CONCLUSION

ENDING “ENDLESS WARS”

During Barack Obama’s presidency, there were promising signs that the long history of U.S. wars might be waning. On his second day as president, Obama promised to close the Guantanamo Bay prison. Soon after taking office he won the Nobel Peace Prize, in part for promoting the abolition of nuclear weapons. In late 2011 President Obama’s administration closed the last U.S. bases in Iraq and officially removed the U.S. military from the country. The administration was beginning to remove tens of thousands of troops from Afghanistan. Meanwhile, Republican and Democratic congressional leaders were imposing mandatory budget caps on military and civilian spending and looking for ways to cut billions from the Pentagon budget with the national debt then nearing $20 trillion. Countries in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) were likewise cutting their military budgets and removing many of their troops from Afghanistan.

Amid these developments military contractors were fearful that the military “market” was shrinking. This fear was the proverbial elephant in the room at two military industry conferences I attended in 2012, in London and Washington, DC. The London conference was for military contractors building, supplying, and running bases around the world. In a chic London hotel, Peter Eberle, a representative for the major weapons manufacturer and base contractor General Dynamics, asked the crowd, “What if we have peace break out?”

Maj. Tim Elliott, one of a few NATO military representatives on hand, blurted out in response, “God forbid!”

Elliott’s retort was intended as an ironic joke. Others in the room laughed because the major and others knew the truth: peace would be bad for business, bad for them. Contractors would lose contracts; profits would shrink; stock prices would likely fall; some employees might face layoffs. For military officers, too, peace might see their careers stall, without opportunities to deploy and lead troops in combat. Lower levels of military spending would also mean fewer lucrative jobs after retirement from the military, in the military-contracting and weapons-manufacturing industries.

Eight years later it’s clear the conference attendees needn’t have worried. Troop reductions continued and some budget cuts occurred, but the U.S. war in Afghanistan continued and the Pentagon and its their allies in Congress found ways to circumvent the cuts. Presidents Obama and Donald Trump responded to the rise of that product of the U.S. war in Iraq the Islamic State by sending new U.S. troops to Iraq and Syria. The military began occupying territory in both countries and building new bases, which were soon hosting thousands of troops.1 The Pentagon used bases around the region to launch what remains an ongoing bombing campaign against ISIS and other militants. The military also used these installations to provide refueling, logistical, and other support for the government of Saudi Arabia’s war against the Houthi movement in Yemen, which seized power there in 2015.² The military and the CIA have continued drone missile attacks on suspected militants in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, and Somalia, as well as in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen.³ By the end of his presidency, Nobel Peace Prize winner Obama supported spending $1 trillion over thirty years to upgrade the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile. By the last full year of his presidency, Obama’s military was dropping an average of seventy-one bombs every day across at least seven countries.⁴

In the United States, some in Congress, the military, the media, and the think tank world began talking openly about cold and hot wars with Russia and China. This talk has helped fuel greater spending on expensive weapons systems. In President Donald Trump’s first years in office, his administration pushed for and secured major increases to the military budget, including billions in additional funding for nuclear weapons and a new Space Command.

In 2024 the Army is scheduled to open a new military hospital in Germany, at a cost of what will likely be more than $1 billion. The new facility, located near Ramstein Air Base, is a replacement for the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, which was built in the 1950s and has received thousands of casualties from Afghanistan, Iraq, and other war zones. When I visited the existing hospital in 2012, Landstuhl had a level-one trauma center rating—the highest possible grade, shared with elite hospitals such as Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles and Massachusetts General in Boston. I asked a surgeon who had been working at Landstuhl for a decade about the condition of the hospital and whether there was need for a replacement. The surgeon, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said he couldn’t comment.

“Is the hospital deficient or suboptimal in any way?” I asked.

“No,” the surgeon replied. If it were at all deficient, he explained, the military would have had to repair it immediately to maintain the hospital’s level-one status.5

I asked Washington Post Pulitzer Prize–winning military reporter Walter Pincus what we should make of spending more than $1 billion to replace a world-class medical facility in Germany.

