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us imperialism
International Lawyers Decry US Aggression Against Cuba, Urge Solidarity With Its People
“Those who remain silent in the face of this growing unlawfulness and aggressiveness assume a grave responsibility," said the head of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers.
Jun 10, 2026
An international group of leftist lawyers on Tuesday condemned the US blockade, sanctions, and war threats against Cuba, and the mounting repression of solidarity with the long-suffering Cuban people.
The International Association of Democratic Lawyers (IADL) held a virtual press conference "to condemn escalating United States measures against Cuba and to call for renewed international action in defense of international law, Cuban sovereignty, and the rights of the Cuban people."
"The United States continues to threaten Cuba while imposing unilateral coercive economic measures designed to destabilize the country and facilitate regime change," IADL noted. "In recent months, restrictions on fuel shipments have further intensified the hardships faced by the Cuban people, with severe consequences for daily life."
"For more than three decades, the United Nations General Assembly has overwhelmingly called for an end to the US blockade of Cuba, with the United States and Israel consistently standing alone in opposition to the international consensus," the group added. "While these annual resolutions represent a powerful condemnation of the blockade, symbolic measures alone are insufficient. International law imposes obligations on states to act in the face of ongoing violations."
Speakers at the press conference warned that the Trump administration's recent actions—including war threats and a deadly fuel blockade—are serious violations of international law that threaten the rights and well-being of millions of Cubans.
"The illegality of the blockade is not in doubt. What is at stake today is the impunity that allows it to continue," IADL general secretary Micòl Savia said. "What is at stake is the complete disregard of the United States for international law and collective institutions and their contempt for the common values of humankind."
"The actions of successive US administrations against Cuba make it very clear that they do not consider themselves bound by the principles of sovereign equality, peaceful coexistence, and self-determination that form the foundation of the international legal order," she continued.
“Another dimension of the blockade and sanctions against Cuba is the pressure imposed on third countries," Savia said. "The threat of punishment against institutions, banks, companies, and individuals that seek to establish commercial, financial, or diplomatic relations with Cuba is an intervention not only against Cuba, but also into the sovereign sphere of other countries."
"This shows how broad and arbitrary the sanctions policy has become as a tool of coercion," she added. "The threat of sanctions against companies from third countries that trade with Cuba violates their sovereignty.”
Speakers at the event excoriated the Trump administration's escalating war threats and politically motivated indictment of former Cuban President Raúl Castro, a hero of his country's successful revolution against a US-backed dictatorship.
"Cuba is now under the direct threat of [a] US imperialist war of aggression after a long period of economic and financial blockade," said Filipino jurist Edwin De La Cruz of the Amistad Philippines-Cuba Friendship Association and National Union of People's Lawyers.
"Serious transgressions on Cuba’s sovereignty, from failed efforts to foment unrest among the population, to the personal assault on the integrity of Comrade Raúl Castro by [President] Donald Trump intensified, with a threat of armed invasion tweeted by Donald Trump himself," he continued.
"Cuba and the Philippines share a common history of US imperialist domination. We share a common enemy and a common struggle," De La Cruz noted, pointing to the so-called Spanish-American War, in which the United States conquered both countries, along with Puerto Rico and Guam, from Spain under the false pretense of a Spanish attack on the battleship USS Maine. The US colonized the Philippines from 1898-1946, except for a brief period of Japanese occupation during World War II.
Deborah Jackson, president of the US group National Conference of Black Lawyers, called the Castro indictment "a transparently political prosecution that serves no legitimate law enforcement purpose."
Castro—who served as Cuba's president for a decade after his older brother, Fidel Castro, stepped down in 2008—was indicted by the US Department of Justice (DOJ) last month for his alleged role in the 1996 shoot-down of planes operated by Brothers to the Rescue, a counter-revolutionary group founded by a CIA-trained operative and Bay of Pigs veteran, after repeated warnings that they had violated Cuban airspace.
Critics noted Trump's ongoing campaign of illegal boat bombings in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean, as well as the long history of US state terrorism against Cuba and support for the perpetrators of attacks carried out by right-wing Cuban exiles, including the 1976 bombing of a commercial flight with 73 people aboard.
