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Iran War Has Cost the Average American More Than $1,200 Over Six Months, Economist Estimates
One columnist said it’s impossible to know the true extent to which the war has hit Americans’ pocketbooks, but “this figure should be understood as a rough sketch that conveys the magnitude of Trump’s folly.”
Sep 01, 2026
As President Donald Trump's war with Iran crosses the six-month mark without an end in sight, a new analysis calculates that it has cost the average American household at least $1,200 more than they would have paid if it had never started.
That is according to Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, who was quoted by New Yorker columnist John Cassidy on Monday as he sought to look beyond military costs to determine the true extent to which the war has impacted Americans' pocketbooks.
Cassidy wrote that the task of reaching a solid number is "far from straightforward," especially since, in his assessment, the Pentagon has been "less than forthright about many aspects of the conflict," including the cost.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told the Senate Appropriations Committee in July that the conflict had cost roughly $37.5 billion.
But prior to that, NBC News reported on internal Pentagon estimates that put the cost of the conflict between $80 billion and $100 billion when accounting for the cost to repair damage to US military bases, which has occurred on a level that, according to former Marine Col. Mark Cancian, has not been seen since World War II.
These costs do not include the additional $73 billion that House Republicans have approved for defense and intelligence related to the war, which will come up for a Senate vote in September.
"Whatever the true figure is, it’s a considerable sum that comes on top of the bloated trillion-dollar Pentagon budget that has already been approved for 2026, and it is money that could, in theory, be used for other purposes," Cassidy wrote.
He cited a recent analysis by the Center for American Progress (CAP), which found that the $73 billion could “provide full Medicaid coverage for 5 million more people, with $33 billion left over."
Some of those remaining funds could be used to provide free school lunch for every child in America, provide free childcare for 1 million children, or extend the Affordable Care Act tax credits that Republicans allowed to expire last year, which would reduce premiums for around 20 million Americans.
Trump has explicitly emphasized that funding the war is coming at the expense of other priorities.
“We’re fighting wars. We can’t take care of daycare. You gotta let a state take care of daycare, and they should pay for it too,” he said in April. “It’s not possible for us to take care of daycare, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things.”
Just taking the lower-bound $80 billion cost estimate would mean the average household has been forced to pay about $300 more as a result of the war, using the same methodology that the National Priorities Project used to estimate the cost to taxpayers in April. But this is only a fraction of the overall cost.
Average gasoline prices have shot up by more than $1 since the war began, while the price of diesel has risen by roughly half. Citing an energy-cost tracker maintained by the Climate Solutions Lab at Brown University’s Watson School of International and Public Affairs, Cassidy said these combined price hikes have cost Americans an additional $93 billion—more than an extra $700 per household.
Oil and fertilizer prices have also shot up, rippling through the economy and contributing to higher food prices. The overall rate of inflation has climbed to 3.4%, up from 2.4% in February. Cassidy notes that inflation has also hiked market interest rates, "raising the costs of mortgages, car loans, and other types of consumer credit."
Combining all these added costs, Zandi estimated that the average household had paid roughly an extra $1,200 in the six months since the war started, but emphasized that this was only a conservative estimate.
"Rather than being taken as a precise number," Cassidy added, "this figure should be understood as a rough sketch that conveys the magnitude of Trump’s folly."
As the midterms approach, Trump's approval rating has hit an all-time low of just 33% according to a poll out Monday from Reuters/Ipsos, which also found just 36% approval for the war.
Meanwhile, 71% of Americans, including 4 in 10 Republicans, said they disapprove of how Trump is handling the cost of living. This has caused the longstanding Republican advantage in the economy to evaporate, with 36% of registered voters saying in a poll last week they believe Democrats are better prepared to tackle the cost of living compared with 28% of Republicans.
"Absent a break in the war’s current stalemate between now and the November midterms," Cassidy said, "the president and his party may end up paying a higher political price. But the economic costs of the conflict can’t be reversed."
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Trump May Be Unique, But He's Following a Long US Tradition of Losing a Pointless War
Despite what anyone, including him, might have learned from American history since 1945, he decided to go to war with Iran anyway in 2026.
Aug 29, 2026
I was born on July 20, 1944, in the midst of World War II. My father had just returned from Burma where he had been operations officer for the 1st Air Commandos in the China-India-Burma Theater. I, of course, remember nothing about that war—except that my father (on extremely rare occasions) would barely mention what he had gone through but would sometimes take me to World War II movies like The Caine Mutiny and Merrill’s Marauders at local movie theaters.
In a country that has never stopped fighting wars, however, that’s certainly the last one that any American could truly be proud of, the global defeat of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.
In fact, we’re talking about a country that, between 2001 and 2024, spent an estimated $21 trillion on its military, which, it turns out, was equal to the military spending of the next 18—yes, 18!—countries combined (if you can even believe it). And in those years, of course, like the 55 preceding ones, the United States managed to never—no, never —actually win a significant war (or, in truth, even come close). In short, President Donald Trump’s present disastrous war with Iran is anything but out of the ordinary when it comes to American military power destroying all too much, but sooner or later finding itself in a remarkably dead-end situation (with an emphasis on dead, of course).
Just imagine for a moment that you had been asked in 2001 to invest $21 trillion taxpayer dollars in a military that would fight wars across the planet without a success in sight after World War II (other than perhaps the invasion of the helpless Caribbean Island of Grenada in 1983). It doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about the Korean War of 1950, the nightmarish Vietnam War that engulfed the 1960s and early 1970s, the Afghan and Iraq wars of this country’s calamitous War on Terror early in this century, or more recently Donald Trump’s wars, which have proven to be one disaster after another, from Somalia to Iran at this very moment.
At the very least, the Iranians should consider renaming the Strait of Hormuz, the Crooked of Donald Trump.
And that should be considered strange indeed. I doubt there’s another example in history of a great imperial power that, for a significant part of its rise (and potential fall) simply couldn’t win a war.
It certainly gives that old song “War (What Is It Good For?)” with the response “absolutely nothing” new meaning. Of course, if you happen to be Donald Trump and you’re the president who simply can’t win a war (which certainly leaves you in good company among American presidents of the last 80 years or so), then the least you can do, when it comes to Iran, is declare that the Strait of Hormuz, through which about 20% of global oil and even more natural gas used to pass and which was closed down by the Iranians in response to his warring acts (distinctly harming the global economy), is now actually US property, or, to be specific, a potential “territory of the United States.” (Phew, that was exhausting!)
And hard as it might be to believe, he really did say that recently. How logical, right? After all, it’s only perhaps 6,500 miles or so from Washington, DC. So, what could possibly make more sense?
Of course, I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi responded that, whatever Trump might think, the Strait “cannot be seized with a tweet, nor with an aircraft carrier, nor by issuing an order, nor through an election speech.” He added, “This strait will only be opened and closed under Iran’s command, and as long as you do not accept the reality of defeat and stop indulging in delusions, Iran will continue to enforce the blockade.”
Defeat Donald Trump? In what world could that possibly happen? How delusional could the Iranians be about our distinctly delusional president?
Oh, but in case you think that’s just so much enemy blather, the fact is that, in the ongoing war with Iran, the US has already lost about one-quarter of its crucial Reaper Drones, valued at $30 to $50 million each (or more than $1.3 billion worth of them), mainly around—yes, of course!—the Strait of Hormuz. And many of them have been taken down by Iranian drones valued at $20,000 to $50,000 each.
