Ukraine: America’s Enduring Proxy War on Russia

Eisenhower’s warning that US policy would be captured by a scientific-technological elite supplies a specific reason the US sustains the Ukraine war: Ukraine has become a unique, live-fire laboratory for AI warfare at scale


A soldier of the Unmanned Systems Forces prepares a drone “Salut” for flight by connecting cables to the system on March 31, 2026 in Kharkiv, Ukraine.
(Photo by Nikoletta Stoyanova/Getty Images)

Jeffrey D. Sachs

Sybil Fares
Jul 21, 2026

Common Dreams


In his farewell address of January 1961, Dwight Eisenhower warned Americans against the “acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex,” and the danger that “public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.” Sixty-five years on, Eisenhower’s warnings have been repeatedly and tragically vindicated. American democracy hangs by a thread, while the military-industrial complex, now including Silicon Valley, runs American foreign policy over the objections of the American people.

The aim is American primacy, meaning the unchallenged wealth, power, and prerogatives of American elites, unchecked by any other nation or group of nations. What this means in practice is that Wall Street, military contractors, Silicon Valley, and Big Oil control American foreign policy to maximize elite wealth and access to global resources, supply chains, and strategic choke points. The rest of the world is to fall in line.

The military-industrial complex deploys a toolkit that we summarize as “regime control,” directed at subordinating the rest of the world’s governments to the United States. The instruments used for regime control include the imposition or removal of trade barriers; the access to or denial of technologies; the introduction or removal of economic sanctions; the ownership and manipulation of foreign media; electoral interference of varying extent; political assassinations, color revolutions, CIA-backed coups; the instigation of overseas bank runs and the supply of emergency loans when states submit; the freezing and unfreezing of foreign assets; the targeting of foreign officials with corruption claims, extradition, or kidnapping; and, when none of these suffice for regime control, outright war. The US wars of choice (really, wars for regime control) are perpetual, and lucrative for the war industries, though the deep state typically prefers that other governments cave in without a fight.

Geopolitical Pivots and American Primacy

Zbigniew Brzezinski’s The Grand Chessboard (1997) laid out the goal of regime control with remarkable candor. Eurasia is the board on which America’s global primacy must be secured. To succeed, America should dominate “geopolitical pivots,” meaning states that are unimportant to America per se but useful for weakening another major power. Brzezinski named key geopolitical pivots, the most important of which was Ukraine. He repeatedly proclaimed that Russia without Ukraine ceases to be a great power. He identified Iran as another pivot. Control over Iran secures America’s hold on the Persian Gulf, Mideast oil, and the Caspian region. It is no surprise that US wars rage in both places.

The US does not want security with mutual respect. It wants primacy, which is an altogether different thing.

This is important to understand the decisions of six seemingly different presidents, who all pursued one consistent Ukraine policy. Bill Clinton set out to enlarge NATO to Ukraine and other border states of Russia, counting on Russia being too weak to object. He and subsequent presidents assumed that Russia would ultimately accept its diminished global status, accept the reality of NATO on its borders, and settle into a subordinate role of supplying raw materials to the West within an American-ordered Eurasia.

Clinton launched NATO enlargement in the 1990s, over George Kennan’s warning that it was “the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold-War era” and despite the legally binding assurances given by the US to Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990 that NATO would move “not one inch eastward.” George W. Bush withdrew from the ABM Treaty and, at Bucharest in 2008, committed NATO to membership for Ukraine and Georgia, crossing what William Burns, then ambassador in Moscow and later CIA director, privately called “the brightest of all redlines” for the entire Russian elite. Barack Obama’s administration backed the 2014 Maidan overthrow of Ukraine’s elected, neutral government (we know this through Victoria Nuland’s intercepted call where she discusses choosing the next prime minister), and then supported the new regime’s bid to join NATO. Donald Trump, in his first term, sent Javelin systems to the US-backed regime in Kyiv to fight the breakaway, Russian-speaking Donbas. Joe Biden brushed aside Russia’s December 2021 draft security treaties without negotiating and scuttled the near-agreement between Russia and Ukraine at Istanbul in the spring of 2022, which would have ended the war. And so the war continues to this day.