Jackson said the charges against Castro "are clearly invalid... attempts to criminalize legitimate acts of self-defense by a sovereign nation" that "have been brought nearly three decades after the incident in question against a 94-year-old former head of state who will never be extradited to the United States."
Kerry McLean, an international human rights attorney with the National Lawyers' Guild in the United States, warned that “the indictment of Castro, a foreign leader and former head of state, threatens a repeat of the illegal abduction on January 3, 2026 of Venezuela’s president and his wife."
Trump ordered the invasion and arrest of President Nicolás Maduro and Cilia Flores on dubious drug trafficking, illegal weapons possession, and narco-terrorism charges. The DOJ has since admitted that the cartel which Trump claimed was led by Maduro does not, in fact, exist.
McLean added that the US invasion of Venezuela—during which more than 75 people, including 32 Cuban members of Maduro's security team, were killed—violated the UN Charter, a treaty that, under the US Constitution, is "the supreme law of the land."
Speakers at the IADL event also decried US efforts to intimidate, investigate, and criminalize solidarity organizations.
“Like the designation of Cuba as a 'state supporter of terror' and the designations of many of the leading organizations and figures of the Cuba solidarity movement, these organizations and individuals are designated and targeted to impose state terror on the Palestine and Cuba solidarity movements, divide people from their homelands, and blunt the effectiveness of any opposition to US imperialism," IADL deputy general secretary Charlotte Kates said.
"The aim of such designations is not only to prohibit financial transactions, but to isolate those organizations and individuals that the US views as key networks of solidarity against imperialism and to prevent meaningful action to bring its crimes to an end," she contended.
Savia said, “Those who remain silent in the face of this growing unlawfulness and aggressiveness assume a grave responsibility, particularly when such conduct is carried out by one of the most powerful and heavily armed states in the world."
"By letting these policies continue unabated," she added, "and by applying double standards and selectivity while granting widespread impunity to rich and powerful states, they contribute to the erosion of the international legal order and pave the way for a world without the rule of law."
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Trump’s Cuba Strategy Is Economic Genocide
In an interview, scholar Danny Shaw discusses President Donald Trump’s policy of strangling Cuba and offers an anatomy of the impact of the economic embargo on its people after having witnessed firsthand the existing conditions on the island.
Jun 10, 2026
Cuba has been under a US trade embargo since the Eisenhower administration, although it was President John F. Kennedy who implemented a comprehensive embargo on all trade with Cuba. And while every subsequent administration has tried since to cause pain and suffering to the Cuban people for its support of a revolutionary government, it is the Trump administration that has made the collapse of the communist regime on the island a top priority by expanding sanctions against the island, blocking fuel deliveries, and threatening Cuba with military action.
Cuba is indeed on the brink and unlikely to survive since the inhumane and criminal actions of the second Trump administration have plunged the island into a deep humanitarian crisis.
In the interview that follows, Danny Shaw discusses President Donald Trump’s policy of strangling Cuba and offers an anatomy of the impact of the economic embargo on its people after having witnessed firsthand the existing conditions on the island. Danny Shaw is a scholar of Latin American and Caribbean studies and a longtime supporter of the Cuban revolution. He recently traveled across Cuba, where he documented for The Grayzone the harrowing conditions following the Trump administration's imposition of an energy blockade.
C. J. Polychroniou: US President Donald Trump has revived the Monroe Doctrine with a series of forceful actions in the Western Hemisphere, such as the attack on Venezuela, which resulted in the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, and conducting military strikes against fishing boats in the Caribbean. It may not be totally clear what’s driving the Trump administration’s gunboat diplomacy, but Cuba, which has endured perhaps the longest economic embargo in modern history, is next on the wannabe dictator’s hit list.
Danny, can you talk about the policy methods the second Trump administration has used in order to further isolate Cuba and, in the process, strangle its economy and its people?
Danny Shaw: On January 29, the Trump administration—the true spokesman of the billionaire class with global reach, as we’ve seen from Caracas to Tehran—took actions to completely shut down the Cuban economy. Threatening any country that sold oil to Cuba or continued to trade with them tightened the screws on an already long-existing, illegal, unilateral Economic War. Washington and their right-wing minions across the hemisphere also went after Cuban medical missions from Honduras to Jamaica, which brought much-needed foreign reserves for Cuba and most importantly afforded medical attention throughout the Americas and the world to marginalized populations. Ecuador and Costa Rica kicked out the Cuban embassies. The Trump administration has made it clear to the world: Any attempt to support the Cuban government will be severely criminalized. Concretely, this means Cuba is more isolated and desperate than it has ever been.
