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nuclear weapons
No, We Can't Deport Our Way Out of Gun Violence
Rather than embrace human complexity, we choose to create enemies. But this is exactly the mindset that motivates mass shooters.
Dec 21, 2025
I stare blankly at the news. Little men with guns once again stir the country—the world—into a state of shock and grief and chaos. Attention: Every last one of us is vulnerable to being eliminated... randomly,
On Saturday, December 13, there’s a classroom shooting at Brown University, in Providence. Rhode Island. Two students are killed, nine others wounded. A day later, in Sydney, Australia—in the midst of a Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach—two gunmen fire into the crowd of celebrants. Fifteen people are killed. The shock is global. The grief and anger flow like blood.
So do the questions: Why? How can we stop this? How can we guarantee that life is safe?
Usually, the calls for change after mass shootings focus on political action: specifically, more serious gun control. Ironically, Australia does have serious gun control. And, unlike the US, mass shootings there are extremely rare, but they still happen, which indicates that legal efforts can play a significant, but not total, role in reducing violence.
Good guy vs. bad guy—good violence vs. bad violence—is the essence of linear thinking.
But that ain’t gonna happen in the USA—not until God knows when, which seriously expands and intensifies the nature of the questions we must start asking. Yeah, there are an incredible number of guns in the United States. Some 400 million of them. And embedded into American culture along with the presence of guns is the belief that they are necessary for our safety, even as they also jeopardize it. Only a good guy with a gun can stop a bad guy with a gun. What a paradox.
And here’s where the process of change must begin. Good guy vs. bad guy—good violence vs. bad violence—is the essence of linear thinking. One person wins, one person loses. And if I draw my gun first, yeehaw, I’m the winner. This simplistic mindset is, and has long been, part of who we are—ultimately resulting, good God, in stockpiles of nuclear weapons, giving humanity the opportunity to commit mass suicide.
And while nukes may be declared to be simply deterrents for our enemies—threatening mutually assured destruction (oh, the MADness)—the global, and especially the US, non-nuclear military budget is itself almost beyond comprehension: larger by far than what we spend on healthcare, education, diplomacy, or environmental salvation, aka, human survival.
As Ivana Nikolić Hughes writes at Common Dreams: “But I think that the problem is far deeper than lack of gun control. The problem lies in having a state, a society, a world, in which violence is not only excused and sanctioned on a regular basis, but celebrated both as a matter of history, but also the present and the future.”
And this thinking isn’t sheerly political. It permeates our social and cultural infrastructure. And it gets personal. “We live in a culture of violence, where weapons are a symbol of power,” Ana Nogales writes in Psychology Today. And having power—over others—also means having the ability, and perhaps the motive, to dehumanize them. And this is the source of human violence—both the kind we hate (mass killings) and the kind we worship (war).
All of which leads me to a quote I heard the other day, in regard to the Bondi Beach shootings, which left me groping for sanity. The speaker was Indiana Republican Sen. Jim Banks, speaking on Fox News. “In America,” he said, “we have to do more to deport terrorists out of the United States to make sure this doesn’t happen in the homeland, and root out antisemitism around the world as well.”
Flush ’em out! All of them—you know, the ones that are different from us. Skin color, whatever. This is the essence of dehumanization, and it’s how we govern. Rather than embrace human complexity, we choose to create enemies and declare them... deportable, and if necessary, killable. This mindset is infectious. Just ask the students at Brown University or the Hanukkah celebrants at Bondi Beach.
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Trump's National Security Strategy Heralds a New Age of American Carnage
The Trump administration is rolling out a new imperial logic that harbingers chaos and violence.
Dec 17, 2025
The Trump administration’s National Security Strategy, or NSS, creates a basis for a more chaotic and violent American empire.
Already coming under heavy criticism, with Foreign Policy in Focus publishing warnings about its implications for global development and grand strategy, the strategy remains perhaps most dangerous for its imperious dictates to the world. Behind platitudes of peace and prosperity, it provides a crude imperial logic for violence and aggression, even gesturing at a need for military interventions.
“For a country whose interests are as numerous and diverse as ours, rigid adherence to non-interventionism is not possible,” the strategy notes.