And while losing so many of its drones, the Trump administration has also been losing other things as well, including its previous insistence that a complete Iranian surrender was the order of the day. No longer, it seems. Now, all that it appears Donald Trump wants (whatever he’s said) is the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz and the free flow of oil and natural gas globally. In other words, what he now yearns for is essentially a return to the very situation that existed six months ago just before he launched his disastrous war.
Or as Vice President JD Vance put it recently, all the Trump administration now wants is to ensure “that the Gulf countries continue to send oil and gas to the world economy so that we have energy price stability,” and, of course, to ensure as well that the Iranians won’t ever have a nuclear weapon. No matter that, as far as anyone knows, they are not faintly close to having, no less possibly even trying to develop such a weapon.
On the other hand, the Iranians are now threatening to continue the state of war with the US until the end of Trump’s second term in office in 2028 (and his approval ratings are, of course, already plunging to new lows). As a senior adviser to the commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard put it: “One way is to prolong this war until we get to the next term of the presidency and cause attrition, so that if anyone else wants to attack Iran, they will know there is a cost... We have to attain deterrence so that the enemy never dares to attack us, so we can live with security.”
And let’s not forget that, lest you think Donald Trump has learned anything from all of this, he has only recently been threatening to “bomb the shit out of” long-time American ally Oman, if it “gets in the way” of his Iranian plans—and what, I ask you, could possibly go wrong with that? (I can’t even imagine.)
Of course, we’re talking about the rule (or do I mean reign—or perhaps I actually mean rain, or even thunderstorms or tornados?) of Donald Trump, a president for whom, according to a recent poll, only 29% of potential voters in the coming midterm elections approve of how he’s handling the situation with Iran.
And yet, sad to say, what’s new? Not much, it seems. After all, Trump, who may indeed be unique in so many ways, is proving anything but unique as president of the greatest power on planet Earth (in certain ways, perhaps the greatest in history) when it comes to making war all too miserably, even disastrously. In fact, give him a certain amount of credit. After all, despite what anyone, including him, might have learned from American history since 1945, he decided to go to war with Iran anyway in 2026. It evidently mattered not at all to him that the most obvious and self-evident fact about American war making since 1945 is that defeat (or minimally nothing faintly approaching victory) would essentially be guaranteed. And yet, he still managed to launch another disastrous all-American war on this distinctly embattled planet of ours.
At the very least, the Iranians should consider renaming the Strait of Hormuz, the Crooked of Donald Trump, and let me just hope that I’ll never have to take one of my grandchildren to a movie about his disastrous war.
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Paper Tiger: The Failure of America’s Trillion-Dollar War Machine
From Korea in the early 1950s to Iran today, the US armed forces have lost nearly every war they have fought, while inflicting mass destruction on foreign countries and siphoning resources away from people's needs at home.
Aug 13, 2026
According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, or SIPRI, the United States spent $21 trillion on its military between 2001 and 2024, in constant 2024 dollars, equal to the combined military spending of the next 18 countries. Iran barely made that list at all, spending only 2% of what the US did, and SIPRI estimated Iran’s 2025 military budget at only $7.5 billion. So how is Iran holding its own against the multitrillion-dollar US war machine?
A critical difference between the US war on Iran and previous US and allied bombing campaigns against Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and now Gaza is that the US and Israel have failed to destroy Iran’s air defense system and cannot fly warplanes over Iran without risking the loss of planes and pilots to enemy fire. Iran has wisely built its critical defense infrastructure underground, with arms factories, weapons stockpiles, and launch sites sheltered safely beneath its impenetrable mountainous terrain.
US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth claimed on March 10 that the US had “total air dominance” over Iran, but that is still not true. Instead, US forces are mainly attacking Iran with stand-off weapons from outside Iran’s borders, radically depleting US stockpiles of extraordinarily expensive weapons.
Even though US warplanes avoid entering Iranian airspace, the Congressional Research Service has reported that the US has lost at least four F-15 fighters, an F-35, an A-10, seven KC-135 refueling planes, an E-6 AWACS plane, two MC-130J special operations aircraft, a helicopter, a high-altitude Triton drone, and 24 MQ-9 Reaper drones.
The American people have sacrificed enormously to pay for this obsolete, overpriced, and ineffective war machine.
By contrast, during the full-scale invasion of Iraq in 2003, US forces lost only one A-10 and six helicopters, after systematically destroying much of Iraq's air defenses through a low-intensity bombing campaign conducted under cover of the so-called no-fly zones, which the US, UK, and France unilaterally imposed after the First Gulf War in 1991.
In 2003, the US Armed Forces dropped 13,000 tons of bombs and missiles on Iraq in the first 30 days of the war. But only 800 tons, or 6%, of those munitions were cruise missiles and other stand-off weapons like the ones the US is now relying on against Iran.
The US has already depleted one-third of its stand-off and air defense weapons stocks, including JASSM and Tomahawk cruise missiles and SM-2, -3, and -6 anti-aircraft missiles, as well as half its stocks of Patriot and THAAD interceptors and the new Precision Strike Missiles that are replacing the shorter-range ATACMs. These missiles range in price from $700,000 each for JASSMs up to $12 million each for THAAD interceptors, and many will take years to replace.
So the US is using multimillion dollar missiles that are irreplaceable in the short term to try, and often fail, to intercept Shahed drones that cost Iran between $20,000 and $50,000 each. This is a stark contrast from Iraq in 2003, when the US weapon of choice was its 500-poun GBU-12 Paveway II laser-guided bomb, which costs only $22,000, and the 7,000 bombs used to attack Iraq were easily restocked.
To make up for the Navy’s dwindling missile stocks in the war zone, the US is flying B-1 bombers from a British airbase at Fairford in England to fire Tomahawk missiles at Iran. So many planes are now flying from so far away to attack Iran that the US has also had to send dozens more aerial refueling planes to reinforce the 60 it already had stationed in Israel.
The Russians have demonstrated in Ukraine that the capacity to quickly ramp up production of relatively inexpensive artillery shells and drones can be more critical in a war than spending trillions on big-ticket weapons programs. Meanwhile, the corrupt US military-industrial complex has built a gold-plated revolving door between the US arms industry; the Pentagon top brass; and a captive, co-opted civilian government. It has produced ever more expensive weapons, but it has lost nearly every war it has fought.
The only wars the US has won since 1945 were three short wars to recover small neocolonial outposts in Grenada, Panama, and Kuwait, as the US took advantage of the weakening of the Soviet Union in the 1980s. Otherwise, from Korea in the early 1950s to Iran today, the US armed forces have lost every single war, while inflicting mass destruction on countries and people the US government claimed to be liberating. As the saying goes, “With friends like us, who needs enemies?”
Like many US industries, the post-Cold War US arms industry has become consolidated around a cabal of five firms—Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon (now RTX), General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman—whose continued growth depends on ever-greater profits from increasingly expensive warships, warplanes, and weapons, while endless wars and “threats” serve to justify siphoning more and more of America’s national wealth into their coffers.
The US government and corporate media have told Americans for decades that these extraordinary military expenditures and endless wars are something to be proud of, and many Americans have swallowed this perverted myth of US military prowess. The Pentagon works hard to bolster its public image, spending $2 billion per year on recruitment and retention, and $1.14 billion on advertising contracts in 2023 alone.
But that narrative is beginning to crack. As with many aspects of the US political and economic system, more and more Americans are questioning what they have been taught about the US military, and veterans themselves are often the most outspoken critics.
Writing in Business Insider about the problems facing US military recruiters, Kelsey Baker reported that many veterans of the “Global War on Terror” now discourage their own children from joining the military. Three of the recruiters Baker spoke to said guns had been drawn on them by the parents of teenagers they were targeting for recruitment, and one recruiter recalled an irate parent calling him a “baby killer” and a government slave.
