Iran Challenges US Doctrine of Low-Intensity Warfare

by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies | Jun 24, 2026 | 

The 60-day extension of the ceasefire between the United States and Iran may lead to lasting peace or it may be over within a week, doomed by the dysfunctional alliance between the US and Israel. If it holds, it could mark the beginning of a transition away from the doctrine of “low-intensity conflict” that has shaped U.S. foreign policy for decades.

Talks between the US, Iran, Pakistan and Qatar began in Switzerland on June 21st. But Iran was firm that it holds the United States responsible for Israel’s violations of the US-Iran memorandum and cannot move forward with other parts of the agreement until the US fulfills its part in Article 1, which requires an actual Israeli ceasefire and withdrawal from Lebanon.

If the memorandum agreed between Iran and the United States fails, the world will be left with vastly reduced oil and gas supplies and a regional war between Iran, Israel and the United States from Lebanon to the Persian Gulf.

This entire crisis is one more devastating result of the world community’s failure to tame Israel’s war crimes and genocide or end its illegal occupation of Palestine and attacks and invasions in neighboring countries – all of which the United States continues to enable and support through its military and diplomatic alliance and arming of the Israeli military.

Trump seems to understand the rapidly deteriorating position of the US and Israel, and to recognize that his own political future now depends on extricating the US from the war on Iran that he and Netanyahu cooked up. Voices of peace from around the world support the tentative ceasefire extension and oppose efforts to sabotage it by politicians in Washington and Tel Aviv.

But to understand the roots of this crisis in US foreign policy, we have to look back. Since the 1980s, aggressive US foreign policy has dragged the Middle East and much of the world into a state that US military planners call “low-intensity conflict” or “LIC.”

Under this doctrine, the United States, and now its protégé Israel, claim the freedom of action to use military force in flagrant and widespread violation of international law, while deterring the rest of the world from mustering the political will to enforce the law or hold them accountable.

The US doctrine of low-intensity conflict was a deliberate policy choice by the Reagan administration in the 1980s, after the US defeat in Vietnam. After Bush II and Cheney’s catastrophic full-scale US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, Obama, Trump and Biden reverted to low-intensity warfare, but globally expanded its scope.

This US choice to expand low-intensity warfare followed the example and the techniques of the British Empire in its final phase in the 1950s. From the Suez crisis to guerrilla war against communist revolutionaries in Malaya and Mau Mau torture camps in Kenya, the deliberate and deadly violence of Britain’s imperial policies was hidden from its own people and the world behind a tapestry of lies.

In 1989, Michael Klare and Peter Kornbluh edited a book titled Low-Intensity Warfare: How the USA Fights Wars Without Declaring Them.

They wrote that the official description of low-intensity warfare was deliberately broad and ambiguous, embracing drug interdiction in Bolivia, the occupation of Beirut, the invasion of Grenada, the airstrikes on Libya in 1986, as well as covert “special operations,” “special activities,” and “unconventional warfare.”

They concluded that low-intensity conflict was in fact “a strategic reorientation of the US military establishment, and renewed commitment to employ force in a global crusade against Third World revolutionary movements and governments.”

Today’s nominal but false ceasefires in Gaza, Lebanon and the Persian Gulf fit squarely within that doctrine. They allow the US and Israel to continue illegal uses of force while appearing to respond to international demands for negotiations and diplomacy.

But the US involvement in low-intensity conflict today is not limited to the Middle East. It also encompasses the proxy war on Russia centered in Ukraine; the savage, deadly siege of Cuba; US and western piracy on the high seas; the kidnapping of President Maduro of Venezuela and his wife; and economic and financial coercive measures or “sanctions” that impact about 40 countries.

Today’s low-intensity warfare also includes deploying US special operations forces in up to 140 countries. Since 2001, US special operations forces claim to have suffered 40% of all US military casualties, including many of the 8,492 American deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Concentrating such a large share of US war casualties in such a small force – about 70,000 men and women at any one time – helps to give most American families the illusion of living in peace, even as the United States projects military force across the world and kills thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands, of people abroad.

