Russia’s invasion of Ukraine: Defensive response or imperialist aggression?

By Chris Slee

Published 12 October, 2025

In his article, “What’s really at stake in Ukraine”, Dave Holmes portrays Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a defensive response to NATO expansion. Explaining Putin’s motivation, Holmes writes:

The simple answer is that Russia invaded because it was seriously worried about NATO’s intentions; it had warned for years and years that NATO activity in Ukraine was an existential red line for Moscow.

Even if it were true that Russian President Vladimir Putin was “worried about NATO’s intentions”, that still would not justify the invasion. Pre-emptive war was not the only option. Moreover, it was counterproductive as it stoked fear of Russian aggression in other European countries, leading to Finland and Sweden joining NATO, as well as rising military expenditure in other countries. The invasion was a gift to NATO.

Holmes quotes Martin Luther King who said the US government is “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today”, and says this remains true today. I agree the US is the main purveyor of violence — but it is not the only one. Putin’s Russia is also a major source of violence.

Russia’s economic and military power

Holmes writes:

According to World Beyond War, the US has 877 foreign military bases, absolutely dwarfing all other countries put together. The bases are there to defend Washington’s world empire.

Russia has fewer bases outside its own borders than the US, but Russia’s military intervention in other countries is significant.

In addition to Ukraine, Russia has intervened in other neighbouring countries, such as Georgia. It has also sent military forces to countries much further away. For example, Russian aircrafts bombed rebel-held areas in Syria, causing widespread death and destruction in a failed attempt to prop up the Bashar al-Assad regime.

With the approval of the Russian government, Russian mercenaries employed by the Wagner Private Military Company have been involved in wars in a number of African countries. In Sudan they worked with the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a paramilitary group allied to the military dictatorship. The RSF repressed ethnic minorities and democracy activists while Wagner profited from gold mining in Sudan and elsewhere.1 [1]

The RSF later came into conflict with the Sudanese regular army, resulting in a civil war that continues today. Putin disbanded the Wagner private army in 2023 after its leader Yevgeny Prigozhin launched a rebellion against the Russian government, but some Wagner troops were then incorporated into the Russian army. Today Russia still has military personnel in several African countries.

Holmes writes:

We can trace US hostility to Russia back to the 1917 Bolshevik-led revolution… Even after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the hostility continued.

This is a one-sided analysis. The US supported the Boris Yeltsin regime in Russia in the 1990s. At the time, the US trusted Russia more than Ukraine. Hence the US insisted that nuclear weapons on Ukrainian soil be transferred to Russia. This was completed by 1996, with assistance from the US-funded Cooperative Threat Reduction Program.2

However, the US did not want Russia to become strong enough to be an imperialist rival. Putin, on the other hand, wants Russia to once again become a great power. This has led to a rise in conflict between the US and Russia.

Holmes writes:

In one sense Russia is a big capitalist country: It is the world’s largest country by area and measured by PPP [purchasing power parity] its GDP is fourth in the world. But its per capita GDP is way down on the list making it definitely part of the Global South, and in no way a part of the imperialist club.

In reality, Russia holds an intermediate position in terms of GDP. It is not at the top of the list, but nor is it near the bottom. Russia was 47th out of 191 countries in GDP (PPP) per capita in 2023.3 This means its GDP (PPP) per capita was higher than more than 70% of countries.

Economically, Russia is intermediate between the richest imperialist countries, such as the US, and the poorest semi-colonial countries, such as Sudan. In 2023, Russia’s GDP (PPP) per capita was 16 times higher than Sudan’s, which was 170th on the list. 

Furthermore, Russia’s military strength means it more closely resembles the US than Sudan.

In 1916, Vladimir Lenin viewed Russia and Japan as imperialist powers, despite the limited development of finance capital in those countries. He said:

The last third of the nineteenth century saw the transition to the new, imperialist era. Finance capital not of one, but of several, though very few, Great Powers enjoys a monopoly. (In Japan and Russia the monopoly of military power, vast territories, or special facilities for robbing minority nationalities, China, etc, partly supplements, partly takes the place of, the monopoly of modern, up-to-date finance capital.)4

Tsarist Russia was a relatively poor and backward state, but Lenin still considered it imperialist because of its military power, its robbery of national minorities, and other factors. Today, Russia’s military strength is evidence of its status as an imperialist power.

Relations among imperialist powers are often hostile. Lenin believed that conflict among great powers is an inevitable feature of imperialism. As such, there is no “imperialist club”.

Maidan and Donbas

Holmes writes:

The February 2014 Maidan upheaval in Ukraine was a watershed moment in the country’s history. Its meaning is completely clear. An elected government (actually not at all opposed to the West) was overthrown and a more nakedly pro-US regime was installed, based on the far right.

This is a one-sided account. It neglects the role that popular discontent and anger at a corrupt regime played in causing the Maidan rebellion.

In today’s world, it often happens that oppression gives rise to protest, but that the weakness of the left means right-wing forces dominate the movement. The Maidan rebellion is an example of this.

Holmes quotes Andriy Manchuk, who said:

The right-wing ideology is a kind of synthesis of neoliberal illusions about the nature of “decent European capitalism” and clerical bigotry of Ukrainian nationalism. It dominated in the Euromaidan protests from the very beginning and almost everything there was under control of right-wing politicians. They managed to exploit the anger of many impoverished and marginalised Ukrainians dissatisfied with the corrupt bourgeois regime of Yanukovich — the regime that we also have been fighting against for many years.

After 20 years of mass anti-communist propaganda, the left in Ukraine was pushed into the margins of politics while the right wing used social populism combined with pro-capitalist and nationalist slogans to make political gains.

