Money for War, Wars for Money
Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
Washington consistently claims that it enters wars hesitantly and only as a last resort. This claim is made as US warships violate the rules of maritime law off the coast of Venezuela and China, the war industry builds bases on other nations’ land, and the military engages in numerous covert operations while its fighter jets illegally fly into the airspace of nations it deems insufficiently subordinate. The politicians from both parties pretend their votes for ever greater war budgets are votes for a peaceful world while they pocket the proceeds from their investments in armaments. Every new administration in the White House publishes a document it calls a national security strategy; each new strategy opens with words about peace even though a deeper read reveals that this strategy is about maintaining and expanding an increasingly challenged US hegemony.
The four presidents of the twenty-first century are not any different. The object of their foreign policy remains focused on dominating the world militarily so it can increase its economic power over that world. Although it shouldn’t need to be said, the foreign policy of George W. Bush and his successors is more alike than different. From Kabul to Baghdad, Tel Aviv to Kyiv, Somalia to Venezuela and beyond, the US war machine and its diplomatic subsidiaries have continued their course towards one world under Washington. Over the course of this campaign, it has facilitated coups, collaborated in genocide, starved nations while ruining their economies and invaded at least two nations killing untold hundreds of thousands. Barack Obama selected his victims in almost daily briefings, sending armed drones to attack villages and camps populated by fighters and their families. Many of those killed in these attacks were emergency workers who met their deaths in what are known as double tap attacks—cynical murders of emergency workers and others rushing to attend to people wounded in a first wave of fire. These attacks have come under scrutiny again after being used against sailors trying to survive earlier attacks by the US Navy in the Caribbean. George W. Bush chose his targets less carefully, launching massive aerial bombardments he called “shock and awe” on cities in Iraq wounding and killing thousands in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. That invasion was preceded by the October 2001 invasion of Afghanistan; an invasion that resulted in almost twenty years of war and occupation of that nation and Washington’s eventual withdrawal and defeat. Joe Biden did not send combat troops in large numbers to any foreign lands, preferring instead to fund local militaries while rejecting ceasefire after ceasefire in both Ukraine and Palestine. As I write, both of these conflicts supported and defended by Washington in either nation continue. While the particulars of each are somewhat different, the underlying truth is that the military element would be severely diminished if Washington demanded it.
Quite recently, the Trump White House released its National Security Strategy. Despite the “analyses” provided by certain observers in the neocon and liberal quarters of the US ruling class claiming this document was a call for some form of isolationism, it is anything but. Instead, it is a somewhat more bellicose version of the last eighty-five years of US history. Its essence can be found in this sentence from the document’s introduction, a sentence that has appeared with minimal changes in statements from US presidents for decades: “We want to recruit, train, equip, and field the world’s most powerful, lethal, and technologically advanced military to protect our interests, deter wars, and—if necessary—win them quickly and decisively, with the lowest possible casualties to our forces.” (3) Likewise, those entities the trumpists consider the biggest threats remain essentially the same as those of the last fifty or so years. As for its clients, there is an intensified interest in reclaiming what was never Washington’s in the first place—the western hemisphere. This is complemented by a more belligerent insistence that the nations of Europe bow to Washington and serve its interests. This process began in the wake of World War Two with the Bretton Woods Agreement, Marshall Plan and the formation of NATO but suffered a bit of a setback in the 1960s and 1970s as Europe’s economy bloomed. This economic success continued into the 2000s, but was greatly diminished in the early months of the current war in Ukraine when its governments succumbed to Washington’s demand for sanctions against Russia, reducing those nations’ economic independence—an independence that could only go as far as Washington would allow. That relationship was probably best defined as neo-colonial. Reading this new document makes it clear that Trump hopes to return the relationship to one that serves US interests by supporting and installing governments with ideals of government that echo those of Trumpism. In other words, the trumpist plan is to turn Europe into a group of ultra-right regimes subservient to US interests; a type of colony if you will. This was Hitler’s plan, too.
Other observers in today’s more liberal and progressive quarters who still hold on to some illusion that Washington operates in the world for the high and lofty ideals of democracy and freedom once taught in schools criticize the trumpist national security strategy from the other end of the once accepted parameters of US political conversation, finding statements therein appalling and a betrayal of those ideas. I find this critique intentionally naïve, especially when voiced by adults educated in the universities and halls of power—places now under attack by the far-right forces gathered behind the avatar of Trump. The world they idealize brought us the war in Vietnam, the Cold War, the wars on Iraq and Afghanistan and innumerable covert ops and “low intensity” conflicts. To be clear, I am not cynical of US motives for the same reasons as the trumpists, but I am cynical, perhaps more than they are. After all, I don’t think the US needs a liberal redemption if it means more economic and military conflicts in Europe, West Asia or anywhere else. Nor does my understanding allow me to believe that Trump’s strategy as stated in the National Security Strategy 2025 document is an abrupt turn from the policies of presidents that preceded him. It’s no such thing. In fact, it’s a continuation of Washington’s empire without pretense; its aggressive and xenophobic language is an indication of the world we currently exist in. It’s a world where liberals pursue and promote proxy wars against Moscow—wars which Moscow is currently willing to pursue—and all sectors of the ruling class grossly fund an ongoing genocide to defend the west’s colony in the region Washington calls the Middle East. These and the military endeavors mentioned previously were/are maintained and expanded by a foreign policy at least as cynical as that proposed by the trumpists.
In today’s world, neither the trumpists or their opponents are doing much to prevent a third world war that both claim they wish to prevent. Although Trump is certainly more bellicose and aggressively obnoxious than most of his domestic opponents, all elements of the US empire ruling elites believe in Washington’s supposed right to rule the world and will certainly send US troops to their deaths should it be deemed necessary in their minds. The seemingly limitless power the United States possesses only encourages this possibility. Despite the cries of those who oppose Trump but support the empire, Trump’s national security strategy is not an aberration, but a logical step in a Washington’s imperial project.
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