Trump’s Vacuous Anti-War Campaign Promises

Donald Trump campaigned in 2024 as the man who would end America’s forever wars. This turned out to be far from the truth.

The year 2025 opened with theater including the Oval Office humiliation of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in February, the taunt that Ukraine had “no cards,” and in March a week-long suspension of US intelligence sharing with Kyiv. That week proved two things. First, this is an American war: Deprived of US intelligence for only a few days, Ukraine’s deep-strike capacity and battlefield awareness visibly degraded. Second, the White House pressure was aimed not at peace with Moscow but at obedience from Kyiv. The US military spigot was reopened, and what followed, behind a proscenium of summits and phone calls, was the most systematic escalation of the American military role since 2022.

In June 2025, Trump signed Executive Order 14307, “Unleashing American Drone Dominance,” directing the rebuilding of the American drone industrial base and instructing that the Pentagon “must be able to procure, integrate, and train using low-cost, high-performing drones.” In July, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth staged a drone demonstration at the Pentagon and stripped away procurement restrictions to “unleash” military drone dominance; the same month, on a call with Zelenskyy, Trump asked, according to the Financial Times’ later reporting, whether Ukraine could strike Moscow if given longer-range weapons.

From midsummer 2025, the US supplied the intelligence for Ukraine’s long-range drone campaign against Russian refineries, pipelines, and power stations, shaping route planning, altitude, timing, and mission decisions; by some officials’ account, setting the target priorities itself. In August came the Alaska summit, suggesting diplomacy, yet at the same time the sale of Extended Range Attack Munitions for Ukraine, with European allies paying. By October, Trump had formally authorized the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies to hand Ukraine targeting data for strikes on Russian energy infrastructure deep inside Russia, a step the Biden administration itself had refused as too escalatory, while Washington pressed NATO allies to do the same and openly debated Tomahawks with the range to reach Moscow. Through it all, CIA Director John Ratcliffe kept the agency’s presence in Ukraine at its highest level, increased funding for its programs there, coordinated Ukrainian strikes on Russian refineries by sharing intelligence on infrastructure vulnerabilities, and patiently guided Trump toward blessing the campaign. The United States, it emerged, had spent billions building Ukraine’s drone program from the start, in an effort backed by the CIA throughout.

Trump lies constantly, and much of it is the improvisation of a vain and careless man. But the consequential lying is systematic, and in one direction: in the service of the military-industrial complex.

The Laboratory

Eisenhower’s warning that US policy would be captured by a scientific-technological elite supplies a specific reason the US sustains the Ukraine war. Ukraine has become a unique, live-fire laboratory for AI warfare at scale: millions of drone sorties, a continuous adaptation race against a peer adversary’s electronic warfare, and thousands of hours of combat data that constitute the most valuable military AI asset on Earth.

At the center of this sits Palantir, born of CIA seed money, running the Pentagon’s Maven targeting enterprise, and threaded through the British security establishment via a revolving door that includes a former MI6 chief among more than 30 UK officials hired or contracted by the company. Its chief executive openly boasts that Palantir software performs “most of the targeting” done by Ukraine. In January 2026 Ukraine’s defense ministry announced that Palantir was building the “Brave1 Dataroom” to feed real battlefield data into the AI brains of interceptor drones; by May, minister and CEO were discussing expanded cooperation in battlefield analysis and military planning, the ministry promising to “transfer the war onto Russian territory.”

Nor is Iran a separate story from the Ukraine saga. Recall that in Brzezinski’s geography the arc from the Persian Gulf through the Caspian is the second great prize, with Iran as its keystone pivot. Ukrainian interceptor teams have deployed to Jordan against Iranian drones; the counter-drone systems proven against Russia are marketed to the Gulf. Two geopolitical pivots, one chessboard, and one ultimate source of these two wars of choice: the military-industrial complex.

