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cold war
Trump Continues the American Tradition of Placing His Faith in War
The nation’s ongoing support for the interminable conflicts in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, along with ever-expanding defense budgets and militarized policing at home, suggests little has changed in the ensuing decades.
Aug 19, 2025
Since inauguration day, the Trump White House has routinely evoked a deep-rooted Cold War framework for expressing America’s relationship with war. This framing sits at odds with the president’s inaugural address in which US President Donald Trump, conjuring Richard Nixon, argued that his “proudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker and unifier.”
From January 2025 on, the administration has instead engaged in a steady drumbeat of aggressive militaristic taunting, threatening real and perceived enemies, foreign and domestic alike. From ordering 1,500 active-duty troops to assist with border patrolling and deportation missions, to the secretary of defense censuring the nation’s armed forces for not focusing enough on “lethality,” the Trump administration is reviving a decades-long trend within an increasingly militarized US foreign policy—a faith in and fear of war and its consequences.
Since the end of World War II, Americans crafted and then embraced a rather disjointed relationship with war, exhilarated by its possibilities to transform the world and make them safe, while also fearing wars they could not prevent or, perhaps worse, win. This tension between faith and fear has haunted Americans and led to a persistent failure to align ends and means in carrying out US foreign relations.
Of course, ideals, interests, and power matter when it comes to foreign policy. Cold War commentators insisted that international politics was a “struggle for power.” True, some critics worried about the consequences of using “raw power” to achieve global dominance while overestimating threats. They fretted that wielding power might actually produce foreign policy crises rather than solve them.
A false faith in war, taken to its extreme, bred not just hyper-patriotism, but xenophobia and nativism.
But in the decades following the Second World War, many Americans feared that if the United States “lost” the burgeoning Cold War, their nation might not even survive. It was a tense time. World War II gave Americans the world… and the faith necessary to rule it. But seemingly new evils emerged that gave pause to policymakers and the general public alike.
Here were inklings of a relationship between faith and fear that would inform US foreign policy ever since. I talk about this in my new book, Faith and Fear: America's Relationship with War since 1945. A secular faith in war to solve any foreign policy problem, coupled with fears of America’s enemies bringing destruction to the nation’s shores, indelibly shaped policy choices when it came to containing communism around the globe.
In short, Americans largely held faith that war would always be utilitarian, a “rational means” for attaining their desired ends.
In such a cognitive framing, war might bring chaos in the dangerous world of which realists warned, but it also lured with the promise of influence, even dominance, the chance to reshape or control whole swaths of the globe.
Now by faith, I’m not talking about religious determinants in US foreign policy. For sure, church leaders used their pulpits in service to both God and the anticommunist cause. Instead, I’m expressing faith as an anecdote for policymakers’ unwavering trust and confidence in war, as a vital tool for achieving policy objectives.
Civilian and military leaders held faith in nuclear arsenals deterring communists’ pursuit of “world domination.” They assumed covert paramilitary operations would stabilize nations in Latin America and the Middle East, enduring nationalist struggles in the postcolonial era. And they faithfully believed that war would aid in modernization efforts aimed at transforming societies abroad, similar to later 21st-century counterinsurgency theorists and regime change advocates seeking to bring liberal democracy and freedom to parts of the world supposedly still living in darkness.
Military force thus became an integral component of how policymakers and citizens alike related with the outside world. After World War II, war occupied a place in America it never relinquished.
Not everyone believed this was healthy for America. Dissenters have long worried about a garrison state emanating from this process of militarizing our foreign policy, but too often their voices were drowned out. The United States had to generate power, so the argument went, and then use that power to advance its political aims against an unyielding, atheistic enemy.
But faith also partnered well with domestic politics. Eager politicians extolled the nation’s military capabilities, diminishing the costs of war while worshipping its benefits. Rarely did they consider the possibility that military intervention might make matters worse, exacerbating local problems instead of solving them.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, those who didn’t accept this compulsory faith were branded as unpatriotic heretics. A false faith in war, taken to its extreme, bred not just hyper-patriotism, but xenophobia and nativism. In the process, dissent was driven to the political periphery. It seemed far easier, and far more patriotic, to embrace false promises of easy, if not eventual victory when the nation committed itself to war.
