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u.s. imperialism
80 Years After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Are We on the Verge of Another Nuclear War?
With escalating military confrontations today—even the possibility of a World War—how long can “deterrence” work?
Aug 06, 2025
Eighty years ago, the U.S. dropped nuclear bombs on the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There are now nine nuclear-armed nations, many in military confrontation with one another. It is quite remarkable that there has not been another nuclear war. How can this be explained?
Some say the absence of another nuclear war proves that nuclear “deterrence” is working, and to some extent that is true. These nations are rightfully afraid of a nuclear conflagration, which could obliterate their societies, and even destroy all life on planet Earth. With escalating military confrontations today—even the possibility of a World War—how long can “deterrence” work?
“So Far, So Good…”
“So far so good” is probably the faintly hopeful refrain heard from many who feel helpless to undo the nuclear danger. This is reminiscent of the cartoon of the man falling from the top of a building. As he passes each descending floor, he proclaims, “So far, so good…”
In reality, a fair amount of luck has helped humanity avert nuclear catastrophe until now. We came very close during the “Cuban Missile Crisis.” A political officer on a Russian submarine that was out of communication and uncertain if a nuclear war had already begun called off a missile launch at the last minute. Another Russian military technician, suspicious of an errant radar reading that appeared to show incoming U.S. missiles, called off another imminent nuclear strike. It could just as easily have gone the other way.
Many experts worry that it will be an accidental nuclear launch that ends us. This is all the more concerning as Artificial Intelligence is applied to nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert, decreasing the decision-making time to split seconds, and removing human oversight. What could go wrong?
Never Again?
Sunset or nuclear blast?
2025 also marks 80 years from the end of World War II and the defeat of the German fascists by Russia, the United States, and the European Allies. Eighty years since Russian and U.S. troops liberated thousands of skeletal prisoners from German concentration camps, much to the horror of the world, which reacted with calls of “Never Again!”
But wait, don’t we have concentration camps now in the U.S.? Isn’t that why Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) now has a larger budget than many national militaries, and larger than the entire current federal prison system? They are building concentration camps for undocumented workers, whom they demonize as “murderers,” “rapists,” “gang members,” and “terrorists.” The vast majority of immigrants who have already been violently taken from their jobs and families, imprisoned, and deported have no criminal records whatsoever, and are productive, respected members of their communities.
If you think I am pointing the finger at the U.S. as the “bad guy” who is mostly responsible for the prospect of a civilization-ending nuclear war, then you are reading correctly.
Authoritarianism with distinct overtones of white supremacy is on the rise once again, while craven European politicians clamor for war with Russia and more military spending. What could go wrong?
Israel, purportedly a safe haven for the persecuted Jewish people—a “land without people for a people without land”—is escalating its blatant genocide in Gaza. The images of intentionally starved Palestinian men, women, and children conjure images of emaciated prisoners—mostly Jews—in World War II concentration camps.
Israel Wages Genocide While Threatening Its Neighbors with Nuclear Weapons
Israel is also a nuclear power, although it has long been considered impolite to say so. The United States helped Israel gain nuclear technology and has helped to shield Israel from any nuclear accountability. Israel has not signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Its nuclear arsenal is not inspected by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which the U.S. weaponized to support its rationale for war against Iraq, Syria, and Iran. The IAEA announced a resolution critical of Iran’s nuclear program on Thursday, June 12, the day before Israel’s attack on Iran. Coincidence? Probably not. Like so many other international bodies, the IAEA has been subverted to serve U.S. and Israeli war aims.
Unlike Iran, Israel actually has nuclear weapons. Will they use them against Iran? The Israeli government of right-wing extremists has already shown us the depths of depravity they are willing to go. Furthermore, all their Arab neighbors know Israel is the only nuclear-armed nation in the Middle East.
Daniel Ellsberg, author of The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, reminded us that “nuclear weapons are used every day. They are like a gun you point at somebody’s head.”
Aside from “luck,” it has been nuclear arms treaties that have held nuclear war in check. In recent years, however, the U.S. has shredded most of these treaties and missed many opportunities for peace:
- Former President Ronald Reagan rejected Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev’s offer for both countries to eliminate all their nuclear weapons if the U.S. would stop deployment of a “Star Wars” missile defense system in space.
- Former President Bill Clinton refused Russian President Vladimir Putin’s offer to cut our massive nuclear arsenals to 1,500 bombs and to call on all of the other nuclear-armed states to negotiate the elimination of all nuclear weapons, in exchange for the U.S. not placing missile sites in Romania.
- Former President George W. Bush walked out of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty and put a missile base in Romania. President Donald Trump placed another missile base in Poland.
- Former President Bush in 2008 and former President Barack Obama in 2014 blocked any discussion of Russian and Chinese proposals for a space weapons ban in the consensus-bound United Nations Committee for Disarmament in Geneva.
- President Obama rejected President Putin’s offer to negotiate a treaty to ban cyber war.
- President Trump pulled the U.S. out of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty.
- President Trump withdrew from the Iran Nuclear Deal, and placed sanctions on Iran.
- From President Clinton through President Trump, the U.S. has never ratified the 1992 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which was ratified by Russia has ratified.
Taken in their totality, these U.S. moves constitute an attempt to gain nuclear superiority, including the possibility of launching a First Strike nuclear attack. Pulling out of the ABM and INF treaties, in particular, indicate U.S. intentions to threaten Russia with nuclear war.
Is it any wonder that Russia, faced with the prospect of the U.S.-North Atlantic Treaty Organization troops and nuclear weapons systems stationed on its border with Ukraine, felt compelled to take military action? Now Russia is stuck in a bloody war that has been constantly escalated by the U.S., which has rejected multiple opportunities for peace talks since the war began. Russia asked for neutrality for Ukraine and respect for the rights of Ukraine’s Russian-speaking populations. Over 1 million casualties later (both sides), the bloody trench-and-drone war drags on, not because of Russian intransigence, but because of the aggressive U.S. policy of “full-spectrum dominance” in every corner of the globe.
Drone Attack on Russia’s Strategic Bombers Tempted Nuclear War
On June 1 of this year, a U.S.-supported Ukrainian drone attack on nuclear bombers in Russia almost triggered a nuclear war. According to a Russian general who spoke with former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) geopolitical analyst Larry Johnson, the world was even closer to nuclear war than during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Russian bombers were openly visible on the tarmac, in accordance with the New START Treaty, which is designed to prevent a nuclear-first strike by either Russia or the U.S. This last remaining nuclear arms control treaty between the U.S. and Russia is due to expire this coming February. But it already has been drone bombed.
News Flash! President Trump just posted on his Truth Social account that he is sending two nuclear-armed submarines closer to Russia. Why? Because he didn’t like something that Russia’s Dmitri Medvedev said on social media. What? Trump is scoring pissing points by playing with nuclear weapons? A narcissistic psychopath has his hand on the nuclear button. This is all the more reason to push for an end to the president’s sole authority to launch a nuclear war.
To round out this bleak report, we must at least mention that the U.S. is planning for war against China. The United States is openly planning to wage a war against China—some say as soon as 2027. Why? Because China’s remarkable revolution from extreme poverty to becoming a prosperous global powerhouse is something that the U.S. ruling class (or “deep state”) will not accept. So China will not be attacked because of its military aggression. Even as the U.S. wages perpetual war on multiple countries, China has not been at war with anybody in this century. U.S. complaints about Taiwan are nothing more than an excuse, a trigger for the war that U.S. leaders are determined to wage, at all costs.
The Pentagon Is Planning a Nuclear First-Strike Against China
The Pentagon has figured out that it cannot win a conventional war against China, however. It is planning to use nuclear weapons—an overwhelming first strike or possibly only “tactical nuclear weapons,” those cute little guys that are several times more powerful than what was dropped on Hiroshima.
U.S. war planners recently asked Australia and Japan to declare what military resources they will bring to bear in a war against China. And get this… the U.S. held talks with Japan, of all nations, to discuss how they will coordinate their efforts after a nuclear strike on China. Among the issues they discussed were how they could best manage public opinion after a nuclear war.
It is mostly by dumb luck, however, that we have not all perished in a nuclear Armageddon already.
So if you think I am pointing the finger at the U.S. as the “bad guy” who is mostly responsible for the prospect of a civilization-ending nuclear war, then you are reading correctly. To put it bluntly, the problem is U.S. imperialism. The waning U.S. empire, desperate to maintain its hegemony and expand it, is the elephant in the room. It is buttressed by a very large and powerful military-industrial complex (MIC), the one that former President Dwight Eisenhower warned us about—now on steroids. Ray McGovern of Veterans Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), a former CIA analyst himself, has expanded the MIC acronym to MICIMATT (Military Industrial Congressional Intelligence Media Academia Think Tanks). Yes, they are all complicit, not just with genocide in Palestine, but with militarizing and destroying the world. We peace-loving people have our work cut out for us. We are up against a lot.
There is a lot of money to be made from war and militarism. And politicians learn the advantages of justifying war and funding the war machine. The ever-growing Pentagon budget has ballooned to over $1 trillion under Trump, money that will be redirected from the social security net that is being systematically shredded. Spending on nuclear weapons “modernization” alone will cost $100 billion in just the next year (from the budgets of the Pentagon and the Department of Energy).
“The End Is Near”
For decades, peace activists, scientists, and others have been warning us about the “growing danger of nuclear war.” Those sounding the nuclear alarm have been treated like the proverbial fanatic with the sign, “The End Is Near,” or like Chicken Little—“The sky is falling.” It is mostly by dumb luck, however, that we have not all perished in a nuclear Armageddon already. The guard rails have been removed, with the U.S. abrogation of nuclear arms deals. There are very few “adults in the room,” certainly not in the U.S., where neocons who love Israel but hate Iran and Russia have seized the helm. It will take a miracle and a lot of activism to avoid utter disaster in the relatively near future.
Many peoples are already experiencing disaster, what with wars, genocide, extreme poverty, starvation, and the climate crisis—the fruits of corporate greed and militarism. Many people also suffer from the poison of the entire nuclear cycle. There are 15,000 abandoned uranium mines in the Western U.S., many of them on First Nations lands. Radiation contaminates the water, the air, the land, and the people, who suffer from many cancers and radiation-related diseases.
The U.S. Exploded 67 Nuclear Bombs in the Marshall Islands
Then there are the “downwinders” who suffer from the radiation of nuclear bomb testing. Or worse. The Marshall Islands were devastated by nuclear bomb testing. From 1946 to 1958, the U.S. detonated 67 nuclear bombs on this island nation in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. To add insult to injury, their islands are now “sinking” from global warming and rising seas. Many Marshallese, unable to grow food on radiated land and unable to eat the fish from radiated waters, have been allowed to live in the U.S., without citizenship or security, and denied healthcare by many states. There is no cancer treatment facility in the Marshall Islands, and no Veterans Affairs facility for its many veterans of the U.S. military.
We will end this disturbing nuclear tour on a positive note. It has to do with the Marshall Islands. In 1958, four Quaker peace activists bought a sailboat and announced to the world their intention to sail from Los Angeles 4,000 miles into the nuclear test zone in the Marshall Islands to stop U.S. nuclear testing. They were led by Albert Bigelow, a World War II Navy commander who resigned his commission in protest of the U.S. nuclear bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The Golden Rule Crew Tried to Stop U.S. Nuclear Testing
Halfway through the voyage, when Bigelow and his intrepid crew pulled into Honolulu, they were arrested and thrown in jail and the Coast Guard seized their boat, named Golden Rule. They never made it to the Marshall Islands, but they succeeded in bringing worldwide attention to the danger of radiation that was floating all over the globe, even getting into mothers’ milk. Opposition to nuclear testing led to the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1962, signed by then-President John F. Kennedy and the leaders of Russia and the United Kingdom. The treaty banned nuclear testing in the atmosphere, in the water, and in space. Only underground tests were permitted. These days most nuclear testing is done using computer simulations.