The doctrine of low-intensity warfare depends on a fundamental assumption: that the countries targeted by the United States and its allies will remain too weak, too isolated or too divided to effectively resist. But that assumption is increasingly being tested.

Iran has made great strides in developing effective military defenses and demonstrating to shocked US and Israeli officials that it can now defend itself. But the deadly results of false ceasefires in Gaza and Lebanon stand as concrete evidence that Israel and the United States still favor low-intensity warfare over real peace.

Even as Trump presents himself as a peacemaker, he remains committed to funding an enormous war machine that can ratchet the intensity of military and covert operations up and down in different parts of the world as it adjusts to new forms of resistance and responds to fluctuating international diplomatic pressures.

But the US-Israeli genocide in Gaza opened the eyes of a new generation of people all over the world to the reality of US imperialism. The official lies that undergird low-intensity warfare are wearing dangerously thin. People are no longer swallowing the false narratives of US and Western politicians and establishment media.

US political, military and business leaders face a crisis of credibility and legitimacy that only grows as they take off the gloves and ratchet up the intensity of these campaigns, from escalating the war on Russia and the brutal blockade of Cuba to murdering innocent fishermen and ferry passengers in the Caribbean and Pacific and threatening traditional allies like Canada and Denmark.

In the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran and the negotiations to end it, we are witnessing a serious effort by an attacked country to stand up to the bullies, redress the imbalance of power and uphold international law.

Whatever one thinks of the Iranian government, Iran’s pursuit of a durable peace based on sovereignty, security and international law deserves the support of governments and people around the world, including Americans.

This moment could become a critical turning point in reining in U.S. aggression and Israeli regional expansion. It could even give humanity a chance to end this cycle of endless war and begin working together to address the existential crises threatening the world in the 21st century.

As the people of the United States commemorate the 250th anniversary of its founding, and the violence of the US empire comes home to attack us and our neighbors in our own homes and streets, we should find common cause with, and learn from, our neighbors around the world who have been resisting US imperial violence for generations.

It is ultimately up to us to take our future in our own hands and begin the  essential transition from empire to democracy.

That is why CODEPINK is calling for a Summer of Peace and Love, a time to reject fear, militarism and empire, and to organize our communities around the simple but radical demand that our country stop making war on the world and start investing in life.

Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies are the authors of War In Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict, now in a revised, updated 2nd edition.

Medea Benjamin is the cofounder of CODEPINK for Peace, and the author of several books, including Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran. 

Nicolas J. S. Davies is an independent journalist, a researcher for CODEPINK and the author of Blood on Our Hands: The American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq.

 

When the Iran War Is Over: The West Bank May Be Netanyahu’s Next Front

by Ramzy Baroud | Jun 22, 2026 | 

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is facing perhaps the most precarious moment of his political career. He knows it. His allies know it. And his rivals – both within his coalition and across Israel’s political spectrum – are preparing to capitalize on his growing weakness.

Former Israeli Justice Minister Haim Ramon, who also served as deputy prime minister between 2007 and 2009, is among the latest Israeli political figures to join a growing chorus of criticism directed at Netanyahu.

“In the final result,” Ramon said in an interview with Radio Galey, cited by the Israeli outlet Srugim, “we did not win.” He then broke down that failure in blunt terms: “We did not win in Lebanon, we did not win in Iran, and we did not win against Hamas.”

Another prominent critic is former Israeli army chief Gadi Eisenkot, who joined Netanyahu’s emergency war government following the events of October 7, 2023, before resigning with Benny Gantz in June 2024.

Beyond accusing Netanyahu of failing to protect Israel on October 7, Eisenkot argues that the prime minister has effectively surrendered Israel’s political decision-making to US President Donald Trump, thereby strategically weakening Israel.

Ironically, Netanyahu’s coalition partners have often been even more opportunistic than the opposition.