Aside this essentialist faith in war sat a fear that nearly all national security threats, both foreign and domestic, were existential ones. Americans bounded their faith in war to a kind of Hobbesian, primal fear of the unknown.
So, what were Americans afraid of? What left them in a near constant state of Cold War paranoia? Well, everything. They feared atomic war and “unconventional” war. They feared an anarchic international system seemingly under threat by godless communist forces. They feared arms races and missile gaps, threats abroad and threats at home. They feared depressions and recessions, the future and the past. They feared Soviet spies and Cuban “revolutionaries,” and, perhaps worst of all, they feared each other.
Americans displayed a kind of “neurotic anxiety” born of perpetually exaggerated fear. The parallels to today are striking. Had not the 9/11 attacks, as just one example, also revived long-simmering, stereotypical fears that Muslim extremists, in literary critic Edward Said’s words, might “take over the world”?
And, not surprisingly, as the Cold War persisted, opportunistic politicians and big business realized that existential fear could be a useful tool for persuasion, propaganda, and profit. Taken to its politicized extreme, fear could breed a form of militarized consensus.
In fact, the insidious relationships between legislators and lobbyists became a hallmark of Cold War politics as major defense firms were rewarded for the nation’s increased military posture. As one journalist noted in 1961, the purposes of the military-industrial complex fit “neatly in the atmosphere of crisis… as the United States continued to be held in the grip of wartime thinking.”
These tensions between faith and fear matter because they endure. For Cold War Americans, not unlike today, war was immensely relevant. As George Kennan, the father of “containment,” saw it in 1951, “many people in this country are coming to believe that war is not only unavoidable but imminent.”
The nation’s ongoing support for the interminable conflicts in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, along with ever-expanding defense budgets and militarized policing at home, suggests little has changed in the ensuing decades.
Ultimately, these interactions between faith and fear have the potential to culminate into a spiraling, never-ending militarization of American foreign policy that leaves us far less safe in an uncertain world.
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80 Years of Living and Writing in the Shadow of the Bomb
My acute focus on the danger of nuclear war may stem in part from the accident of my birthday on August 9, 1945.
Aug 09, 2025
I was born on August 9, 1945, the day the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki, Japan, three days after dropping an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Fear of nuclear war was widespread among children of my generation. There were air raid drills where we hid under our desks or crouched alongside the wall in the hall. There were debates about the construction of fallout shelters. Fallout from nuclear testing caused the radioactive element strontium 90 to appear in the milk supply, we were told. When I visited the Oceanside public library when I was 12 or so, I read the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. Each issue included a picture of a nuclear clock showing how close political and military tension was pushing us to midnight and the risks of a nuclear war, which the scientists viewed as unthinkable.
For my 76th birthday, my older brother Ron gave me a puzzle of The New York Times front page on the day of my birth. The three-line banner headline for the day read: “Soviet Declares War on Japan; Attacks Manchuria, Tokyo Says; Atom Bomb Loosed on Japan.” The importance of the Soviet Union joining in their allies’ war against Japan was rightly emphasized by the Times. Unfortunately, the alliance came apart soon after the end of the war, and the Cold War between two nuclear-armed powers shaped global and domestic politics for over 40 years. Although several arms control agreements were reached between 1963 and 2010, in the last 15 years, the cancellation and suspension of these agreements and increasing political and military tension have put the Bulletin’s clock closer than ever to midnight.
We grew up with the fear that the Cold War could become a nuclear war, and each of us had to decide what attitude to take to both the Cold War and the nuclear danger. My parents shaped my attitudes, raised my brother and me to support unions, working people, and civil rights and to oppose the Cold War and McCarthyism. When playing touch football and other games with three other boys when I was about 12, we debated the U.S.-Soviet conflict. We usually played in a field near the Ocean Lea complex where the three of them lived. Touch football is a pretty easy, fun game to play when it’s two against two, at least when the four players are similar sizes, ages, and skill levels. We took breaks from throwing, running, and catching to debate politics, especially international affairs. In these discussions, I was critical of Cold War confrontation and favored negotiations to reduce the dangers of nuclear war and achieve eventual nuclear disarmament.