Kissinger’s Admonition to Friends of the US

Henry Kissinger is famously credited with telling the truth to nations that the US would use and discard: To be an enemy of the United States may be dangerous, but to be a friend is fatal.

Ukraine is dying at American hands. Thirty years since Brzezinski pointed to Ukraine as the key geopolitical pivot for American primacy, Ukraine has been demographically hollowed and territorially truncated, with its energy grid pounded, its elections suspended, and its politics reduced to corrupted palace intrigues. This month’s rupture in Kyiv shows that in the midst of what Western coverage calls Ukraine’s great comeback, Zelenskyy dissolved his government for the fourth time in the war; dispatched his prime minister toward the Washington embassy to manage the “key partner;” and summarily sacked Mykhailo Fedorov, the popular minister celebrated as the architect of the drone ecosystem. A country truly winning its war does not behave this way.

The deepest cruelty is that Russia sought, repeatedly and for 30 years, a security arrangement with the US in which both countries and their neighborhoods would live in peace, mutual respect, and indivisible security. Yet the US does not want security with mutual respect. It wants primacy, which is an altogether different thing. In the process, it sacrifices Ukraine and Iran to its hubris. Peace in Ukraine requires only that the US relinquish the hubris it has maintained for decades that Russia can be pressured into surrender, and instead accept Ukraine as a neutral bridge between Europe and Russia rather than a geopolitical pivot to be used against Russia. Eisenhower foresaw why acceptance of peace would be so hard: The military-industrial complex does not merely influence policy; it defines it. Until the American people reclaim the democracy from Palantir, BlackRock, SpaceX, Chevron, and their ilk, the battlefield “laboratories” will stay open, and Ukraine will pay the fatal price for American “friendship.”


Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.


Jeffrey D. Sachs
Jeffrey D. Sachs is a University Professor and Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, where he directed The Earth Institute from 2002 until 2016. He is also President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network and a commissioner of the UN Broadband Commission for Development. He has been advisor to three United Nations Secretaries-General, and currently serves as an SDG Advocate under Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. Sachs is the author, most recently, of "A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism" (2020). Other books include: "Building the New American Economy: Smart, Fair, and Sustainable" (2017) and "The Age of Sustainable Development," (2015) with Ban Ki-moon.
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Sybil Fares
Sybil Fares is a specialist and advisor in Middle East policy and sustainable development at SDSN
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Impeachment or Prison?

Joseph Natoli

 July 17, 2026

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Photograph Source: Tony Webster from Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States – CC BY 2.0

“This was about staying out of prison.”

– Haberman and Swan (Regime Change) as to why Trump ran in 2024

Whether we impeach or imprison (or both) Donald J. Trump would be a first step if we are to return to a struggling path of an electoral, Constitutional, democratic order we recognized on this 250^th July 4^th.

Trump’s presidencies have taken us to a place where trust in our elections, a bedrock necessity, a peaceful transfer of power, respect for a Constitutional due process and judicial verdicts rendered, respect for First Amendment freedom of the press rights, and observance of the co-equal powers of executive, legislative and judicial branches of government are mockingly ignored and violated at will.

Trump’s struggle is to get those who would get him before they get him.  And meanwhile line his own pockets. The boldness in him that some admire goes no deeper than this.  He has been on trial and been found guilty by unanimous jury of 34 felony counts. This had all led to a second go at turning the country and the world upside down.

He’s taken us down the rabbit hole where half of us can’t distinguish bullshit and lies from verifiable assertions and the other half remain stunned or apoplectic. The man’s presence is absolutely confounding in a Mephistophelian way.