The Trump administration tries to distinguish itself from previous administrations by criticizing foreign policy elites for seeking “permanent American domination of the entire world,” but it displays similar ambitions, even if framing them differently. Rather than making serious commitments to peace and democracy, the Trump administration is prioritizing national power, economic expansion, and military domination, going so far as to glorify its ability to kill people across the world.
“President Trump is hell-bent on maintaining and accelerating the most powerful military the world has ever seen, the most powerful, the most lethal and American-made,” Secretary of War Pete Hegseth said earlier this month.
Imperial Logics
In the 21st century, the United States has presented multiple imperial logics to the world. Despite the fact that US officials have largely refrained from associating the United States with empire and imperialism, they have developed national security strategies that have rationalized the exercise of US imperial power.
After the terrorist attacks against the United States on 9/11, the administration of George W. Bush developed a NSS that provided a basis for the United States to wage wars across the world. Under a framework of a global war on terrorism, the Bush administration claimed a need to act unilaterally and preemptively against alleged terrorists anywhere on the planet, even in violation of international law.
For two decades, the United States carried out the Bush administration’s approach, wreaking havoc across the world, especially the Middle East. The United States directed major wars against Iraq and Afghanistan, spreading devastation and destruction. According to the Costs of War project at Brown University, the United States spent about $8 trillion on wars that destabilized multiple countries and killed millions of people.
The Trump administration is trying to shift the focus away from great-power competition to sell the public on a new imperial logic that rationalizes national power, economic expansion, and military domination.
Leaders across multiple administrations defended the approach, even when facing criticisms about endless war, but US strategists eventually began turning to a new logic. Calling attention to rising powers, such as China and Russia, US strategists started to argue that the United States must exercise its military might to defend a rules-based international order against rising powers.
During the 2010s, officials in Washington began embracing the new logic, gradually rolling it out to the public. They introduced it during the final years of the administration of Barack Obama and then formalized it during the initial years of the first administration of Donald Trump.
When the first Trump administration released its NSS in 2017, it declared that the United States was competing with China and Russia in a new era of great-power competition.
“This strategy recognizes that, whether we like it or not, we are engaged in a new era of competition,” Trump announced. “We accept that vigorous military, economic, and political contests are now playing out all around the world.”
The new logic marked a shift away from the global war on terrorism, but it presented new dangers. By adopting a logic of great-power competition, the United States positioned itself for confrontations with China and Russia, two nuclear powers with growing influence across their peripheries and the world.
The new approach increased tensions with China in the Asia Pacific and rationalized conflict with Russia in Europe, particularly over Ukraine. Perhaps the greatest victim of the new logic has been Ukraine, which has suffered tremendously since Russia’s invasion in 2022.
For years, the United States and its European allies have been exploiting the war in Ukraine for the purpose of weakening Russia. They have been providing Ukraine with just enough support to defend itself but not enough to expel Russia. Their approach has kept Russian forces “bogged down in Ukraine—at enormous cost,” as Jake Sullivan noted earlier this year, when he was still national security adviser in the outgoing administration of Joe Biden.
The war in Ukraine may have resulted in enormous casualties for Russia, but it has also been devastating for Ukraine, leading current Secretary of State Marco Rubio to describe the war as a “meat grinder.”
“On the Russian side, they’ve lost 100,000 soldiers—dead—not injured—dead,” Rubio stated earlier this year. “On the Ukrainian side, the numbers are less but still very significant.”
Now that a second Trump administration is in power, it is shifting to yet another imperial logic. Facing concerns about the war in Ukraine, including the US role, the Trump administration is trying to shift the focus away from great-power competition to sell the public on a new imperial logic that rationalizes national power, economic expansion, and military domination.
Following the thinking of President Trump, who prioritizes wealth, power, and domination, the second Trump administration is embracing a cruder imperial logic that revives classical imperialism, or the use of force to open markets, seize resources, and maintain spheres of influence.
The Trump administration’s new logic takes aim at Latin America, where the United States is directing a military buildup and threatening a military intervention in Venezuela.
