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human rights
A Moral or Militarized American Foreign Policy?
Instead of a values-based foreign policy, what has come out of the Trump White House this past year was a steady drumbeat of aggressive militaristic taunting.
Jan 04, 2026
As the world takes stock of the United States’ most recent military venture in South America, it seems an appropriate moment to consider the possible long-term implications of what will be wrought from the seizure of Venezuela President Nicolás Maduro and President Trump’s declaration that “we’re going to run the country.”
Americans historically have wrestled with balancing power politics and moral concerns in their approach to foreign policy. An accounting of the second Trump administration’s first year in office, however, suggests that those leading in Washington today are not all that concerned with such dynamics. This should cause concern, especially after the current military strike on Venezuela. As US foreign policy became less guided by moral ambitions in 2025, it became, perhaps inevitably so, more militarized.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, laying out the new administration’s priorities back in January 2025, mandated that US foreign policy should answer “three simple questions: Does it make America safer? Does it make America stronger? Does it make America more prosperous?” Nowhere in this guidance did Rubio speak of setting an example based on moral virtues, on values that might favor diplomacy over raw military power within the international arena.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the latest National Security Strategy, published in November, remained equally silent on morality’s role in defining American grand strategy. It did, though, state that the United States would “reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American pre-eminence in the Western Hemisphere.”
Instead of a values-based foreign policy, what has come out of the Trump White House this past year, culminating with the attack on Venezuela, was a steady drumbeat of aggressive militaristic taunting, much of it threatening military violence and economic sanctions while politicizing the nation’s armed forces, both at home and overseas. These actions, of course, sit at odds with the president’s 2025 inaugural address in which Mr. Trump, evoking Richard Nixon, argued that his “proudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker and unifier.”
A chaotic year in, one might question that historical inheritance. Conjuring a near existential threat at the nation’s southern border, for instance, the president began his term by ordering the Pentagon send some 1,500 active-duty troops to assist with border patrolling and “alien” deportation missions.
Equally belligerent language targeted Denmark over the intent to take Greenland, with Trump declining to rule out the use of military force to achieve his aims. Nearly a full year later, the president is still arguing that the world’s largest island is “essential” to US national security, suggesting that forcible annexation of an ally’s territory is warranted as long as the commander-in-chief deems it so.
Closer to home, the administration also set its sights on the Western Hemisphere, claiming the United States’ command of the Panama Canal despite a 1977 treaty guaranteeing its neutrality. Then, with little restraint and less legal authority, the Department of Defense began attacking suspected drug-smuggling craft off the coast of Venezuela, escalating tensions throughout the second half of 2025 that led to a blockade of the South American country, the CIA carrying out drone strikes on its coastal port facilities, and now a unilateral, illegal invasion ostensibly aimed at regime change and command of the Venezuelan oil industry.
This devaluation of diplomacy is not new. It marked Trump’s first year in office, as the State Department abruptly paused all foreign aid and assistance with little to no warning soon after inauguration, with critics lamenting the impact such suspensions have had on global health programs over the course of 2025.
Such breakneck, unprincipled flexing of American power abroad this arguably was matched by a similar lack of moral concerns at home. The pardoning of domestic terrorists who attacked the US capitol on January 6th, 2020—with far-right extremist groups like the “Proud Boys” vowing revenge for their jail time—and the unlawful militarized policing of American cities were but just two examples of an administration acting with few self-imposed ethical guardrails.
But morals matter, both at home and abroad. They always have, even if the United States historically has not always lived up to its idealistic founding principles. Morality is not irrelevant to a nation’s foreign policy, despite noted State Department diplomat George Kennan once arguing that the “interests of the national society” such as “military security” and “the integrity of its political life…have no moral quality” of their own.
Of course, power matters, too. But power unhinged from ethical reasoning (and restraint) leads to a dark world in which military power becomes the inevitable answer to nearly any foreign policy question. Even a realist like Hans Morgenthau, author of the 1948 Politics Among Nations, counseled that the “aspiration for power” should, in some sense, be “in harmony with the demands of reason, morality, and justice.” As the famed political scientist put it, morality, mores, and law reinforced each other and offered “protection to the life of society and to the lives of the individuals who compose it.”
More recently, Joseph S. Nye, Jr. argued that we should consider the potential benefits of “maintaining an institutional order that encourages moral interests.” In short, the tension between morality and power has been healthy in our past debates over foreign policy. (Even if Morgenthau himself warned against the “intoxication with moral abstractions.”) Historically speaking, moral aims have set examples abroad, highlighted the values of human rights across the globe, and informed critiques against those who support more imperialistic and militaristic policies.
But what happens when the president of the United States, in both rhetoric and deeds, flaunts power and interests above all else? When morals are deemed an inconvenience at best, a threat to rational decision-making at worst? The likely result is the militarization of the nation’s foreign policy.
True, Mr. Trump has boasted that his deal-making has ended eight wars while complaining that he deserves a Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts. Yet motives matter when it comes to moral concerns. Was the president seeking peace or adulation? Moreover, Mr. Trump has seemed reluctant to wade into the details for achieving lasting peace in the Middle East or for holding Vladimir Putin to task for Russia’s unbridled aggression against Ukraine.