Without missing a beat, he said, “It implies we’re going to keep fighting.” ⁶

Numerous signs suggest that unless there are significant changes in the United States, the wars that began in October 2001 won’t be coming to an end soon. Why? is the question I asked at the start of this book. In many ways, that the United States has existed in a state of near-permanent war since its revolution is unsurprising. This book has shown that the newly independent country’s embrace of a long string of wars and invasions followed nearly three hundred years of deadly colonizing warfare by European empires and European settlers in the Americas. After independence, the aim for many U.S. civilian and military leaders was expansion and conquest. The aim was empire. And the construction of bases on and beyond the borders of U.S.-claimed territory helped make wars for imperial expansion possible.

These dynamics, which developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, intensified and became more powerfully embedded in the economic, political, and social life of the United States in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. During the earlier period, forts and the U.S. Army made land available and relatively safe for settlement and Euro-Americans’ individual and familial enrichment. The Army protected major trading posts, trade routes, railroads, and eventually growing towns and cities to support Euro-American profit making and to ensure the smooth operation of capitalism in North America. After 1898 and especially after World War II, bases abroad continued to support individual and corporate profit making, but at a much larger, global scale.

In the post–World War II era, overseas bases have played an important role in the creation of a permanent war system in the United States. When the global base infrastructure remained in place after World War II, it became entrenched in tandem with the expansion of the Military Industrial Congressional Complex. The global base network became a microcosm of the Complex as it became embedded in local, national, and international political-economic and social systems, making it increasingly difficult to uproot.

The growth in the size and power of the Military Industrial Congressional Complex reflected the central role that military spending came to play in the U.S. economy after World War II. Weapons production and other military spending became the “largest public works project” in the postwar era, Catherine Lutz notes. While other wealthy industrialized nations created welfare states after World War II with investments in universal health care, education, child care, housing, and other social benefits, U.S. leaders and elites created a warfare state built around the construction and maintenance of military bases, the world’s largest arms industry, a large standing military, and the wars that followed in their wake. U.S. leaders directed tax spending to create “the largest budget for the production of violence of any government, anywhere, ever.”7 It’s no coincidence that the other major postwar public works project was created by former Army general President Dwight Eisenhower with military functions firmly in mind: the nationwide Interstate Highway System offered a way to move military forces quickly and reliably around the country. A global infrastructure of bases abroad was likewise helpful in advancing elite economic interests and the personal and professional interests of high-ranking military officers. A large collection of bases abroad provided justification for a large standing military and for high levels of spending to maintain the bases, all to the benefit of the Military Industrial Congressional Complex.

Following the start of the U.S. war in Afghanistan in 2001, this Complex and the system of permanent war have reached new levels of entrenched power and insidiousness. The intensification of power is the result of Congress’s willingness to appropriate extraordinary levels of taxpayer funding for the military and war after October 2001 and the ability of the U.S. government to run up trillions in dollar-denominated debts (now around $23 trillion). Since 2006 military budgets have exceeded the highest spending levels of the “Cold War,” when the United States confronted another empire in the form of the Soviet Union.8 This more profound economic, political, and sociocultural power in turn has helped normalize permanent war. Indeed, military leaders, analysts, journalists, and others now can talk with a straight face about the United States existing in a state of “infinite war.” Air Force General Mike Holmes explained “infinite war” in a 2018 speech. Infinite war, he said, is “not losing. It’s staying in the game and getting a new plan and keeping pursuing your objectives.”⁹

In other words, the Military Industrial Congressional Complex has become a Dr. Strangelove–like caricature of itself: a system transparently and perhaps exclusively dedicated to its own perpetuation and expansion, lacking any threat warranting these levels of profligate spending but producing catastrophic warfare that has created more militants, thus ensuring higher levels of funding and more war in a cycle that indeed appears infinite.