That is true. But the “anti-Maidan” revolt in Donbas in 2014 suffered a similar fate. A popular revolt occurred, yet reactionary forces gained control of that movement. There was also intervention by Russian ethnonationalists, and then by the Russian army.

Holmes quotes Renfrey Clarke, who writes:

In reality, and as this article will demonstrate, the Donbass revolt was a local initiative that had very robust popular origins, particularly in the region’s coal-mining communities. A key immediate source was a spontaneous, defensive response to the threat of armed attacks by ultra-right Ukrainian nationalist bands allied with the new Kyiv government of Prime Minister Arsenyi Yatseniuk. At a more elemental level, the uprising rested on working-class resistance to a program of neoliberal austerity being readied for implementation by the new Kyiv authorities.

This popular upsurge was one aspect of the Donbas revolt. But Russian ethnonationalists played a key role in the armed conflict, just as Ukrainian ethnonationalists did on the other side. For example, Igor Girkin (aka Strelkov), a former officer in the Russian FSB (Federal Security Service), led an armed group that took over the city of Sloviansk. The Russian Imperial Movement was also active in eastern Ukraine.

Clarke writes:

With its pronounced component of working-class struggle, the Donbass revolt was at odds in fundamental respects with the Russian administration — conservative, despite its populism — of President Vladimir Putin. The formidable sympathy for the rebellion among the population in Russia nevertheless constrained Putin from joining with the new Ukrainian authorities to suppress an essentially unwelcome development. Obliged to support the revolt to the point needed to allow its survival, the Russian government exerted strong pressure on the rebels to limit their radicalism.

I would add that Russian authorities violently suppressed the progressive aspects of the Donbas rebellion. Russian socialist Boris Kagarlitsky, who supported the rebellion in its early period, says it was quickly undermined and repressed.5

According to Kagarlitsky, there were “three sides” in the conflict: the Ukrainian government, the Russian government and the local people. The 2014 Donbas rebellion was a response by local people to the overthrow of the Yanukovych government, which most people in eastern Ukraine had voted for. For them the new government in Kyiv had “no legitimacy”. They saw it as the product of a coup.

Kagarlitsky says the Donbas uprising was a “popular rebellion”. But Russia’s intervention changed the situation. The Russian government “did everything to undermine the popular democratic movement”. Many of the uprising’s leaders were murdered by pro-Russian forces. Today, the Donbas “people's republics” are run by “totally corrupt puppets installed by Moscow.” 

Holmes writes:

Under the post-Maidan regimes Ukraine has become completely subordinated to the West. Western advisers are everywhere, not only in the military and security services but also in other state institutions.

That is true, but it is also true that eastern Ukraine is totally subordinated to Russia. Thus, the war in Donbas became a conflict between a Ukrainian government subservient to Western imperialism and reactionary puppet regimes in eastern Ukraine subservient to Russia. The conflict increasingly resembled an inter-imperialist proxy war. 

But Russia’s full scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 changed the situation, converting it into a war of aggression by an imperialist power (Russia) against a semi-colonial country (Ukraine).

Chauvinism in Ukraine and Russia

Holmes writes:

There may well be Nazi-minded groups in Russia but they are small, isolated and reviled and don’t remotely control or set government policy. The Putin regime’s ideological stance is not Nazi but stresses conservative and Russian nationalist themes (restrictions on LGBTIQ rights, lauding the Russian Orthodox church, and so on).

But in Ukraine today, Ukrainian Nazis (harking back to wartime Nazi-collaborator Stepan Bandera) have grown markedly stronger during the war and are now a significant force.

Yet Putin has promoted an ideology of Great Russian chauvinism. This is reflected in his denial that Ukraine is a nation. It is also reflected in his glorification of some of the tsars, especially Peter the Great, who greatly expanded the Russian empire.6

Ceasefire and concessions

Holmes writes:

Peace is the key need for ordinary Ukrainians: A stop to the war and the killing, reconstruction and a return to some sort of normality.

An August 7 Gallup poll found that 69% of Ukrainians want peace as soon as possible even if it means territorial concessions; only 24% want to keep on fighting. This is a sharp reversal of the sentiment several years earlier.

Facing a militarily stronger enemy, Ukraine may have to make territorial concessions. There are precedents for this.

Under the Brest-Litovsk treaty, signed in 1918, the Bolsheviks allowed German imperialism to keep territory it had seized during World War I. Less than a year later, a rebellion by German workers, soldiers and sailors ended the war and ended German occupation of this territory.

The Irish War of Independence (1919-21) ended in a peace treaty that allowed Britain to keep six counties in the north of the island. Some independence fighters opposed the treaty as a sell-out, leading to a civil war among republicans. Pro-treaty forces won the war, but the outcome was a divided Ireland, with reactionary political regimes in control of both parts.

So, a peace agreement involving territorial concessions can create new problems. Nevertheless, Ukraine may have to accept it. If so, they will have to hope that, as in Germany in 1918, rebellion in Russia leads to the end of the occupation.

Spheres of influence

Holmes quotes Ray McGovern, who says:

14 years ago, then U.S. Ambassador to Russia (current CIA Director) William Burns was warned by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov that Russia might have to intervene in Ukraine, if it were made a member of NATO. The subject line of Burns’s Feb. 1, 2008 Embassy Moscow cable (#182) to Washington makes it clear that Amb. Burns did not mince Lavrov’s words; the subject line stated: “Nyet means nyet: Russia’s NATO enlargement redlines.” Thus, Washington policymakers were given forewarning, in very specific terms, of Russia’s redline regarding membership for Ukraine in NATO.