Since the formation of the current coalition government on December 29, 2022 – widely regarded as the most right-wing government in Israel’s history – figures such as National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich have repeatedly used Netanyahu’s political vulnerability to expand their own influence. Whenever Netanyahu needed political support to remain in power, they demanded concessions in return.

For Israel’s far-right extremists, Netanyahu’s inability to secure decisive strategic victories has often translated into opportunities to advance their own agendas. Every setback on the battlefield became an opening for greater settlement expansion, harsher measures against Palestinians, and deeper entrenchment of extremist policies.

Unable to deliver ‘victory’, Netanyahu turned perpetual war into a political strategy in its own right. The result has been a genocidal war in Gaza, widespread devastation in Lebanon, and a dangerous confrontation with Iran that has repeatedly brought the region to the brink of a wider catastrophe.

For a time, this formula proved politically sustainable. Netanyahu successfully enlisted unwavering US support to keep the fires of war burning. At the same time, the failure of Europe and much of the international community to hold a wanted war criminal accountable provided him with the political space necessary to continue his bloody calculations.

Yet that formula may be nearing its limits. While this possibility may appear encouraging, it comes with a serious warning. If Netanyahu can no longer sustain the wars that have prolonged his political life for nearly three years, he may escalate where resistance is weakest: the occupied West Bank.

Regarding Iran, there is growing recognition that the current confrontation is unsustainable indefinitely and that some form of arrangement will eventually emerge. Likewise, regardless of whether Lebanon is formally included in any future agreement, Israel’s ambition of permanently occupying parts of Lebanese territory remains untenable.

Historically, when Israel fails to secure a strategic breakthrough on one front, it seeks compensation on another – typically where Palestinians are most vulnerable and where international scrutiny is weakest.

As Israeli elections approach, it is therefore reasonable to fear a further escalation of the genocide in Gaza, pushing both the death toll and the level of destruction to new heights. According to Gaza health authorities, nearly 1,000 Palestinians have been killed since the ceasefire agreement was announced in October, bringing the overall death toll of Israel’s genocide in Gaza to 73,000 Palestinians.

Though Israel’s war has already failed to break Palestinian steadfastness, the broader objective remains unchanged: the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Gaza and the transformation of the Strip into a space that can no longer sustain Palestinian life.

The West Bank, however, presents a different challenge.

There, Israel faces a fragmented political landscape and a Palestinian Authority that refuses to develop an effective strategy for confronting accelerating Israeli violence, ethnic cleansing, home demolitions, land confiscation, and the relentless expansion of illegal settlements.

This vulnerability has enabled Israel to move from discussing annexation to implementing it in practice. The strategy rests on two interconnected pillars: extreme violence and displacement on the one hand, and rapid settlement expansion on the other.

According to an Oxfam International study published on June 12, Israel has killed 1,244 Palestinians, including 268 children, in the occupied West Bank since 2023 – more than the total number killed during the previous seventeen years combined.

This bloodshed has been accompanied by large-scale displacement that has already uprooted nearly 46,000 Palestinians, many of them from refugee camps and vulnerable communities across the northern West Bank.

An Amnesty International report published on June 10 documented the full or partial displacement of at least 117 Palestinian Bedouin and herding communities between January 2023 and April 2026.

Expectedly, the violence, displacement, settlement expansion, and land seizures are not isolated developments but components of a coherent political project. In September 2025, Smotrich openly proposed the annexation of 82 percent of the occupied West Bank. What was once presented as a political vision is now steadily being translated into facts on the ground.

The era of Netanyahu may be nearing its end, but before this bloody political chapter closes, countless more Palestinians may be forced to bear the cost.

Arab and Muslim countries, along with their allies in the international community, must not wait for Israel to launch a much larger assault on the West Bank before responding.

The matter demands urgent attention and immediate action.