In a world deemed existentially dangerous, then only war and the threat of war, the flawed argument goes, will keep the nation safe when morals no longer matter. Seemingly, Mr. Trump sees the world this way. In his inaugural address, the president stressed his responsibility to “defend our country from threats and invasions…at a level that nobody has ever seen before.” Such martial rhetoric has been reinforced this past year by Secretary of Defense (“War”) Pete Hegseth who, in critics’ eyes, views military morality through the lens of “might makes right.”
In our heated, if not fractured, political moment, debating the value of morals guiding our nation’s foreign policy will be a difficult task. Indeed, even finding consensus today over what we mean by “moral behavior” seems a fraught enterprise. But the discussion is needed. Surely, President Barak Obama’s drone-based “targeted killing program” or Joseph Biden’s “unconditional” support of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s exterminationist policies against the Palestinians warrant examination, if not condemnation. So too the militarized actions of the Trump administration this past year. In short, effective American leadership is moral leadership, both at home and abroad.
Moreover, a nation broken free of its ethical moorings will engender only resentment and retaliation on the world stage. In such a scenario, a reliance on military force likely will grow as fears of America losing its “greatness” feed into themselves. If the Trump administration spies a dangerous world beyond its shores, then a foreign policy lacking in any moral principles hardly will dispel those threats, as real as they may be. Indeed, those threats will likely only escalate.
If we can agree with the proposition that power and morals can—and should—reinforce each other, then the opening year of the second Trump administration serve as a warning sign for the coming implications of a nation’s foreign policy bereft of moral criteria. Militarization surely will follow immorality.
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Before Executing 2 Shipwrecked Sailors, US Admiral Consulted Top Military Lawyer: Report
A military spokesperson refused to comment on what the admiral told Congress beyond confirming that "he did inform them that during the strike he sought advice from his lawyer and then made a decision."
Dec 24, 2025
The journalist who initially revealed that President Donald Trump's administration killed shipwrecked survivors of its first known boat bombing reported Tuesday that the admiral in charge consulted with a US military lawyer before ordering another strike on the two alleged drug traffickers who were clinging to debris in the Caribbean Sea.
Just days after Trump announced the September 2 bombing on social media, Intercept journalist Nick Turse exposed the follow-up strike that killed survivors, citing US officials. The attack has sparked fresh alarm in recent weeks, since late November reporting from the Washington Post and CNN that Adm. Frank "Mitch" Bradley ordered the second strike to comply with an alleged spoken directive from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to kill everyone on board, which Hegseth has denied.
After the first strike, "Bradley—then the head of Joint Special Operations Command—sought guidance from his top legal adviser," according to Turse. He interviewed several sources familiar with the admiral's recent classified briefing to Congress, former members of the Judge Advocate General's (JAG) Corps, and ex-colleagues of the JSOC staff judge advocate to whom Bradley turned, Col. Cara Hamaguchi.
As Turse reported:
How exactly [Hamaguchi] responded is not known. But Bradley, according to a lawmaker who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a classified briefing, said that the JSOC staff judge advocate deemed a follow-up strike lawful. In the briefing, Bradley said no one in the room voiced objections before the survivors were killed, according to the lawmaker.
Five people familiar with briefings given by Bradley, including the lawmaker who viewed the video, said that, logically, the survivors must have been waving at the US aircraft flying above them. All interpreted the actions of the men as signaling for help, rescue, or surrender.
Bradley, now the chief of Special Operations Command, declined to comment, the reporter noted. SOCOM also declined to make Hamaguchi available, though the command's director of public affairs, Col. Allie Weiskopf, said: "We are not going to comment on what Admiral Bradley told lawmakers in a classified hearing. He did inform them that during the strike he sought advice from his lawyer and then made a decision."
Tuesday's reporting caught the attention of the former longtime executive director of Human Rights Watch (HRW), Kenneth Roth, who has stressed that not only is it "blatantly illegal to order criminal suspects to be murdered rather than detained," but "the initial attack was illegal too."
Various other experts and US lawmakers have similarly condemned the dozens of strikes in the Caribbean and Pacific Ocean since September—which as of Monday have killed at least 105 people, according to the Trump administration—as "war crimes, murder, or both," as the Former JAGs Working Group put it after the Hegseth reporting last month.
"Extrajudicial executions," declared public interest lawyer Robert Dunham on social media Wednesday, sharing Turse's new report and tagging the groups Amnesty International USA, HRW, and Reprieve US, as well as the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and independent experts who report to the UN Human Rights Council.
Those experts on Wednesday rebuked Trump's recent aggression toward Venezuela, including not only the boat strikes but also threats to bomb the South American country and attempts to impose an oil blockade. They said that "the illegal use of force, and threats to use further force at sea and on land, gravely endanger the human right to life and other rights in Venezuela and the region."
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Immigration Detention Is Reproductive Violence
Politicians who call themselves “pro-life” support policies that detain pregnant people, criminalize pregnancy, and separate families.