Lavrov’s claim that Russia has the right to intervene in Ukraine if it joins NATO is reminiscent of the Monroe Doctrine, whereby the US claimed the right to intervene in Latin American countries to stop rival powers from doing so.

The implication of Lavrov’s comment is that Russia claims a sphere of influence covering neighbouring countries, such as Ukraine. We should not accept this.

If Mexico were to form a military alliance with China and Russia, this would no doubt be a “red line” for the US government, which might feel entitled to invade Mexico to prevent it. We would oppose such an invasion. Similarly, we should oppose Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The military situation

Holmes writes:

Has the Russian military intervention been a failure? Has it simply been “counterproductive”? I don’t think so.

Firstly, there is the military balance sheet. After three and half years of fighting, Moscow is clearly inflicting a serious defeat on the US-NATO-Ukraine forces. There is a way to go but it is hard to see Russia’s battlefield dominance being reversed. There is a real danger of World War III, given Ukraine’s repeated deep strikes into Russia (all of which necessitate Western approval, planning and technical involvement).

It does appear that Russian troops are advancing in eastern Ukraine. This is not surprising. Russia is militarily stronger than Ukraine. It has a much larger population, so it has more potential soldiers. It has a larger military industry. It has nuclear weapons. Hence Russia may well win a military victory.

This does not mean we should therefore support Russia’s actions.

Our policy

Instead, socialists should continue to condemn Russia’s invasion. But we should recognise that there is little prospect of a Ukrainian military victory and call for a ceasefire.

If Russia does not agree to a ceasefire, then we should call for Ukraine to receive the military aid it needs to prevent Russia conquering even more Ukrainian territory.

If a ceasefire is implemented, we should call for a United Nations-supervised referendum in the Donbas.

We should also continue to campaign in solidarity with anti-war forces in Russia, and for the freedom of political prisoners such as Boris Kagarlitsky.

• 1

  Adam Tooze, Chartbook #209 The Sudan crisis and the Sahel gold rush

• 2

  Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, Nuclear Disarmament Ukraine

• 3

  Russia GDP, GDP per Capita - Worldometer

• 4

  Lenin Collected Works, vol. 23, p. 115-116

• 5

  Boris Kagarlitsky, Putin’s war is driven by domestic politics: Interview with Boris Kagarlitsky | Links

• 6

  Putin and the tsars, The Guardian

No Fascist USA

Joshua Frank

 October 10, 2025
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JOSHUA FRANK is co-editor of CounterPunch and co-host of CounterPunch Radio. He is the author of Atomic Days: The Untold Story of the Most Toxic Place in America, and the forthcoming, Bad Energy: The AI Hucksters, Rogue Lithium Extractors, and Wind Industrialists Who are Selling Off Our Future, both with Haymarket Books. He can be reached at joshua@counterpunch.org. You can troll him on Bluesky @joshuafrank.bsky.social

Great American Anti-Fascists

Stephen F. Eisenman

October 10, 2025



Sue Coe, Terrible things are happening outside, 2025. Courtesy, the artist.

“First they came”

I always scoffed at “First They Came,” the often quoted, 1946 poem by the German Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller. There are several versions of it, but the best-known starts “First they came for the communists/And I did not speak out because I was not a communist.” Each of the following three verses names another target — socialists, trade unionists and Jews, until concluding: “Then they came for me/And there was no one left/To speak out for me.”

The poem suggests, wrongly, that “they” – the unmentioned Nazis – targeted everyone, not just communists, socialists, trade unionists and Jews. (Niemöller should have added to the list queers, Roma, Slavs, and the disabled.) In fact, the Nazi regime made great efforts to placate the broad, middle and lower-middle class populace and increase its size. Nazism was aggressively pro-natalist, rewarding families that had many children, so long as they were the right kind. In addition, the secret Lebensborn (“fount of life”) program, established by SS chief Heinrich Himmler, supported unwed, supposedly “Aryan” mothers through their pregnancies and distributed the children to similarly racially elite, SS parents. The goals of these initiatives were eugenicist and militarist: the creation of a racially superior population and enough soldiers to forge and sustain a thousand-year Reich.

The Nazis, in other words, knew very well who they wanted to imprison or kill and who they wanted to protect or nurture, and the idea that they would inevitably “come for” someone not on their targeted list is mistaken. Niemöller’s poem is harmful because it suggests that anyone could be a victim of fascism when in fact only some are; protecting those in danger requires solidarity and entails risk. To the pastor’s credit, he openly opposed Nazification of the Protestant Church and was consequently cast into Sachsenhausen and then Dachau concentration camps. Much later, long after the Nazi defeat, pastor Niemöller was active in the anti-Vietnam War and anti-nuclear movements. His poem is therefore belied by his own life; he understood very well who were and who were not the likely victims of fascism and embraced the role of anti-fascist or “antifa” to use the shorthand beloved of Reichkanzler Trump, Reichsmarschall Hegseth, and Reichsministers Miller, Bondi, Patel, Holman, Noem, and Kennedy.

Carefully selected targets

Until about two weeks ago, the Trump administration carefully followed the script of “First They Came.” One by one, it targeted groups and individuals who might challenge the kleptocratic, neofascist state, confident that it could do so without significant resistance. First it was the special counsels and ombudsmen who policed federal agencies for corruption. Then it was the U.S. Attorneys and prosecutors whose job is to ensure that federal laws are faithfully executed, and violators punished. Following that, was the regulatory state. Even junior employees were fired if they worked for agencies – including EPA, Education, Justice, Treasury, HUD, Interior, and HHS – who might object to privatization, deregulation, and sleaze.

