glitter of nuclear weapons. It is irresistible if you come to them as a scientist. To feel it’s there in your hands, to release this energy that fuels the stars, to let it do your bidding. To perform these miracles, to lift a million tons of rock into the sky. It is something that gives people an illusion of illimitable power, and it is, in some ways, responsible for all our troubles—this, what you might call technical arrogance, that overcomes people when they see what they can do with their minds.
I’ve felt something akin to that as well. When I wore a military uniform, I was in some sense a captive to power. The military both captures and captivates. There’s an allure of power in the military, since you have a lot of destructive power at your disposal.
Of course, I wasn’t a B-1 bomber pilot or a missile-launch officer for ICBMs, but even so, when you’re part of something that’s so immensely, even world-destructively powerful, believe me, it does have an allure to it. And I don’t think we’re usually fully aware of how captivating that can be and how much you can want to be a part of that.
Even after their service, many veterans still want to go up in a warplane again or take a tour of a submarine, a battleship, or an aircraft carrier for nostalgic reasons, of course, but also because you want to regain that captivating feeling of being so close to immense—even world-ending—power.
The saying that “power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely” may never be truer than when it comes to nuclear war. We even have expressions like “use them or lose them” to express how ICBMs should be “launched on warning” of a nuclear attack before they can be destroyed by an incoming enemy strike. So many years later, in other words, the world remains on even more of a nuclear hair-trigger, the pistol loaded and cocked to our collective heads, just waiting for news that will push us over the edge, that will make those trigger fingers of ours too itchy to resist the urge to put too much pressure on that nuclear trigger.
No matter how many bunkers we build, no matter that the world’s biggest bunker tunneled out of a mountain, the one I was once in, still exists, nothing will save us if we allow the glitter of nuclear weapons to flash into preternatural thermonuclear brightness.
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A Rebuke to Elliot Abrams’ Venezuela Delusions
When the infamous neocon warns about “criminal regimes,” I don’t think of Venezuela. I think of the mass graves, the scorched villages, the secret prisons, and the tens of thousands of Latin American lives shattered under the policies he championed.
Nov 26, 2025
Elliott Abrams has resurfaced with familiar instructions on how to “fix” Venezuela, a country he neither understands nor respects, yet feels entitled to rearrange like a piece of furniture in Washington’s living room. His new proposal is drenched in the same Cold War fever and colonial mindset that shaped his work in the 1980s, when US foreign policy turned Central America into a graveyard.
My childhood in Venezuela was shaped by stories from our region that the world rarely sees: stories of displacement, of death squads, of villages erased from maps, of governments toppled for daring to act outside Washington’s orbit. And I know exactly who Elliott Abrams is, not from think-tank biographies, but from the grief woven into Central America’s landscape.
Abrams writes with the confidence of someone who has never lived inside the countries his policies have destabilized. His newest argument rests on the most dangerous assumption of all: that the United States has the authority, by virtue of power alone, to decide who governs Venezuela. This is the original sin of US policy in the hemisphere, the one that justifies everything else: the sanctions, the blockades, the covert operations, the warships in the Caribbean. The assumption that the hemisphere is still an extension of US strategic space rather than a region with its own political will.
In this telling, Venezuela becomes a “narco-state,” a convenient villain. But anyone who bothers to study the architecture of the global drug trade knows that the world’s largest illegal market is the United States, not Venezuela. The money laundering happens in New York and London, not in Caracas. The guns that sustain the drug corridors of the continent used to threaten, to extort, to kill, come overwhelmingly from American producers. And the history of the drug war itself, from its intelligence partnerships to its paramilitary enforcement wings, was written in Washington, not in the barrios of Venezuela.
The history of the drug war itself, from its intelligence partnerships to its paramilitary enforcement wings, was written in Washington, not in the barrios of Venezuela.
Even US government data contradicts Abrams’ narrative. DEA and UNODC reports have long shown that the vast majority of cocaine destined for US consumers travels from Colombia through the Pacific, not through Venezuela. Washington knows this. But the fiction of a “Venezuelan narco-route” is politically useful: it turns a geopolitical disagreement into a criminal case file and prepares the public for escalation.
What’s striking is that Abrams never turns to the real front line of the drug trade: US cities, US banks, US gun shows, US demand. The crisis he describes is born in his own country, yet he looks for the solution in foreign intervention. The United States has long armed, financed, and politically protected its own “narco-allies” when it suited larger strategic goals. The Contras in Nicaragua, paramilitary blocs in Colombia, and death squads in Honduras. These were policy tools, and many of them operated with Abrams’ direct diplomatic support.
I grew up with the stories of what that machinery did to our neighbors. You don’t need to visit Central America to understand its scars; you only need to listen. In Guatemala, Maya communities still grieve a genocide that US officials refused to acknowledge, even as villages were erased and survivors fled into the mountains. In El Salvador, families continue lighting candles for the hundreds of children and mothers killed in massacres that Abrams dismissed as “leftist propaganda.” In Nicaragua, the wounds left by the Contras, a paramilitary force armed, financed, and politically blessed by Washington, remain visible in the stories of burned cooperatives and murdered teachers. In Honduras, the word disappeared is not historically remote; it is widely remembered, a reminder of the death squads empowered under the banner of US anti-communism.