The NSS cites the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 to provide a justification for the Trump administration’s actions. Introducing what it calls a Trump corollary, it calls for a reassertion of US military power, the control of key geographies, and the exclusion of competitors from the hemisphere.
“The United States will restore US military dominance in the Western Hemisphere,” Hegseth declared.
Critiques
Now that the Trump administration has introduced its NSS, it is facing strong pushback from multiple directions. Not only are people across Latin America condemning the United States, particularly its unlawful killings of alleged drug traffickers in the Pacific and Caribbean, but the Trump administration is fielding a great deal of criticism from establishment figures, both in the United States and around the world.
Several European leaders have been highly critical of the NSS, especially its plans for US interference in European affairs. They have expressed shock over the administration’s call for “cultivating resistance” to European leaders.
Another source of pushback has been the US foreign policy establishment. Although the foreign policy establishment shares many of the Trump administration’s imperial commitments, especially to the Monroe Doctrine and military domination, it fears that the administration is not showing enough appreciation for great-power competition.
At its core, the Trump administration is preparing the world for future exercises of American military power.
Earlier this month, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expressed displeasure with the new strategy. She criticized Trump for going easy on Russian President Vladimir Putin and questioned why he is pressuring Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy into accepting a deal that would leave Ukraine vulnerable to future Russian aggression.
“I think that there’s a lot that needs to be reviewed and looked at from the perspective of what are the long-term consequences,” Clinton said.
But these establishment figures’ preferred framework of great-power competition has led to significant tensions with China and Russia, including great-power conflict. Several experts have argued that the expansion of NATO provoked Russia, an interpretation that President Trump has used to explain the war in Ukraine.
Another problem for the foreign policy establishment is that there is little agreement over how to characterize China and Russia. Although some analysts warn that Russia remains a rising power, making gains on the battlefield in Ukraine, others insist that Russia is a country in decline, as indicated by its inability to conquer Ukraine.
“I don’t think there’s any doubt that from a conventional military capability the Russians could not take on the United States or frankly many of the countries in Europe, for that matter,” Rubio said earlier this year.
Within the foreign policy establishment, there is just as much disagreement over China. Many analysts repeatedly sound the alarm over China, warning that the country is seeking global domination. Others dismiss these warnings, however, claiming that Chinese leaders are not seeking hegemony, despite their aspirations for world leadership.
“They really don’t seem to have an interest in being the hegemonic force that actually the United States has been in trying to maintain and enforce the rules-based order,” former Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines said earlier this month.
Perhaps most awkward for the foreign policy establishment, however, is that the second Trump administration remains focused on great-power competition. Although its National Security Strategy does not define great-power competition as the definitive feature of international relations, as the foreign policy establishment prefers, the Trump administration is making hostile moves toward both China and Russia.
The Trump administration is keeping pressure on Russia, even while the president signals his willingness to sacrifice Ukraine as part of his vainglorious quest for a Nobel Peace Prize. Perhaps most significant, the Trump administration is intensifying its economic war against Russia while pushing European countries to embrace militarization.
This past June, NATO members pledged at the Hague Summit to increase their military spending to 5% of GDP, despite Trump’s acknowledgments that Russia feels threatened by the military alliance.
“We just need to continue to get stronger and to make sure that we don’t demonstrate an inch of weakness, because we’re not weak,” US Ambassador to NATO Matthew Whitaker said earlier this month. “As we continue to implement the 5% commitment from the Hague, I think we’re going to be, you know, really not only the strongest alliance in the history of the planet, but really a dramatic force to be reckoned with.”
Meanwhile, the Trump administration is making aggressive moves against China. Although the administration insists that it is not seeking conflict with China, it is overseeing a military buildup that poses a major threat to the country.
Earlier this month, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth declared that China must respect US interests in the Asia Pacific, including the ability of the United States to project military power across the region. He explained the Trump administration’s approach by quoting a well-known imperial aphorism of former US President Theodore Roosevelt.
“We will speak softly and carry a big stick,” Hegseth said.
The Fundamental Problem
The fundamental problem, of course, is that the Trump administration is rolling out a new imperial logic that harbingers chaos and violence. Given all the harm the administration is already causing around the world, such as its crackdowns on immigrants, killings of alleged drug traffickers, and facilitation of genocide in Gaza, the new NSS indicates that the administration is just getting started in a new age of American carnage.