Then came the attacks on individuals and institutions of civil society. University presidents were dressed down by Republicans at congressional show trials. (It didn’t help that these leaders conceded error of which they were innocent.) Around a dozen college and university presidents have resigned in the face of administration, congressional Republican, or state Republican pressure. Other universities were forced to accept limitations on their institutional freedom or make cash payments (aka bribes) to continue to receive federal grants. Columbia coughed up $200 million. Many colleges and universities pro-actively limited student and faculty free-speech rights in the hope of avoiding government or conservative trustee sanction.

Law firms too have been targeted. Despite court rulings consistently affirming the right of attorneys to choose their own clients without fear of federal retribution, at least eight major firms – most notably Paul Weiss — acceded to Trump’s demands that they pay money or provide pro bono services in exchange for continuing access to lucrative U.S. government contracts. Other civil society organizations, including non-profits focused on women’s health, the environment, civil rights, immigration law, and fair housing, have had grants cancelled or awards rescinded. Many have changed their rhetoric and programs so as not to attract Trump administration ire. Entertainment companies and sports franchises have also bowed to Trumpian pressure to change programming or limit outreach to targeted communities, especially immigrants. The German word for such a coordinated pressure campaign, first used in 1933, is Gleichschaltung: bringing all institutions of state and civil society into conformity with Nazi ideology and practice.

By attacking each group — universities, law firms, non-profits, media companies — separately and in succession, the Trump administration has succeeded in keeping them isolated, unable to marshal the solidarity and collective strength available to them. To be sure, many of the richest and most powerful corporate heads and tech entrepreneurs – Elon Musk at Tesla, Larry Ellison at Oracle, Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook, Sam Altman at Open AI, Tim Cook at Apple, Jeff Bezos at Amazon, Peter Thiel, and others – have welcomed Trump’s strong-armed interventions. They support technocratic Caesarism – rule by one or several tech and finance billionaires beholden to no one, and believe Trump is sympathetic to their goal, despite the president’s claim to speak for a broad, working-class MAGA base. Indeed, low-income Republicans have been assaulted by tariffs, elimination of green energy subsidies, and soon, cuts to Medicaid and the ACA, but their congressional representatives have registered no protest. They remain fully in Trump’s thrall. Small business leaders and professionals, harmed by the president’s tariff, deregulation, and immigration policies, have similarly remained quiet out of fear of reprisal.

Larger goals

Trump’s dismantling of democracy has been methodical and effective and has served his primary goal: self-aggrandizement. But the president’s most influential courtiers, including Stephen Miller, Russell Vought and J.D. Vance as well as the ideologues of the Heritage Foundation and Claremont Institute, have other ambitions, broadly consonant with the fascism of interwar Europe. Their goals are to:

1) Purify the body politic by the deportation or exclusion of non-whites.

2) Embed Christian nationalist ideology in government and educational institutions.

3) Broadcast and promote American exceptionalism.

4) Reject feminism, invigorate patriarchy, and denounce non-binary models of gender.

5) Insulate or protect the corporate elite from regulation, taxation, and organized labor.

6) End competitive elections. Vance whisperer Curtis Yarvin supports a monarchy. Marco Rubio’s former Director of Policy Planning, Michael Anton, prefers a Caesar.

7) Destroy the disinterested, professional, government bureaucracy, and slash spending on health, food, education, housing and environmental protection.

8) Revive the American empire by alignment with Russia (a racial comrade) and antagonism to China (a racial foe).

9) Buttress the Leadership cult: Trump als Führer. (This is Trump’s personal favorite.)

10) Welcome environmental catastrophe. Umberto Eco wrote: “The Ur-Fascist hero is impatient to die. In his impatience, he frequently sends other people to death.”

Anybody who opposes these ten goals is anti-fascist or antifa; they are enemies of the regime.

Coordination interruptus

Buoyed by success, the Trump administration decided to press its advantage; Niemöller’s final stage of political capture — “then they came for me/And there was no one left” — is the order of the day. Having begun the work of Gleichschaltung mere months ago, the Trump regime now wants to foreclose democracy altogether — if not for a thousand years, at least beyond the 2026 midterm elections.

But the necessary work of coordination remains unfinished. Unlike Germany in 1933-34, the administration lacks SA or SS enforcers. ICE, FBI, and other federal forces – abusive and violent as they are — remain constrained by custom and law. The judicial branch of government is not yet fully co-opted, as indicated by the succession of lower court rulings barring immigrant expulsions, executive branch dismissals, and placement of federal troops in cities. While many of these decisions have been reversed by the Supreme Court, every defeat – even temporary — exposes administration weakness and invites resistance. Legislative opposition exists too, just not from Republicans. Democrats in Congress may be feckless, but they are large in number. Their size has prevented Trump from passing anything like the Enabling Act of 1933 that provided Hitler an easy glide path to authoritarianism. Civil society organizations, including wealthy, liberal-left foundations are also still functioning. Counter-hegemonic non-profits remain active and, in some cases, more energized than before. Most colleges and universities, and most law firms have not (so far) yielded to Trump’s threats.