The remarkable saga of the Golden Rule continued. The 34-foot ketch was sold and sailed as a pleasure boat by several families to the South Pacific and the Caribbean. Somehow, in 2010 it was found in Humboldt Bay in northern California—a derelict boat that had sunk in a gale and had a big hole in its side. Some locals dragged the beat-up boat onto the beach and planned to make a bonfire of it. When a someone discovered the boat’s legacy, however, local members of Veterans For Peace rescued it and decided to restore it to its original glory.
In June of 2015, after five years of dedicated volunteer labor by veterans, Quakers, and boat lovers, the Golden Rule splashed back into the waters of Humboldt Bay and began sailing up and down the West Coast from British Columbia to Mexico (Ensenada), then to Hawai’i and all around the Hawai’ian islands. Back to California, trucked to Minneapolis, sailed down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico, to Cuba and up the East Coast to Toronto and back to Chicago, a 12-month voyage with a total of 102 port stops. At every stop the Golden Rule and its crew were welcomed excitedly by local peace and environmental activists as well as by state and local officials. Nobody wants a nuclear war!
The Golden Rule Is Sailing Around San Francisco Bay
The historic peace boat Golden Rule Sails by the Golden Gate Bridge
The historic Golden Rule peace boat sailed last week from its homeport in Humboldt Bay to San Francisco Bay, where it will spend the month of August educating the public about the “growing danger of nuclear war,” and the importance of supporting the U.N. Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW). The treaty, supported by an overwhelming majority of countries, went into force in January 2021. It prohibits nations from developing, testing, producing, manufacturing, transferring, possessing, stockpiling, using, or threatening to use nuclear weapons, or allowing nuclear weapons to be stationed on their territory. It also prohibits them from assisting, encouraging, or inducing anyone to engage in any of these activities
Peace at Home, Peace Abroad!
The Golden Rule is a national project of Veterans For Peace, a 40-year-old organization dedicated to exposing the true costs of war; to restraining our government from intervening, overtly and covertly, in the internal affairs of other nations; and to ridding the world of nuclear weapons. At its recent national convention, veterans from U.S. wars in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and recent deployments made a united call for opposition to the U.S.-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza and for resistance to racist ICE attacks in our own communities. While calling for the abolition of nuclear weapons, the Golden Rule will be echoing these urgent cries for “Peace at Home, Peace Abroad.”
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As the US Detains and Deports, Venezuela Reunites Families
A country labeled a dictatorship offered what this so-called democracy did not: return, reunification, and dignity.
Aug 05, 2025
In July 2025, the U.S. Congress passed a budget that commits at least $131 billion to expanding detention, deportation, and border militarization. It is the largest immigration enforcement package in modern U.S. history and one that most people are funding without knowing.
Public pension funds, university endowments, and municipal budgets are deeply invested in Immigration and Custom Enforcement’s (ICE) machinery. If you pay into a retirement fund, attend a university, or live in a major city, your money might be helping detain someone. Your tax dollars already are.
The plan triples ICE’s funding, revives the failed border wall project, builds new jails for families, and allocates $10 billion in unregulated funds to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). At the same time, up to 17 million people risk losing healthcare and millions of children face losing access to school meals.
These priorities are not accidental. They reflect a political strategy that treats migration as a threat to be neutralized rather than a consequence of U.S. policy. This budget doesn’t just expand infrastructure, it expands a racialized system of surveillance, incarceration, and profit, while shrinking legal protection, due process, and public oversight.
Here’s what the new immigration budget includes:
- $29.9 billion for ICE enforcement and deportation—a threefold increase;
- $45 billion to build new immigration detention centers, including for children and families;
- $46.6 billion for border wall construction, which is more than triple what U.S. President Donald Trump spent in his first term;
- $10 billion in unregulated DHS funding to “safeguard the border” without oversight;
- A daily detention capacity of 116,000 human beings, enough to fill a stadium with mothers, students, toddlers, and elders or to disappear the entire population of Lansing, Michigan or Athens, Georgia; and
- An 800 person limit on the number of immigration judges, worsening already record-breaking court backlogs and delaying due process for millions.
ICE Is Everywhere
ICE doesn’t operate alone. It dances with Palantir’s algorithms. It swallows data from school and Department of Motor Vehicles records. It whispers to local cops in sanctuary cities. It hides in contracts signed by universities that claim to care about inclusion. It is public and private, visible and invisible, and always expanding.
The border doesn’t stop at the border.
ICE shares tech, tactics, and training with local police across the U.S., especially in Black and Brown communities. The same algorithms used to deport migrants are used to lock up teenagers in Chicago, LA, and New York. The war economy is domestic, too.
Migration Is Not a Crisis; U.S. Policy Is
The people being detained and deported are not a crisis. They are the result of one. U.S. foreign policy, through sanctions, coups, climate extraction, and economic warfare, has destabilized entire regions and then criminalized those who flee.
Nowhere is this more visible than in Venezuela.
Years of U.S. sanctions have severely constrained Venezuela’s economy and pushed millions to migrate. A recent study in The Lancet Global Health found that unilateral economic sanctions lead to an estimated 564,000 deaths every year, mostly among children under five. The researchers concluded that sanctions are a form of economic warfare with deadly consequences, often as destructive as armed conflict. Venezuela is among the countries most severely affected.
A Stark Contrast: Venezuela’s Efforts to Reunite Families
Despite being locked out of international markets, denied access to its own reserves, and targeted by ongoing U.S. sanctions, the Venezuelan government has prioritized reuniting families separated by deportation. Flights have been organized to return Venezuelan migrants from the U.S. and neighboring countries. Deportees are met with medical care, housing support, and assistance. There are no billion-dollar detention centers. No ankle monitors. No private contractors. Just the political decision to bring people home with dignity.
This reflects a deeper difference. The United States continues to expand a war economy, one that profits from incarceration, surveillance, and militarized borders. Corporations like Palantir, CoreCivic, and GEO Group are major beneficiaries of immigration funding, alongside weapons manufacturers and data firms. In contrast, Venezuela’s response, under siege, has been to build on a peace economy rooted in social programs, community organization, and everyday resilience.
The United States fuels crises abroad—sanctions, coups, austerity—and then builds cages for those who flee.
Much of that work is led by women.
In Venezuela, Madres Víctimas del Fascismo have been organizing alongside the government to locate, support, and repatriate their children, many of whom were detained in the U.S. or in Latin American countries. These mothers have worked with consular authorities, spoken in public forums, and demanded state action to bring their families back together. Through their pressure, and the government’s cooperation, some have already seen their children return home.
This is what a peace economy looks like, one built on social programs, community organization, and state-supported reunification.
The Violence of the Border Enforcement Is the Violence of the Empire
The United States fuels crises abroad—sanctions, coups, austerity—and then builds cages for those who flee. Venezuela knows this intimately. Its economy has been blocked, its institutions targeted, and its people criminalized the moment they cross a border. And yet it was Venezuela that welcomed deported migrants with food, medicine, and housing; they were greeted with care. A country labeled a dictatorship offered what this so-called democracy did not: return, reunification, and dignity.
Who Is Complicit?
This system doesn’t operate in just one region. It’s not limited to Texas or Arizona. It’s embedded across the country, in contracts, databases, and quiet forms of cooperation.
Schools often share data, directly or indirectly, with ICE. Universities collaborate with DHS through software licensing and research grants. Investors, including public pension funds and university endowments, hold shares in GEO Group, Palantir, and other deportation profiteers.
The U.S. has made its priorities clear. It is willing to spend more to detain migrants than to house the hundreds of thousands living unhoused on the streets of its cities. It is expanding detention while limiting legal avenues for relief. It is responding to the consequences of its foreign policy with policing not accountability.
It’s not enough to say “Abolish ICE.” We must hold accountable every institution that feeds its machinery, from schools that share data, to universities that license surveillance tech, to investors profiting from migrant detention.
Migration is not a crime. U.S. sanctions are.
- End institutional cooperation with ICE
- Demand divestment from companies profiting off detention
- Organize against U.S. sanctions and intervention
The war economy is everywhere. So the resistance must be, too.
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It’s Up to We the People to Save a Flailing America From Spiritual Death
For tyranny to be stopped, for a catastrophic war with China (and who knows what else) to be avoided, America must have profiles in courage, not cowardice.
Aug 05, 2025
As a retired U.S. Air Force officer, I firmly believe in civilian control of our military. This country should be a nation of laws—not of special interests, oligarchs, or kings. Before committing our forces to battle, Congress should always declare war in the name of the people. Our military should indeed be a citizen-soldier force, not an isolated caste driven by a warrior ethos. And above all, the United States should be a republic ruled by law and shaped by sound moral values, not a greed-driven empire fueled by militarism.
Yet when I express such views, I feel like I’m clinging to a belief in the tooth fairy, the Easter Bunny, and Santa Claus. It feels idealistic, naïve, even painful to think that way. Yes, I served this country in uniform for 20 years, and now, in the age of Donald Trump, it has, as far as I can tell, thoroughly lost its way. The unraveling began so long ago—most obviously with the disastrous Vietnam War of the 1960s and 1970s, though in truth this country’s imperial desires predated even the Spanish-American War of 1898, stretching back to the wanton suppression of indigenous peoples as part of its founding and expansion.
A glance at U.S. history reveals major atrocities: the displacement and murder of Native Americans, slavery, and all too many imperial misadventures abroad. I knew of such realities when I joined the military in 1985, near the end of the Cold War. Despite its flaws, I believed then that this country was more committed to freedom than the Soviet Union. We could still claim some moral authority as the leader of what we then referred to as “the free world,” however compromised or imperfect our actions were.
That moral authority, however, is now gone. U.S. leaders fully support and unapologetically serve an ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza. They sell weapons to nearly every regime imaginable, irrespective of human rights violations. They wage war without Congressional approval—the recent 12-day assault on Iran being just the latest example. (The second Trump administration has, in fact, launched almost as many air strikes, especially in Yemen and Somalia, in its first five months as the Biden administration did in four years.) Those same leaders have been doing a bang-up job dismantling the America I thought I was serving when I took that oath and put on second lieutenant’s bars four decades ago. That America—assuming it ever existed—may now be gone forever.
FUBAR: A Republic in Ruins
My fellow citizens, America is FUBAR (a term that dates from World War II). We are not faintly who we claim to be. Rather than a functioning republic, we are an ailing, flailing, perhaps even failing empire. We embrace war, glorify warriors, and profit mightily from the global arms trade, no matter the civilian toll, including tens of thousands of dead and wounded children in Gaza, among the latest victims of U.S.-made bombs, bullets, and missiles.
Signs of moral rot are everywhere. Our president, who would like to be known for his budget cuts, nonetheless giddily celebrates a record trillion-dollar war budget. Our secretary of defense gleefully promotes a warrior ethos. Congress almost unanimously supports or acquiesces in the destruction of Gaza. Images from the region resemble bombed-out Stalingrad in 1942 or Berlin in 1945. Meanwhile, for more than two decades now, America’s leaders have claimed to be waging a successful global “war on terror” even as they fuel terror across the globe. What do they think all those U.S. weapons are for—spreading peace?