At its core, the Trump administration is preparing the world for future exercises of American military power. It is glorifying military domination, even preparing for military interventions for the purposes of seizing resources and maintaining spheres of influence.
At the same time, the administration is upending popular forms of politics and international relations. Its NSS displays contempt for democracy. Not only does it confirm the administration’s preference for monarchy in the Middle East, but it signals ongoing support for right-wing movements in Europe, which are positioning themselves to revive fascism.
Perhaps most dangerous, the strategy disregards existential threats to the planet. It embraces fossil fuels, the primary cause of the climate crisis. It even defends nuclear weapons, despite the extraordinary danger of nuclear war.
What the Trump administration is doing, in short, is laying the groundwork for a more volatile American empire. Rather than making genuine commitments to peace and democracy, it is introducing a crude imperial logic that makes the United States into a greater menace to the planet, with more horrors to come.
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Spending More Money on New Nukes Is a Moral Obscenity
The world remains on even more of a nuclear hair-trigger, the pistol loaded and cocked to our collective heads, just waiting for news that will push us over the edge.
Dec 02, 2025
It’s been 20 years since I retired from the Air Force and 40 years since I first entered Cheyenne Mountain, America’s nuclear redoubt at the southern end of the Front Range that includes Pikes Peak in Colorado. So it was with some nostalgia that I read a recent memo from General Kenneth Wilsbach, the new chief of staff of the Air Force. Along with the usual warrior talk, the CSAF vowed to “relentlessly advocate” for the new Sentinel ICBM, or intercontinental ballistic missile, and the B-21 Raider stealth bomber. While the Air Force often speaks of “investing” in new nukes, this time the CSAF opted for “recapitalization,” a remarkably bloodless term for the creation of a whole new generation of genocidal thermonuclear weapons and their delivery systems.
(Take a moment to think about that word, “creation,” applied to weapons of mass destruction. Raised Catholic, I learned that God created the universe out of nothing. By comparison, nuclear creators aren’t gods, they’re devils, for their “creation” may end with the destruction of everything. Small wonder J. Robert Oppenheimer mused that he’d become death, the destroyer of worlds, after the first successful atomic blast in 1945.)
In my Cheyenne Mountain days, circa 1985, the new “must have” bomber was the B-1 Lancer and the new “must have” ICBM was the MX Peacekeeper. If you go back 20 to 30 years earlier than that, it was the B-52 and the Minuteman. And mind you, my old service “owns” two legs of America’s nuclear triad. (The Navy has the third with its nuclear submarines armed with Trident II missiles.) And count on one thing: It will never willingly give them up. It will always “relentlessly advocate” for the latest ICBM and nuclear-capable bomber, irrespective of need, price, strategy, or above all else their murderous, indeed apocalyptic, capabilities.
At this moment, Donald Trump’s America has more than 5,000 nuclear warheads and bombs of various sorts, while Vladimir Putin’s Russia has roughly 5,500 of the same. Together, they represent overkill of an enormity that should be considered essentially unfathomable. Any sane person would minimally argue for serious reductions in nuclear weaponry on this planet. The literal salvation of humanity may depend on it. But don’t tell that to the generals and admirals, or to the weapons-producing corporations that get rich building such weaponry, or to members of Congress who have factories producing such weaponry and bases housing them in their districts.
So, here we are in a world in which the Pentagon plans to spend another $1.7 trillion (and no, that is not a typo!) “recapitalizing” its nuclear triad, and so in a world that is guaranteed to remain haunted forever by a possible future doomsday, the specter of nuclear mushroom clouds, and a true “end-times” catastrophe.
I Join AF Space Command Only to Find Myself Under 2,000 Feet of Granite
My first military assignment in 1985 was at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado with Air Force Space Command. That put me in America’s nuclear command post during the last few years of the Cold War. I also worked in the Space Surveillance Center and on a battle staff that brought me into the Missile Warning Center. So, I was exposed, in a relatively modest way (if anything having to do with nuclear weapons can ever be considered “modest”), to what nuclear war would actually be like and forced to think about it in a way most Americans don’t.