The US method of stoking “hunger” and “desperation” has completely crushed this fascinating, historical experiment in resistance and a people’s government.
We must see Trump’s energy blockade in the context of an economic blockade which has left Cuba on life support since 1991, the year the Soviet Union and the Socialist Block countries fell. Overnight, these measures cut Cubans’ average caloric intake in half. Periodically, under both Democratic and Republican presidencies, the US government has taken a scalpel to the Cuban economy. With a Gazaesque strategy of surgical precision, the State Department has cut off remittances, wiped out tourism, and penalized any foreign company that did business with Cuba. January 29 was yet another inflection point of what has truthfully been an ongoing “special period” and is now proving to be a death sentence for many Cuban families. Now the FBI and Homeland Security are going after those of us who have brought humanitarian aid to Cuba.
Every word I share, including my quotation of hungry and dispirited Cubans, has to be seen within the context of a 67-year-old war on a country that has sought to be sovereign from empire. As an ethnographer, an international affairs analyst for Cuban and Venezuelan television since 2014, and someone building fluency in Cuban Spanish for over three decades, I have had a lot of intimate contact with Cubans, their opinions, and their struggles. We have to go back to the original State Department memorandum as laid out by Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs Lester Mallory on April 6, 1960:
..it follows that every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba. If such a policy is adopted, it should be the result of a positive decision which would call forth a line of action which, while as adroit and inconspicuous as possible, makes the greatest inroads in denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.”
I quoted the ruling class’s thinking at length because that is precisely what has been happening in Cuba now since at least 1991. The US method of stoking “hunger” and “desperation” has completely crushed this fascinating, historical experiment in resistance and a people’s government. What I witnessed in Cuba in February, March, and April of this year was apocalyptic.
C. J. Polychroniou: The Trump administration forced a leadership change in Venezuela, but it is debatable whether there has also been a regime change. However, the plan for Cuba seems to be regime change even though its government is not doing anything to threaten the United States. Why is Trump after regime change in Cuba and to what end? Whose interests is he really serving?
Danny Shaw: Trump is the ultimate distraction. Like all billionaire bubble boys, there are no consequences for his lies, threats, and general clownishness. But behind the bombastic, arrogant billionaire are the true global power brokers, a small group of 2,800 billionaires who seek to preside over humanity’s destiny. They use Trump as their spokesman to carry out a fascist global agenda that was thought to be impossible prior to 2016 when he first came into power.
The War on Cuba and all states who represent any type of resistance—China, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Palestine, Russia etc.—is designed to convince us again and again of “the end of history.” The idea that cowing to the billionaires and soon-to-be trillionaires is inevitable.
The corporate media has long presented “Cuba” as a “failed socialist state.” This serves the empire’s ideological interests. They can showcase this “miserable island,” stripped of all contexts, and show this horrible place on CNN and Fox hemorrhaging their own people. Millions of Cubans are dying and migrating. Even before this crisis, the most extreme ever, the Cuban population shrank by 1.4 million between 2020 and 2024. The capitalist media can then propagandistically contrast this reality with a mirage of extreme abundance and excess that they parade in front of our faces through their ideological apparatuses. Think social media, Hollywood, the mainstream media etc.
We are all focused on US drones, bombs, and boots on the ground, but the invasion has already arrived.
The other interest the US has in Cuba is of course economic. The Cuban state has been the ultimate arbiter of questions of foreign trade and investment and an obstacle to unfettered penetration by private capital. Trump, his business partners, and cronies will cash in on land grabs, mineral deals, and the buying of shorefront hotels. Cuba has long had a big tourist economy that they can cash in on.
So these are some of their motivations. But I think your question is an interesting one that I have sat with for decades.
Truthfully, the Empire would only have to blow and the Cuban government would fall. In terms of being able to provide for and defend the Cuban people, the Cuban government fell long ago, arguably in 1991.