Journalist Andrew Cockburn compares the Complex to a “giant, malignant virus” with a “built-in self-defense reflex that reacts forcefully whenever a threat to its food supply—taxpayers’ money—hits a particular trigger point.” In another world, where the consequences weren’t so wasteful and deadly, it might be humorous. Except it’s not, because the waste and destruction have been so profound and because daily U.S. military operations risk triggering a new, even more catastrophic, potentially nuclear war, whether with Russia, China, Iran, or North Korea. The irony deepens given that the astronomically high military budgets have yielded a “very poor fighting force for our money.”10 People in the United States should pray the military never actually has to defend the United States.

With little public awareness or debate, war and military spending have become even more deeply rooted in the structure of U.S. politics and government as de facto U.S. economic policy and the major form of national economic investment. Today’s collection of U.S. bases abroad has given military and other government leaders the ability to deploy and use military force almost anywhere in the world, whether it be with aerial bombing campaigns, ground troops, drone strikes, or proxy armies guided by special forces operators. This hyperinterventionist vision of deploying U.S. military power to strike in any and every “dark corner” of the world has shaped U.S. foreign policy and further entrenched the United States in a state of permanent, endless war. That many and perhaps most U.S. Americans think and feel little about these wars—if they’re aware of them at all—is due to the absence of a national draft and the government’s ability to put the costs of infinite war effectively on a credit card by running up trillions in debt.¹¹

This book has shown some of the powerful forces that have shaped the permanent system of imperial war in which the United States is trapped today. As “God forbid [peace might break out]!” reveals, there are corporations, elements of the military and other government agencies, politicians, lobbyists, journalists, think tank analysts, academics, and many others who are literally invested in war—while also being professionally, psychologically, and socially invested. U.S. bases abroad and the near-continuous wars they have helped enable indeed have benefited some. I have been one of the beneficiaries as a Euro-American man growing up in a privileged upper-class home in and around Washington, DC, a city whose economy revolves to a significant degree around the Military Industrial Congressional Complex. (That much of my professional career has revolved around studying and writing about U.S. bases abroad is another ironic way I have benefited.) The people securing most of the benefits of this system have tended to be elites with direct economic interests tied to bases and to the markets and industries directly supported by bases and wars abroad.

Some will respond that the system creates jobs. It does. But the U.S. military should not be a jobs program. If the country needs a jobs program, Congress should invest in other sectors of the economy that create far more jobs per dollar spent than investments in the military: infrastructure and clean energy create 40 percent more jobs for every $1 million invested, health care creates 100 percent more jobs, and education creates 120 percent more.12 Even if military investments created just as many jobs as other sectors, or even more, the military should be focused on defending the country. And it should defend the country’s people at the lowest possible cost and not a cent more. As Eisenhower said, “Every arms dollar we spend above adequacy has a long-term weakening effect upon the nation and its security.”¹³

Beyond the nation, we must of course face the full breadth of harm inflicted by the war system. As we’ve seen, the total dead from U.S. wars number in the tens of millions. The wars have left millions more injured and traumatized physically and mentally in the countries where the wars have been waged and in the homes of people who went to fight. The wars have displaced millions. They have torn apart neighborhoods, communities, and societies. They have impoverished people economically, politically, and even spiritually, as President Eisenhower suggested in his Military Industrial Complex speech. Others have suffered “peacetime crimes” as a result of U.S. bases abroad and other regular preparations for war.¹⁴ The victims include people displaced by bases, such as the Chagossians. They include the people of the U.S. colonies, who still are colonized and live as third- and fourth-class U.S. Americans because of the freedom the military gets from having bases in their homes, while their freedoms are denied.¹⁵

In Afghanistan the Taliban is stronger than it’s ever been since being evicted from power almost two decades ago. In 2001, when the Bush/Cheney administration launched its global war on terrorism, al-Qaeda was the only significant militant group in the country. There are now more than twenty, including the Islamic State. For most of two decades, U.S. officials have dedicated little energy to peace negotiations, although there are encouraging signs of some diplomatic progress as I finish this book in early 2020. Thousands of Afghans have continued to die on a yearly basis as a result of the ongoing war and attacks on civilians.¹⁶ Around the world the war on terrorism has largely fueled terrorism, creating dozens of new militant groups willing to use attacks on civilians as a political tool, often with devastating effects.