Trump and Hegseth are not faintly what the founders of this country envisioned when they placed the military under civilian control.
My wife and I cope through dark humor. We see news on cuts to Medicaid, the mentally ill in the streets, and crumbling infrastructure, and quip: “But Bibi [Netanyahu] needs bombs. Or Ukraine does. Or the Pentagon needs more nukes.” That’s why Americans can’t have nice things like healthcare. That’s why all too many of us are unhoused, in debt, out of work, and desperate. In 1967—yes, that’s almost 60 years ago!—Martin Luther King warned of exactly this: America’s approaching spiritual death through militarism (aggravated by extreme materialism and racism). That death is visibly here, now.
Washington is not even faintly committed to “peace through strength,” a vapid slogan touted by the Trump administration, and an unintentional echo of George Orwell’s dystopian “war is peace.” It is committed instead to what passes for dominance through colossal military spending and persistent war. And let’s face it, that warpath may well end in the death of the American experiment.
The Mediocrity of Our Generals
In this era of creeping authoritarianism and mass surveillance, perhaps the U.S. is lucky that its generals are, by and large, so utterly uninspired. Today’s American military isn’t open to the mercurial and meteoric talents of a Napoleon or a Caesar. Not in its upper ranks, at least.
One struggles to name a truly great American general or admiral since World War II. That war produced household names like George C. Marshall, Dwight D. Eisenhower, George S. Patton, and Chester W. Nimitz. In contrast, America’s recent generals—Norman Schwarzkopf and Colin Powell of Desert Storm fame, Tommy Franks in Iraq in 2003, David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal of the “fragile” and “reversible” Iraq and Afghan “surges”—have left anything but a legacy of excellence or moral leadership, not to speak of decisive victory. At best, they were narrowly competent; at worst, morally compromised and dangerously deluded.
Mind you, this isn’t a criticism of this country’s rank-and-file troops. The young Americans I served with showed no lack of courage. It wasn’t their fault that the wars they found themselves in were misbegotten and mismanaged. Twenty years have passed since I served alongside those young troops, glowing with pride and purpose in their dedication, their idealism, their commitment to their oath of service. Many paid a high price in limbs, minds, or lives. Too often, they were lions led by donkeys, to borrow a phrase once used to describe the inept and callous British leadership during World War I at bloody battles like the Somme (1916) and Passchendaele (1917).
Today, I fear that America’s lions may, sooner or later, be led into even deeper catastrophe—this time possibly a war with China. Any conflict with China would likely rival, if not surpass, the disasters produced by World War I. The world’s best military, which U.S. presidents have been telling us we have since the 9/11 attacks of September 2001, stands all too close to being committed to just such a war in Asia by donkeys like Donald Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.
And for what? The island of Taiwan is often mentioned, but the actual reason would undoubtedly be to preserve imperial hegemony in the service of corporate interests. War, as General Smedley Butler wrote in 1935 after he retired from the military, is indeed a racket, one from which the rich exempt themselves (except when it comes to taking profits from the same).
A disastrous conflict with China, likely ending in a U.S. defeat (or a planetary one), could very well lead to a repeat of some even more extreme version of Trump’s Make America Great Again campaign, amplified and intensified by humiliation and resentment. From the ashes of that possible defeat, an American Napoleon or Caesar (or at least a wannabe imitator) could very well emerge to administer the coup de grace to what’s left of our democracy and freedom.
Avoiding a Colossal Act of Folly
War with China isn’t, of course, inevitable, but America’s current posture makes it more likely. Trump’s tariffs, his bombastic rhetoric, and this country’s extensive military exercises in the Pacific contribute to rising tensions, not deescalation and rapprochement.
While this country invests in war and more war, China invests in infrastructure and trade, in the process becoming what the U.S. used to be: the world’s indispensable workhorse. As the 10 BRICS countries, including China, expand and global power becomes more multipolar, this country’s addiction to military dominance may drive it to lash out. With ever more invested in a massive military war hammer, impetuous leaders like Trump and Hegseth may see China as just another nail to be driven down. It would, of course, be a colossal act of folly, though anything but a first in history.
And speaking of folly, the U.S. military as it’s configured today is remarkably similar to the force I joined in 1985. The focus remains on ultra-expensive weapons systems, including the dodgy F-35 jet fighter, the unnecessary B-21 Raider bomber, the escalatory Sentinel Intercontinental Ballistic Missile, and Trump’s truly fantastical “Golden Dome” missile defense system (a ghostly rehash of President Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” proposal, vintage 1983). Other militaries, meanwhile, are improvising, notably in low-cost drone technology (also known as UAS, or uncrewed autonomous systems) as seen in the Russia-Ukraine War, a crucial new arena of war-making where the U.S. has fallen significantly behind China.
Far too often, America’s leaders, whatever they’ve said in their election campaigns, have valued weapons and wars over almost anything else.
The Pentagon’s “solution” here is to continue the massive funding of Cold War-era weapons systems while posing as open to innovation, as an embarrassing video of Hegseth walking with drones suggests. America’s military is, in short, well-prepared to fight a major conventional war against an obliging enemy like Iraq in 1991, but such a scenario is unlikely to lie in our future.
With respect to drones or UAS, I can hear the wheels of the military-industrial complex grinding away. A decentralized, low-cost, flexible cottage industry will likely be transformed into a centralized, high-cost, inflexible cash cow for the merchants of death. When the Pentagon faces a perceived crisis or shortfall, the answer is always to throw more money at it. Ka-ching!
Indeed, the recent profit margins of major military contractors like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and RTX (formerly Raytheon) have been astounding. Since 9/11, Boeing’s stock has risen more than 400%. RTX shares are up more than 600%. Lockheed Martin, maker of the faltering F-35, has seen its shares soar by nearly 1,000%. And Northrop Grumman, maker of the B-21 Raider bomber and Sentinel ICBM, two legs of America’s “modernized” nuclear triad, has seen its shares increase by more than 1,400%. Who says that war (even the threat of a global nuclear war) doesn’t pay?
Meanwhile, the Pentagon’s war budget, soaring to unprecedented levels, has been virtually immune to DOGE cuts. While Elon Musk and his whiz kids searched for a few billion in savings by gutting education or squelching funding for public media like PBS and NPR, the Pentagon emerged with about $160 billion in new spending authority. As former President Joe Biden once reminded us: Show me your budget and I’ll tell you what you value. Far too often, America’s leaders, whatever they’ve said in their election campaigns, have valued weapons and wars over almost anything else.
What Is To Be Done
I’ve written against warriors, warfighters, and U.S. militarism since 2007. And yes, it often feels futile, but silence means surrender to warmongering fools like Hegseth, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), and the farrago of grifters, clowns, toadies, con men, and zealots who inhabit the Trump administration and much of Congress as well. The fight against them must go on.
All leaders, military and civilian, must remember their oath: loyalty to the Constitution, not to any man. Illegal orders must be resisted. Congress must impeach and remove a president who acts unlawfully. It must also reassert its distinctly lost authority to declare war. And it must stop taking “legal” bribes from the lobbyists and foot soldiers who flood the halls of Congress, peddling influence with campaign “contributions.”
For tyranny to be stopped, for a catastrophic war with China (and who knows what else) to be avoided, America must have profiles in courage, not cowardice. Yet even despair is being weaponized. As a retired colonel and friend of mine wrote to me recently: “I don’t even know where to start anymore, Bill. I have no hope for anything ever improving.”
And don’t think of that despair as incidental or accidental. It’s a distinct feature of the present system of government.
Trump and Hegseth are not faintly what the founders of this country envisioned when they placed the military under civilian control. Yet power ultimately resides in the people (if we remember our duties as citizens). Isn’t it high time that we Americans recover our ideals, as well as our guts?
After all, the few can do little without the consent of the many. It’s up to the many (that’s us!) to reclaim and restore America.
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The Peace Deal That Wasn’t
Trump’s Congo-Rwanda Peace Accord is an affront to Congolese human rights and sovereignty.
Aug 03, 2025
After the signing of the so-called peace agreement between Rwanda and Congo on June 27, U.S. President Donald Trump took a victory lap. “This is a Great Day for Africa and, quite frankly, a Great Day for the World! I won’t get a Nobel Peace Prize for this... but the people know, and that’s all that matters to me!” he posted. The agreement, heralded as a breakthrough ending more than three decades of violence in Congo, was quickly praised by powerful institutions in the West, including the United Nations and the European Union.
There’s no question that peace in Congo is a desperately needed goal. Since 1996, war in the country has killed nearly 6 million people and displaced over 7 million. More than 21 million require humanitarian assistance, and in 2023 alone, the U.N. recorded over 133,000 cases of sexual violence, almost certainly a significant undercount.
However, while world leaders and celebratory headlines applaud the deal, violence continues to rage in the eastern Congo. The deal will not end this suffering; instead, it prioritizes Western private interests over peace, justice, and dignity for the Congolese people, serving as a blueprint for resource extraction and continued violence in the country rather than a true diplomatic success.
The deal, while ostensibly aimed at ending hostilities, places a heavy emphasis on mineral exploitation, leading Congolese civil society to question its true purpose. Nobel Peace Prize laureate Dr. Denis Mukwege has denounced it for “legitimizing the plundering of Congolese natural resources,” a concern supported by the agreement’s inclusion of a clause committing signatories to “launch and/or expand cooperation on… formalized end-to-end mineral value chains… with the U.S. government and U.S. investors.” Upon the release of the Declaration of Principles that laid the deal’s foundations, the International Crisis Group noted that the deal reads “partly like a framework for ending a conflict and partly like a commercial memorandum.”
The False Promise of Peace
It is highly unlikely that the deal will bring a just and lasting peace to Congo. Though a potential cease-fire was announced between the Congo government and M23, the conflict’s largest rebel group, experts say that M23 has already broken the agreement while serious implementation challenges remain. M23 has left withdrawal—and, thus, a true and lasting end to the conflict—out of the question, telling reporters they “will not retreat, not even by one meter.” Meanwhile, over 100 other armed groups continue to fight in the east. On July 23, the U.N. condemned three recent deadly attacks by groups not party to the agreement.
More troublingly, the deal grants Rwanda a green light to continue looting Congolese resources, furthering a central driver of the conflict. By backing M23, Rwanda has taken control of Congolese mines, and committed widespread human rights abuses. Up to 90% of its coltan exports are believed to be illicitly smuggled from eastern Congo, funding armed groups. The accord, which invites Rwanda into a “regional economic integration framework,” legitimizes this theft and proxy warfare.
Rwandan President Paul Kagame doesn’t seem ready to scale back this influence. Just days after the agreement was signed, he cast doubt on the peace process, telling reporters, “If the side that we are working with plays tricks... then we deal with the problem like we have been dealing with it.”
Who Does the Deal Really Benefit?
Today, the Congolese people endure violence not only from armed conflict but also from systemic exploitation, through forced labor, environmental destruction, and land seizures. The scramble for Congo’s mineral wealth has forced tens of thousands of children into dangerous mines, polluted and devastated ecosystems, and displaced entire communities from their homes.
A recent policy brief by the Oakland Institute lays bare how, through handing over Congolese mineral wealth to a web of U.S.-aligned corporate actors and billionaire investors, Trump’s peace deal will deepen the ravages of the country’s mining industry, leaving the Congolese people to pay the price.