Private property is now ascendant in Cuba and has been arguably since 1991. Whatever leadership that is there now, though they put out daily patriotic statements, is not the leadership of Fidel, Che, and Camilo that we in the Western left came to love and defend since 1959. What I have seen over the past 31 years was a people left to fend for themselves. The ethos and general mindset in Cuba is not “Patria o Muerte” and “Venceremos,” (“Homeland or Death” and “We Shall Overcome”), the historic slogans of the Revolution; it is the “Law of the Jungle” and “Every Man For Himself.”
While leftist tourists maintain a glorified, outdated image of this museum of socialism, another mentality already reigns over Cuba, especially among the two generations born into the special period. For example, in the province of Sancti Spiritus I stayed with a family that was relatively stable. The father was a retired track coach and the mother a retired physical therapist. The son plays professional basketball in Brazil and, at 6 feet 9 inches, is one of the tallest Cubans in the country. They have given a plate of food to two elderly neighbors, Sonia and Francisco, for years now. They can no longer afford to do so as they can barely feed themselves and their immediate family. Sonia and Francisco are now hungry and malnourished. They will soon die, two more anonymous victims of this macabre US foreign policy. But who will record their deaths? Who will know their names? The local officials will just record that they died of old age.
And this happens everyday now in Cuba. Generalized hunger has become mass malnutrition, and everyday that passes there is more death. Many Cubans say there is already starvation in the most historically neglected areas like Guantanamo and Las Tunas.
So I think being able to point a finger and enact laws in Florida about "commemorating the victims of communism” serves the billionaires' interests. This begins to explain why they have sadistically sought to cause so much suffering in Cuba.
C. J. Polychroniou: As you already pointed out, you were recently in Cuba and traveled throughout the island. Describe the actual conditions that you encountered.
Danny Shaw: Let me take you deeper into the class contradictions that have long been surfacing in Cuba.
One of the first things a visitor to Cuba will notice is that as the people are dehydrated and starved, the private sector is growing. It is important to clarify that Marco Rubio, Trump, and the architects of the intensification of the economic war on Cuba are at the same time bolstering the private sector. So the owners of private businesses, the MIPYMES, are allowed to import gas, generators, food, etc. It is the Cuban masses that are completely cut off, as an emerging business sector continues to consolidate its economic power on the island functioning as Miami and Washington’s beachheads. But to access these private shops one has to have dollars, or big stacks of Cuban pesos. The 99% of Cubans have neither. The private MYPIMES also have more quality food, but they are private peninsulas of privilege, or Little Miamis, that very few Cubans can afford.
Four days after the guerrillas took power in Havana on January 1 1959, Fidel Castro asked a crowd of tens of thousands in Camaguey, “How can we call this our homeland, if the homeland gives us nothing?” Today, the children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of that generation of Cubans circulate this heroic speech that grew out of their anti-imperialist and anti-dictatorship struggle and ask, “Why are we being shut out of our own country?”
Collectively, right now, Cuban children have less access to toys and food than what I have seen across Haiti since I first went there in 1998. Some of my friends in Cuba have asked me if there is any way for them to escape to Haiti. Haitian medical students I knew in Santiago and other Haitians were forced to flee Cuba and return to their besieged homeland because of how bad Cuba is. When Haiti is a reference for relative abundance, that is the ultimate indicator of how blockaded and dire Cuba is.
My responsibility is not to parrot Cuban government speeches and positions as the left does here in the West, but to give a voice to a population captured in a looming Economic Genocide, trapped between two bureaucracies,
Agricultural products cannot get from the countryside into the city. Every day there is more hunger, malnutrition, and encroaching starvation. The Cuban people say they have no voice. The most vulnerable, the elderly, children and prisoners, are already dying. There is a stark sense of generalized hopelessness. There are no functioning means of transportation. Yet as one waits for buses that never arrive, imported cars from Miami speed down the highways. The people say those are rich Cubans or government officials. The people do not trust their government and see them as a central ingredient in the genocidal campaign they are facing.
Let’s break down the math of starvation, CJ. Because we are all focused on US drones, bombs, and boots on the ground, but the invasion has already arrived. What will play out in the upcoming days and months is the consolidation of the umpteenth US intervention in the affairs of the people of the Caribbean, South America, and the world. And it will continue to exterminate a lot of lives. When Cubans say that today Cuba is the equivalent of Gaza without bombs, they are not exaggerating.
