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colonialism
Israel's Air-Power Colonialism
Like the British empire before it, Israel is attempting to dominate the Middle East from the skies.
Oct 14, 2025
US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s nomination of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, his hands already crimson with the blood of innocent Iraqis, to run post-war Gaza, brings to mind a distant era when London sent its politicians out to be viceroys in its global colonial domains. Consider Blair’s proposed appointment, made (of course!) without consulting any Palestinians, a clear signal that the Middle East has entered a second era of Western imperialism. Other than Palestine, which has already been subjected to classic settler colonialism, our current neo-imperial moment is characterized by the American use of Israel as its base in the Middle East and by the employment of air power to subdue any challengers.
Swarming
The odd assortment of grifters, oil men, financiers, mercenaries, white nationalists, and Christian and Jewish Zionists now presiding in Washington, led by that great orange-hued hotelier-in-chief, has (with the help of Germany, Great Britain, and France) built up Israel into a huge airbase with a small country attached to it. From that airbase, a constant stream of missiles, rockets, drones, and fighter jets routinely swarm out to hit regional neighbors.
Gaza was pounded into rubble almost hourly for the last two years, only the first month of which could plausibly have been justified as “self-defense” in the wake of the horrific Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023. Even the Palestinian West Bank, already under Israeli military rule, has been struck repeatedly from above. Lebanon has been subject to numerous bombings despite a supposed ceasefire, as has Syria (no matter that its leader claims he wants good relations with his neighbor). Yemen, which has indeed fired missiles at Israel to protest the genocide in Gaza, has now been hit endlessly by the Israelis, who also struck Iranian nuclear enrichment sites and other targets last June.
Some of the Israeli bombing raids or missile and drone strikes were indeed tit-for-tat replies to attacks by that country’s enemies. Others were only made necessary because of Israeli provocations, including its seemingly never-ending atrocities in Gaza, to which regional actors have felt compelled to reply. Many Israeli strikes, however, have had little, if anything, to do with self-defense, often being aimed at civilian targets or at places like Syria that pose no immediate threat. On September 9, Israel even bombed Qatar, the country its leaders had asked to help negotiate with Hamas for the return of Israeli hostages taken on October 7.
Tel Aviv is now shaping governments of the Middle East simply by wiping their officials off the face of the Earth or credibly threatening to do so.
In short, what we’re now seeing is Israel’s version of air-power colonialism.
Typically, its fighter jets bombed the Yemeni capital of Sanaa on August 28, assassinating northern Yemen’s prime minister, Ahmed al-Rahwi, along with several senior members of the region’s Houthi government and numerous journalists. (Israeli officials had previously boasted that they could have killed the top leadership of Iran in their 12-day war on that country in June.)
In reality, Tel Aviv is now shaping governments of the Middle East simply by wiping their officials off the face of the Earth or credibly threatening to do so. Israel has also had an eerie hand in shaping outside perceptions of developments in the region by regularly assassinating journalists, not only in Palestine but also in Lebanon and as far abroad as Yemen. However, by failing to come close to subduing the region entirely, what Tel Aviv has created is a negative version of hegemony rather than grasping any kind of positive leadership role.
Negative Imperialism
The massive June bombardment of Iran by Israel and the United States, destroying civilian nuclear enrichment facilities at Natanz and Fordow, came amid ongoing diplomatic negotiations in Oman. As a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Iran has the right to enrich uranium for civilian uses and no credible evidence was presented that Tehran had decided to militarize its program. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) condemned both sets of strikes as severe violations of the United Nations charter and of its own statutes. They also posed public health concerns, mainly because of the release of potentially toxic chemicals and radiological contaminants.
Those attacks, in short, were aimed at denying Iran the sort of economic and scientific enterprises that are a routine part of life in Israel and the United States, as well as Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, Japan, the Netherlands, Pakistan, Russia, and the United Kingdom. Several of those countries (like Israel) do, of course, also have nuclear weapons, while Iran does not. In the end, Tehran saw no benefit in the 2015 nuclear deal its leaders had agreed to that required it to mothball 80% of its civilian nuclear enrichment program. Indeed, President Trump functionally punished the Iranian leadership for complying with it when he imposed maximum-pressure sanctions in May 2018—sanctions largely maintained by the Biden administration and in place to this day.