In Iran, the United States is caught between escalating a catastrophic, unwinnable war it should never have started and the urgent need to rethink the illegal, corrupt, policy of aggressive war it has pursued since 2001.
The September 11 attacks were carried out by 19 al-Qaeda hijackers—not by the countries that the United States went on to invade and occupy. Yet our leaders responded to those horrific crimes with a multitrillion-dollar investment in new weapons and imperial military expansion—a decision driven by precisely the “unwarranted influence” of the military-industrial complex that President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned against in his farewell speech in 1961.
US occupation forces in Afghanistan and Iraq were defeated by lightly-armed resistance forces defending their own countries. Yet America’s leaders ignored their own failures and defeats, continuing to blindly climb the escalation ladder—first confronting Russia through the war in Ukraine and now taking on Iran in its own territory.
We should note that it was under Democratic administrations that the US backed a coup in Ukraine in 2014 and then rejected a peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine in April 2022, while President Donald Trump, a Republican, assassinated Iran’s top military leader in 2020 and launched wars on Iran, in cahoots with Israel, in 2025 and 2026. The US-Israeli genocide in Gaza, like the illegal occupation that spawned it, still enjoys bipartisan support in Congress, but not from the American people its members claim to represent.
Many Americans understood the dangers of the United States’ militarized response to the crimes of September 11, 2001, even before the Pentagon embarked on its spending spree and unleashed mass destruction on country after country.
Chalmers Johnson wrote his prescient and widely acclaimed book, Blowback, in 1999, explaining how US militarism and imperialism inevitably sow the seeds for cataclysmic events like the 9/11 attacks. He followed it with three more books in his American Empire Project before his death in 2010.
Former Nuremberg prosecutor Ben Ferencz told NPR a week after 9/11: “It is never a legitimate response to punish people who are not responsible for the wrong done… We must make a distinction between punishing the guilty and punishing others. If you simply retaliate en masse by bombing Afghanistan, let us say, or the Taliban, you will kill many people who don't approve of what has happened.”
By the time the United States was preparing to invade Iraq in 2003, international outrage was so widespread that it produced the largest global street protests in history, with up to 36 million people protesting in 60 countries. But US leaders ignored the world’s rejection of their lies, both at the United Nations and in the streets, and insisted on pretending that Iraq had chemical, biological, and even nuclear weapons, and was somehow responsible for the crimes of September 11.
The brainwashing of US occupation troops in Iraq was so complete that, even three years into the war, in February 2006, 85% of US occupation forces in Iraq told a Zogby poll that their main mission there was to “retaliate for Saddam’s role in the 9/11 attacks.”
The lies, brainwashing, torture, civilian massacres, and other war crimes that have corrupted the last 25 years of American military history—together with the outrageous cost—have turned the American people squarely against more new wars. But incredibly, they have failed to persuade members of Congress to exercise their constitutional responsibility to stop feeding the out-of-control US military-industrial complex with record amounts of money, weapons, and false pretexts for war.
Trump has requested a record $1.5 trillion in military spending for FY2027. The House-passed National Defense Authorization Act authorizes $1.15 trillion in discretionary military spending, with additional funding outside the NDAA bringing the administration’s overall military-spending plan to $1.5 trillion. The Senate has so far blocked its version of the NDAA.
The draft NDAA also includes unprecedented provisions to further integrate US and Israeli weapons production and intelligence sharing.
Trump’s frustration over the US-Israeli failure to defeat Iran stems from the same delusion of US military supremacy that infected his predecessors, especially since the end of the Cold War.
But in his 2018 book Losing Military Supremacy: the Myopia of American Strategic Planning, Andrei Martyanov warned that huge US investments in aircraft carriers and other big-ticket warships and warplanes were rapidly being rendered obsolete by a new generation of Russian and Chinese missiles capable of traveling much faster and farther than the most advanced missiles in the US arsenal.
Now Iranian missiles and drones have fundamentally altered the military balance in the Middle East. They have driven the US military out of its bases in the Persian Gulf and are forcing US aircraft carriers to stay 1,000 miles from the coast of Iran. US Central Command has had to relocate its regional headquarters from Qatar to Jordan, but Iran has attacked it there too.
Now the United States is repositioning more of its forces in the Middle East to Israel. This raises the stakes, and increases the risks, of any future escalation in the war on Iran, and it further expands the entangling US military alliance with the genocidal state of Israel, which most Americans now oppose.
On August 8, Iran reiterated six points from the Memorandum of Understanding that Trump already signed on June 17, and insisted that the United States must comply with them before it will reopen the Strait of Hormuz to international shipping.
Western commentators have described these as tough new conditions, but they are neither new nor tougher than before. They simply make explicit what was already implicit—for example, by specifically mentioning Palestine and Yemen, whereas the original memorandum merely called for ending the war "on all fronts, including Lebanon.” The United States and Israel started this war, and the United States has the power to end it by negotiating in good faith, based on the memorandum it already agreed to.
The American people have sacrificed enormously to pay for this obsolete, overpriced, and ineffective war machine. Many have paid with their lives, their limbs, or their health. All of us pay the opportunity cost of our leaders’ warmongering and reckless squandering of our national wealth, leaving us without the basic support systems that our neighbors in other developed countries take for granted, from universal free healthcare and quality public education to living wages and paid vacation time.
The US government’s corrupt priorities leave our most serious problems unaddressed, while undermining global efforts to address them, from the destruction of the climate and the natural world to the ever-present danger of nuclear war.
As this year’s primary election results suggest, most Americans want a society that cares for its people, with a government that addresses our most urgent needs. That must surely include dismantling this failed, corrupt, out-of-control, and absurdly expensive war machine.
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Foreign War, Domestic Cost: The Hidden Price of America’s Wars
The Iran war shows how conflicts abroad can reshape domestic priorities, transferring the economic burden of war onto ordinary Americans.
Aug 11, 2026
For Washington, war usually begins with decisions made behind closed doors and explained through familiar terms such as security, deterrence, and national interest. It is then presented through images of aircraft and missiles moving toward targets thousands of miles away. But for ordinary people, war often arrives more quietly: through the fuel pump, grocery bills, transportation costs, and household budgets that leave less room for basic needs.
The Iran war demonstrated this reality once again. A crisis in the Middle East quickly became connected to one of the world’s most sensitive energy choke points: the Strait of Hormuz. Concerns about disruptions to global energy flows showed how a conflict far from American shores can affect domestic economic conditions. For most Americans, the consequences are not measured through military operations or geopolitical calculations, but through higher energy costs, rising transportation expenses, and pressure on living standards.
Yet the cost of war extends beyond immediate economic effects. Measuring conflict only through oil prices or military spending overlooks a deeper question: what a country cannot invest in because resources are directed toward war.
No national budget is unlimited. Every billion dollars allocated to military operations, weapons purchases, troop deployments, or rebuilding stockpiles cannot be spent simultaneously on infrastructure, education, healthcare, housing, or other public priorities. This is the social opportunity cost of war: the value of needs that receive fewer resources because military commitments take precedence. Defense spending appears clearly in budgets, but the school never built, the infrastructure project delayed, or the public service left underfunded often remain invisible.
A country that spends vast resources on war in the name of security must also ask whether those choices strengthen or weaken the society that security is supposed to protect.