The list of the deal’s likely beneficiaries is a veritable who’s-who of Trump-linked billionaires: Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Michael Bloomberg, Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, and Ben Horowitz, among others. Also on it are mining giants like Ivanhoe Mines, Rio Tinto, and Glencore.
The accord threatens to entrench this cyclical poverty and violence in service of enriching behemoth mining firms and Trump’s billionaire friends.
The track records of these companies undermine any claim that Trump’s deal is about peace for the Congolese people. Ivanhoe Mines’s cochair Robert Friedland once ran Galactic Resources, responsible for one of the worst mining-related environmental disasters in U.S. history. He has already been exposed for harmfully evicting Congolese families to expand his new operations in the Congo. Rio Tinto, notorious for sparking a civil war in Papua New Guinea and for destroying a 46,000-year-old sacred Aboriginal site in Australia, is now eyeing Congo’s Manono Lithium Deposit. Glencore has been fined over $1 billion for abuses in its African mines and maintains illicit financial ties to sanctioned Israeli billionaire Dan Gertler. Both Ivanhoe and Rio Tinto are reportedly set to join a forthcoming minerals agreement tied directly to the deal’s economy-driven clauses.
Lacking the infrastructure to process its own resources, Congo remains trapped in a cycle where foreign actors siphon off its $24 trillion in mineral wealth while its citizens remain among the poorest in the world. Compounding that systemic inequality, both corporate and artisanal mines enact severe human rights abuses and environmental devastation on the Congolese people, injustices that the agreement appears likely to bolster as it opens the door to firms perpetrating them against communities around the globe. In doing so, the accord threatens to entrench this cyclical poverty and violence in service of enriching behemoth mining firms and Trump’s billionaire friends.
Despite what he may think, or wish, Donald Trump deserves no applause for this “peace agreement” because the agreement itself is misnamed. Its focus has never been peace, but rather profit, and his attempt to launder it into something more benevolent is transparently disingenuous.
Without a radical shift, Trump’s deal will likely achieve exactly what it was intended for, funneling billions to already wealthy oligarchs and multinational corporations while sidelining the communities forced to live with its consequences.
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The US Advances Its Dystopian Plan to Destroy China
Western media tells you that China is the most aggressive nation on Earth, but China has shown extreme restraint in the face of U.S. military buildup and hostile rhetoric calling for war.
Aug 01, 2025
Imagine: It’s the summer of 2025, and the United States has been surrounded by foreign military bases. The bases have been built by some antagonistic country on the other side of the world that drones on about the inevitability of war. Leaders of the nation pump billions into their military, drumming up advanced AI weaponry, building long-range ballistic missile systems targeting the most populated U.S. cities, and sending thousands of troops to the Caribbean in preparation. Large-scale war games are held throughout the region, including drills that simulate nuclear war on the U.S. In the next two years, they say. War is coming, and we need to be ready. Meanwhile, back on domestic soil, the nation’s top thinkers gather to plan the collapse of the U.S. government, releasing a 120-page document outlining the steps to take after the war leaves nothing but dust and instability behind.
But wait. You don’t need to imagine. That is happening, just not to the United States. No, the U.S. is not the victim at all—the U.S. is the antagonistic country on the other side of the world, bloating its military, prepping for war, and outlining the collapse of another nation’s government.
The U.S. has built over 300 military bases in the Asia Pacific alone, installed long-range missile systems pointed at China’s largest cities, and held joint war exercises with regional allies simulating nuclear war with China. And just last week, the federally funded Hudson Institute released its 128-page plan for the collapse of China’s government.
Western media tells you that China is the most aggressive nation on Earth, but China has shown extreme restraint in the face of U.S. military buildup and hostile rhetoric calling for war. If the opposite were true—if China had surrounded the U.S. with missiles, troops, and bases—the U.S. would have already considered that an act of war. Just think back to the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, when the installation of Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba almost led to the U.S. declaring full-scale nuclear war.
We must reject the path of endless war and build a world based on mutual respect, not militarism.
Luckily, the facts speak louder than U.S. war propaganda, and these are the facts: The U.S. has over 700 foreign military bases, while China has just one. The U.S. has surrounded China with over 300 military bases, while China has zero in the entire Western Hemisphere. The U.S. has launched 251 military interventions since just 1991, while China hasn’t intervened in any country for 50 years.
And on July 10, 2025, the U.S. and its allies began conducting the largest military exercises in the Pacific since World War II. Nicknamed Resolute Force Pacific, or REFORPAC 2025, the exercise will involve over 350 aircraft, more than 12,000 service members, and will take place at more than 50 locations across 3,000 miles in the Pacific, including Hawaii, Guam, Japan, and international airspace. The U.S. Air Force says these exercises will “prove how we’ll fight and win” a war against China.
China’s “acts of aggression,” as labeled by mainstream Western media, are often just its own defensive military exercises that it conducts in response to the constant war games off its shores. But please, let’s be honest with ourselves—what country wouldn’t respond that way? If anything, it’s an act of restraint to clear preparation for war.
Just last week, the Hudson Institute (which has received millions from the U.S. Department of Defense) held a conference to discuss the collapse of China’s government and released a 128-page document outlining the plan. The document is heinous and dystopian, outlining a gradual invasion of China through clandestine information campaigns, cultural and psychological restructuring, military intervention, and an overall manipulation of the soul of China from the shadows.
Phase 0 will begin before the collapse. U.S. Special Operations Forces will use psychological and political warfare to sow division between the government, the military, and the people—the government has already funded billions of U.S. tax dollars to do just that. They plan to twist narratives to undermine China’s history, exploit trauma, and mock the Communist Party of China (CPC) through information campaigns. Phase 1 will go into play after China’s collapse, which is U.S. occupation in everything but name. U.S. forces will be deployed to China’s cities and embedded into China’s military. A new puppet government will adhere to the whims of U.S. leaders. Anyone sympathetic to the CPC will be “controlled” while U.S. forces conduct action raids to secure nuclear weapons. And finally, Phase 2 will attempt to rewrite national consciousness by installing a U.S.-approved version of history. They will create a “Voice of China” modeled after the “Voice of America,” the people will be reeducated about the evils of communism, and a “sad but transparent” period of national mourning will pave the way to a new China shaped entirely by the United States.
The rest of the document outlines how to precisely target China’s facilities, restructure China’s financial system to suit U.S. interests, secure assets, restructure the military, and conduct a “reconciliation” campaign. At the end, the document mentions an imaginary, arbitrarily drawn line across China separating East from West, and discusses potentially splitting or partitioning territories. It also considers name changes for China, such as Taiwan or the Chinese Federal Republic.
The document is as Orwellian as it sounds, written by “experts” such as Miles Yu, Ryan Clarke, and Gordon G. Chang. Chang is one of the most frequently cited “China experts” in the U.S., but he’s not an expert so much as a propaganda mouthpiece. He has built an entire career out of making bold, spectacularly wrong predictions about China’s collapse, all while reinforcing U.S. imperial talking points.
His most infamous claim came in his 2001 book, The Coming Collapse of China, in which he confidently declared that the Chinese Communist Party would fall by 2011 at the latest. When that didn’t happen, he extended the deadline... and extended it again. He even made Foreign Policy’s “10 Worst Predictions of the Year” twice. Over two decades later, not only has China not collapsed, but grown into one of the world’s most powerful economies and a leading force in global diplomacy and development.
Despite his long track record of failure, Chang remains a regular on Fox News, a speaker at military think tanks like the Hudson Institute, and a go-to figure for anti-China hardliners in Washington. Why? Because he tells them exactly what they want to hear. His role is simply to justify aggression, stir up fear, and promote regime change narratives under the cover of “expertise.” In truth, Gordon C. Chang is no more than a state-aligned propagandist, useful only because he reinforces the U.S. imperial worldview so Congress can use more of your tax dollars to go to war on China.
People like Chang will keep returning to live congressional hearings and federally funded organizations like the Hudson Institute to justify U.S. war and domination abroad. It’s time to demand that lying imperial mouthpieces like Chang no longer get uplifted to be used as a means for global death and destruction—not in Congress, in academia, or anywhere. We must reject the path of endless war and build a world based on mutual respect, not militarism. But that future requires us to stop imagining that we are always the victims and start recognizing when we are the aggressors.
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We Need a New Punctuation Mark to Catch the Essence of Trumpian Decline
What we really need is to turn the exclamation point in any Trumpian sentence into a red tie! Or even a series of them!
Aug 01, 2025
Once upon a time, nothing in this world could have convinced me that I would be living through this moment in this America on this planet. As a start, once upon an increasingly distant time, Donald J. Trump as president of the United States would have been inconceivable. Literally beyond conception, even in some wildly dystopian satiric novel about an all-too(un)-American future.
I mean, forget anything else, a man who in private life bankrupted six (yes, six!) companies has now been elected president of the United States not just once but twice. You know, the fellow who thinks of those he considers his domestic enemies (and that’s not too strong a word for it), whether Democrats, Republicans, or journalists as nothing short of—and this is the word he uses—“evil.” Once upon a time, this would have been inconceivable even in your wildest all-(un)-American dreams! Not a shot in hell of a chance! Never!
Until, of course, it happened (yes, twice).
And indeed, I have to repeat that “once upon a time” because the American past, however grim in all too many periods of our history, now seems something like a dark fairy tale to me. A distinctly “once upon a time” creation.
It really shouldn’t be Donald J. Trump anymore. It should be Donald D. Trump. And I’m sure you’ve already guessed that such a D would stand for decline.
Having just turned 81 myself, I wonder what world I’m now really living in and how, in that very same world, any of us could ever have ended up here. Sometimes I try to imagine telling my parents about—I have the urge to capitalize this word but can’t quite bring myself to do it, so italics will have to do—him. My mother was a professional caricaturist for an endless string of newspapers and magazines, and she drew, among other grim figures in this country and on this planet, Sen. Joe McCarthy, a distinctly Trumpian character from her moment. The difference being that he was just a senator, not the president of the United States. And he was able to do his damnedest (and that’s definitely the word for it) for only a few grim years before the Senate censured him and he essentially drank himself to death. And yet, having lived through presidents from Theodore Roosevelt when she was born in 1907 to Jimmy Carter in the year of her death in 1977, I have no doubt that Donald Trump would have left her speechless (or do I mean pen or pencil-less?).
My father, at age 35, immediately joined the U.S. Air Force after the Japanese struck Pearl Harbor and served in Burma during World War II. Even though he was, like my mother, a Democrat, he would have found someone who got out of the U.S. military in wartime thanks to fake “bone spurs” almost unimaginable as president. And that would have only been the first of an endless list of Trumpian things that my mom and dad, not to speak of more or less anyone else of their generation, would have found unbelievable in an American president. Even Ronald Reagan (and that’s no small “even”) seemed like a reasonably sane president by comparison.
It’s hard for me to imagine how I would tell either of them about President Trump’s “big beautiful bill” that’s cutting so much, including medical care, for so many Americans at the bottom of the political spectrum in order to give a $975 billion tax break to the wealthiest 1% of us. Or as he put it, “I said to one guy, he’s a very, very unattractive man, but he’s smart and he’s rich, and I said, ‘You better hope we get this thing passed because your wife will be gone within about two minutes.’ He said, ‘You’re right.’”
Red-Tie Decline
And yet, believe it or not, here we are as August begins in 2025, six months into Donald Trump’s manic second term in office and ever deeper in the Trumpian swamp.