Those dangerous and illegal air strikes on Iran should bring to mind 19th-century British and Russian resistance to the building of a railroad by Iran’s Qajar dynasty, a form of what I’ve come to think of as “negative imperialism.” In other words, contrary to classic theories of imperialism that focused on the domination of markets and the extraction of resources, some imperial strategies have always been aimed at preventing the operation of markets in order to keep a victim nation weak.
After all, Iran has few navigable waterways and its economy has long suffered from transportation difficulties. The obvious solution once upon a time was to build a railroad, something both the British and the Russians came to oppose out of a desire to keep that country a weak buffer zone between their empires. Iran didn’t, in fact, get such a railroad until 1938.
In a similar fashion, 21st-century imperialism-from-the-air is denying it the ability to produce fuel for its nuclear power plant at Bushehr. The United States, Europe, and Israel are treating Iran differently from so many other countries in this regard because of its government’s rejection of a Western-imposed imperial order in the region.
Popular movements and revolts brought the long decades of British and French colonial dominance of the Middle East to an end after World War II. The demise of colonialism and the rise of independent nation-states was, however, never truly accepted by right-wing politicians in either Europe or the United States who had no interest in confronting the horrors of the colonial age. Instead, they preferred to ignore history, including the slave trade, economic looting, the displacement or massacre of Indigenous populations, the mismanagement of famines, and forms of racist apartheid. Worse yet, the desire for a sanitized history of the colonial era was often coupled with a determination to run the entire deadly experiment all over again.
The framers of the ill-omened Global War on Terror’s nightmares in Afghanistan and Iraq during the administration of President George W. Bush would openly celebrate what was functionally the return of Western colonialism. They attempted to use America’s moment as a hyperpower (unconstrained by great power competition after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991) to attempt to recolonize the Greater Middle East.
Predictably, they failed miserably. Unlike their 19th-century ancestors, people in the Global South are now largely urban and literate, connected by newspapers and the internet, organized by political parties and nongovernmental outfits, and in possession of capital, resources, and sophisticated weaponry. Direct colonization could now only be achieved through truly genocidal acts, as Israeli actions in Gaza suggest—and, even then, would be unlikely to succeed.
“We Destroyed the Villages by Air Patrols”
No wonder imperial powers have once again turned to indirect dominance through aerial bombardment. The use of air power to try to subdue or at least curb Middle Easterners is, in fact, more than a century old. That tactic was inaugurated by the government of Italian Prime Minister Giovanni Giolitti during his country’s invasion and occupation of Ottoman Libya in 1911. Aerial surveillance pilot Lieutenant Giulio Gavotti fitted detonators to two-pound grenades, dropping them on enemy camps. Though he caused no injuries, his act, then seen as sneaky and ungentlemanly, provoked outrage.
The ruthless British subjugation of Palestine, aimed at—this should sound eerily familiar today—displacing the Indigenous population and establishing a European “Jewish Ulster” there to bolster British rule in the Middle East, also deployed air power. As Irish parliamentarian Chris Hazzard observed, “Herbert Samuel, hated in Ireland for sanctioning Roger Casement’s execution and the internment of thousands following the Easter Rising in 1916—would, as Britain’s first High Commissioner in Palestine, order the indiscriminate aerial bombardment of Palestinian protestors in 1921 (the first bombs dropped from the sky on Palestinian civilians).”
The most extensive use of aerial bombardment for imperial control, however, would be pursued by the British in Mesopotamia, which they derogatorily called “Mespot.” The fragile British occupation of what is now Iraq from 1917 to 1932 ended long before imperialists like then-Secretary of State for War, Air, and the Colonies Winston Churchill thought it should, largely because the armed local population mounted a vigorous resistance to it. A war-weary British public proved unwilling to bear the costs of a large occupation army there in the 1920s, so Churchill decided to use the Royal Air Force to keep control.
Unlike genuine international leadership, the Frankenstein monster of negative hegemony in the Middle East stirs only opposition and resistance.