A liter of gasoline in Cuba costs more than 6,000 pesos ($10 US dollars), meaning a gallon of gas costs $40. The average Cubans’ salary or pension is 2,400 pesos ($4 dollars) monthly. A bottle of Turkish sunflower oil to cook costs 1,500 ($2.50), a pound of rice costs 350 ($0.60), and the electricity bill, regardless of whether there is any, is 400-500 pesos (less than $1 per month), meaning that alone consumes a Cuban’s money for the month.
In Cuba, no matter how much money you have in the bank, you can only take out $2 or $3 dollars. That is why you see long lines across Cuba of retirees and heads of family waiting all day in front of banks, trying to get their money out. Cuba is a country of lines, long lines.
Infant mortality rates have increased by 148% in Cuba. Center for Economic and Policy Research’s director of international policy Alexander Main: explains: “The Trump policy of 'maximum pressure' on Cuba has killed a lot of babies… it’s highly likely that more babies are dying now, and at an even higher rate than last year as a result of the current US fuel blockade targeting Cuba.”
Many families have to get up in the middle of the night because that is the only time they have access to a few hours of electricity. Measures of insomnia, depression, and all mental health indicators are skyrocketing. US terrorism comes in many different forms.
By the time we publish, the hyperinflation and devaluation of the Cuban peso will be even more extreme. Everyday, the peso is worth a fraction less than the dollar, damaging Cubans’ earning power even more. What Cubans have whispered to me since 1995 is that if they film their reality or try to speak out against the economic disparities, the authorities will arrest them immediately.
What if you have children? How do you feed them? Cuban families are weary of having children because they cannot feed them. The War on Cuba is a Demographic War, a War of Depopulation. From the perspective of capital, Cuba’s population is excessive and expendable, especially old people who are generally more loyal to the revolution because they can remember what it once was prior to 1991. Similar to Palestine and Haiti, masses of people can be displaced and exterminated. Why would capital care? And why would a Western public care, if they have never heard one positive word about these “sh^thole countries,” to quote the ever-eloquent Trump again.
Religion, alcohol and drug addiction all find a foothold among a population who cannot see beyond this bleak material reality. All of the ingredients for an Economic Genocide are in place. Cubans I met and hung out with in Las Tunas, Holguin, or Granma were not worried about imperialist drones or bombs. They said the bombs of thirst and hunger have long been their number one enemy. Colonial death comes in many different forms.
C. J. Polychroniou: Cuban government officials have said that the country will fight to death in the event of a US invasion. But is it realistic to expect a starving nation fight back in the event of a full-scale invasion of the island by the world’s most powerful and advanced military?
Danny Shaw: Minister of Foreign Affairs, Bruno Rodriguez, himself explained: “It seems that the US government has chosen a dangerous path, a path that could lead to unimaginable consequences, to humanitarian catastrophe, to a genocide.” He then says what every leader has to say but it is tough to take seriously: "Cuba will exercise its right for its legitimate defense to the very last consequences with massive, mass support of the people." These militant government statements are out of touch with mass sentiment.
Observing our movement of activists, Marxists, the left, or whatever we call ourselves, we pretend like it is 1959 or 1989 and Fidel and well-trained, honest revolutionaries are still at the helm of the state. If we cannot honestly reflect on this question of leadership, the Cuban state and the masses, aren’t we complicit in the ongoing strangling and starvation of today’s mambisado (the masses who fought for Cuba’s independence against Spain)? Do we judge a revolution by the objective and subjective conditions the people confront, or by the latest interview or speech of Diaz-Canel? Have any of these activists who defend Cuba ever gotten outside of the Hotel Nacional and outside of the government-guided tours? If we mischaracterize the objective and subjective conditions in Cuba, aren't we complicit in our own way in the war on Cuba, which Cubans say comes from both an internal and external blockade?
Capitalism is the accumulation of misery in one pole, and luxury in the other.