Also confounding is the historical path to where we are now.  I mean the struggle to American Exceptionalism. Were we struggling close to coming apart before Trump or after? Trump sold a story of American carnage that only he could remedy. There was carnage. By 2016, the top 1% had as much wealth as the bottom 90%. That Trump would readjust that carnage to the greater immiseration of the 90% not enough voters foresaw. Stunned or already at the Kool-Aid.

In Gore Vidal’s view, the United States of Amnesia has been more of a militarized republic than a 5^thCentury BCE Athenian “rule by the people.” The country has been protectively amnesiac regarding the extermination of an indigenous population, 89 years of Black African slavery up until the 1865 13^thAmendment, the annihilation of Japanese civilian populations with atomic bombs in August 1945, and 144 years after the declaration “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights” the 19^th Amendment extended the right to vote to women. 144 years.

It seems that such total amnesia has given way to what you would call a “So What?” response. It’s as if a callus has been formed on the American Mass Psyche. Perhaps this is what  happens when an individual or a country is bombarded constantly with words and images that punish an image, like Exceptional, we try to hold on to. Nevertheless, this “So What?” defense is tragic because unless we are able to fully feel and recognize what is true, though terrifying and humiliating, we cannot repair and improve. An overwhelming number of Americans need to conclude that Trump deserves – impeachment followed by imprisonment —  if this government and its citizens are to escape absolute farce post-Trump.

We’re all very soon going to get on the “Get Trump” bandwagon/funeral procession, or, off his sinking ship, and at the same time hopefully recognize that unless all his violations face justice and not allowed to slide into Amnesia or “So What? or “More Than I Can Deal With,” our very much on-going 250 year old struggle is going to be troubled as it never has before with challenges and damages to basic principles left unanswered.

That events can be sent to the oblivion of the River Lethe in our American Mass psyche is a real thing. But whether the Trump assault can be so evaporated without the country still feeling, like an amputated limb, the aftermath of this assault is, to my mind, not possible. His devastation is of an order different than this country has struggled with before.  He’s attacked with reckless impunity the grounds upon which we can decisively squash the flood of troglodyte “posts” that fill the mosh pit of social media.

Gore Vidal called the U.S. “a militarized Republic” which, if reliable to some extent, and I think it is, then Trump is the first leader who has played the country as just that. Positioned at the top of a military/economic powerhouse, Trump dealt as such both domestically and internationally. Manipulating investment returns manipulates the flow of that money into political campaigns. Internationally, the wealth supporting winning military ventures replaces protocols of diplomacy with Mafia-like offers that can’t be refused. Don Corleone extorted competitors because Luca Brasi was his enforcer. Trump sees U.S. military might as his enforcer and the Justice Department at home as the same.

While we could feel that previous presidencies have not negotiated as a militarized Republic, when you look closely through that lens, or listen to international views, Neo-Con regime of Cheney/Rumsfeld/Wolfowitz/Perle/Bremer/Feith et al seized  the 9/11 moment to get away with being a militarized Republic. Military/Economic power could position in an advantageous way then and in a future relation to China’s own rising power.  This was the window quickly closing of fixing a new American order. It was LBJ who also knew how to act on behalf of a militarized Republic: “America is an elephant. Cyprus is a flea… If these two fleas continue itching the elephant, they just might get whacked good.” Not Cyprus but Viet-nam got “whacked good” based on the Gulf of Tonkin lies, equal in devastating outcome to the WMD lies.

In short, Vidal had history to prove his point but Trump’s push internationally is being played on a different board. Listen: “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” Message to us: Try to stop me. Trump has been successful in taking all he can get away with; a con man/grifter/extortionist, he will cut and run, as he is now doing with a war in Iran he began for no profit to himself — revealed thus far — but completely out of a demented hubris. Jared Kushner, who picks up slaughtered parts like a jackal in Trump’s wake may be too busy evicting Palestinians to make a Spa of a war torn Iran. The real estate investor’s eye is on Cuba but the country has to be war torn first.