Arthur “Bomber” Harris, a settler in colonial Rhodesia, who joined the British Air Force during the first World War, was then sent to Iraq. As he wrote, “We were equipped with Vickers Venon and subsequently Victoria aircraft… By sawing a sighting hole in the nose of our troop carriers and making our own bomb racks we converted them into what were nearly the first post-war long-range heavy bombers.” He did not attempt to gild the lily about his tactics: “[I]f the rebellion continued, we destroyed the villages and by air patrols kept the insurgents away from their homes for as long as necessary.” That, as he explained, was far less expensive than using troops and, of course, produced no high infantry casualty counts of the sort that had scarred Europe’s conscience during World War I.
Colonial officials obscured the fact that such measures were being taken against a civilian population in peacetime, rather than enemy soldiers during a war. In short, the denial that there are any civilians in Palestine, or in the Middle East more generally, has a long colonial heritage. It should be noted, however, that, in the end, Great Britain’s aerial dominance of Iraq failed, and it finally had to grant that country what at least passed for independence in 1932. In 1958, an enraged public would finally violently overthrow the government the British had installed there, after which Iraq became a nationalist challenger to Western dominance in the region for decades to come.
Of course, Harris’ air power strategy, whetted in Mesopotamia, came to haunt Europe itself during the Second World War, when he emerged as commander-in-chief of Bomber Command and rose to the rank of air chief marshal. He would then pioneer the tactic of massively bombarding civilian cities, beginning with the “thousand bomber” raid on Cologne in May 1942. His “total war” air campaign would, of course, culminate in the notorious 1945 firebombing of Dresden, which devastated eight square miles of the “Florence of Germany,” wiping out at least 25,000 victims, most of them noncombatants.
Terror from the Skies
In the end, the way Bomber Harris’ deadly skies came home to Europe should be an object lesson to our own neo-imperialists. At this very moment, in fact, Europe faces menacing drones no less than does the Middle East. Moreover, unlike genuine international leadership, the Frankenstein monster of negative hegemony in the Middle East stirs only opposition and resistance. Despite Israel’s technological superiority, it has hardly achieved invulnerability. Poverty-stricken and war-ridden Yemen has, for instance, managed to all but close the vital Red Sea to international shipping to protest the genocide in Gaza and has hit Israel with hypersonic missiles, closing the port of Eilat. Nor, during their 12-day war, did Iran prove entirely helpless either. It took out Israel’s major oil refinery and struck key military and research facilities. Instead of shaking the Iranian government, Israel appears to have pushed Iranians to rally around the flag. Nor is it even clear that Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium was affected.
Most damning of all, Israel’s ability to inflict atrocities on the Palestinians of Gaza (often with US-supplied weaponry) has produced widespread revulsion. It is now increasingly isolated, its prime minister unable even to fly over France and Spain due to a fear of an International Criminal Court warrant for his arrest. The publics of the Middle East are boiling with anger, as are many Europeans. In early October, Italy’s major labor unions called a general strike, essentially closing the country down to protest Israel’s interception of the Global Sumud Flotilla, a group of ships attempting to bring humanitarian aid to Gaza. As with Bomber Harris’ ill-starred domination of Iraq, terror from the skies in Gaza and beyond is all too likely to fail as a long-term Grand Strategy.
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Report Shows How to End 'Climate Colonialism' and Ensure a Just Transition for Global South
"A just transition must redistribute power and resources, curb overconsumption, and prioritize dignity and rights for all," Oxfam International stresses in a new report.
Sep 24, 2025
A report published Wednesday details how "climate colonialism" of wealthier nations "hijacks" investment and profits from the Global South—and lays out how the world can "move beyond extractive models and build an energy system rooted in equality, justice, care, and collective prosperity."
The Oxfam International report notes that "the global energy transition stands at a pivotal moment: It can either dismantle the inequalities driving the climate crisis or deepen them. Today, the transition risks reproducing patterns of extractivism and exploitation, with the most marginalized paying the highest price while elites profit."
"From transition mineral mining to debt burdens and unequal energy access, the current trajectory mirrors centuries of colonial injustice," the publication states. "A just transition must redistribute power and resources, curb overconsumption, and prioritize dignity and rights for all."