Each time I journeyed into Cheyenne Mountain, I walked or rode through a long tunnel carved out of granite. The buildings inside were mounted on gigantic springs (yes, springs!) that were supposed to absorb the shock of any nearby hydrogen bomb blast in a future war with the Soviet Union. Massive blast doors that looked like they belonged on the largest bank vault in the universe were supposed to keep us safe, though in a nuclear war they might only have ensured our entombment. They were mostly kept open, but every now and then they were closed for a military exercise.
I was a “space systems test analyst.” The Space Surveillance Center ran on a certain software program that needed periodic testing and evaluation, and I helped test the computer software that kept track of all objects orbiting the Earth. Back then, there were just over 5,000 of them. (Now, that number’s more like 45,000 and space is a lot more crowded—perhaps too crowded.)
It angers me that all of us, whether those like me who served in uniform or your average American taxpayer, have sacrificed so much to create genocidal weaponry and a distinctly world-ending arsenal.
Anyhow, what I remember most vividly were military exercises where we’d run through different potentially world-ending scenarios. (Think of the movie War Games with Matthew Broderick.) One exercise simulated a nuclear attack on the United States. No, it wasn’t like some Hollywood production. We just had monochrome computer displays with primitive graphics, but you could certainly see missile tracks emerging from the Soviet Union, crossing the North Pole, and ending at American cities.
Even though there were no fancy (fake) explosions and no other special effects, simply realizing what was possible and how we would visualize it if it were actually to happen was, as I’m sure you can imagine, a distinctly sobering experience and not one I’ve ever forgotten.
That “war game” should have shaken me up more than it did, however. At the time, we had a certain amount of fatalism about the possibility of nuclear war, something captured in the posters of the era that told you what to do in case of a nuclear attack. The final step was basically to bend over and kiss your ass goodbye. That was indeed my attitude.
Rather than obsess about Armageddon, I submerged myself in routine. There was a certain job to be done, procedures to be carried out, discipline to adhere to. Remember, of course, that this was also the era of the rise of the nuclear freeze protest movement that was demanding the US and the Soviet Union reach an agreement to halt further testing, production, and deployment of nuclear weapons. (If only, of course!) In addition, this was the time of the hit film The Day After, which tried to portray the aftermath of a nuclear war in the United States. In fact, on a midnight shift in Cheyenne Mountain, I even read Tom Clancy’s Red Storm Rising, which envisioned the Cold War gone hot, a Third World War gone nuclear.
Of course, if we had thought about nuclear war every minute of every day, we might indeed have been cowering under our sheets. Unfortunately, as a society, except in rare moments like the nuclear freeze movement one, we neither considered nor generally grasped what nuclear war was all about (even though nine countries now possess such weaponry and the likelihood of such a war only grows). Unfortunately, that lack of comprehension (and so protest) is one big reason why nuclear war remains so chillingly possible.
If anything, such a war has been eerily normalized in our collective consciousness and we’ve become remarkably numb to and fatalistic about it. One characteristic of that reality was the anesthetizing language that we used then (and still use) when it came to nuclear matters. We in the military spoke in acronyms or jargon about “flexible response,” “deterrence,” and what was then known as “mutually assured destruction” (or the wiping out of everything). In fact, we had a whole vocabulary of different words and euphemisms we could use so as not to think too deeply about the unthinkable or our possible role in making it happen.
My Date With Trinity
After leaving Cheyenne Mountain and getting a master’s degree, I co-taught a course on the making and use of the atomic bomb at the Air Force Academy. That was in 1992, and we actually took the cadets on a field trip to Los Alamos where the first nuclear weapon had largely been developed. Then we went on to the Trinity test site in Alamogordo, New Mexico, where, of course, that first atomic device was tested and that, believe me, was an unforgettable experience. We walked around and saw what was left of the tower where Robert Oppenheimer and crew suspended the “gadget” (nice euphemism!) for testing that bomb on July 16, 1945, less than a month before two atomic bombs would be dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, destroying both of them and killing perhaps 200,000 people. Basically (I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn), nothing’s left of that tower except for its concrete base and a couple of twisted pieces of metal. It certainly does make you reflect on the sheer power of such weaponry. It was then and remains a distinctly haunted landscape and walking around it a truly sobering experience.
