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ukraine war
Trump Continues the American Tradition of Placing His Faith in War
The nation’s ongoing support for the interminable conflicts in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, along with ever-expanding defense budgets and militarized policing at home, suggests little has changed in the ensuing decades.
Aug 19, 2025
Since inauguration day, the Trump White House has routinely evoked a deep-rooted Cold War framework for expressing America’s relationship with war. This framing sits at odds with the president’s inaugural address in which US President Donald Trump, conjuring Richard Nixon, argued that his “proudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker and unifier.”
From January 2025 on, the administration has instead engaged in a steady drumbeat of aggressive militaristic taunting, threatening real and perceived enemies, foreign and domestic alike. From ordering 1,500 active-duty troops to assist with border patrolling and deportation missions, to the secretary of defense censuring the nation’s armed forces for not focusing enough on “lethality,” the Trump administration is reviving a decades-long trend within an increasingly militarized US foreign policy—a faith in and fear of war and its consequences.
Since the end of World War II, Americans crafted and then embraced a rather disjointed relationship with war, exhilarated by its possibilities to transform the world and make them safe, while also fearing wars they could not prevent or, perhaps worse, win. This tension between faith and fear has haunted Americans and led to a persistent failure to align ends and means in carrying out US foreign relations.
Of course, ideals, interests, and power matter when it comes to foreign policy. Cold War commentators insisted that international politics was a “struggle for power.” True, some critics worried about the consequences of using “raw power” to achieve global dominance while overestimating threats. They fretted that wielding power might actually produce foreign policy crises rather than solve them.
A false faith in war, taken to its extreme, bred not just hyper-patriotism, but xenophobia and nativism.
But in the decades following the Second World War, many Americans feared that if the United States “lost” the burgeoning Cold War, their nation might not even survive. It was a tense time. World War II gave Americans the world… and the faith necessary to rule it. But seemingly new evils emerged that gave pause to policymakers and the general public alike.
Here were inklings of a relationship between faith and fear that would inform US foreign policy ever since. I talk about this in my new book, Faith and Fear: America's Relationship with War since 1945. A secular faith in war to solve any foreign policy problem, coupled with fears of America’s enemies bringing destruction to the nation’s shores, indelibly shaped policy choices when it came to containing communism around the globe.
In short, Americans largely held faith that war would always be utilitarian, a “rational means” for attaining their desired ends.
In such a cognitive framing, war might bring chaos in the dangerous world of which realists warned, but it also lured with the promise of influence, even dominance, the chance to reshape or control whole swaths of the globe.
Now by faith, I’m not talking about religious determinants in US foreign policy. For sure, church leaders used their pulpits in service to both God and the anticommunist cause. Instead, I’m expressing faith as an anecdote for policymakers’ unwavering trust and confidence in war, as a vital tool for achieving policy objectives.
Civilian and military leaders held faith in nuclear arsenals deterring communists’ pursuit of “world domination.” They assumed covert paramilitary operations would stabilize nations in Latin America and the Middle East, enduring nationalist struggles in the postcolonial era. And they faithfully believed that war would aid in modernization efforts aimed at transforming societies abroad, similar to later 21st-century counterinsurgency theorists and regime change advocates seeking to bring liberal democracy and freedom to parts of the world supposedly still living in darkness.
Military force thus became an integral component of how policymakers and citizens alike related with the outside world. After World War II, war occupied a place in America it never relinquished.
Not everyone believed this was healthy for America. Dissenters have long worried about a garrison state emanating from this process of militarizing our foreign policy, but too often their voices were drowned out. The United States had to generate power, so the argument went, and then use that power to advance its political aims against an unyielding, atheistic enemy.
But faith also partnered well with domestic politics. Eager politicians extolled the nation’s military capabilities, diminishing the costs of war while worshipping its benefits. Rarely did they consider the possibility that military intervention might make matters worse, exacerbating local problems instead of solving them.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, those who didn’t accept this compulsory faith were branded as unpatriotic heretics. A false faith in war, taken to its extreme, bred not just hyper-patriotism, but xenophobia and nativism. In the process, dissent was driven to the political periphery. It seemed far easier, and far more patriotic, to embrace false promises of easy, if not eventual victory when the nation committed itself to war.
Aside this essentialist faith in war sat a fear that nearly all national security threats, both foreign and domestic, were existential ones. Americans bounded their faith in war to a kind of Hobbesian, primal fear of the unknown.
So, what were Americans afraid of? What left them in a near constant state of Cold War paranoia? Well, everything. They feared atomic war and “unconventional” war. They feared an anarchic international system seemingly under threat by godless communist forces. They feared arms races and missile gaps, threats abroad and threats at home. They feared depressions and recessions, the future and the past. They feared Soviet spies and Cuban “revolutionaries,” and, perhaps worst of all, they feared each other.