The economic consequences of war also spread through markets, supply chains, and production costs. Conflicts involving major energy-producing regions create uncertainty that eventually reaches households. However, these burdens are not shared equally. A wealthy family may absorb higher fuel or food prices with limited disruption, while a family already struggling with housing, food, and energy costs may be forced to sacrifice another necessity.
The cost of war is therefore not simply national; it is social. Those with the least influence over decisions about war do not necessarily experience the smallest consequences. The civilian impact of conflict extends beyond battlefields. An American worker whose purchasing power declines or a family facing higher living costs also becomes part of the economic burden created by war.
Supporters of military action argue that these costs must be weighed against the dangers of inaction. They maintain that failing to confront threats abroad could create greater instability and eventually produce even higher costs. This argument deserves consideration. Governments have a responsibility to protect citizens and maintain the capabilities needed to respond to serious threats.
However, national security cannot be measured only through military strength. Military power is one element of national power, but it depends on other foundations: a productive economy, reliable infrastructure, an educated workforce, effective institutions, and a society with economic stability. The central question is not whether the United States should maintain defense capabilities, but whether military spending always strengthens security or whether excessive commitments can weaken the foundations that make security possible.
This is where militarism becomes a political issue. Militarism is not simply the use of military force; it emerges when military solutions become Washington’s default response to international crises and increases in defense spending are treated automatically as greater security. Under these conditions, domestic priorities are repeatedly delayed while the costs of war become immediate and certain. The opportunity cost of war is therefore not only economic; it reflects how the United States defines security and allocates national resources.
The costs of war also continue after military operations end. Rebuilding weapons stockpiles, maintaining readiness, supporting deployments, and preparing for future conflicts can keep public resources tied to military spending for years. War is therefore not only a short-term decision; it can create long-term commitments that shape national priorities long after fighting stops.
Over time, this dynamic can contribute to a war economy: a cycle in which conflict increases demand for military production, that demand creates contracts and budget commitments, and those commitments make continued military spending politically easier to sustain.
Within this cycle, the role of the defense industry becomes an important democratic question. Greater military demand creates more orders and revenue for defense companies, while the costs are distributed nationally through public budgets and debt. This does not mean defense contracts are inherently corrupt, but it raises a fundamental question: Are the voices that benefit from continued military spending more influential in shaping security priorities than the citizens who ultimately pay for them?
War is therefore not only a foreign policy decision but also a domestic democratic issue. When the costs of conflict are distributed among millions of citizens while decisions about war are made within a limited political circle, accountability becomes part of national security itself. Citizens must be able to evaluate not only whether military operations achieve their goals, but whether their costs are proportionate to their results.
From this perspective, diplomacy should not be viewed merely as a moral alternative to military power. If war creates economic risks, energy instability, and long-term financial burdens, reducing tensions can directly protect national resources. Diplomacy is not a substitute for strength; it is a way to prevent unnecessary costs and avoid cycles of confrontation that consume economic and strategic capacity.
Ultimately, the question is not whether the United States should abandon military power or ignore external threats. The question is whether military power remains a tool for protecting national strength or becomes a substitute for it.
The Iran war has placed this issue before the United States in concrete terms. A country that spends vast resources on war in the name of security must also ask whether those choices strengthen or weaken the society that security is supposed to protect.
National power is not defined only by America’s ability to wage war. It also depends on the economic and social foundations that sustain that ability. If repeated conflicts transfer resources away from infrastructure, healthcare, education, and economic opportunity toward permanent military commitments, the United States may increase its short-term capacity to fight wars while weakening the foundations required to remain strong over time.
A nation that consumes its economic and social capital to preserve its power may finance more conflicts. But eventually it must answer a deeper question: D oes it still possess the strong society that this power was originally meant to defend?
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It's Time to Evolve Beyond Nationalism
I love the life this nation has given me, and value much of what it claims to stand for, but I think it’s time for humanity to reach beyond nationalism and borders and connect with a larger god—a larger global organizing principle.
Aug 09, 2026
“Nation” equals identity. I’m an American! Hurray!
It’s almost embarrassing to confess this, but yeah, that’s me (or used to be me), sitting back in my easy chair, waving a flag. My “nationality” is such a profound, lifelong part of who I am I rarely actually questioned it. At best I shrugged, then momentarily glared in anger at... the government, the media, whoever. Why do we have a trillion-dollar military budget, or a president who wants to up it to $1.5 trillion? Why do we always have an enemy or two or three, who isn’t as human as we are and must be defeated, or at least arrested?
At least being an American comes with a fair amount of rights—freedom of speech, freedom to question authority, and so-o-o much more—and usually I embrace those rights with a sense of hope that the future will be saner. But that sense of hope has been ebbing lately. I have come to realize over the years that I am no longer just an American. I’m a citizen of Planet Earth.
I say this with a sense of paradox. I love the life this nation has given me, and value much of what it claims to stand for, but I think it’s time for humanity to reach beyond nationalism and borders and connect with a larger god—a larger global organizing principle. And I do not claim that this will be simple or obvious.
The global military expenditures in 2025 were $2.9 trillion, a total that’s been increasing every year for the last 11 years.
But it’s time. “Nation” equals war. It equals “get outa here!” The more power it has, the more it sustains itself with the worst of who we are. This means it always needs an enemy... or two, or three, or 50,000.
And our enemy becomes the norm. Here’s where I truly lose hope that the human race can survive nationalism. We dehumanize our enemies, which gives us “permission” to kill them: to shatter their social structure, to erase them from existence. Ho hum.
For instance, here’s a quickie ICE update from ABC News the other day:
US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested 51,000 individuals in July, according to sources familiar with the data. The arrests are the largest in a single month in DHS history...
And guess what?
“Those being detained in some cases do not have criminal records and have valid work authorization or parole documents...”
And what does the phrase “in some cases” mean? Maybe a dozen of the arrestees were good guys? That’s what it sounds like, as you give the story a read. After all, remember Donald Trump’s words back in 2015: “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best... They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people”
But all of them are aliens! They’re illegals (even if they’re not). They’re wrecking our country. They need to go.
And then, of course, there are the wars going on around the world, wreaking death and hell and genocide: Israel’s bombing of Palestine has killed over 73,000 people at this point, with more than 173,200 wounded. As PBS points out, over 1,000 people have been killed in Gaza since the start of the so-called “ceasefire.” And, my God, the death and casualty toll in the Ukraine war, on both sides, is approaching 2 million people over these last four years.
This is just part of it. The global military expenditures in 2025 were $2.9 trillion, a total that’s been increasing every year for the last 11 years. As Connie Peck, founder of the United Nations Institute for Training and Research Programme in Peacemaking and Conflict Prevention, wrote: “If similar increases continue, and NATO countries enlarge their expenditure to 5% as pledged, global military spending could reach 6.6 trillion by 2035—five times the level at the end of the Cold War.”
In other words, it’s getting worse. The more “they” spend, the more we have to spend. And the only way the world’s nations are safe from one another is by “mutually assured destruction”: a concept that, with the emergence of nuclear weapons, means the threat of planetary annihilation. I think it’s time to evolve beyond nationalism, which is not based on valuing life. It’s based on “winning.”
Peck writes: “Do we really want or need more weapons and more wars? Shouldn’t we, instead, choose cooperative security, collective security, and human security, as represented by the United Nations?”
Let’s stash our cynicism and, as Peck writes, begin addressing the root causes of conflict. We are capable of looking beyond ourselves. She quotes from the UN Charter Preamble.
Here are the words from the Preamble that pierced me most deeply, as I imagined them helping to create a new form of government: “We the peoples of the United Nations (have) determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war... and to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person...”
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Is the United Nations About to Be Pushed Off a Cliff?