My acute focus on the danger of nuclear war may stem in part from the accident of my birthday. I’ve been writing about the dangers presented by nuclear weapons for over 60 years. I hope the reader will forgive me for quoting some of my previous writings.
Cuban Missile Crisis and Nuclear Test Ban Treaty
When I was a senior in high school, I wrote some political essays for the Oceanside High School newspaper, Sider Press. I wrote an essay about the nuclear danger just before the Cuban missile crisis erupted. I commented:
On a recent television program, Howard K. Smith made the extraordinary statement that President Kennedy was experiencing a decline in popularity because there was no great crisis for him to overcome. Mr. Smith overlooked one extremely important crisis—that of the threatened nuclear holocaust.
If President Kennedy were to effect a decrease in world tension during the next two years, he would undoubtedly be returned to office. The stage would then be set for the president to work toward a successful disarmament agreement during the next four years. If the president accomplished this task, he would become one of the most popular presidents in the nation’s history.
The essay went on to recommend cultural exchanges and a compromise to achieve an end to nuclear testing. “What we need most is for both sides to make a sincere effort to bring about a decrease in world tension. President Kennedy and Premier Khrushchev should acknowledge the fact that nuclear war would result in the destruction of mankind. There would be no winner in the event of a nuclear catastrophe.” Before my essay appeared in print, Cold War tensions and the danger of nuclear war reached a peak with the Cuban missile crisis. Eight months after the confrontation over Cuba was resolved by diplomacy, the U.S. and the Soviet Union agreed on the Limited Test Ban Treaty.
I explored the significance of the events of 1962 and 1963 in an essay published in The Japan Times in 1999:
...the experience of the missile crisis led Kennedy to move away from seeing foreign policy as a tough competitive game. He came to appreciate the human stakes involved. He was, after all, a parent of young children as well as a president.
In a speech at American University on June 10, 1963, Kennedy indicated the changes in his thinking. He said that the U.S. should seek a “genuine peace“ so that nations can “build a better life for their children” rather than a “Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war.“
Casting a critical eye on cold war attitudes, Kennedy sought to “make the world safe for diversity.” He stressed that “we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.”
Members of Massachusetts Peace Action, an organization to which I belong, have also been highlighting Kennedy’s American University speech. It’s possible for individuals and presidents to think anew, and it’s dearly needed at a time of the genocide in Gaza and the ongoing and dangerous war in Ukraine.
Ronald Reagan, the Nuclear Freeze Movement, and the INF Treaty
Shortly after he was inaugurated president, I wrote to Ronald Reagan asking him to accept Leonid Brezhnev’s suggestion that they meet in a summit conference:
I am very concerned about the escalation in anti-Soviet rhetoric that has characterized your first weeks in office. A return to 1950s rhetoric can only lead to increasing tensions between our country and the Soviet Union. Such tensions can bring us to the brink of nuclear war again. And who knows if once at the brink, you will be able to stop from falling over into a nuclear holocaust that would destroy us all... Are you afraid that if peace breaks out, you will find it more difficult to line the pockets of the defense contractors with still more billions of taxpayers’ dollars? Whatever your... fears, I believe you should fear nuclear war more. The overwhelming desire of the peoples of the world is to see an end to the nuclear arms race which threatens us all.
Reagan’s initial aggressive posture led to the development of a massive nuclear freeze movement in the U.S. and a movement in Europe against accepting new U.S. intermediate range nuclear weapons. I was among over 1 million people in New York City on June 12 ,1982 demanding that all sides add no new weapons to their nuclear arsenals. It was the nuclear freeze movement, which the Soviet Union supported, and the Reagan administration attacked, that eventually led to a reversal in Reagan’s policy and the adoption of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in 1987. Initiatives by a new Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, also played a part in Reagan’s change.