Dr. Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of six books. His forthcoming book, ‘Before the Flood,’ will be published by Seven Stories Press. His other books include ‘Our Vision for Liberation’, ‘My Father was a Freedom Fighter’ and ‘The Last Earth’. Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA). His website is www.ramzybaroud.net

 

Netanyahu Cannot Have a Veto Over US Iran Diplomacy

by Greg Pence | Jun 24, 2026 | 

On June 23, Israeli and Lebanese delegations began a new round of talks in Washington even as the U.S.-Iran memorandum entered its first serious test. The interim deal, signed on June 17, was meant to create 60 days of space for a final settlement: a halt in hostilities, a path toward safer navigation through the Strait of Hormuz, limited sanctions relief, and negotiations over the nuclear file. But the deal is now being tested by the very question it was supposed to contain. Can the United States pursue diplomacy with Iran while Israel insists that it must retain unrestricted freedom of military action in Lebanon?

That question should not be evaded. Israel has real security concerns about Iran’s nuclear capacity, its missile program, and the armed groups Tehran supports across the region. Israelis living near the Lebanese border have endured rocket fire and the threat of renewed war. A rushed agreement that merely freezes danger while leaving the machinery of escalation intact would not deserve American support. But serious security concerns do not create a right to veto another country’s diplomacy. They create a case for stronger verification, clearer consequences for violations, and more durable regional arrangements.

The June 17 memorandum is not a finished peace agreement. It is a fragile framework. Its text leaves the hardest questions for the next 60 days: the status of Iran’s enriched uranium, the future of enrichment, sanctions schedules, inspection arrangements, and the mechanisms that would enforce compliance. The United States has since issued a temporary sanctions waiver, while public statements from Washington and Tehran have already diverged over whether Iran agreed to long-term nuclear inspections. Those gaps are not a reason to abandon diplomacy. They are the reason diplomacy must be exacting.

This is where Netanyahu’s position matters. Israel is not a signatory to the U.S.-Iran memorandum, and it is entitled to press its case in Washington. Yet Netanyahu has repeatedly argued that Israeli forces must preserve freedom of action against Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, even as the ceasefire there remains part of the wider regional de-escalation effort. That posture turns a legitimate debate over security into something more consequential: an assertion that any agreement limiting Israeli military discretion is, by definition, unacceptable.

The distinction is not semantic. Israel can demand that a final agreement address missile threats, weapons transfers, Hezbollah’s arsenal, and enforceable nuclear restrictions. It can seek rapid intelligence-sharing, inspection standards, and clear American commitments if Iran violates a deal. What it should not demand is a regional order built around the premise that Washington must keep military escalation available whenever Israeli leaders decide diplomacy has become too constraining. A security strategy can seek tougher terms without requiring permanent crisis as its operating condition.

Netanyahu’s record makes this concern difficult to dismiss. In 2015, he addressed the U.S. Congress to oppose the emerging nuclear agreement with Iran and argued that “no deal is better than a bad deal.” His intervention went beyond a technical dispute over centrifuges and inspections. It was an effort to shape American politics against an agreement that would have reduced Iran’s isolation and narrowed the space for a constantly escalating confrontation. The current moment is different in detail, but not in structure. Again, an American administration is trying to convert military exhaustion into a diplomatic opening. Again, Netanyahu’s government is treating the opening less as an opportunity to improve terms than as a danger to its freedom of action.

The strongest case for Netanyahu’s position deserves to be stated plainly. Iran has violated or reduced past nuclear commitments; it has built missile capabilities that threaten Israel and regional states; and its relationship with Hezbollah gives Israel reason to fear that an incomplete deal could postpone a confrontation rather than prevent one. No responsible American policymaker should dismiss those fears as manufactured. Nor should Washington assume that a signature alone will produce peace.

But accepting those facts does not require accepting Netanyahu’s conclusion. The lesson of past failures is not that diplomacy is futile. It is that agreements need verification, enforcement, and political staying power. The alternative — a posture in which every imperfect agreement is treated as worse than open-ended confrontation — has repeatedly produced the opposite of security. It has left Iran’s nuclear program unresolved, deepened regional militarization, exposed Israeli civilians to repeated rounds of retaliation, and kept American forces tied to crises with no durable political end state.