Could the irrationality, lack of knowledge, and limited vision of world leaders destroy the hopes that the world’s people have invested in the UN?
Aug 04, 2026
Currently we live in a world bristling with nuclear and conventional weapons—with a potential destructiveness unprecedented in history. A nuclear war, for example, would largely be over in one hour, with each second equivalent in destruction to World War II.
Meanwhile, our security is increasingly threatened by skyrocketing global military expenditure at the same time as the United Nation’s capacity to maintain peace is being undermined by member states starving the organization of funds.
The United Nations and its Prescription for a Better World
In the aftermath of two world wars, there was considerable hope that humanity would learn its lesson and that each would be “the war to end all wars.” Indeed, the United Nations was created for just this purpose, as stated in the Preamble to its Charter: “We the peoples of the United Nations determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind…” But hope was not enough.
The Charter’s prescription for preventing violent conflict was a solid one. The states that joined the organization agreed, as an obligation of membership, to resolve their disputes peacefully and to refrain from the threat or use of force against one another.
The UN of today is staggering under the unparalleled expectation that it should be able to deal effectively with a multiplicity of extremely complex problems and that it should somehow be able to do so with resources that are woefully inadequate.
The prescription went beyond the peaceful settlement of disputes to address the root causes of conflict and create conditions for sustainable peace, pledging “to reaffirm our faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small, and to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained, and to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom…”
But before this hopeful blueprint could get off the drawing board, a new danger to global peace and security arose:
As the Charter was being negotiated and signed in San Francisco, the atomic bomb was being developed in Los Alamos, New Mexico, a thousand miles away… The first atomic bomb was exploded over Hiroshima on 6 August 1945, just forty-one days after the Charter was signed. By the time the United Nations was established on 24 October 1945, the world that it was to serve had changed in fundamental ways.
Indeed, for the next 45 years, the nuclear threat and the Cold War hung like a pall over the UN, greatly distorting the hopes invested in it by the world’s peoples.
When the Cold War suddenly ended, its legacy of abuse and neglect was not easily swept away. One superpower had bankrupted itself in the headlong race toward military superiority, and the other had spent vast resources developing expensive nuclear weapons.
Meanwhile, large segments of the world’s population lived in extreme poverty and were malnourished, unhealthy, and undereducated. The neglect of demographic and environmental problems led to a whole host of security threats, as underdevelopment, economic stagnation, and rising expectations generated conditions for protest, violence, and intrastate war. There were also new threats, as global warming; deforestation; desertification; degradation of air, soil and water; and loss of biodiversity endangered the health of the planet itself.
In the power vacuum following the Cold War, the UN was no longer sidelined but, instead, required to take center stage. In a short space of time, the expectations, demands, and responsibilities placed on the organization increased dramatically. An organization whose peacekeeping budget was no greater than the budgets of the New York City police and fire departments was asked to become the world’s police and fire department. At the same time, some who clamored for it to play this enhanced role continued to be late in payment of their dues or to withhold them altogether.
The UN of today is staggering under the unparalleled expectation that it should be able to deal effectively with a multiplicity of extremely complex problems and that it should somehow be able to do so with resources that are woefully inadequate.
Even so, over its 81 years, the UN has had many successes, exemplified by the 12 Nobel Peace Prizes awarded to various parts of the organization. Although detailing its work is well beyond the scope of this article, mentioning just a few achievements can provide some context.
At the time of the UN’s creation, almost one-third of the world’s population (750 million people) were under the yoke of colonial rule. Due to UN decolonization efforts, they are now citizens of 80 independent states and UN membership has grown from 51 to 193.
The UN operates at two levels. At the inter-governmental level, it offers venues (through the General Assembly and its committees, the Economic and Social Council and the Security Council) for member states to discuss international problems and take action, when possible. In a world dominated by Westphalian states, whose interests are not always aligned, multilateral decision-making is necessarily slow and cumbersome. But there are many instances where agreements have had far-reaching consequences. An example is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and its covenants, as well as the many subsequent human rights instruments, including the establishment of mechanisms to monitor and assist their implementation.
Another example is the 2015 Sustainable Development goals and targets, including, “no poverty;” “zero hunger;” “good health and well-being;” “quality education;” “gender equality;” “clean water and sanitation;” “climate action;” “peace, justice, and strong institutions;” and nine others.
UN thematic conferences offer another opportunity for inter-governmental dialogue, with potentially constructive outcomes on issues such as climate change, HIV/AIDs, population and development, women and gender equality, racism, and others.
In a parallel process, the secretary-general, the Secretariat and its departments, as well as UN funds, programmes, and specialized agencies (i.e., the World Food Programme, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the United Nations Children’s Fund, the World Health Organization, and many others) fulfill their mandates and implement resolutions of the General Assembly or Security Council around the world.
Throughout the UN’s existence, efforts in preventive diplomacy, peacemaking, peacekeeping, post-conflict peacebuilding, and peace enforcement have prevented and resolved many crises and conflicts. Local UN disarmament initiatives have ensured that conflicts don’t reoccur and international efforts have contributed to nuclear non-proliferation, and to outlawing and monitoring of biological and chemical weapons. Humanitarian efforts have prevented or contained famines, refugee flows, and pandemics. Smallpox has been eradicated, and the end of polio is near. The number of people living in extreme poverty has been halved, access to schooling has massively increased, and maternal mortality slashed. The UN has also played a major role in advancing gender equality.
The International Court of Justice (also part of the UN) has helped create and strengthen international law by providing legally-binding judgments in a host of cases. Treaties, negotiated via the UN, have established new international law, such as the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, which provides a legal framework for marine and maritime activities.
The UN is also involved in many less recognized efforts, including improving agricultural productivity; codifying principles and techniques of international air navigation; labor issues; standardizing and regulating international telecommunications; protecting intellectual property; offering assistance on migration; promoting peaceful nuclear energy and inhibiting its military use; verifying adherence to the Chemical Weapons Convention; and many others.
But the UN’s most important achievement, as Secretary-General António Guterres has argued, is: “Eight decades later, one can draw a direct line between the creation of the United Nations and the prevention of a third world war.”
Meanwhile, World Military Expenditure Increases, as Do Conflicts
Even after the Cold War, states continue to pursue the flawed policy of deterrence and to equate military might with security, in spite of research that arms races increase the likelihood of war and evidence that military spending does not decrease conflict—as the most recent data from the world’s leading source of information on organized violence show.
In 2025, violent conflicts increased to 65, the highest since data collection began in 1946. While most were intrastate conflict, there is also a sharp increase in interstate conflict: “The first decade of the 2000s saw 8 interstate conflicts, while the 2010s saw 12. The 2020s have thus far seen 22.”
Fatalities also increased sharply in 2025 to the second highest since the Rwandan genocide in 1994. The war between Russia and Ukraine was the deadliest in the world for the third consecutive year.
The world’s global military expenditure also increased in 2025 for the 11th consecutive year—to an astonishing 2.9 trillion dollars. If similar increases continue, and NATO countries enlarge their expenditure to 5% as pledged, global military spending could reach 6.6 trillion by 2035—five times the level at the end of the Cold War.
Do we really want or need more weapons and more wars? Shouldn’t we, instead, choose cooperative security, collective security, and human security, as represented by the United Nations?
The current US military budget is a jaw-dropping $1 trillion, but the Trump administration is requesting a whopping increase to $1.5 trillion for 2027. Thus, if global military expenditure increases as predicted, the US $1.5 trillion (if approved) would account for nearly half of the entire world’s military expenditure.