Japan and Peace
About a decade after Reagan left the White House, I was a Fulbright scholar at Tohoku University in Japan. When I arrived in Japan, I mentioned at the initial Fulbright scholar gathering my birth date, my opposition to nuclear weapons, and my experience as part of a generation involved in peace and civil rights activism. Two others around the table, Lois Helmbold, a historian who became a close friend, and Sam Sheppard, the director of the Fulbright program in Japan, mentioned they were also born in 1945. In interviews I’ve conducted with members of my birth cohort, it seemed clear that most of us were influenced by Kennedy’s idea that “the world is very different now.” As San Antonio playwright Sterling Houston put it in my interview with him: “Coming of age in the 60s when there was this ferment [and] the possibilities of change and all this stuff was happening... It seemed like it really could happen... we really could make it better.”
The most memorable experience of my stay in Japan was the visit my younger daughter Leah and I took to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum and the Children’s Peace Monument in Peace Memorial Park. We were already aware of the story of Sadako Sasaki and the folding of paper cranes. Seeing the exhibits in the museum, the monuments, the film Hiroshima: A Mother’s Prayer, and the thousands of cranes in the park brought both of us to tears.
With the danger of nuclear war, greater than ever, we need a renewed grassroots movement to support the eradication of nuclear weapons from the planet.
In an essay published in The Japan Times after I returned home, I commented on the impact of the visit to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum and my concern that Japan was sending 600 soldiers to join the U.S. occupation of Iraq. I mentioned my fear that the government of Japan was undermining the country’s peace constitution. The New York Times article on Japan’s military mission emphasized that the U.S. “imposed” the peace constitution on Japan, but I pointed out the Times failed to note “the strong desire of the Japanese people after the war to break with the militarism and aggression that had brought enormous harm and suffering to Japan’s neighbors and disaster to Japan itself.” I added that “I learned from my time in Japan that strong sentiments for peace and opposition against nuclear arms persist to this day.”
I learned a great deal from the peace museum’s “documentation of the many times my government has threatened to use nuclear weapons and of the continuing advocacy of nuclear disarmament by the citizens and leaders of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” I argued, that “at a time when a neoconservative clique seeking world hegemony plays a leading role in U.S. foreign policy formation... Japan’s antinuclear advocacy is needed now more than ever.”
Anti-Nuclear Weapons Advocacy Today
Commemorations of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are taking place throughout the world this week. On August 6, 2025, United Nations Under-Secretary-General Izumi Nakamitsu issued a statement to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial on behalf of United Nations Secretary General António Guterres:
...today the risk of nuclear conflict is growing. Trust is eroding. Geopolitical divisions are widening. And the very weapons that brought such devastation to Hiroshima and Nagasaki are once again being treated as tools of coercion.
Yet, there are signs of hope.
Last year, the Japanese organization Nihon Hidankyo—which represents the survivors of the Nagasaki and Hiroshima bombings—was awarded the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize for its tireless work in raising awareness about this critical issue.
We must focus our attention on the genocide in Gaza and the “escalating violence” and “forced displacement” in the West Bank, the continuing war in Ukraine, and the humanitarian crisis in Sudan. With the danger of nuclear war, greater than ever, we need a renewed grassroots movement to support the eradication of nuclear weapons from the planet.
Nuclear arms agreements among the nuclear powers are nearly defunct. The people who live in the nuclear armed states need to pressure their governments to eliminate their nuclear stockpiles and instead pursue diplomacy with all the other nations of the world rather than nuclear intimidation.
The United Nations notes that September 26 “The International Day for the Total Elimination of Nuclear Weapons has been observed annually since 2014.” The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons adopted by the United Nations entered into force on January 22, 2021. We the people of the states possessing nuclear weapons must do all in our power to persuade our governments to ratify the treaty and implement its provisions that will lead to a world without nuclear weapons. The survival of humanity is at stake.
This piece was originally published on Martin Halpern’s Substack, A Marxist Writing and Making History.
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NATO's 5% Pledge: An Obscene Betrayal of Global Needs
Presented as a historic step, in truth this increased level of military spending represents a major step backwards for humanity and the common good.