Thousands of civilians have also died in the U.S.-led war against ISIS, which resulted in the reduction of ISIS-held territory from an area the size of Britain in 2015 to an area the size of Manhattan by 2018.17 As of 2017, an estimated one in five U.S. bomb strikes resulted in civilian casualties, leading to more than 3,000 noncombatant deaths.¹⁸ The U.S.-backed Saudi war in Yemen “has turned much of Yemen into a wasteland,” states the New York Times Magazine. The world’s worst modern cholera epidemic has broken out there. The United Nations estimates that 14 million Yemenis are at risk of starvation.¹⁹ The most recent data suggests that, since 2015, more than 91,000 people have died in the war. More than 11,700 of the dead have been civilians, with the Saudi-U.S. coalition responsible for almost 70 percent of those deaths.²⁰

The role of the U.S. government in the suffering is clear. As others have noted, U.S. forces have literally fueled the war by providing eighty-eight million pounds of in-air refueling (as of January 1, 2018) for the Saudi Air Force’s bombing campaign in addition to providing intelligence and targeting assistance. In 2017 the Trump administration signed a deal to sell the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia tens of billions of dollars’ worth of U.S. weapons, continuing a decades-old arms-sales relationship. When a Saudi air strike hit a school bus in 2018, killing forty-four children and ten adults, locals found bomb fragments indicating the ordnance had come from the United States. Nearby graffiti in English and Arabic read, “America Kills Yemeni Children.”²¹

The toll of U.S. wars on U.S. citizens has also been grave. This damage includes the casualties suffered by U.S. military personnel as well as the suffering of their families, friends, and communities touched by such deaths, injuries, and impairment. I opened this book with the story of Peggy Madden Davitt, who lost her son Russell Madden to the war in Afghanistan. After Russell’s death, Peggy suffered from severe depression for most of the rest of her life, before her death in 2018. “It doesn’t stop” on the battlefield, Peggy told me, of the post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) she suffered after losing Russell. The secondary effects keep going, she said.

The domestic toll of endless fighting also includes the trillions of dollars spent on war and preparations for war. President Eisenhower famously described war spending as a “theft”:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: A modern brick school in more than 30 cities. . . . We pay for a single fighter with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.22

“Theft” is not a strong enough word. Consider the $6.4 trillion that Congress has spent and obligated to fund the post-2001 wars.²³ “Horror” seems a more appropriate word when we consider:

How many have died because the U.S. government has not spent even a small portion of this sum to provide universal health care or to improve U.S. public health infrastructure and pandemic preparedness?

How many children and adults have gone hungry?

How many students suffer every day going to deteriorating, delapitated, unhealthy schools where they get a substandard education?

How many college students have taken on tens of thousands of dollars in debt because the country lacks free higher education?

How many have suffered the pain of unemployment when the country could have put millions more to work in sectors such as education, housing, health care, and infrastructure that produce far more jobs per dollar spent than the military?²⁴

How far could the country have gone to build a green-energy infrastructure to slow global warming and its catastrophic effects?

How many millions of preventable deaths could have been avoided worldwide with comparably small investments to stop epidemics of disease, malnutrition, and gender-based violence?

And this is just the beginning of a proper accounting of war’s damage since October 2001, let alone since July 1776.