Lebanon shows the human stakes. Families displaced by fighting do not experience a ceasefire as a strategic abstraction. They experience it as the difference between returning home and preparing to flee again. Israeli communities near the border do not need more speeches about deterrence; they need confidence that another round of rockets and mobilization is not inevitable. Iranian civilians, meanwhile, have lived under sanctions, strikes, and the anxiety that a new escalation may arrive before diplomacy has a chance to work. Political leaders may retain leverage by keeping crisis alive, but ordinary people pay the price of that leverage.

This is also an American question. The United States cannot define its interests solely through the threat assessments of even its closest partners. Washington must consider Israel’s security, but it must also weigh maritime stability, energy markets, the safety of U.S. service members, relations with Gulf states, domestic economic pressure, and the strategic cost of endless regional deployment. A functioning U.S.-Iran agreement would not make Iran an ally or solve every conflict in the Middle East. It could, however, reduce the chance that every dispute in Lebanon, the Gulf, or the nuclear file automatically becomes a reason for another American military commitment.

The real test of the memorandum is therefore not whether Netanyahu endorses every clause. It is whether Washington can address legitimate Israeli concerns while retaining an independent definition of American interests. A final deal should be harder, not softer: it should include credible verification, clear penalties for violations, protection for commercial shipping, and mechanisms that prevent Lebanon from becoming the trigger for a wider war. But it should not grant Israel an informal veto over whether the United States may pursue diplomacy at all.

The choice is not between naïve accommodation and Israeli security. It is between a regional policy that treats insecurity as permanent and politically useful, and one that tries to reduce it through enforceable limits and reciprocal obligations. Netanyahu cannot have a veto over America’s Iran diplomacy because no durable peace can be built on the assumption that diplomacy is always provisional and escalation is always available. The next 60 days will show whether Washington is prepared to act on that principle.

The Security State’s Middle East: Why Washington Keeps Choosing Pressure Over Diplomacy

by Greg Pence | Jun 22, 2026 | 

For more than twenty years now, American leaders from both parties have talked about turning over a new leaf in the Middle East. One president pushed hard for democracy promotion, another tried diplomatic outreach, and someone else swore we’d finally end the “forever wars.” Yet every time a crisis hits, Washington’s first move is rarely sitting down to hammer out a political deal. Instead, it reaches for sanctions, sends in more troops, ramps up deterrence, and leans on the threat – or actual use – of force.

This pattern raises a tough question. If the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq didn’t create stable governments, if years of pressure haven’t really changed Iran’s behavior, and if coercion keeps delivering only mixed results, why does the U.S. keep relying on the same old toolbox?

It’s not just about individual presidents or partisan fights. Republicans and Democrats argue over tactics, sure, but they all work inside a national security system that has slowly pushed military and coercive tools to the top while sidelining diplomacy and messy political solutions. The foreign policy crowd increasingly views the Middle East first through the lens of security competition and only second through its complicated politics.

More than sixty years ago, President Dwight Eisenhower warned about this in his farewell address. He talked about the “military-industrial complex” – the tight web of defense officials, contractors, and politicians that could end up warping America’s priorities. He wasn’t saying military power is useless. He worried it might become so dominant that other options would lose out. You can still read the speech on the Eisenhower Presidential Library archives. At the time it felt like a distant concern. Today it looks spot on.

The 9/11 attacks supercharged this shift. The Global War on Terror didn’t just launch invasions – it changed how Washington saw the world. Instability anywhere became a direct security threat. Local disputes turned into big strategic battles. Grievances rooted in history and society got reframed as problems that needed sanctions, surveillance, or military action. Diplomacy didn’t vanish, but it became secondary, always operating inside a security-first framework.

The Middle East shows this dynamic better than anywhere else. Take Afghanistan. At first, the invasion looked like a clear success. The Taliban fell fast, and officials in Washington talked confidently about building democracy and long-term stability. But turning military victory into a legitimate government proved far harder. We had the guns and the money, but we underestimated tribal loyalties, history, and what local people would actually accept. After twenty years, the U.S. left and the Taliban came right back. The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) reports laid it out plainly: unrealistic goals set in Washington, poor understanding of local realities, and timelines that ignored conditions on the ground.