Jun 26, 2025
At this week’s NATO summit in The Hague, leaders announced an alarming new goal: push military spending to 5% of nations’ GDP by 2035. Framed as a response to rising global threats, particularly from Russia and terrorism, the declaration was hailed as a historic step. But in truth, it represents a major step backwards—away from addressing the urgent needs of people and the planet, and toward an arms race that will impoverish societies while enriching weapons contractors.
This outrageous 5% spending target didn’t come out of nowhere—it’s the direct result of years of bullying by U.S. President Donald Trump. During his first term, Trump repeatedly berated NATO members for not spending enough on their militaries, pressuring them to meet a 2% GDP threshold that was already controversial and so excessive that nine NATO countries still fall below that “target.”
Now, with Trump back in the White House, NATO leaders are falling in line, setting a staggering 5% target that even the United States—already spending over $1 trillion a year on its military—doesn’t reach. This is not defense; it’s extortion on a global scale, pushed by a president who views diplomacy as a shakedown and war as good business.
This is not defense; it’s extortion on a global scale, pushed by a president who views diplomacy as a shakedown and war as good business.
Countries across Europe and North America are already slashing public services and yet they are now expected to funnel even more taxpayer money into war preparation. Currently, no NATO country spends more on the military than on health or education. But if they all hit the new 5% military spending goal, 21 of them would spend more on weapons than on schools.
Spain was one of the few to reject this escalation, with Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez making clear that his government would not sacrifice pensions and social programs to meet a militarized spending target. Other governments, including Belgium and Slovakia, quietly pushed back too.
Still, NATO leaders pressed on, cheered by Secretary-General Mark Rutte, who fawned over Donald Trump’s demand that Europe boost defense spending. Rutte even referred to Trump as “Daddy,” a comment that—while dismissed as a joke—spoke volumes about NATO’s subservience to U.S. militarism. Under Trump’s influence, the NATO alliance is shedding even the pretense of being a defensive pact, embracing instead the language and logic of perpetual war.
Real security doesn’t come from tanks and missiles—it comes from strong communities, global cooperation, and urgent action on our shared crises.
Just before NATO leaders were gathering at the Hague, protesters took to the streets under the banner “No to NATO.” And back in their home countries, civic groups are demanding a redirection of resources toward climate justice, healthcare, and peace. Polls show that majorities in the U.S. oppose increased military spending, but NATO is not accountable to the people. It’s accountable to political elites, arms manufacturers and a Cold War logic that sees every global development through the lens of threat and domination.
NATO’s expansion, both in terms of war spending and size (it has grown from 12 founding members to 32 countries today) has not brought peace. On the contrary, the alliance’s promise that Ukraine would one day join its ranks was one of the triggers for Russia’s brutal war. Instead of de-escalating, the alliance has doubled down with weapons, not diplomacy. In Gaza, Israel continues its U.S.-backed war with impunity, while NATO nations send more arms and offer no serious push for peace. Now the alliance wants to drain public coffers to sustain these wars indefinitely. NATO is also surrounding its adversaries, particularly Russia, with ever more bases and troops.
Under Trump’s influence, the NATO alliance is shedding even the pretense of being a defensive pact, embracing instead the language and logic of perpetual war.
All of this demands a radical rethink. As the world burns—literally—NATO is stocking up on kindling. When healthcare systems are crumbling, schools underfunded, and blazing temperatures making large swaths of the planet uninhabitable, the idea that governments should commit billions more to weapons and war is obscene. Real security doesn’t come from tanks and missiles—it comes from strong communities, global cooperation, and urgent action on our shared crises.
We need to flip the script. That means cutting military budgets, withdrawing from endless wars, and beginning a serious conversation about dismantling NATO. The alliance, born of the Cold War, is now a stumbling block to global peace and an active participant in war-making. Its latest summit only reinforces that reality.
This is not just about NATO’s budget—it’s about our future. Every euro or dollar spent on weapons is one not spent on confronting the climate crisis, lifting people out of poverty, or building a peaceful world. For the future of our planet, we must reject NATO and the war economy.
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