And so, it’s not just the crippling of the U.S.’s always shaky Constitutional order compliments of Trump but a full scale exposure through Trump of the U.S’s strong arm international affairs that need to be answered.  The erratic tactics of Trump do not keep China at bay nor they reassure the EU that such tactics will support them and not Russia or China or North Korea. It is only because American focus on anything is always on the individual that we underestimate the macro level of damage that we face and the consequences of not insisting that a price must be paid.

I believe since Reagan planned a multi-layer missile defense system, the international community realized the U.S. would use its economic power in the service of its military power and international peace pacts be damned. All that was wanted was an American president who would without shame or hesitation slap aside honorable peaceful diplomacy, making it clear that filling the craw of this beast was the healthy thing to do.

 Perhaps everyone but Americans were surprised that someone like Trump hadn’t come along before, although everyone has been surprised at the sheer impossibility of such an existence. I would argue that in a country that values getting rich as a personal and societal  summum bonum and has only laughable deterrents to this predation of the weak and poor, the unscrupulous would be every other face in a crowd.

 If this is true, it would give us an answer to the hot question: Why do Republicans and Cabinet members not say no to Trump, challenge his lies, and stand up against his mania? Answer: They are so very like him, only differing in that he is the president and they are not. He lets them stick their beak in the money pot to be had in return for their loyalty. As Putin’s moguls keep him safe, Trump’s moguls keep him from impeachment and imprisonment. Only when his grift and extortion threaten returns on investment will his moguls run from him. But like the crow who won’t leave the carrion feast in the middle of the road until the last second, this Trump gang will do the same.  Tsar Paul I of Russia’s fate may be what awaits Trump.

“I’ll pardon everyone who has come within 200 ft. of the Oval Office,” Trump has told this accessories to crime lot who are nervous about a real retribution conducted by an unchained Congress and Department of Justice, nervous about a time when reason will regain its hold on the country.

No need for armchair diagnosis of these criminal accessories as sociopathic or innately predatory. They are home grown American soil products. Trump’s uniqueness lies in extended public exposure. As president his corrupted soul is on a 24/7 display, which he enjoys because fame, or notoriety, simply goes along with being rich. Securities and insider trader fraudsters avoid such exposure for obvious reasons. Trump doesn’t forego parading his crimes in the limelight because his own megalomania and now the Supreme Court has made him invulnerable. Never before has the American Confidence Man, whom Melville saw as endemic, been in such full display or has so much latent mental illness been given so much time to blossom before our eyes on a presidential stage.

It may not be possible to bring to a hard core 35% Trump loyalists an acceptance of empirical and rational methods of establishing objective, verifiable facts and evidence, but all the mindboggling stupidities laid on us require that an effort be made. Amnesia will not set in here. Crimes alleged and pursued without evidence must be brought into the court of reason and answered.

Every department and agency Trump has contaminated must, like the Augean tables, be mucked out and his appointed clowns judged. The destruction to all the agencies listed in the U.S. Government Manual made by Musk and his Nerd Army need to be re-established.  An un-elected trillionaire batshit crazy should never again be allowed to take a chain saw to our government. The ways in which mind boggling stupidities swarm on social media cannot be primary in how we know, anything, including politics. That recuperation begins in the 3^rd grade, not with STEM, but reading comprehension.

Redemption here  is hard to imagine but it surely begins with Trump in jail, preceded by impeachment.

Joseph Phillip Natoli’s The New Utrecht Avenue novel trilogy is on sale at Amazon. Time is the Fire ended what began with Get Ready to Run and Between Dog & Wolf. Humour noire with counterpunches. .

Out of time: Expert says America may be nearing its point of no return

Sarah K. Burris 

July 11, 2026 

ALTERNET

Canadian lawyer and author Omer Aziz is warning Americans that fascism has not only arrived, but it's also been alive and well in the U.S. for some time. The real chore is in ending it before it goes too far.