While the mass media have long been colonized by conservative and even fascist provocateurs – Steve Banon, Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Candace Owen, Jesse Wattters, Joe Rogan and many others – their reach is less extensive than it seems. Even the biggest outlet is small by historical standards. At the height of its popularity in the early 1960s, Walter Cronkite’s “CBS Evening News” had 30 million viewers, or about 15% of the U.S. population. Today, Fox’s most popular conservative talk show, “The Five” has 3.5 million viewers, or just 1% of the population. Steve Bannon’s WarRoom podcast has 85,000 listeners per month. (Counterpunch has more than five times that number of monthly readers.) So far, the right has been unable to dismantle the left ecosystem of magazines, podcasts, and broadcasts. Mainstream TV hosts Stephen Colbert, John Stewart, Jimmy Kimmel and the rest may not be very “left,” but they are certainly oppositional. Colbert and Kimmel each have about 2 million nightly viewers. Given this ideologically fractured environment, the question arises: Has Trump’s effort at fascist coordination reached its apogee, and will it now begin to recede? Is this a case of coordination interruptus?

Whither NSPM-7?

On September 25, 2025, the White House issued a memorandum, National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7), “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence”. The document falsely asserts that there has been a dramatic upsurge in “violent and terroristic activities under the umbrella of self-described anti-fascism.” The directive goes on to state: “This ‘anti-fascist’ lie has become the organizing rallying cry used by domestic terrorists to wage a violent assault against democratic institutions, constitutional rights, and fundamental American liberties.” A previous Executive Order designated “antifa” a “domestic terrorist organization,” even though no such group exists, and there is no legal category “domestic terrorist organization.”

Memorandum NSPM-7 then directs the National Joint Terrorism Task Force (established in 1980 and led by the FBI) to investigate and prosecute political violence and its institutional or individual funders, as well as identify “any behaviors, fact patterns, recurrent motivations, or other indicia common to organizations and entities that coordinate these acts in order to direct efforts to identify and prevent potential violent activity.” Poor writing masks the author’s intentions here, but the memorandum proceeds to designate troubling “indicia”:

“anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”

The vagueness of the targeting is breathtaking; it would be hard to find anybody who isn’t hostile – sometimes or always — to “traditional American values on family, religion and morality.” Isn’t that the topic of conversation or at least the undercurrent at most family dinner tables?

Though the memorandum doesn’t specifically target Democrats, Trump, Miller and others have elsewhere called them “vermin,” “an enemy within”, “gnats” and the “party of hate, evil and Satan.” Simply being a Democrat thus makes you a subject for investigation. About 45 million people in the U.S. are registered Democrats. (37 million are Republicans.) Kamala Harris gained 75 million votes; Biden got 81 million in 2020. Are we all antifa now?

With the federal government shutdown, prices rising, employment falling, health insurance set to increase (in many cases double) for millions of Americans, a recession likely, and an enemies list as large as half the U.S. population, Trump may finally succeed in forging solidarity among his enemies, thereby creating the very bogey he imagined, a genuine antifa movement. And if that happens, there will be an army of people ready to “speak out for me.”

Great American anti-fascists

The following is a list of famous or notable anti-fascists, or antifas. They are not all radicals, socialists, liberals, or even Democrats — but they are anti-fascist. Trump would sic ICE on them if he could. Feel free to add names to the list and send them to me:

Thomas Paine, Benjamin Rush, Aaron Burr (not for shooting Hamilton), William Lloyd Garrison, Nat Turner, Frederick Douglas, John Brown, Harriet Tubman, Henry Ward Beecher, Sojourner Truth, Abraham Lincoln, the Union Army, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Louisa May Walcott, Henry David Thoreau, William Dean Howells, Edward Bellamy, Margaret Fuller, Thorstein Veblen, Eugene V. Debs, Emma Goldman, Lincoln Steffens, John Reed, Upton Sinclair, Jane Addams, Mabel Dodge Luhan, Georgia O’Keefe, Helen Keller, Franklin Roosevelt, George S. Patton, 2.5 million U.S. troops in the European theatre of war in World War II, Clifford Odets, Eleonor Roosevelt, John Garfield, Humphrey Bogart, Dashiell Hammett, Edward G. Robinson, Dorothy Parker, Orson Welles, Billie Holiday, Robert Ryan, Lillian Hellman, Henry Fonda, the Marx brothers, Meyer Schapiro, Barnett Newman, Philip Guston, Norman Lewis, Ad Reinhardt, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Frank Sinatra (for a while), Woodie Guthrie, Theodore Bikel, Joan Baez, Jackson Pollock, John Coltrane, Marilyn Monroe, Arthur Miller, Bob Dylan, Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, Philip Roth, Benjamin Spock, Allen Ginsberg, William Kunstler, Louis Armstong, Malcolm X, Betty Friedan, Martin Luther King, Muhammed Ali, Angela Davis, Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, Sam Cooke, Phil Ochs, Gil Scott-Heron, Pete Seeger, Nina Simone, Aretha Franklin, Max Roach, Mahalia Jackson, Stanley Kubrick, Zero Mostel, Norman Lear, Spike Lee, Jane Fonda, LeBron James, Billie Eilish, Tom Hanks, AOC, Jamelle Bouie, Joaquin Phoenix, Bernie…

Illustration by Sue Coe.