The report continues:
Today, the warning signs are clear: The global renewable energy transition is being built on unequal foundations. We are witnessing climate inequality inaction: a transition focused on replacing fossil fuels with green alternatives, without questioning the excessive energy use of the richest, while often leaving lower-income communities to bear the greatest costs, including through the harmful impacts of transition mineral mining, inadequate benefit sharing, and global financial and trade systems rigged against their interests. Put simply, the same dynamics that drove historical colonialism are reaemerging in new forms through the green transition.
These patterns of inequality play out both between and within countries. While stark inequalities exist between the richest and poorest within high-income countries too, global inequality is most sharply felt in the Global South, where structural barriers and historic injustices have left entire nations bearing the brunt of the climate crisis and now shouldering the greatest risks in the renewable energy transition.
"Unless the logic underpinning the transition changes, it will continue to replicate the history of extractivism and exploitation," the report warns. "These inequalities intersect with gender, race, class, age, and other marginalized people or groups, meaning that the costs of an unjust transition fall heaviest on Indigenous peoples, Black communities and other racialized groups, women, workers, peasants, and of course young people and future generations."
"This concentration of wealth and power is mirrored in patterns of energy use: A small minority live in extreme luxury and overconsume planetary resources, while others still lack basic electricity," the report's authors wrote. "If just one year’s energy consumption of the wealthiest 1% were redistributed, it could meet the modern energy needs of all the people in the world without electricity seven times over, while redistributing the consumption of the top 10% global energy consumers could meet the needs of the entire Global South nine times over."
The report also highlights how a "colonial financial system" plays a key role in perpetuating injustice, noting that "while rich countries can pour billions into their own clean energy transitions, the Global South is left with rising debt, punishing interest rates, and shrinking fiscal space."
For every #ElectricVehicle that contains about 3kg of cobalt mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Tesla earns approximately $3,150 in profit. While the DRC government receives less than $10 in royalties and the average miner earns just $7!📢 Read our new report to learn more: oxf.am/3W68E2o
[image or embed]
— Oxfam International (@oxfaminternational.bsky.social) September 24, 2025 at 6:46 AM
According to Oxfam:
In 2024, high-income countries accounted for roughly 50% of global clean energy investment, and China for 29%, while Africa accounted for just 2%, despite sub-Saharan Africa being home to 85% of all the people in the world without electricity. The inequality is not only in where finance flows, but in how much it costs: Clean energy projects in the Global South face interest rates of 9–13.5%, compared with just 3–6% in richer countries, slowing the pace of the transition. These costs are not inevitable—they reflect a system that prices risk through the racialized lens of colonial legacies. The impact is stark: Powering 100,000 people with clean energy costs about $95 million in advanced economies like the UK, but $139 million (45% higher) in emerging economies such as India and $188 million (97% higher) in African countries such as Nigeria.
How does the Global South reclaim its energy future from climate colonialism? According to the report's authors, "Rather than treating the energy future as a race with few winners, we must reimagine it as a shared global project."
"Energy should not be hoarded, withheld, or used as leverage for geopolitical or corporate power," the report advises. "This structural change requires reparative justice: making rich polluters pay, redistributing resources, confronting overconsumption, and prioritizing the rights of those historically excluded while embracing economic models that put equality, well-being, and ecological limits at the center.
"Tackling inequality is both a moral imperative and an effective strategy for climate mitigation," the authors stressed, offering the following recommendations:
- Differentiating transition pathways based on historical responsibility and capacity;
- Working toward more equitable energy consumption;
- Reforming trade, investment, and taxation systems;
- Replacing extractive financial models with debt cancellation, grant-based climate finance, and reparations initiatives;
- Safeguarding communities and nature;
- Democratizing energy governance; and
- Adopting an international mechanism at the United Nations Climate Change Conference to ensure policy coherence and accelerate, consolidate, and achieve a holistic just transition.
The UN conference, or COP30—scheduled to begin November 10 in Belém, Brazil—is set to feature the theme of a just transition as a central agenda item.
"There is no single blueprint for a just transition—it will differ across contexts, shaped by diverse histories, knowledge, and needs," the Oxfam report states. "But all just transitions must share one principle: Energy should serve life, not profit."