And prepare yourself. There’s really no way to write about this American world of ours without exclamation points! In fact, in some fashion, the exclamation point isn’t faintly enough for this moment. Perhaps what we in these all-too-dis-United States of America now truly need is to invent some far wilder form of punctuation to catch the essence of this moment!!! (Three exclamation points are certainly apt, but they don’t really work, do they?) Maybe, in fact, what we really need is to turn the exclamation point in any Trumpian sentence into a red tie! Or even a series of them!
And let me make one small instant correction to my first paragraph here: Honestly, it really shouldn’t be Donald J. Trump anymore. It should be Donald D. Trump. And I’m sure you’ve already guessed that such a D would stand for decline. And not, mind you, just the decline of the United States—though that’s certainly significant enough—but of the planet itself.
Yes, in 1991, after the Soviet Union collapsed and the last vestiges of the Cold War ended with the U.S. becoming this planet’s “sole superpower,” there were certainly thinkers who already sensed that someday, somewhere along the line, like any great imperial power, this country was bound to enter a path of decline. After all, what great power in history hadn’t done so sooner or later and, in the process, had some idiot or idiots run the show for a while?
Still, let’s face it, there’s decline and then there’s DECLINE (followed, of course, by several red ties). And Donald DECLINE (red tie, red tie) Trump has offered us a path down that simply couldn’t be more uniquely his. I doubt that anyone in the history of imperial power has ever both personalized and personified decline in quite such a… well, deeply, madly personal and unbearably convincing fashion.
Planetary Decline in the Age of Trump
And give him credit, he’s able to do it so much more convincingly because of his advanced age. After all, his second time around, he is indeed—offer him record-setting credit here (red tie)—the oldest president ever to take office in two and a half centuries of all-American history. In other words, in the next three years and five months, we’ll clearly be able to watch not just this 21st century imperial power of an almost unimaginable sort—consider, for instance, those 750 or so U.S. military bases that still span this globe of ours—or our 79-year-old president both decline in an up close and personal fashion, but our planet do so as well. And that’s something new in human history.
Never in the past has the Earth itself been on such a precipitous path downward. And before Donald Trump is done (or do I mean, like the rest of us aging creatures, done in?), given his attitude toward climate change, he may manage to take not just this country but the planet down with him. No small feat (and, believe me, I don’t mean feet or even bone spurs here [red tie]) when you think about it. (As a matter of fact, thinking about Donald D. Trump is, in every sense, a declinist activity[red tie].)
It’s amazing how relatively little attention is being given to what may be by far the worst of all his visible urges, his deep-seated desire not just to take this country down with him but our whole overheating planet, too.
I mean from those devastating floods in Texas on the Fourth of July weekend, the deadliest inland flooding in this country in almost half a century, to the record-setting, never-ending mega-drought across the American Southwest, to those flooded subway stations in my hometown of New York, climate change is increasingly being felt by Americans of every sort. (It’s mid-summer and I’m sweating as I write this amid a striking heatwave across the Eastern U.S.) Climate change was certainly visible in the staggering temperatures that hit Europe this June, leading to an unexpectedly high death toll, and the horrifying wildfires that have recently ravaged parts of Greece and Turkey; the extensive flooding and other natural disasters in China; and the devastation of every sort it’s been causing in Africa. And that’s just to start down a list that certainly would have to include the Arctic, which may now be heating up four times faster than the global average.
Mind you, none of that should truly be surprising, since this year the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has peaked above 430 parts per million. That’s the highest it’s estimated to have been in millions of years, according to data recently released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and Scripps Institution of Oceanography. And overall, it’s estimated that, in the last year alone, climate change has added an extra 30 days of extreme heat for more than 4 billion people globally. Think about that for a moment, take a breath, and make sure you’re not overdressed.
And the Trump response to all of this? Among other things, to open Alaska’s wilderness areas more fully to oil and natural gas drilling and mining. Brilliant, no?
Trump Him (Red Tie)
All of that undoubtedly only makes Donald D. Trump all that much prouder. After all, he’s the man (or do I mean: The Man?). And imagine this: The country that was already the historically largest emitter of planet-heating carbon dioxide is, under him, certain to retain that title for the (un)foreseeable future.
Of course, he invariably has an urge to be the ultimate record holder in anything. After all, he’s going all out to cut funds to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and NOAA that might have been used to deal in some fashion with climate change’s potential devastation in this country. As The New York Times recently reported, “In an effort to shrink the federal government, President Trump and congressional Republicans have taken steps that are diluting the country’s ability to anticipate, prepare for, and respond to catastrophic flooding and other extreme weather events, disaster experts say.”
In his Big Beautiful Budget, he’s been ready to cut so much that matters to this country. Yet the soaring trillion-dollar military budget he’ll preside over (whatever its other problems, including its staggering cost for American taxpayers) will only add to the planetary mayhem by making the U.S. military “the 38th largest emitter [of carbon] in the world if it were its own nation.” And don’t forget the Trumpian-induced science brain drain from this country that’s now underway.
And yet here’s the strange thing (or rather one of all too many strange things): among the Trumpian—and yes, on this planet at this moment in this country, he’s certainly a noun, a verb, an adjective, and undoubtedly an adverb, too—wildness and disastrous acts being covered in the media, it’s amazing how relatively little attention is being given to what may be by far the worst of all his visible urges, his deep-seated desire not just to take this country down with him but our whole overheating planet, too. In a sense, in fact, one thing Donald Trump has proven particularly skilled at is removing attention of any sort from climate change.
Yes, who doesn’t know that, among other things, he once called it a “Chinese hoax”? And it seems to matter not at all to him that, at this very moment, this planet is heating up in a record-setting fashion. Of course, I’ve been writing about just that reality repeatedly because it repeatedly stops me short.
Still, to this day, I can’t understand how 49.8% of American voters found Donald Trump appealing enough to elect him president (again!) in 2024. And of course, we’re talking about the guy who is reportedly dreaming about not running for but just being president a third time around—to hell with the Constitution. His backers have already produced a “Trump 2028” red cap, and he’s told some of them that it would be “the greatest honor of my life to serve not once, but twice or three times or four times” (only later claiming that he was joking).
Don’t you have the urge to call George Orwell back from the dead to write a Trumpian sequel to 1984? Perhaps 2026? And speaking of bringing back the dead, if only I could bring back my parents and let my mother do her ultimate devastating caricature of Donald D. Trump.
However it happens, he really does need to be trumped before he Trumps us all off this planet and global bankruptcy becomes us.
Trump him (red tie, red tie, red tie, red tie, red tie, red tie, red tie, red tie).
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What Will It Take to End Western Complicity in Israel’s Gaza Genocide?
Those of us who are disgusted and appalled by this grotesque exercise in extermination struggle to respond in a manner that would make a difference.
Jul 25, 2025
I have rarely felt so helpless. Or hopeless. Every morning I turn on my computer and read of another mass murder by the Israeli military. Thirty, 40, 50, and more murdered while trying to get food while serving as target practice for a military force seemingly disconnected from their own humanity. Lately, the numbers of the murdered include children and old people intentionally starved to death by the slick machine called the Israeli government.
In a manner the war criminal Adolf Eichmann would have approved of, the Israeli military, government, and private sector are openly collaborating with other governments around the world—but mostly in Europe and North America—in a revolting systematic and heartless attempt to eradicate not just the civilization that was Gaza, but the concept of Palestine. Those of us who are disgusted and appalled by this grotesque exercise in extermination struggle to respond in a manner that would make a difference.
While politicians in Israel celebrate their military’s descent into madness, governments in the West call for Israeli restraint while they send more weapons and money so Israel can continue its homicidal course. The callousness of Israel’s supporters in the U.S. Congress is surpassed only by the size of the checks they receive from the Israel lobby. Simultaneously, the personal complicity of each and every taxpaying U.S. resident increases with each missile fired, each home destroyed, each child denied food, and each child starved to death. That complicity is multiplied every time a U.S. fighter jet is sent to Israel to replace one that was destroyed and with every volley of automatic weapons fire from a weapon held by a U.S. mercenary or Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldier.
Washington holds the purse strings while Israel does its work in the region we call the Middle East. Friedrich Merz, the chancellor of Germany, could not have described the role Israel plays in the West’s imperial scheme led by Washington better than when he told the media that Israel’s illegal bombing of Iran was just “dirty work (that) Israel is doing for all of us.” Although his remarks were met with some criticism, he speaks the truth. This doesn’t mean that everything Israel does necessarily gets the specific approval of Washington, London, Berlin or another Western capital; it does mean that whatever Israel does is seen as part of its role in maintaining Western dominance in the region.
Every day that the genocide continues the culpability of each person in the United States increases.
Throughout most of Israel’s 77-year history, this relationship has provided Washington and its cohorts with a degree of plausible deniability—a process that sees Israel violate human rights and international law followed by Washington “reprimanding” Israeli excesses. Nowadays, those reprimands rarely come. Of course, the funding has never stopped no matter what atrocity Israel’s military committed or what United Nations Security Council resolution it ignored.
Every state in the U.S. is guilty of mass murder in the Israeli slaughter in Gaza and the West Bank. This culpability may come in the form of government investments in Israeli Bonds or its private sector; it may come in those investments being held by retirement funds of state employees in the government or state’s educational systems. This culpability also exists in every state where a company with defense contracts that service the IDF is located. Last time I looked that list included every state in the union. The International Court of Justice has called Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land illegal. Numerous officials in the United Nations, together with clergy, artists, politicians, and others have justifiably labeled Israel’s actions in Gaza as a genocide.
I began this piece stating that I have never felt so helpless. Even during the worst days of the U.S. war in Vietnam, the public protests and the opposition to the war by some politicians, business people, and the media kept me hopeful. Nowadays, when the media refuses to present those against the slaughter in Gaza in any reasonable way, those hopes are almost nonexistent. Every day that the genocide continues the culpability of each person in the United States increases. It is way past time that Israel is cut off from all outside aid in any form. Its killing must end.
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Trump Brings the Authoritarianism We Propped up in the Middle East Back Home
His administration seems keen on making the U.S. a giant version of the United Arab Emirates, functionally an absolute (Trumpian) monarchy.
Jul 24, 2025
The United States has focused on the Middle East since World War II, seeking its oil, gas, and other mineral resources and coveting control of its strategic waterways. The old colonial powers and the superpowers of the Cold War era most often backed dictatorial regimes there, because they were easier to control than democracies, and this country also supported the Israeli settler colony as a bulwark of Western interests. President George W. Bush was the first president to depart (at least rhetorically) from America’s romance with regional authoritarians, pledging to “democratize” the Middle East, though he left office with little to show for it. Now, you have to wonder whether, in some strange sense, the shoe is on the other foot and the pathological U.S. support for dictatorships there is now spreading across the Atlantic Ocean, just as the trade winds blow Saharan sand and dust toward the American Southwest.
Democratic Backsliding
Here’s something that should sound familiar in the United States today: Qais Saied of Tunisia, elected president in 2019, campaigned against homosexuality and—yes!—African immigrants. In 2021, he lawlessly dismissed his prime minister and parliament and went on to rewrite the country’s constitution so that he could appoint yes-men to its Supreme Court. Then he began jailing his political opponents. In four short years, Saied undid all the political progress Tunisia had made in the previous decade, creating a dictatorship arguably worse than that of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, who was overthrown in January 2011 in the first of several major Arab Spring youth revolts.
Worse yet—and this should sound familiar, too—Tunisia seemed to sleepwalk into authoritarianism. Trade unionists hoped the president would reject the neoliberalism of the International Monetary Fund, while civil society organizations hoped he would curb the Interior Ministry’s past repressiveness. No such luck. Europe declined to punish the newly developing dictatorship by cutting off aid, instead rewarding Saied with an economic deal in return for his willingness to crack down on African emigration. Of course, such democratic backsliding has been a feature of the Middle East for decades, since local civil society remains weak, pro-regime billionaires have proliferated, and Western governments have seldom reacted negatively to (and all too often rewarded) any move toward dictatorship.
Ironically, in the second Trump era, America’s billionaires and corporate elites have decided that this country should be ruled with some of the same techniques that they and their Middle Eastern proxies have long used abroad.
Now, you might say that the shoe is on the other foot. What Saied did to Tunisia might as well have been a blueprint for U.S. President Donald Trump. Although he hasn’t yet actually tried to rewrite the Constitution, the MAGA leader has been the beneficiary of a decades-long $250 million dark-money plot, led by obscure Federalist Society apparatchik Leonard Leo, to reshape the Supreme Court. The result: a set of justices who are distinctly inclined to let Trump do his damnedest—even expel undocumented residents of the United States to gulags in third-world countries with no court process. Meanwhile, labor union members have too often placed faith in Trump’s pledges to bring back industry by using tariffs to reduce competition. And the centrists of the Democratic Party are the proverbial deer in the headlights, too paralyzed to react effectively as he transforms this country into an ever more autocratic state. They also seem all too inclined to let our democracy slip away, while placing their hopes in a 2026 congressional blue wave that, even if it happens, may be too late to stop Trump from creating his version of a one-party state.
Raw Milk and Vitamin A
Consider it typical of our times that Field Marshall Abdelfattah al-Sisi’s 2013 coup against the only freely elected Egyptian government since the country’s monarchy was toppled in 1952 had no significant adverse consequences in Washington. In 2014, a leading officer in the Egyptian army, which receives $1.3 billion a year in American aid, made quixotic health claims. Major General Ibrahim Abdel-Atti announced that he had personally “defeated AIDS with the grace of my God at the rate of 100%. And I defeated hepatitis C.” In the process, he confused the foundational nucleic acids DNA and RNA, provoking one Egyptian comedian to suggest that the country’s medical schools should never again accept anyone from Abdel-Atti’s village. However, the North Korean-like pall that has blanketed freedom of speech in Egypt was precisely what permitted such bizarre official behavior, since there was little way for the public to respond to even his most absurd claims.
Yet, imagine this: Abdel-Atti appears almost sane and sober in comparison with the antics of U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has discouraged vaccinations even as a measles outbreak has begun to run wild (and prove fatal in a few cases) 25 years after the U.S. officially eliminated the disease. Kennedy’s proposed treatment for measles? Raw milk and vitamin A. Sadly, overdoses of the latter have caused liver disease in some children.
Kennedy is also working hard to gut the Department of Health and Human Services and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The damage he’s doing in the Trump era to America’s vital and effective vaccination infrastructure could unleash serial plagues upon the public. And it’s not likely to get better any time soon, given the irrational demagogue now in the White House, just as Egyptians suffer under megalomaniacal generals.
A Kafala System
And here’s another Middle Eastern peculiarity inherited from Western colonialism that will sound all too familiar in Donald Trump’s America: the large numbers of noncitizens and stateless people who suffer from a lack of basic civil and human rights. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, imperial Great Britain made treaties with small sheikhdoms along the coast of the Persian Gulf to ensure the security of its shipping and check rivals like the Ottoman Empire. When the British finally withdrew completely from the Gulf in 1972, they left behind postage-stamp countries with vast oil and gas wealth, which did not have a sufficient native-born population to work the rigs or staff the energy companies. The British Empire had often brought into its colonies, like Kuwait and Bahrain, subjects from British India.
The Middle East is a patchwork of citizenship hierarchies, where the line can be drawn capriciously by nationalists, fundamentalists, or monarchs.
After decolonization, such workers from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh were coded as foreigners in the Arab Gulf. They began laboring under a “guarantor” (kafala) system in which a local entrepreneur would take responsibility for migrant laborers who often surrendered their passports to him for as long as they were in the country. The guarantor would then take a cut of their wages or business profits. No matter how long such migrants lived in those countries, they and their children almost never became eligible for citizenship, and they could have their visas revoked at any time. Others now have trouble even getting in. Typically, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in January announced a ban on visas (for Afghans, Libyans, Yemenis, Somalians, Lebanese, Bangladeshi, Cameroonians, Sudanis, and Ugandans). And that should sound familiar, since the Trump regime has already implemented a visa ban on 19 mainly African and Middle Eastern countries. In short, the policies toward immigrant labor in the two regions seem to be converging.
Countries like the United Arab Emirates have a little more than a million citizens and 10 million mostly South Asian guest workers, some of whom have lived there all their lives or are even second or third generation residents. Such migrant workers, however, have no right to form unions or strike. Any encounter with law enforcement, even a fender-bender, can result in their expulsion. New York University Professor Andrew Ross was typically banned from the country simply for researching labor conditions. British academic Matthew Hedges was imprisoned on false espionage charges in 2018, tortured, and threatened with deportation to a UAE black site in Yemen before ultimately being released. New York University has a branch in Abu Dhabi, where the students and faculty have had run-ins with the government of President Mohammed Bin Zayed, which surged in the past two years because the country does not permit social media posts criticizing Israel’s atrocities in Gaza.
And it’s not only migrant laborers in the Middle East who can be denied citizenship despite long residence. Indigenous people, too, sometimes become noncitizens (just as Native Americans were denied U.S. citizenship until 1924). The Arab nationalists of Syria denaturalized some 100,000 Kurdish Syrians in Hasakah Province in 1962 and, over time, that figure grew to several hundred thousand. The Middle East is a patchwork of citizenship hierarchies, where the line can be drawn capriciously by nationalists, fundamentalists, or monarchs.
It does not take much familiarity with Donald Trump’s policies in the past six months to see the ways in which his administration seemingly yearns for similar levels of citizenship and limited residency to be imposed in this country. He has even threatened to deport naturalized American citizens like (can you believe it?) Elon Musk or Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic candidate for mayor of New York City, for their criticisms of him. If his fondest wishes were fulfilled, he might even prefer his country to be more like Israel when it came to anyone he didn’t like living there.
Expelled for Gandhism
An analogy could also be made between the “foreign” migrant workers in the Gulf, who have no local citizenship or rights, and the Palestinians under Israeli rule in the West Bank or Gaza. Like the Syrian Kurds of Hasakah, they have been made stateless in their own country. They lack a national government and the rights and passport it would give them. Palestinians in Area C, the 60% of the West Bank that is directly ruled by the Israeli military, see rights like unionizing or striking routinely curbed. Like Gulf workers, Palestinians are subject to expulsion at the whim of the Israeli military. And keep in mind that, when Israel seized the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, some 300,000 Palestinians were expelled from it or, if working abroad, forbidden to return home.
Some of those trapped by the decades-long occupation have also been subject to arbitrary removal. The Israeli authorities illegally expelled Palestinian pacifist Mubarak Awad from his homeland in 1988 for advocating Gandhi-style nonviolent noncooperation. Tens of thousands of West Bank Palestinians have been forced from their homes in the past two years, as entire refugee camps have been razed, the Israeli military has destroyed homes, and Israeli squatters on Palestinian land have enacted pogroms. Since the Hamas assault on Israel in October 2023, at least 100,000 Gazans have been forced out of Palestine entirely by Israeli commanders, who have ordered that some 90% of the housing stock there be damaged or destroyed.
Inside the Jewish ethnostate of Israel, the 21% of the population who are of Palestinian heritage are distinctly second-class citizens. Human Rights Organizations like Adalah have identified 65 Israeli laws that discriminate against Palestinian-Israelis. In 2018, the Israeli parliament declared that national sovereignty is invested solely in the country’s Jews. Since October 2023, Palestinian-Israelis have been under strict surveillance and have to be careful about their Internet postings. The Israeli Supreme Court ruled in 2022 that they can be stripped of their citizenship and expelled for breach of loyalty to the Israeli state.
SEVIS Hits
Like the rulers of some Gulf states, Trump and his crew want to treat all noncitizens on visas in the U.S.—and even some naturalized citizens—arbitrarily. Since he returned to power in January, thousands of visas have been revoked for even minor contact with law enforcement, just as happens to hapless migrants in the UAE. Trump officials ran the data in the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS) against police reports and zeroed in on 6,400 of them, terminating their SEVIS entries without notice. That was, of course, in contravention of government regulations. Most of the hits involved cases where charges had been dropped or were minor. Affected students filed more than 60 lawsuits and consistently prevailed in court, forcing Immigration and Customs Enforcement to restore the SEVIS records, at least for now.
In addition, Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio attempted to revoke the visas of students who had been active in protests against the Israeli genocide in Gaza (in precisely the same way and on the same grounds as the Emirati government does). Among such high-profile cases, the State Department targeted figures like Columbia University graduate and pro-Palestinian protester Mahmoud Khalil, who had permanent resident status in the country but was arrested anyway and sent to a Louisiana prison. Tufts graduate student Rümeysa Öztürk, who had written a mild opinion piece for her student newspaper criticizing her school’s response to events in Gaza, was similarly seized. Apparently, the plan was to avoid letting them appear before a judge and instead summarily deport them, but the courts insisted they be given hearings, upholding the apparently imperiled principle of habeas corpus. Chapters of the American Association of University Professors, along with the Middle East Studies Association, have sued on First Amendment grounds to overturn Rubio’s policy of declaring speech to be a national security emergency, permitting the deportation of visa and green card holders.
In 1945, the case of Bridges v. Wixon established that not just citizens but all people residing in the United States enjoy the protection of the Bill of Rights. As the Cold War heated up in the 1950s, however, the court did allow a few deportations of noncitizens due to their membership in the Communist Party (as in Harisiades v. Shaughnessy in 1952). Eighty years later, in a distinctly new world, Rubio and his colleagues wish to reverse Bridges and make the U.S. a giant version of the United Arab Emirates, functionally an absolute (Trumpian) monarchy. Instead of emulating the best of Middle Eastern values such as generosity to guests and love of learning, Trump and crew seem to admire only Western-imposed authoritarianism.
Ironically, in the second Trump era, America’s billionaires and corporate elites have decided that this country should be ruled with some of the same techniques that they and their Middle Eastern proxies have long used abroad. Instead of America democratizing the Middle East, it’s increasingly clear that Trump and crew have decided to Middle-Easternize the United States.
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Let’s (Not) Choose Sides and Fight
It would be harder to stoke homicidal zeal if everyone understood that behind all our hostilities is the simple, though stark, reality that humanity faces climate change and resource depletion.
Jul 23, 2025
In the course of human events there are times when everyone seems determined to pick sides and brawl. A prime example was the
First World War: Over a dozen countries divided into two camps—the Allied Powers and the Central Powers—and fought for four years, with 40 million casualties. Afterward, few seemed to agree on what the conflict had been about (probably the best explanation was that it had been over tensions between a fading colonial superpower, Britain, and a potential rival, Germany). World War II, which left 60 million dead, was in many ways a continuation of the same conflict, with the terms of surrender for the first war setting a 20-year fuse for the second (the punitive terms of the Versailles Treaty were partly a response to German demands at the end of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871, a reminder of how revenge echoes through history).
We appear to be sliding into a similar era, where a previously stable world order is failing and much of humanity seems to be preparing to divide and do battle. Many historians see the United States—which emerged as world hegemon after WWII—as a decaying imperial hub, now facing an increasingly organized battery of opponents.
This time, hovering above the potential fray are profound environmental shifts, including climate change, the disappearance of much of wild nature, and resource depletion. In 2024, global average temperature was 1.6°C above the preindustrial average, and the rate of warming is accelerating. We appear to be on course to reach 2°C of warming around 2035—an amount of heating that, according to a recent research paper, “The Future of the Human Niche,” by Tim Lenton and colleagues, might result in roughly a billion refugees.
As conflict approaches, mentally getting outside society’s collective miasma of hostile emotions might help our own mental well-being, while also improving the survival prospects for our species.
At the same time, global energy from fossil fuels is set to start its inevitable decline after 2030 due to a combination of climate policies and the accelerating depletion of oil, coal, and natural gas resources. Since energy from renewables won’t fully replace energy from fossil fuels, the result will be an overall decline in available energy, making economic contraction hard to stave off. Declining population in many countries will also present economic challenges. Energy transitions and economic disruptions both seem to correlate with international conflicts.
In this article, I’ll make a case for the increasing likelihood of conflict, internationally as well as domestically within the U.S,, and then consider some novel ideas about conflict. As we’ll see, either taking sides in an approaching battle, or refusing to do so, comes with a cost. We’ll also see why the tendency to choose sides and fight is not uniquely human, though humans have developed it into a specialty. Finally, we’ll explore how, as conflict approaches, mentally getting outside society’s collective miasma of hostile emotions might help our own mental well-being, while also improving the survival prospects for our species.
Nation Against Nation
Since 1945, the U.S. has been a military, financial, manufacturing, agricultural, scientific, and cultural global leader, acting in alliance with the United Kingdom, a selection of other European nations, and Japan. Much of the rest of the world supplied labor and resources at cut-rate prices and shouldered debt imposed by U.S.-led international institutions such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF). Prior to 1990, the Soviet bloc posed a military and ideological counterweight, but it collapsed, leaving the U.S. seemingly triumphant.
Decline is the eventual default path for empires, and the U.S. is adhering to that historical trend: It has depleted its domestic resources; increased its people’s economic inequality; built up staggering amounts of public and private debt; and pissed off a list of nations that it raided, demonized, invaded, or humiliated over the decades. The stage has been set for internal and external conflict.
Arguably the first round of that conflict started with the spectacular attacks of September 11, 2001, to which the U.S. responded with senseless and ultimately self-destructive invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. Those invasions happened to coincide with the plateauing of global conventional oil production, which was in turn the backdrop for, and a contributor to, the Global Financial Crisis of 2008. The U.S.-led international order appeared to be on increasingly shaky ground. It was at about this time that Brazil, Russia, India, and China (soon joined by South Africa) began holding meetings to build ties of trade and strategic cooperation under the rubric BRICS.
Instead of big, expensive weapons, smaller and cheaper drone and cyberweapons systems are likely to predominate.
Over the following 20 years, conflict was largely contained and imperial decline minimized as fracking made the U.S. once again the world’s foremost oil and gas producer. Meanwhile, China grew its economy rapidly, while oil-rich Russia under President Vladimir Putin became more authoritarian and looked for ways to regain its former superpower status.
Then, in 2016, Donald Trump landed on the American political stage. Among voters, he stoked long-festering white, rural working-class resentments resulting from growing domestic economic inequality and high rates of immigration; he ridiculed his country’s invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan; and he decried globalization as a “rip-off” of American wealth. If U.S.-based globalist institutions (including the World Bank, the IMF, and USAID) were under fire previously, in the second Trump administration all are comatose or defunct. Using tariffs as a cudgel, Trump has introduced a nakedly nationalist, personal approach to international economic policy. Understandably, many formerly allied nations are looking to exit what’s left of the U.S.-led global order.
As of this year, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Indonesia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) have joined the five original BRICS members. Together, the 10 member nations represent over 40% of the world’s population and 37% of the global economy. China now operates the world’s biggest development bank.
The rise of BRICS comes as the U.S. is at a crossroads in more than just politics. U.S. tight oil (which has been the main source of global petroleum production growth since 2010) is set to start its inevitable decline within the next year or so, according to the International Energy Agency. The peaking of U.S. shale gas will come close behind. Meanwhile, President Trump has done his best to undercut U.S. electrification and development of renewable energy (the fabled energy transition, undertaken mostly to blunt climate change). He is instead promoting the rapid development of energy-hungry AI and cryptocurrencies.
China, in contrast, is poised to profit from the energy transition: It leads in the export of all things electric and renewable, despite depending overwhelmingly on coal for its domestic energy. China far exceeds the U.S. in electricity generation (and therefore the potential for development of AI). As oil and gas run out, the transition will demand more minerals, many of which China controls.
Will there be war between the U.S. and its fraying alliance on one hand, and BRICS on the other? Currently there are visible flashpoints in the Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Iran conflicts. On July 7, Trump posted the following on social media: “Any country aligning themselves with the Anti-American policies of BRICS, will be charged an ADDITIONAL 10% tariff. There will be no exceptions to this policy.” He had previously threatened that any move to replace the U.S. dollar with a BRICS-backed international reserve currency would trigger 100% tariffs.
Given the apocalyptic potential of nuclear weaponry, the major powers wish to avoid direct all-out military engagement. What appears far more likely is a stairstep increase in strategic resource wars over minerals, water, and arable land, along with proxy conflicts to test alliances and probe weaknesses. Instead of big, expensive weapons, smaller and cheaper drone and cyberweapons systems are likely to predominate. However, there is always the possibility that limited skirmishes could metastasize.
Neighbor Against Neighbor
People are increasingly choosing sides not just internationally, but also within nations. I have written recently about the increase of political polarization in the United States and many European countries, and about the global decline in democracy and rise of autocrats.
Trends toward polarization and authoritarian rule are being driven by shifting demographics, by increasing inequality and economic precarity, and by new communication technologies (social media and AI) that amplify extreme beliefs. Each of these drivers is set to explode in dimension and impact. Ideology (e.g., capitalism versus socialism, or democracy versus autocracy) and religion will likely continue to provide people with immediate justifications for conflict, as deeper environmental and economic trends make conflict more likely.
Measured levels of civil violence have declined in recent decades, as discussed by Steven Pinker in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature. However, Pinker’s analysis misses two of the main causes of the relative calm that much of humanity has enjoyed since World War II: the immense wealth produced by fossil fuels, along with soaring levels of food production (likewise tied to fossil fuels). Pinker also downplays the degree to which daily average numbers of violent incidents can greatly shift during times of all-out war between major military-industrial powers. The fact that global violence was held in check by an imperial power for eight decades (a period sometimes called “Pax Americana,” in a nod to “Pax Romana” two millennia ago and the more recent “Pax Britannica”) says little about how durable this peace may be as that empire declines, as the world warms, and as fossil fuels deplete.
In the U.S. and some other countries, civil violence may increase in tandem with international conflict—or, as has happened repeatedly in history, war may serve to unify domestic sentiment against a common enemy. In either case, it is likely that nations will continue to see highly variable levels of internal strife, as is already the case: Jamaica’s level of violent crime is 350 times that of Singapore, and Norway is far less politically polarized than Argentina.
Belligerent Humans
It’s tempting to think that choosing sides and fighting is just a human thing. But wars do happen elsewhere in nature. Some species are natural enemies: Crows often cooperate to drive away hawks, which raid crow nests. And, in a few species, notably chimpanzees, individuals band together to attack other members of the same species. Chimp wars can be brutal. Animal conflicts are usually fought over scarce resources, access to potential mates, and territory.
However, because humans have language and advanced tool-making ability, we have developed fighting into a vastly more destructive enterprise. We use language to plan and coordinate attacks, and to demonize enemies—but also to negotiate peace. As for tools, while we humans have created technologies for every conceivable purpose, no field of endeavor has prompted more inventiveness than warfare. We have turned conflict into an art, science, philosophy, and business.
The trouble is, once we’ve declared war on nature, we all surely lose.
We humans also have more things to fight over than do other animals, thanks to language. Religion, money, trade, and political ideologies all derive from our talent for symbolic communication, and all provide justifications for organized mayhem.
Warfare has become so intensive that the casualties aren’t just other humans. Just one example: the Russia-Ukraine war is ruining soils and water sources, and threatens both wildlife and domesticated animals. The Ukrainian government and environmental journalists have described the damage as ecocide, and the consequences are forecasted to persist for centuries.
Indeed, humans’ relationship with the natural world is often described in martial terms. Earlier in the Industrial Revolution, prior to the emergence of the modern environmental movement, it was common to hear politicians and academics speak of the “conquest” not just of diseases but of nature generally. The trouble is, once we’ve declared war on nature, we all surely lose.
What If They Held a War and Nobody Came?
I came of age during the Vietnam War, and my generation was steeped in anti-war sentiment. It seemed easy then to think of all war as stupid. Things look different today if you happen to live in a country, like Ukraine, that’s being invaded (or, if you’re on the other side of the conflict, if you live in a nation, like Russia, that’s been vilified for decades by the global superpower). Similarly, within the U.S., neutrality looks like cowardice if you’re concerned that the nation is being taken over by authoritarian thugs (or, if you’re on the other side of the conflict, if you believe the country is being invaded by lawless immigrants). It’s not so easy to say, “Don’t fight,” when something apparently needs to be done to protect people you care about from an imminent threat.
I tend to side with the (perceived) oppressed over the (perceived) oppressor, and democracy over autocracy. But I also realize that the sides we choose are largely determined by geography and genes.
We can minimize the bloodshed if we never lose sight of our common humanity and creaturehood.
Understanding tends to blunt bloodlust. Humans are more likely to fight if they believe, “Those are bad people, they mean us harm, and we must kill them.” Once one starts inquiring deeply into the motives of the opposition, bloodlust tends to fade. Returning to the example of World War I: If more people had seen the conflict as “competition between a fading colonial superpower and a rising rival” and less as “a war of good against evil,” the public would have been less likely to endorse sending their sons into battle. Britain’s depiction of German soldiers as murderous Huns helped recruit soldiers; perhaps because Germany already had a larger standing army, its propaganda tended to be more matter-of-fact, often featuring graphs of German resources in comparison with those of other nations. Demonization worked for Britain and its allies, and it has become central to modern propaganda ever since (the Nazis adopted it in the 1930s and helped make it a science).
Today, it would be harder to stoke homicidal zeal if everyone understood that behind all our hostilities is the simple, though stark, reality that humanity faces climate change and resource depletion, and that living space is likely to become more constricted. Widespread acceptance of that framing might inspire efforts to share what’s left peacefully while reducing the consumption of the richest nations and individuals.
I’m not suggesting that we can all simply summon a “kumbaya moment” and avert the looming hostilities. Our deck of cards is stacked (in terms of history, resources, trends, and personalities) toward conflict. But we can minimize the bloodshed if we never lose sight of our common humanity and creaturehood—that is, if we continually make the effort to see the world through the eyes of not just our allies, but our enemies as well, and through the “eyes” of the animals, plants, and ecosystems that we currently dominate.
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What Can We Learn From the Birth of the Nuclear Era?
The history serves as a reminder that alternative paths were available then and that another world remains possible today.
Jul 18, 2025
In recent months, nuclear weapons have reemerged in global headlines. Nuclear-armed rivals India and Pakistan approached the brink of a full-scale war, a confrontation that could have become an extinction-level event, with the potential to claim up to 2 billion lives worldwide.