To think Cuba can resist in any way is ridiculous. How can a half-starved, unarmed people resist the largest military with the largest budget, $1.5 trillion, in the history of the world? Cubans overwhelmingly told me they are so sick of “resolving," “surviving," and “resisting." Besides some elderly veterans of the heroic war of liberation in Angola and that generation of fighters, I met almost no Cubans with any enthusiasm for the idea of fighting back against the United States. There’s a complete state of demoralization across Cuba. Hyperbolic leftist comparisons to “People’s War” in Vietnam under the direction of Ho Chi Minh and General Nygun Vo Giap are goofy and dishonest. Cubans see their government and police as complicit in everything that is happening. Why would they die for a process they long stopped believing in? The Western “left movement” is clueless about the objective and subjective conditions in Cuba because we uncritically take our cues from the Cuban government. The private sector could not be ascendant in Cuba if there was not collusion with high-level officials. The Cuban masses perceive that government officials are saying one thing publicly but behind the scenes are looking out for themselves. And if you listen to the statements on CNN by this generation of Castros, that is exactly what they say. They praise capitalism and position themselves to adapt to the inevitable reconquering of the island.
Cuban officialdom and their leftist counterparts have engaged in what we can call “high politics.” Spanish researcher of communes in Venezuela, Cira Pascual Marquina, explains that we often base our conclusion on “institutional declarations, negotiations, geopolitical responses—while overlooking the dense fabric of everyday political practice that sustains the process.” Look at the Venezuela General Vladimir Padrino and all of his rhetoric before January 3 about a “people's war” in Venezuela that would resist any efforts by the Trump administration. What resistance has there been in Venezuela? Today, six months after the US
occupation of Venezuela, Padrino is an agricultural minister.
All of these triumphant-sounding speeches mask the reality of the Cuban masses, and arguably do more damage than good. As a supporter of the Cuban Revolution, I waited years if not decades to say some of these things publicly. Because again, I am with David, not Goliath. But scholars and supporters of Cuba need to be vocal about the whole truth. My responsibility is not to parrot Cuban government speeches and positions as the left does here in the West, but to give a voice to a population captured in a looming Economic Genocide, trapped between two bureaucracies. Here is an essay by a Cuban student in Ireland which brilliantly captures how the Cuban people feel they are stuck between two competing rhetorics, which both ignore their interests.
C. J. Polychroniou: US imperialism never went away but has gone totally berserk under the second Trump administration. Can the beast be reformed?
Danny Shaw: In Cuba, the closest place to get Cuban food is Miami.
It’s surreal. After navigating dehydration and hunger across Cuba for one month, I returned, like other activists and friends of Cuba, to be detained and interrogated by the FBI in Miami. When I was released, after my third detention and interrogation in less than two years, I walked through an airport full of every last type of food and consumer good. Capitalism is the accumulation of misery in one pole, and luxury in the other. The Donroe Doctrine means US imperialism cuts off any attempt by China, Russia, Iran, etc., at building multipolarity in the hemisphere and recolonizes any bad example or “maroon state" that has escaped their hegemony. There is no reforming US imperialism. Only the unity of oppressed peoples as expressed through multipolar projects like the BRICS+ nations could ever defeat empire. That is the only hope right now for defeating this beast which will continue to starve, bomb, and genocide resistant populations until a knife is plunged into its neck.
Like the War on Haiti, first through the use of paramilitary gangs beginning in 2018, and now through Erik Prince and his private security companies to displace the once resistant population of Port-au-Prince and Latibonit (another department or province of Haiti), this constitutes the latest and most intense chapter of war on the Cuban people. Cubans are dying in silence as US government officials talk about bringing “freedom” to Cuba and Cuban government officials give speeches about Cuba’s “historic resistance.” What I have lived and witnessed in Cuba since 1995 constitutes an ongoing Economic Genocide against a defenseless, muzzled population.
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Trump Is Trying to Shoot His Way Out of US Decline—It Won't Work
The president wants a 50% increase over last year’s Pentagon budget, to $1.5 trillion; a wiser policy would be to rethink how the US is to co-exist with other nations in what is emerging as a multipolar world.
Jun 08, 2026
The US empire is in decline. Compare it today to where it was only 30 years ago, following the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was a “hyperpower,” then, almost inconceivably dominant with no challengers on Earth.
Since then, China has surpassed the US economically. Russia is rated No.1 militarily. The US has to borrow close to $2+ trillion per year (the annual federal budget deficit) just to keep the lights on. Its government based on checks and balances is under assault by a sleazy felon who wants to be king. It is wracked by social divisions that presage civil war.