Despite the depressing signs, there are reasons for optimism about the future of the U.S. Empire. Throughout U.S. history people within and beyond the borders of the United States have opposed, resisted, and protested U.S. wars. Frequently, the powers supporting war have succeeded. At other times opponents of war have prevented the United States from fighting anew. The mobilization of tens of millions worldwide to protest the 2003 war in Iraq—including the largest day of protest in human history, February 14, 2003—was not a failure. That movement and protests against the war in Afghanistan helped ensure that public opinion in the United States and beyond turned against the war in Iraq as fast as against perhaps any war in U.S. history. This movement and the catastrophic outcome of the wars have meant that, since George W. Bush’s second term as president, U.S. leaders have not had the political freedom to launch a new large-scale ground war.

In 2013 public protest and opposition among Republicans and Democrats in Congress prevented a major new U.S. war against the government of Syria. This reflected what the late historian Marilyn Young called “a little break in the wall of war.”25 Some might object that the years of deadly violence that have followed in Syria’s civil war are a sign that the Obama administration should have gone to war against the Bashar al-Asad government. This objection rests on an assumption that invading Syria would have made the situation better rather than making the situation worse. Attacking Syria could have resulted in a far broader war, potentially involving Russia, Iran, and other Gulf states. The experience of the U.S. war in Iraq, alone, should be a reminder of war’s potential to generate violence and forces beyond the control and comprehension of any nation, no matter how militarily powerful some might believe it to be. The better questions about Syria are whether the Obama administration could have done more diplomatically to bring about an end to the war and whether U.S. leaders are doing enough now. The idea that a nation either “does something” and fights or “does nothing” is a false binary revolving around unsupported mythologies about the efficacy of war and the idea that there are military solutions to problems that actually can’t be solved with bombs and bullets.

Thankfully, in 2019 more breaks in the wall of war appeared when both houses of Congress voted to end U.S. support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen and to bar arms sales to Saudi Arabia and its ally in the Yemen war, the United Arab Emirates. While President Trump vetoed both laws, the bipartisan votes were more evidence that members of Congress are increasingly trying to reclaim war-making powers from the executive branch. In early 2020, the House and Senate passed bills requiring the president to get congressional authorization before initiating any further military attacks on Iran. This followed Trump’s assassination of Iranian Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, which brought the two countries close to a war whose damage could have far eclipsed that of the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq combined. Trump again vetoed the legislation.

The opposition to war with Iran also followed the Washington Post’s 2019 publication of the “Afghanistan Papers”; the trove of government documents showed that, since the beginning of the war in Afghanistan in 2001, “senior U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan . . . making rosy pronouncements [about progress] they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable.” In some cases, the Post found “explicit and sustained efforts by the U.S. government to deliberately mislead the public.”26

One Republican senator, Utah’s Mike Lee, who joined Democrats in voting to require congressional authorization before there could be any further attacks on Iran, explained his vote: “We need congressional authorization. We’ve been lied to by the Pentagon for years regarding a war that has gone on two decades. That’s long enough. . . . We don’t want any more wars without the people’s elected representatives being able to debate.”²⁷ At least seven major Democratic presidential candidates signed a pledge to “end the forever wars.”²⁸

Growing bipartisan antiwar sentiment shows how opposition to U.S. war making and empire has spread across the political spectrum. A group of anti-interventionist Republicans has slowly begun to find common ground with antiwar activists on the Left, even if their motivations and broader politics differ considerably. Strange bedfellows Charles Koch and George Soros have helped launch a major new transpartisan foreign policy–focused think tank, the Quincy Institute. Pointing to a “once-in-a-generation opportunity to bring together like-minded progressives and conservatives,” the institute says it “will lay the foundation for a new foreign policy” that moves “away from endless war and toward vigorous diplomacy in the pursuit of international peace.”²⁹ Recent public-opinion polls show that a wide bipartisan majority supports such approaches: with a rare degree of agreement among Republicans, Democrats, and independents, 86 percent of U.S. respondents supported the use of the military only as a last resort.30

Clearly, the U.S. military has found increasingly surreptitious ways to fight and deploy its forces around the planet. But the fact that a significant majority of the U.S. public has turned against large-scale, publicly declared warfare is encouraging. It’s also encouraging that the military has had to spend more money and work harder to camouflage its activities and that it has had to go further “underground” with the help of lily-pad bases and other disguised operations. These are signs that a majority in the United States and beyond wants to avoid war and that this sentiment is taking hold as a political and social norm.

