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ukraine war
The Stunning Hypocrisy of US Foreign Policy
The US government regards the entire world as its legitimate sphere of influence, including the backyards of its rivals.
Oct 28, 2025
The US invaded, bombed, and sanctioned nations worldwide. It armed militias and launched regime change operations.
Prior to 9-11 the US fought proxy wars and launched coups throughout Latin America, supporting autocratic regimes. In Indonesia it helped kill about a million leftists. During the Vietnam War, it killed several million.
Since just 9-11 the US invaded or bombed Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Serbia, Yemen, Iran, Somalia, and Niger. According to Brown University’s Costs of War project, US wars since 9-11 killed 4.5 million people and cost over $8 trillion.
The US aided war crimes in Gaza and the West Bank. The US has occupied one-third of Syria, the parts with oil, since about 2015, with help from a proxy army, the SDF. The US allied with al-Qaeda-linked extremist groups in Syria, as reported here, here, and here. It killed hundreds of thousands of Syrians through brutal sanctions. The Trump administration is now bombing Venezuelan boats and is preparing for a land invasion.
Would the US allow Russia to expand a military alliance to include Cuba and Mexico and then overthrow the government of Canada, install the new prime minister, arm anti-US militias, ban the official use of English, and station missiles and bases near US borders?
The US lied about almost all these wars and other interventions, which caused mass migrations that destabilized politics in America and the EU. The US even lied about the war in Yugoslavia, as documented in Harper’s Magazine, here, and here. In short, the Kosovo Liberation Army that the US supported was, basically, a terrorist organization funded by the CIA. Likewise, The US backed ethnic cleansing of Serbs in Croatia. US propaganda greatly overstated the nobility of the US intervention.
The US has over 750 overseas military bases. It withdrew from multiple nuclear arms treaties (ABM, INF, START II, JCPOA, and Open Skies Treaty).
According to the US Government, Russia’s and China’s Spheres of Influence Don’t Even Include Their Own Borderlands
The US is preparing for war with China over Taiwan, with massive arms buildups near China. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US expanded NATO right up to Russia’s borders, violating multiple verbal promises given to Soviet leaders. The CIA and its sister organization, the NED, sponsored color revolutions in multiple former Soviet bloc countries. The CIA “engineered” the 2014 coup in Ukraine, according to former US Ambassador Chas W. Freeman. The US armed the Azov battalion that was killing Russian speakers in the east of Ukraine. (See also this and this.) In 2019, the RAND Corporation recommended arming Ukraine as the best way to weaken Russia; RAND predicted the actions would result in a war in which Russia would have the advantage. The New York Times and Washington Post reported on extensive CIA meddling in Ukraine since at least 2014. The New Yorker reported on CIA and National Security Agency efforts to hide what they had done in Ukraine.
Jack Matlock, former US ambassador the the USSR, said in a 2024 interview: “Why don’t we understand that trying to remove Ukraine from Russian influence and put military bases there would be, in their case, absolutely unacceptable and worthy of defense?” Matlock said the US backed the 2014 coup, and, “Obviously, to any Russian leader, not just Vladimir Putin, that would have been an absolutely impossible, hostile act, which they had to react to. And in particular, they were not going to lose their naval base in Crimea.” Finally, Matlock said the Ukrainians are “dominated in their thinking by neo-Nazis—we tend to ignore that, or when Putin points it out, we say he’s lying. He’s not lying.” And Matlock wrote: “I have been appalled that a succession of American presidents and European leaders discarded the diplomacy that ended the Cold War, abandoned the agreements that curbed the nuclear arms race, and provoked a new cold war which has now become hot.”
See this for dozens of mainstream news articles about the presence of Nazis in Ukraine and US support for them.
The US stymied peace deals both before and after the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Would the US allow Russia to expand a military alliance to include Cuba and Mexico and then overthrow the government of Canada, install the new prime minister, arm anti-US militias, ban the official use of English, and station missiles and bases near US borders?
See "The Ukraine Papers" for more information about the war in Ukraine.
In short, the US shares responsibility for the war in Ukraine, and it’s a grotesque lie to say that the Russian invasion was “unprovoked.” Senior US diplomats, secretaries of defense, and others warned that NATO expansion was unnecessary and provocative. Even neocon Robert Kagan says it’s wrong to call the invasion unprovoked. The neocons who run US foreign policy used the poor Ukrainians as pawns in a nasty geopolitical chess game. US policies killed hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians and Russians, devastated Ukraine’s infrastructure, damaged European economies, and diverted trillions of dollars toward military buildups.
The war in Ukraine raises the very real risk of nuclear war. As JFK warned, it’s suicidal to push a nuclear-armed adversary into the corner.
It’s time for Americans to wise up to the lies told about this war; to oppose the trillion-dollar budget for the Department of War; to demand the closing of overseas bases; to oppose the trillion-dollar expansion of the US nuclear arsenal; and to demand a stop to endless wars, proxy wars, regime change operations, and provocations. Our country is $38 trillion in debt, and we have numerous pressing needs to address domestically. We can no longer afford to be the world hegemon. We lost disastrous wars against third world countries in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Yet our leaders are picking fights with both Russia and China, which is technologically advanced and which has four times our population.