Iraq told a similar story. Toppling Saddam was militarily straightforward. What came after – disbanding the army and state institutions, the sectarian explosion, and eventually the rise of ISIS – was a political disaster. These failures should have forced a deep rethink. Instead, they often led to calls for even tougher pressure and better deterrence. Setbacks didn’t kill faith in coercive tools; sometimes they strengthened it.

With Iran, we’ve seen the same cycle across administrations: periods of talks mixed with heavy sanctions, military posturing, and threats. The 2015 nuclear deal showed diplomacy could work when both sides saw real incentives. But it fell apart partly because the wider U.S. approach stayed locked in security logic. We keep repeating the pattern – negotiate, pressure, escalate, repeat.

Yemen has been another messy example. Support for military campaigns, partial pullbacks, and occasional pushes for talks – all while security concerns consistently trumped real political efforts to fix the roots of the war. The human suffering that followed showed the limits of treating it mainly as a military problem.

The Palestinian issue might be the starkest case. For decades, the U.S. talked about a two-state solution but often acted as if broader regional deals could sideline the core conflict. The Abraham Accords under Trump were a real diplomatic win for normalizing ties between Israel and several Arab states. Yet they rested on the idea that the Palestinian question could be managed or postponed. October 7, 2023, and everything since made clear that deep grievances don’t disappear just because you focus elsewhere.

There’s also the selective approach to democracy. When Hamas won elections in 2006, Washington rejected the result and helped isolate them. That sent a message across the region: democracy is fine – unless it produces the “wrong” winners. Hamas could have taken a different road toward normalization and tolerance if U.S. could act otherwise.

All this points to a structural issue inside the U.S. system. It’s not that American officials are clueless about the Middle East or incapable of diplomacy. The institutions – military, intelligence, defense contractors, and national security bureaucracies – simply carry more weight. They shape how problems get defined and which fixes feel realistic. Coercive options often have built-in advantages over patient political or diplomatic ones. So diplomacy ends up as just another tool within a pressure strategy rather than a genuine alternative.

The Middle East keeps exposing the limits. This is a region shaped by history, identity, religion, legitimacy, memory, and fierce resistance to outside meddling. You can’t sanction or bomb those things into submission.

The big lesson from the last twenty-five years isn’t that America lacks power. It has more military muscle than almost any country in history. The real lesson is that raw power can’t solve problems that are fundamentally political. We’ve won battles, removed regimes, and shown overwhelming strength – but turning those wins into lasting, stable political outcomes has been incredibly difficult.

Until Washington rebalances security thinking with real diplomatic and political understanding – and stops treating military force as the default starting point – the same cycle will continue. The U.S. will always be able to project power in the Middle East. The harder, more important question is whether it can learn to wield influence without making force the first option every single time. That may matter more than any single conflict for the future of American policy in the region.

Greg Pence is an international studies graduate of University of San Francisco and my articles have been published on websites like Middle East Monitor.

 

A Republic or an Empire?

by Andrew P. Napolitano | Jun 24, 2026 | 

The Declaration of Independence of July 4, 1776, embraces two value sets. The first is natural rights, and the second is limited government. After 250 years, neither value has survived, and the opposite of each currently prevails in America.

Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration in three days while staying at a rooming house in Philadelphia. He had been greatly influenced by the British philosopher John Locke. Locke is the godfather of the theory of natural rights, which he extrapolated from the natural law teachings of Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas.

Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) did not argue that humans have inherent natural rights, but rather that the concept of justice demanded by human nature should be “naturally just” when addressing claims for protection of persons and property, whether those protections were legislated or not. The “whether legislated or not” is the first known articulation of a higher civil law, higher than the government’s own laws.