Dec 21, 2025
Early this month, The 19th reported that a 22-year-old mother named Nayra Guzman was kidnapped by Immigration and Customs Enforcement on her way to the neonatal intensive care unit to see her newborn daughter, just days after a long and complicated delivery. While her daughter remained hospitalized, Guzman—still recovering from a C-section and managing Type 1 diabetes—was taken to an immigration detention center and held for 34 hours without adequate medical care, food, or water, or access to a breast pump.
This is not an isolated failure. It is reproductive violence by design.
Immigration in the US has always been about control—controlling who belongs, who gets to build a family, and who is deemed worthy of safety and care. Early laws like the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and the 1924 Immigration Act codified eugenicist ideas about which communities were deemed “desirable” and which the country sought to exclude. During World War II, Japanese Americans were subject to mass incarceration, families were separated, pregnancies endangered, and women sterilized. More recently, between 2017 and 2021, more than 4,600 children were kidnapped at the US border—1,360 of whom still remain unaccounted for.
Reports show this has been the deadliest year in immigration detention since 2004. Next year is projected to be even worse. People are dying from untreated infections, suicide, dehydration, and preventable complications. Investigations have documented hundreds of human-rights abuses—including pregnant people miscarrying, being shacked across their stomachs during transport, placed in solitary confinement, and denied translation during medical procedures.
We must dismantle the systems that cage people, separate families, and dictate who is allowed to parent safely.
Major medical, public health, and advocacy organizations have long recognized that pregnant and postpartum people should not be incarcerated. Under the Obama administration, ICE was directed to avoid the detention of pregnant people whenever possible, citing serious health risks and the agency’s inability to provide appropriate care. Under both Trump terms, those protections were rolled back. And last month, Intercept uncovered that the Trump administration has been actively concealing how many pregnant people are in ICE custody.
What we don’t know should scare us even more. Until recently, the Department of Homeland Security was required to publish semiannual reports detailing how many pregnant, postpartum, and lactating people were detained, and what care they received. Since the start of President Donald Trump’s second term, those reports have stopped, and Congress quietly dropped the reporting requirement altogether.
Without even basic reporting requirements, what happens inside detention becomes nearly impossible to track, and people vanish. They are transferred in the middle of the night, across state lines, with no transparency, and no way for their families to know where their loved ones are or if they’re safe.
What we are seeing today are the consequences of a system rooted in racialized policing and mass incarceration—one that criminalizes migration and is built to financially benefit from human suffering. Today, detention quotas and private contracts dictate immigration policy.
For nearly a century after Ellis Island first opened, immigration detention was relatively rare. But by the 1980s, as the "War on Drugs" expanded the criminal legal system, immigration enforcement adopted the same punitive logic. The Reagan administration imposed the nation’s first immigration detention quota, ensuring that thousands of migrants—many fleeing violence or seeking family reunification—would be incarcerated at any given time. After 9/11, detention intensified with the “War on Terror” and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. Private prison companies secured lucrative federal contracts, new facilities opened nationwide, and immigration violations—many of them civil, not criminal—were now punished with incarceration. ICE’s own data shows roughly 72% of people in detention have no criminal record. Yet thousands are incarcerated for civil violations that carry no criminal penalty under federal law.
As prison beds became profitable, people became commodities. Today, the US operates the largest and fastest-growing immigration detention system in the world. In July, Congress budgeted $45 billion for ICE to build more immigration detention centers, and an additional $30 billion for arrests and deportation. The two biggest private prison companies, CoreCivic and GEO Group, have reported record-breaking profits and described the Trump administration as offering “unprecedented growth opportunities.”
As climate change, war, and economic and political instability drive global displacement and migration, the US has responded with cages instead of care. And apathy feels endless. Politicians who call themselves “pro-life” support policies that detain pregnant people, criminalize pregnancy, and separate families. The American people, exhausted and complacent, have learned to tune it out. Silence has become a coping mechanism.
Working in policy, I live with a constant tension: I know change is incremental, that the system moves slowly, but I am also an abolitionist. I do not believe in prisons or borders. I believe health and reproduction are human rights, and that no one should be imprisoned for migrating or for being pregnant. I think of my policy work as harm reduction—protecting people’s dignity and autonomy now, as we fight for collective liberation in the future.
Calls to release pregnant people from detention are growing. In November, the Democratic Women’s Caucus declared the treatment of pregnant, postpartum, and nursing people in ICE custody “unacceptable,” and last week, Illinois Rep. Delia Ramirez introduced a resolution urging congressional action.
But that demand cannot come from advocates and politicians alone—change depends on ordinary people determined to not look away. Our outrage is long overdue. Call your representatives and let them know that cruelty is a political choice we refuse to normalize. Join groups organizing on the ground, donate to local defense funds, and talk about this in your circles.
In the long term, we must dismantle the systems that cage people, separate families, and dictate who is allowed to parent safely. That vision is at the heart of reproductive justice—because every struggle is connected, and every win brings us closer to the world we deserve.
As Fannie Lou Hamer said, “Nobody’s free until everybody’s free.”
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