In his book Shadow of the Republic, Aziz explains that it appears the pro-fascist group “is using the machinery of constitutional government in a partisan way to make it subservient to the political party and then to turn it against ordinary citizens, dissidents, free thinkers, journalists."

It's something that horror writer and anti-fascist activist Stephen King explained, "should be an alarm bell announcing that the American house is on fire."


Speaking to Zeteo's Mehdi Hasan, Aziz walked through America's long flirtation with fascism that is too often glossed over in a history that prizes American exceptionalism above reality.

“By the time the fascists are building the camps, it’s already too late and we have lost," Hasan read from the book. It prompted him to ask just how close the U.S. is.


Aziz said that currently, Trump likes to "cosplay as a fascist," using things like his "weaponization fund" and "the prosecution of political enemies" as examples. Republicans dismiss such claims as hyperbolic and symptoms of the imagined "Trump derangement syndrome" or "paranoid liberals."

But Aziz said there is "substance" to the claim.

"I think when you look at Trump's rhetoric around poisoning the blood of immigrants and some of the language he has used and his team has used, they're clearly drawing from this common wellspring of influence and inspiration. At the same time, I would say, he is an opportunist. I think he likes the idea of himself thinking of himself as a Mussolini or someone of a strongman character. But in terms of the rabid ideology, I don't think he has that."

He explained that it's important to understand that the emergence of Fascism is different from every society. Germany, for example, was very different from Italian fascists and American fascists are also different. For Trump, his fascism is "particularly American."

Hasan noted the administration declaring "antifa" a terrorist group while conservative states throw the book at peaceful protesters.

Aziz said that these kinds of arrests, even of non-violent protesters, will continue as Trump and his ilk continue to lose their political battles.


"They will use the state and politicize it to destroy and dismantle their political opponents who are exercising their free speech rights right and we're seeing this across the board: the weaponization the prosecution of political enemies," he said. "This is clearly part of the fascist playbook and we need to be clear here because there is a cultural side of this. There's a far-right influencer far-right protester side of this. The Jan. 6 folks, for example."

The more dangerous part of fascism, he said, isn't the obvious ones waving Nazi flags in the street. Aziz called the "fascists in suits" far more of a threat to American ideals, because they are the ones using that machinery of government to subvert the citizenry, just as Italy and Germany did with journalists and dissidents.

One group he talks about in the book that Hasan said he found particularly interesting is the younger spectrum of voters who are growing more attracted to fascism, Nazism and white supremacy.

Aziz said it's even starting to pop up with young men of color, whether South Asian or Latino.


"I think the reason why that's happening is because neoliberal economic policy has failed young people, in particular," he said. "Whether that's the financial crisis, whether that is the enormous amounts of greed, outsourcing of industries. And then, of course, the wars on terror in Iraq and Afghanistan."

He said that it makes it easy to drift further right.

"There's an analogy here to young men who would join ISIS, for example, 10 years ago," Aziz continued. "Again when you don't have something within your community within your body politic that supports and uplifts you, it becomes a lot more tempting."

Op-Ed 

The Anti-Indigenous Slur in the Declaration of Independence Speaks Volumes

The US Declaration of Independence frames Indigenous resistance as aggression and colonial violence as self-defense.

By Johnnie Jae , 

Truthout

July 4, 2026

Joe Craig, a park volunteer, holds a copy of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 2025, at the Saratoga National Historical Park in Stillwater, New York.Jim Franco / Albany Times Union via Getty Images

Every Fourth of July, the Declaration of Independence is the cornerstone of the U.S.’s celebrations. It’s read aloud in radio, television, and public celebrations. But it carries a contradiction expressed through a slur that Native people have never been able to ignore — a scathing reference to “merciless Indian Savages.” Even as the framers promised a nation of equality and liberty for all, they also made it clear that Indigenous people are not included in their notion of “all.” So, within Native communities, the yearly invocations of the Declaration Independence are also a reminder of how long we have been struggling to resist, survive, and defeat every effort to silence, erase, and eradicate us.