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Democrats Have Let Republicans Become the 'Peace' Party
Trump’s successful diplomatic efforts have put the lie to the idea that there was nothing Biden and the Democrats could have done to end the massacre in Gaza, seriously undermining any claim that Democrats might make as the party of peace.
Oct 18, 2025
When President Donald Trump announced that he had helped broker an end to Israel’s onslaught in Gaza, it marked the achievement of a goal many anti-war activists had been struggling toward for two years. Few were bothered by the fact that it was Trump who ultimately presided over the cessation of violence; the goal was always to end the bombing, by any means possible. Whether this deal amounts to a lasting end to violence in the region is all but certain; already, Israel has attacked and killed Palestinians in an apparent breach of the agreement’s terms. But, with a hostage swap underway, there is some reason to believe that this merciless, apocalyptic phase of the genocide in Gaza is coming to an end. As this fragile “ceasefire” takes hold, it is worth considering what this apparent diplomatic success means for Trump, his foreign policy going forward, and for his opposition.
For his part, Trump has long telegraphed his yearning to win the Nobel Peace Prize. As with any policy he pursues, the ends are always self-serving, and this latest round of peacemaking is no different. After his apparent success in Palestine, Trump has already announced his intent to broker a ceasefire agreement between Russia and Ukraine, ending another conflict that dogged his predecessor, Joe Biden. It is unlikely that Trump is earnestly committed to an anti-war legacy (see, for example, his illegal and outrageous attempts to draw Venezuela into open conflict). Rather, Trump is eager to shore up his image as a president who can end seemingly intractable conflicts. That Biden fumbled his handling of both Gaza and Ukraine so badly is just more inspiration for Trump to succeed where his nemesis failed.
Whether Trump can bring an end to the fighting in Ukraine before his term ends is an open question. His newfound enthusiasm for peacemaking, though, leaves his opposition, the Democrats, in a quandary. Biden’s term as president coincided with the onset of the two military conflicts that have come to dominate the 2020s, in Ukraine and Gaza. In both cases, Democrats, and much of the Republican establishment too, quickly lined up behind the US’ nominal allies: Israel and Ukraine. As the conflicts dragged on, though, a strain of isolationist skepticism provided an off-ramp for many Republicans, exemplified by members of Congress like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.). By the time Trump’s 2024 campaign was off the ground, he was running on ending the war in Ukraine, even promising, with typical Trump bombast, to do so within his first 24 hours in office.
Meanwhile, Biden and other Democratic leaders were doubling down on their support for prolonging both conflicts. In Ukraine, Democrats repeatedly advocated for and voted to approve the shipment of weapons, even as the US’ own internal assessments were dubious about Ukraine’s chances for success. By 2024, unfaltering support for President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Ukraine’s army had become largely identified with the Democrats, while Republicans dithered.
The risk, rather, is that Americans who care about peacemaking abroad will find themselves increasingly alienated from both parties.
And then there was Gaza. As Democratic Party leaders pledged undying fealty to Israel, the party’s base began to sour on US complicity in the wanton slaughter playing out in Gaza. While more international bodies confirmed that Israel’s onslaught there met the criteria for genocide, the Biden administration was unstinting in its support. Heading into 2024, signs mounted that Biden’s reelection bid (and, subsequently, Kamala Harris’ campaign) were threatened by constituents’ discontent over the administration’s Israel policy. Despite the gathering storm clouds, the party could not bring itself to depart from its initial hard-line support, even going as far as to bar a Palestinian-American speaker from its 2024 convention floor.
The massive disconnect between the Democratic Party’s leadership and its base is sure to have ramifications far beyond last year’s election. Recent polling has revealed that just 8% of Democratic voters are supportive of Israel’s “military action” in Gaza; meanwhile, just 55 of the 214 Democratic representatives in Congress (only 26%) support a bill to halt weapons shipments to Israel. The dealignment between Democrats’ base and elected leadership on this issue could hardly be more stark.
Now, Trump has succeeded where Biden failed in bringing some measure of peace to the region. The risk to Democrats is not so much that Trump will woo more Democratic constituents to the Republican Party—Trump’s authoritarian tendencies at home and his vile persecution of all perceived political enemies largely foreclose that possibility. The risk, rather, is that Americans who care about peacemaking abroad will find themselves increasingly alienated from both parties. Trump’s successful diplomatic efforts have put the lie to the idea that there was nothing Biden and the Democrats could have done to end the massacre in Gaza, seriously undermining any claim that Democrats might make as the party of peace.
Some Democrats seem to understand what a dire bind the party has put itself in. Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), for example, recently sounded the alarm about Democrats ceding the “anti-war” mantle to Republicans and Trump. Others, like Rep. Delia Ramirez (D-Ill.), have put this opposition to war-making into legislation, authoring the aforementioned Block the Bombs Act.
But, for the Democrats to truly turn the ship around, many more elected representatives will have to follow in the footsteps of Khanna and Ramirez. If the party cannot quickly change its tune on war and peace, it may risk ceding this policy terrain to the Republican Party well into the future.
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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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