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The Department of Defense Has Always Been the Department of War
The reversion of the Defense Department to the War Department should be seen less as a rupture than a revelation. It strips away a euphemism to make far plainer what has long been the reality of our world.
Sep 19, 2025
The renaming of the Defense Department should have surprised no one. US President Donald Trump is an incipient fascist doing what such figures do. Surrounded by a coterie of illiberal ideologues and careerist sycophants, he and his top aides have dispensed with pretense and precedent, moving at breakneck speed to demolish what remains of the battered façade of American democracy.
In eight months, his second administration has unleashed a shock-and-awe assault on norms and institutions, civil liberties, human rights, and history itself. But fascism never respects borders. Fascists don’t recognize the rule of law. They consider themselves the law. Expansion and the glorification of war are their lifeblood. Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini put it all too bluntly: The fascist “believes neither in the possibility nor the utility of perpetual peace… war alone brings up to its highest tension all human energy and puts the stamp of nobility upon the peoples who have courage to meet it.”
Pete Hegseth is now equally blunt. From the Pentagon, he’s boasting of restoring a “warrior ethos” to the armed forces, while forging an offensive military that prizes “maximum lethality, not tepid legality. Violent effect, not politically correct.” The message couldn’t be clearer: When the US loses wars, as it has done consistently despite commanding the most powerful military in history, it’s not due to imperial overreach, political arrogance, or popular resistance. Rather, defeat stems from that military having gone “woke,” a euphemism for failing to kill enough people.
The recent rechristening of the Department of Defense as the Department of War was certainly a culture-war stunt like Trump’s demand that the Gulf of Mexico be renamed the Gulf of America. But it also signaled something more insidious: a blunt escalation of the criminal logic that has long underwritten US militarism. That logic sustained both the Cold War of the last century and the War on Terror of this one, destroying millions of lives.
When Hegseth defended the recent summary executions of 11 alleged Venezuelan drug smugglers on a boat in the Caribbean, he boasted that Washington possesses “absolute and complete authority” to kill anywhere without congressional approval or evidence of a wrong and in open defiance of international law. The next day, in responding on X to a user who called what had been done a war crime, Vance wrote, “I don’t give a shit what you call it.” It was the starkest admission since the Iraq War that Washington no longer pretends to operate internationally under the rule of law but under the rule of force, where might quite simply makes right.
While such an escalation of verbiage—the brazen confession of an imperial power that believes itself immune from accountability—should alarm us, it’s neither unprecedented nor unexpected. Peace, after all, has never been the profession of the US military. The Department of Defense has always been the Department of War.
American Imperialism and “Star-Spangled Fascism”
The US has long denied being an empire. From its founding, imperialism was cast as the antithesis of American values. This nation, after all, was born in revolt against the tyranny of foreign rule. Yet for a country so insistent on not being an empire, Washington has followed a trajectory nearly indistinguishable from its imperial predecessors. Its history was defined by settler conquest, the violent elimination of Indigenous peoples, and a long record of covert and overt interventions to topple governments unwilling to yield to American political or economic domination.
The record is unmistakable. As Noam Chomsky once put it, “Talking about American imperialism is like talking about triangular triangles.” And he was hardly the first to suggest such a thing. In the 1930s, General Smedley Butler, reflecting with searing candor on his years of military service in Latin America, described himself as “a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism… I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests… I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street.”
Historically, imperialism and fascism went hand in hand. As Aimé Césaire argued in his 1950 Discourse on Colonialism, fascism is imperialism turned inward. The violence inherent in colonial domination can, in the end, never be confined to the colonies, which means that what we’re now witnessing in the Trumpian era is a reckoning. The chickens are indeed coming home to roost or, as Noura Erakat recently observed, “The boomerang comes back.”
Yet for a country so insistent on not being an empire, Washington has followed a trajectory nearly indistinguishable from its imperial predecessors.
In their insatiable projection of power and pursuit of profit, Washington and Wall Street ignored what European empires had long revealed: that colonization “works to decivilize the colonizer, to brutalize him… to degrade him.” English novelist Joseph Conrad recognized this in his classic 19th-century work of fiction, Heart of Darkness, concluding that it wasn’t the Congo River but the Thames River in Great Britain that “led into the heart of an immense darkness.”