President Trump is another surprising sign of the growing questioning of the status quo of war and empire. While Trump has unabashedly embraced old-school imperialism, torture, and war crimes in a range of contexts (among other vile views), he tends to be like a stopped clock: twice a day he’s right on time. It’s encouraging that he has worked toward a Korean peace agreement, taken some steps toward diplomacy and the removal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, and questioned the existence of NATO when its reason for being (the Soviet Union) hasn’t existed for three decades. Of the tens of billions spent on bases abroad, Trump has been one of a growing number to ask, “What are we getting out of this?”³¹

Trump’s track record in following through on these issues has been inconsistent at best. At the very least, his public articulation of once-heretical views has opened new room for questioning the foreign policy status quo—and for changing it. Simultaneously, Trump’s articulation of views associated with nineteenth-century imperialism—including taking Iraq’s oil, condoning U.S. war criminals, and torturing terrorist suspects and killing their family members—is both dangerous in legitimizing such ideas and helpful in revealing ongoing racist imperialism in the twenty-first century.³²

Those concerned and hopefully angered by the U.S. record of war must find ways to demand and force change. Failing to do so out of an assumption that nothing will change is the worst kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. Not imagining and advancing alternatives to the war system and to existing U.S. foreign policy is the surest way to guarantee the continuation of the status quo, the continuation of endless, infinite war.

Giving up empire, or deimperializing the United States, must be at the heart of change. How can people initiate a process to deimperialize the United States? Beginning to close bases abroad is a critical part of that process. Unlike closing domestic bases, which usually generates understandable opposition from locals fearful about losing jobs and economic activity, closing overseas installations should be relatively easy. After all, U.S. politicians have few constituents abroad to whom they need to be beholden. For locals abroad, closures would provide opportunities to transform bases into schools, housing, parks, museums, shopping centers, offices, and more; research reveals that most communities bounce back quickly from base closures and often end up with healthier economies postclosure.33

Congress should create a regular review process to assess the need to maintain every base overseas. The Pentagon should be required to scrutinize every base annually as well. Congress could create incentives for the military to carry out closures abroad by ensuring that a proportion of savings would remain in the budget of each military branch responsible for closures, while also allocating funds to assist the transition of individuals and communities affected by closures.

As important as extraterritorial bases have been to making war more likely, even the closure of all U.S. bases abroad wouldn’t guarantee a reduction in war. The United States and other nations can wage war from domestic bases. While closing significant numbers of bases abroad is a critical step toward deimperializing the United States, changing the economic, political, and ideological structures supporting the war system is also fundamental. This means reducing the power of the Military Industrial Congressional Complex. The interlocking and mutually reinforcing nature of this structure of power makes it particularly difficult to challenge. There are structural changes in U.S. law and the U.S. political system that could reduce some of the power of the Complex, and military contractors in particular. Dramatically increasing civilian oversight over contracts and every aspect of the operations of the military agencies responsible for more than half of discretionary spending is one important step to crack down on tens of billions of dollars in annual waste, fraud, and legalized profiteering.

Most in the United States have little idea of the vast sums of money or the percentage of total taxpayer funds that go to military operations, including bases abroad. Doing more to educate people about this diversion—this theft—of the country’s wealth is an important step to advancing a movement demanding the transfer of money from the Military Industrial Congressional Complex to address the daily insecurity experienced by most U.S. Americans in their health, employment, housing, and education. While many proposals exist, cutting half of the total $1.25 trillion annual military budget would still leave the United States with the largest military budget in the world—larger than the budgets of China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea combined.34