Americans displayed a kind of “neurotic anxiety” born of perpetually exaggerated fear. The parallels to today are striking. Had not the 9/11 attacks, as just one example, also revived long-simmering, stereotypical fears that Muslim extremists, in literary critic Edward Said’s words, might “take over the world”?
And, not surprisingly, as the Cold War persisted, opportunistic politicians and big business realized that existential fear could be a useful tool for persuasion, propaganda, and profit. Taken to its politicized extreme, fear could breed a form of militarized consensus.
In fact, the insidious relationships between legislators and lobbyists became a hallmark of Cold War politics as major defense firms were rewarded for the nation’s increased military posture. As one journalist noted in 1961, the purposes of the military-industrial complex fit “neatly in the atmosphere of crisis… as the United States continued to be held in the grip of wartime thinking.”
These tensions between faith and fear matter because they endure. For Cold War Americans, not unlike today, war was immensely relevant. As George Kennan, the father of “containment,” saw it in 1951, “many people in this country are coming to believe that war is not only unavoidable but imminent.”
The nation’s ongoing support for the interminable conflicts in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, along with ever-expanding defense budgets and militarized policing at home, suggests little has changed in the ensuing decades.
Ultimately, these interactions between faith and fear have the potential to culminate into a spiraling, never-ending militarization of American foreign policy that leaves us far less safe in an uncertain world.
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Ukraine and Gaza Confirm That the Post-War International Order Is Obsolete
Reflections on recent events in this dark and brutal world.
Aug 18, 2025
The war in Ukraine continues unabated and the international community has failed to stop Israel’s genocide in Gaza and its forced replacement campaign in the West Bank. As such, the limits of international law and the ever-declining influence of the United Nations (UN) are there for all to see. Indeed, we live in extremely dark times, and the need for a new world order architecture beyond the nation-state and capitalism is more urgent than ever before, says political scientist, political economist, author, and journalist C. J. Polychroniou in the interview that follows with the French-Greek independent journalist Alexandra Boutri.
Alexandra Boutri: Let me start by asking you about the Trump-Putin summit which ended without a concrete deal. What’s your take on it? Do you agree with the view that sees a Trump alignment with Putin?
C. J. Polychroniou: Among the major takeaways from the Trump-Putin summit in Alaska is that Trump’s image as a dealmaker has suffered yet another massive blow. Of course, we already knew that Trump is the ultimate bullshitter and the slickest con artist in modern political history. His position on the war in Ukraine has changed on numerous occasions, most likely out of frustration for his failure in fulfilling his promise to end the war between Russia and Ukraine, which is now well into its third year. But that’s because he lacks even a rudimentary understanding of how complex of a situation this is since the two sides, i.e., Russia and Ukraine, are diametrically opposed in their positions to end the war. In Alaska, Trump aligned with Putin by dropping his demand for a ceasefire in favor of pursuing a full peace accord. Russia had opposed US and European ceasefire proposals, so Trump’s shift to a peace deal is undoubtedly a win for Putin. In addition, no sanctions against Russia were announced, so the Alaska summit turns out to be a double win for Putin. But that’s not the end of the story. With the Trump-Putin summit, the U.S. has shown Europeans that it and it alone decides how to deal with Russia in ending the Ukraine war. Thus, we may speak of a third major win for Putin.
Alexandra Boutri: What does the Russia’s invasion of Ukraine tells us about the current world order architecture?
C. J. Polychroniou: One may have thought that such aggression would be a thing of the past in the twentieth-first century, but the reality is that not much has changed in state behavior since the end of the Second World War. International law in establishing standards of behavior remains a weak law and collective security as a mechanism to prevent or resolve conflicts is something of an illusion. Ukraine and Gaza are striking examples of the failure of the current world order architecture.
Alexandra Boutri: Is there any justification for Putin’s war?
C. J. Polychroniou: The Russian position on Ukraine had been quite explicit for quite some time before the invasion. Putin had warned NATO against deploying its troops and weapons to Ukraine, saying that this represented a red line for Russia. But the U.S. was obsessed with bringing Ukraine into NATO and the Biden administration backed Ukraine for NATO membership just as strongly as the George W. Bush administration had done in 2008. Obama, of course, was also open to accepting Ukraine as a NATO member and had in fact urged NATO to increase its military support for Ukraine. The point here is that the West in general was always in favor of NATO’s eastward expansion since the end of the Cold War and did not take into account Russia’s security concerns. The US that is principally responsible for the Ukraine crisis although Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is unmistakably a criminal act of aggression.
Alexandra Boutri: Let’s move on to Israel’s barbaric assault on Gaza. What are the cold facts behind this terrible drama?