Stephen F. Eisenman is emeritus professor at Northwestern University and Honorary Research Fellow at the University of East Anglia. His latest book, with Sue Coe, is titled “The Young Person’s Illustrated Guide to American Fascism,” (OR Books). He is also co-founder and Director of Strategy at Anthropocene Alliance. He can be reached at s-eisenman@northwestern.edu

Empire by Numbers: 392 U.S. Military Interventions Across Every Region of the World

by Michael Holmes | Oct 9, 2025 | ANTIWAR.COM

Monica Duffy Toft and Sidita Kushi’s 2023 book Dying by the Sword is both a work of scholarship and an unflinching indictment. It demolishes the enduring myth of the United States as a hesitant warrior, reluctantly drawn into conflicts by others. Instead, using their Military Intervention Project – the most comprehensive dataset of its kind – they prove that America has been the most interventionist state in modern history. The numbers are stark. From 1776 to 2019 the United States engaged in 392 military interventions. Thirty-four percent of these occurred in Latin America and the Caribbean, twenty-three percent in East Asia and the Pacific, fourteen percent in the Middle East and North Africa, thirteen percent in Europe and Central Asia, and nine percent in sub-Saharan Africa. More than half of all interventions have taken place since 1945, and nearly one-third since the end of the Cold War. Remarkably, Toft and Kushi note that 1974 was the last year in which the United States did not launch at least one new military intervention. Before that, the only other pause in the postwar era was 1952 – underscoring how constant war has become the American default. Measured over time, the tempo of U.S. intervention has accelerated dramatically. Between 1776 and 1945, Washington intervened roughly once to one and a half times per year. During the Cold War this climbed to nearly 2.5 interventions annually. After the Cold War it surged to 4.6 per year, and since 2001 it has remained extraordinarily high at 3.6 annually.

Perhaps the book’s most damning finding comes from their comparison of U.S. hostility levels with those of its enemies. During the Cold War, the hostility levels were roughly symmetrical. But in every period before and after, the United States displayed higher hostility levels than its adversaries – often significantly higher. This strongly suggests that most U.S. wars throughout its history were not defensive wars, but imperial wars of choice in which Washington was the prime escalator. Moreover, from 1776 until the end of the Cold War more than 75 percent of all US interventions were unilateral. Since 1990 this percentage dropped to 57.7 percent. The self-declared global policeman never cared very much for global opinion or international law.

One of Toft and Kushi’s most revealing statistical facts is that America’s principal adversaries today are not random enemies, but rather the very countries it has intervened in most often throughout its history. The top seven are telling: China, Russia, Mexico, North Korea, Cuba, Iran, and Nicaragua. Far from building stability, repeated interventions left behind legacies of grievance, mistrust, and resistance. What emerges is a sobering picture: today’s conflicts are not accidents of geopolitics but the direct outgrowth of a long history in which Washington sought to impose its will by force. In other words, America’s most enduring enemies are, to a large extent, the ones it helped create. And crucially, U.S. military interventions, interference, economic sanctions, and constant threats in these countries not only entrenched cycles of hostility but almost certainly contributed to their lack of democracy, liberalism, and prosperity – the authoritarian regimes that Washington now loves to demonize are, in no small part, the product of its own aggressions. When people live under siege from a great power, when their societies are scarred by violence, poverty, and the erosion of education and opportunity, they do not become more democratic or liberal. Instead, fear, hardship, and insecurity create fertile ground for authoritarian rule – and Washington’s aggressions have repeatedly helped bring exactly that about. In the starkest terms, America manufactures its own enemies, and then condemns them for the very conditions it helped to create.

This review draws on both the book and its companion case studies to provide a chronological overview of the crimes that resulted from this pattern of intervention. From the scorched-earth campaigns against Indigenous peoples to the water-cure torture in the Philippines, from the terror bombings of Japan, Germany and Korea to the support for death squads in Guatemala and El Salvador, from the chemical devastation of Vietnam to the War on Terror, Toft and Kushi’s evidence adds up to a damning portrait. America’s wars have rarely been wars of survival. They have overwhelmingly been wars of choice, driven by expansionist, commercial, and imperial ambitions.

Empire at Home: Conquest and Expansion

The first century of American military activity was devoted above all to continental conquest. The wars against Indigenous nations were systematic campaigns of annihilation and displacement, not isolated frontier skirmishes. Entire villages were burned to the ground, crops destroyed, and populations forced onto death marches like the Trail of Tears. From the Seminoles in Florida to the Sioux and Apache on the Plains and in the Southwest, the pattern was the same: the use of overwhelming force to clear land for settlers, often accompanied by massacres of noncombatants.

At the same time, the young republic projected force overseas. In North Africa, the Barbary Wars saw U.S. naval bombardments of Tripoli and Algiers, coupled with punitive raids on coastal towns. In the Caribbean, American warships landed marines in places like Cuba and Puerto Rico long before they became formal U.S. possessions. In the Pacific, early interventions targeted Polynesian islands and Chinese ports in the name of commerce, often leaving destruction behind.

The Mexican-American War of 1846-1848 was the republic’s first major overseas conquest. Framed as defense, it was in reality an expansionist war that stripped Mexico of half its territory. U.S. troops occupied cities, committed looting, and carried out summary executions of suspected guerrillas. Civilians bore the brunt of the violence, and the conquered lands became the foundation of America’s continental empire.

By mid-century the pattern was unmistakable: the United States was not a besieged power fighting for survival. It was an expansionist republic using force to displace, conquer, and secure commercial advantage.

The Imperial Turn: From the Caribbean to the Pacific

By the end of the nineteenth century the United States had outgrown its continental frontier and turned outward. The Spanish-American War marked the opening of a new imperial phase. Cuba was occupied, Puerto Rico and Guam annexed, and the Philippines violently subdued. In the Philippines the U.S. military unleashed a counterinsurgency so brutal it stands comparison with the worst colonial wars of Europe. Villages were burned to the ground, civilians herded into concentration zones, and torture became routine. The “water cure,” a form of simulated drowning, was applied systematically. On the island of Samar, General Jacob Smith ordered his troops to turn the region into a “howling wilderness” and to kill any male over ten years old. Tens of thousands of Filipinos died in a war of pacification waged under the banner of civilization.