President Donald Trump’s proposed solution to these problems is to shoot our way out. He wants a 50% increase over last year’s Pentagon budget, to $1.5 trillion. It is stupid in the measure to which it is excessive. It is suicidal to the extent it will degrade our security and our chances of improving national prosperity.
A wiser policy would be to rethink how the US is to co-exist with other nations in what is emerging as a multipolar world. That’s a big rethink. There’s another rethink coming as well: how we run the economy and what it is that actually accounts for national well-being.
The era when the US could dominate, intimidate, and expropriate the rest of the world is over. If it continues to push military power as its primary path forward it will continue to produce catastrophe.
Neither of these “rethinkings”—neither security nor the economy—will be easy. Both will go against existing failed doctrines and the powerful interests that back them. But, without doing this, we face the certainty of continuing national decline.
The highest-level rationale for rejecting a 50% increase in the Pentagon’s budget is that the military simply doesn’t win wars. Sure, it can knock off defenseless, pipsqueak principalities like Grenada, or Serbia, or Libya. But whenever it goes up against a committed adversary, especially one that fights back, it loses.
It lost in Vietnam to a nation of rice farmers that hadn’t even entered the industrial age. It killed more than 3 million Vietnamese, 4 million Southeast Asians when you count Laos and Cambodia. Yet, it lost.
It lost in Iraq, despite Iraq having been bombed for the prior decade, since the first Gulf War in 1991. Even in losing, the US killed more than a million Iraqis and spawned ISIS, one of the most virulent terrorist organizations ever let loose on the world.
It lost in Afghanistan, despite 20 years of trying to win. Afghanistan was a fourth-world country, with the Taliban literally living in caves. The Taliban had only hand-held firearms. No air force. No artillery. No satellite intelligence. The US still managed to lose.
Ukraine isn’t over, yet, but it is lost. Russia has crushed every one of the fabled “wonder weapons” the US has thrown at it. Remember when Trump was going to end the Ukraine war “on Day One”? We’re now past Day 500. It hasn’t ended because Trump is too weak to take the Loss on his watch. But it is lost.
Iran is the most recent—and damaging—case of catastrophic US military failure. It has a military budget one-one hundredth that of the US. Yet, Iran has “humiliated” the US, at least in the words of German Chancellor, Friedrich Merz. Neocon heavyweight Robert Kagan recently wrote, “It’s hard to think of a time when the United States suffered a total defeat in a conflict, a setback so decisive that the strategic loss could be neither repaired nor ignored.”
None of these outcomes are equivocal. None are ambiguous. Is that the kind of outfit we want to give a 50% raise to when it can never come close to accomplishing its essential mission? And when it never learns from its repeated failures?
This is one of the major rethinks that will have to be conducted before any thought can be given to giving even one extra dollar to the Pentagon. We need to hear from the leadership what, exactly, is going to change. And we don’t mean fiddling at the margins. We mean at the core of the institution. For example…
US weapons systems are not made to be able to win in battle. They are made to deliver maximum profits to the weapons makers. Consider…
The Patriot missile system is easily baited with low-cost drones into giving away its location and radar signature. “Here I am! Here I am!” It is then a sitting duck for cruise missiles, hypersonic missiles, even swarms of the same low-cost drones.
The HIMARS rocket launcher uses common GPS as part of its guidance system. This is easily jammed resulting in missiles sometimes landing kilometers away from their intended targets. Its greatest value might be that every battery reliably drains $20 million from US taxpayers.
The M-1 Abrams tank wears a gigantic “shoot me” sign as soon as it’s spotted by one of the Russian drones that saturate the skies over Ukraine. The phrase “Fish in a barrel” comes to mind.
The bigger problem—bigger than weapons that don’t work—is that the US economy is not set up to support sustained, high intensity warfare. It gave up that capability decades ago, when it decided to de-industrialize so its companies could make more money building their stuff in China.
This is one of the reasons the US, via its proxy, Ukraine, has not been able to defeat Russia: it simply cannot supply the amount of ammunition Ukraine would need to prevail. Russia is firing 5-10 times the amount of artillery Ukraine is, and there’s literally nothing the US can do about it.