Imperialism incubates fascism, a dynamic evident in the carnage of World War I, rooted, as W.E.B. DuBois observed at the time, in colonial competition that laid the foundations for World War II. In that conflict, Césaire argued, the Nazis applied to Europe the methods and attitudes that until then were reserved for colonized peoples, unleashing them on Europeans with similarly genocidal effect.
War Is Peace
In the postwar years, the United States emerged from the ruins of Europe as the unrivaled global hegemon. With some 6% of the world’s population, it commanded nearly half of the global gross domestic product. Anchored by up to 2,000 military bases across the globe (still at 800 today), it became the new imperial power on which the sun never set. Yet Washington ignored the fundamental lesson inherent in Europe’s self-cannibalization. Rather than dismantle the machinery of empire, it embraced renewed militarism. Rather than demobilize, it placed itself on a permanent global war footing, both anticipating and accelerating the Cold War with that other great power of the period, the Soviet Union.
The United States was, however, a superpower defined as much by paranoia and insecurity as by military and economic strength. It was in such a climate that American officials moved to abandon the title of the Department of War in 1947, rebranding it as the Department of Defense two years later. The renaming sought to reassure the world that, despite every sign the US had assumed the mantle of European colonialism, its intentions were benign and defensive in nature.
That rhetorical shift would prove inseparable from a broader ideological transformation as the Cold War froze geopolitics into rigid Manichean camps. President Harry Truman’s March 1947 address to Congress marked the start of a new global confrontation. In that speech, the president proclaimed the United States the guardian of freedom and democracy everywhere. Leftist movements were cast as Soviet proxies and struggles for national liberation in the former colonial world were framed not in the language of decolonization and self-determination but as nefarious threats to American interests and international peace and security.
In Europe at the time, a civil war raged in Greece, while decisive elections loomed in Italy. Determined not to “lose” such countries to communism, Washington moved to undermine democracy under the guise of saving it. In Greece, it would channel $300 million to right-wing forces, many staffed by former fascists and Nazi collaborators, in the name of defending freedom. In Western Europe, Washington used its position as the world’s banker to manipulate electoral outcomes. In the wake of the 1947 National Security Act that created the Central Intelligence Agency, or CIA (the same bill that renamed the War Department), the agency launched its first large-scale covert operation. In 1948, the US would funnel millions of dollars into Italy and unleashed a torrent of propaganda to ensure that leftist parties would not prevail.
Across the Third World, the CIA perfected that template for covert interventions aimed at toppling democratic governments and installing pliant authoritarians. The overthrow of Iran’s Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953 and Guatemala’s Jacobo Árbenz in 1954 marked the beginning of a series of regime-change operations. More assassinations and coups followed, including of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo in 1961, Sukarno in Indonesia in 1965, and Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973. The utter contempt for democracy inherent in such actions was embodied in National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger’s remark: “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.”
In the aftermath of each intervention, Washington installed anticommunist dictators who had one thing in common: They murdered their own citizens, and often those of other countries as well, dismantled democratic institutions, and siphoned national wealth into personal fortunes and the coffers of multinational corporations.
By the 1980s, the CIA was bankrolling proxy wars spanning the globe. Billions of dollars were being funneled to the Afghan mujahideen and Nicaraguan Contras. In both Afghanistan and Nicaragua, those US-backed “freedom fighters” (or, as President Ronald Reagan termed the Contras, the “moral equals of our founding fathers”) deployed tactics that amounted to scaled-up terrorism. The mask occasionally slipped. As historian Greg Grandin has noted, one adviser to the Joint Chiefs of Staff described the Contras as “the strangest national liberation organization in the world.” In truth, he conceded, they were “just a bunch of killers.”
“The Greatest Purveyor of Violence”
As with the CIA, the not-so-aptly-renamed “Defense Department” would oversee a succession of catastrophic wars that did nothing to make Americans safer and had little to do with the protection of democratic values. Within a year of its renaming, the US was at war in Korea. When the North invaded the South in 1950, seeking to reunify a peninsula divided by foreign powers, Washington rushed to intervene, branding it a “police action,” the first of many Orwellian linguistic maneuvers to sidestep the constitutional authority of Congress to declare war.