The new century saw the Marines become the iron fist of American empire in the Caribbean and Central America. Nicaragua was invaded repeatedly, sometimes for years at a stretch, and its politics subordinated to Washington’s will. Honduras endured a series of occupations and landings designed to protect American corporate interests. Haiti was occupied from 1915 to 1934, during which time U.S. forces imposed forced labor, shot down protestors, and maintained direct military rule. In the Dominican Republic, another occupation beginning in 1916 installed a regime sustained by American bayonets and riddled with abuses against civilians. In Cuba, formal independence masked a reality of repeated American interventions, military occupations, and economic domination.

The methods were strikingly consistent: forced labor in Haiti, executions and collective punishments in the Dominican Republic, massacres of insurgents in Nicaragua, and the training of local security forces whose brutality was legendary. Across the Caribbean basin, U.S. interventions propped up regimes, safeguarded corporate plantations and banks, and crushed dissent through violence.

Beyond the hemisphere, the United States projected power into China, joining other imperial powers in the suppression of the Boxer Rebellion, and into the Pacific, using gunboat diplomacy to enforce commercial treaties. In every theater the hallmark was not restraint but escalation. Where opponents resisted, the United States used overwhelming force – burning villages, occupying capitals, and imposing direct control.

By the eve of World War I, the United States had become an unmistakable imperial power. Its reach extended across the Caribbean and Central America, into the Pacific and Asia, and onto the world stage in Europe. And the price was paid not only in annexed territory but in the blood of civilians subjected to massacres, scorched-earth campaigns, and military occupations.

World Wars and the Globalization of Violence

The entry into World War I projected American power onto the European continent for the first time, but the war was framed by what came before and after: the consolidation of empire in the Caribbean and the beginnings of global intervention. Marines still patrolled Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Nicaragua even as American troops crossed the Atlantic. By 1918 the United States was both a European belligerent and a hemispheric occupier.

World War II is often remembered as the “good war,” but Toft and Kushi’s framework strips away the mythology. American bombing campaigns targeted cities and civilian infrastructure with devastating effect. In Europe, raids destroyed cultural centers like Dresden. In Asia, strategic bombing reached its apotheosis in the firebombing of Tokyo, which incinerated more than 100,000 civilians in a single night, and in the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These were not surgical strikes. They were deliberate acts of mass killing designed to terrorize populations into submission.

The Cold War transformed America’s global reach into a permanent system of intervention. Korea was the first testing ground. Between 1950 and 1953 the U.S. Air Force dropped more tonnage of bombs on the peninsula than it had on the entire Pacific during World War II. Cities and villages were flattened, dams and irrigation works destroyed, producing widespread famine and civilian deaths. The case narratives describe entire towns erased from the map.

Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos followed. The My Lai massacre, in which U.S. troops slaughtered hundreds of unarmed villagers, became emblematic of a war fought with pervasive disregard for civilian life. Napalm and Agent Orange were used indiscriminately, burning flesh and poisoning generations. Strategic hamlets, free-fire zones, and search-and-destroy missions blurred any line between combatants and civilians. The countryside was devastated, millions displaced, and the land itself poisoned.

At the same time the covert side of American power expanded. In 1954 in Guatemala, a U.S.-backed coup overthrew the elected government of Jacobo Árbenz. What followed was one of Latin America’s darkest chapters: a forty-year civil war marked by massacres of entire villages, forced disappearances, and a genocidal campaign against the Mayan population.

From East Asia to Latin America to the Middle East, the record is consistent. U.S. interventions escalated conflicts, empowered repressive regimes, and inflicted extraordinary violence on civilian populations. And the dataset shows what the narratives make visceral: in the majority of these confrontations it was the United States, not its adversaries, that chose escalation and inflicted the greater share of destruction.

Central America’s Dirty Wars

Nowhere is the brutality of U.S. intervention more visible than in Central America during the 1970s and 1980s. The Military Intervention Project records these episodes in detail, and the case studies give them human texture: scorched-earth campaigns, death squads, massacres, and systematic terror carried out by governments and paramilitaries armed, trained, or financed by Washington.

El Salvador’s US-backed government prosecuted its war with death squads that hunted down priests, nuns, teachers, and peasants. The 1981 El Mozote massacre, in which nearly a thousand civilians were slaughtered, is only the most infamous example. U.S. advisors trained the Atlacatl Battalion that carried it out, and successive administrations poured military aid into the country despite overwhelming evidence of systematic killings.

In Nicaragua, the U.S. sought to overturn the Sandinista government by funding and arming the contras. Their campaign of terror targeted civilians, burning schools and clinics, murdering teachers and health workers, and depopulating the countryside with indiscriminate violence. The International Court of Justice eventually condemned U.S. actions as unlawful aggression, but the policy continued for years, devastating the country.

Honduras became a staging ground for these operations. The U.S. military established bases and trained local security forces that carried out assassinations and disappearances against domestic opponents. The infamous Battalion 316, supported by U.S. advisors, ran a campaign of kidnappings and torture.

Across the region, the pattern was unmistakable. When popular movements sought reform or revolution, the United States responded with military force, coups, and proxy wars. The cost was borne by peasants, labor organizers, teachers, and clergy, who were systematically targeted by militaries and paramilitaries acting with U.S. support. The crimes were not incidental. They were the strategy: terrorizing populations into submission, destroying the social base of insurgency, and keeping governments aligned with Washington.

Latin America became a laboratory of repression. And it was all the more damning because the United States was not reacting to existential threats. These were small, impoverished countries. Their struggles threatened American dominance, not American survival. The wars were wars of choice, and the crimes were the price Washington was willing to exact to maintain control of its “backyard.”