While most public readings of the Declaration of Independence include the full passage, others read around its anti-Indigenous slur or omit that line entirely. The omission says just as much as the words themselves. The U.S. wants the Declaration’s promises without its confession, its dreams of liberty without regard for the people it dehumanized and oppressed, and its proclamation of independence without any acknowledgment of the crimes against humanity that made it possible for the U.S. to exist.

The commemoration of this country’s founding every July 4 asks the public to celebrate a United States that begins with the myth of a nation born of nothing but courage and liberty, on lands not yet tamed or developed. Native people know another beginning. Our nations were already here, with governments, laws, languages, and infrastructure.

The United States is only the latest nation to exist on these lands. As it celebrates 250 years of “independence,” it still has not rescinded or made an effort to correct the violence and policies that followed from the framing of Native people as “merciless Indian Savages.” Instead, it has expanded the strategy of using dehumanizing language against migrants, trans people, anti-fascists, and other targeted communities in an effort to reframe their resistance as “antithetical to freedom and the American way of life.”
“Merciless Indian Savages”

The phrase “merciless Indian Savages” isn’t just an unfortunate remnant of a different time; it was an intentional and strategic political move that set a precedent for anti-Native ideology and policies that persist today.

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Historian and member of the Yamasee Nation Donald Grinde Jr. described the phrase as political rhetoric used to justify frontier wars and the taking of Native land. The phrase collapsed hundreds of Native nations into a new enemy and stripped them of their humanity. If Natives were “merciless savages,” their resistance could be framed as aggression, and colonial violence could then be positioned as self-defense, maintaining the optics of innocence and exceptionalism as the newly formed republic looked to build its empire.

“Merciless Indian Savages.” These three words set into motion centuries of brutal anti-Native policy from the Indian Removal Act of 1830 to the Dawes Act to the reservation and boarding school systems — every policy carrying the weight of those three words into every new era.

How the Phrase Impacts Natives Today

The intent and danger of the phrase “merciless Indian Savages” is alive and well. It’s threaded through our contemporary realities every time the federal government treats Native people, land, water, and treaty rights as acceptable casualties of profit and so-called progress.

Donald Trump’s first administration made that painfully clear almost immediately. In January 2017, he issued a memorandum to expedite the controversial Dakota Access Pipeline, despite the massive Native-led protest at Standing Rock, in which Water Protectors were subjected to military-style counterterrorism tactics and compared to terrorists. That same year, he revived theKeystone XL Pipeline that had already met with years of organized resistance from Tribal Nations, environmental organizations, and local ranchers and farmers, who were labeled extremists for efforts ostensibly impeding U.S. jobs and energy independence. By December 2017, his administration had moved against Bears Ears National Monument, cutting it by roughly 85 percent and weakening protections for a landscape that Tribal Nations had spent years fighting to protect.

In a commencement speech to the U.S. Naval Academy’s class of 2018, Trump praised settlers who “tamed a continent” and declared that: “We will not apologize for America.” His words appeared to do the same work as the phrase “merciless Indian Savages.” They dehumanize us, making Native people and lands sound wild and dangerous, while settlers are remembered as courageous. His administration carried that attitude into policy when the Interior Department moved to revoke the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe’s land-in-trust status, pushed oil and gas leasing near Chaco Canyon in New Mexico, and treated treaty rights and federal trust responsibilities as barriers to development. In 2020, border wall construction near the Tohono O’odham Nation and Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument caused lasting environmental and cultural damage. During the COVID-19 crisis, tribes were left fighting each other over access to the $8 billion CARES Act tribal relief fund and then having to sue the government for the funds to be released, while the Native American Health Center reported receiving body bags instead of the personal protective equipment (like masks and gloves) it had ordered.