Buying off the military contractors that form the core of the Complex is another approach. Given the breadth and depth of contractors’ power, providing incentives for them to convert their operations and move into other industries, such as civilian infrastructure and green energy, may be more likely to succeed than attempts to cut the contracts of firms such as Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and KBR entirely. Stymied attempts to shut down the production of shockingly wasteful and ineffective multibillion-dollar weapons systems, such as the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, show how difficult it is to take on the Military Industrial Congressional Complex.³⁵

U.S. citizens and others need to think even more boldly about broader structural changes necessary to deimperialize the United States and end the system of permanent war. For example, we should consider using antitrust laws to break up or nationalize the major weapons manufacturers. This could help eliminate or reduce the conflict of interest that makes them literally invested in perpetuating war. The Pentagon likewise has become so powerful that it is now truly a fourth branch of government, such is its power to shape U.S. foreign policy over the desires of the president and Congress and its domination of more than half of the federal discretionary budget (which effectively shapes domestic policy too).³⁶ While there are many legislative changes that could help return power to Congress in particular, a constitutional amendment may be required to shift the balance of power. A paired constitutional amendment could return the authority to wage war to Congress, given how a long line of presidents has effectively seized this extraconstitutional power for the executive.

An initial step toward such radically needed transformation would be to deprivatize many contracted military services, which could save billions and improve outcomes dramatically (in contrast to proponents’ claims, privatization has squandered massive sums in recent decades).37 One of many possible legislative strategies to reduce the military’s hold on the national budget would be to bar the Pentagon and the military branches from lobbying Congress for taxpayer funds.

Giving people in the U.S. colonies full constitutionally guaranteed citizenship rights, including the presidential vote and full democratic representation in Congress as well as the right to determine their political futures in accordance with international law, should not be a radical proposal. It’s but one important step in a parallel process to decolonize the United States. This would require the U.S. government to fulfill indigenous peoples’ land and treaty rights and take real steps to repair the damage inflicted since U.S. independence.

Making these kinds of structural changes would require a Reconstruction-like effort similar to the process after the U.S. Civil War. The horror of the death, the destruction, and the theft caused by the U.S. record of war should make it obvious that small changes alone will not suffice.

Without major structural transformation, the U.S. Empire and its Military Industrial Congressional Complex are likely to crumble only as the result of an epochal economic crisis or another calamity starving the system of the money that fuels it. After World War II, elites in Britain and France struggled futilely to maintain their empires. This led to terrible wars, whose effects are still being felt, and forced imperial decline.

The United States may be on a similar path, accelerated by the past two decades of disastrous war and by what looks to be the epochal economic crisis of COVID-19. There is still time for people in the United States and allies abroad to demand an end to endless wars and the closure of bases abroad, reclaiming money from the Military Industrial Congressional Complex and ending the imperial mission. Alternatively the United States will likely follow the British-French path, forced to give up bases and empire from a position of desperation. For all of China’s flaws and long record of human rights violations, the Chinese government last fought a war outside its borders in 1979, for one month in Vietnam (in 1988 the two countries’ militaries had a brief clash in the South China Sea). While there are now around eight hundred U.S. bases in some eighty-five countries and territories, the Chinese military has one foreign base, in Djibouti. There are five if we count reefs and shoals turned into bases in parts of the South China Sea where national sovereignty is disputed. Since 1979, rather than building bases abroad and fighting unnecessary wars, the Chinese government has focused its wealth and energies on building more wealth, infrastructure, and employment for its people.38

President Eisenhower’s warning about the Military Industrial Congressional Complex applies equally to this system of endless war and empire. It has militarized “the very structure of our society” (and our world) with “economic, political, even spiritual” effects “in every city, every statehouse, every office of the federal government” (and far beyond). As a result of what Eisenhower rightly called the “disastrous rise of misplaced power,” endless war, empire, and the Military Industrial Congressional Complex have shredded many of our “democratic processes.” They have shredded “our liberties” that grew in the United States and worldwide after World War II, thanks to decolonization struggles and other global social movements that demanded equality, justice, democracy, peace, and the extension of liberties to those denied them for far too long.³⁹