Wars of Choice in the New American Century

The end of the Cold War did not bring an end to American interventionism. On the contrary, the pace quickened. The Military Intervention Project shows that nearly one-third of all U.S. interventions took place after 1991, and they were increasingly wars of choice against much weaker opponents. The pattern of disproportionate violence documented across earlier centuries continued into the present.

The 1991 Gulf War inaugurated the new era. U.S. airpower devastated Iraq’s infrastructure in a matter of weeks, targeting not only military sites but electricity grids, water treatment facilities, and bridges essential for civilian life. Tens of thousands of civilians died directly or indirectly from the bombing and its aftermath. The following decade of sanctions further destroyed Iraq’s economy and contributed to mass malnutrition and preventable deaths, especially among children.

The 2003 invasion of Iraq stands as the paradigmatic war of choice. Launched without a clear defensive justification, it toppled Saddam Hussein but unleashed chaos that killed hundreds of thousands. U.S. forces conducted night raids that killed civilians, detained tens of thousands without due process, and operated torture sites like Abu Ghraib, where prisoners were humiliated, beaten, and sometimes killed. The occupation fragmented the state, triggered sectarian war, and created the conditions for the rise of the so-called Islamic State.

Afghanistan, the longest war in U.S. history, followed a similar trajectory. After the fall of the Taliban in 2001, the occupation stretched for two decades. Night raids by U.S. and allied special forces repeatedly killed civilians, drone strikes hit weddings and funerals, and detention centers became notorious for abuse. Civilian casualties mounted year after year even as the war’s stated objectives shifted and receded. By the time of withdrawal, Afghanistan was left impoverished and unstable, with millions displaced.

Elsewhere, the U.S. turned increasingly to air campaigns and proxy wars. In 2011, NATO’s intervention in Libya, driven by American airpower, destroyed Muammar Gaddafi’s regime but left the country in ruins. Rival militias carved up territory, civilians bore the brunt of lawlessness, and the state collapsed into chaos. In Syria, U.S. military involvement fueled a brutal conflict that devastated entire cities like Raqqa, where bombardments leveled neighborhoods and killed thousands.

The era of drone warfare extended American violence across borders with little accountability. In Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, drone strikes killed suspected militants but also countless civilians, spreading fear in rural areas where the constant buzzing of drones became a form of psychological terror. Families were obliterated at weddings and funerals, farmers struck in their fields, children killed in their homes. These were not accidents at the margins of precision warfare. They were the predictable consequences of a strategy that privileged remote killing over political solutions.

Across the globe, interventions destabilized entire regions. In West Africa, U.S. counterterrorism programs armed and trained militaries that later staged coups. In Somalia, interventions stretching from the 1990s to the present repeatedly produced cycles of violence, from the infamous Black Hawk Down incident to ongoing drone strikes and special operations. Even in Europe, interventions in the Balkans left a legacy of destroyed infrastructure and displaced civilians.

The post-Cold War interventions reveal most clearly what Toft and Kushi’s dataset proves statistically: these wars were not responses to existential threats. They were chosen. And in the overwhelming majority of cases, the United States used more force than its adversaries, escalating conflicts that might otherwise have remained local. The methods may have shifted – from scorched-earth to drones, from occupations to proxy wars – but the results were the same: shattered states, traumatized societies, and civilians paying the highest price.

Conclusion: The Arithmetic of Empire

Monica Duffy Toft and Sidita Kushi have done something rare. They have replaced myth with measurement. By assembling the most comprehensive dataset of U.S. military interventions ever created, they show in black and white what generations of victims already knew in blood and fire. The United States has not been a reluctant warrior. It has been the most interventionist power in modern history – rivalled only by the British Empire.

Even in its budgetary priorities, the imbalance is clear. The authors note that State Department spending – a rough proxy for diplomacy and peaceful engagement – has crept up only slowly from about 1 percent of Defense Department spending in the 1960s to around 4 or 5 percent in recent years. The pattern is unmistakable: the United States has consistently poured multiple times more resources into war-making than into diplomacy.

The figures are devastating. Three hundred and ninety-two interventions from 1776 to 2019. The trend is unmistakable. As America grew stronger, it intervened more often. And the methods were not defensive. In the vast majority of cases the United States used more force than its adversary. Time and again, it was Washington that escalated, that bombed, that occupied, that tortured. Its enemies, when they fought at all, were usually far weaker, and the overwhelming share of destruction was inflicted by American hands.

The case studies expose the human cost. They are not isolated aberrations. They are the record of a state that has consistently used its power to dominate, to coerce, and to destroy. The book’s great achievement is to prove this not just through narrative but through data. The dataset is the skeleton, the case studies the flesh. Together they show a nation that has institutionalized military intervention, made violence a default tool of policy, and exported suffering on a global scale.

Dying by the Sword is more than a history. It is an indictment. It demands that Americans and the world alike face a truth too long obscured by rhetoric about freedom and democracy: the United States has built its global position not on hesitant leadership, international law or human rights; but on repeated, aggressive wars of empire. And in those wars, it has too often been the author of the greatest crimes.

You can find Michael’s interviews with Jeffrey Sachs, Trita Parsi, Scott Horton and other antiwar voices on his author’s page for NachDenkSeiten — the videos are in English!

Michael Holmes is a German-American freelance journalist specializing in global conflicts and modern history. His work has appeared in Neue Zürcher Zeitung – the Swiss newspaper of record – Responsible Statecraft, Psychologie Heute, taz, Welt, and other outlets. He regularly conducts interviews for NachDenkSeiten.  He has reported on and travelled to over 70 countries, including Iraq, Iran, Palestine, Lebanon, Ukraine, Kashmir, Hong Kong, Mexico, and Uganda.  He is based in Potsdam, Germany.