Although the US government frames security threats from China and Russia as the main reason for its sky-high military budget, Russia’s military expenditure for 2025 was $190 billion, less than one-fifth of that of the US. China, the world’s second largest military spender, was $336 billion—about one-third of the US military budget.
As the secretary-general concludes, “Despite rising expenditures… global security has continued to deteriorate, calling into question the effectiveness of more military spending to enhance security.”
Do we really want or need more weapons and more wars? Shouldn’t we, instead, choose cooperative security, collective security, and human security, as represented by the United Nations?
Regrettably, we haven’t. Because of unpaid bills from 2025, in January 2026, Guterres sent a letter to member states warning of “imminent financial collapse” if dues were not paid on time. By February 8, the due date for membership contributions to the regular budget, only 55 countries had paid and, even now, neither the US nor China, the UN’s biggest contributors, have paid all of their dues. In July, the UN controller reported: “We don’t have enough cash beyond August. Unless its big donors step up, the UN will have to delay other payments to afford its High-Level Week of the General Assembly” (September 22-28 this year). To address last year’s shortfall, the UN’s regular budget was reduced by 15% in 2026 to 3.45 billion—making the world’s military expenditure 840 times that of the UN regular budget.
In a recent review of where the international order is headed, Brookings scholars conclude, “Whether the Trump administration moves aggressively enough to shatter what’s left of the multilateral order remains to be seen; there’s no evidence of what would replace it beyond unfettered American power.”
However, as A New Agenda for Peace notes: “War is always a choice… if war is a choice, peace can be too. It is time for a recommitment to peace.” It is also time to commit to revitalizing and reforming the United Nations to meet the needs of the future. As the UN secretary-general has stated, “Rebalancing global priorities... is an imperative for humanity to survive.”
Of course, this also depends on the informed participation of citizens and civil society (that means us), who must ensure that the public resources we give our governments to spend on our behalf are used in ways that bring us genuine security. We can’t let the world’s misguided leaders throw the United Nations off the cliff—and, while we’re at it, we must also ensure that we don’t sleepwalk into Armageddon.
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As Trump Renews Assault on Iran, Dems Prepare Another War Powers Resolution
Congress already passed one resolution last month, but Trump has defied it, claiming that his latest attacks are part of a new war against Iran.
Jul 22, 2026
Democrats introduced another war powers resolution in the US House of Representatives on Wednesday that they hope will strengthen their efforts to stop President Donald Trump from continuing to escalate his war with Iran.
Both houses of Congress already passed a war powers resolution in June, but it was not signed by Trump and lacked the force of law.
Trump has refused to comply with its order to withdraw troops from hostilities in the region, claiming that his renewed attacks on Iran this month constitute a new conflict that resets the 60-day countdown before Congress can intervene.
According to Politico, Rep. Gregory Meeks (NY), the ranking Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, expects the resolution to come to the floor for a vote on Thursday, just before Congress adjourns for a five-week summer recess.
The resolution, introduced by Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) on Wednesday, is expected to have the support of every Democrat, as well as Reps. Tom Barrett (R-Mich.), Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.), Warren Davidson (R-Ohio), and Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), who voted for the last resolution.
A co-sponsor of the bill, Rep. Jason Crow (D-Col.), said on Wednesday that Democrats, as well as these "Republicans of courage and conscience," were united in their goal of sending "a message that this war has got to stop."
Jayapal said recent developments, including the deaths of four US soldiers over the past week, had raised the urgency of ending the war now.
"This war has killed 18 US service members, cost billions of taxpayer dollars, and displaced millions of civilians," she noted.
A new resolution may also strengthen a separate effort by Rep. John Larson (D-Conn.), who is planning to introduce legislation that would block any additional federal funding for attacks against Iran not authorized by Congress. He also said he was preparing a lawsuit challenging Trump's continuation of the war without congressional approval, which he has called "legally baseless."
As the administration requests tens of billions more in military spending in order to fund the war, Democrats in the Senate last week blocked debate on the annual National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).
The House passed the NDAA on Wednesday with limited Democratic support, though it did not contain the separate Iran War funding package.
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Johnson Says Pentagon Needs More Money for ‘Fighting Communism on Our Own Shores’
Trump has threatened to deploy the military against the "enemy within" and has recently promoted the idea that "democratic socialism must be criminalized."
Jul 14, 2026
As he pushed for Congress to approve $350 billion in new spending requested by the Pentagon, House Speaker Mike Johnson suggested Tuesday that some of the funds were needed for "fighting communism on our own shores," an ominous notion in light of President Donald Trump's threats to deploy the US military against his domestic enemies.
In addition to the already record-breaking $1.1 trillion military spending bill that was approved last month by the House Appropriations Committee, the Pentagon has requested a separate $350 billion package to be passed through a separate GOP-led spending bill known as "Reconciliation 3.0," which can pass without Democratic support.
Johnson (La.) has faced pushback from some GOP senators, including Sens. Susan Collins (Maine) and the hospitalized Sen. Mitch McConnell (Ky.), as he's sought additional spending. During a press conference on Tuesday, Johnson made his case for Republicans to back the reconciliation proposal.
The speaker argued that the package included "transformational funding that will help us change the dynamic of the Department of War and make it more efficient and effective," including Trump's request to "effectively double the funding for national defense."
"Look, we live in dangerous times," Johnson said. "We're fighting communism on our own shores, and we're fighting evil terrorists and tyrants around the world, and we have to be able to protect our national security."
In the weeks following a series of Democratic primary victories by progressive and democratic socialist candidates in New York, Colorado, Kentucky, Ohio, Texas, and elsewhere, Trump and his allies in the GOP have relentlessly hammered on the idea that the nation was under siege by "godless Communists" who want to “completely destroy the traditional American way of life,” rhetoric that echoed McCarthy era red-baiting to many critics.
In just two weeks since those primaries on June 23, Reuters found that Trump had invoked "communism" at least 81 times to demonize candidates and officials like New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and others, who have promoted policies like Medicare for All, higher taxes on the wealthy, the expansion of public utilities, the abolition of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, cutting off aid to Israel, and other policies supported by large numbers of Democratic voters.
Trump's recent rhetoric has indicated that opposing "communism" goes beyond simply voting to keep these candidates out of power. He's referred to the so-called communists as "animals," as a "cancer" that needs to be "cut out fast."
He said during a July 3 speech outside Mount Rushmore that "communists" cannot be "loyal" to America and he will “send them into exile... send them quickly away.”
On Sunday, Trump reposted a video from the right-wing radio host Michael Savage with the title "DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISM MUST BE CRIMINALIZED; LEADERS DEPORTED."
Johnson echoed Trump's rhetoric on Tuesday, continuing to describe passing the military spending proposal as part of the existential fight against internal communist enemies.
"THE BARBARIANS ARE INSIDE THE GATE!" Johnson posted to social media alongside a video of himself promoting the bill.
"We are fighting right now in Congress over whether we're going to maintain our status as a constitutional republic OR trade that in, dismantle the foundations and GO DOWN THIS DARK ROAD OF DEATH TO COMMUNISM," he continued. "THAT is the question."
With these comments, Johnson was explicitly tying increased military funding to Trump's fight against communism, though it's unclear which aspect of the budget proposal would be directed toward those ends.
Federal troops are generally barred from domestic law enforcement, though the president can deploy them in cases of domestic insurrection and violence that ordinary law enforcement cannot handle.
Trump has deployed active duty Marines to US cities like Los Angeles and ordered the National Guard to deploy to many others, including Portland, Memphis, and Chicago, which courts have said violated the law.