Returning to the visions of these movements offers a foundation for a fundamentally new vision for U.S. foreign policy and for U.S. engagement in the world. In keeping with the best traditions in U.S. history, this would be a democratic vision embracing the equality and equal rights of all human beings. It should be obvious, but needs saying, that imperialism and war are antidemocratic. As an antidemocratic ideology and form of rule based on the fraudulent idea that some humans are superior to others, imperialism—like war—must be rejected in favor of a renewed commitment to ensuring universal democratic rights for all. “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death,” Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said in 1967, a year to the day before his assassination.⁴⁰

Little has changed since 1967, when King rightly (if painfully for some of us) declared his own government “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.” So little has changed that I suspect King would rephrase his speech at New York’s Riverside Church only slightly, replacing the word communism—the bogeyman of the day—with terrorism: today’s bogeyman. King would thus urge us to undertake “a positive thrust for democracy, realizing that our greatest defense against terrorism is to take offensive action on behalf of justice. We must with positive action seek to remove those conditions of poverty, insecurity, and injustice, which are the fertile soil in which the seed of terrorism grows and develops.” As King said simply, “war is not the answer.”41

King pointed trenchantly to the “giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism.”⁴² To this day they connect war and imperialism waged abroad with the war and imperialism waged at home against people of color, the poor, and other vulnerable, stigmatized peoples. Building justice abroad must be mirrored by building justice at home.

To do so, I follow King and others in believing that U.S. Americans need to reckon honestly with our history of war and with the tremendous suffering our country has caused. Beyond reckoning we must repair some of the damage. Here Germans provide a model, for reckoning with their history of war and genocide and for trying, however imperfectly, to repair some of the damage and ensure that such crimes cannot be repeated. The payment of billions in reparations as well as public education and memorialization programs have been critical to this work—so too have individual, community, and national efforts to build reconciliation with Nazi victims. Reckoning with the past and offering some measure of repair also requires exposing and documenting past crimes. Countries such as Argentina, South Africa, Guatemala, and Rwanda provide complicated, imperfect but useful models in the form of truth and reconciliation commissions, public hearings and investigations, and war-crimes trials.

There has been no such reckoning here. Without a reckoning with our history of war and its effects, we will likely continue to lurch from one war to the next, with war begetting more war. I hope this book helps contribute to such a reckoning. I hope this book provides some encouragement and ideas to those who would act on the basis of our knowledge of the past—to end wars funded with U.S. taxpayers’ money and to help repair and heal some of the damage that U.S. wars have inflicted on victims from all nations, including victims in the United States.

Equal enjoyment of democratic rights globally. Justice for all. Global equity. Reckoning with past wars and violence. The pursuit of healing. Surely these are better foundations for the foreign policy of the United States and for engaging with other human beings in the world than a foreign policy and an entire society revolving around a state of permanent war?

As challenging as attaining these goals may be, we must try, or else we continue down a path of endless war that has long sowed destruction. “Perfectionists [often] hold that anything less than total victory is failure, a premise that makes it easy to give up at the start or to disparage the victories that are possible,” Rebecca Solnit has written. “We cannot eliminate all devastation for all time, but we can reduce it, outlaw it, undermine its source and foundation: these are victories.”43

For those who find such sentiments and perhaps all my suggestions naive or unrealistic, retired Army officer and historian Andrew Bacevich rightly asks, “How is it then that peace has essentially vanished as a US policy objective?”⁴⁴ Given the violence my country has wreaked, given the millions of deaths that U.S. wars have caused in the Middle East alone in the past two decades, how can the central U.S. foreign policy objective be anything except real efforts to build peace through diplomacy and other nonmilitary forms of international engagement and cooperation? How can war still be a legitimate policy option for the United States? To state the obvious that needs stating, the United States must become a United States of Peace, not a United States of War.

For those who would say the status quo of permanent war is the only realistic option or that small reforms are the only realistic change possible, I would ask, realistic for whom?