So when Abrams warns about “criminal regimes,” I don’t think of Venezuela. I think of the mass graves, the scorched villages, the secret prisons, and the tens of thousands of Latin American lives shattered under the policies he championed. And those graves are not metaphors. They are the cartography of an entire era of US intervention, the era Abrams insists on resurrecting.
Abrams now adds new threats to the old script: warnings about “narco-terrorism,” anxieties about “Iranian operatives,” alarms over “Chinese influence.” These issues are stripped of context, inflated, or selectively highlighted to manufacture a security crisis where none exists. Venezuela is not being targeted because of drugs, Iran, or China. It is being targeted because it has built relationships and development paths that do not answer to Washington. Independent diplomacy, South-South cooperation, and diversified alliances are treated as threats—not because they endanger the hemisphere, but because they weaken US dominance within it.
His fantasy for Venezuela rests on another imperial delusion. The notion that the United States can bomb air bases, sabotage infrastructure, deploy Special Forces into a sovereign country, tighten sanctions until society buckles, and then “install” a compliant government as if Venezuela were an uninhabited outpost is a breathtaking escape from reality. Venezuela is a nation of 28 million people, with a national identity shaped by resisting foreign control, above all, control over oil. Abrams presents a military-assisted overthrow as if it were a routine administrative task, erasing the human cost, the regional fallout, and the absolute certainty of popular resistance. It is the same imperial fantasy that has haunted Latin America for generations: the belief that our countries can be redesigned by force and that our people will obediently accept it.
The notion that the United States can bomb air bases, sabotage infrastructure, deploy Special Forces into a sovereign country, tighten sanctions until society buckles, and then “install” a compliant government as if Venezuela were an uninhabited outpost is a breathtaking escape from reality.
He also assumes that once Washington’s preferred government is installed, the oil will conveniently flow. Nothing could reveal a deeper ignorance about Venezuela. Oil in Venezuela is not merely an export or a source of revenue; it is the ground on which its sovereignty was fought for, betrayed, reclaimed, and fought for again. It was the terrain of foreign concessions, the site of the 2002 sabotage, the backbone of the Bolivarian project. Venezuelan refineries, pipelines, and fields are the archive of a century of struggle to control its own destiny. Believing that foreign troops would be welcomed as managers of their most intimate sovereignty is to be utterly blinded by arrogance.
Then there is the matter of sanctions. In Washington, they are treated as technical measures, policy levers, bargaining chips. In Venezuela, there are shortages in hospitals, lines at pharmacies, collapsed revenue, currency freefall, and families forced into migration. And here Abrams’ fingerprints are impossible to ignore: during Trump’s first administration, he served as “Special Representative for Venezuela,” helping design and defend the very sanctions that strangled the economy he now blames the government for failing to manage. Abrams says sanctions “failed,” as though they were meant to improve Venezuelan life. But sanctions did not fail. They succeeded at destabilizing society, suffocating public services, and manufacturing the humanitarian crisis now used to justify further intervention. It is circular logic: create the conditions of collapse and then point to the collapse as evidence that the government must be removed.
Abrams now frames regime change as a solution to migration, but history tells another story entirely. U.S. interventions do not stop migration; they generate it. The largest waves of displacement in our region came in the wake of U.S.-backed coups, civil wars, counterinsurgency campaigns, and, more recently, the weaponization of economic sanctions. People fled not because their governments were left alone, but because Washington treated their countries as battlefields or, in the case of sanctions, as laboratories for economic collapse. Central Americans ran from bullets and death squads; Venezuelans have been pushed out by a siege designed to break the economy and fracture society. The result is the same: migration engineered by U.S. policy, then used as justification for further intervention.
It is circular logic: create the conditions of collapse and then point to the collapse as evidence that the government must be removed.
Washington’s case against Venezuela now leans on a familiar set of fabricated alarms: claims that the country has become a hub of “narco-terrorism,” that it harbors Iranian operatives, that Chinese investment is a Trojan horse for hostile influence. Venezuela is not being targeted because of drugs, Iran, or China. It is being targeted because it has built relationships and development projects that do not answer to Washington’s dictates. Independent diplomacy, South-South cooperation, and diversified alliances are treated as threats, not because they endanger the hemisphere, but because they weaken U.S. dominance within it.
Until Washington abandons the idea that it owns the hemisphere, Latin America will never be safe. Not from Abrams, not from coups, not from CIA programs, not from blockades, and not from the Monroe Doctrine.
And perhaps the clearest sign of this imperial hypocrisy is watching Trump accuse his domestic opponents of “sedition” for a simple video where lawmakers remind US service members that they are legally bound to refuse unlawful orders. Yet the very same political forces praise the idea of Venezuelan officers breaking their own constitutional order to topple a government Washington dislikes. Latin America has lived long enough under that double standard, and we are done paying the price for it.
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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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