He has also suggested using armed forces to target his ideological enemies. During a speech to generals last year, he said cities should be used as “training grounds for our military" as they fight an "enemy within," which has included immigrants, the "radical left" and protest movements that have mobilized in opposition to his administration.
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‘Of the Pentagon, by the Congress, and for the War Profiteers’: Ad Blasts Trump Military Budget
“The $1.5 trillion Pentagon budget request represents more than $9,000 per individual taxpayer."
Jul 13, 2026
As the Republican-controlled US Congress advances President Donald Trump's requested $1.5 trillion budget for "rebuilding" a military that's already more powerful than any armed force in human history, a group of former national security officials is urging Americans to challenge "out of control" Pentagon spending.
On Monday, the Eisenhower Media Network published a full-page advertisement in USA Today written by EMN executive director and retired Maj. Gen. Dennis Laich decrying what he called a military budget "of the Pentagon, by the Congress, and for the War Profiteers."
Invoking Thomas Paine's 1776 essay "Common Sense" and former Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower's repeated warnings about the dangers of the then-burgeoning military-industrial complex, the ad asserts that "time and reason strongly suggest that the US 'defense' budget is out of control, unsustainable, and absent of accountability."
"Only the American people can rein it in," Laich argued.
The advertisement notes that the US military budget is already "larger than the next eight nations (most of whom are allies) in the world combined, while American citizens lack healthcare, childcare, and other basic needs."
The ad continues:
The defense industry’s lobbyists team up with US politicians, who receive campaign financing from the industry, to draft the annual National Defense Authorization Act, which sets military policy, the expensive weaponry to be purchased, and the overall military budget. The industry takes the ensuing windfall and puts it toward stock buybacks, which increase the share price, making the rich richer; dividend payments for shareholders; eight-figure annual compensation packages for corporate executives; and the continual political graft (campaign contributions and lobbyists) that keeps the wheel spinning. Incredibly, some contracts stipulate that only the contractor may repair and maintain equipment. The most embarrassing example of this practice is the F-35 stealth fighter, which is grossly over budget, behind schedule, and is only 25% fully mission capable.
"Money talks in America, but few members of Congress choose to talk about the $39 trillion national debt to which military spending is a major contributor," Laich wrote.
"Additionally, the Pentagon cannot tell the American taxpayer where the money went, since it is unable to pass a financial audit as required by law—something every other department of the federal government is able to do," the ad notes. "Now, they are requesting a 50% increase in the defense budget to $1.5 trillion. This is equivalent to your child asking for more money a day after receiving his/her allowance. When you ask what happened to the money he/she received yesterday, the child can’t answer the question, but yougive him/her more money regardless."
Laich accused "uniformed bureaucrats" of lacking "the courage to stand up against a draft dodger and a Rambo-wannabe," an apparent swipe at Trump and, perhaps, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
Meanwhile, despite having the best-funded and most powerful military on paper, the ad points out that since World War II, "the US has won one war (the first Gulf War), lost four (Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iran), and tied one (Korea). Iran may be as much an embarrassment as a loss. The United States has failed to achieve its stated objectives in any recent war."
The ad asks, "What football coach could keep his job with a 1-4-1 record?"
"The $1.5 trillion Pentagon budget request represents more than $9,000 per individual taxpayer," EMN said. "If we Americans are tired of seeing our tax dollars spent on endless wars, bombing campaigns, and military excess while our own communities struggle with the costs of healthcare, childcare, education, and infrastructure, then the time has come to do what Thomas Paine asked Americans to do 250 years ago: challenge the assumptions that have become accepted simply because they are old."
"The courage required today is not to defeat an empire abroad, but to confront one at home—the military-industrial-congressional complex—and reclaim a government that serves the American people rather than the interests of perpetual war," the ad concludes.
EMN's advertisement follows an ad released by Hegseth in May touting Trump's $1.5 trillion proposal, which would add nearly $7 trillion to the US national debt over the next decade, according to the nonpartisan watchdog group Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.
A survey conducted in May by ReThink Media and the Costs of War Project at Brown University's Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs revealed that nearly 60% of Americans believe the proposed Pentagon budget is too large, including 40% who say $1.5 trillion is “much too high” to spend on the military.
Last month, US Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) introduced the Slash the Pentagon Act, which would set a hard cap of $750 billion on the amount Congress could authorize for national defense spending in fiscal year 2027.
"As Americans struggle to pay for healthcare, rent, electricity, groceries, and gas... Trump has spent over $100 billion on his expensive, dangerous, and unnecessary war with Iran," Markey said at a Capitol Hill press conference introducing the legislation. “We should invest in our hospitals, schools, affordable housing, and the real security American families need right now—not expensive wars and weapons that make us less safe.”
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NATO 3.0 Emerges Alive and Dangerous from the Ankara Summit
What was gained—and what did they refuse to admit—when the powerful military bloc held talks in Türkiye?
Jul 13, 2026
Despite its well-advertised tensions and tectonic geopolitical changes, this week’s NATO summit demonstrated that NATO has survived and is resilient. It remains committed to reinforcing US hegemony across Europe and globally. Not a lot has changed since former US National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote that US global dominance relies on controlling the periphery of Eurasia: NATO in the West, in Southwest Asia to the South, as well as its Asia-Pacific allies from South Korea and Japan through the Philippines and Australia. In the 21st century, military planning as well as trade is deeply integrated across these three regions.
The Summit served to reinforce what is emerging as a new bloc system for our yet to be named era. Threatened by the US and NATO, as John Mearsheimer remarked, Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea each see the US as a mortal enemy. While each of these nations’ situations and ambitions are vastly different, they share an interest in fending off threats from the US. They are thus increasingly binding themselves to one another economically, militarily, and diplomatically.
There were four major dimensions to the summit: 1) NATO’s survival despite its fault lines, 2) the first day’s focus on expanding and integrating European and US military production infrastructures and weapons sales contracts. 3) The final declaration celebrated and committed to still more European military spending. And 4) support for Ukraine was manifest.
The move to what is termed NATO 3.0, with European nations assuming greater responsibilities for the European theater, reflects the United States relative decline, something which has been glaringly demonstrated in its failed war against Iran. Trump and his coterie understand that US “leadership” is only possible with NATO. Despite his rhetoric, Trump and company value NATO because it allows them to do what they want to do elsewhere, especially in the most economically dynamic part of the world: the Indo-Pacific.
The transatlantic and increasingly global NATO alliance remains strong despite its fault lines due to what the elites understand as overlapping US and European shared interests, if not values.
NATO Secretary General Rutte and his allies insulated the alliance from Trump, from his madness, his dementia, his claim that US ships have been attacked by the Islamic Republic of Japan, demands for Greenland, and his complaints that European nations didn’t deliver all that he wanted in his war on Iran. Toward that end, the summit was convened and adjourned in less than a day, and the final declaration was limited to just six paragraphs, leaving little room for debate.
In fact, although not widely reported, during the war European allies have allowed US warplanes and ships to operate from bases across the continent, and they have provided access to their facilities for repairs and refueling.
As we could read in Carnegie Europe, “…trans-Atlanticism was never only a values project. It was—and remains—a convergence of security, economic, and technological interests between two regions that together account for roughly 43 percent of global GDP and comprise the world’s most capable alliance.”
The best way to understand what transpired in Ankara may be to use the lens of transactional dealmaking among Mafia families. Trump and Colby got what they wanted: European elites signed onto NATO 3.0 with increased European military spending and preparations to militarily contain and press Russia, so that the US can focus on containing China’s ambitions and reinforcing its 21st century Indo-Pacific hegemony. Remember, this has been a US goal that began with Obama’s “pivot to Asia.”