C. J. Polychroniou; The cold facts? That will require an extensive discussion of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which is impossible to offer here. The “terrible drama” doesn’t start with the atrocious attack and kidnapping by Hamas-led forces in Israel on October 7, 2023. Israel has a long history of occupation and dispossession, coupled with systematic violation of human rights against Palestinians. Anyone denying this “cold fact” is either ignorant of history or simply an Israeli propagandist. Nonetheless, it was the criminal and shockingly stupid cross-border raids by Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups on October 7, 2023, that led to Israeli vows of greater retaliation, which eventually took the form of ethnic cleansing and genocide. Another “cold fact” behind this terrible drama is that the Israeli occupation, dispossession, and killing of Palestinians would not have been possible without the backing and support of the US and major European powers. The western governments are fully complicit in Israeli crimes and the genocide taking place in Gaza today. Yet another “cold fact” is that the holy mantra of the “two-state solution,” cited for many years now by western powers and even so-called progressives in the western world as the only way forward for the Palestinian question, is a delusion as it has ignored the facts on the ground. Israel has always been bent on the creation of an ethnic state and a "greater Israel" and thus would never accept a Palestinian state near its own borders.
Alexandra Boutri: You described the Hamas-led attacks of October 7 not only as criminal but also utterly stupid. Yet, there are many siding with the Palestinian cause who feel that the case for Palestinian self-determination stands now a better chance precisely because of the global condemnation against Israeli actions in Gaza.C J. Polychroniou: This is utterly absurd. Complete rubbish, I must say. Palestinians in Gaza are faced with total extinction because of the Hamas-led attacks on October 7. Israel has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians (it’s more likely than not that the actual death toll in Gaza is much higher than what the Gaza health ministry has reported) and the number of injured exceeds 150,000. More carnage is sure to follow with Israel's plan to take control of all of Gaza. And bear in mind that most of Gaza’s infrastructure is totally destroyed as it has experienced one of the most intense bombardments in history. Israel has dropped more than 90,000 tons of bombs on the Gaza Strip, which happens to be one of the most densely populated territories in the world, exceeding World War II bombings in Dresden, Hamburg, and London combined. Indeed, it has been estimated that the Israeli bombardment of Gaza is the equivalent of six atomic bombs dropped in Hiroshima. How anyone can speak of “progress” on the Palestinian front in the midst of such immense human tragedy is mind-boggling to me. Israel is now more determined than ever before not to co-exist with Palestinians in its midst. You have a neo-Nazi government in power, actually using Nazi-like tactics against Palestinians, while a sizeable majority of Israeli citizens appear to be applauding the government’s campaign to liquidate them because they feel that “there are no innocent civilians” in Gaza. The fact that the western governments not only tolerate but support the actions of a neo-Nazi regime in Israel speaks volumes of their moral depravity. But, yes, Hamas’ actions have been not only criminal but utterly destructive for the Palestinian cause.
Alexandra Boutri: Under what circumstances can you imagine the restructuring of the current world order architecture and the end of capitalism?
C. J. Polychroniou: Unfortunately, I cannot imagine the restructuring of the world order architecture or the end of capitalism in my own lifetime. Such radical transformations would mandate, first and foremost, the end of the nation-state and the subsequent rise of cosmopolitanism. The driving force behind the formation of the nation-state was capitalism itself, so the two are deeply intertwined even though global capitalism gives the impression that it seeks to transcend the nation-state framework but, in reality, depends on it for its own expansion. Be that as it may, the point is that neither international law nor the UN collective security system work in preventing wars and resolving conflicts. Certain progress in human affairs notwithstanding, we continue to live in a dark and brutal world.
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The Choice Between Peace and Escalation After Trump-Putin Talks
Trump went to Alaska with a weak hand, but one that will get weaker still if the war goes on. Failure of peace negotiations could lead to a more aggressive Russian war plan to seize territory much faster.
Aug 18, 2025
Donald Trump came into office promising to end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours. Now, six months later, his high stakes meeting with Vladimir Putin in Alaska may have put the United States and Russia on a new path toward peace, or, if this initiative fails, could trigger an even more dangerous escalation, with warhawks in Congress already pushing for another $54.6 billion in weapons for Ukraine.
After emerging from the meeting, Putin correctly framed the historical moment: “This was a very hard time for bilateral relations and, let’s be frank, they’ve fallen to the lowest point since the Cold War. I think that’s not benefiting our countries and the world as a whole. Sooner or later, we have to amend the situation to move on from confrontation to dialogue.”
Trump said he will follow up by talking to NATO leaders and Zelenskyy, as if the US is simply an innocent bystander trying to help. But in Ukraine, as in Palestine, Washington plays the “mediator” while pouring weapons, intelligence, and political cover into one side of the war. In Gaza, that has enabled genocide. In Ukraine, it could lead to nuclear war.