The instability of a global order structured on nuclear apartheid has also come into sharp relief in the context of the recent attacks on Iran by Israel and the United States. That system has entrenched a dangerous double standard, creating perverse incentives for the proliferation of world-destroying weaponry, already possessed by nine countries. Many of those nations use their arsenals to exercise imperial impunity, while non-nuclear states increasingly feel compelled to pursue nuclear weapons in the name of national security and survival.
Meanwhile, the largest nuclear powers show not the slightest signs of responsibility or restraint. The United States, Russia, and China are investing heavily in the “modernization” and expansion of their arsenals, fueling a renewed arms race. And that escalation comes amid growing global instability contributing to a Manichean world of antagonistic armed blocs, reminiscent of the Cold War at its worst.
The nuclear threat endangers not only global peace and security but the very continuity of the human species, not to speak of the simple survival of life on Earth. How, you might wonder, could we ever have arrived at such a precarious situation?
The current crisis coincides with the 80th anniversary of the Trinity Test, the first detonation of an atomic weapon that would soon obliterate the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and so inaugurate the atomic age. So many years later, it’s worth critically reassessing the decisions that conferred on humanity such a power of self-annihilation. After all, we continue to live with the fallout of the choices made (and not made), including those of the scientists who created the bomb. That history also serves as a reminder that alternative paths were available then and that another world remains possible today.
A Tale of Two Laboratories
In the summer of 1945, scientists and technicians at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico worked feverishly to complete the construction of the atomic bomb. Meanwhile, their colleagues at the University of Chicago’s Metallurgical Laboratory mounted a final, ultimately unsuccessful effort to prevent its use.
The alarm spreading in Chicago stemmed from a sobering realization. The Manhattan Project that they had joined on the basis of a belief that they were in an existential arms race with Nazi Germany had, by then, revealed itself to be a distinctly one-sided contest. Until then, the specter of a possible German atomic bomb had conferred a sense of urgency and a veneer of moral legitimacy on what many scientists otherwise recognized as a profoundly unethical undertaking.
Prior to the fall of Berlin, Allied intelligence had already begun to cast serious doubt on Germany’s progress toward developing an atomic weapon. By April 1945, with the Nazi regime in a state of collapse and Japan’s defeat imminent, the threat that served as the original justification for the bomb’s development had all but vanished.
While we cannot know exactly how events would have unfolded had dissent been amplified rather than suppressed, we can raise our own voices now to demand a safer, saner future.
No longer represented as a plausible deterrent, the bomb now stood poised to become what Los Alamos Director J. Robert Oppenheimer would describe shortly after the war as “weapons of terror, of surprise, of aggression… [used] against an essentially defeated enemy.”
By that point, it was evident that the bomb would be used not to deter Germany but to destroy Japan, and not as the final act of World War II but as the opening salvo of what would become the Cold War. The true target of the first atomic bomb wasn’t, in fact, Tokyo, but Moscow, with the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki sacrificed on the altar of American global imperial ambition.
For the scientists at Chicago, that new context demanded new thinking. In June 1945, a committee of physicists led by James Franck submitted a report to Secretary of War Henry Stimson warning of the profound political and ethical consequences of employing such a bomb without exhausting all other alternatives. “We believe,” the Franck Report stated, “that the use of nuclear bombs for an early, unannounced attack against Japan [would be] inadvisable.” The report instead proposed a demonstration before international observers, arguing that such a display could serve as a gesture of goodwill and might avert the need to use the bombs altogether.
One of that report’s signatories, Leo Szilard, who had been among the bomb’s earliest advocates, further sought to prevent what he had come to recognize as the catastrophic potential outcome of their creation. With Germany defeated, he felt a personal responsibility for reversing the course he had helped set in motion. Echoing concerns articulated in the Franck Report, he drafted a petition to be circulated among the scientists. While acknowledging that the bomb might offer short-term military and political advantages against Japan, he warned that its deployment would ultimately prove morally indefensible and strategically self-defeating, a position which would also be held by 6 of the 7 U.S. five-star generals and admirals of that moment.
Szilard emphasized that the atomic bomb wasn’t just a more powerful weapon but a fundamental transformation in the nature of warfare, an instrument of annihilation. He already feared Americans might come to regret that their own government had sown the seeds of global destruction by legitimizing the sudden obliteration of Japanese cities, a precedent that would render a heavily industrialized, densely populated country like the United States especially vulnerable.
Moreover, he concluded that using such weapons of unimaginable destructive power without sufficient military justification would severely undermine American credibility in future arms control efforts. He observed that the development of the bomb under conditions of extreme wartime secrecy had created an abjectly anti-democratic situation, one in which the public was denied any opportunity to deliberate on such an irrevocable and consequential decision.
As Eugene Rabinowitch, a co-author of the Franck Report (who would later co-found The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists), would note soon after, the scientists in Chicago were growing increasingly uneasy in the face of escalating secrecy: “Many scientists began to wonder: Against whom was this extreme secrecy directed? What was the sense of keeping our success secret from the Japanese? Would it have helped them to know that we had an atomic bomb ready?”
Rabinowitch concluded that the only “danger” posed by such a disclosure was that the Chicago scientists might be proven right, and Japan might surrender. “Since there was no justifiable reason to hold the bomb secret from the Japanese,” he argued, “many scientists felt that the purpose of deepened secrecy was to keep the knowledge of the bomb… from the American people.”
In other words, officials in Washington were concerned that a successful demonstration might deprive them of the coveted opportunity to use the bomb and assert their newly acquired monopoly (however temporary) on unprecedented power.
The Road to Trinity and the Cult of Oppenheimer
Seventy scientists at Chicago endorsed the Szilard Petition. By then, however, their influence on the project had distinctly diminished. Despite their early contributions, notably the achievement of the first self-sustained nuclear chain reaction in December 1942, the project’s center of gravity had shifted to Los Alamos.
Recognizing this, Szilard sought to circulate the petition among his colleagues there, too, hoping to invoke a shared sense of scientific responsibility and awaken their moral conscience in the critical weeks leading up to the first test of the weapon. Why did that effort fail? Why was there so little dissent, debate, or resistance at Los Alamos given the growing scientific opposition, bordering on revolt, that had emerged in Chicago?
One answer lies in Oppenheimer himself. In popular culture and historical scholarship, his legacy is often framed as that of a tragic figure: the reluctant architect of the atomic age, an idealist drawn into the ethically fraught task of creating a weapon of mass destruction compelled by the perceived exigencies of an existential war.
Rather than using his influence to restrain the bomb’s use, he exercised what authority he had to facilitate its most catastrophic outcome, entrusting its consequences to political leaders who soon revealed their recklessness.
Yet the myth of him as a Promethean figure who suffered for unleashing the fundamental forces of nature onto a society unprepared to bear responsibility for it obscures the extent of his complicity. Far from being a passive participant, in the final months of the Manhattan Project, he emerged as a willing collaborator in the coordination of the coming atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
When Oppenheimer and physicist Edward Teller (who would come to be known as “the father of the hydrogen bomb”) received Szilard’s petition, neither shared it. While Oppenheimer offered no response, Teller provided a striking explanation: “The things we are working on are so terrible that no amount of protesting or fiddling with politics will save our souls.” He further rejected the idea that he held any authority to influence the bomb’s use. “You may think it is a crime to continue to work,” he conceded, “but I feel that I should do the wrong thing if I tried to say how to tie the little toe of the ghost to the bottle from which we just helped it escape.”
Teller later claimed to be in “absolute agreement” with the petition, but added that “Szilard asked me to collect signatures… I felt I could not do so without first seeking Oppenheimer’s permission more directly. I did so and Oppenheimer talked me out of it, saying that we as scientists have no business meddling in political pressure of that kind… I am ashamed to say that he managed to talk me out of [it].”
Teller’s explanation was likely self-serving given his later acrimonious rift with Oppenheimer over the hydrogen bomb. Yet further evidence indicates that Oppenheimer actively sought to suppress debate and dissent. Physicist Robert Wilson recalled that upon arriving at Los Alamos in 1943, he raised concerns about the broader implications of their work and the “terrible problems” it might create, particularly given the exclusion of the Soviet Union, then an ally. The Los Alamos director, Wilson remembered, “didn’t want to talk about that sort of thing” and would instead redirect the conversation to technical matters. When Wilson helped organize a meeting to discuss the future trajectory of the project in the wake of Germany’s defeat, Oppenheimer cautioned him against it, warning that “he would get into trouble by calling such a meeting.”
The meeting nonetheless proceeded, with Oppenheimer in attendance, though his presence proved stifling. “He participated very much, dominating the meeting,” Wilson remembered. Oppenheimer pointed to the upcoming San Francisco Conference to establish the United Nations and insisted that political questions would be addressed there by those with greater expertise, implying that scientists had no role to play in such matters and ought to abstain from influencing the applications of their work.
Reflecting on his mindset at the time, Oppenheimer explained, “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.” In a similar vein, his oft-quoted remark that “the physicists have known sin” was frequently misinterpreted. He was not referring, he insisted, to the “sin” of the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but to pride for “intervening explicitly and heavy-handedly in the course of human history.”
When situated within this broader context of a professed commitment to scientific detachment, Oppenheimer’s behavior becomes more intelligible. In practice, however, his stated ideals stood in stark contrast to his conduct. While he claimed to reject political engagement, he ultimately intervened in precisely such a manner, using his position to advocate forcefully for the bomb’s immediate military use against Japan without prior warning. He emerged as a leading opponent of any prospective demonstration, cautioning that it would undermine the psychological impact of the bomb’s use, which could only be realized through a sudden, unannounced detonation on a relatively untouched, non-military target like the city of Hiroshima. This position stood in sharp contrast to that of the Chicago scientists, of whom only 15% supported using the bomb in such a manner.
That climate of deference fostered a culture of complicity, where questions of social responsibility were subordinated to uncritical faith in authority. Reflecting on that dynamic, physicist Rudolf Peierls acknowledged, “I knew that Oppenheimer was on a committee and was briefing with the high-ups. I felt there were two things one could rely on: Oppenheimer to put the reasonable ideas across, and that one could trust people. After all, we are not terrorists at heart or anything… Both these statements might now be somewhat optimistic.”
Ultimately, the only member of Los Alamos to register dissent was Joseph Rotblat, who quietly resigned on ethical grounds after learning in November 1944 that there was no active Nazi atomic bomb program. His departure remained a personal act of conscience, however, rather than an effort to initiate a broader moral reckoning within the scientific community.
“Remember Your Humanity”
The legacy of Oppenheimer, a burden we all now carry, lies in his mistaking proximity to power for power itself. Rather than using his influence to restrain the bomb’s use, he exercised what authority he had to facilitate its most catastrophic outcome, entrusting its consequences to political leaders who soon revealed their recklessness. In doing so, he helped lay the groundwork for what President Dwight D. Eisenhower would, in his farewell address to Congress in 1961, warn against as “the disastrous rise of misplaced power.”
Yet we are not doomed. This history should also remind us that the development and use of nuclear weapons was not inevitable. There were those who spoke out and a different path might well have been possible. While we cannot know exactly how events would have unfolded had dissent been amplified rather than suppressed, we can raise our own voices now to demand a safer, saner future. Our collective survival may well depend on it. How much longer a world armed with nuclear weapons can endure remains uncertain. The only viable path forward lies in renewing a commitment to, as Albert Einstein and Bertrand Russell urged, “remember your humanity, and forget the rest.” With ever more nations developing increasingly powerful arsenals, one thing remains clear: As the Doomsday Clock moves ever closer to midnight, there is no time to waste.
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