With NATO 3.0, the US intends to gradually reduce its ostensible role in guaranteeing European security. It is worth noting that European NATO members already massively outspending Russia on their militaries. They have conventional military superiority over Russia. And with NATO 3.0 these differentials will only become greater.
In time, the US will provide only what its European allies cannot: nuclear threats and high-tech intelligence. But it is also worth noting is that Trump said nothing in Ankara about pulling more troops out of Europe. The announced 5,000 troop reduction in Germany has yet to begin, and a commitment for increased US troop rotations in Poland was made. The Hegseth-Colby campaign for major US force reductions in Europe has been slowed by the two-month review won by Secretary of State Marco Rubio. In the end, Trump, and no one else, is the decision maker. Remember too that despite Trump ranting about NATO’s limited support for his war against Iran, the US would be very limited in its Southwest Asian and North African power projection without it bases still in Europe.
The West wasn’t shattered. In the transactional exchange, the US joined the dominant European narrative forged by the Baltic states and Poland about Russia and signed onto the summit’s final declaration with its commitments to support Ukraine in the war with Russia. This includes blessing Ukrainian debilitating attacks on Russian energy infrastructure deep within Russia. The declaration identified Russia as a long-term threat and reinterred the Treaty’s Article V commitment to come to the aid of any NATO member that is attacked. Ukraine won’t be joining NATO any time soon, but its advanced military technologies and warfighting experience make it an increasingly powerful adjunct to NATO.
In fact, the arms sales announced as the summit began serve as glue for the alliance’s future. Fifty billion dollars in weapons contracts were signed, with commitments made to Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Palantir, Anduril, Germany’s Rheinmetall, French Airbus, Sweden’s Saab, and Turkey’s Aselsan. Even Denmark, despite Trump’s Greenland threats, will be buying US Hellfire missiles and ships to patrol the Arctic.
NATO 3.0 makes it possible for the US to reinforce its lattice-like military alliance system and its military buildup across the Indo-Pacific. Note that the RIMPAC (Rim of the Pacific) naval show of force was held at the same time as the NATO summit. It includes the forces of 10 of 30 NATO nations. Almost one-third of all NATO countries sent military forces: land, air, and sea to Hawaii to participate in the RIMPAC 38-day war drills.
The summit also demonstrated Turkey’s increased role in NATO, both in relation to Southwest Asia, but also via its increased weapons production capacity for the alliance. Trump tossed Erdogan what may prove to be only a symbolic military bone with his offer to endorse the sale of F-35s to Turkey. There remain two major obstacles to those sales: Turkey’s S-400 air defense systems which were purchased from Moscow and the need for Congressional authorization for those sales.
On the subject of weapons sales, in his ostensible tilt toward Ukraine, Trump authorized the much-ballyhooed licensing for Ukraine to produce Patriot missile defense systems. This is too little too late to be meaningful. It will take at least a year to get such a complex weapons manufacturing system up and running. And Putin would certainly make these weapons facilities a primary target while they are being built. Moreover, to defend the construction of these facilities the already beleaguered Ukraine would need to divert its very limited missile and drone defenses to protect the construction, leaving the country still more vulnerable.
Reinforcing the global commitments of NATO, at a meeting on the sidelines of the summit the Japanese government called for deeper cooperation between NATO and its Indo-Pacific partners Australia, Japan, South Korea, and New Zealand at a meeting on the summit sidelines. Japan, which hosts more than 100 US military bases and installations, and has its most militarist government since 1945, has a security and defense pact with the EU. In recent months, Tokyo has created or deepened strategic partnerships and weapons development agreements with countries including Britain, Germany, Italy, and Sweden.
Tokyo is in the process of doubling its military spending. It is moving to trash Article 9, the heart of its Peace Constitution. It has deployed conventional preemptive strike missiles that can reach China and North Korea. And it has declared its readiness to go to war for Taiwan.
Despite the still open wounds of Japanese conquest and colonization of Korea in the last century, the US backed Japanese-ROK alliance is the strongest it has ever been. And there is increasing discussion in South Korea about returning US nuclear weapons to the Peninsula or developing its own nuclear arsenal.
Filling out the network of Indo-Pacific alliances, the US has been deepening military ties with its former colony, the Philippines. Add to this AUKUS (Australia, Britain and the US) and the QUAD (US, Japan, Australia, and India).
Several other points are worth noting. Europe’s massive military spending increases, trending at an annual rate of 20%, have been financed by increasing debt. That can’t continue. As Stop Re/Arm Europe network warns, if this increased spending continues it can only come at the expense of essential social services. Those cuts, and the suffering they cause, will further open the way for far-right wing political gains.
In truth, we are still a long way from an operational NATO 3.0. As the French and German refusal to cooperate on development of the next jet fighter indicates, continuing divisions among the leading European powers remain very real. Issues of command and control and many other concerns will be challenging for NATO to address. And while not widely reported in the US media, US and European national security mandarins have been remarking about the failure to announce a NATO summit in 2027. The absence of a NATO summit next year may serve to prevent a new round of headlines and reports about US-NATO divisions, and it will also allow for more backroom deals.
For more than 60 years (1945 – 1980) humanity was plagued by the clash of competing block systems. The Cold War was not always cold, and on several occasions, we were confronted by the specter of nuclear annihilation.
During the Cuban Missile Crisis, President Kennedy and his advisors believed the odds were 50-50 that the crisis would end in a thermonuclear exchange.
Computer and human errors were not uncommon. NATO’s 1983 Abel Archer military exercise sparked fears that they were under attack. That same year computer Soviet systems mistook a rare alignment of sunlight on high-altitude clouds for incoming US nuclear armed missiles. Most of us are alive today because Soviet Colonel Petrov, believed it to be a false alarm, defied his standing orders, dismissed the nuclear alert, and was later reprimanded for his courageous act.
Millions, from Vietnam to Afghanistan and Greece to Mozambique died in proxy wars between the US and Soviet led blocs. As President Dwight Eisenhower warned, the US military-industrial complex threatened democratic values and practice. And trillions of dollars, rubles, francs and other currencies were wasted on weaponry at the cost of essential medical care, education, housing and more.
One definition of stupidity is doing the same thing twice but expecting different results. With the creation of a new bloc system, the expansion and upgrading of the world’s nuclear arsenals, the climate emergency’s fires and rising seas, and uncertainty over where new high-tech weaponry will lead, it appears that NATO, Russian, and many other elites failed to learn the Cold War’s existential lessons.
But there is still time. It should be obvious that the only way to end the war between Russia and Ukraine is with a dirty deal that includes a ceasefire in place, security guarantees for both Ukraine and Russia, and a commitment to negotiate the status of currently occupied territories over time. How many more Russian and Ukrainian lives should be sacrificed in the killing fields of Donbass? How long should we tolerate spiraling military spending at the sacrifice of our living standards which in turn opens the way for fascist forces on the right?
There is also the lesson of Common Security diplomacy which thankfully provided the foundation for détente and the end of the Cold War. We can take some hope from off the record Track II discussions and others among elite Europeans, Russians, and US figures that there are increasing references to building on the traditions and surviving resources of the Helsinki process and the OSCE (Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe) to build a post-war Common Security European and transatlantic strategic architecture. Too few among us now remember that three decades ago the Cold War came to an end when NATO and Russian leaders finally came to understand that security cannot be achieved against a nation’s rival, but only through hard won win-win diplomacy that addresses the fears of all parties to a conflict.
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