Despite protests from Zelenskyy and European leaders, Trump was right to meet with Putin, not because they are friends, but because the United States and Russia are enemies, and because the war they are fighting to the last Ukrainian is the front line of a global conflict between the United States, Russia and China.
In our book, War In Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict, which we have now updated and revised to cover three years of war in Ukraine, we have detailed the U.S. role in expanding NATO up to Russia’s borders, its support for the violent overthrow of Ukraine’s elected government in 2014, its undermining of the Minsk II peace accord, and its rejection of a peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine after only two months of war in 2022.
The whole world celebrated the end of the Cold War in 1991, but the people of the world are still waiting for the long-promised peace dividend that a generation of corrupt, war-mongering leaders have stolen from us.
We doubt that Donald Trump fully grasps this history. Are his simplistic statements alternately blaming Russia and Ukraine, but never the United States, just a public façade for domestic consumption, or does he really believe America’s hands are clean?
At their first meeting in Saudi Arabia on February 18th, senior US and Russian negotiators agreed on a three-step plan: first to restore US-Russian diplomatic relations; then to negotiate peace in Ukraine; and finally to work on resolving the broader, underlying breakdown in relations between the United States and Russia. Trump and Putin’s decision to meet now was a recognition that they must address the deeper rift before they can achieve a stable and lasting peace in Ukraine.
The stakes are high. Russia has been waging a war of attrition, concentrating on destroying Ukrainian forces and military equipment rather than on advancing quickly and seizing a lot more territory. It has still not occupied all of Donetsk province, which unilaterally declared independence from Ukraine in May 2014, and which Russia officially annexed before its invasion in February 2022.
The failure of peace negotiations could lead to a more aggressive Russian war plan to seize territory much faster. Ukrainian forces are thinly spread out along much of its 700-mile front line, with as few as 100 soldiers often manning several miles of defenses. A major Russian offensive could lead to the collapse of the Ukrainian military or the fall of the Zelenskyy government.
How would the US and its Western allies respond to such major changes in the strategic picture? Zelenskyy’s European allies talk tough, but have always rejected sending their own troops to Ukraine, apart from small numbers of special operations forces and mercenaries.
Putin addressed the Europeans in his remarks after the Summit:
“We expect that Kyiv and the European capitals will perceive [the negotiations] constructively, and that they won’t throw a wrench in the works, will not make any attempts to use some backroom dealings to conduct provocations to torpedo the nascent progress.”
Meanwhile, more US and NATO troops are fighting from the relative safety of the joint Ukraine-NATO war headquarters at the US military base in Wiesbaden in Germany, where they work with Ukrainian forces to plan operations, coordinate intelligence, and target missile and drone strikes. If the war escalates further, Wiesbaden could become a target for Russian missile strikes, just as NATO missiles already target bases in Russia. How would the United States and Germany respond to Russian missile strikes on Wiesbaden?
The US and NATO’s official policy has always been to keep Ukraine fighting until it is in a stronger position to negotiate with Russia, as Joe Biden wrote in the New York Times in June 2022. But every time the US and NATO prolong or escalate the war, they leave Ukraine in a weaker position, not a stronger one. The neutrality agreement that the US and UK rejected in April 2022 included a Russian withdrawal from all the territory it had just occupied. But that was not good enough for Boris Johnson and Joe Biden, who instead promised a long war to weaken Russia.
NATO military leaders believed that Ukraine’s counter-offensive in the fall of 2022 achieved the stronger position they were looking for, and General Milley went out on a limb to say publicly that Ukraine should “seize the moment” to negotiate. But Biden and Zelenskyy rejected his advice, and Ukraine’s failed offensive in 2023 squandered the moment they had failed to seize. No amount of deceptive propaganda can hide the reality that it has been downhill since then, and 69% of Ukrainians now want a negotiated peace, before their position gets even worse.
So Trump went to Alaska with a weak hand, but one that will get weaker still if the war goes on. The European politicians urging Zelenskyy to cling to his maximalist demands want to look tough to their own people, but the keys to a stable and lasting peace are still Ukrainian neutrality, self-determination for the people of all regions of Ukraine, and a genuine peace process that finally lays to rest the zombification of the Cold War.
The whole world celebrated the end of the Cold War in 1991, but the people of the world are still waiting for the long-promised peace dividend that a generation of corrupt, war-mongering leaders have stolen from us.
As negotiations progress, US officials must be honest about the American role in provoking this crisis. They must demonstrate that they are ready to listen to Russia’s concerns, take them seriously, and negotiate in good faith to achieve a stable and lasting agreement that delivers peace and security to all parties in the Ukraine war, and in the wider Cold War it is part of.
Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies are the authors of a new edition of War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict, just published by OR Books.
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