The official narrative that the communists launched the war to topple a democratically elected government in the South obscured its deeper origins. After World War II, Washington installed Syngman Rhee, an exile who had spent decades in the United States, as South Korea’s leader. He commanded little popular legitimacy but proved a staunch ally for American officials determined to secure an anticommunist foothold on the peninsula. Far from embodying liberal democracy, his regime presided over a repressive police state.
Washington reserves for itself the unilateral right to intervene, violently and antidemocratically, in the affairs of other nations to secure what it considers its interests.
In 1948, two years before the war, an uprising against Rhee’s corrupt rule broke out on Jeju Island. With Washington’s blessing, his security forces launched a brutal counterinsurgency that left as many as 80,000 dead. Far from an aberration, Jeju epitomized Washington’s emerging Cold War policy: not the cultivation of democracies responsive to their citizenry (with the uncertainty that entailed), but the defense of authoritarian regimes as reliable bulwarks against communism.
The Korean War also marked a growing reliance on air power. Carpet bombing and the widespread use of napalm would reduce the North to rubble, destroying some 85% of its infrastructure and killing 2 million civilians. As future Secretary of State Dean Rusk would later admit, the US bombed “everything that moved in North Korea.” The only “restraint” exercised was the decision not to deploy atomic bombs, despite the insistence of Air Force General Curtis LeMay who would reflect unapologetically, “Over a period of three years or so, we killed off… 20% of the population.”
A remarkably similar pattern unfolded in Vietnam. As revealed in the Pentagon Papers, the United States initially backed France in its attempt after World War II to reimpose colonial rule over Indochina. After the French forces were defeated in 1954, the partition of the country ensued. Elections to reunify Vietnam were scheduled for 1956, but US intelligence concluded that the North’s communist leader, Ho Chi Minh, would win in a landslide, so the elections were cancelled. Once again, Washington placed its support behind the unpopular, repressive South Vietnamese regime of Ngo Dinh Diem, chosen not for his legitimacy but for his reliability in the eyes of American policymakers.
The result was a futile slaughter. The US would kill well over 3 million people in Southeast Asia and drop more than three and a half times the tonnage of bombs on Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos as were used in all of World War II. That orgy of violence would lead Martin Luther King Jr., in 1967, to denounce the United States as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” The same has held true for nearly the entire span of the past 80 years.
Empire or Democracy
The human toll of the Cold War exceeded 20 million lives. As historian Paul Chamberlin calculated, that amounted to some 1,200 deaths every day for 45 years. To call such an era “cold” was not only misleading but obscene. It was, in truth, a period of relentless and bloody global conflict, much of it instigated, enabled, or prolonged by the United States. And its wars also produced the blowback that would later be rebranded as the “War on Terror.”
The names of America’s adversaries may have changed over the years from Hitler to Stalin, Kim Il-Sung to Ho Chi Minh, Saddam Hussein to Xi Jinping, but the principle has remained constant. Washington reserves for itself the unilateral right to intervene, violently and antidemocratically, in the affairs of other nations to secure what it considers its interests. The reversion of the Defense Department to the War Department should be seen less as a rupture than a revelation. It strips away a euphemism to make far plainer what has long been the reality of our world.
We now face a choice. As historian Christian Appy has reminded us, “The institutions that sustain empire destroy democracy.” That truth is unfolding before our eyes. As the Pentagon budget tops $1 trillion and the machinery of war only expands in Donald Trump’s America, the country also seems to be turning further inward. Only recently, President Trump threatened to use Chicago to demonstrate “why it is called the Department of War.” Meanwhile, US Customs and Immigration Enforcement, or ICE, is set to become among the most well-funded domestic “military” forces on the planet and potentially the private paramilitary of an aspiring autocrat.
If there is any hope of salvaging this country’s (not to speak of this planet’s) future, then this history has to be faced, and we must recover—or perhaps discover—our moral bearings. That will require not prolonging the death throes of American hegemony, but dismantling imperial America before it collapses on itself and takes us all with it.
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