It would take decades to rebuild the weapons-focused industrial capacity the US possessed in the 1960s. Given the failure of the larger military enterprise in the US, there is no certainty that, once delivered, it would not be ill-conceived, misdirected, or already obsolete. In fact, given the Pentagon’s track record, the likelihood is that it would be all three.
The deepest problem for the US in grappling with increased Pentagon funding is rooted in its world view.
That was formed in the aftermath of World War II and reinforced following the collapse of the Soviet Union, in 1991. After both events, the US stood astride the world like a colossus, unchallenged in its ability to destroy any other country. Heady stuff but the world doesn’t sit still.
Countries do not acquiesce in their own destruction. They organize themselves to fight back; they collaborate with other countries for collective self-defense; and they employ asymmetric strategies to defeat predators, as Vietnam and Afghanistan did, and as Iran has just done. The US military hasn’t gotten the memo.
The unprovoked Iran debacle has boosted the fortunes of Russia and China, the US’ principal rivals. It has elevated Iran to being the hegemon in the Persian Gulf. That rise is abetted by a quartet of Islamic powers that are tired of US and Israeli bullying: Pakistan, Turkey, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia. They are forming an “Islamic NATO” to keep the US and Israel out of the Gulf. This is super important.
Since World War II, the Middle East has been one of the most important regions in the world because of its vast oil wealth. A 1945 US State Department memo stated that “Arab oil resources constitute a stupendous source of strategic power and one of the greatest material prizes in world history.”
It is the Trump Pentagon, the Pete Hegseth Pentagon, that has destroyed the US’ control of that “greatest material prize in world history.” Actually, it’s even worse than that. By forcing 50% higher oil prices on the rest of the world, the US is draining wealth from every country on Earth. Many of those countries were already economically tenuous. There’s not a one that doesn’t despise the US for the extortion.
Is that an organization to which we want to grant an additional half a trillion dollars a year? Every year? So it can wreak more destruction on US fortunes? Before it rethinks itself and how it can contribute responsibly to US well-being in the world? It’s not even fatuous. It’s insane.
So, if a $1.5 trillion budget for the military is not the solution to the US woes, what is?
The US could more plausibly revive its fortunes in the world by investing the would-be increase in Pentagon spending into the civilian economy, instead.
It should invest in the nation’s people—education—so as to improve the economy’s productivity. It should invest in the nation’s infrastructure to increase the economy’s efficiency. It should invest in scientific research and development to boost innovation. And, it should re-invest in alternative energy to build resilience.
Productivity. Efficiency. Innovation. Resilience. Those are what built the US in the 20th century. They are the real foundations of national well-being. None of them are mysteries as far as how they lead to a better economy and a stronger state. None are conceptually hard to carry out.
Donald Trump is doing exactly the opposite.
He is gutting education, rescinding major infrastructure projects, savaging scientific research, and in all ways possible dismantling alternative energy. Those avenues all go against the essence of Trumpism, which is looting, shifting national resources and wealth to the already wealthy—Trump’s base.
Looting is what Trump’s proposed increase in the Pentagon budget is really all about. It is the Mother of All Trump Grifts. It is 277 times larger than his laughable $1.8 billion Slush Fund. It wants to hide the grift under the quasi-sacrosanct cover of military spending.
But it doesn’t begin to even acknowledge, to say nothing of fix, the deep failings in the military. It actively damages the economy by diverting scarce resources to parasitic looting that inflicts more harm than it heals.
Trump’s proposal improves the fortunes of the already very wealthy, as all things from Trump do. It lards them with $500 billion of unaccountable giveaways every year. It is a payoff to his rich backers and to the military Trump thinks he’s going to need to finish his overthrow of the government when the time comes, in 2028.
The era when the US could dominate, intimidate, and expropriate the rest of the world is over. If it continues to push military power as its primary path forward it will continue to produce catastrophes like Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine, and Iran, all of which have degraded US power, influence, and standing in the world.
Alternatively, it can invest in the economy, in the American people, to create higher growth, income, equality, resilience, and prosperity. Instead of trying to shoot our way out of our self-inflicted decline, we can try to think our way out, earn our way out, work our way out. It’s not certain. Nothing ever is. But it has so much more dignity and likelihood of success about it.
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