Trump’s second term has taken it a step further, increasing the danger to Native communities. Federal freezes and proposed cuts have threatened programs tied to treaty and trust obligations, including health care, education, housing, public safety, and social services. Reporting on Trump’s fiscal 2026 budget exposed proposed cuts of more than $700 million from Bureau of Indian Affairs programs and $239 million from tribal housing programs. His administration’s attack on birthright citizenship dragged Native citizenship back into public debate, forcing Native legal advocates to remind the country that Native people born in the United States are U.S. citizens and that tribal citizenship cannot be erased by federal political panic. Immigration raids have also raised alarms in Native communities, where Native citizens have reportedly been questioned, detained, or targeted because agents racially profiled them due to appearance, language, or proximity to the border. The legacy behind the three-word slur in the Declaration of Independence has not changed since 1776, and Trump’s administration has taken them to heart in its glorification of Manifest Destiny.

Ahead of the semiquincentennial, Trump leaned into the revival of national mythmaking and exceptionalism. In May, the White House released a statement celebrating the 222nd anniversary of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, praising it for fulfilling Manifest Destiny and carrying “prosperity” across the continent.

The Lewis and Clark story is personal for me. My people, the Otoe-Missouria, were the first Native people to hold council with Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. On August 3, 1804, near present-day Fort Calhoun, Nebraska, tribal leaders met the expedition at what became known as Council Bluffs. The official story treats that meeting as a diplomatic milestone. Lewis and Clark arrived in full military display, made some speeches and promises, gave some gifts, and showcased the technologies of the time: an air gun, a magnet, a spyglass, a compass, and a watch. But despite the pomp and circumstance, they didn’t really accomplish much beyond establishing a routine for future councils on the expedition.

For my people, the U.S.’s westward story does not begin with wonder nor does it end with conquest, the way the U.S. would like the world to believe. We are not a conquered people. We’re still here and still resisting the narratives and violence that have followed those three words from 1776 to our present day.

Who Have the “Merciless” and “Savage” Ones Been?

The semiquincentennial celebrations urge us to turn westward expansion into a patriotic stage set, but Native people know what gets left outside the frame: truth. Before the celebration moves on from the Declaration of Independence to the fireworks, the U.S. needs to acknowledge the gravity of the words the founding fathers chose for us — “Merciless Indian Savages” — and to recognize the brutality of colonialism.

When we look at history, who have the actual cruel ones been? Who was “merciless” and “savage” when Native communities were massacred? When treaties were signed and broken? When children were taken to residential boarding schools, and when their graves were found on those same school grounds? When sacred sites were destroyed, and pipelines were forced through our lands?

Who is “merciless” and “savage” now, as immigration raids tear through communities and as families live under the threat of detention, disappearance, and deportation? Who is acting with cruelty when federal troops are sent into cities in response to protests against immigration enforcement? When the genocide in Gaza is streamed in real time and the lives of Palestinians are treated as negotiable?

Who is “merciless” and “savage” when disabled people are threatened by policies that force institutionalization and punish people for needing support? When the trans community is targeted by executive orders, health care restrictions, school policies, prison restrictions, and public campaigns built to erase trans people from law and daily life? When women and pregnant people are forced to fight for bodily autonomy while reproductive health care is attacked across the country?

The words “merciless Indian Savages” taught the U.S. how to turn targeted people into threats. The authors of the Declaration of Independence called us “merciless Indian Savages” because they needed a justification for the violence and death upon which the U.S. was founded, for the violence and death that would continue to structure this nation. After 250 years, the phrase still carries the weight of that violence. This country needs to answer one question before asking anyone to celebrate: Is this legacy of violence really what we want to continue building on and celebrating for the next 250 years?


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Johnnie Jae

Johnnie Jae (Otoe-Missouria and Choctaw) is a writer, speaker, and founder of Red POP! News and the late A Tribe Called Geek. Known for her journalism, mental health advocacy, and digital activism, she is dedicated to amplifying Native voices through storytelling, media, and art. You can find her in the Bluesky and Instagram.

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