And when I toured the Los Alamos lab right after the collapse of the other great superpower of that moment, the Soviet Union, it was curious how glum the people I met there were. The mood of the scientists was like: hey, maybe I’m going to have to find another job because we’re not going to be building all these nuclear weapons anymore, not with the Soviet Union gone. It was so obviously time for America to cash in its “peace dividends,” and the scientists’ mood reflected that.
Now, just imagine that 33 years after I took those cadets there, Los Alamos is once again going gangbusters, as our nation plans to “invest” another $1.7 trillion in a “modernized” nuclear triad (imagine what that means in terms of ultimate destruction!) that we (and the rest of the world) absolutely don’t need. To be blunt, today that outrages me. It angers me that all of us, whether those like me who served in uniform or your average American taxpayer, have sacrificed so much to create genocidal weaponry and a distinctly world-ending arsenal. Worse yet, when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, we didn’t even try to change course. And now the message is: Let’s spend staggering amounts of our tax dollars on even more apocalyptic weaponry. It’s insanity and, no question about it, it’s also morally obscene.
The Glitter of Nuclear Weapons
That ongoing obsession with total destruction, ultimate annihilation, reflects the fact that the United States is led by moral midgets. During the Vietnam War years, the infamous phrase of the time was that the US military had to “destroy the town to save it” (from communism, of course). And for 70 years now, America’s leaders have tacitly threatened to order the destruction of the world to save it from a rival power like Russia or China. Indeed, nuclear war plans in the early 1960s already envisioned a massive strike against Russia and China, with estimates of the dead put at 600 million, or “100 Holocausts,” as Daniel Ellsberg of Vietnam War fame so memorably put it.
Take it from this retired officer: You simply can’t trust the US military with that sort of destructive power. Indeed, you can’t trust anyone with that much power at their fingertips. Consider nuclear weapons akin to the One Ring of Power in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Anyone who puts that ring on is inevitably twisted and corrupted.
Freeman Dyson, a physicist of considerable probity, put it well to documentarian Jon Else in his film The Day After Trinity. Dyson confessed to his own “ring of power” moment:
I felt it myself. The glitter of nuclear weapons. It is irresistible if you come to them as a scientist. To feel it’s there in your hands, to release this energy that fuels the stars, to let it do your bidding. To perform these miracles, to lift a million tons of rock into the sky. It is something that gives people an illusion of illimitable power, and it is, in some ways, responsible for all our troubles—this, what you might call technical arrogance, that overcomes people when they see what they can do with their minds.
I’ve felt something akin to that as well. When I wore a military uniform, I was in some sense a captive to power. The military both captures and captivates. There’s an allure of power in the military, since you have a lot of destructive power at your disposal.
Of course, I wasn’t a B-1 bomber pilot or a missile-launch officer for ICBMs, but even so, when you’re part of something that’s so immensely, even world-destructively powerful, believe me, it does have an allure to it. And I don’t think we’re usually fully aware of how captivating that can be and how much you can want to be a part of that.
Even after their service, many veterans still want to go up in a warplane again or take a tour of a submarine, a battleship, or an aircraft carrier for nostalgic reasons, of course, but also because you want to regain that captivating feeling of being so close to immense—even world-ending—power.
The saying that “power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely” may never be truer than when it comes to nuclear war. We even have expressions like “use them or lose them” to express how ICBMs should be “launched on warning” of a nuclear attack before they can be destroyed by an incoming enemy strike. So many years later, in other words, the world remains on even more of a nuclear hair-trigger, the pistol loaded and cocked to our collective heads, just waiting for news that will push us over the edge, that will make those trigger fingers of ours too itchy to resist the urge to put too much pressure on that nuclear trigger.
No matter how many bunkers we build, no matter that the world’s biggest bunker tunneled out of a mountain, the one I was once in, still exists, nothing will save us if we allow the glitter of nuclear weapons to flash into preternatural thermonuclear brightness.
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