St. Augustine (354-430 A.D.) also did not define explicitly the existence of natural rights, but he did argue that norms of human behavior are knowable from the exercise of reason aided by revelation. He is the seminal thinker to express the view that right and wrong is knowable to all persons, whether legislated or not; and this knowledge — because it is common to all — is itself a higher law. He called this universal knowledge the natural law.

St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274 A.D.) did not articulate natural rights, but he did proceed deep into the ideas of Aristotle and Augustine and taught that all human beings possess innate moral claims and innate moral obligations to honor the moral claims of other persons; and these claims and obligations are knowable by the exercise of reason.

John Locke (1632-1704), whose writings Jefferson read at the College of William and Mary, and James Madison read at Princeton, drew upon all three philosophers to argue that Aquinas’ moral natural law claims are really natural rights, and these, too, just like knowing right from wrong, are inherent in our humanity and are superior to the government.

Locke further argued that rights are claims against the whole world. Thus, your right to be alive, to think as you wish, to say what you think, to publish what you say; to worship as you wish or not to worship; your right to associate with others; your right to protect yourself and your property; your right to be left alone; your right to own and possess and control property; your right to travel; and your right to fairness from the government are all natural rights, and the exercise of these rights does not require government permission.

From all of this, Jefferson wrote that our rights are divinely gifted, individually possessed and inalienable. This is the first value we celebrate on July 4.

The second value also stems from human nature. Locke taught and Jefferson believed that the ownership of property is absolute. That is, the owner can use his property as he wishes — without harming others; he can sell or lease it; and he can exclude anyone he wishes for any unstated reason — including the government.

From that view, Jefferson recognized that the only morally licit government was one affirmatively consented to by the governed. Eleven years later, Madison was the scrivener at the Constitutional Convention; and two years after that, he crafted the Bill of rights. Jefferson, Madison and their colleagues recognized the divine hand in the human origin of personal freedom, the natural rights of all persons and the limited nature of the republic they created.

Then, along came war — the great scourge of natural rights and limited government.

The extraconstitutional growth of government comes during war and war-like crises, from the never-declared war with France in the 1790s that spawned the Alien and Sedition Acts, which punished speech critical of the government; to the arrest of journalists without charge or trial during the Civil War; to the prosecution of pamphleteers against the draft during World War I; to incarceration of Americans in American concentration camps based on race during World War II; to the war on terror, which spawned the Patriot Act and its warrantless spying; to the present era’s undeclared wars on presidential whim, and the expansion of America’s 750 foreign military bases into 80 countries.

To Jefferson and Madison, a natural right was truly inalienable and exercisable against the whole world. It may only morally and legally be curtailed after a jury trial and upon conviction for violating someone else’s natural rights. Any law or executive command that impairs natural rights was invalid and there was no obligation to comply with it. On this, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Locke, Jefferson and Madison all agreed.

In a constitutional republic, government may only take liberty and property pursuant to law and only from those who have consented by granting those powers to the government in the constitution that created it; and any exercise of any powers not consented to by the governed is assaultive of natural rights, is beyond the government’s moral and constitutional authority, is morally illicit and of no legal validity.

In an empire, the government has no limits. It does whatever the head of state wants. It denies the enforceability of international norms, enriches itself at the people’s expense, takes property without the consent of the governed, violates natural rights, starts wars to please constituent groups, murders people without trial whom it claims have violated its laws, suppresses foreign people and tells them how to live, and even kidnaps their leaders. It floods the money supply with cash, thereby devaluing all private property; it monitors all communications, and builds hundreds of military bases around the globe. Its legislature is weak and bullied by the head of state, who imposes his own taxes, promotes blood sport and builds garish monuments to himself.

Which form of government are we celebrating next month?

Andrew P. Napolitano, a former judge of the Superior Court of New Jersey, is the senior judicial analyst at Fox News Channel. Judge Napolitano has written seven books on the US Constitution. The most recent is Suicide Pact: The Radical Expansion of Presidential Powers and the Lethal Threat to American Liberty. To find out more about Judge Napolitano and to read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com. COPYRIGHT 2025 ANDREW P. NAPOLITANO – DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM