On July 24th, the Israeli Knesset passed a measure forbidding the country’s High Court of Justice from in any way checking the power of the government, whether in making cabinet decisions or appointments, based on what’s known as the “reasonability” standard. In the Israeli context, this was an extreme act, since right-wing parliamentarians were defying massive crowds that had, for months on end, demonstrated with remarkable determination against such radical legislation. And that measure was only one part of a wide-ranging redesign of the court system unveiled by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in January, which deeply alarmed his critics.

As exemplified by prominent world historian Yuval Noah Harari, such protestors warned that limiting the functions of the highest court, in a land with a parliamentary system largely lacking other checks and balances, represented a big stride toward a future autocracy. After all, dangers abound in a nation with a one-chamber legislature, lacking the equivalent of a Senate, that elects the prime minister as the instrument of its will.

The central motivation for that legislation, however, lay not in domestic politics but in the desire of extremists in the cabinet to ensure that the courts won’t be able to interfere with their plans to vastly increase the number of Israeli squatter-settlements on Palestinian land on the West Bank and perhaps someday soon simply annex that occupied territory. Under such circumstances, members of the far-right Religious Zionist Party were recently excoriated by Tamir Pardo, a former head of Israeli intelligence, as Israel’s “Ku Klux Klan.”

Reasonability, Fraud, and Occupation

The Israeli supreme court had invoked what’s called “the reasonableness doctrine,” rooted in British common law, to strike down Netanyahu’s January appointment of Aryeh Makhlouf Deri as Minister of Health and the Interior in his ever more extreme cabinet. Deri, a Moroccan-Israeli, leads the ultra-Orthodox Shas Party, largely comprised of Mizrahim, or Jews of Middle Eastern ancestry, like himself. Deri has often been in trouble with the law. He was, in fact, given a three-year jail sentence in 1999 for fraud and bribery. In 2022, he was facing a possible conviction for tax fraud by the High Court of Justice, which could have resulted in jail time and a seven-year ban on political activity. According to the justices of that court, Deri promised to retire from politics to avoid being sentenced, a vow on which he later reneged.

Netanyahu managed to keep Shas in his current coalition despite its loss of that important cabinet seat. Indeed, he still needs its support to stay in power. Over time, the Shas Party has swung far to the right on the Israeli political spectrum, while taking an ever-harder line in favor of expanding Jewish settlements in the Palestinian West Bank, which Israel seized in 1967. It is now inhabited by some three million stateless Palestinians whose land continues to be usurped. The Shas leadership has shifted to ever stronger support for Jewish settlements on the West Bank in large part because of the increasing proportion of Israeli squatters there who hail from the Haredim or Ultra-Orthodox religious tradition. They had already become about a third of all West Bank settlers by 2017.

In the Israeli system, the Ultra-Orthodox pay little in taxes, are subsidized to study the Bible, and are exempted from military service. Moreover, as a group, thanks to their tendency to have large families, they have grown to about 13% of the Israeli population. They place a substantial burden on the state, which, in recent years, has responded by giving them inexpensive housing on Palestinian land.

At the left-leaning +976 Magazine, journalist Ben Reiff recently pointed out that Minister of Justice Yariv Levin, a long-time factotum in Netanyahu’s Likud Party and a driving force behind the recent attack on the judiciary, justified his actions primarily in terms of the Palestine issue. He singled out High Court decisions that prevented the blackballing of individuals who supported the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) on Israel movement for the country’s apartheid-style policies toward the Palestinians or who backed “refuseniks,” Israeli soldiers who decline to serve as part of an occupation force in the Palestinian West Bank. Levin also complained bitterly about court rulings requiring that Palestinians be treated in accord with the Geneva Conventions. One conclusion from Reiff’s reporting is that there will be ever more blackballing of critics of the occupation by the present government.

The High Court (Sometimes) Recognizes the Rights of Palestinians

Another step Netanyahu has said he would like to implement is to allow a simple majority in the Knesset to overrule any High Court rulings striking down legislation as inconsistent with the country’s basic laws on human rights, passed in the 1990s. Among the grievances of the particularly extremist Greater Israel faction in the cabinet is that court’s dependence on international law in some of its rulings against “Illegal settlements” — those established by militant vigilantes on West Bank land owned by Palestinian families for centuries.

Over the years, the High Court has, in fact, ruled in favor of numerous settlements, while drawing on aspects of Ottoman, British, and international law to do so. Ottoman law, for instance, permitted the state to assume ownership of fallow land. On that basis, the court has, in the past, allowed the Israeli state to declare swathes of the Palestinian West Bank “state land.” It mattered little that an occupying state settling its citizens on such territory gravely breached the Geneva Convention IV and the 2002 Rome Statute that acts as a charter for the International Criminal Court.

In other words, all such settlements should be illegal. Palestinians often protest, to no avail, that land designated by authorities in Tel Aviv as ownerless and fallow is, in fact, private property and has even been recently cultivated. Once it officially becomes state land, however, the court has indeed permitted Israeli citizens to build on it, which is how most Israeli settlements on the West Bank came to be. The court considers such Jewish-only housing projects “legal” under Israeli law.

Although those settlements on the West Bank are often depicted as a volunteer and private activity, the Israeli government has long provided subsidies and other incentives to people moving into such remarkably low-rent settlements and continues to do so to this day. Because so many Ultra-Orthodox men, with their limited educations (and incomes), are unemployed, they are especially open to such obvious opportunities.

Although once upon a time many illegal Israeli settlements were swiftly dismantled by the Israeli army, some survived and began lobbying the government for recognition. In 2017, the Knesset took a radical step, passing a law that allowed the Israeli state to expropriate Palestinian land at will and used that power to legalize 16 previously illegal squatter-settlements. In 2020, the High Court shocked Knesset right-wingers by striking down that very law and explicitly stating that Israeli sovereignty simply didn’t apply to West Bank Palestinians who were under occupation and must be treated in the context of international law on military occupations. The Court even cited Article 27 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which guarantees occupied persons respect for their dignity and family rights.

“Sovereignty and Settlement”

That ruling, with its explicit denial of Israeli sovereignty over the Occupied Territories, proved a genuine shock to the political right and underlies its ongoing Knesset campaign to neuter the courts. Extremist Bezalel Smotrich, now both minister of finance and responsible for the Palestinian West Bank, was deeply angered by that High Court ruling. He insisted that the only acceptable response would be “passing the bill allowing the Knesset to override the courts immediately.” As it happens, his own home was built on private Palestinian land just outside the municipal limits of the “legal” settlement of Kedumim. The left-leaning Israeli newspaper Haaretz also reported in June 2020 that then-speaker of the Israeli parliament, Yariv Levin, lashed out, claiming the High Court had “once again today trampled, as is its unacceptable tradition, Israeli democracy and the basic human rights of many Israeli citizens.” As for Netanyahu, at the time he suggested that the problem of illegal settlements would best be resolved by a formal Israeli annexation of a large area of the Palestinian West Bank.

The way the High Court held that Israel has no sovereignty over the West Bank deeply offended the members of the extremist Religious Zionism bloc led by Smotrich, including its coalition partner, the Jewish Power Party led by extremist Itamar Ben-Gvir (who is now Israel’s minister of national security). Under the circumstances, you undoubtedly won’t be surprised to learn that their platform for the November 2022 parliamentary election centered on “sovereignty and settlement” — that is, sovereignty over and settlement of the Palestinian West Bank. Indeed, they claimed that Palestinian agricultural and building projects in their own villages were “expansionist” and vowed to act quickly to curtail them.

Having joined Netanyahu’s ruling coalition since that election, they have now acquired substantial power to pursue the goal of halting Palestinian economic life. Smotrich even called for a Palestinian village to be wiped off the map of the West Bank. Though he later backpedaled under pressure, the lawless extremity he and a significant part of Netanyahu’s coalition today represent should be all too obvious.

Given that the High Court stands in the way of such lawlessness, despite its own frequent betrayal of Palestinian rights, the extremists are determined to gut it. Significant numbers of those who responded to the recent mass demonstrations against Netanyahu’s court decision with counterdemonstrations were bussed in from the squatter-settlements, many of them Haredim.

The Imperiled Rights of Women, LGBTQ+, and Minorities in Israel

Although the right wing’s primary motivation for eviscerating the authority of the courts had to do with the urge to take fuller control of the Occupied Palestinian Territories, the changes already implemented and still contemplated by Prime Minister Netanyahu and crew have dire implications for all too many Israeli citizens as well. As a start, more than 20% of them are persons of Palestinian heritage. Think of them as Palestinian-Israelis (on the model of “Italian-Americans”), though they are called “Arab Israelis” in Hebrew. Some 60 laws and administrative decrees have already ensured that they remain second-class citizens. In 2018, in fact, the Knesset explicitly deprived them of “sovereignty,” reserving it for Jewish Israelis alone (while stripping Arabic of its previous designation as an “official language”).

Admittedly, on occasion, the High Court has ruled in favor of equal rights for Israelis of Palestinian heritage. It did, for instance, allow government funding of their religious communities and school administration. In most other instances, however, it repeatedly rebuffed their demands for equal treatment under the law, which helps explain why they have largely been absent from the enormous demonstrations that have shaken the country every week since January. Still, Palestinian-Israeli community activists are alarmed that the Knesset’s removal of court oversight when it comes to the reasonableness of administrative appointments could prove a carte blanche for far more active discrimination against Muslim and Christian Palestinian-Israelis.

Despite a distinct lack of concern for Palestinian rights, centrist and secular Jewish Israelis are in no doubt about the serious impact the Netanyahu government’s gutting of the judiciary could have on their lives. That explains why a quarter of the country has participated in those huge, ongoing demonstrations and 58% of all Israelis want the government to stop trying to curtail the power of the courts.

Haaretz reports that women fear such power could lead the present right-wing government to put authority over alimony and child support in the hands of all-male rabbinical courts, block the government from signing onto the Istanbul Convention for the Prevention of Violence against Women, and increase gender segregation at beaches, parks, and the Wailing Wall. It might even move to reduce any commitment to their very presence on governmental bodies.

Similarly, LGBTQ+ Israelis, who had, through their activism, secured ever more rights in Israel since the repeal of the country’s “sodomy laws” in 1988, feared that their freedoms might be reversed by the most homophobic government in the country’s history. That self-described “proud homophobe” Bezalel Smotrich typically supports a law that would exempt religious people from being charged with discrimination if they decline to provide a service on the basis of their religious beliefs.

Corruption

Although the rights of women, the LGBTQ+ community, and minorities are obviously on the line, another pressing concern for those protesting the limits being imposed on judicial authority is the growth of government corruption, which could have a striking impact on the country’s future. Netanyahu is already on trial for accepting bribes (a trial he’s tried to legislate away). He also wanted to make the notoriously corrupt Aryeh Makhlouf Deri his deputy prime minister and may now proceed with that plan.

A Netanyahu government unconstrained by the courts could engage in favoritism in contracts, licenses, and legislation of all sorts. The fear of such things has led 28% percent of Israelis, including a surprising number of young married professionals, to admit that they are at least considering leaving the country. Many claim they fear that “the government is going to take their money.” Although 600,000 to a million Israelis are typically out of the country at any time, studying or working elsewhere, they usually do come home sooner or later. Now, however, relocation agencies report that such returns are plummeting. There has also been a 20% drop in immigration to Israel this year and that shortfall would undoubtedly be even more serious were it not for the Russian Jews fleeing their ever more unstable, war-embroiled country. Reuters reports that investors in the usually vibrant Israeli high-tech sector that accounts for about 14% of the country’s $500 billion gross domestic product are now keeping about 80% of their new start-ups abroad. Many tech companies have also moved both their bank accounts and some of their assets out of the country.

Meanwhile, the protests — with hundreds of thousands of people in the streets every Saturday evening — continue, with demonstrators experiencing increasing police brutality. Masked cops are arbitrarily beating them up and aiming water cannons at their heads, sometimes using “skunk water” — a putrid chemical that sticks to your clothing and skin — to disperse them.

Once upon a time, such tactics were honed to a kind of grim perfection to repress Palestinians on the West Bank. Now, the Israeli opposition is discovering that such brutalization of indigenous West Bank villagers has boomeranged and the government has begun to deal with them as it once did with stateless Palestinian demonstrators. Consider this the new Israeli reality: the 56-year-long brutal occupation of the Palestinian Territories has come home to roost and Israel is now occupying itself.

In his message to the troops prior to the July 4th weekend, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin offered high praise indeed. “We have the greatest fighting force in human history,” he tweeted, connecting that claim to the U.S. having patriots of all colors, creeds, and backgrounds “who bravely volunteer to defend our country and our values.”

As a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel from a working-class background who volunteered to serve more than four decades ago, who am I to argue with Austin? Shouldn’t I just bask in the glow of his praise for today’s troops, reflecting on my own honorable service near the end of what now must be thought of as the First Cold War?

Yet I confess to having doubts. I’ve heard it all before. The hype. The hyperbole. I still remember how, soon after the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush boasted that this country had “the greatest force for human liberation the world has ever known.” I also remember how, in a pep talk given to U.S. troops in Afghanistan in 2010, President Barack Obama declared them “the finest fighting force that the world has ever known.” And yet, 15 years ago at TomDispatch, I was already wondering when Americans had first become so proud of, and insistent upon, declaring our military the world’s absolute best, a force beyond compare, and what that meant for a republic that once had viewed large standing armies and constant warfare as anathemas to freedom.

In retrospect, the answer is all too straightforward: we need something to boast about, don’t we? In the once-upon-a-time “exceptional nation,” what else is there to praise to the skies or consider our pride and joy these days except our heroes? After all, this country can no longer boast of having anything like the world’s best educational outcomes, or healthcare system, or the most advanced and safest infrastructure, or the best democratic politics, so we better damn well be able to boast about having “the greatest fighting force” ever.

Leaving that boast aside, Americans could certainly brag about one thing this country has beyond compare: the most expensive military around and possibly ever. No country even comes close to our commitment of funds to wars, weapons (including nuclear ones at the Department of Energy), and global dominance. Indeed, the Pentagon’s budget for “defense” in 2023 exceeds that of the next 10 countries (mostly allies!) combined.

And from all of this, it seems to me, two questions arise: Are we truly getting what we pay so dearly for — the bestest, finest, most exceptional military ever? And even if we are, should a self-proclaimed democracy really want such a thing?

The answer to both those questions is, of course, no. After all, America hasn’t won a war in a convincing fashion since 1945. If this country keeps losing wars routinely and often enough catastrophically, as it has in places like Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, how can we honestly say that we possess the world’s greatest fighting force? And if we nevertheless persist in such a boast, doesn’t that echo the rhetoric of militaristic empires of the past? (Remember when we used to think that only unhinged dictators like Adolf Hitler boasted of having peerless warriors in a megalomaniacal pursuit of global domination?)

Actually, I do believe the United States has the most exceptional military, just not in the way its boosters and cheerleaders like Austin, Bush, and Obama claimed. How is the U.S. military truly “exceptional”? Let me count the ways.

The Pentagon as a Budgetary Black Hole

In so many ways, the U.S. military is indeed exceptional. Let’s begin with its budget. At this very moment, Congress is debating a colossal “defense” budget of $886 billion for FY2024 (and all the debate is about issues that have little to do with the military). That defense spending bill, you may recall, was “only” $740 billion when President Joe Biden took office three years ago. In 2021, Biden withdrew U.S. forces from the disastrous war in Afghanistan, theoretically saving the taxpayer nearly $50 billion a year. Yet, in place of any sort of peace dividend, American taxpayers simply got an even higher bill as the Pentagon budget continued to soar.

Recall that, in his four years in office, Donald Trump increased military spending by 20%. Biden is now poised to achieve a similar 20% increase in just three years in office. And that increase largely doesn’t even include the cost of supporting Ukraine in its war with Russia — so far, somewhere between $120 billion and $200 billion and still rising.

Colossal budgets for weapons and war enjoy broad bipartisan support in Washington. It’s almost as if there were a military-industrial-congressional complex at work here! Where, in fact, did I ever hear a president warning us about that? Oh, perhaps I’m thinking of a certain farewell address by Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1961.

In all seriousness, there’s now a huge pentagonal-shaped black hole on the Potomac that’s devouring more than half of the federal discretionary budget annually. Even when Congress and the Pentagon allegedly try to enforce fiscal discipline, if not austerity elsewhere, the crushing gravitational pull of that hole just continues to suck in more money. Bet on that continuing as the Pentagon issues ever more warnings about a new cold war with China and Russia.

Given its money-sucking nature, perhaps you won’t be surprised to learn that the Pentagon is remarkably exceptional when it comes to failing fiscal audits — five of them in a row (the fifth failure being a “teachable moment,” according to its chief financial officer) — as its budget only continued to soar. Whether you’re talking about lost wars or failed audits, the Pentagon is eternally rewarded for its failures. Try running a “Mom and Pop” store on that basis and see how long you last.

Speaking of all those failed wars, perhaps you won’t be surprised to learn that they haven’t come cheaply. According to the Costs of War Project at Brown University, roughly 937,000 people have died since 9/11/2001 thanks to direct violence in this country’s “Global War on Terror” in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and elsewhere. (And the deaths of another 3.6 to 3.7 million people may be indirectly attributable to those same post-9/11 conflicts.) The financial cost to the American taxpayer has been roughly $8 trillion and rising even as the U.S. military continues its counterterror preparations and activities in 85 countries.

No other nation in the world sees its military as (to borrow from a short-lived Navy slogan) “a global force for good.” No other nation divides the whole world into military commands like AFRICOM for Africa and CENTCOM for the Middle East and parts of Central and South Asia, headed up by four-star generals and admirals. No other nation has a network of 750 foreign bases scattered across the globe. No other nation strives for full-spectrum dominance through “all-domain operations,” meaning not only the control of traditional “domains” of combat — the land, sea, and air — but also of space and cyberspace. While other countries are focused mainly on national defense (or regional aggressions of one sort or another), the U.S. military strives for total global and spatial dominance. Truly exceptional!

Strangely, in this never-ending, unbounded pursuit of dominance, results simply don’t matter. The Afghan War? Bungled, botched, and lost. The Iraq War? Built on lies and lost. Libya? We came, we saw, Libya’s leader (and so many innocents) died. Yet no one at the Pentagon was punished for any of those failures. In fact, to this day, it remains an accountability-free zone, exempt from meaningful oversight. If you’re a “modern major general,” why not pursue wars when you know you’ll never be punished for losing them?

Indeed, the few “exceptions” within the military-industrial-congressional complex who stood up for accountability, people of principle like Daniel Hale, Chelsea Manning, and Edward Snowden, were imprisoned or exiled. In fact, the U.S. government has even conspired to imprison a foreign publisher and transparency activist, Julian Assange, who published the truth about the American war on terror, by using a World War I-era espionage clause that only applies to American citizens.

And the record is even grimmer than that. In our post-9/11 years at war, as President Barack Obama admitted, “We tortured some folks” — and the only person punished for that was another whistleblower, John Kiriakou, who did his best to bring those war crimes to our attention.

And speaking of war crimes, isn’t it “exceptional” that the U.S. military plans to spend upwards of $2 trillion in the coming decades on a new generation of genocidal nuclear weapons? Those include new stealth bombers and new intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) for the Air Force, as well as new nuclear-missile-firing submarines for the Navy. Worse yet, the U.S. continues to reserve the right to use nuclear weapons first, presumably in the name of protecting life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And of course, despite the countries — nine! — that now possess nukes, the U.S. remains the only one to have used them in wartime, in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Finally, it turns out that the military is even immune from Supreme Court decisions! When SCOTUS recently overturned affirmative action for college admission, it carved out an exception for the military academies. Schools like West Point and Annapolis can still consider the race of their applicants, presumably to promote unit cohesion through proportional representation of minorities within the officer ranks, but our society at large apparently does not require racial equity for its cohesion.

A Most Exceptional Military Makes Its Wars and Their Ugliness Disappear

Here’s one of my favorite lines from the movie The Usual Suspects: “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he did not exist.” The greatest trick the U.S. military ever pulled was essentially convincing us that its wars never existed. As Norman Solomon notes in his revealing book, War Made Invisible, the military-industrial-congressional complex has excelled at camouflaging the atrocious realities of war, rendering them almost entirely invisible to the American people. Call it the new American isolationism, only this time we’re isolated from the harrowing and horrific costs of war itself.

America is a nation perpetually at war, yet most of us live our lives with little or no perception of this. There is no longer a military draft. There are no war bond drives. You aren’t asked to make direct and personal sacrifices. You aren’t even asked to pay attention, let alone pay (except for those nearly trillion-dollar-a-year budgets and interest payments on a ballooning national debt, of course). You certainly aren’t asked for your permission for this country to fight its wars, as the Constitution demands. As President George W. Bush suggested after the 9/11 attacks, go visit Disneyworld! Enjoy life! Let America’s “best and brightest” handle the brutality, the degradation, and the ugliness of war, bright minds like former Vice President Dick (“So?”) Cheney and former Secretary of Defense Donald (“I don’t do quagmires”) Rumsfeld.

Did you hear something about the U.S. military being in Syria? In Somalia? Did you hear about the U.S. military supporting the Saudis in a brutal war of repression in Yemen? Did you notice how this country’s military interventions around the world kill, wound, and displace so many people of color, so much so that observers speak of the systemic racism of America’s wars? Is it truly progress that a more diverse military in terms of “color, creed, and background,” to use Secretary of Defense Austin’s words, has killed and is killing so many non-white peoples around the globe?

Praising the all-female-crewed flyover at the last Super Bowl or painting rainbow flags of inclusivity (or even blue and yellow flags for Ukraine) on cluster munitions won’t soften the blows or quiet the screams. As one reader of my blog Bracing Views so aptly put it: “The diversity the war parties [Democrats and Republicans] will not tolerate is diversity of thought.”

Of course, the U.S. military isn’t solely to blame here. Senior officers will claim their duty is not to make policy at all but to salute smartly as the president and Congress order them about. The reality, however, is different. The military is, in fact, at the core of America’s shadow government with enormous influence over policymaking. It’s not merely an instrument of power; it is power — and exceptionally powerful at that. And that form of power simply isn’t conducive to liberty and freedom, whether inside America’s borders or beyond them.

Wait! What am I saying? Stop thinking about all that! America is, after all, the exceptional nation and its military, a band of freedom fighters. In Iraq, where war and sanctions killed untold numbers of Iraqi children in the 1990s, the sacrifice was “worth it,” as former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright once reassured Americans on 60 Minutes.

Even when government actions kill children, lots of children, it’s for the greater good. If this troubles you, go to Disney and take your kids with you. You don’t like Disney? Then, hark back to that old marching song of World War I and “pack up your troubles in your old kit-bag, and smile, smile, smile.” Remember, America’s troops are freedom-delivering heroes and your job is to smile and support them without question.

Have I made my point? I hope so. And yes, the U.S. military is indeed exceptional and being so, being #1 (or claiming you are anyway) means never having to say you’re sorry, no matter how many innocents you kill or maim, how many lives you disrupt and destroy, how many lies you tell.

I must admit, though, that, despite the endless celebration of our military’s exceptionalism and “greatness,” a fragment of scripture from my Catholic upbringing haunts me still: Pride goeth before destruction and a haughty spirit before a fall.

Hey, who knows? It could be the Gulf Stream collapsing or the planet eternally breaking heat records. But whatever the specifics, we’re living it right now, not in the next century, the next decade, or even next year. You couldn’t miss it — at least so you might think — if you were living in the sweltering Southwest; especially in broiling, record-setting Phoenix with 30 straight days of temperatures above 110 degrees Fahrenheit; or in flaming Greece or western China on the day the temperature hit 126 degrees Fahrenheit or sweltering, blazing Algeria when the temperature reached an almost unimaginable 135 (yes, 135!) degrees Fahrenheit; not to speak of broiling Canada with its more than 1,000 fires now burning (a figure that still seems to be rising by the week) and its 29 million acres already flamed out; and don’t forget Italy’s 1,400 fires; or Florida’s hot-tub-style seawater, which recently hit an unheard-of 101-plus degrees Fahrenheit. And though I’m still writing this as the month is ending, July is more or less guaranteed to set the record for the hottest month in history. And don’t assume that “record” will stand for long, either.

Who even remembers that this June was the hottest since records have been kept or that July 6th was the hottest day in recorded history (and July 3rd through 6th, the hottest four days ever)? And don’t be surprised if 2023 ends up setting a record for the hottest year or assume that such a record will last long on a planet where the previous eight years were the warmest ever. And if I’m already boring you, then one thing is guaranteed: you’re going to be bored out of your mind in the years to come.

And with all that’s burning across significant parts of southern Europe, northern Africa, Canada, and elsewhere, yet more carbon dioxide is being released into the atmosphere, preparing the way for a truly scorching world to come. Just keep in mind, in fact, that, by the time this piece is published, I could undoubtedly produce a startling new paragraph or two of updated, overheated horrors to send your way.

Yes, as U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres recently put it, the era of “global warming” should be considered over, since we’re now clearly living at the beginning of a time of “global boiling.” And as you sit there sweating and reading this, if that doesn’t strike you as extreme, consider something else: fossil-fuel companies are still bringing in staggering profits (even if poor Shell’s second-quarter profits in 2023 were down to a mere $5.1 billion) as they — yes! — continue to expand their oil and natural gas operations globally. And can you blame them? After all, the companies whose executives have long known what their products would do to this planet and even sometimes responded by funding think tanks that promoted climate change denial, have little choice but (if you’ll excuse the phrase) to cover their assets. Meanwhile, last year, China, at the forefront of the alternative energy boom now underway, also granted permits to build, on average, two new coal plants a week (while burning more coal than the rest of the planet combined).

Environmental Extremism

Now, tell me that you’re not sweating at least a little and that we don’t live on an increasingly extreme planet. And just to add a cheery note to that, check out blistering Texas. El Paso has had more than 41 days in a row of temperatures at or above 100 degrees Fahrenheit (just short of — yes, Ron! — Miami at 45 while I was writing this). However, Texas’s Republican-controlled legislature is now striving to dramatically curb that state’s remarkable advances in solar and wind power while raising their cost, even as many of its members push for public investment in the construction of new natural gas plants (which, as a recent study indicates, could prove as greenhouse-gas dirty as coal).

Just remind me: What planet are they living on?

If, however, you truly want to see American extremism up close and personal, don’t even bother to check out Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, who charmingly enough launched his now-faltering presidential campaign by forswearing the “politicization of the weather.” Under the circumstances, I know you won’t be faintly surprised to learn that he had previously rejected the very idea of climate change as “leftwing stuff.” (Of course, if the left turns out to be our future, then maybe he’ll prove to be… oh, my gosh, so sorry, but what other word can I use than “right”?)

No, skip Ron. After all, if you don’t happen to live in Florida, he couldn’t be more skippable. Look instead at Donald Trump. Yes, our much-indicted (or soon to-be-indicted-again) former president and (“Be there, will be wild!”) aspiring autocrat, who shows every sign of once again becoming the “Republican” candidate for president.

Were he indeed to become that and then — also anything but unimaginable — win the 2024 election and end up back in the White House, the extremity of the world we could find ourselves in might be almost beyond imagining. We’re talking about the guy who claimed that, when it comes to climate change, its full effect could be — uh-oh! — that “the ocean will rise by 1/100th of an inch over the next 350 years.” (Actually, if global temperature rise is kept to 2 degrees Celsius, the sea level near Mar-a-Lago would be expected to rise three feet by 2150, a mere 3,500 times the former president’s estimate in half the time — and that’s if we don’t truly turn out to be on a climate-boiling planet.)

Of course, should Donald Trump win not just the Republican nomination but the 2024 election, this sweltering country will have put someone back in the White House who has spent his political career mocking the very idea of global warming and supporting to the hilt the production of fossil fuels. His administration reversed, rolled back, or wiped out nearly 100 environmental rules and regulations, many related to climate change, including “Obama-era limits on planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions from power plants and from cars and trucks.” Meanwhile, he appointed cabinet members who openly dismissed the very idea of global warming.

And, by the way, if you want to measure the mad extremism of Republicans today, try to recall a once-upon-a-time era when they held a hardly less environmental outlook than Democrats. (It’s easy to forget that it was the otherwise lamentable Republican President Richard Nixon whose administration established the Environmental Protection Agency.) If you want to measure the extremism of what can hardly be called the Republican — as opposed to Trumpublican — Party of 2023, check out the positions on climate change of most of its possible presidential candidates.

If, in fact, you want a gauge of how extreme this country has already become in this century, just stop and think for a moment about the fact that, as of now, few polling professionals believe a 2024 Biden-Trump election wouldn’t prove a total nail-biter. That should make you sweat a little more.

Be There, Will Be Wild!

On this sweltering planet of ours, Donald Trump and his Trumpublicans should indeed be considered up-close-and-personal versions of American extremism. Yes, in 2016, Trump won the election by catching the mood of all too many voters with the slogan “make America great again!” or MAGA! (exclamation point included). As I wrote at the time, “With that ‘again,’ Donald Trump crossed a line in American politics that, until his escalator moment, represented a kind of psychological taboo for politicians of any stripe, of either party.” And with his inaugural address, he added another unforgettable slogan: “America First.” (“From this moment on, it’s going to be America First,” he insisted.)

But America first? Today, don’t make me laugh. Donald Trump is, of course, running for president as the potential leader of a party that now bears next to no relation to the Republican Party of the not-so-distant past and he’s doing so not on an America First but on a Me-First ticket against a crew of other candidates, most of whom have either rejected outright or simply ignored the very idea that there might be a climate crisis on planet Earth.

In such a state, Trump could become the Me-First candidate of all time and, for him, especially in climate terms, it’s undoubtedly America 19th. Or do I mean 29th or 129th or 1,029th?

Now, I hardly want to claim that President Joe Biden is the perfect anti-climate-broiling candidate. Still, give him credit. He and a Democratic Congress did pass the Inflation Reduction Act, which represented significant climate legislation that, in the years to come, will put hundreds of billions of dollars into reducing American fossil-fuel use and so help cut U.S. greenhouse gas emissions in significant ways. In addition, unlike the Trumpublicans, he at least seems to worry about Americans living through a heat emergency (though the present Congress will let him do all too little about it).

Still, being the politician he is, despite pledging “no more drilling on federal lands, period, period, period” in his 2020 election campaign, he couldn’t bring himself to say no when it came to the new ConocoPhillips Willow Project on federal land in Arctic Alaska (already among the fastest warming places on Earth). It’s slated to produce — hold your hats! — almost 600 million barrels of oil over the next three decades. Nor could he do so when it came to the completion of Senator Joe Manchin’s baby, the West Virginia Mountain Valley natural gas pipeline that his administration (and only recently the Supreme Court as well) approved in what’s distinctly too much of a Me-First (or at least fossil-fuel-producing companies first) world even without Donald Trump.

But count on one thing, the Donald himself is no longer living on this planet of ours — you know, the one where only recently more than 190 million Americans were under heat advisory alerts and 250 million to 275 million of us faced heat indexes of at least (and do put the emphasis on that “at least”) 90 degrees Fahrenheit. He now exists on one that’s sprung directly from what passes for his imagination. Forget the extremist positions he and so many of his followers (not to speak of his Republican presidential opponents) hold on everything from abortion and what books school libraries can contain to what’s gender acceptable (not much) in this all-American world of ours.

The crucial thing here is that, in the Me-First world that’s him all the way — even one that could, in the end, leave this country in the dust of climate and history — one thing is guaranteed: were he to make it back into the White House, the future would be Me-First all the way to… well, either the bank or the outhouse. And he and his advisors are making no secret of that fact. Thanks to fine reporting by Jonathan Swan, Charlie Savage, and Maggie Haberman of the New York Times, we already know that, were they to make it back into the White House, they would be intent on instantly enhancing the powers of his presidency by concentrating “far greater authority in his hands,” and altering “the balance of power by increasing the president’s authority over every part of the federal government that now operates, by either law or tradition, with any measure of independence from political interference by the White House.” And all of this, they are already openly discussing more than a year before the 2024 election.

In other words, Donald Trump is intent on winning the power to create, at best, a Hungarian version of “democracy” here in America and that, make no mistake, would help add more than three feet of sea-level rise to the area of Florida near Mar-a-Lago. As for the rest of us, if you’re hot now, just wait for the return of the Donald’s Me-First World. Believe me, you don’t know nothin’ yet when it comes to heat. Be there, will be wild!

There can be little question that the grim prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, which still shows no sign of closing anytime soon, is a key legacy — in the worst sense imaginable — of America’s post-9/11 forever wars. I’ve been covering the subject for decades now and that shameful legacy has never diminished.

Last month, in response to a column I wrote for TomDispatch — one of dozens, I’m sad to say, that I’ve done on Guantánamo over these endless years — I received a surprise email: an invitation to attend a meeting at the British Parliament. A group known as the All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for Closing the Guantanamo Bay Detention Facility, formed this April, was gathering for the second time. Its stated purpose is “to urge the U.S. administration to close the Guantánamo Bay detention facility, to ensure the safe resettlement of those approved for release, and to ensure that due process is expedited for all the remaining prisoners.” Nine members of the House of Parliament and four Members of the House of Lords have already joined the group.

Thirty men remain in custody at that infamous American prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Sixteen of those detainees have finally been cleared for release; they are, that is, no longer subject to criminal charges or considered a potential danger to the United States and yet they still remain behind bars. Three other prisoners have never either been charged with a crime or cleared for release. Ten more are still facing trial, while one has been convicted and remains in custody there. For the APPG, the release of those 16 cleared detainees is a paramount goal.

That meeting I attended included a handful of MPs from all parties, as well as leading figures from British organizations that have been supporting justice for Guantánamo’s detainees for decades. Also present were two former detainees. One was Moazzem Begg, among the first prisoners released in 2005 and repatriated to England, where he is now a senior director at CAGE, an advocacy group focused on the remaining Gitmo detainees. In 2006, he published Enemy Combatant: My Imprisonment at Guantanamo, Bagram, and Kandahar, an early account of the injustices and cruelties in America’s war-on-terror prisons. The other was Mohamedou Salahi, whose book Guantánamo Diary led to the dramatic film The Mauritanian about his life at that infamous prison. A third former detainee, Mansoor Adayfi, author of Don’t Forget Us Here, had been transferred from Gitmo to Serbia in 2016. Though invited to attend, his visa wasn’t approved in time.

That meeting was but one of several recent events in which organizations outside the United States have issued detailed impassioned calls for this country to finally address the ongoing nightmare it created so long ago at Guantánamo.

Site Visits and U.N. Reports

In April, Patrick Hamilton, the head of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), made a site visit to Guantánamo and issued “a rare statement of alarm.” It was, as New York Times reporter Carol Rosenberg pointed out, the ICRC’s 146th visit to the prison since it opened in January 2002. That short statement urged American officials to address the deteriorating health of the prisoners there, concluding, “The planning for an aging population,” it concluded, “cannot afford to wait.”.

Then, in mid-June, the U.N. Human Rights Council followed up its own site visit by issuing a comprehensive, devastatingly critical report. Fionnuala Ni Aoláin, that council’s special rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism, focused on the potential war crimes and “crimes against humanity” committed against the detainees during and after their time at that island prison, now in its 21st year of existence.

Ni Aoláin was the perfect person for the job. She’s long defended human rights and international law, with a particular focus on issues of justice and human dignity. In 2013, she co-edited Guantánamo and Beyond: Exceptional Courts and Military Commissions in Comparative Perspective. Her 2023 report, clear, fact-based, and measured in tone, is in many ways a step above that of any of its predecessors.

Hers was, of course, anything but the first U.N. report to address the sins of Guantánamo. In 2010, the U.N. Human Rights Council prepared a detailed report on “global practices in relation to secret detention in the context of countering terrorism.” It focused on violations of international law carried out globally, often involving exceptionally cruel treatment and outright torture. Alongside sections on countries throughout Africa and the Middle East that abused captives, the torture and misuse of prisoners in the American war on terror at CIA black sites around the world and Guantánamo Bay took center stage. The study focused special attention on the lack of accountability when it came to Americans who had implemented or abetted the mistreatment and secret detention of prisoners.

Twelve years later, in March 2022, Ni Aoláin, five years into her role as special rapporteur wrote a follow-up to the report, highlighting “the abject failure to implement the recommendations” of that study and the “tragic and profound consequences for individuals who were systematically tortured, rendered across borders, arbitrarily detained, and deprived of their most fundamental rights.” Her update “reiterates the demand that accountability, reparation, and transparency be implemented by those states responsible for these grave human rights violations.”

Now, she has issued her new 23-page report, adding significantly to the debate over liberty and security that has defined discussions over Guantánamo since its birth in January 2002.

A Singular Report

A notable distinction between this report and those that preceded it is the access the special rapporteur was granted by the Biden administration. It was, in fact, the first visit ever to Guantánamo by an independent U.N. investigator. After two decades in which administration after administration placed severe restrictions on journalists as well as non-governmental and international organizations when it came to covering that prison, the Biden administration granted Ni Aoláin remarkably full access “to former and current detention facilities and to detainees, including ‘high value’ and ‘non-high value’ detainees.”

The interviews she conducted with those still imprisoned there were both confidential and unsupervised. She was allowed to deal with “military and civilian personnel, military commission personnel, and defense lawyers.” She also “interviewed victims, survivors, and families of victims of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, former detainees in countries of resettlement or repatriation, and human rights and humanitarian organizations.” Ni Aoláin commended the Biden administration for allowing such unprecedented access. “Few states.,” as she puts it, “exhibit such courage.”

In the process, she drew a uniquely sweeping picture of Guantánamo — from the period after the horrifying 9/11 attacks through the widespread and gruesome torture of prisoners at CIA black sites to the grim details of detention at Gitmo itself to the often unjust and harmful fates of the detainees who were finally released to the persistent challenges that lie ahead. It’s the first report to tie together, historically as well as legally, the many grim pieces of the post-9/11 story that have previously been underappreciated.

Like its predecessors, Ni Aoláin’s report reiterates the sins of Guantánamo: the physical and psychological abuse and outright cruelties committed there and the lack of any access to justice for its prisoners. She also reminds us that “the vast majority of the men rendered and detained there were brought without cause and had no relationship whatsoever with the events that took place on 9/11.” She calls out the United States for its widespread ongoing violations of human rights and international law and mentions numerous times that the way it dealt with its detainees amounted to “cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment.”

Her report, however, also potentially shifts the never-ending discussion of Guantánamo to new ground.

Putting the Focus on the Prisoners

As a start, Ni Aoláin looks beyond policymaking to the more subtle forms of injustice and harm that became the daily essence of Guantánamo. She particularly focuses on what she calls the “arbitrariness” and the damage it has caused. “Arbitrariness,” she concludes, “pervades the entirety of the Guantánamo detention infrastructure,” leading to a persistent lack of predictability in treatment. While Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) do exist when it comes to “detainee reception and transfer, restraints, cell block searches, mess operations, religious accommodations, and medication distribution,” the deeper reality has been one of constant, cruel, and unpredictable deviations from those SOPs.

In fact, “arbitrariness, confusion, and inconsistency” define life at Guantánamo and have only been exacerbated by the secrecy with which those SOPs are guarded, further intensifying the cruel and inhuman treatment that has always defined that prison. Ni Aoláin suggests that it’s finally time for transparency to come to Gitmo. For example, many of the detainees suffer from the long-term effects of torture, a past all too lacking in transparency, and neither they nor their lawyers have access to their unclassified medical files.

She underscores her focus on finally bringing humanity to Gitmo by arguing that the widespread abuses Americans committed over the years, including by setting up a prison offshore of American justice, also significantly impacted the families of those who were killed in the attacks of September 11, 2001. She begins with torture, suggesting “that the systematic rendition and torture at multiple (including black) sites and thereafter at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba — with the entrenched legal and policy practices of occluding and protecting those who ordered, perpetrated, facilitated, supervised, or concealed torture — comprise the single most significant barrier to fulfilling victims’ rights to justice and accountability.” In her view, the use of torture was “a betrayal of the rights of victims,” too, by making the holding of trials impossible to this day and so making both accountability and closure inconceivable for the victims’ families.

While widening the lens to include a larger pool of victims, Ni Aoláin also widens the time frame. The mistreatment of detainees at Gitmo, she emphasizes, continues to this day. “Regrettably,” she writes, “the vast majority of detainees continue to experience sustained human rights violations beginning with the very process of transfer to the country of return or resettlement.”

In fact, the transfer of former prisoners from that prison to countries like the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Serbia, Kazakstan, and Slovakia has often resulted in yet more degradation, including utter social ostracism, the inability to obtain work, or even additional transfers to countries where yet more cruel and inhuman treatment has subsequently occurred. Sadly, for those “released” from that prison, the term “Guantanamo 2.0” best describes their situations.

One case in particular has been a focal point for the APPG in London: Ravil Mingazov, a Russian citizen granted asylum in Great Britain. He was captured in Pakistan in 2002. Accused of being associated with al-Qaeda and the Taliban, he would then be transported to Gitmo where he remained until 2017 when he was cleared for release to the UAE. After his arrival there, however, he was again imprisoned, despite assurances that his release would include rehabilitation and support for rebuilding his life. He’s now been detained there for six years. In 2021, reports circulated that the UAE was trying to send Mingazov back to Russia, where he would face probable imprisonment and mistreatment. To make matters worse, for the past two years, his family has had no news of him.

Ni Aoláin also highlights American attempts to destroy certain parts of Guantánamo and so functionally erase the record of what went on there. She calls instead for “the preservation and access to both prior and present detention sites,” as well as medical records and digital evidence. The crimes committed at Guantánamo, she emphasizes, need to be kept on the record and addressed, adding that “the U.S. government has an ongoing obligation to investigate the crimes committed [there], including an assessment of whether they meet the threshold of war crimes and crimes against humanity.”

Worse yet, redress for the victims of the 9/11 attacks and their families remains lacking. They continue to need treatment in ways not provided for and she recommends a “comprehensive audit of existing medical support (physical and psychological) for victims and survivors” and a commitment “to comprehensive lifelong holistic support for survivors.”

Succinct, measured, and profoundly disturbing, her report calls for a way forward that directly addresses the crimes of the past, including the need for public apology, compensation to former detainees, and the shutting down of that infamous prison. Her message: after all these years, even decades, the harm and the crimes associated with Guantánamo are still unending.

Where We Are Now

While the U.N., the ICRC, the British Parliament, and various nongovernmental organizations focus on Guantánamo’s sins and its painful legacy, the United States continues to fail to close the prison, even though the need for closure was acknowledged in 2006 by no less than its “founder,” President George W. Bush. On July 14th, when the House passed its version of the latest National Defense Authorization Act, it not only kept in place a prohibition on the use of funds to close Guantánamo but extended a congressional ban on using such funds to transfer detainees to the United States or six countries in the greater Middle East, making the end of Gitmo that much harder.

With her steady hand and deployment of facts, Ni Aoláin was unsparing in her conclusions about the injustice and perpetual cruelty that still is Guantánamo. Yes, she appreciates any movement forward, even at this late date, including “the openness and willingness” of the Biden administration to allow her to visit the prison. Still, she couldn’t be clearer on what, 21 years later, is needed: accountability for the perpetrators and restitution for the victims.

Closing the prison, if it ever actually happens, will not be enough. Sadly, even such an act will not bring true closure to the sins of America’s forever prison.

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock for the past few months, you’re undoubtedly aware that award-winning director Christopher Nolan has released a new film about Robert Oppenheimer, known as the “father of the atomic bomb” for leading the group of scientists who created that deadly weapon as part of America’s World War II-era Manhattan Project. The film has earned widespread attention, with large numbers of people participating in what’s already become known as “Barbieheimer” by seeing Greta Gerwig’s hit film Barbie and Nolan’s three-hour-long Oppenheimer on the same day.

Nolan’s film is a distinctive pop cultural phenomenon because it deals with the American use of nuclear weapons, a genuine rarity since ABC’s 1983 airing of The Day After about the consequences of nuclear war. (An earlier exception was Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, his satirical portrayal of the insanity of the Cold War nuclear arms race.)

The film is based on American Prometheus, the Pulitzer Prize-winning 2005 biography of Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin. Nolan made it in part to break through the shield of antiseptic rhetoric, bloodless philosophizing, and public complacency that has allowed such world-ending weaponry to persist so long after Trinity, the first nuclear bomb test, was conducted in the New Mexico desert 78 years ago this month.

Nolan’s impetus was rooted in his early exposure to the nuclear disarmament movement in Europe. As he said recently:

It’s something that’s been on my radar for a number of years. I was a teenager in the ‘80s, the early ‘80s in England. It was the peak of CND, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the Greenham Common [protest]; the threat of nuclear war was when I was 12, 13, 14 — it was the biggest fear we all had. I think I first encountered Oppenheimer in… Sting’s song about the Russians that came out then and talks about Oppenheimer’s ‘deadly toys.’

A feature film on the genesis of nuclear weapons may not strike you as an obvious candidate for box-office blockbuster status. As Nolan’s teenage son said when his father told him he was thinking about making such a film, “Well, nobody really worries about nuclear weapons anymore. Are people going to be interested in that?” Nolan responded that, given what’s at stake, he worries about complacency and even denial when it comes to the global risks posed by the nuclear arsenals on this planet. “You’re normalizing killing tens of thousands of people. You’re creating moral equivalences, false equivalences with other types of conflict… [and so] accepting, normalizing… the danger.”

These days, unfortunately, you’re talking about anything but just tens of thousands of people dying in a nuclear face-off. A 2022 report by Ira Helfand and International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War estimated that a “limited” nuclear war between India and Pakistan that used roughly 3% of the world’s 12,000-plus nuclear warheads would kill “hundreds of millions, perhaps even billions” of us. A full-scale nuclear war between the United States and Russia, the study suggests, could kill up to five (yes, five!) billion people within two years, essentially ending life as we know it on this planet in a “nuclear winter.”

Obviously, all too many of us don’t grasp the stakes involved in a nuclear conflict, thanks in part to “psychic numbing,” a concept regularly invoked by Robert Jay Lifton, author of Hiroshima in America: A History of Denial (co-authored with Greg Mitchell), among many other books. Lifton describes psychic numbing as “a diminished capacity or inclination to feel” prompted by “the completely unprecedented dimension of this revolution in technological destructiveness.”

Given the Nolan film’s focus on Oppenheimer’s story, some crucial issues related to the world’s nuclear dilemma are either dealt with only briefly or omitted altogether.

The staggering devastation caused by the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is suggested only indirectly without any striking visual evidence of the devastating human consequences of the use of those two weapons. Also largely ignored are the critical voices who then argued that there was no need to drop a bomb, no less two of them, on a Japan most of whose cities had already been devastated by U.S. fire-bombing to end the war. General (and later President) Dwight D. Eisenhower wrote that when he was told by Secretary of War Henry Stimson of the plan to drop atomic bombs on populated areas in Japan, “I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary.”

The film also fails to address the health impacts of the research, testing, and production of such weaponry, which to this day is still causing disease and death, even without another nuclear weapon ever being used in war. Victims of nuclear weapons development include people who were impacted by the fallout from U.S. nuclear testing in the Western United States and the Marshall Islands in the Western Pacific, uranium miners on Navajo lands, and many others. Speaking of the first nuclear test in Los Alamos, New Mexico, Tina Cordova of the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium, which represents that state’s residents who suffered widespread cancers and high rates of infant mortality caused by radiation from that explosion, said “It’s an inconvenient truth… People just don’t want to reflect on the fact that American citizens were bombed at Trinity.”

Another crucially important issue has received almost no attention. Neither the film nor the discussion sparked by it has explored one of the most important reasons for the continued existence of nuclear weapons — the profits it yields the participants in America’s massive nuclear-industrial complex.

Once Oppenheimer and other concerned scientists and policymakers failed to convince the Truman administration to simply close Los Alamos and place nuclear weapons and the materials needed to develop them under international control — the only way, as they saw it, to head off a nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union — the drive to expand the nuclear weapons complex was on. Research and production of nuclear warheads and nuclear-armed bombers, missiles, and submarines quickly became a big business, whose beneficiaries have worked doggedly to limit any efforts at the reduction or elimination of nuclear arms.

The Manhattan Project and the Birth of the Nuclear-Industrial Complex

The Manhattan Project Oppenheimer directed was one of the largest public works efforts ever undertaken in American history. Though the Oppenheimer film focuses on Los Alamos, it quickly came to include far-flung facilities across the United States. At its peak, the project would employ 130,000 workers — as many as in the entire U.S. auto industry at the time.

According to nuclear expert Stephen Schwartz, author of Atomic Audit, the seminal work on the financing of U.S. nuclear weapons programs, through the end of 1945 the Manhattan Project cost nearly $38 billion in today’s dollars, while helping spawn an enterprise that has since cost taxpayers an almost unimaginable $12 trillion for nuclear weapons and related programs. And the costs never end. The Nobel prize-winning International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) reports that the U.S. spent $43.7 billion on nuclear weapons last year alone, and a new Congressional Budget Office report suggests that another $756 billion will go into those deadly armaments in the next decade.

Private contractors now run the nuclear warhead complex and build nuclear delivery vehicles. They range from Raytheon, General Dynamics, and Lockheed Martin to lesser-known firms like BWX Technologies and Jacobs Engineering, all of which split billions of dollars in contracts from the Pentagon (for the production of nuclear delivery vehicles) and the Department of Energy (for nuclear warheads). To keep the gravy train running — ideally, in perpetuity — those contractors also spend millions lobbying decision-makers. Even universities have gotten into the act. Both the University of California and Texas A&M are part of the consortium that runs the Los Alamos nuclear weapons laboratory.

The American warhead complex is a vast enterprise with major facilities in California, Missouri, Nevada, New Mexico, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas. And nuclear-armed submarines, bombers, and missiles are produced or based in California, Connecticut, Georgia, Louisiana, North Dakota, Montana, Virginia, Washington state, and Wyoming. Add in nuclear subcontractors and most states host at least some nuclear-weapons-related activities.

And such beneficiaries of the nuclear weapons industry are far from silent when it comes to debating the future of nuclear spending and policy-making.

Profiteers of Armageddon: The Nuclear Weapons Lobby

The institutions and companies that build nuclear bombs, missiles, aircraft, and submarines, along with their allies in Congress, have played a disproportionate role in shaping U.S. nuclear policy and spending. They have typically opposed the U.S. ratification of a Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban treaty; put strict limits on the ability of Congress to reduce either funding for or the deployment of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs); and pushed for weaponry like a proposed nuclear-armed, sea-launched cruise missile that even the Pentagon hasn’t requested, while funding think tanks that promote an ever more robust nuclear weapons force.

A case in point is the Senate ICBM Coalition (dubbed part of the “Dr. Strangelove Caucus” by Arms Control Association Director Daryl Kimball and other critics of nuclear arms). The ICBM Coalition consists of senators from states with major ICBM bases or ICBM research, maintenance, and production sites: Montana, North Dakota, Utah, and Wyoming. The sole Democrat in the group, Jon Tester (D-MT), is the chair of the powerful appropriations subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee, where he can keep an eye on ICBM spending and advocate for it as needed.

The Senate ICBM Coalition is responsible for numerous measures aimed at protecting both the funding and deployment of such deadly missiles. According to former Secretary of Defense William Perry, they are among “the most dangerous weapons we have” because a president, if warned of a possible nuclear attack on this country, would have just minutes to decide to launch them, risking a nuclear conflict based on a false alarm. That Coalition’s efforts are supplemented by persistent lobbying from a series of local coalitions of business and political leaders in those ICBM states. Most of them work closely with Northrop Grumman, the prime contractor for the new ICBM, dubbed the Sentinel and expected to cost at least $264 billion to develop, build, and maintain over its life span that is expected to exceed 60 years.

Of course, Northrop Grumman and its 12 major ICBM subcontractors have been busy pushing the Sentinel as well. They spend tens of millions of dollars on campaign contributions and lobbying annually, while employing former members of the government’s nuclear establishment to make their case to Congress and the executive branch. And those are hardly the only organizations or networks devoted to sustaining the nuclear arms race. You would have to include the Air Force Association and the obscurely named Submarine Industrial Base Council, among others.

The biggest point of leverage the nuclear weapons industry and the arms sector more broadly have over Congress is jobs. How strange then that the arms industry has generated diminishing job returns since the end of the Cold War. According to the National Defense Industrial Association, direct employment in the weapons industry has dropped from 3.2 million in the mid-1980s to about 1.1 million today.

Even a relatively small slice of the Pentagon and Department of Energy nuclear budgets could create many more jobs if invested in green energy, sustainable infrastructure, education, or public health – anywhere from 9% to 250% more jobs, depending on the amount spent. Given that the climate crisis is already well underway, such a shift would not only make this country more prosperous but the world safer by slowing the pace of climate-driven catastrophes and offering at least some protection against its worst manifestations.

A New Nuclear Reckoning?

Count on one thing: by itself, a movie focused on the origin of nuclear weapons, no matter how powerful, won’t force a new reckoning with the costs and consequences of America’s continued addiction to them. But a wide variety of peace, arms-control, health, and public-policy-focused groups are already building on the attention garnered by the film to engage in a public education campaign aimed at reviving a movement to control and eventually eliminate the nuclear danger.

Past experience — from the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament that helped persuade Christopher Nolan to make Oppenheimer to the “Ban the Bomb” and Nuclear Freeze campaigns that stopped above-ground nuclear testing and helped turn President Ronald Reagan around on the nuclear issue — suggests that, given concerted public pressure, progress can be made on reining in the nuclear threat. The public education effort surrounding the Oppenheimer film is being taken up by groups like The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the Federation of American Scientists, and the Council for a Livable World that were founded, at least in part, by Manhattan Project scientists who devoted their lives to trying to roll back the nuclear arms race; professional groups like the Union of Concerned Scientists and Physicians for Social Responsibility; anti-war groups like Peace Action and Win Without War; the Nobel Peace prize-winning International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons; nuclear policy groups like Global Zero and the Arms Control Association; advocates for Marshall Islanders, “downwinders,” and other victims of the nuclear complex; and faith-based groups like the Friends Committee on National Legislation. The Native American–led organization Tewa Women United has even created a website, “Oppenheimer — and the Other Side of the Story,” that focuses on “the Indigenous and land-based peoples who were displaced from our homelands, the poisoning and contamination of sacred lands and waters that continues to this day, and the ongoing devastating impact of nuclear colonization on our lives and livelihoods.”

On the global level, the 2021 entry into force of a nuclear ban treaty — officially known as the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons — is a sign of hope, even if the nuclear weapons states have yet to join. The very existence of such a treaty does at least help delegitimize nuclear weaponry. It has even prompted dozens of major financial institutions to stop investing in the nuclear weapons industry, under pressure from campaigns like Don’t Bank on the Bomb.

In truth, the situation couldn’t be simpler: we need to abolish nuclear weapons before they abolish us. Hopefully, Oppenheimer will help prepare the ground for progress in that all too essential undertaking, beginning with a frank discussion of what’s now at stake.

It’s been devastating, even if no one’s paying attention.

Three months of fighting in Sudan between the army and a paramilitary group called the Rapid Support Force (RSF) has left at least 3,000 people dead and wounded at least 6,000 more. Over two million people have been displaced within the country, while another 700,000 have fled to neighboring nations. According to the World Health Organization, two-thirds of the health facilities in Khartoum, the capital, and other combat zones are now out of service, so the numbers of dead and injured are believed to be far higher than recorded, and bodies have been rotting for days in the streets of the capital, as well as in the towns and villages of the Darfur region.

Almost all foreign nationals, including diplomats and embassy staff, are long gone and so, according to Al Jazeera, hundreds or thousands of Sudanese who had visa applications pending have instead found themselves marooned in the crossfire with their passports locked away inside now-abandoned embassies. In the Darfur region, according to non-Arab tribal leaders, the RSF and local Arab militias have been carrying out mass killings, raping women and girls, and looting and burning homes and hospitals. Earlier this month, United Nations humanitarian chief Martin Griffiths told the Associated Press, “If I were Sudanese, I’d find it hard to imagine that this isn’t a civil war… of the most brutal kind.”

According to the United Nations, half the country’s population, a record 25 million people, is now in need of humanitarian aid. And worse yet, half of those are children, many of whom were in dire need even before this war broke out. Tragically, global warming will only compound their misery. Among 185 nations ranked by the Notre Dame Global Adaptation Initiative, Sudan is considered the sixth most susceptible to harm from climate change.

Heat waves, drought, and flooding are projected to become ever more frequent and intense as the atmosphere above Sudan warms further. This summer war and weather have been converging in strikingly deadly ways. With cloudless skies, water and electricity services largely knocked out, and daily temperature highs in the capital recently ranging from 109° to 111° Fahrenheit, the misery is only intensifying. Meanwhile, in the Darfur region and across the border in eastern Chad, the season of torrential rains is about to begin. The country director for Concern Worldwide in Chad says that many of the quarter-million Sudanese refugees there “are living in makeshift tents made from sticks and any material they can find, which means they are not protected from the heavy rains. The situation is catastrophic.”

This Conflict Will Not Be Televised

Among the refugees from this war are some of our own relatives and in-laws, part of an extended Indian-Sudanese family who have lived in Khartoum all their lives. In May, they fled the escalating violence, some via a perilous, hair-raising 500-mile road trip across the Nubian Desert to Port Sudan. There, they caught a ship across the Red Sea to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Their goal, as they informed us in June through voice messages, was Egypt — so far, the most common destination for Sudanese refugees over the past three months. And mind you, desperate as they may be, our relatives are in a far less perilous situation than people fleeing the Darfur region for Chad. Still, they are leaving behind a life built up over decades, without knowing if they will ever be able to return to Khartoum.

And here — for us — is a disturbing reality. We’ve had to do a lot of searching to find significant information in the U.S. major media about the struggle in Sudan, no less the plight of its refugees — though recently there were finally substantive reports at NPR and in the Washington Post. Still, the contrast with 16 months of breathless, daily, top-of-the-hour reporting on the Ukraine war and the millions of people it’s displaced has been striking indeed.

There’s a major difference as well between Washington’s responses to each of those wars. Before the fighting broke out in Sudan, the country had about 30% fewer people living in need of humanitarian assistance than Ukraine. Now, it has almost 50% more than Ukraine. Given those relative needs, U.S. humanitarian aid to Sudan in Fiscal Year 2023 ($536 million) was not all that skimpy compared with the humanitarian aid going to Ukraine ($605 million). — not, at least, until you add in the $49 billion in military aid Washington has been sending to Kyiv — 80 times the civilian aid, to which has only recently been added fundamentally anti-humanitarian cluster bombs. In the past year, in other words, Ukraine got 13% more humanitarian aid than Sudan but 93 times more total aid when you count war assistance.

And the U.S. is not alone. The entire world is lagging badly in its response to the humanitarian tragedy in Sudan. William Carter of the Norwegian Refugee Council recently lamented, “I haven’t seen it treated with urgency. It’s not ignorance; it’s a case of apathy.” Admittedly, conditions in Sudan and Chad make aid delivery difficult now, but Western powers, Carter pointed out, are simply “not willing to stick their necks out.”

Sidelining Civilians, Coddling Generals

Washington has assisted Ukraine massively since the war there began. In contrast, its actions in the months leading up to Sudan’s current conflict were not only ineffective but may even have made war more likely.

Some background: Four years ago, a popular uprising overthrew the country’s longtime autocratic president, Omar al-Bashir. A Sovereignty Council was formed to negotiate a transition to democracy. Susan Page, who served as the first U.S. ambassador to the Republic of South Sudan, has written that the council’s designation as a “civilian-led transitional government” was “always a bit of a fig leaf,” given that its membership included more military officials than civilians. The transition was even led by military officials, including the two men who command the forces now locked in battle, Sudanese army chief General Abdel-Fattah Burhan and General Mohamed Hamdan, who leads the RSF paramilitary group.

After two years of obstructing the work of the Sovereignty Council, that odd duo joined forces in an October 2021 coup and took control of Sudan. The negotiations over a democratic transition, mediated by the United States, Great Britain, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia nonetheless went on for another 18 months, while those generals continued to stonewall. According to Democratic Senator Chris Coons of Delaware, the generals even stooped to outright extortion, hinting that if they didn’t get full backing from the West, they’d create a fresh migration crisis in Europe by kicking out hundreds of thousands of their fellow Sudanese and sending them northward. Still, last February, with military-civilian negotiations bogged down, Coons remained hopeful, writing:

The Sudanese people… are not backing down in the defense of their political gains. Even in the face of persistent killings, sexual violence, and arrests by the regime, a massive, nationwide pro-democracy movement has for months maintained nonviolent street protests. The determination these thousands of people have shown as they risk their lives against heavily armed security forces should serve as a reminder the world over of how precious democracy truly is.

Coons urged the Biden administration to throw its weight behind the pro-democracy movement, with sanctions that would hit the military leaders hard while sparing civil society: “A modern, comprehensive set of sanctions on the coup leaders and their networks,” he wrote, “will disrupt the military’s revenue streams and their grip on power, creating an opening for the nation’s nascent democracy movement to grow.” As is now painfully obvious, Biden didn’t take Coons’s advice and, six weeks later, the shooting started.

In an article published soon after the outbreak of fighting, Edward Wong and three colleagues at the New York Times reported that some of the people who played a part in the negotiations told them “the Biden administration, rather than empowering civilian leaders, prioritized working with the two rival generals,” even after they’d seized power in that coup. A high-level government adviser assured the Times that senior American diplomats “made the mistake of coddling the generals, accepting their irrational demands, and treating them as natural political actors. This fed their lust for power and their illusion of legitimacy.”

“A Critical Puzzle Piece”

The broad lack of concern for the Sudanese people in the U.S. and other rich countries also contrasts sharply with the intense geopolitical interest in Sudan of certain regional powers. Mohammad Salami of the International Institute for Global Strategic Analysis observes that Washington’s Persian Gulf allies have big plans for Sudan, thanks to its strategically important Red Sea coastline, its wealth in mineral resources, and its potential for tourism and agricultural production. (We can’t help wondering if they’re taking into account the degree to which its farming may, in the future, be clobbered by climate change.) Looking ahead, Salami writes, “The United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia have long-term plans for Africa, and for Sudan as their gateway to it.”

Until the recent chaos began, Sudan had also been a gateway for refugees from Asia, the Middle East, and other parts of Africa. Writing less than three weeks into the Sudan conflict, MSNBC columnist Nayyera Haq observed that many of the people then fleeing the country were, in fact, repeat refugees, having fled previous conflicts in Syria, Yemen, and Myanmar, among other places. As Western diplomats and embassy staff across Khartoum rushed for the exits (echoes of Kabul and Kandahar two summers ago!), Haq concluded:

Sudan, once considered a far-off nation, is now a critical puzzle piece in this era of great power competition among global economies. As boundaries continue to blur because of technology and climate change, forced migration is more common: millions flee north from Latin America to the U.S., from Syria to Europe, and now across East Africa. But the same countries eager to extract oil and minerals from Africa are quick to shut down, only watching out for their own as Sudan devolves into chaos.

Sudan is indeed rich in mineral resources that span the alphabet: aluminum, chromium, cobalt, iron, manganese, nickel, rare earths, silver, and zinc. All of those are important to the world’s renewable energy and battery industries. But Sudan’s biggest source of wealth lies in its gold deposits. The gold-mining industry is largely owned by a Russian-Sudanese joint venture headquartered in the northeast of the country. The wealth it’s generated hasn’t benefited the Sudanese people. Before the recent chaos, in fact, it was being split by the military regime, the Russian government, and none other than the infamous warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner Group, which had been managing the joint venture’s gold-mining and processing operations since 2017. And Wagner being Wagner, they also have now taken sides in Sudan’s war, according to the U.S. Treasury Department, by providing surface-to-air missiles to the RSF paramilitary forces.

Unworthy Victims

The paucity of attention paid to civilian victims of the conflict in Sudan compared to Ukrainian civilians brings to mind the contrast between “worthy” and “unworthy” victims drawn by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky in their 1988 book Manufacturing Consent. They contrasted the extensive mass-media coverage of the 1984 murder of a Polish priest, Jerzy Popieluszko, during the Cold War with the lack of the same when it came to more than two dozen priests and other religious people slaughtered by governments and death squads in El Salvador and Guatemala in those years., Having been murdered by agents of a Communist government. Popieluszko was regarded as worthy of attention in the American media of the time, while his counterparts slaughtered by Central American governments allied with the U.S. weren’t. In a similar fashion, white Europeans now being killed, wounded, or rendered homeless by Russian troops are victims worthy of media attention, while Sudanese facing similar fates aren’t.

To be fair, a previous horrific conflict that gripped Sudan’s Darfur region from 2003 to 2008 did receive significant coverage in the Western media thanks to a convergence of unusual circumstances. The chief among them: the massive attention it received from celebrities of the time, including Angelina Jolie, George Clooney, Lady Gaga, and Mia Farrow. Sudan’s media appeal of 15 years ago was, however, an exception to the rules of this world of ours. Today, such celebrities and the media seem to be gripped by a kind of compassion fatigue.

Of course, like most Americans, we were paying no attention whatsoever to developments in Sudan before the fighting started — and before we learned that our own kinfolk were in danger. Now, what choice do we have but to keep up with the latest developments?

For weeks, our relatives were in limbo, trying to reach Egypt. Some were already in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, but stuck there. Others had made it to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. We were by then in touch and they acknowledged that they were “better off than most,” meaning they weren’t being pinned down in a deadly 110° war zone without passports, electricity, or running water, nor were they, like so many Sudanese, trapped in squalid refugee camps.

Only the other day, we finally learned that they had arrived safely in Egypt. Back in Khartoum they’d operated a small school, and they’re now hoping, if they can work their way through Cairo’s bureaucracy, that, as one of them put it, “Next year, Inshallah, we can start our school here, if we are still here and still war-driven.” Their futures have indeed been driven by war into a hard-to-imagine future. As one put it, “Nothing seems to be settling down in Sudan anytime soon.”

Sadly, their assessment seems all too accurate. Since April, at least 10 ceasefires between the army and that paramilitary outfit have broken down more or less instantly. In mid-July, leaders of the six countries bordering Sudan met, in the impressive-sounding words of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi, to formulate “an executive action plan to reach a comprehensive solution to the Sudanese crisis.”

Not so surprisingly, though, no such plan has yet emerged. Given its resources and its geographical centrality, an assortment of richer, stronger countries all want a piece of Sudan, but none of those plans include the war’s victims. To make matters worse, in this war (as in others to come), climate disruption will be a “threat multiplier.” Worse yet, as long as our media fails to see the Sudanese conflict or, more importantly, the Sudanese people as worthy of extensive reporting, the realities of the ongoing war there will continue to lie somewhere beyond the horizon.

In 1963, the summer I turned 11, my mother had a gig evaluating Peace Corps programs in Egypt and Ethiopia. My younger brother and I spent most of that summer in France. We were first in Paris with my mother before she left for North Africa, then with my father and his girlfriend in a tiny town on the Mediterranean. (In the middle of our six-week sojourn there, the girlfriend ran off to marry a Czech she’d met, but that’s another story.)

In Paris, I saw American tourists striding around in their shorts and sandals, cameras slung around their necks, staking out positions in cathedrals and museums. I listened to my mother’s commentary on what she considered their boorishness and insensitivity. In my 11-year-old mind, I tended to agree. I’d already heard the expression “the ugly American” — although I then knew nothing about the prophetic 1958 novel with that title about U.S. diplomatic bumbling in Southeast Asia in the midst of the Cold War — and it seemed to me that those interlopers in France fit the term perfectly.

When I got home, I confided to a friend (whose parents, I learned years later, worked for the CIA) that sometimes, while in Europe, I’d felt ashamed to be an American. “You should never feel that way,” she replied. “This is the best country in the world!”

Indeed, the United States was, then, the leader of what was known as “the free world.” Never mind that, throughout the Cold War, we would actively support dictatorships (in Argentina, Chile, Indonesia, Nicaragua, and El Salvador, among other places) and actually overthrow democratizing governments (in Chile, Guatemala, and Iran, for example). In that era of the G.I. Bill, strong unions, employer-provided healthcare, and general postwar economic dominance, to most of us who were white and within reach of the middle class, the United States probably did look like the best country in the world.

Things do look a bit different today, don’t they? In this century, in many important ways, the United States has become an outlier and, in some cases, even an outlaw. Here are three examples of U.S. behavior that has been literally egregious, three ways in which this country has stood out from the crowd in a sadly malevolent fashion.

Guantánamo, the Forever Prison Camp

In January 2002, the administration of President George W. Bush established an offshore prison camp at the U.S. Naval Base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The idea was to house prisoners taken in what had already been labeled “the Global War on Terror” on a little piece of “U.S.” soil beyond the reach of the American legal system and whatever protections that system might afford anyone inside the country. (If you wonder how the United States had access to a chunk of land on an island nation with which it had the frostiest of relations, including decades of economic sanctions, here’s the story: in 1903, long before Cuba’s 1959 revolution, its government had granted the United States “coaling” rights at Guantánamo, meaning that the U.S. Navy could establish a base there to refuel its ships. The agreement remained in force in 2002, as it does today.)

In the years that followed, Guantánamo became the site of the torture and even murder of individuals the U.S. took prisoner in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other countries ranging from Pakistan to Mauritania. Having written for more than 20 years about such U.S. torture programs that began in October 2001, I find today that I can’t bring myself to chronicle one more time all the horrors that went on at Guantánamo or at CIA “black sites” in countries ranging from Thailand to Poland, or at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, or indeed at the Abu Ghraib prison and Camp NAMA (whose motto was: “No blood, no foul”) in Iraq. If you don’t remember, just go ahead and google those places. I’ll wait.

Thirty men remain at Guantánamo today. Some have never been tried. Some have never even been charged with a crime. Their continued detention and torture, including, as recently as 2014, punitive, brutal forced feeding for hunger strikers, confirmed the status of the United States as a global scofflaw. To this day, keeping Guantánamo open displays this country’s contempt for international law, including the Geneva Conventions and the United Nations Convention against Torture. It also displays contempt for our own legal system, including the Constitution’s “supremacy” clause which makes any ratified international treaty like the Convention against Torture “the supreme law of the land.”

In February 2023, Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, the U.N.’s Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism, became the first representative of the United Nations ever permitted to visit Guantánamo. She was horrified by what she found there, telling the Guardian that the U.S. has “a responsibility to redress the harms it inflicted on its Muslim torture victims. Existing medical treatment, both at the prison camp in Cuba and for detainees released to other countries, was inadequate to deal with multiple problems such as traumatic brain injuries, permanent disabilities, sleep disorders, flashbacks, and untreated post-traumatic stress disorder.”

“These men,” she added, “are all survivors of torture, a unique crime under international law, and in urgent need of care. Torture breaks a person, it is intended to render them helpless and powerless so that they cease to function psychologically, and in my conversations both with current and former detainees I observed the harms it caused.”

The lawyer for one tortured prisoner, Ammar al-Baluchi, reports that al-Baluchi “suffers from traumatic brain injury from having been subjected to ‘walling’ where his head was smashed repeatedly against the wall.” He has entered a deepening cognitive decline, whose “symptoms include headaches, dizziness, difficulty thinking and performing simple tasks.” He cannot sleep for more than two hours at a time, “having been sleep-deprived as a torture technique.”

The United States, Ní Aoláin insists, must provide rehabilitative care for the men it has broken. I have my doubts, however, about the curative powers of any treatment administered by Americans, even civilian psychologists. After all, two of them personally designed and implemented the CIA’s torture program.

The United States should indeed foot the bill for treating not only the 30 men who remain in Guantánamo, but others who have been released and continue to suffer the long-term effects of torture. And of course, it goes without saying that the Biden administration should finally close that illegal prison camp — although that’s not likely to happen. Apparently it’s easier to end an entire war than decide what to do with 30 prisoners.

Unlawful Weapons

The United States is an outlier in another arena as well: the production and deployment of arms widely recognized as presenting an immediate or future danger to non-combatants. The U.S. has steadfastly resisted joining conventions outlawing such weaponry, including cluster bombs (or more euphemistically, “cluster munitions”) and landmines.

In fact, the United States deployed cluster bombs in its wars in Iraq, and Afghanistan. (In the previous century, it dropped 270 million of them in Laos alone while fighting the Vietnam War.) Ironically — one might even say, hypocritically — the U.S. joined 146 other countries in condemning Syrian and Russian use of the same weapons in the Syrian civil war. Indeed, former White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters that if Russia were using them in Ukraine (as, in fact, it is), that would constitute a “war crime.”

Now the U.S. has sent cluster bombs to Ukraine, supposedly to fill a crucial gap in the supply of artillery shells. Mind you, it’s not that the United States doesn’t have enough conventional artillery shells to resupply Ukraine. The problem is that sending them there would leave this country unprepared to fight two simultaneous (and hypothetical) major wars as envisioned in what the Pentagon likes to think of as its readiness doctrine.

What are cluster munitions? They are artillery shells packed with many individual bomblets, or “submunitions.” When one is fired, from up to 20 miles away, it spreads as many as 90 separate bomblets over a wide area, making it an excellent way to kill a lot of enemy soldiers with a single shot.

What places these weapons off-limits for most nations is that not all the bomblets explode. Some can stay where they fell for years, even decades, until as a New York Times editorial put it, “somebody — often, a child spotting a brightly colored, battery-size doodad on the ground — accidentally sets it off.” They can, in other words, lie in wait long after a war is over, sowing farmland and forest with deadly booby traps. That’s why then-Secretary General of the United Nations Ban Ki-moon once spoke of “the world’s collective revulsion at these abhorrent weapons.” That’s why 123 countries have signed the 2008 Convention on Cluster Munitions. Among the holdouts, however, are Russia, Ukraine, and the United States.

According to National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, the cluster bombs the U.S. has now sent to Ukraine each contains 88 bomblets, with, according to the Pentagon, a failure rate of under 2.5%. (Other sources, however, suggest that it could be 14% or higher.) This means that for every cluster shell fired, at least two submunitions are likely to be duds. We have no idea how many of these weapons the U.S. is supplying, but a Pentagon spokesman in a briefing said there are “hundreds of thousands available.” It doesn’t take much mathematical imagination to realize that they present a real future danger to Ukrainian civilians. Nor is it terribly comforting when Sullivan assures the world that the Ukrainian government is “motivated” to minimize risk to civilians as the munitions are deployed, because “these are their citizens that they’re protecting.”

I for one am not eager to leave such cost-benefit risk calculations in the hands of any government fighting for its survival. That’s precisely why international laws against indiscriminate weapons exist — to prevent governments from having to make such calculations in the heat of battle.

Cluster bombs are only a subset of the weapons that leave behind “explosive remnants of war.” Landmines are another. Like Russia, the United States is not found among the 164 countries that have signed the 1999 Ottawa Convention, which required signatories to stop producing landmines, destroy their existing stockpiles, and clear their own territories of mines.

Ironically, the U.S. routinely donates money to pay for mine clearance around the world, which is certainly a good thing, given the legacy it left, for example, in Vietnam. According to the New York Times in 2018:

“Since the war there ended in 1975, at least 40,000 Vietnamese are believed to have been killed and another 60,000 wounded by American land mines, artillery shells, cluster bombs and other ordnance that failed to detonate back then. They later exploded when handled by scrap-metal scavengers and unsuspecting children.”

Hot Enough for Ya?

As I write this piece, about one-third of this country’s population is living under heat alerts. That’s 110 million people. A heatwave is baking Europe, where 16 Italian cities are under warnings, and Greece has closed the Acropolis to prevent tourists from dying of heat stroke. This summer looks to be worse in Europe than even last year’s record-breaker when heat killed more than 60,000 people. In the U.S., too, heat is by far the greatest weather-related killer. Makes you wonder why Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed a bill eliminating required water breaks for outside workers, just as the latest heat wave was due to roll in.

Meanwhile, New York’s Hudson Valley and parts of Vermont, including its capital Montpelier, were inundated this past week by a once-in-a-hundred-year storm, while in South Korea, workers raced to rescue people whose cars were trapped inside the completely submerged Cheongju tunnel after a torrential monsoon rainfall. Korea, along with much of Asia, expects such rains during the summer, but this year’s — like so many other weather statistics — have been literally off the charts. Journalists have finally experienced a sea change (not unlike the extraordinary change in surface water temperatures in the Atlantic Ocean). Gone are the tepid suggestions that climate change “may play a part” in causing extreme weather events. Reporters around the world now simply assume that’s our reality.

When it comes to confronting the climate emergency, though, the United States has once again been bringing up the rear. As far back as 1992, at the United Nations Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, President George H.W. Bush resisted setting any caps on carbon-dioxide emissions. As the New York Times reported then, “Showing a personal interest on the subject, he singlehandedly forced negotiators to excise from the global warming treaty any reference to deadlines for capping emissions of pollutants.” And even then, Washington was resisting the efforts of poorer countries to wring some money from us to help defray the costs of their own environmental efforts.

Some things don’t change all that much. Although President Biden reversed Donald Trump’s move to pull the U.S. out of the Paris climate accords, his own climate record has been a combination of two steps forward (the green energy transition funding found in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, for example) and a big step back (greenlighting the ConocoPhillips Willow oil drilling project on federal land in Alaska’s north slope, not to speak of Senator Joe Manchin’s pride and joy, the $6.6 billion Mountain Valley Pipeline for natural gas).

And when it comes to remediating the damage our emissions have done to poorer countries around the world, this country is still a day late and billions of dollars short. In fact, on July 13th, climate envoy John Kerry told a congressional hearing that “under no circumstances” would the United States pay reparations to developing countries suffering the devastating effects of climate change. Although at the U.N.’s COP 27 conference in November 2022, the U.S. did (at least in principle) support the creation of a fund to help poorer countries ameliorate the effects of climate change, as Reuters reported, “the deal did not spell out who would pay into the fund or how money would be disbursed.”

Welcome to Solastalgia

I learned a new word recently, solastalgia. It actually is a new word, created in 2005 by Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht to describe “the distress that is produced by environmental change impacting on people while they are directly connected to their home environment.” Albrecht’s focus was on Australian rural indigenous communities with centuries of attachment to their particular places, but I think the concept can be extended, at least metaphorically, to the rest of us whose lives are now being affected by the painful presences (and absences) brought on by environmental and climate change: the presence of unprecedented heat, fire, noise, and light; the presence of deadly rain and flooding; and the growing absence of ice at the Earth’s poles or on its mountains. In my own life, among other things, it’s the loss of fireflies and the almost infinite sadness of rarely seeing more than a few faint stars.

Of course, the “best country in the world” wasn’t the only nation involved in creating the horrors I’ve been describing. And the ordinary people who live in this country are not to blame for them. Still, as beneficiaries of this nation’s bounty — its beauty, its aspirations, its profoundly injured but still breathing democracy — we are, as the philosopher Iris Marion Young insisted, responsible for them. It will take organized, collective political action, but there is still time to bring our outlaw country back into what indeed should be a united community of nations confronting the looming horrors on this planet. Or so I hope and believe.

Seeking news coverage about the Adriana, the boat crowded with some 700 people migrating to Europe to seek a better life that sank in mid-June off the coast of Greece, I googled “migrant ship” and got 483,000 search results in one second. Most of the people aboard the Adriana had drowned in the Mediterranean, among them about 100 children.

I did a similar search for the Titan submersible which disappeared the same week in the North Atlantic. That kludged-together pseudo-submarine was taking four wealthy men and the 19-year-old son of one of them to view the ruins of the famed passenger ship, the Titanic. They all died when the Titan imploded shortly after it dove. That Google search came up with 79.3 million search results in less than half a second.

Guardian journalist Arwa Mahdawi wrote a powerful column about the different kinds of attention those two boats received. As she astutely pointed out, we in the anglophone world could hardly help but follow the story of the Oceangate submersible’s ill-fated journey. After all, it was the lead news story of the week everywhere and commanded the attention of three national militaries (to the tune of tens of millions of dollars) for at least five days.

The Adriana was quite another story. As Mahdawi pointed out, the Greek Coast Guard seemed preoccupied with whether the migrants on that boat even “wanted” help, ignoring the fact that many of those aboard the small trawler were children trapped in the ship’s hull and that it was visibly in danger.

On the other hand, few, she pointed out, questioned whether the men in the submersible wanted help — even though its hull was ludicrously bolted shut from the outside prior to departure, making rescue especially unlikely. Glued to the coverage like many Americans, I certainly didn’t think they should be ignored, since every life matters.

But why do people care so much about rich men who paid $250,000 apiece to make what any skilled observer would have told them was a treacherous journey, but not hundreds of migrants determined to better their families’ lives, even if they had to risk life itself to reach European shores? Part of the answer, I suspect, lies in the very different reasons those two groups of travelers set out on their journeys and the kinds of things we value in a world long shaped by Western military power.

An American Preoccupation with the Military

I suspect that we Americans are easily drawn to whatever seems vaguely military in nature, even a “submersible” (rather than a submarine) whose rescue efforts marshaled the resources and expertise of so many U.S. and allied naval forces. We found it anything but boring to learn about U.S. Navy underwater rescue ships and how low you can drop before pressure is likely to capsize a boat. The submersible story, in fact, spun down so many military-style rabbit holes that it was easy to forget what even inspired it.

I’m a Navy spouse and my family, which includes my partner, our two young kids, and various pets, has been moving from one military installation to another over the past decade. In the various communities where we’ve lived, during gatherings with new friends and extended family, the overwhelming interest in my spouse’s career is obvious.

Typical questions have included: “What’s a submarine’s hull made out of?” “How deep can you go?” “What’s the plan if you sink?” “What kind of camo do you wear?” And an unforgettable (to me at least) comment from one of our kids: “That blue camo makes you guys look like blueberries. Do you really want to hide if you fall in the water? What if you need to be rescued?”

Meanwhile, my career as a therapist for military and refugee communities and as a co-founder of Brown University’s Costs of War Project, which might offer a strange antiwar complement to my spouse’s world, seldom even makes it into the conversation.

Aside from the power and mystery our military evokes with its fancy equipment, I think many Americans love to express interest in it because it seems like the embodiment of civic virtue at a time when otherwise we can agree on ever less. In fact, after 20 years of America’s war on terror in response to the September 11, 2001, attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, references to our military are remarkably widespread (if you’re paying attention).

In our militarized culture, we seize on the cosmetic parts like the nature of submarines because they’re easier to talk about than the kind of suffering our military has actually caused across a remarkably wide stretch of the planet in this century. Most of us will take fancy toys like subs over exhausted servicemembers, bloodied civilians, and frightened, malnourished migrants all too often fleeing the damage of our war on terror.

Migration During Wartime

We live in an era marked by mass migration, which has increased over the past five decades. In fact, more people are now living in a country other than where they were born than at any other time in the last half-century.

Among the major reasons people leave their homes as migrants are certainly the search for education and job opportunities, but never forget those fleeing from armed conflict and political persecution. And of course, another deeply related and more significant reason is climate change and the ever more frequent and intense national disasters like flooding and drought that it causes or intensifies.

The migrants on the Adriana had left Afghanistan, Egypt, Libya, Palestine, and Pakistan for a variety of reasons. Some of the Pakistani men, for instance, were seeking jobs that would allow them to house and feed their desperate families. One Syrian teenager, who ended up drowning, had left the war-torn city of Kobani, hoping to someday enter medical school in Germany — a dream that was unlikely to be realized where he lived due to bombed-out schools and hospitals.

In my mind’s eye, however, a very specific shadow loomed over so many of their individual stories: America’s forever wars, the series of military operations that began with our 2001 invasion of Afghanistan (which ended up involving us in air strikes and other military activities in neighboring Pakistan as well) and the similarly disastrous invasion of Iraq in 2003. It would, in the end, metastasize into fighting, training foreign militaries, and intelligence operations in some 85 countries, including each of the countries the Adriana’s passengers hailed from. All in all, the Costs of War Project estimates that the war on terror has led to the displacement of at least 38 million people, many of whom fled for their lives as fighting consumed their worlds.

The route taken by the Adriana through the central Mediterranean Sea is a particularly common one for refugees fleeing armed conflict and its aftermath. It’s also the most deadly route in the world for migrants — and getting deadlier by the year. Before the Adriana went down, the number of fatalities during the first three months of 2023 had already reached its highest point in six years, at 441 people. And during the first half of this year alone, according to UNICEF, at least 289 children have drowned trying to reach Europe.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned — even if on a distinctly small scale — as a therapist in military and refugee communities, it’s this: a painful history almost invariably precedes anyone’s decision to embark on a journey as dangerous as those the migrants of that ill-fated ship undertook. Though I’m sure many on it would not have said that they were fleeing “war,” it’s hard to disentangle this country’s war on terror from the reasons so many of them made their journeys.

One Syrian father who drowned had been heading for Germany, hoping to help his three-year-old son, who had leukemia and needed a treatment unavailable in his devastated country, an area that the U.S. invasion of Iraq first threw into chaos and where war has now deprived millions of healthcare. Of course, it hardly need be noted that his death only ensures his family’s further impoverishment and his son’s possible death from cancer, not to mention what could happen if he and his mom were forced to make a similar journey to Europe to get care.

Pakistan’s War Story

As many as 350 migrants on the Adriana were from Pakistan where the U.S. had been funding and fighting a counterinsurgency war — via drones and air strikes — against Islamist militant groups since 2004. The war on terror has both directly and indirectly upended and destroyed many lives in Pakistan in this century. That includes tens of thousands of deaths from air strikes, but also the effects of a refugee influx from neighboring Afghanistan that stretched the country’s already limited resources, not to speak of the deterioration of its tourism industry and diminished international investments. All in all, Pakistan has lost more than $150 billion dollars over the past 20 years in that fashion while, for ordinary Pakistanis, the costs of living in an ever more devastated country have only increased. Not surprisingly, the number of jobs per capita decreased.

One young man on the migrant ship was traveling to Europe to seek a job so that he could support his extended family. He had sold 26 buffalo — his main source of income — to pay for the journey and was among the 104 people who were finally rescued by the Greek Coast Guard. After that rescue, he was forced to return to Libya where he had no clear plan for how to make it home. Unlike most of the other Pakistanis on the Adriana, he managed to escape with his life, but his is not necessarily a happy ending. As Zeeshan Usmani, Pakistani activist and founder of the antiwar website Pakistan Body Count, points out, “After you’ve sacrificed so much in search of a better life, you’d likely rather drown than return home. You’ve given all you have.”

Rest Stops in a Militarized World

We certainly learned much about the heady conversations between the Titan’s OceanGate CEO, his staff, and certain estranged colleagues before that submersible embarked on its ill-fated journey, and then about the dim lighting and primitive conditions inside the boat. Barely probed in media coverage of the Adriana, however, was what it was like for those migrants to make the trip itself.

What particularly caught my attention was the place from which they left on their journey to hell and back — Libya. After all, that country has quite a grim history to be the debarkation point for so many migrants. A U.S.-led invasion in 2011 toppled dictator Muammar Gaddafi, leaving the country’s remote beaches even less policed than they had been, while Libya itself was divided between two competing governments and a collection of affiliated militias.

In such a chaotic setting, as you might imagine, conditions for migrants transiting through Libya have only continued to deteriorate. Many are kept in warehouses by local authorities for weeks, even months, sometimes without basic needs like blankets and drinking water. Some are even sold into slavery to local residents and those lucky enough to move on toward European shores have to deal with smugglers whose motives and practices, as the Adriana’s story reminds us, are anything but positive (and sometimes terrorizing).

Onward, to the sea itself: When, some 13 hours after the first migrants called for help, the Greek Coast Guard finally responded, it sent a single ship with a crew that included four armed and masked men. The Guard alleges that many of the migrants refused help, waving the men away. Whether or not this was the case, I can imagine their fears that the Greeks, if not smugglers, might at least be allied with them. They also might have feared that the Guard would set them and their children, however young, on rafts to continue drifting at sea, as had happened recently with other migrant ships approached by the Greeks.

If that sounds far-fetched to you, then consider how you would feel if you’d been adrift at sea, hungry, thirsty, and fearful for your life, when men in another boat armed and wearing masks approached you, further rocking a boat that was already threatening to capsize. My guess is: not good.

Uncounted War Deaths

It would be far-fetched to count people like the migrants on the Adriana as “war deaths.” But framing many of their deaths as in some sense war-related should force us to pay attention to ways in which fighting in or around their countries of origin might have impacted their fates. Paying attention to war’s costs would, however, force us Westerners to confront the blood on our hands, as we not only supported (or at least ignored) this country’s wars sufficiently to let them continue for so long, while also backing politicians in both the U.S. and Europe who did relatively little (or far worse) to address the refugee crises that emerged as a result.

To take language used by the Costs of War Project’s Stephanie Savell in her work on what the project calls “indirect war deaths,” migrants like the drowned Syrian teenager seeking an education in Europe could be considered “doubly uncounted” war deaths because they weren’t killed in battle and, as in his case and others like it, their bodies will not be recovered from the Mediterranean’s depths.

When we see stories like his, I think we should all go deeper in our questioning of just what happened, in part by retracing those migrants’ steps to where they began and trying to imagine why they left on such arduous, dangerous journeys. Start with war-gutted economies in countries where millions find slim hope of the kind of decent life that you or I are likely to take for granted, including having a job, a home, health care, and safety from armed violence.

I’ll bet that if you do ask more questions, those migrants will start to seem not just easier to relate to but like the planet’s true adventurers on this planet — and not those billionaires who paid $250,000 apiece for what even I could have told you was an unlikely shot at making it to the ocean floor alive.

If you didn’t know better, you’d think Lloyd Marbet was a dairy farmer or maybe a retired shop teacher. His beard is thick, soft, and gray, his hair pulled back in a small ponytail. In his mid-seventies, he still towers over nearly everyone. His handshake is firm, but there’s nothing menacing about him. He lumbers around like a wise, old hobbling tortoise.

We’re standing in the deco lobby of the historic Kiggins Theater in downtown Vancouver, Washington, about to view a screening of Atomic Bamboozle, a remarkable new documentary by filmmaker Jan Haaken that examines the latest push for atomic power and a nuclear “renaissance” in the Pacific Northwest. Lloyd, a Vietnam veteran, is something of an environmental folk hero in these parts, having led the early 1990s effort to shut down Oregon’s infamous Trojan Nuclear Plant. He’s also one of the unassuming stars of a film that highlights his critical role in that successful Trojan takedown and his continued opposition to nuclear technology.

I’ve always considered Lloyd an optimist, but this evening I sense a bit of trepidation.

“It concerns me greatly that this fight isn’t over yet,” he tells me in his deep baritone. He’s been at this for years and now helps direct the Oregon Conservancy Foundation, which promotes renewable energy, even as he continues to oppose nuclear power. “We learned a lot from Trojan, but that was a long time ago and this is a new era, and many people aren’t aware of the history of nuclear power and the anti-nuclear movement.”

The new push for atomic energy in the Pacific Northwest isn’t just coming from the well-funded nuclear industry, their boosters at the Department of Energy, or billionaires like Bill Gates. It’s also echoing in the mainstream environmental movement among those who increasingly view the technology as a potential climate savior.

In a recent interview with ABC News, Bill Gates couldn’t have been more candid about why he’s embraced the technology of so-called small modular nuclear reactors, or SMRs. “Nuclear energy, if we do it right, will help us solve our climate goals,” he claimed. As it happens, he’s also invested heavily in an “advanced” nuclear power start-up company, TerraPower, based up in Bellevue, Washington, which is hoping to build a small 345-megawatt atomic power reactor in rural Kemmerer, Wyoming.

The nuclear industry is banking on a revival and placing its bets on SMRs like those proposed by the Portland, Oregon-based NuScale Power Corporation, whose novel 60-megawatt SMR design was approved by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) in 2022. While the underlying physics is the same as all nuclear power plants, SMRs are easier to build and safer to run than the previous generation of nuclear facilities — or so go the claims of those looking to profit from them.

NuScale’s design acceptance was a first in this country where 21 SMRs are now in the development stage. Such facilities are being billed as innovative alternatives to the hulking commercial reactors that average one gigawatt of power output per year and take decades and billions of dollars to construct. If SMRs can be brought online quickly, their sponsors claim, they will help mitigate carbon emissions because nuclear power is a zero-emissions energy source.

Never mind that it’s not, since nuclear power plants produce significant greenhouse gas emissions from uranium mining to plant construction to waste disposal. Life cycle analyses of carbon emissions from different energy sources find that, when every stage is taken into account, nuclear energy actually has a carbon footprint similar to, if not larger than, natural gas plants, almost double that of wind energy, and significantly more than solar power.

“SMRs are no longer an abstract concept,” Assistant Secretary for Nuclear Energy Kathryn Huff, a leading nuclear advocate who has the ear of the Biden administration, insisted. “They are real and they are ready for deployment thanks to the hard work of NuScale, the university community, our national labs, industry partners, and the NRC. This is innovation at its finest and we are just getting started here in the U.S.!”

A Risky (and Expensive) Business

Even though Huff claims that SMRs are “ready for deployment,” that’s hardly the case. NuScale’s initial SMR design, under development in Idaho, won’t actually be operable until at least 2029 after clearing more NRC regulatory hurdles. The scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are already calling for fossil-fuel use to be cut by two-thirds over the next 10 years to transition away from carbon-intensive energy, a schedule that, if kept, such small reactors won’t be able to speed up.

And keep in mind that the seemingly prohibitive costs of the SMRs are a distinct problem. NuScale’s original estimate of $55-$58 per megawatt-hour for a proposed project in Utah — already higher than wind and solar which come in at around $50 per megawatt-hour — has recently skyrocketed to $89 per megawatt-hour. And that’s after a $4 billion investment in such energy by U.S. taxpayers, which will cover 43% of the cost of the construction of such plants. This is based on strikingly rosy, if not unrealistic, projections. After all, nuclear power in the U.S. currently averages around $373 per megawatt-hour.

And as the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis put it:

“[N]o one should fool themselves into believing this will be the last cost increase for the NuScale/UAMPS SMR. The project still needs to go through additional design, licensing by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, construction, and pre-operational testing. The experience of other reactors has repeatedly shown that further significant cost increases and substantial schedule delays should be anticipated at any stages of project development.”

Here in the Pacific Northwest, NuScale faces an additional obstacle that couldn’t be more important: What will it do with all the noxious waste such SMRs are certain to produce? In 1980, Oregon voters overwhelmingly passed Measure 7, a landmark ballot initiative that halted the construction of new nuclear power plants until the federal government established a permanent site to store spent nuclear fuel and other high-level radioactive waste. Also included in Measure 7 was a provision that made all new Oregon nuclear plants subject to voter approval. Forty-three years later, no such repository for nuclear waste exists anywhere in the United States, which has prompted corporate lobbyists for the nuclear industry to push several bills that would essentially repeal that Oregon law.

NuScale, no fan of Measure 7, has decided to circumvent it by building its SMRs across the Columbia River in Washington, a state with fewer restrictions. There, Clark County is, in its own fashion, beckoning the industry by putting $200,000 into a feasibility study to see if SMRs could “benefit the region.” There’s another reason NuScale is eyeing the Columbia River corridor: its plants will need water. Like all commercial nuclear facilities, SMRs must be kept cool so they don’t overheat and melt down, creating little Chernobyls. In fact, being “light-water” reactors, the company’s SMRs will require a continuous water supply to operate correctly.

Like other nuclear reactors, SMRs will utilize fission to make heat, which in turn will be used to generate electricity. In the process, they will also produce a striking amount of waste, which may be even more challenging to deal with than the waste from traditional reactors. At the moment, NuScale hopes to store the nasty stuff alongside the gunk that the Trojan Nuclear Plant produces in big dry casks by the Columbia River in Oregon, near the Pacific Ocean.

As with all the waste housed at various nuclear sites nationwide, Trojan’s casks are anything but a permanent solution to the problem of such waste. After all, plutonium garbage will be radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years. Typically enough, even though it’s no longer operating, Trojan still remains a significant risk as it sits near the Cascadia Subduction Zone, where a “megathrust” earthquake is expected someday to violently shake the region and drown it in a gigantic flood of seawater. If that were to happen, much of Oregon’s coastline would be devastated, including the casks holding Trojan’s deadly rubbish. The last big quake of this sort hit the area more than 300 years ago, but it’s just a matter of time before another Big One strikes — undoubtedly, while the radioactive waste in those dry casks is still life-threatening.

Nuclear expert M. V. Ramana, a soft-spoken but authoritative voice in Jan Haaken’s Atomic Bamboozle documentary, put it this way to me:

“The industry’s plans for SMR waste are no different from their plans for radioactive waste from older reactors, which is to say that they want to find some suitable location and a community that is willing to accept the risk of future contamination and bury the waste underground.

“But there is a catch [with SMR’s waste]. Some of these proposed SMR designs use fuel with materials that are chemically difficult to deal with. The sodium-cooled reactor design proposed by Bill Gates would have to figure out how to manage the sodium. Because sodium does not behave well in the presence of water and all repositories face the possibility of water seeping into them, the radioactive waste generated by such designs would have to be processed to remove the sodium. This is unlike the fleet of reactors [currently in operation].”

Other troubles exist, too, explains Ramana. One, in particular, is deeply concerning: the waste from SMRs, like the waste produced in all nuclear plants, could lead to the proliferation of yet more atomic weaponry.

Nuclear Hot Links

As the pro-military Atlantic Council explained in a 2019 report on the deep ties between nuclear power and nuclear weapons in this country:

“The civilian nuclear power sector plays a crucial role in supporting U.S. national security goals. The connectivity of the civilian and military nuclear value chain — including shared equipment, services, and human capital — has created a mutually reinforcing feedback loop, wherein a robust civilian nuclear industry supports the nuclear elements of the national security establishment.”

In fact, governments globally, from France to Pakistan, the United States to China, have a strategic incentive to keep tabs on their nuclear energy sectors, not just for potential accidents but because nuclear waste can be utilized in making nuclear weapons.

Spent fuel, or the waste that’s left over from the fission process, comes out scalding hot and highly radioactive. It must be quickly cooled in pools of water to avoid the possibility of a radioactive meltdown. Since the U.S. has no repository for spent fuel, all this waste has to stay put — first in pools for at least a year or more and then in dry casks where air must be constantly circulated to keep the spent fuel from causing mayhem.

The United States already has a troubling and complicated nuclear-waste problem, which worsens by the day. Annually, the U.S. produces 88,000 metric tons of spent fuel from its commercial nuclear reactors. With the present push to build more plants, including SMRs, spent fuel will only be on the rise. Worse yet, as Ramana points out, SMRs are going to produce more of this incendiary waste per unit of electricity because they will prove less efficient than larger reactors. And therein lies the problem, not just because the amount of radioactive waste the country doesn’t truly know how to deal with will increase, but because more waste means more fuel for nukes.

As Ramana explains:

“When uranium fuel is irradiated in a reactor, the uranium-238 isotope absorbs neutrons and [transmutes] into plutonium-239. This plutonium is in the spent fuel that is discharged by the reactor but can be separated from the rest of the uranium and other chemicals in the irradiated fuel through a chemical process called reprocessing. Once it is separated, plutonium can be used in nuclear weapons. Even though there are technical differences between different kinds of nuclear reactors, all reactors, including SMRs, can be used to make nuclear weapons materials… Any country that acquires a nuclear reactor automatically enhances its ability to make nuclear weapons. Whether it does so or not is a matter of choice.”

Ramana is concerned for good reason. France, as he points out, has Europe’s largest arsenal of nuclear warheads, and its atomic weapons industry is deeply tied to its “peaceful” nuclear energy production. “Without civilian nuclear energy there is no military use of this technology — and without military use there is no civilian nuclear energy,” admitted French President Emmanuel Macron in 2019. No surprise then, that France is investing billions in SMR technology. After all, many SMR designs require enriched uranium and plutonium to operate, and the facilities that produce materials for SMRs can also be reconfigured to produce fuel for nuclear weapons. Put another way, the more countries that possess this technology, the more that will have the ability to manufacture atomic bombs.

As the credits rolled on Atomic Bamboozle, I glanced around the packed theater. I instantly sensed the shock felt by movie-goers who had no idea nuclear power was priming for a comeback in the Northwest. Lloyd Marbet, arms crossed, was seated at the back of the theater, looking calmer than most. Still, I knew he was eager to lead the fight to stop SMRs from reaching the shores of the nearby Columbia River and would infuse a younger generation with a passion to resist the nuclear-industrial complex he’s been challenging for decades.

“Can you believe we’re fighting this shit all over again?” he asked me later with his usual sense of urgency and outrage. “We’ve beat them before and you can damn well bet we’ll do it again.”

Editor's note: This piece originally appeared on TomDispatch.com. The author's citation was corrected.

In April, when Jack Teixeira, a 21-year-old Massachusetts Air National Guardsman with a top-secret clearance, was arrested for posting a trove of classified documents about the Russia-Ukraine war online, the question most often asked was: How did such a young, inexperienced, low-level technician have access to such sensitive material? What I wanted to know was: How did he ever get accepted into the Air Force in the first place?

Teixeira seems to have leaked that secret information for online bragging rights rather than ideological reasons, so his transgression probably wouldn’t have fallen under the military’s newly reinforced regulations on extremist activities. After he was indicted, however, perturbing details about his behavior emerged, including his online searches for violent extremist events, an outsized interest in guns, and social media posts that an FBI affidavit called “troubling” and I’d call creepy.

Ideological zealotry is disruptive wherever it takes root, even if it never erupts into violence, but it’s particularly chilling inside the military. After all, servicemembers have access to weapons and the training to use them. Even more significant, a kind of quid pro quo exists between the military and civilians. Trust is paramount within the military and every service member is supposed to abide by a code of ethics, as well as by the Constitution, to which all of them swear an oath.

In theory, a democratic civil society invests its military with the authority to use force in its name in exchange for the principled conduct of its members. Military service is supposed to be a higher calling and soldiers better (or at least better behaving) people. So when active-duty personnel or veterans use violence against the system they’re sworn to protect, the sting of betrayal is especially sharp.

Whoops!

In a photo of Teixeira in a neat dress uniform that accompanied media reports, he’s a bright-eyed kid with stick-out ears and a sweet half-smile. He looks young and promising, the kind of guy people offer thanks to when they see him in uniform at an airport. In reality, however, everything else about him was a red flag.

The Washington Post found videos and chat logs that suggested he was getting ready for a race war. Former classmates told CNN that he had been obsessed with guns and war. He was suspended from high school for comments he made about Molotov cocktails. His first application for a gun license was denied, but he kept trying and was eventually approved, over time amassing a trove of handguns, rifles, shotguns, high-capacity weapons, and a gas mask, which he kept in a gun locker about two feet from his bed.

Granted, some of this activity didn’t begin until he enlisted in 2019 and no one’s advocating that military recruiters make bedroom checks. Still, recruits are supposed to go through a careful vetting process. Family, friends, teachers, and classmates may be interviewed to assess a recruit’s character and fitness. Such background checks are designed to detect things like racist tattoos, drug use, gang affiliation, or arrest records, but are inevitably limited in what they can discover about young people without much life experience, including the teenage gamers the Air Force woos for their up-to-the-minute technical skills who may not prove to be the most level-headed crew — people, in fact, like Jack Teixeira.

In his case in particular, the vetting of service members for handling the top-secret or sensitive-compartmentalized-information security clearances he received in 2022 is supposed to be particularly thorough. I was first faced with this reality when a government agent showed up at my door, flashed a badge, and asked me about a neighbor applying for a clearance. He inquired all too casually about whether I had noticed anything telling, like lots of liquor bottles in his trash. (That left me wondering how many people check their neighbor’s garbage.)

Teixeira’s posts of classified material taken from the computers of the intelligence unit at the Cape Cod air base where he was stationed first appeared on Thug Shaker Central, a small, obscure chat group which appealed largely to teenage boys through adolescent humor, a fetishistic love of guns, and extreme bigotry. It was hosted on the gamer-centric platform Discord. At first, he posted transcribed documents, then began photographing hundreds more in his parents’ kitchen and started uploading copies of them filled with secret materials on the U.S., its allies, and its enemies. Someone at Thug Shaker began sharing those posts more widely and they made their way to Russian Telegram channels, Twitter, and beyond — and Teixeira was in big trouble.

Since he seems to have made no effort to hide who he was, no one could call him the world’s smartest criminal. He made it all too easy for the FBI to track him down. By then, Air Force officials had already admonished him for making suspicious searches of classified intelligence networks, but allowed him to stay in his job. That’s where the Justice Department charged him with the retention and transmission of classified information under the Espionage Act of 1917, which had already caught in its maw journalists, dissidents, whistleblowers (including Daniel Ellsberg, who, to the end of his life, wanted to challenge the act in court on First Amendment grounds), and most recently, another hoarder of classified documents, former President Donald Trump.

In June, Teixeira pleaded not guilty on six counts, each carrying a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000. Probably just as happy to let the civilians handle it, the Air Force removed the intelligence division from his unit, but it hasn’t yet brought charges against him.

Meanwhile, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin ordered a policy and procedure review to assess how bad Pentagon security really was. The results, made public on July 5th, gave the military a passing grade but, with a firm grasp of the obvious, recommended more careful monitoring of the online activities of personnel with security clearances.

Small Numbers, Outsized Impact

Rhetoric and regulations addressing extremism in the military date back to at least 1969 and have been tinkered with since, usually in response to hard-to-ignore events like the murder of 13 people at Fort Hood by Army psychiatrist Nidal Hasan in 2009. In reaction to the material Chelsea Manning (who was anything but an extremist) leaked to WikiLeaks to reveal human-rights abuses connected to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Department of Defense created a counter-insider threat program around 2014. Six years later, the Army revised its policies for the first time to face the potential role of social media in extremist activities.

Tracking and reporting on extremism in the military has not been without controversy, which tended to be of the let’s-not-air-our-dirty-laundry-in-public variety. In 1986 when, for instance, the Southern Poverty Law Center informed the Department of Defense (DoD) that active-duty Marines were participating in the Ku Klux Klan, the Pentagon responded that the “DoD does not prohibit personnel from joining such organizations as the Ku Klux Klan.” (It still doesn’t name or ban specific organizations in its regulations.) And when, in 2009, a Department of Homeland Security assessment warned of right-wing extremists recruiting veterans, conservative politicians and veterans groups killed the report which, they claimed, was insulting to veterans.

Then came the invasion of the Capitol on January 6, 2021. A striking number of participants proved to have military connections or histories — 13.4% to 17.5% of those charged, depending on who’s counting — and the Pentagon could no longer ignore the problem. Defense Secretary Austin ordered an unprecedented, day-long stand-down to educate all military personnel on extremist activity and then created the Countering Extremist Activity Working Group, or CEAWG, to come up with a plan for dealing with that anything-but-new reality.

It’s not possible to pin down the true scope of the phenomenon, but the Center for Strategic and International Studies found active-duty and reserve personnel were linked to 7 of the 110 terrorist attacks and plots the FBI investigated in 2020. That same year, the New York Times estimated that active-duty military personnel and veterans accounted for at least 25% of antigovernment militias. In 2022, the Anti-Defamation League identified 117 active-duty service personnel and 11 reservists on a leaked membership list from the Oath Keepers, the far-right antigovernment militia prominently involved in January 6th events. CEAWG, on the other hand, claimed that, in 2021, there were fewer than 100 substantiated cases of military personnel involved in officially prohibited extremist activity in the past year.

While such reckonings suggest that just a small number of servicemembers are actively involved in extremist violence, even a relative few should be concerning for obvious reasons.

Report, Revise, Reconsider

Opportunities to identify and prevent extremism arise at three junctures: during recruitment, throughout the active-duty years, and in the discharge process when those transitioning back to civilian life may be especially susceptible to promises of camaraderie and ready action from extremist groups. As 2021 ended, the Pentagon’s working group reported that it had addressed such vulnerabilities by standardizing questionnaires, clarifying definitions, and — that old bureaucratic fallback — commissioning a new study.

The revised rules included a long list of banned “extremist activities” and a long definition of what constitutes “active participation.” In addition to the obvious — violence, plans to overthrow the government, and the leaking of sensitive information — prohibited acts include liking, sharing, or retweeting online content that supports extremist activities or encouraging DoD personnel to disobey lawful orders with the intention of disrupting military activities.

Active participation includes organizing, leading, or simply attending a meeting of an extremist group and distributing its literature on or off base. Commanders may declare places off-limits where “counseling, encouraging, or inciting Service members to refuse to perform duty or to desert” occurs. That also sounds like it could apply to gatherings of antiwar groups like Veterans for Peace, where supporting war resisters is part of their mission. And therein lies the rub.

As in the past, the updates focus on activity, rather than speech, which is a good thing, but figuring out how to suppress extremism without turning into the thought police is challenging, particularly in light of the prominence of social media and the impossibility of monitoring everyone’s online activity. The result: regulations that are both too vague and too restrictive and a recipe for implementing the rules unfairly.

In military culture, reporting is often equated with snitching and retaliation is common. Since it’s not practicable to draw bright lines between what’s allowed and what isn’t, that determination rests ultimately (and sometimes ominously) with commanders. The regulations urge them to balance First Amendment rights with “good order and discipline and national security.” In reality, however, such decisions too often fall prey to bias, distrust, self-interest, racial disparities, and a history of bad faith.

Then there’s the issue of paying for the extra work the rules require. The only relevant funding seems to be a puny $13.5 million for the insider-threat program. Meanwhile, the Pentagon budget that recently exited the Republican-controlled House Appropriations Committee makes it a “conservative priority” to defund the position of Deputy Inspector General for Diversity and Inclusion and Extremism in the Military. So anti-extremism may prove but one more victim of anti-diversity and, even without that, if money is a measure of commitment, the military’s commitment to fighting extremism is looking lukewarm at best.

Consistently Inconsistent

Recently, the Center for New American Security, a D.C.-based think tank, damned the military’s efforts to address domestic violent extremism historically as being all too often “reactionary, sporadic, and inconsistent” when it comes to recognizing the problem to be solved, or even admitting there is one. Though harsh, it’s not an unfair assessment.

The National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), a Department of Homeland Security research center at the University of Maryland, analyzed an extensive database of extremist activity in the U.S. called PIRUS and found that 628 Americans with military backgrounds were involved in such criminal activity from 1990 to March 2023. Almost all of them were male veterans, with Marines showing up in disproportionately large numbers (as they did among the January 6th arrestees). A slight majority of the cases considered involved violence and a large majority involved white supremacist militias. And here’s an intriguing fact that probably won’t surprise anyone who’s followed the U.S. military’s dismal war record in this century: extremists with a military background were less successful in carrying out violent attacks than those without it.

Indeed, the extremist threat appears to be growing. A chart in a research brief looking at PIRUS data shows little blips for extremist cases in most years until the past six, including not only the (hopefully) unrepeatable 2021, but the years on either side of it.

Activities that rise to the level of criminal conduct, however, tell only part of the story.

The RAND Corporation interviewed a large, demographically representative sample of veterans — mostly older, white, middle-class men who joined the military before 9/11 — to assess sympathy for extremist organizations and ideas. The researchers found no evidence that veterans support violent extremist groups or their ideologies more than the rest of the American public does.

If you find that reassuring, however, think again. After all, according to the 2022 Yahoo! News/YouGov poll Rand used for comparison, a little more than a third of the U.S. population agrees with the Great Replacement Theory that “[a] group of people in this country are trying to replace native-born Americans with immigrants and people of color who share their political views.” Am I supposed to be comforted because only about 5% fewer veterans think that?

Then there’s the finding that almost 18% of the veterans surveyed who agree with one of four cited extremist ideologies also support violence as a means of political change. That finding is scary, too, because extremist groups can take advantage of such veterans’ support for political violence to recruit them for their often all-too-violent purposes.

All of this leaves me very uneasy, both about what is being done and what should or even could be done. I worry about how much more extreme and violent this country has become in this century of failed wars. And I worry about anti-extremism policies sliding into prosecuting — and persecuting — people for disfavored beliefs, while immediate danger glides in from some unexpected source — like a 21-year-old techie, who, for reasons no one anticipated, pulled off one hell of a breach of national security right under the military’s nose.

Editor's note: formatting fixed.

In case you hadn’t noticed — and how could you not? — there have been more than 500 (yes, 500-plus!) wildfires burning across the vast reaches of Canada, an unheard-of number, and more than half of them completely out of (human) control in a record-shattering fire season. That’s been true for seemingly endless weeks now with no end in sight. (And, by the way, elsewhere in the northern hemisphere, Siberia is having its own possibly record fire season.) If you didn’t notice any of this, though, I have a possible explanation. Perhaps the vast clouds of smoke from those fires that recently gave the skies of Chicago and Detroit, New York and Washington, D.C., the worst air quality on the planet blurred your vision.

Anyway, if you were to look back, say, a decade or two ago, I have no doubt you would be struck by how few commentators even faintly imagined the planet we’re living on at this very moment — and not, as predicted, 2033 or 2043 or 2053, if ever. Few imagined that the oceans would heat so quickly; that Texas and parts of the southern U.S. would be experiencing the sorts of fever-dream temperatures this summer that once might, at worst, have been associated with northern India; that Europe would, in recent years, have recorded heat and drought of a sort not seen in half a millennium; that China would break heat, fire, and flood records, while Antarctica’s sea ice hit record lows.

Last season, when fires fiercely scorched northern Canada, who would have predicted that this year far more acreage would burn nationwide long before the fire season was faintly near an end, sending yet more carbon into the atmosphere to make future seasons even worse? Oh, and just recently, the planet experienced its hottest day ever, in all of human history — or at least during the last 125,000 years. But count on one thing: it won’t be the hottest day ever for long. (Oh, wait! The very next day, July 4th, proved in true patriotic fashion to be even hotter and the following day tied it for the record with, by the way, 57 million Americans under an extreme heat watch!) In the weeks to come, we may even pass the 1.5°C temperature limit set just eight years ago as part of the Paris climate agreement. And the saddest thing of all is that I could go on and on… and yes, on.

Hey, I don’t blame you if you’re shocked. Honestly, who knew? I didn’t and I suspect I was typical. Early in this century, I certainly grasped something of the possible grim future reality of climate change, but I didn’t personally expect to live through it in any major way. Though I already imagined it as a potential nightmare for future life on this planet — even possibly the nightmare of all times — the emphasis was on that “future.” I imagined my children (or possibly, though they didn’t exist yet, my grandchildren) having to face such a potential horror, but not me, not in a major way in my own lifetime and in that inability to truly grasp what was coming I was in the company of many climate scientists.

And yet I now find myself, like you, like all of us, experiencing the idea of future global warming being transformed before my very eyes into a climate emergency of the first order.

Nuking Planet Earth

Still, despite all the climate surprises in store for me and my generation, there were certain things that we already knew. For instance, just to change the subject for a moment — and I think you’ll see why soon enough — who today doesn’t know that, in the midst of World War II, scientists working for the American government invented (and yes, that word works as well for what they did as for Edison and the telephone) atomic weaponry — that is, a way to destroy not just two Japanese cities to end World War II in the Pacific but, as it turned out, humanity itself, lock, stock and barrel!

If you don’t believe me, just check out what a relatively moderate atomic war on this planet might mean in terms of what’s come to be known as “nuclear winter.” In the wake of such a conflict, it’s expected that billions of us would all too literally starve to death. (And as with climate change, count on one thing: the reality is likely to be worse than the predictions.)

Admittedly, from the beginning, the idea of such weaponry made at least a few of the scientists who created it, not to speak of the president of the United States, anxious. As President Harry Truman scrawled in his diary: “We have discovered the most terrible bomb in the history of the world. It may be the fire destruction prophesied in the Euphrates Valley Era, after Noah and his fabulous Ark.”

One of the leading atomic scientists, J. Robert Oppenheimer, later recalled the experience this way:

We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty, and to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, ‘Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.’ I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.

Still, when two atomic bombs took out Hiroshima and Nagasaki, who could have imagined what the fallout of every sort from such weaponry, if enough of them were used in some future war, could potentially do to humanity (and much of the rest of life on this planet as well)? And once the Cold War ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, who could have imagined that, in 2023, a Russian leader named Vladimir Putin, would rule over a country with more nuclear weapons than any other on the planet and would once again be threatening to use what are now called “tactical nuclear weapons” (even though many of them are far more powerful than the two that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki) in — yes! — Europe (okay, officially, Ukraine) to save himself from the hellish war he launched?

Or for that matter, who in 1991 could have guessed that, more than three decades later, the U.S. and China would be locked in what has come to be known as a “new cold war” with the issue of the island of Taiwan at its heart and Americans gaining an ever more cold-war-style mentality? In that context, who would have guessed that, in 2023, China would be rushing to massively upgrade its nuclear arsenal, while, in the coming decades (if they were to come, of course), the U.S. was planning to invest another $2 trillion in the so-called modernization (a concept that doesn’t go very well with the potential ultimate destruction of Planet Earth) of its own vast arsenal. Or who could have guessed that, by 2023, nine countries would be nuclear-armed, including India and Pakistan (gulp!), Israel, and — yikes! — North Korea.

Admittedly, since August 9, 1945, though many nuclear weapons have been “tested,” most recently by the North Koreans, none have yet been used in war. Still, don’t faintly think it’s beyond the bounds of possibility, starting in Ukraine.

Another Kind of Fallout

But here’s the tricky thing. While some of the atomic scientists who helped create the first nuclear weapons quickly grasped that they would have the potential to destroy humanity, none of them imagined that humanity had already invented a means to do so all too “peacefully” by burning fossil fuels. None of them knew that putting carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere might, in the end, fry the planet in something like slow motion rather than in an atomic instant. In other words, humanity had, however unknowingly as part of the industrial revolution, created another sort of “weaponry” that could again — not in a brief set of warring moments but over endless decades — do this planet in. That “bomb” couldn’t, in a sense, have been more peaceful.

Think of it this way: humanity had — once knowingly and once without realizing it — created systems with the sort of devastating fallout that could, in the end, do us all in and that represents a unique accomplishment of sorts. Of course, had more of us been paying attention, we would have realized this far sooner when it came to climate change. After all, in 1965, a science advisory committee provided President Lyndon Johnson with a report on the phenomenon that predicted what the carbonization of the atmosphere might do to this planet early in the next century with remarkable accuracy. So it wasn’t that we weren’t (or shouldn’t have been) warned. Johnson himself, of course, was so wrapped up in a disastrous war in Vietnam that he (and his advisers) seem to have paid no attention whatsoever.

The other crew who knew all too much about the heating of this planet early were the guys who, in the previous century, ran the giant fossil-fuel companies. From the 1970s on, Exxon’s scientists, for instance, kept that company’s executives all too up to date on the future fallout from the burning of the fossil fuels they were making their fortunes off of and those CEOs often responded — surprise! surprise! — remarkably decisively by ignoring the news, denying it, or even supporting organizations deeply involved in climate-denialism.

Ground Zeros

Give us — that is, humanity — credit. No other species could possibly have discovered two different ways to destroy itself, not to speak of most of the other creatures on Planet Earth. And in 2023, living in an ever more extreme country on an ever more extreme planet at a moment when both of those ways of ultimate devastation are once again distinctly in play, we shouldn’t underestimate who we are. In fact, the question of whether there is a third way is now up for grabs.

In other words, whatever you do, don’t sell us short! In the end (and I use that phrase advisedly), we may prove even more remarkable than we imagined and the fallout from the human brain almost beyond conception. In other words, don’t for a second think that humanity is restricted to just two versions of end-time. After all, as in 1945 with the atomic scientists, so today, some of the scientific figures who created artificial intelligence (AI) are beginning to warn us that it might ultimately (in every sense of the term) do us in.

Among them is the man known as “the godfather of AI,” Geoffrey Hinton, who quit his job at Google to express his fears about where we might indeed be heading, artificially speaking. “The idea that this stuff could actually get smarter than people,” he said, “a few people believed that, but most people thought it was way off. And I thought it was way off. I thought it was 30 to 50 years or even longer away. Obviously, I no longer think that.” Now, he fears not just killer robots beyond human control but “the risk of super intelligent AI taking over control from people…It’s a threat for the Chinese and for the Americans and for the Europeans, just like a global nuclear war was.”

And keep in mind that we’re just in the earliest moments of AI’s development. Who knows, as Michael Klare recently warned us, what future global militaries run by “robot generals” with potential access to our nuclear arsenals could do to us.

The “fallout” from AI is still hard to begin to assess, even as militaries around the globe double their efforts to adapt it for uses of all sorts. And keep in mind, lest we underestimate humanity’s remarkably inventive powers yet again, that while AI might prove to be the third way we’ve created to potentially do ourselves in, even it might not be the last, not given who we are.

Whether another nuclear weapon is ever used or not (don’t do it Vlad!), in the heat of this record-breaking summer, this planet and everything on it are already suffering more and faster than just about anyone expected from one version of humanity’s fallout.

There was a phrase used with the atomic bombs that took out Hiroshima and Nagasaki and reused after September 11, 2001, for the site in New York where al-Qaeda hijackers took down the World Trade Center: “Ground Zero.” Increasingly, with the never-ending burning of fossil fuels, Ground Zero is no longer a single city of any sort, but this planet itself and, whether we’ve already found a third way to destroy ourselves (and so much else) or not, there is something awesomely ominous about our urge to destroy so much with our multiplying versions of fallout.

A world in which machines governed by artificial intelligence (AI) systematically replace human beings in most business, industrial, and professional functions is horrifying to imagine. After all, as prominent computer scientists have been warning us, AI-governed systems are prone to critical errors and inexplicable “hallucinations,” resulting in potentially catastrophic outcomes. But there’s an even more dangerous scenario imaginable from the proliferation of super-intelligent machines: the possibility that those nonhuman entities could end up fighting one another, obliterating all human life in the process.

The notion that super-intelligent computers might run amok and slaughter humans has, of course, long been a staple of popular culture. In the prophetic 1983 film “WarGames,” a supercomputer known as WOPR (for War Operation Plan Response and, not surprisingly, pronounced “whopper”) nearly provokes a catastrophic nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union before being disabled by a teenage hacker (played by Matthew Broderick). The “Terminator” movie franchise, beginning with the original 1984 film, similarly envisioned a self-aware supercomputer called “Skynet” that, like WOPR, was designed to control U.S. nuclear weapons but chooses instead to wipe out humanity, viewing us as a threat to its existence.

Though once confined to the realm of science fiction, the concept of supercomputers killing humans has now become a distinct possibility in the very real world of the near future. In addition to developing a wide variety of “autonomous,” or robotic combat devices, the major military powers are also rushing to create automated battlefield decision-making systems, or what might be called “robot generals.” In wars in the not-too-distant future, such AI-powered systems could be deployed to deliver combat orders to American soldiers, dictating where, when, and how they kill enemy troops or take fire from their opponents. In some scenarios, robot decision-makers could even end up exercising control over America’s atomic weapons, potentially allowing them to ignite a nuclear war resulting in humanity’s demise.

Now, take a breath for a moment. The installation of an AI-powered command-and-control (C2) system like this may seem a distant possibility. Nevertheless, the U.S. Department of Defense is working hard to develop the required hardware and software in a systematic, increasingly rapid fashion. In its budget submission for 2023, for example, the Air Force requested $231 million to develop the Advanced Battlefield Management System (ABMS), a complex network of sensors and AI-enabled computers designed to collect and interpret data on enemy operations and provide pilots and ground forces with a menu of optimal attack options. As the technology advances, the system will be capable of sending “fire” instructions directly to “shooters,” largely bypassing human control.

“A machine-to-machine data exchange tool that provides options for deterrence, or for on-ramp [a military show-of-force] or early engagement,” was how Will Roper, assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition, technology, and logistics, described the ABMS system in a 2020 interview. Suggesting that “we do need to change the name” as the system evolves, Roper added, “I think Skynet is out, as much as I would love doing that as a sci-fi thing. I just don’t think we can go there.”

And while he can’t go there, that’s just where the rest of us may, indeed, be going.

Mind you, that’s only the start. In fact, the Air Force’s ABMS is intended to constitute the nucleus of a larger constellation of sensors and computers that will connect all U.S. combat forces, the Joint All-Domain Command-and-Control System (JADC2, pronounced “Jad-C-two”). “JADC2 intends to enable commanders to make better decisions by collecting data from numerous sensors, processing the data using artificial intelligence algorithms to identify targets, then recommending the optimal weapon… to engage the target,” the Congressional Research Service reported in 2022.

AI and the Nuclear Trigger

Initially, JADC2 will be designed to coordinate combat operations among “conventional” or non-nuclear American forces. Eventually, however, it is expected to link up with the Pentagon’s nuclear command-control-and-communications systems (NC3), potentially giving computers significant control over the use of the American nuclear arsenal. “JADC2 and NC3 are intertwined,” General John E. Hyten, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, indicated in a 2020 interview. As a result, he added in typical Pentagonese, “NC3 has to inform JADC2 and JADC2 has to inform NC3.”

It doesn’t require great imagination to picture a time in the not-too-distant future when a crisis of some sort — say a U.S.-China military clash in the South China Sea or near Taiwan — prompts ever more intense fighting between opposing air and naval forces. Imagine then the JADC2 ordering the intense bombardment of enemy bases and command systems in China itself, triggering reciprocal attacks on U.S. facilities and a lightning decision by JADC2 to retaliate with tactical nuclear weapons, igniting a long-feared nuclear holocaust.

The possibility that nightmare scenarios of this sort could result in the accidental or unintended onset of nuclear war has long troubled analysts in the arms control community. But the growing automation of military C2 systems has generated anxiety not just among them but among senior national security officials as well.

As early as 2019, when I questioned Lieutenant General Jack Shanahan, then director of the Pentagon’s Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, about such a risky possibility, he responded, “You will find no stronger proponent of integration of AI capabilities writ large into the Department of Defense, but there is one area where I pause, and it has to do with nuclear command and control.” This “is the ultimate human decision that needs to be made” and so “we have to be very careful.” Given the technology’s “immaturity,” he added, we need “a lot of time to test and evaluate [before applying AI to NC3].”

In the years since, despite such warnings, the Pentagon has been racing ahead with the development of automated C2 systems. In its budget submission for 2024, the Department of Defense requested $1.4 billion for the JADC2 in order “to transform warfighting capability by delivering information advantage at the speed of relevance across all domains and partners.” Uh-oh! And then, it requested another $1.8 billion for other kinds of military-related AI research.

Pentagon officials acknowledge that it will be some time before robot generals will be commanding vast numbers of U.S. troops (and autonomous weapons) in battle, but they have already launched several projects intended to test and perfect just such linkages. One example is the Army’s Project Convergence, involving a series of field exercises designed to validate ABMS and JADC2 component systems. In a test held in August 2020 at the Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona, for example, the Army used a variety of air- and ground-based sensors to track simulated enemy forces and then process that data using AI-enabled computers at Joint Base Lewis McChord in Washington state. Those computers, in turn, issued fire instructions to ground-based artillery at Yuma. “This entire sequence was supposedly accomplished within 20 seconds,” the Congressional Research Service later reported.

Less is known about the Navy’s AI equivalent, “Project Overmatch,” as many aspects of its programming have been kept secret. According to Admiral Michael Gilday, chief of naval operations, Overmatch is intended “to enable a Navy that swarms the sea, delivering synchronized lethal and nonlethal effects from near-and-far, every axis, and every domain.” Little else has been revealed about the project.

“Flash Wars” and Human Extinction

Despite all the secrecy surrounding these projects, you can think of ABMS, JADC2, Convergence, and Overmatch as building blocks for a future Skynet-like mega-network of super-computers designed to command all U.S. forces, including its nuclear ones, in armed combat. The more the Pentagon moves in that direction, the closer we’ll come to a time when AI possesses life-or-death power over all American soldiers along with opposing forces and any civilians caught in the crossfire.

Such a prospect should be ample cause for concern. To start with, consider the risk of errors and miscalculations by the algorithms at the heart of such systems. As top computer scientists have warned us, those algorithms are capable of remarkably inexplicable mistakes and, to use the AI term of the moment, “hallucinations” — that is, seemingly reasonable results that are entirely illusionary. Under the circumstances, it’s not hard to imagine such computers “hallucinating” an imminent enemy attack and launching a war that might otherwise have been avoided.

And that’s not the worst of the dangers to consider. After all, there’s the obvious likelihood that America’s adversaries will similarly equip their forces with robot generals. In other words, future wars are likely to be fought by one set of AI systems against another, both linked to nuclear weaponry, with entirely unpredictable — but potentially catastrophic — results.

Not much is known (from public sources at least) about Russian and Chinese efforts to automate their military command-and-control systems, but both countries are thought to be developing networks comparable to the Pentagon’s JADC2. As early as 2014, in fact, Russia inaugurated a National Defense Control Center (NDCC) in Moscow, a centralized command post for assessing global threats and initiating whatever military action is deemed necessary, whether of a non-nuclear or nuclear nature. Like JADC2, the NDCC is designed to collect information on enemy moves from multiple sources and provide senior officers with guidance on possible responses.

China is said to be pursuing an even more elaborate, if similar, enterprise under the rubric of “Multi-Domain Precision Warfare” (MDPW). According to the Pentagon’s 2022 report on Chinese military developments, its military, the People’s Liberation Army, is being trained and equipped to use AI-enabled sensors and computer networks to “rapidly identify key vulnerabilities in the U.S. operational system and then combine joint forces across domains to launch precision strikes against those vulnerabilities.”

Picture, then, a future war between the U.S. and Russia or China (or both) in which the JADC2 commands all U.S. forces, while Russia’s NDCC and China’s MDPW command those countries’ forces. Consider, as well, that all three systems are likely to experience errors and hallucinations. How safe will humans be when robot generals decide that it’s time to “win” the war by nuking their enemies?

If this strikes you as an outlandish scenario, think again, at least according to the leadership of the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, a congressionally mandated enterprise that was chaired by Eric Schmidt, former head of Google, and Robert Work, former deputy secretary of defense. “While the Commission believes that properly designed, tested, and utilized AI-enabled and autonomous weapon systems will bring substantial military and even humanitarian benefit, the unchecked global use of such systems potentially risks unintended conflict escalation and crisis instability,” it affirmed in its Final Report. Such dangers could arise, it stated, “because of challenging and untested complexities of interaction between AI-enabled and autonomous weapon systems on the battlefield” — when, that is, AI fights AI.

Though this may seem an extreme scenario, it’s entirely possible that opposing AI systems could trigger a catastrophic “flash war” — the military equivalent of a “flash crash” on Wall Street, when huge transactions by super-sophisticated trading algorithms spark panic selling before human operators can restore order. In the infamous “Flash Crash” of May 6, 2010, computer-driven trading precipitated a 10% fall in the stock market’s value. According to Paul Scharre of the Center for a New American Security, who first studied the phenomenon, “the military equivalent of such crises” on Wall Street would arise when the automated command systems of opposing forces “become trapped in a cascade of escalating engagements.” In such a situation, he noted, “autonomous weapons could lead to accidental death and destruction at catastrophic scales in an instant.”

At present, there are virtually no measures in place to prevent a future catastrophe of this sort or even talks among the major powers to devise such measures. Yet, as the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence noted, such crisis-control measures are urgently needed to integrate “automated escalation tripwires” into such systems “that would prevent the automated escalation of conflict.” Otherwise, some catastrophic version of World War III seems all too possible. Given the dangerous immaturity of such technology and the reluctance of Beijing, Moscow, and Washington to impose any restraints on the weaponization of AI, the day when machines could choose to annihilate us might arrive far sooner than we imagine and the extinction of humanity could be the collateral damage of such a future war.

In early April 2003, as American forces sought to wrap up their conquest of the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, and take strongholds to its north, the Marine Corps formed “Task Force Tripoli.” It was commanded by General John F. Kelly (who would later serve as Donald Trump’s White House chief of staff). His force was charged with capturing the city of Tikrit, the birthplace of dictator Saddam Hussein. The obvious eastern approach to it was blocked because a bridge over the Tigris River had been damaged. Since the Marines assembled the Task Force in northeastern Baghdad, its personnel needed to cross the treacherous, hard-flowing Tigris twice to advance on their target. Near Tikrit, while traversing the Swash Bridge, they came under fire from military remnants of Saddam’s regime.

Still, Tikrit fell on April 15th and, historically speaking, that double-crossing of the Tigris was a small triumph for American forces. After all, that wide, deep, swift-flowing waterway had traditionally posed logistical problems for any military force. It had, in fact, done so throughout recorded history, proving a daunting barrier for the militaries of Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon and the Achaemenid Cyrus the Great, for Alexander the Great and Roman Emperor Justinian, for the Mongols and the Safavid Iranians, for imperial British forces and finally General John H. Kelly. However, just as Kelly’s stature was diminished by his later collaboration with America’s only openly autocratic president, so, too, in this century the Tigris has been diminished in every sense and all too abruptly. No longer what the Kurds once called the Ava Mezin, “the Great Water,” it is now a shadow of its former self.

Fording the Tigris

Thanks at least in part to human-caused climate change, the Tigris and its companion river, the Euphrates, on which Iraqis still so desperately depend, have seen alarmingly low water flow in recent years. As Iraqi posts on social media now regularly observe in horror, at certain places, if you stand on the banks of those once mighty bodies of water, you can see through to their riverbeds. You can even, Iraqis report, ford them on foot in some spots, a previously unheard-of phenomenon.

Those two rivers no longer pose the military obstacle they used to. They were once synonymous with Iraq. The very word Mesopotamia, the premodern way of referring to what we now call Iraq, means “between rivers” in Greek, a reference, of course, to the Tigris and the Euphrates. Climate change and the damming of those waters in neighboring upriver countries are expected to cause the flow of the Euphrates to decline by 30% and of the Tigris by a whopping 60% by 2099, which would be a death sentence for many Iraqis.

Twenty years ago, with President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, two oil men and climate-change denialists, in the White House and new petroleum finds dwindling, it seemed like the most natural thing in the world for them to use the 9/11 horror as an excuse to commit “regime change” in Baghdad (which had no role in taking down the World Trade Center in New York and part of the Pentagon in Washington, D.C.). They could thereby, they thought, create a friendly puppet regime and lift the U.S. and U.N. sanctions then in place on the export of Iraqi petroleum, imposed as a punishment for dictator Saddam Hussein’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait.

There was a deep irony that haunted the decision to invade Iraq to (so to speak) liberate its oil exports. After all, burning gasoline in cars causes the earth to heat up, so the very black gold that both Saddam Hussein and George W. Bush coveted turned out to be a Pandora’s box of the worst sort. Remember, we now know that, in Washington’s “war on terror” in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, the U.S. military emitted at least 400 million metric tons of heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. And mind you, that fit into a great tradition. Since the eighteenth century, the U.S. has put 400 billion — yes, billion! — metric tons of CO2 into that same atmosphere, or twice as much as any other country, which means it has a double responsibility to climate victims like those in Iraq.

Climate Breakdown, Iraqi-Style

The United Nations has now declared oil-rich Iraq, the land on which the Bush administration bet the future of our own country, to be the fifth most vulnerable to climate breakdown among its 193 member states. Its future, the U.N. warns, will be one of “soaring temperatures, insufficient and diminishing rainfall, intensified droughts and water scarcity, frequent sand and dust storms, and flooding.” Sawa Lake, the “pearl of the south” in Muthanna governorate, has dried up, a victim of both the industrial overuse of aquifers and a climate-driven drought that has reduced precipitation by 30%.

Meanwhile, temperatures in that already hot land are now rising rapidly. As Adel Al-Attar, an Iraqi adviser to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) on water and habitat, describes it, “I’ve lived in Basra all my life. As a boy, the summer temperature never went much beyond 40C (104° F) in summer. Today, it can surpass 50C (122° F).” The climate statistics bear him out. As early as July 22, 2017, the temperature in Basra reached 54 °C (129.2° F), among the highest ever recorded in the eastern hemisphere. Iraqi temperatures are, in fact, two to seven times higher than average global temperatures and that means greater dryness of soil, increased evaporation from rivers and reservoirs, decreasing rainfall, and a distinct loss of biodiversity, not to mention rising human health threats like heat stroke.

The American war did direct harm to Iraq’s farmers, who make up 18% of the country’s labor force. And when it was over, they had to deal with staggering numbers of explosives left in the countryside, including landmines, unexploded ordnance, and improvised explosive devices, many of which have since been dangerously covered by desert sands as a climate-driven drought worsens. An article in the journal of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences observes that when it comes to military disruptions of waterways, “Displacement, explosions, and movement of heavy equipment increase dust that then settles on rivers and accumulates in reservoirs.” Worse yet, between 2014 and 2018 when the guerrillas of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, whom the American war helped bring into existence, took over parts of northern and western Iraq, they blew up dams and practiced scorched-earth tactics that did $600 million worth of damage to the country’s hydraulic infrastructure. Had the U.S. never invaded, there would have been no ISIL.

Dust and More Dust

As Al-Attar of the ICRC observed, “When there’s not enough rain or vegetation, the upper layers of earth become less compact, meaning the chance of dust or sandstorms increases. These weather events contribute to desertification. Fertile soil is turning into desert.” And that is part of Iraq’s post-invasion fate, which means ever more frequent dust- and sandstorms. In mid-June, the Iraqi government warned that particularly violent dust and thunderstorms in al-Anbar, Najaf, and Karbala provinces were uprooting ever more trees and flattening ever more farms. In late May in Kirkuk, a dust storm sent hundreds of Iraqis to the hospital. A year ago, the dust storms came so thick and fast, week after week, that visibility was often obscured in major cities and thousands were hospitalized with breathing problems. In the late twentieth century, there already were, on average, 243 days annually with high particulate matter in the air. In the past 20 years, that number has reached 272. Climate scientists predict that it will hit 300 by 2050.

A little over half of Iraq’s farmed land relies on rain-fed agriculture, mostly in the north of the country. Iraqi journalist Sanar Hasan describes the impact of increasing drought and water scarcity in the northern province of Ninewah, where yields have shrunk considerably. Ninewah produced 5 million metric tons of wheat in 2020 but only 3.37 million in 2021 before plummeting by more than 50% to 1.34 million in 2022. Such declining yields pose a special problem in a world where wheat has only grown more expensive, thanks in part to the Russian war on Ukraine. Thousands of Iraqi farming families are being forced off their lands by water shortages. For example, Hasan quotes Yashue Yohanna, a Christian who worked all his life in agriculture but now can’t make ends meet, as saying, “When I leave the farm, what do you expect me to do next? I’m an old man. How will I afford the cost of living?”

Worse yet, southern Iraq’s marshlands are turning into classic dust bowls. The Environment Director of Maysan Governorate in southern Iraq recently announced that its al-Awda Marsh was 100% dried up.

The marshes at the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers have been storied for thousands of years. The world’s oldest epic, the Mesopotamian tale of Gilgamesh, is set there as it describes a hero journeying to an enchanted garden of the gods in search of immortality. (Echoes of that epic can be found in the biblical story of the garden of Eden.)

Our addiction to fossil fuels, however, has contributed significantly to the blighting of that very source of life and legend. It was there that marsh dwellers once hauled in a majority of the fish eaten by Iraqis, but the remaining wetlands are now experiencing increasingly high rates of evaporation. The Shatt al-Arab, created where the Tigris and Euphrates flow together into the Persian Gulf, has seen its water pressure drop, allowing an influx of salt water that has already destroyed 60,000 acres of farmland and some 30,000 trees.

Many of Iraq’s date palms have also died owing to war, neglect, soil salinization, and climate change. In the 1960s and 1970s, Iraq provided three-quarters of the world’s dates. Now, its date industry is tiny and on life support, while Marsh Arabs and southern farming families have been forced from their lands into cities where they have few of the skills needed to make a living. Journalist Ahmed Saeed and his colleagues at Reuters quote Hasan Moussa, a former fisherman who now drives a taxi, as saying, “The drought ended our future. We have no hope, other than for a [government] job, which would be enough. Other work doesn’t fulfill our needs.”

Water as Women’s Work

Although it was mostly men who planned out Iraq’s ruinous wars of the past half-century and set their sights on burning as much petroleum, coal, and natural gas as possible for profit and power, Iraq’s women have borne the brunt of the climate crisis. Few of them are in the formal job market, though many do work on farms. Because they are at home, they have often been given responsibility for providing water. Because of the present drought conditions, many women already spend at least three hours a day trying to get water from reservoirs and bring it home. Water foraging is becoming so difficult and time-consuming that some girls are dropping out of secondary school to focus on it.

At home, women are dependent on tap water, which is often contaminated. Men who work outside the home often gain access to water purified for Iraqi industry and its cities. As farms fail owing to drought, men are emigrating to those very cities for work, often leaving the women of the household in rural villages scrambling to raise enough food in arid circumstances to feed themselves and their children.

Last fall, the International Organization for Migration at the United Nations estimated that 62,000 Iraqis living in the center and the south of the country had been displaced from their homes by drought over the previous four years and anticipated that many more would follow. Just as people from Oklahoma fled to California in droves during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, so now Iraqis are facing the prospect of dealing with their own dustbowl. It is, however, unlikely to be a mere episode like the American one. Instead, it looms as the long-term fate of their country.

If, instead of invading Iraq, the American government had swung into action in the spring of 2003 to cut carbon dioxide output, as one of our foremost climate scientists, Michael Mann, was suggesting at the time, the emission of hundreds of billions of tons of CO2 might have been avoided. Humanity would have had an extra two decades to make the transition to a zero-carbon world. In the end, after all, the stakes are as high for Americans as they are for Iraqis.

If humanity doesn’t reach zero carbon emissions by 2050, we are likely to outrun our “carbon budget,” the ocean’s ability to absorb CO2, and the climate will undoubtedly go chaotic. What has already happened in Iraq, not to speak of the dire climate impacts that have recently left Canada constantly aflame, U.S. cities smoking, and Texans broiling in a record fashion would then seem like child’s play.

At that point, in short, we would have invaded ourselves.

Steve Fraser, Return of the Repressed

Yes, as TomDispatch regular and historian Steve Fraser, author of Class Matters: The Strange Career of an American Delusion, points out today, child labor is making a grim comeback in this country — and immigrant children are leading the way. This brings to my mind a tale from my own past. My grandfather, born in what’s now Ukraine, fled home at age 14, spent two years all too literally working his way north to Hamburg, Germany, where he got a job as a “scribe” — he had beautiful handwriting — and then boarded a boat for America. As his daughter, my Aunt Hilda, wrote years ago, “A boy of 16, he arrived in New York from Europe in March 1888. It was during the famous blizzard and after a sea voyage of about 30 days. He had no money. He often said that he had a German 50-cent piece in his pocket when he landed. His trip had to be in the cheapest part of the ship — way down in steerage. Poor boy… and for the first few months in America I imagine he slept behind the stove in somebody’s kitchen.”

She hardly needed to add that, as immigrant labor, he went right to work. His wife, my grandmother Celia, was born into a poverty-stricken family — her parents had been immigrants — two years before he arrived and, as Hilda reported, she completed just one year of high school before she, too, had to go to work “as soon as possible… The last job she had was with the telephone company as an operator. She was with them for a year or two when she left to get married” at age 17.

And that is indeed ancient history, personal and otherwise. But how unbelievably eerie that such a distant tale should once again be so desperately of this moment. Let Fraser explain. Tom

Caution: Children at Work

The Return of Child Labor Is the Latest Sign of American Decline

An aged Native-American chieftain was visiting New York City for the first time in 1906. He was curious about the city and the city was curious about him. A magazine reporter asked the chief what most surprised him in his travels around town. “Little children working,” the visitor replied.

Child labor might have shocked that outsider, but it was all too commonplace then across urban, industrial America (and on farms where it had been customary for centuries). In more recent times, however, it’s become a far rarer sight. Law and custom, most of us assume, drove it to near extinction. And our reaction to seeing it reappear might resemble that chief’s — shock, disbelief.

But we better get used to it, since child labor is making a comeback with a vengeance. A striking number of lawmakers are undertaking concerted efforts to weaken or repeal statutes that have long prevented (or at least seriously inhibited) the possibility of exploiting children.

Take a breath and consider this: the number of kids at work in the U.S. increased by 37% between 2015 and 2022. During the last two years, 14 states have either introduced or enacted legislation rolling back regulations that governed the number of hours children can be employed, lowered the restrictions on dangerous work, and legalized subminimum wages for youths.

Iowa now allows those as young as 14 to work in industrial laundries. At age 16, they can take jobs in roofing, construction, excavation, and demolition and can operate power-driven machinery. Fourteen-year-olds can now even work night shifts and once they hit 15 can join assembly lines. All of this was, of course, prohibited not so long ago.

Legislators offer fatuous justifications for such incursions into long-settled practice. Working, they tell us, will get kids off their computers or video games or away from the TV. Or it will strip the government of the power to dictate what children can and can’t do, leaving parents in control — a claim already transformed into fantasy by efforts to strip away protective legislation and permit 14-year-old kids to work without formal parental permission.

In 2014, the Cato Institute, a right-wing think tank, published “A Case Against Child Labor Prohibitions,” arguing that such laws stifled opportunity for poor — and especially Black — children. The Foundation for Government Accountability, a think tank funded by a range of wealthy conservative donors including the DeVos family, has spearheaded efforts to weaken child-labor laws, and Americans for Prosperity, the billionaire Koch brothers’ foundation, has joined in.

Nor are these assaults confined to red states like Iowa or the South. California, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, and New Hampshire, as well as Georgia and Ohio, have been targeted, too. Even New Jersey passed a law in the pandemic years temporarily raising the permissible work hours for 16- to 18-year-olds.

The blunt truth of the matter is that child labor pays and is fast becoming remarkably ubiquitous. It’s an open secret that fast-food chains have employed underage kids for years and simply treat the occasional fines for doing so as part of the cost of doing business. Children as young as 10 have been toiling away in such pit stops in Kentucky and older ones working beyond the hourly limits prescribed by law. Roofers in Florida and Tennessee can now be as young as 12.

Recently, the Labor Department found more than 100 children between the ages of 13 and 17 working in meatpacking plants and slaughterhouses in Minnesota and Nebraska. And those were anything but fly-by-night operations. Companies like Tyson Foods and Packer Sanitation Services (owned by BlackRock, the world’s largest asset management firm) were also on the list.

At this point, virtually the entire economy is remarkably open to child labor. Garment factories and auto parts manufacturers (supplying Ford and General Motors) employ immigrant kids, some for 12-hour days. Many are compelled to drop out of school just to keep up. In a similar fashion, Hyundai and Kia supply chains depend on children working in Alabama.

As the New York Times reported last February, helping break the story of the new child labor market, underage kids, especially migrants, are working in cereal-packing plants and food-processing factories. In Vermont, “illegals” (because they’re too young to work) operate milking machines. Some children help make J. Crew shirts in Los Angeles, bake rolls for Walmart, or work producing Fruit of the Loom socks. Danger lurks. America is a notoriously unsafe place to work and the accident rate for child laborers is especially high, including a chilling inventory of shattered spines, amputations, poisonings, and disfiguring burns.

Journalist Hannah Dreier has called it “a new economy of exploitation,” especially when it comes to migrant children. A Grand Rapids, Michigan, schoolteacher, observing the same predicament, remarked: “You’re taking children from another country and putting them almost in industrial servitude.”

The Long Ago Now

Today, we may be as stunned by this deplorable spectacle as that chief was at the turn of the twentieth century. Our ancestors, however, would not have been. For them, child labor was taken for granted.

Hard work, moreover, had long been considered by those in the British upper classes who didn’t have to do so as a spiritual tonic that would rein in the unruly impulses of the lower orders. An Elizabethan law of 1575 provided public money to employ children as “a prophylactic against vagabonds and paupers.”

By the eighteenth century, the philosopher John Locke, then a celebrated champion of liberty, was arguing that three-year-olds should be included in the labor force. Daniel Defoe, author of Robinson Crusoe, was happy that “children after four or five years of age could every one earn their own bread.” Later, Jeremy Bentham, the father of utilitarianism, would opt for four, since otherwise, society would suffer the loss of “precious years in which nothing is done! Nothing for Industry! Nothing for improvement, moral or intellectual.”

American “founding father” Alexander Hamilton’s 1791 Report on Manufacturing noted that children “who would otherwise be idle” could instead become a source of cheap labor. And such claims that working at an early age warded off the social dangers of “idleness and degeneracy” remained a fixture of elite ideology well into the modern era. Indeed, it evidently remains so today.

When industrialization began in earnest during the first half of the nineteenth century, observers noted that work in the new factories (especially textile mills) was “better done by little girls of 6-12 years old.” By 1820, children accounted for 40% of the mill workers in three New England states. In that same year, children under 15 made up 23% of the manufacturing labor force and as much as 50% of the production of cotton textiles.

And such numbers would only soar after the Civil War. In fact, the children of ex-slaves were effectively re-enslaved through onerous apprenticeship arrangements. Meanwhile, in New York City and other urban centers, Italian padrones expedited the exploitation of immigrant kids while treating them brutally. Even the then-brahmin-minded, anti-immigrant New York Times took offense: “The world has given up stealing men from the African coast, only to kidnap children from Italy.”

Between 1890 and 1910, 18% of all children between the ages of 10 and 15, about two million young people, worked, often 12 hours a day, six days a week.

Their jobs covered the waterfront — all too literally as, under the supervision of padrones, thousands of children shucked oysters and picked shrimp. Kids were also street messengers and newsies. They worked in offices and factories, banks and brothels. They were “breakers” and “trappers” in poorly ventilated coal mines, particularly dangerous and unhealthy jobs. In 1900, out of 100,000 workers in textile mills in the South, 20,000 were under the age of 12.

City orphans were shipped off to labor in the glassworks of the Midwest. Thousands of children stayed home and helped their families turn out clothing for sweatshop manufacturers. Others packed flowers in ill-ventilated tenements. One seven-year-old explained that “I like school better than home. I don’t like home. There are too many flowers.” And down on the farm, the situation was no less grim, as children as young as three worked hulling berries.

All in the Family

Clearly, well into the twentieth century, industrial capitalism depended on the exploitation of children who were cheaper to employ, less able to resist, and until the advent of more sophisticated technologies, well suited to deal with the relatively simple machinery then in place.

Moreover, the authority exercised by the boss was in keeping with that era’s patriarchal assumptions, whether in the family or even in the largest of the overwhelmingly family-owned new industrial firms of that time like Andrew Carnegie’s steelworks. And such family capitalism gave birth to a perverse alliance of boss and underling that transformed children into miniature wage-laborers.

Meanwhile, working-class families were so severely exploited that they desperately needed the income of their children. As a result, in Philadelphia around the turn of the century, the labor of children accounted for between 28% and 33% of the household income of native-born, two-parent families. For Irish and German immigrants, the figures were 46% and 35% respectively. Not surprisingly, then, working-class parents often opposed proposals for child labor laws. As noted by Karl Marx, the worker was no longer able to support himself, so “now he sells his wife and child. He becomes a slave dealer.”

Nonetheless, resistance began to mount. The sociologist and muckraking photographer Lewis Hine scandalized the country with heart-rending pictures of kids slaving away in factories and down in the pits of mines. (He got into such places by pretending to be a Bible salesman.) Mother Jones, the militant defender of labor organizing, led a “children’s crusade” in 1903 on behalf of 46,000 striking textile workers in Philadelphia. Two hundred child-worker delegates showed up at President Teddy Roosevelt’s Oyster Bay, Long Island, residence to protest, but the president simply passed the buck, claiming child labor was a state matter, not a federal one.

Here and there, kids tried running away. In response, owners began surrounding their factories with barbed wire or made the children work at night when their fear of the dark might keep them from fleeing. Some of the 146 women who died in the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911 in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village — the owners of that garment factory had locked the doors, forcing the trapped workers to leap to their deaths from upper floor windows — were as young as 15. That tragedy only added to a growing furor over child labor.

A National Child Labor Committee was formed in 1904. For years, it lobbied states to outlaw, or at least rein in, the use of child labor. Victories, however, were often distinctly pyrrhic, as the laws enacted were invariably weak, included dozens of exemptions, and poorly enforced. Finally, in 1916, a federal law was passed that outlawed child labor everywhere. In 1918, however, the Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional.

In fact, only in the 1930s, after the Great Depression hit, did conditions begin improving. Given its economic devastation, you might assume that cheap child labor would have been at a premium. However, with jobs so scarce, adults — males especially — took precedence and began doing work once relegated to children. In those same years, industrial work began incorporating ever more complex machinery that proved too difficult for younger kids. Meanwhile, the age of compulsory schooling was steadily rising, limiting yet more the available pool of child laborers.

Most important of all, the tenor of the times changed. The insurgent labor movement of the 1930s loathed the very idea of child labor. Unionized plants and whole industries were no-go zones for capitalists looking to exploit children. And in 1938, with the support of organized labor, President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal administration finally passed the Fair Labor Standards Act which, at least in theory, put an end to child labor (although it exempted the agricultural sector in which such a workforce remained commonplace).

Moreover, Roosevelt’s New Deal transformed the national zeitgeist. A sense of economic egalitarianism, a newfound respect for the working class, and a bottomless suspicion of the corporate caste made child labor seem particularly repulsive. In addition, the New Deal ushered in a long era of prosperity, including rising standards of living for millions of working people who no longer needed the labor of their children to make ends meet.

Back to the Future

It’s all the more astonishing then to discover that a plague, once thought banished, lives again. American capitalism is a global system, its networks extend virtually everywhere. Today, there are an estimated 152 million children at work worldwide. Not all of them, of course, are employed directly or even indirectly by U.S. firms. But they should certainly be a reminder of how deeply retrogressive capitalism has once again become both here at home and elsewhere across the planet.

Boasts about the power and wealth of the American economy are part of our belief system and elite rhetoric. However, life expectancy in the U.S., a basal measure of social retrogression, has been relentlessly declining for years. Health care is not only unaffordable for millions, but its quality has become second-rate at best if you don’t belong to the top 1%. In a similar fashion, the country’s infrastructure has long been in decline, thanks to both its age and decades of neglect.

Think of the United States, then, as a “developed” country now in the throes of underdevelopment and, in that context, the return of child labor is deeply symptomatic. Even before the Great Recession that followed the financial implosion of 2008, standards of living had been falling, especially for millions of working people laid low by a decades-long tsunami of de-industrialization. That recession, which officially lasted until 2011, only further exacerbated the situation. It put added pressure on labor costs, while work became increasingly precarious, ever more stripped of benefits and ununionized. Given the circumstances, why not turn to yet another source of cheap labor — children?

The most vulnerable among them come from abroad, migrants from the Global South, escaping failing economies often traceable to American economic exploitation and domination. If this country is now experiencing a border crisis — and it is — its origins lie on this side of the border.

The Covid-19 pandemic of 2020-2022 created a brief labor shortage, which became a pretext for putting kids back to work (even if the return of child labor actually predated the disease). Consider such child workers in the twenty-first century as a distinct sign of social pathology. The United States may still bully parts of the world, while endlessly showing off its military might. At home, however, it is sick.

Beverly Gologorsky, What Is Possible?

It’s reasonable to ask: What gets anyone involved in politics, American-style? What leads any of us to decide to protest anything? Today, TomDispatch regular (and my old friend) Beverly Gologorsky explores how a childhood in poverty prepared her to become “political” — to become, that is, an “activist against injustice” (as well as a superb novelist).

In comparison, I grew up in what at least passed for a middle-class family in New York City’s Manhattan in the “golden” 1950s. It’s true that my parents were actually having quite a tough time then. I can still remember hearing them loudly arguing — at a moment when I was supposed to be asleep — about how they were going to pay “Tommy’s bills.” Still, I was lucky, relatively speaking, and I was certainly raised to be neither a political activist nor particularly critical of the American world I would find myself in.

Nonetheless, sometime in the 1960s, the distant nightmare of the war in Vietnam got under my skin. Something about what this country was doing in a particularly grim and bloody fashion in that distant land genuinely unnerved me. Why, I’m not quite sure, but — perhaps because, in those years, long before the all-volunteer military, I expected to be drafted sooner or later — I finally found myself in the streets protesting and, in the end, turned in my draft card as an act of resistance. That changed the way I looked at my own country, which led me, however tortuously and decades later, to TomDispatch.

And that, in turn, means, however I explain my personal path into the political, I was here and ready when Beverly offered me her own moving explanation. (And by the way, if you have a chance, I couldn’t recommend more strongly her latest novel, Can You See the Wind?, which — yes — is set in those very years of the Vietnam War.) Tom

How the Personal Becomes Political

Or You Can Fight City Hall

[TomDispatch and StatORec Literary Journal are sharing the publication of this article.]

Looking into the long reflecting pool of the past, I find myself wondering what it was that made me an activist against injustice. I was born in New York City’s poor, rundown, and at times dangerous South Bronx, where blacks, whites, and Latinos (as well as recent immigrants from Ireland, Italy, and Eastern Europe) lived side by side or, perhaps more accurately, crowded together.

I was the middle child of four siblings, not counting the foster children my mother often cared for. My father worked six days a week in a leather factory where the rat-tat-tatting of sewing machines never stopped and layoffs were a constant reality. I grew up after World War II in the basement of a six-story building at a time when jobs were still hard to find and scary to lose. Many young men (really boys) joined the military then for the same reason so many young men and women volunteer today, one that, however clichéd, remains a reality of our moment: the promise of some kind of concrete future instead of a wavy unknown or the otherwise expectable dead-end jobs. Unfortunately, many of them, my brother included, returned home with little or nothing “concrete” to show for the turmoil they endured.

At the time, there was another path left open for girls, the one my parents anticipated for me: early marriage. And there was also the constant fear, until the introduction of the birth-control pill in the 1960s, of unplanned pregnancies with no chance of a legal abortion before Roe v. Wade. After all, dangerous “kitchen-table” abortions — whether or not they were actually performed on a kitchen table — were all too commonplace then.

Poverty, Burned-out Buildings, Illness, and Crime

Yet growing up in the South Bronx wasn’t an entirely negative experience. Being part of a neighborhood, a place where people knew you and you knew them, was reassuring. Not surprisingly, we understood each other’s similar circumstances, which allowed for both empathy and a deep sense of community. Though poverty was anything but fun, I remain grateful that I had the opportunity to grow up among such a diversity of people. No formal education could ever give you the true power and depth of such an experience.

The borough of the Bronx was always divided by money. In its northern reaches, including Riverdale, there were plenty of people who had money, none of whom I knew. Those living in its eastern and western neighborhoods were generally aiming upward, even if they were mostly living paycheck to paycheck. (At least the checks were there!) However, the South Bronx was little more than an afterthought, a scenario of poverty, burned-out buildings, illness, and crime. Even today, people living there continue to struggle to eke out a decent living and pay the constantly rising rents on buildings that remain as dangerously uncared for as the broken sidewalks beneath them. Rumor has it that, in the last decade, there’s been new construction and more investments made in the area. However, I recently watched an online photo exhibit of the South Bronx and it was startling to see just how recognizable it still was.

Poverty invites illness. Growing up, I saw all too many people afflicted by sicknesses that kept them homebound or only able to work between bouts of symptoms. All of us are somewhat powerless when sickness strikes or an accident occurs, but the poor and those working low-paying jobs suffer not just the illness itself but also its economic aftereffects. And in the South Bronx, preventive care remained a luxury, as did dental care, and missing teeth and/or dentures affected both nutrition and the comfort of eating. Doctor’s visits were rare then, so in dire situations people went to the closest hospital emergency room.

Knowledge Is Power

Being a sensitive and curious child, I became a reader at a very early age. We had no books at home, so I went to the library as often as possible. Finding the children’s books then available less than interesting, I began reading ones from the adult section — and it was my good fortune that the librarian turned a blind eye, checking out whatever I chose without comment.

Books made me more deeply aware of the indignities all around me as well as in much of a world that was then beyond me. As I got older, I couldn’t help but see the hypocrisy of a country that loudly proclaimed its love of equality (as taught from the kindergarten pledge of allegiance on) and espoused everywhere values that turned out to be largely unrealized for millions of people. Why, I began to wonder, did so many of us accept the misery, why weren’t we fighting to change such unlivable conditions?

Of course, what I observed growing up wasn’t limited to the South Bronx. Today, such realities continue to be experienced in communities nationwide. Poor and working-class people often have to labor at two or more jobs just to make ends meet (if they’re “lucky” enough to have jobs at all). Many experience persistent anxiety about having enough food, paying the rent, purchasing clothing for their children, or — heaven forbid — getting sick. Such never-ending worries can rob you of the strength even to pay attention to anything more than the present moment. You fret instead about what’s to be on your plate for dinner, how to make it through the day, the week, the month, never mind the year. And add to all of this the energy-sapping systemic racism that people of color face.

During the Vietnam War years, I began organizing against poverty, racism, sexism, and that war in poor white working-class neighborhoods. I asked people then why living in such awful situations wasn’t creating more of a hue and cry for change. You can undoubtedly imagine some of the responses: “You can’t fight city hall!” “I’m too exhausted!” “What can one person do?” “It’s a waste of the time I don’t have.” “It is what it is.”

Many of those I talked to complained about how few politicians who promise change while running for office actually deliver. I did then and do now understand the difficulties of those who have little and struggle to get by. Yet there have been people from poor and working-class communities who refused to accept such situations, who felt compelled to struggle to change a distinctly unjust society.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, though not myself a student, I became a member of Students for a Democratic Society, better known in those years as SDS. I also got the opportunity to work with members of the New York chapter of the Black Panther Party who came together thanks to direct experiences of racism and poverty that had kept so many of them from worthwhile lives. The Panthers were set on doing whatever they could to change the system and were remarkably clear-eyed in their belief that only struggle could bring about such a development.

Mostly young, and mostly from poor backgrounds, their members defied what convention taught: that the leaders of movements usually come from the middle and upper-middle classes. Of course, many then did and still do. Many grew up well-fed, well-sheltered, and safe from hunger or future homelessness. Many also grew up in families where social-justice values were a part of everyday life.

However, there is also a long history of poor and working-class people becoming leaders of struggles against injustice. The Black Panthers were one such group. As I write this, many safety-net programs are under assault from reactionary Republicans who wish to slash away at food stamps and other programs that offer at least modest support for the poor. They have been eager to add work provisions to safety-net programs, reviving the old trope that the poor are lazy or shirkers living off the dole, which couldn’t be further from the truth. They insist on believing that people should lift themselves out of poverty by their own bootstraps, whether they have boots or not.

But poverty isn’t inevitable, as they would have us believe. Strengthening and expanding the safety net would help so many — like those I grew up with in the South Bronx — move into better situations. However, count on one thing: the reactionary Republicans now serving in government and their MAGA followers will never stop pushing to further weaken that net. They only grow more reactionary with every passing year, championing white nationalism, while attempting to ban books and stop the teaching of the real history of people of color. In short, they’re intent on denying people the power of knowledge. And as history has repeatedly shown, knowledge is indeed power.

Which Way This Country?

As the rich grow richer, they remain remarkably indifferent to suffering or any sort of sharing. Even allowing their increasingly staggering incomes to be taxed at a slightly higher rate is a complete no-no. Poor and working-class people who are Black, Latino, white, Asian, LGBTQ, or indigenous continue to battle discrimination, inflation, soaring rents, pitiless evictions, poor health, inadequate healthcare, and distinctly insecure futures.

Like my parents and many others I knew in the South Bronx, they scrabble to hang on and perhaps wonder if anyone sees or hears their distress. Is it a surprise, then, that so many people, when polled today, say they’re unhappy? However, an unhappy, divided, increasingly unequal society filling with hate is also the definition of a frightening society that’s failing its people.

Still, in just such a world, groups and organizations struggling for social justice have begun to take hold, as they work to change the inequities of the system. They should be considered harbingers of what’s still possible. National groups like Black Lives Matter or the Brotherhood Sister Sol in New York’s Harlem organize against inequities while training younger generations of social-justice activists. And those are but two of many civil-rights groups. Reproductive rights organizations are similarly proliferating, strengthened by women angry at the decisions of the Supreme Court and of state courts to overturn the right to an abortion. Climate change is here, and as more and more communities experience increasingly brutal temperatures and ever less containable wildfires (not to speak of the smoke they emit), groups are forming and the young, in particular, are beginning to demand a more green-centered society, an end to the use of fossil fuels and other detriments to the preservation of our planet. Newly empowered union organizing is also occurring and hopefully will spread across the country. All such activities make us hopeful, as they should.

But here’s a truly worrisome thing: we’re also living in a moment in history when the clamor of reactionary organizing and the conspiratorial thinking that goes with it seem to be gathering strength in a step-by-step fashion, lending a growing power to the most reactionary forces in our society. Politicians like Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis, as well as anti-woke pundits, use all too many platforms to preach hatred while working to erase whatever progress has been made. Scary as well is the fantastical rightwing theory of white replacement which preaches (in a country that once enslaved so many) that whites are endangered by the proliferation of people of color.

This march toward a more reactionary society could be stemmed by a strong counteroffensive led by progressives in and out of government. In fact, what other choice is there if we wish to live in a society that holds a promise for peace, equality, and justice?

My political involvement taught me many lessons of victory and defeat but has never erased my faith in what is possible. Consider this sharing of my experiences a way to help others take heart that things don’t have to remain as they are.

I haven’t been back to the South Bronx since my parents died, but as a writer and novelist I still visit there often.

Stan Cox, Every Kind of Conflict, Everywhere, All at Once?

It hardly matters whether you’re talking about the Canadian wildfires that continue to burn in an out-of-control fashion or the 120-degree temperatures in… no, not India! — Texas!! Heat waves, megadroughts, ever more violent storms, ever fiercer fires, ever more staggering floods, you name it and we’re either already experiencing it or likely to do so in the years to come. In short, we’re living in — and no, for once I’m not thinking of Donald Trump — an ever more extreme world. And worse yet — okay, okay, I apologize but I just can’t help myself — Trump, DeSantis, and most of the rest of that crew are ready to deny that any of it is actually happening. If one of them were to take power in 2024 (and don’t for a second think it couldn’t happen!), it might well ensure that our children and grandchildren will all too literally find themselves in a hell on earth.

Yes, once upon a time, the fires of hell were left for the afterlife (ask Dante!), but no longer, it seems. And it’s not just in Canada. In recent years, ever-fiercer fires have been setting the worst sorts of records in this country, too. Out-of-control flames have been turning even people in the United States, even people I know, into climate refugees. And North America is anything but alone. Europe set fire records last summer, while record heat waves from North Africa to China should remind us that we are, in some sense, on a planet Dante might well have recognized.

Given all of this (and more), it seems appropriate to let TomDispatch regular Stan Cox consider the kinds of violent meltdowns (and not even the most literal versions of them) that are likely to leave us all on an increasingly broken and costly hell of a planet. Tom

We’re Having a Violent Meltdown

The Human Costs of Global Warming — and of Our Response to It

Several times in recent weeks I’ve heard people suggest that Mother Nature has been speaking to us through that smoke endlessly drifting south from the still-raging Canadian wildfires. She’s saying that she wants the coal, oil, and gas left in the ground, but I fear her message will have little more influence on climate policy than her previous ones did. After all, we essentially hit the “snooze” button on the wakeup call from Hurricane Katrina 18 years ago; ditto the disastrous Hurricane Sandy seven years later, as well as the East Coast heat waves and West Coast wildfires of more recent years; or the startling overheating of global waters and the sea level rise that goes with it. And that’s just to begin an ever longer list of horrors.

Despite the fact that, in recent weeks, more than 100 million North Americans have been inhaling lungfuls of smoke from those Canadian wildfires, we’ll probably continue to ignore the pummeling so many here are enduring daily while carbon dioxide continues to accumulate overhead. Climate disasters are not only failing to goad governments into taking bold action but may be nudging societies toward increasing violence and cruelty.

Recently, Joel Millward-Hopkins of the University of Leeds suggested that, as the climate emergency intensifies, we may only find ourselves ever more affected by some of the indirect impacts of global warming. Those would include the “widening of socioeconomic inequalities (within and between countries), increases in migration (intra- and inter-nationally), and heightened risk of conflict (from violence and war through to hate speech and crime).” Such impacts, he suggests, will reflect a “highly inconvenient overlap with key drivers of the authoritarian populism that has proliferated in the 21st century.” Inconvenient indeed.

In other words, although weather disasters of many kinds can increase public concern about climate change, they can also help to whip up an oppressively violent sociopolitical climate that may prove ever more hostile to the very idea of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions — especially in large, affluent, high-emission societies.

Warm in the USA

Though not itself linked to climate change, the Covid-19 pandemic may have given us a preview of such developments. When it first struck, a feeling of noble national purpose, shared sacrifice, and mutual aid swept the country… for perhaps a few weeks. Then came the waves of social conflict that may, in the end, have left us even more poorly prepared for the next public health emergency. After all, the pandemic of hate that first fed on anti-vaccine and anti-mask fervor now sups from a far larger buffet of political issues including energy and climate.

Guardian columnist George Monbiot wrote recently that “culture war entrepreneurs” are casting efforts to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions as authoritarian attacks on ordinary people’s fundamental freedoms. Be ready to do battle, they say, against any move to promote heat pumps over furnaces or electric induction stoves over gas stoves or walking to the store instead of driving a big-ass truck there. In fact, he suggests, “You cannot propose even the mildest change without a hundred professionally outraged influencers leaping up to announce: ‘They’re coming for your …’’”

There are always going to be people under the influence of such influencers who will respond by jumping in their trucks for a session of “rollin’ coal” — that is, spewing toxic diesel fumes into the faces of pedestrians and cyclists. Or maybe they’ll run over a climate protester (without fear of prosecution if they’re in Florida, Iowa, or Oklahoma).

This outbreak of hostility and violence among right-wingers is occurring even though no one has actually curtailed any of their freedoms. Now, imagine the ferocity of the backlash if we could somehow manage to enact the policies that are undoubtedly most urgently needed to rein in greenhouse gases and other environmental threats: a rapid phase-out of fossil fuels and cuts in the extraction and use of material resources. The eruption would undoubtedly be far more aggressive and violent than the resistance to Covid-19 regulations.

From Pole to Equator, the Specter of Violence Looms

New climate realities are also expected to alter military conflicts among nations. One of the most troubling potential flashpoints could be the fast-melting Arctic, which, thanks to all that carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere, will soon be wide open for fishing, resource extraction, and other activities. In fact, the United States and Russia haven’t even let the Arctic Sea finish its thaw before starting to militarize it. As Devin Speak of NPR reports,

“While indigenous communities have long thrived in communion with the land there, nation states haven’t had much presence in the northern latitudes because it hasn’t been ripe for exploitation. Until sea ice began rapidly receding, oil, gas, shipping, and minerals were all under frigid lock and key. But with dwindling sea ice, tapping the region’s resources is becoming more feasible. And in conjunction with the economic opportunities, nations are eyeing big military spending. Russia has already ramped up its military presence and the United States is playing catch-up.”

As an armed standoff in cold polar waters heats up, increased attention is being paid to climate-induced mass migration as another likely conflict trigger. After all, forecasts now suggest that if greenhouse-gas emissions aren’t reduced deeply and quickly, the climatic zones safe for humans to live in will shrink dramatically. The worst of it will happen in tropical South America and Africa, the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia, parts of China, and the U.S. Sun Belt. By 2050, two to three billion people are likely to either be living in or fleeing regions that have become increasingly hostile to human existence and, by 2090, it could be three to six billion of us, or a quarter to a third of humanity. Desired destinations will include the northern United States and southern Canada, Russia, Central Asia, Korea, Japan, northern China, and northern Europe.

Consider for a moment the torrent of hate and cruelty we’ve seen in the past decade along borders between the United States and Mexico, Southeast and South Asia, and Europe and Africa. Now, imagine a 10- to 20-fold increase in long-distance migration rates and the anti-immigrant hate, violence, and even international conflict that could grip the globe in the decades to come. As a preview, just consider the fact that Republican governors in 14 states have already deployed National Guard troops to the border with Mexico for no good reason whatsoever.

In his Guardian column, Monbiot explains succinctly how climate disruption and anti-immigrant bias reinforce each other: “Round the cycle turns,” he writes. “As millions are driven from their homes by climate disasters, the extreme right exploits their misery to extend its reach. As the extreme right gains power, climate programs are shut down, heating accelerates, and more people are driven from their homes. If we don’t break this cycle soon, it will become the dominant story of our times.” It may already be the most important story, whether we realize it or not.

Climate change is likely to exacerbate violence within countries as well, simply by discombobulating us as individuals. A 2015 analysis of 57 nations found that “each degree Celsius increase in annual temperatures is associated with a nearly 6% average increase in homicides.” More recently, a review of research worldwide found that climate disruption can undermine peace by interfering with people’s mental or physiological functioning and by threatening our quality of life.

Increasingly extreme heat will also push waves of human displacement within national borders, further fanning the flames of domestic conflict. An analysis by Abrahm Lustgarten of ProPublica found that, as the Earth’s atmosphere warms, almost half of the U.S. population “will most likely experience a decline in the quality of their environment, namely more heat and less water. For 93 million of them, the changes could be particularly severe.” Expect many millions of us to move from the Sunbelt to, perhaps, the Great Lakes region and from rural to urban areas.

Mathew Hauer, a sociologist at Florida State University and a modeler of climate migration interviewed by Lustgarten, predicts some especially hard times for Atlanta. It’s the largest metropolitan area in the Southeast, a region in which, climate models suggest, droughts and wildfires will become far more common and severe as the decades pass. He projects that hundreds of thousands of local climate refugees will migrate from outlying areas into an urban area already experiencing overburdened water systems and a shaky infrastructure, along with the highest income inequality among large U.S. cities. All of that, writes Lustgarten, could make the future Atlanta “a virtual tinderbox for social conflict.”

Such conflict could well include the kind of state violence and oppression that’s increasingly unleashed on people and groups who are determined to protest against the systems that create climate chaos, environmental devastation, and injustice. Indeed, in Atlanta, that violence is already a reality. This winter and spring, city police shot and killed an activist and arrested 40 more for nonviolently occupying the city’s largest urban forest. They were part of a broad effort by people in low-income neighborhoods bordering the forest, environmental organizations, and racial-justice groups to head off the construction of a tactical-training center for the Atlanta police department that would occupy and devastate 85 of that woodland’s 150 acres. The coalition aims to prevent deforestation, preserve the quality of life for nearby neighborhoods, and halt the expenditure of $90 million on a facility that would hone the skills of cops who have demonstrated their willingness to kill unarmed Black people.

And mind you, those forest defenders were charged not with trespassing but with violating Georgia’s domestic terrorism law, which carries a sentence of at least five years in prison. When arrested, they were held in a jail that, reported Piper French of Bolts, “is notorious for squalid conditions and allegations of mistreatment by staff.” The defendants, who had committed no acts of violence, let alone “terrorism,” were denied bail on flimsy grounds, including accusations of merely “wearing black, having a jail support number scrawled on their arm, and having mud on their shoes,” according to French. And the basis for denying bail thanks to wearing black clothing and having on muddy shoes? That domestic terrorism law provides for something called “vicarious liability.” (In plain English, you could call it guilt by association.)

Nor did the repression stop there. Following a SWAT team’s recent raid on a southeast Atlanta home, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation arrested three board members of an Atlanta nonprofit that was arranging legal support for those forest defenders. They were charged with money laundering and charity fraud, stretching the already dubious concept of vicarious liability even further. Writing for Jacobin, Abe Asher notes that “the intensity of the threats protesters in Atlanta are facing is reminiscent of the risks climate defenders routinely face in the Global South, where both activists and journalists are routinely jailed and killed in their defense of land and water. Of the 401 human rights defenders killed last year, nearly half were killed defending the climate.”

Violence on the Ground (and Below It)

Some of America’s domestic policies aimed at curbing climate change could also become increasingly responsible for conflict in the Global South. If, for instance, the wealthier North continues to pursue technology-heavy “green growth” climate policies, the South could suffer yet more from the inherent violence of resource extraction. The need for increasing amounts of the minerals and metals essential to building renewable energy systems and vast fleets of electric vehicles — including lithium, cobalt, copper, nickel, and rare earths — is attracting much media attention these days.

Worse yet, in the future, they are likely to become the focus of “green resource wars.” And the mining of such ores isn’t the only extractive activity that raises the threat of conflict. To take one example, if the world’s nations pursue climate-mitigation policies that depend heavily on biofuels, the ensuing fuel plantations could end up occupying a staggering quarter to a third of the world’s croplands, almost certainly displacing some essential food crops to less productive areas. And count on this: communities throughout the global south are not going to stand back and allow such potentially wholesale losses without protest.

Selina Gallo-Cruz is an associate professor of sociology at Syracuse University. She recently published a paper, “Peace Studies and the Limits to Growth,” in which she laid out the ways the widespread violence and injustice implicit in the global North’s quest for growth — green or otherwise — has affected other communities around the world.

Citing the work of organizations like Global Witness in conflict zones worldwide, she points out that a significant part of the violence on this planet comes from the North’s “extraction of natural resources through mining or deforestation — palm oil plantations are a big one — and mega-, mega-agricultural projects,” all of which lead to “outbreaks of very violent conflict.” We must not, says Gallo-Cruz, fall for the specious argument that it would be unfair and cruel not to extract resources from impoverished countries, because the North needs such minerals and energy, while the South needs the revenue those resources can bring in. That argument is, of course, blind to the devastation of the lands, waters, and biodiversity on which such communities depend, not to mention the violent conflict that so often threatens to become a part of resource extraction.

To sum up: There has always been violent conflict. (As striking evidence, the artist Miranda Maher has documented that over the past 2,023 years of human history, only one year, 327 AD, was completely free of open armed conflict.) But we may now be preparing to top off that sorry record with climate-induced conflict globally — from open war between nation-states to abuse of migrants at borders to hate and physical assaults that happen just down the block. And efforts to curb climate change are already provoking a right-wing backlash that encourages civil conflict while bringing state violence down on climate activists. Meanwhile, corporate efforts to achieve climate-friendly growth end up inflicting the violence that accompanies resource extraction on the world’s poorest regions, creating conditions for… yes, yet more conflict.

In short, industrial civilization has by now painted the world into a perilous corner. The only way out of this mess would be for affluent societies to deeply reduce their consumption of energy and extraction of material resources, but don’t hold your breath on that one.

Editor's note: This article originally appeared on TomDispatch.com.

On June 3rd, President Joe Biden signed a bill into law that lifted the government’s debt ceiling and capped some categories of government spending. The big winner was — surprise, surprise! — the Pentagon.

Congress spared military-related programs any cuts while freezing all other categories of discretionary spending at the fiscal year 2023 level (except support for veterans). Indeed, lawmakers set the budget for the Pentagon and for other national security programs like nuclear-related work developing nuclear warheads at the Department of Energy at the level requested in the administration’s Fiscal Year 2024 budget proposal — a 3.3% increase in military spending to a whopping total of $886 billion. Consider that preferential treatment of the first order and, mind you, for the only government agency that’s failed to pass a single financial audit!

Even so, that $886 billion hike in Pentagon and related spending is likely to prove just a floor, not a ceiling, on what will be allocated for “national defense” next year. An analysis of the deal by the Wall Street Journal found that spending on the Pentagon and veterans’ care — neither of which is frozen in the agreement — is likely to pass $1 trillion next year.

Compare that to the $637 billion left for the rest of the government’s discretionary budget. In other words, public health, environmental protection, housing, transportation, and almost everything else the government undertakes will have to make do with not even 45% of the federal government’s discretionary budget, less than what would be needed to keep up with inflation. (Forget addressing unmet needs in this country.)

And count on one thing: national security spending is likely to increase even more, thanks to a huge (if little-noticed) loophole in that budget deal, one that hawks in Congress are already salivating over how best to exploit. Yes, that loophole is easy to miss, given the bureaucratese used to explain it, but its potential impact on soaring military budgets couldn’t be clearer. In its analysis of the budget deal, the Congressional Budget Office noted that “funding designated as an emergency requirement or for overseas contingency operations would not be constrained” by anything the senators and House congressional representatives had agreed to.

As we should have learned from the 20 years of all-American wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the term “overseas contingency” can be stretched to cover almost anything the Pentagon wants to spend your tax dollars on. In fact, there was even an “Overseas Contingency Operations” (OCO) account supposedly reserved for funding this country’s seemingly never-ending post-9/11 wars. And it certainly was used to fund them, but hundreds of billions of dollars of Pentagon projects that had nothing to do with the conflicts in Iraq or Afghanistan were funded that way as well. The critics of Pentagon overspending quickly dubbed it that department’s “slush fund.”

So, prepare yourself for “Slush Fund II” (coming soon to a theater near you). This time the vehicle for padding the Pentagon budget is likely to be the next military aid package for Ukraine, which will likely be put forward as an emergency bill later this year. Expect that package to include not only aid to help Ukraine fend off Russia’s ongoing brutal invasion but tens of billions of dollars more to — yes, of course! — pump up the Pentagon’s already bloated budget.

Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) made just such a point in talking with reporters shortly after the debt-ceiling deal was passed by Congress. “There will be a day before too long,” he told them, “where we’ll have to deal with the Ukrainian situation. And that will create an opportunity for me and others to fill in the deficiencies that exist from this budget deal.”

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) made a similar point in a statement on the Senate floor during the debate over that deal. “The debt ceiling deal,” he said, “does nothing to limit the Senate’s ability to appropriate emergency/supplemental funds to ensure our military capabilities are sufficient to deter China, Russia, and our other adversaries and respond to ongoing and growing national security threats.”

One potential (and surprising) snag in the future plans of those Pentagon budget boosters in both parties may be the position of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA). He has, in fact, described efforts to increase Pentagon spending beyond the level set in the recent budget deal as “part of the problem.” For the moment at least, he openly opposes producing an emergency package to increase the Pentagon budget, saying:

“The last five audits the Department of Defense [have] failed. So there’s a lot of places for reform [where] we can have a lot of savings. We’ve plussed it up. This is the most money we’ve ever spent on defense — this is the most money anyone in the world has ever spent on defense. So I don’t think the first answer is to do a supplemental.”

The Massive Overfunding of the Pentagon

The Department of Defense is, of course, already massively overfunded. That $886 billion figure is among the highest ever — hundreds of billions of dollars more than at the peak of the Korean or Vietnam wars or during the most intensely combative years of the Cold War. It’s higher than the combined military budgets of the next 10 countries combined, most of whom are, in any case, U.S. allies. And it’s estimated to be three times what the Chinese military, the Pentagon’s “pacing threat,” receives annually. Consider it an irony that actually “keeping pace” with China would involve a massive cut in military spending, not an increase in the Pentagon’s bloated budget.

It also should go without saying that preparations to effectively defend the United States and its allies could be achieved for so much less than is currently lavished on the Pentagon. A new approach could easily save significantly more than $100 billion in fiscal year 2024, as proposed by Representatives Barbara Lee (D-CA) and Mark Pocan (D-WI) in the People Over Pentagon Act, the preeminent budget-cut proposal in Congress. An illustrative report released by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) in late 2021 sketched out three scenarios, all involving a less interventionist, more restrained approach to defense that would include greater reliance on allies. Each option would reduce America’s 1.3-million-strong active military force (by up to one-fifth in one scenario). Total savings from the CBO’s proposed changes would, over a decade, be $1 trillion.

And a more comprehensive approach that shifted away from the current “cover the globe” strategy of being able to fight (though, as the history of this century shows, not always win) wars virtually anywhere on Earth on short notice — without allies, if necessary — could save hundreds of billions more over the next decade. Cutting bureaucracy and making other changes in defense policy could also yield yet more savings. To cite just two examples, reducing the Pentagon’s cohort of more than half-a-million private contract employees and scaling back its nuclear weapons “modernization” program would save significantly more than $300 billion extra over a decade.

But none of this is even remotely likely without concerted public pressure to, as a start, keep members of Congress from adding tens of billions of dollars in spending on parochial military projects that channel funding into their states or districts. And it would also mean pushing back against the propaganda of Pentagon contractors who claim they need ever more money to provide adequate tools to defend the country.

Contractors Crying Wolf

While demanding ever more of our tax dollars, the giant military-industrial corporations are spending all too much of their time simply stuffing the pockets of their shareholders rather than investing in the tools needed to actually defend this country. A recent Department of Defense report found that, from 2010-2019, such companies increased by 73% over the previous decade what they paid their shareholders. Meanwhile, their investment in research, development, and capital assets declined significantly. Still, such corporations claim that, without further Pentagon funding, they can’t afford to invest enough in their businesses to meet future national security challenges, which include ramping up weapons production to provide arms for Ukraine.

In reality, however, the financial data suggests that they simply chose to reward their shareholders over everything and everyone else, even as they experienced steadily improving profit margins and cash generation. In fact, the report pointed out that those companies “generate substantial amounts of cash beyond their needs for operations or capital investment.” So instead of investing further in their businesses, they choose to eat their “seed corn” by prioritizing short-term gains over long-term investments and by “investing” additional profits in their shareholders. And when you eat your seed corn, you have nothing left to plant next year.

Never fear, though, since Congress seems eternally prepared to bail them out. Their businesses, in fact, continue to thrive because Congress authorizes funding for the Pentagon to repeatedly grant them massive contracts, no matter their performance or lack of internal investment. No other industry could get away with such maximalist thinking.

Military contractors outperform similarly sized companies in non-defense industries in eight out of nine key financial metrics — including higher total returns to shareholders (a category where they leave much of the rest of the S&P 500 in the dust). They financially outshine their commercial counterparts for two obvious reasons: first, the government subsidizes so many of their costs; second, the weapons industry is so concentrated that its major firms have little or no competition.

Adding insult to injury, contractors are overcharging the government for the basic weaponry they produce while they rake in cash to enrich their shareholders. In the past 15 years, the Pentagon’s internal watchdog has exposed price gouging by contractors ranging from Boeing and Lockheed Martin to lesser-known companies like TransDigm Group. In 2011, Boeing made about $13 million in excess profits by overcharging the Army for 18 spare parts used in Apache and Chinook helicopters. To put that in perspective, the Army paid $1,678.61 each for a tiny helicopter part that the Pentagon already had in stock at its own warehouse for only $7.71.

The Pentagon found Lockheed Martin and Boeing price gouging together in 2015. They overcharged the military by “hundreds of millions of dollars” for missiles. TransDigm similarly made $16 million by overcharging for spare parts between 2015 and 2017 and even more in the following two years, generating nearly $21 million in excess profits. If you can believe it, there is no legal requirement for such companies to refund the government if they’re exposed for price gouging.

Of course, there’s nothing new about such corporate price gouging, nor is it unique to the arms industry. But it’s especially egregious there, given how heavily the major military contractors depend on the government’s business. Lockheed Martin, the biggest of them, got a staggering 73% of its $66 billion in net sales from the government in 2022. Boeing, which does far more commercial business, still generated 40% of its revenue from the government that year. (Down from 51% in 2020.)

Despite their reliance on government contracts, companies like Boeing seem to be doubling down on practices that often lead to price gouging. According to Bloomberg News, between 2020 and 2021, Boeing refused to provide the Pentagon with certified cost and pricing data for nearly 11,000 spare parts on a single Air Force contract. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Representative John Garamendi (D-CA) have demanded that the Pentagon investigate since, without such information, the department will continue to be hard-pressed to ensure that it’s paying anything like a fair price, whatever its purchases.

Curbing the Special Interest Politics of “Defense”

Reining in rip-offs and corruption on the part of weapons contractors large and small could save the American taxpayer untold billions of dollars. And curbing special-interest politics on the part of the denizens of the military-industrial-congressional complex (MICC) could help open the way towards the development of a truly defensive global military strategy rather than the current interventionist approach that has embroiled the United States in the devastating and counterproductive wars of this century.

One modest step towards reining in the power of the arms lobby would be to revamp the campaign finance system by providing federal matching funds, thereby diluting the influential nature of the tens of millions in campaign contributions the arms industry makes every election cycle. In addition, prohibiting retiring top military officers from going to work for arms-making companies — or, at least, extending the cooling off period to at least four years before they can do so, as proposed by Senator Warren — would also help reduce the undue influence exerted by the MICC.

Last but not least, steps could be taken to prevent the military services from giving Congress their annual wish lists — officially known as “unfunded priorities lists” — of items they want added to the Pentagon budget. After all, those are but another tool allowing members of Congress to add billions more than what the Pentagon has even asked for to that department’s budget.

Whether such reforms alone, if adopted, would be enough to truly roll back excess Pentagon spending remains to be seen. Without them, however, count on one thing: the department’s budget will almost certainly continue to soar, undoubtedly reaching $1 trillion or more annually within just the next few years. Americans can’t afford to let that happen.

Copyright 2023 William D. Hartung and Julia Gledhill

Featured image: Pentagon by Thomas Hawk is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0 / Flickr

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel, Songlands (the final one in his Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II, and Ann Jones’s They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from America’s Wars: The Untold Story.

Julia Gledhill, a TomDispatch regular, is an analyst at the Center for Defense Information at the Project On Government Oversight.

William D. Hartung, a TomDispatch regular, is a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and the author of "More Money, Less Security: Pentagon Spending and Strategy in the Biden Administration."

Living on a Smoke-Bomb of a Planet

September 11th, Climate-Change-Style

As it turns out, it’s never too late. I mention that only because last week, at nearly 79, I managed to visit Mars for the first time. You know, the red planet, or rather — so it seemed to me — the orange planet. And take my word for it, it was eerie as hell. There was no sun, just a strange orange haze of a kind I had never seen before as I walked the streets of that world (well-masked) on my way to a doctor’s appointment.

Oh, wait, maybe I’m a little mixed up. Maybe I wasn’t on Mars. The strangeness of it all (and perhaps my age) might have left me just a bit confused. My best hunch now, as I try to put recent events in perspective, is that I wasn’t in life as I’d previously known it. Somehow — just a guess — that afternoon I might have become a character in a science-fiction novel. As a matter of fact, I had only recently finished rereading Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s sci-fi classic A Canticle for Leibowitz, last visited in 1961 at age 17. It’s about a world ravaged by humanity (using nukes, as a matter of fact) and, so many years later, still barely in recovery mode.

I must admit that the streets I was traversing certainly looked like they existed on just such a planet. After all, the ambiance had a distinctly end-of-the-world (at least as I’d known it) feel to it.

Oh, wait! I checked the news online and it turns out that it was neither Mars, nor a sci-fi novel. It was simply my very own city, New York, engulfed in smoke you could smell, taste, and see, vast clouds of it blown south from Canada where more than 400 wildfires were then burning in an utterly out of control, historically unprecedented fashion across much of that country — as, in fact, all too many of them still are. That massive cloud of smoke swamped my city’s streets and enveloped its most famous buildings, bridges, and statues in a horrifying mist.

That day, New York, where I was born and have lived much of my life, reportedly had the worst, most polluted air of any major city on the planet — Philadelphia would take our place the very next day — including an air quality index that hit a previously unimaginable 484. That day, my city was headline-making in a way not seen since September 11, 2001. In fact, you might think of that Wednesday as the climate-change version of 9/11, a terror (or at least terrorizing) attack of the first order.

Put another way, it should have been a signal to us all that we — New Yorkers included — now live on a new, significantly more dangerous planet, and that June 7th may someday be remembered locally as a preview of a horror show for the ages. Unfortunately, you can count on one thing: it’s barely the beginning. On an overheating planet where humanity has yet to bring its release of greenhouse gasses from the burning of coal, oil, and natural gas under any sort of reasonable control, where summer sea ice is almost certain to be a thing of the past in the fast-heating Arctic, where sea levels are rising ominously and fires, storms, and droughts are growing more severe by the year, there’s so much worse to come.

In my youth, of course, a Canada that hadn’t even made it to summer when the heat hit record levels and fires began burning out of control from Alberta in the west to Nova Scotia and Quebec in the east would have been unimaginable. I doubt even Walter M. Miller, Jr., could have dreamed up such a future, no less that, as of a week ago, 1,400% of the normal acreage of that country, or more than 8.7 million acres, had already burned (with so much more undoubtedly still to come); nor that Canada, seemingly caught unprepared, without faintly enough firefighters, despite recent all-too-flammable summers — having, in fact, to import them from around the world to help bring those blazes under some sort of control — would be in flames. And yet, for that country, experiencing its fiercest fire season ever, one thing seems guaranteed: that’s only the beginning. After all, United Nations climate experts are now suggesting that, by the end of this century, if climate change isn’t brought under control, the intensity of global wildfires could rise by another 57%. So, be prepared, New Yorkers, orange is undoubtedly the color of our future and we haven’t seen anything like the last of such smoke bombs.

Oh, and that June evening, once I was home again, I turned on the NBC nightly news, which not surprisingly led with the Canadian fires and the smoke disaster in New York in a big-time way — and, hey, in their reporting, no one even bothered to mention climate change. The words went unused. My best guess: maybe they were all on Mars.

Been There, Done That

In fact, you could indeed think of that June 7th smoke-out as the 2023 climate-change equivalent of September 11, 2001. Whoops! Maybe that’s a far too ominous comparison and I’ll tell you why.

On September 11, 2001, at the World Trade Center in New York, the Pentagon in Washington, and aboard four hijacked jets, almost 3,000 people died. That was indeed a first-class nightmare, possibly the worst terrorist attack in history. And the U.S. responded by launching a set of invasions, occupations, and conflicts that came to be known as “the global war on terror.” In every sense, however, it actually turned out to be a global war of terror, a 20-plus-year disaster of losing conflicts that involved the killing of staggering numbers of people. The latest estimate from the invaluable Costs of War Project is: almost a million direct deaths and possibly 3.7 million indirect ones.

Take that in for a moment. And think about this: in the United States, there hasn’t been the slightest penalty for any of that. Just ask yourself: Was the president who so disastrously invaded Afghanistan and then Iraq, while he and his top officials lied through their teeth to the American people, penalized in any way? Yes, I do mean that fellow out in Texas who’s become known for his portrait painting in his old age and who, relatively recently, confused his decision to invade Iraq with Vladimir Putin’s to invade Ukraine.

Or, for that matter, has the U.S. military suffered any penalties for its record in response to 9/11? Just consider this for starters: the last time that military actually won a war was in 1991. I’m thinking of the first Gulf War and that “win” would prove nothing but a prelude to the Iraq disaster to come in this century. Explain this to me then: Why does the military that’s proven incapable of winning a war since that 9/11 terror attack still get more money from Congress than the next — your choice — 9 or 10 militaries on this planet combined, and why, no matter who’s in charge in Washington, including cost-cutting Republicans, does the Pentagon never — no, absolutely never — see a cut in its funding, only yet more taxpayer dollars? (And mind you, this is true on a planet where the real battles of the future are likely to involve fire and smoke.)

There may indeed be a “debt ceiling” in this country, but there seems to be no ceiling at all when it comes to funding that military. In fact, Republican hawks in the Senate only recently demanded yet more money for the Pentagon in the debt-ceiling debate (despite the fact that, amid other cuts, its funding was already guaranteed to rise by 3% or $388 billion). As Senator Lindsey Graham so classically put it about that (to him) pitiful rise, “This budget is a win for China.”

Now, I don’t mean to say that there’s been no pain anywhere. Quite the opposite. American troops sent to Afghanistan, Iraq, and so many other countries came home suffering everything from literal wounds to severe post-traumatic stress syndrome. (In these years, in fact, the suicide rate among veterans has been unnervingly high.)

And did the American people pay? You bet. Through the teeth, in fact, in a moment when inequality in this country was already going through the roof — or, if you’re not one of the ever-greater numbers of billionaires, perhaps the floor would be the more appropriate image. And has the Pentagon paid a cent? No, not for a thing it’s done (and, in too many cases, is still doing).

Consider this the definition of decline in a country that, as Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis continue to make desperately clear, could be heading for a place too strange and disturbing for words, a place both as old as the present president of the United States (should he win again) and as new as anyone can imagine.

Will the Climate Version of 9/11 Become Daily Life?

Throughout history, it’s true that great imperial powers have risen and fallen, but lest you think this is just another typical imperial moment when, as the U.S. declines, China will rise, take a breath — oops, sorry, watch out for that smoke! — and think again. As those Canadian wildfires suggest, we’re no longer on the planet we humans have inhabited these last many thousand years. We’re now living in a new, not terribly recognizable, ever more perilous world. It’s not just this country that’s in decline but Planet Earth itself as a livable place for humanity and for so many other species. Climate change, in other words, is quickly becoming the climate emergency.

And as the reaction to 9/11 shows, faced with a moment of true terror, don’t count on the response of either the United States or the rest of humanity being on target. After all, as that smoke bomb in New York suggests, these days, too many of those of us who matter — whether we’re talking about the climate-change-denying Trumpublican Party or the leaders of the Pentagon — are fighting the wrong wars, while the major companies responsible for so much of the terror to come, the giant fossil-fuel outfits, continue to pull in blockbuster — no, record! — profits for destroying our future. And that simply couldn’t be more dystopian or, potentially, a more dangerously smoky concoction. Consider that a form of terrorism even al-Qaeda couldn’t have imagined. Consider all of that, in fact, a preview of a world in which a horrific version of 9/11 could become daily life.

So, if there is a war to be fought, the Pentagon won’t be able to fight it. After all, it’s not prepared for increasing numbers of smoke bombs, scorching megadroughts, ever more powerful and horrific storms, melting ice, rising sea levels, broiling temperatures, and so much more. And yet, whether you’re American or Chinese, that’s likely to sum up our true enemy in the decades to come. And worse yet, if the Pentagon and its Chinese equivalent find themselves in a war, Ukraine-style or otherwise, over the island of Taiwan, you might as well kiss it all goodbye.

It should be obvious that the two greatest greenhouse gas producers, China and the United States, will rise or fall (as will the rest of us) on the basis of how well (or desperately poorly) they cooperate in the future when it comes to the overheating of this planet. The question is: Can this country, or for that matter the world, respond in some reasonable fashion to what’s clearly going to be climate terror attack after terror attack potentially leading to dystopian vistas that could stretch into the distant future?

Will humanity react to the climate emergency as ineptly as this country did to 9/11? Is there any hope that we’ll act effectively before we find ourselves on a version of Mars or, as Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, and others like them clearly wish, fossil-fuelize ourselves to hell and back? In other words, are we truly fated to live on a smoke bomb of a planet?

Alfred McCoy, Ending Putin's Forever War in Ukraine

[Note for TomDispatch Readers: As you check out today’s post, give a thought to getting your hands on the new paperback version of To Govern the Globe: World Orders and Catastrophic Change, Alfred McCoy’s remarkable history of our imperial world from the Portuguese empire of the sixteenth century to late tomorrow night. Updated and with a new introduction, it’s quite a read! And let me remind you that, for a $125 donation to this site ($150 if you live outside the U.S.), you can get a signed, personalized copy of the paperback and, while you’re at it, ensure that future pieces like his today will continue to appear at TomDispatch. As ever, this site needs your help! So, consider visiting our donation page and doing whatever you can. Believe me, it will be appreciated! Tom]

Yes, a crucial Ukrainian dam is destroyed, the downriver communities flood, and the danger to the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant only grows. It could prove Ukraine’s worst ecological disaster since the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown of 1986. And yes, it’s that war again, the latest European conflict in a horrific history that extends to hell and back. And what’s on the mind of the top figures in the Biden administration and the U.S. military right now? How to end it as quickly as possible before further disaster strikes? Not a chance!

After all, as I wrote so many years ago, the U.S. lives in a… well, in 2023, you would have to say the dregs of a “victory culture” and, in a Washington still filled with relics from the Cold War era (including our president), peace is not exactly at the top of anyone’s agenda. In fact, in a recent speech, Secretary of State Antony Blinken essentially chucked the very idea of peace, no less halting the war in Ukraine, however briefly, out the window. “Some countries,” he said, “will call for a ceasefire. And on the surface, that sounds sensible — attractive, even. After all, who doesn’t want warring parties to lay down their arms? Who doesn’t want the killing to stop? But a ceasefire that simply freezes current lines in place and enables Putin to consolidate control over the territory he’s seized… It would legitimize Russia’s land grab. It would reward the aggressor and punish the victim.”

And yes, amid the chaos and rising destruction, the Ukrainian “spring” counteroffensive (which only really started last week) is on its way, but whatever gains it may make, one thing is distinctly unlikely: that the Ukrainians will be capable of triumphing in a war with a Russia that, whatever its (many) problems, is simply the larger and more powerful of the two countries. The question then becomes: How — short of escalating to the nuclear level — could this disastrous war near the heart of Europe possibly end?

With that question in mind, let TomDispatch regular Alfred McCoy, author of the aptly titled history of the rise and fall of empires To Govern the Globe: World Orders and Catastrophic Change, suggest how it might finally conclude. While he’s at it, let him also explain how that very ending might mark a new stage in the rise — and fall — of imperial powers on this beleaguered planet of ours. Tom

Peace for Ukraine Courtesy of China?

Another Step in Beijing’s Rise to Global Power

All wars do end, usually thanks to a negotiated peace agreement. Consider that a fundamental historical fact, even if it seems to have been forgotten in Brussels, Moscow, and above all, Washington, D.C.

In recent months, among Russian President Vladimir Putin’s followers, there has been much talk of a “forever war” in Ukraine dragging on for years, if not decades. “For us,” Putin told a group of factory workers recently, “this is not a geopolitical task, but a task of the survival of Russian statehood, creating conditions for the future development of the country and our children.”

Visiting Kyiv last February, President Joseph Biden assured Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky, “You remind us that freedom is priceless; it’s worth fighting for, for as long as it takes. And that’s how long we’re going to be with you, Mr. President: for as long as it takes.” A few weeks later, the European Council affirmed “its resolute condemnation of Russia’s actions and unwavering support for Ukraine and its people.”

With all the major players already committed to fighting a forever war, how could peace possibly come about? With the U.N. compromised by Russia’s seat on the Security Council and the G-7 powers united in condemning “Russia’s illegal, unjustifiable, and unprovoked war of aggression against Ukraine,” the most likely dealmaker when it comes to ending this forever war may prove to be President Xi Jinping of China.

In the West, Xi’s self-styled role as a peacemaker in Ukraine has been widely mocked. In February, on the first anniversary of the Russian invasion, China’s call for negotiations as the “only viable solution to the Ukraine crisis” sparked a barbed reply from U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan who claimed the war “could end tomorrow if Russia stopped attacking Ukraine.”

When Xi visited Moscow in March, the statement Chinese officials released claiming that he hoped to “play a constructive role in promoting talks” prompted considerable Western criticism. “I don’t think China can serve as a fulcrum on which any Ukraine peace process could move,” insisted Ryan Hass, a former American diplomat assigned to China. Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, pointed out that “China has taken sides” in the conflict by backing Russia and so could hardly become a peacemaker. Even when Xi made a personal call to Zelensky promising to dispatch an envoy to promote negotiations “with all parties,” critics dismissed that overture as so much damage control for China’s increasingly troubled trade relations with Europe.

The Symbolism of Peace Conferences

Still, think about it for a moment. Who else could bring the key parties to the table and potentially make them honor their signatures on a peace treaty? Putin has, of course, already violated U.N. accords by invading a sovereign state, while rupturing his economic entente with Europe and trashing past agreements with Washington to respect Ukraine’s sovereignty. And yet the Russian president relies on China’s support, economically and otherwise, which makes Xi the only leader who might be able to bring him to the bargaining table and ensure that he honors any agreement he signs. That sobering reality should raise serious questions about how any future Beijing-inspired peace conference might happen and what it would mean for the current world order.

For more than 200 years, peace conferences have not only resolved conflicts but regularly signaled the arrival at stage center of a new world power. In 1815, amid the whirling waltzes in Vienna’s palaces that accompanied negotiations ending the Napoleonic wars, Britain emerged for its century-long reign as the globe’s greatest power. Similarly, the 1885 Berlin Conference that carved up the continent of Africa for colonial rule heralded Germany’s rise as Britain’s first serious rival. The somber deliberations in Versailles’s grand Hall of Mirrors that officially ended World War I in 1919 marked America’s debut on the world stage. Similarly, the 1945 peace conference at San Francisco that established the U.N. (just as World War II was about to end) affirmed the ascent of U.S. global hegemony.

Imagine the impact if, sooner or later, envoys from Kyiv and Moscow convene in Beijing beneath the gaze of President Xi and find the elusive meeting point between Russia’s aspirations and Ukraine’s survival. One thing would be guaranteed: after years of disruptions in the global energy, fertilizer, and grain markets, marked by punishing inflation and spreading hunger, all eyes from five continents would indeed turn toward Beijing.

After all, with the war disrupting grain and fertilizer shipments via the Black Sea, world hunger doubled to an estimated 345 million people in 2023, while basic food insecurity now afflicts 828 million inhabitants of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Should such negotiations ever prove fruitful, a televised signing ceremony, hosted by President Xi and watched by countless millions globally, would crown China’s rapid 20-year ascent to world power.

Forget Ukraine for a moment and concentrate on China’s economic rise under communist rule, which has been little short of extraordinary. At the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949, China was an economic lightweight. Its massive population, 20% of the world’s total, was producing just 4% of global economic output. So weak was China that its leader Mao Zedong had to wait two weeks amid a Moscow winter for an audience with Soviet leader Joseph Stalin just to plead for the industrial technology that would help rebuild an economy devastated by 12 years of war and revolution. In the decade following its admission to the World Trade Organization in 2002, however, China quickly became the workshop of the world, accumulating an unprecedented $4 trillion in foreign-exchange reserves.

Instead of simply swimming in a hoard of cash like Scrooge McDuck in his Money Bin, in 2013 President Xi announced a trillion-dollar development scheme called the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Its aim was to build a massive infrastructure across the Eurasian landmass and Africa, thereby improving the lives of humanity’s forgotten millions, while making Beijing the focal point of Eurasia’s economic development. Today, China is not only an industrial powerhouse that produces 18% of the global gross domestic product, or GDP (compared to 12% for the U.S.), but also the world’s chief creditor. It provides capital for infrastructure and industrial projects to 148 nations, while offering some hope to the quarter of humanity still subsisting on less than four dollars a day.

Testifying to that economic prowess, for the past six months, world leaders have ignored Washington’s pleas to form a united front against China. Instead, remarkable numbers of them, including Germany’s Olaf Scholz, Spain’s Pedro Sánchez, and Brazil’s Lula da Silva, have been turning up in Beijing to pay court to President Xi. In April, even French President and U.S. ally Emmanuel Macron visited the Chinese capital where he proclaimed a “global strategic partnership with China” and urged other countries to become less reliant on the “extraterritoriality of the U.S. dollar.”

Then, in a diplomatic coup that stunned Washington, China took a key step toward healing the dangerous sectarian rivalry between Shia Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia by hosting a meeting of their foreign ministers in Beijing. As the Saudis’ chief oil customer and Iran’s largest creditor, Beijing had the commercial clout to bring them to the bargaining table. China’s top diplomat Wang Yi then hailed the restored diplomatic relations as part of his country’s “constructive role in facilitating the proper settlement of hot-spot issues around the world.”

Geopolitics as a Source of Change

Underlying the sudden display of Chinese diplomatic clout is a recent shift in that essential realm called “geopolitics” that’s driving a fundamental realignment in global power. Around 1900, at the high tide of the British Empire, an English geographer, Sir Halford Mackinder, started the modern study of geopolitics by publishing a highly influential article arguing that the construction of the 5,000-mile-long Trans-Siberian Railway from Moscow to Vladivostok was the beginning of a merger of Europe and Asia. That unified land mass, he said, would soon become the epicenter of global power.

In 1997, in his book The Grand Chess Board, former U.S. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brezinski updated MacKinder, arguing that “geopolitics has moved from the regional to the global dimension, with preponderance over the entire Eurasian continent serving as the central basis for global primacy.” In words particularly apt for our present world, he added: “America’s global primacy is directly dependent on how long and how effectively its preponderance on the Eurasian continent is sustained.”

More than a quarter-century later, imagine geopolitics as a deep substrate shaping far more superficial political events, even if it’s only noticeable in certain moments, much the way the incessant grinding of the planet’s tectonic plates only becomes visible when volcanic eruptions break through the earth’s surface. For centuries, if not millennia, Europe was separated from Asia by endless deserts and sprawling grasslands. The empty center of that vast land mass was crossed only by an occasional string of camels travelling the ancient Silk Road.

Now, thanks to its trillion-dollar investment in infrastructure — rails, roads, pipelines, and ports — China is fundamentally changing that geopolitical substrate through a more than metaphoric merger of continents. If President Xi’s grand design succeeds, Beijing will forge a unified market stretching 6,000 miles from the North Sea to the South China Sea, eventually encompassing 70% of all humanity, and effectively fusing Europe and Asia into a single economic continent: Eurasia.

Despite the Biden administration’s fervid attempts to create an anti-Chinese coalition, recent diplomatic eruptions are shaping a new world order that isn’t at all what Washington has in mind. With the economic creation of a true Eurasian sphere seemingly underway, from that Iran-Saudi entente to Macron’s visit to Beijing, we may be seeing the first signs of the changing face of international politics. The question is: Could a Chinese-engineered peace in Ukraine be next in line?

Pressures on China for Peace

Such growing geopolitical power is giving China both the motivation and potentially even the means to negotiate an end to the fighting in Ukraine. First, the means: as Russia’s chief customer for its commodity exports, and Ukraine’s largest trading partner before the war, China can use commercial pressure to bring both parties to the bargaining table — much as it did for Iran and Saudi Arabia.

Next, the motivation: while Moscow and Kyiv might each exude confidence in ultimate victory in their forever war, Beijing has reason to grow impatient with the economic disruptions radiating out across the Black Sea to roil a delicately balanced global economy. According to the World Bank, almost half of humanity (47%) is now surviving on seven dollars a day, and most of them live in Africa, Asia, and Latin America where China has made massive, long-term developmental loans to 148 countries under its Belt and Road Initiative.

With 70% of its lands and their rich black soils devoted to agriculture, Ukraine has, for decades, produced bumper crops of wheat, barley, soybeans, and sunflower oil that made it “the breadbasket of the world,” providing the globe’s hungry millions with reliable shipments of affordable commodities. Right after the Russian invasion, however, world prices for grains and vegetable oils shot up by 60%. Despite stabilization efforts, including the U.N.’s Black Sea Grain Initiative to allow exports through the war zone, prices for such essentials remain all too high. And they threaten to go higher still with further disruption of global supply chains or more war damage like the recent rupture of a crucial Ukrainian irrigation dam that’s turning more than a million acres of prime farmland into “desert.”

As costs for imports of fertilizer, grain, and other foodstuffs have soared since the Russian invasion, the Council on Foreign Relations reports that “a climbing number of low-income BRI countries have struggled to repay loans associated with the initiative, spurring a wave of debt crises.” In the Horn of Africa, for example, the sixth year of a crippling drought has pushed an estimated 23 million people into a “hunger crisis,” forcing the governments of Ethiopia and Kenya to balance costly food imports with the repayment of Chinese loans for the creation of critical infrastructure like factories, railroads, and renewable energy. With such loans surpassing 20% of gross domestic product (GDP) in nations like Ghana, Malaysia, Pakistan, and Zambia, while China itself holds outstanding credits equivalent to 25% of its GDP, Beijing is far more invested in global economic peace and stability than any other major power.

Beyond Western Fantasies of Victory

At present, Beijing might seem alone among major nations in its concern about the strain the Ukraine war is placing on a world economy poised between starvation and survival. But within the coming six months, Western opinion will likely start to shift as its inflated expectations for Ukrainian victory in its long-awaited “spring counteroffensive” meet the reality of Russia’s return to trench warfare.

After the stunning success of Ukraine’s offensives late last year near Kharkiv and Kherson, the West dropped its reticence about provoking Putin and began shipping billions of dollars of sophisticated equipment — first, HIMARS and Hawk missiles, then Leopard and Abrams battle tanks, and, by the end of this year, advanced F-16 jet fighters. By the war’s first anniversary last February, the West had already provided Kyiv with $115 billion in aid and expectations of success rose with each new arms shipment. Adding to that anticipation, Moscow’s own “winter offensive” with its desperate suicide attacks on the city of Bakhmut suggested, as Foreign Affairs put it, that “the Russian military demonstrated… it was no longer capable of large-scale combat operations.”

But defense is another matter. While Moscow was wasting some 20,000 lives on suicide assaults on Bakhmut, its specialized tractors were cutting a formidable network of trenches and tank traps along a 600-mile front designed to stall any Ukrainian counteroffensive.

Ukraine’s troops will probably achieve some breakthroughs when that offensive finally begins, but are unlikely to push Russia back from all its post-invasion gains. Remember that Russia’s army of 1.3 million is three times larger than Ukraine’s which has also suffered many casualties. In March, the commander of Ukraine’s 46th Air Assault brigade told the Washington Post that a year of combat had left 100 dead and 400 wounded in his 500-man unit and that they were being replaced by raw recruits, some of whom fled at the very sound of rifle fire. To counter the few dozen “symbolic” Leopard tanks the West is sending, Russia has thousands of older-model tanks in reserve. Despite U.S. and European sanctions, Russia’s economy has actually continued to grow, while Ukraine’s, which was only about a tenth the size of Russia’s, has shrunk by 30%. Facts like these mean just one thing is likely: stalemate.

Beijing as Peacemaker

By next December, if Ukraine’s counteroffensive has indeed stalled, its people face another cold, dark winter of drone attacks, while Russia’s rising casualties and lack of results might by then begin to challenge Putin’s hold on power. In other words, both combatants might feel far more compelled to sit down in Beijing for peace talks. With the threat of future disruptions damaging its delicate global position, Beijing will likely deploy its full economic power to press the parties for a settlement. By trading territory, while agreeing with China on reconstruction aid, and some further strictures on Ukraine’s future NATO membership, both sides might feel they had won enough concessions to sign an agreement.

Not only would China then gain enormous prestige for brokering such a peace deal, but it might win a preferential position in the reconstruction bonanza that would follow by offering aid to rebuild both a ravaged Ukraine and a damaged Russia. In a recent report, the World Bank estimates that it could take $411 billion over a decade to rebuild a devastated Ukraine through infrastructure contracts of the very kind Chinese construction companies are so ready to undertake. To sweeten such deals, Ukraine could also allow China to build massive factories to supply Europe’s soaring demand for renewable energy and electric vehicles. Apart from the profits involved, such Chinese-Ukrainian joint ventures would ramp up production at a time when that country is likely to gain duty-free access to the European market.

In the post-war moment, with the possibility that Ukraine will be an increasingly strong economic ally at the edge of Europe, Russia still a reliable supplier of cut-rate commodities, and the European market ever more open to its state corporations, China is likely to emerge from that disastrous conflict — to use Brzezinski’s well-chosen words — with its “preponderance over the entire Eurasian continent” consolidated and its “basis for global primacy” significantly strengthened.

Andrea Mazzarino, The Wound of the War on Terror, Up Close and Personal

It couldn’t be stranger when you think about it. This country has been at war nonstop since September 12, 2001. It’s poured our taxpayer dollars — an estimated $8 trillion of them — down the sinkhole of those disastrous wars. The two biggest ones in Afghanistan and Iraq are officially over, though the U.S. still has 2,500 troops in Iraq and hundreds more (as well as private contractors) in neighboring Syria. Still, though we hear far less about it, the war on terror is ongoing. As Nick Turse has been reporting for years, for instance, the U.S. military continues to pour money and effort into war-on-terror-style military campaigns across significant parts of Africa, while terror groups only grow larger and more violent there, and yet who in this country even notices anymore?

Here, I suspect, is the reality of the situation: most Americans not connected to the U.S. military undoubtedly stopped thinking about the war on terror and its toll years ago — except at rare moments like during the disastrous collapse of the U.S.-backed Afghan government in August 2021 as this country was trying to withdraw its troops after two decades of failed war there. As has been true so often in these years, we generally neither pay significant attention to the damage we’re causing in distant lands nor to the damage we’ve caused ourselves in the process. Otherwise, how could it be possible that, during the recent debt-ceiling crisis, cuts were made to domestic programs, but the Pentagon budget, already larger than those of the next 10 countries combined, only continued to rise?

And yet, don’t think that, in the process, we haven’t damaged ourselves in all sorts of ways. Today, TomDispatch regular, co-founder of the Costs of War Project, therapist, and military spouse Andrea Mazzarino considers just what we did to ourselves in what might be considered a hidden campaign of… yes… self-inflicted terror. Tom

Americans in Pain

Confronting the Phantom Limbs of America’s Foreign Wars

America’s War on Terror, launched in response to the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, has had a staggering impact on our world. The Costs of War Project at Brown University, which I helped found, paints as full a picture as possible of the toll of those “forever wars” both in human lives and in dollars. The wars, we estimate, have killed nearly one million people, including close to 400,000 civilians in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan alone. Worse yet, they sickened or injured several times more than that — leading to illnesses and injuries that, we estimate, resulted in millions of non-battlefield deaths.

And don’t forget that those figures include dead and wounded Americans, too. Most of us, however, have little awareness of any of this. If you live outside the archipelago of American military bases that extends across this country and the planet — an estimated 750 of them outside the U.S. on every continent except Antarctica — it’s easy enough not to meet stressed-out military service members and their families. It’s easy enough, in fact, not to grasp just how America’s wars of this century rippled out to touch military communities.

In recent times, those bases have become ever more difficult for the public to enter and often aren’t close to the cities where so many of us live. All of this means that, if you’re a civilian, the odds are you haven’t met the grieving spouses of the soldiers who never came home or the shaken children of the ones who did, forever changed, sometimes with amputated limbs or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). I’m thinking of the ones with those far-off gazes and the pain they have to deal with in their heads, their limbs, their backs.

Personally, I find it overwhelmingly hard to write about such human-shaped holes in our disturbed world. That’s probably why the Costs of War Project has a 35-person (and counting) team of journalists, physicians, social scientists, and other experts to portion out the research and the pain that goes with it as they deal with the fact that the monumental death and injury counts they’ve produced are likely to be underestimates.

As I write this, my chest tightens and my breath gets short, reminding me that some realities are impossible to contemplate without a physical reaction. And I begin to understand why so many Americans, including those not in the military — an estimated 50 million in fact! — experience chronic pain. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof is writing a stunning series of pieces reporting on what many in the public-health world term “diseases of despair” like depression, suicidality, and addiction. A significant portion of those Americans don’t have injuries that are detectable via X-rays, CT scans, MRIs, or the like. Often, pain is linked with major depression, other symptoms of PTSD, or anxiety. Something is happening in the minds of Americans that’s not easily traceable in the body because its causes may lie in our wider world.

The Costs of War on the Homefront

Know one thing: in the U.S., so many of us do feel the painful results of our disastrous distant wars of this century, whether we know it or not. For instance, ever more Americans attend crumbling, understaffed schools, drive on roads in disrepair, and go to hospitals and health clinics (not just Veterans Administration ones with their seemingly endless waiting lists!) that don’t have enough doctors and mental-health therapists to meet our needs. Arguably, a major culprit is the war on terror. To take just one example, we could have fully staffed and equipped our whole healthcare system and made it significantly more pandemic resilient had we spent just a fraction of the $8 trillion or more this country put out for our foreign wars.

And the sting of war on our society doesn’t end with decrepit infrastructure, but extends to civil liberties and human rights. For example, our police are armed to the teeth with military-grade weaponry and other equipment provided by an overfed Pentagon and in this century have grown more aggressive towards unarmed people here at home.

And believe me, pain from American war-making is felt elsewhere, too, often all too directly in the dozens of countries around the world where the U.S. arms and trains militaries, continues to fight counterinsurgency wars, and runs prisons and intelligence operations. There are the air strikes and shootings, the father or brother who can no longer be the breadwinner because he was collateral damage in a drone strike, the millions of displaced and malnourished people — many of them mothers with children — in countries where Washington has supported authoritarian regimes in questionable counterinsurgency wars.

Pain That Is Difficult to Trace

Given global events since those 9/11 attacks, it shouldn’t be surprising that pain is so frequently experienced by people in our military communities. Somewhere between 31% and 44% of active-duty American soldiers report chronic pain of some sort. That’s significantly higher than in the general population. And no surprise in this either: veterans are about 40% more likely to report chronic pain than non-veterans.

Chronic pain is, in fact, part of a category of neurological conditions that ranks as the fifth most common source of disability for service members treated at on-installation clinics and hospitals. Worse yet, military pain-related diagnoses have been growing. Back pain, neck pain, knee pain, migraines, and chest pain are becoming the norm.

As a military spouse and a therapist who has treated many soldiers and veterans, I’ve all too often observed how such pain, while sometimes untraceable to a visible source, is all too real — real enough, in fact, to immobilize some soldiers, or even keep them from successfully stringing together sentences. (And while I’ve seldom found that commonly recommended medication treatments truly alleviate such pain in a sustainable way, I have watched it subside over time thanks to the sorts of things that also boost mental health — talk therapy, exercise, and deepening friendships.)

Of course, military communities aren’t the only places where such pain is commonplace. It’s also experienced all too often by poor Americans without college degrees, especially women and people of color — in other words, the most vulnerable slices of our American pie.

The portraits in Kristof’s pieces reveal some surprising findings about pain. First, the amount of pain you experience depends not just on the physical injury that may show up on an X-ray or CT scan or, in the case of soldiers, the wound you got, but on what you think and feel. Two-thirds of people with depression have unexplained chronic pain, for example. Doctors have even discovered that some people reporting knee pain have no discernable anatomical problem.

By the same token, the brain has a certain ability to heal or ameliorate pain. In some cases, through the use of “mirror therapy,” people have been able to ease pain from an amputated limb or “phantom limb” by looking repeatedly at the intact one and somehow creating the impression that they’re okay.

Some people, military or not, with chronic depression, anxiety, or PTSD symptoms like exaggerated startle reflexes or sleep problems experience greater sensitivity to pain if they get physically injured again. Their brains, it turns out, have been trained by trauma to believe something’s wrong with their bodies.

Common diagnoses that have seeped into household parlance tend to reinforce this notion for many. Medical categories like fibromyalgia and irritable bowel symptom make pain sound as though it’s related to something tangible, except that all too often, it’s “just” pain.

It’s hardly a surprise anymore that the go-to treatment for pain in America is opioids, and look where that’s left us — with an epidemic of addiction and deaths to the tune of tens of thousands of lives lost yearly. Somehow, that approach to dealing with pain brings me back to the way the U.S. fought “terrorism” after the 9/11 attacks — with our own brand of terror (war!) globally and, indeed, it not only proved all too addictive but so much more costly to us and so many others on this planet than the original blow.

The Phantom Limb of American Society

If this comparison seems kind of out there to you, that’s my point. The problems experienced by Americans in pain are often all too hard to pin down, because at least in part they derive from survival guilt at having watched fellow soldiers getting blown to pieces by improvised explosive devices, or your parents dying from Covid because their jobs as janitors didn’t allow them to quarantine, or intense loneliness in a pandemic that made high school a virtual solo performance for all too many students. And get this: you don’t even need to go through one of those nightmarish scenarios personally to be in pain. Just hearing about economic insecurity in our world can exacerbate whatever aches you have.

This makes me wonder what it was like for so many to watch the recent coverage of Congress reaching the precipice over whether to raise the debt ceiling so that the government could pay its bills. How did it affect already struggling people to contemplate imminent economic catastrophe in the form of potentially soaring interest rates, inflation, job loss, and potential cutoffs in social services like healthcare? As a therapist who relies heavily on state-funded health insurance for my income and whose spouse is a soon-to-be veteran, I can’t help but scoff at congressional representatives who claim to be supporting our military by insisting on raising already astronomic Pentagon funding yet higher, while trying to gut the very systems that would let even a family as privileged as mine make ends meet once a soldier finishes his or her service.

Now look a little farther out if you want to be anxious. Most Americans don’t realize that our forever wars have been funded almost entirely by borrowing. A fundamental reason why we have to talk about a debt ceiling and continue to borrow ever more money to pay bills like those due for Medicare, Medicaid, and food stamps is war. One key reason why we need to worry at all about making college graduates start paying their exorbitant loans back again is… yes, our debts from war-making. Notice a theme here?

Of course, war means that the remedies for pain that have proven to be most effective in the long run are not as available to those who experience the most pain. Exercise, certain types of talk therapy, and community are key and yet can be all too sparsely available to those working multiple jobs and struggling to pay their bills, not to mention those being shipped from base to base amid the grinding pace of military life.

In the meantime, military families and veterans are left to pay the costs of war directly via just about every kind of stress and distress imaginable. I remember someone I knew at one military post. A person of color and a veteran of the Vietnam war, he’d often be outside his house in the early mornings and evenings, smoking weed in order to alleviate leg pain that was untraceable to any particular injury. What he did talk about frequently were his painful memories of shooting at rural, dark-skinned villagers in Vietnam who resembled his own farmworker family in the U.S. when he was growing up. Trauma and pain were his frequent travel companions and yet the source of his pain remained unidentifiable in his small, fit body.

As then-President Donald Trump had banned or suspended the entry of people from eight different majority Muslim nations (as well as other refugees) to this country, I knew life wasn’t easy for him. He was, after all, often mistaken for a Muslim, called racial slurs, and told by passersby to go back where he came from. And even so many years later, that veteran and all too many soldiers like him may still not find a healthy part of our country to look at in order to convince themselves that life indeed will be okay.

Yes, there are all too many sick parts of our land, including a shaky social safety net, the hate and violence that continue to spread, and the long lines to get anywhere near a doctor or therapist. Contemplating all of this can be like gazing at a phantom limb that still smarts, even as so many of the original injuries — from 9/11 to our disastrous military response to it — seem all too forgettable to so many of us. Sad to say, but it’s vital that we remember the costs of war not only for ourselves but for those millions of people out there who experienced the — in every sense — wounds we inflicted in the name of an injured America in our nightmarish war on terror. Otherwise, don’t be surprised if we do it again.

Todd Miller, Out-Trumping Trump at the Border

These days, it seems as if it happened in another world. I’m thinking of that June afternoon in 2015 when The Donald rode a Trump Tower escalator down to waiting reporters (and a cheering crowd of — yes! — actors he had hired at $50 a pop) to announce that he was going to run for president. In that speech, he took the crowd and those reporters with him on a quick trip, however metaphoric, southwest, swearing he would build a “great, great wall on our southern border, and I will make Mexico pay for that wall.” Why? Because, of course, Mexico was sending its worst people northwards. “They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”

But count on one thing, the man who only recently was convicted of… well, not quite raping but “sexually abusing” E. Jean Carroll… sure didn’t think many of them were “good people” like him, nor does he now. Admittedly, he neither successfully built much of that “big, beautiful wall” of his, nor managed to make Mexico pay for any of the wildly expensive parts he did get constructed (47 new miles, the rest replacing fencing already there). And yet, almost eight years later, without an escalator in sight, in some fashion he’s still on that border. Only recently, for instance, the former president running for the Republican nomination in 2024 swore that when he returned to the White House, he would quickly issue an executive order ensuring that the children of undocumented immigrants “will not receive automatic U.S. citizenship”; in other words, he would end the “birthright citizenship” guaranteed by the 14th Amendment, something he had promised to do in 2015 and again as president.

And of course, with the race for that nomination heating up, in mid-May, Ron DeSantis tried to out-Trump Trump by dispatching 800 members of the Florida National Guard, 200 agents from the state Department of Law Enforcement, 101 state highway patrol troopers, 20 agents from the State Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission and the Department of Emergency Management, 5 fixed-wing aircraft, 17 unmanned drones, and 10 boats to… yes, you guessed it, Texas’s border with Mexico — for, well… at least 30 days as the Trump/covid era Title 42 border expulsion policy finally ended.

What you wouldn’t know, however, unless you were reading the work of TomDispatch regular and border expert Todd Miller, was that, while the Republicans made (mostly fake) border policy their pride, joy, and nightmare first class, what he calls the border-industrial complex has been making a fortune off American taxpayers by fortifying that border in ways that fit not Trump’s wall-eyed vision of prevention, but one more in keeping with our increasingly AI-ed world. Let me not tell you more though, just suggest you get on the nearest escalator and head down this page to Miller’s latest border foray to see for yourself. Tom

The Real Border Surge

The End of Title 42 and the Triumph of the Border-Industrial Complex

On May 11th, I was with a group of people at the bottom of the Paso del Norte bridge in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. Suddenly, I realized that I didn’t have the small change needed to cross the bridge and return to El Paso, Texas, where I was attending the 16th annual Border Security Expo. Worse yet, this was just three hours before Title 42, the pandemic-era rapid-expulsion border policy instituted by the Trump administration, was set to expire. The media was already in overdrive on the subject, producing apocalyptic scenarios like one in the New York Post reporting that “hordes” of “illegals” were on their way toward the border.

While I searched for those coins, a woman approached me, dug 35 cents out of a small purse — precisely what it cost! — and handed the change to me. She then did so for the others in our group. When I pulled a 20-peso bill from my wallet to repay her, she kept her fist clenched and wouldn’t accept the money.

Having lived, reported, and traveled in Latin America for more than two decades, such generosity didn’t entirely surprise me, though it did contradict so much of the media-generated hype about what was going on at this historic border moment. Since Joe Biden took office in 2021, the pressure on his administration to rescind Trump’s Title 42 had only grown. Now, it was finally going to happen — and hell was on the horizon.

But at that expo in El Paso that brought together top brass from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), its border and immigration enforcement agencies, and private industry, I was learning that preparations for such a shift had been underway for years and — don’t be shocked! — the corporations attending planned to profit from it in a big-time fashion.

Seeing the phase-out of Title 42 through the lens of a growing border-industrial complex proved grimly illuminating. Border officials and industry representatives continued to insist that just on the other side of the border was a world of “cartels,” “adversaries,” and “criminals,” including, undoubtedly, this woman forcing change on me. By then, I had heard all too many warnings that, were the United States to let its guard down, however briefly, there would be an infernal “border surge.”

As I later stood in the halls of that expo, however, I became aware of another type of surge not being discussed either there or in the media. And I’m not just thinking about the extra members of the National Guard and other forces the Biden administration and Texas Governor Greg Abbott only recently sent to that very border. What I have in mind is the surge of ever higher budgets and record numbers of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) contracts guaranteed to ensure that those borderlands will remain one of the most militarized and surveilled places on planet Earth.

Robo-Dogs at the Expo

Earlier that day, I found myself standing in front of the Ghost Robotics booth. There sat a vendor and, in front of him, a chrome-colored robotic dog on a puke-green carpet. Behind him, a large sign said: “Robots that Feel the World.” He was explaining to prospective customers that the robo-dog could run at a pace of up to nine miles an hour. A vendor in the adjacent booth, Persistent Systems, that claimed to connect “soldiers, sensors, unmanned systems, and cameras in a dynamic network,” was not impressed. (Those, by the way, were but two of nearly 200 companies in that large exhibition hall.). He said, “I’ll take my dog any day,” meaning his living and breathing dog.

The Ghost Robotics vendor responded earnestly, “We are not going to replace dogs!”

All around us, well-dressed corporate types, uniformed Border Patrol agents, and other police officials wandered the aisles, looking at retractable tower masts, taser demonstrations, Glock guns, and facial recognition and iris scanners, part of a border industry that’s been in a state of constant growth for two decades.

Honestly, walking through that exhibition hall was like being in a science-fiction novel that had come to life or perhaps a crystal ball for our border future. The Israel Aerospace Industries banner hovered on the rafters praising a company “Where Courage Meets Technology.” On the ground, the company highlighted its MegaPop high-powered surveillance camera.

The slogan of Tower Solutions, which sells body armor, was more typically down to earth (or do I mean sky-high?): “Speed, Strength, Stability, Elevated.” Armored Republic, which also sells body armor, offered religious fervor in a banner that said: “In a Republic There’s No King but Christ.” But Anduril, the new border darling — 11 contracts with CBP since 2018 — may have caught the enforcement future most perfectly with its “Autonomy for Border Security” banner. Autonomous sentry towers, autonomous drones, and autonomous robotic dogs were to be the true post-Title 42 future, and the exhibition hall was a crystal ball for such a time to come.

Contemplating the Ghost Robotic guy’s response, the Persistent Systems vendor then pointed at the robo-dog and said, “You can weaponize those things and they can go into barracks and blow a motherfucker’s face off.”

The Ghost Robotics vendor responded, “We’re already doing that.” Did he mean weaponizing robo-dogs or blowing a person’s face off? I had no idea.

The Budget Surge

A few hours earlier, DHS Chief Information Officer Eric Hysen assured industry officials that his agency had the “largest budget ever enacted” in its 20-year history. Formerly a Silicon Valley software engineer and program organizer for Google, he had arrived in Washington in 2014 to work in the Obama White House. The next year, he created a Digital Services Team at DHS and “never looked back.” His technocratic language had no Trumpian bluster or hyperbole. It was grounded in numbers and budgets with a bit of social justice spun in (including a mention of a program to hire more women and assurances that, no matter the invasive surveillance technology DHS was developing, privacy issues were taken quite seriously by the department).

At $29.8 billion, the CBP/ICE portion of the DHS budget he praised was not just the highest ever but a $3 billion jump above 2022, including $2.7 billion for “new acquirements in our southwestern border.” In other words, the coming surge at the border was distinctly budgetary.

For context, when Donald Trump took office in 2017 his CBP/ICE budget was $21.2 billion. By 2020, it had gone up to $25.4 billion. In other words, it took him four years to do what the Biden administration essentially did in one. The last time there had been such a jump was from $9.4 billion in 2005 to $12.4 billion in 2007, including funding for huge projects like the Secure Fence Act that built nearly 650 miles of walls and barriers, SBInet which aimed to build a virtual wall at the border (with special thanks to the Boeing Corporation), and the largest hiring surge ever undertaken by the Border Patrol — 8,000 agents in three years.

But if that’s what $3 billion meant in 2005-2007, what does it mean in 2023 and beyond? Gone was the Trump-era bravado about that “big, beautiful wall.” Hysen’s focus was on the Department of Homeland Security’s launching of an Artificial Intelligence Taskforce. A technocrat, Hysen spoke of harnessing “the power of AI to transform the department’s mission,” assuring the industry audience that “I follow technology very closely and I am more excited by the developments of AI this year than I have been about any technology since the first smartphones.”

That robo-dog in front of me caught the state of the border in 2023 and the trends that went with it perfectly. It could, after all, be controlled by an agent up to 33 miles away, according to the vendor, and apparently could even — thank you, AI — make decisions on its own.

The vendor showed me a video of just how such a dog would work if it were armed. It would use AI technology to find human forms. A red box would form around any human it detects on a tablet screen held by an agent. In other words, I asked, can the dog think?

I had in mind the way Bing’s Chatbox, the AI-powered search engine from Microsoft, had so infamously professed its love for New York Times reporter Kevin Roose. A human, using an Xbox-like controller, the vendor told me, will be able to target a specific person among those the dog detects. “But,” he reassured me, “it’s a human who ultimately pulls the trigger.”

The Title 42 Surge

In Mexico, when I walked to a spot where the Rio Grande flowed between the two countries, I ran into a small group of migrants camped out at the side of the road. Near them was a fire filled with charred wood over which a pot was cooking. A pregnant Colombian woman told me they were providing food to other migrants passing by. “Oh,” I asked, “so you sell food?” No, she responded, they gave it away for free. Before they had been camped out for months near the immigration detention center in Ciudad Juárez where a devastating fire in March killed 40 people. Now, they had moved closer to the border. And they were still waiting, still hoping to file applications for asylum themselves.

Behind where they sat, I could see the 20-foot border wall with coiling razor wire on top. There was nothing new about a hyper-militarized border here. After all, the El Paso build-up had begun 30 years ago with Operation Hold the Line in 1993. A desert camo Humvee sat below the wall on the U.S. side and a couple of figures (Border Patrol? National Guard?) stood at the edge of the Rio Grande shouting to a Mexican federal police agent on the other side.

The clock for the supposed Title 42 Armageddon was ticking down as I then crossed the bridge back to El Paso, where more barriers of razor wire had only recently been emplaced. There was also a slew of blue-uniformed CBP agents and several jeeps carrying camouflaged members of border units. Everyone was heavily armed as if about to go into battle.

At the Border Security Expo, Hysen pointed out that fear of a Title 42 surge had resulted in an even more fortified border, hard as that might be to imagine. Fifteen hundred National Guard troops had been added to the 2,500 already there, along with 2,000 extra private security personnel, and more than 1,000 volunteers from other agencies. Basically, he insisted, they had everything more than under control, whatever the media was saying.

At another panel entitled “State of the Border,” Border Patrol Chief Raul Ortiz joked that he would prefer discussing his golf game, only reinforcing that by adding, “As all of America and the political pundits and the reporters run around and say when we lose Title 42 the sky is going to fall, it ain’t gonna fall. We will process people as we normally have during my 32-year career.”

As Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas similarly pointed out, Title 8 authority, the pre-Title 42 enforcement program to which DHS will now return, “carries stiff consequences for irregular migration, including at least a five-year ban on reentry and potential criminal prosecution for repeated attempts to cross unlawfully.” In addition, the Biden administration expects to aggressively expand the process, including implementing a plan to ramp up enforcement far south of the border in the Darién Gap between Colombia and Panama. It’s even possible that U.S. troops will be deployed there for the job. And in a repetitive note at that expo, American officials indicated in a variety of ways that help would, above all, be needed from the corporate world.

Biden Is Already Out-Trumping Trump at the Border

Since the Department of Homeland Security was established 20 years ago, Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement have given private companies 113,276 contracts (yes, you read that right!), or on average 5,664 contracts annually, 16 per day. In the 15 years since 2008, the money spent on such contracts has amounted to $72.6 billion dollars and such figures have only been on the rise since Joe Biden entered the White House.

The 4,465 contracts CBP and ICE have agreed to so far this year (at a price of $4.1 billion) put them on pace to surpass 2022’s record-setting $7.5 billion. In 2022, CBP and ICE offered 9,909 contracts, an average of 27 per day, all of which means the Biden administration is likely to be the largest border-enforcement contractor ever.

Only recently, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman suggested that President Biden should “out-Trump Trump” and “do everything possible to secure the border like never before — more walls, more fences, more barriers, more troops, the 82nd Airborne — whatever it takes. Make Democrats own border security.” What Friedman apparently didn’t realize was that Biden had already taken just that border path.

From his first days in office, the president had stressed technology over wall-building and (not surprisingly) received three times more campaign contributions from top companies in the border industry than Trump did in 2020. And unlike the former president’s Title 42, this policy of contracts, campaign contributions, and lobbying that will push for endlessly higher border budgets is not set to expire. Ever.

At the Edge of Everything — and Nothing At All

On the morning of May 12th, I was with border scholar Gabriella Sanchez at the very spot where the borders of Texas, New Mexico, and Chihuahua meet near El Paso. Title 42 had expired the night before and I asked her what she thought. She responded that she considered this the border norm: we’re regularly told something momentous and possibly terrible is going to happen and then nothing much happens at all.

And she was right, the predicted “surge” of migrants crossing the border actually decreased — and yet, in some sense, everything keeps happening in ways that only seem grimmer. Perhaps 100 yards from where we were standing, in fact, we soon noticed a lone man cross the international boundary and walk into the United States as if he were taking a morning stroll. Thirty seconds later, a truck sped past us kicking up gravel. For a moment, I thought it was just a coincidence, since it wasn’t an official Border Patrol vehicle.

Then, I noted an insignia on its side that included the U.S. and Mexican flags. The truck came to a skidding stop by the man. A rotund figure in a gray uniform jumped out and ran toward him while he raised his hands. Just then, a green-striped Border Patrol van also pulled up. I was surprised — though after that Border Security Expo I shouldn’t have been — when I realized that the initial arrest was being made by someone seemingly from a private security firm. (Remember, Hysen said that an extra 2,000 private security agents had been hired for the “surge.”)

In truth, that scene couldn’t have been more banal. You might have seen it on any May 12th in these years. That banality, by the way, included a sustained violence that’s intrinsically part of the modern border system, as geographer Reece Jones argues in his book Violent Borders: Refugees and the Right to Move. In the days following Title 42’s demise, an eight-year-old Honduran girl died in Border Patrol custody and a Tohono O’odham man was shot and killed by the Border Patrol. In April, 11 remains of dead border crossers were also recovered in Arizona’s Pima County desert alone (where it’s impossible to carry enough water for such a long trek).

In the wake of Donald Trump, everything on the border has officially changed, yet nothing has really changed. Nothing of note is happening, even as everything happens. And as Hysen said at that border expo meeting, big as the record 2023 border budget may be, in 2024 it’s likely to go “even further” into the stratosphere.

Put another way, at the border, we are eternally at the edge of everything — and nothing at all.

All around us things are falling apart. Collectively, Americans are experiencing national and imperial decline. Can America save itself? Is this country, as presently constituted, even worth saving?

For me, that last question is radical indeed. From my early years, I believed deeply in the idea of America. I knew this country wasn’t perfect, of course, not even close. Long before the 1619 Project, I was aware of the “original sin” of slavery and how central it was to our history. I also knew about the genocide of Native Americans. (As a teenager, my favorite movie — and so it remains — was Little Big Man, which pulled no punches when it came to the white man and his insatiably murderous greed.)

Nevertheless, America still promised much, or so I believed in the 1970s and 1980s. Life here was simply better, hands down, than in places like the Soviet Union and Mao Zedong’s China. That’s why we had to “contain” communism — to keep them over there, so they could never invade our country and extinguish our lamp of liberty. And that’s why I joined America’s Cold War military, serving in the Air Force from the presidency of Ronald Reagan to that of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. And believe me, it proved quite a ride. It taught this retired lieutenant colonel that the sky’s anything but the limit.

In the end, 20 years in the Air Force led me to turn away from empire, militarism, and nationalism. I found myself seeking instead some antidote to the mainstream media’s celebrations of American exceptionalism and the exaggerated version of victory culture that went with it (long after victory itself was in short supply). I started writing against the empire and its disastrous wars and found likeminded people at TomDispatch — former imperial operatives turned incisive critics like Chalmers Johnson and Andrew Bacevich, along with sharp-eyed journalist Nick Turse and, of course, the irreplaceable Tom Engelhardt, the founder of those “tomgrams” meant to alert America and the world to the dangerous folly of repeated U.S. global military interventions.

But this isn’t a plug for TomDispatch. It’s a plug for freeing your mind as much as possible from the thoroughly militarized matrix that pervades America. That matrix drives imperialism, waste, war, and global instability to the point where, in the context of the conflict in Ukraine, the risk of nuclear Armageddon could imaginably approach that of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. As wars — proxy or otherwise — continue, America’s global network of 750-odd military bases never seems to decline. Despite upcoming cuts to domestic spending, just about no one in Washington imagines Pentagon budgets doing anything but growing, even soaring toward the trillion-dollar level, with militarized programs accounting for 62% of federal discretionary spending in 2023.

Indeed, an engorged Pentagon — its budget for 2024 is expected to rise to $886 billion in the bipartisan debt-ceiling deal reached by President Joe Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy — guarantees one thing: a speedier fall for the American empire. Chalmers Johnson predicted it; Andrew Bacevich analyzed it. The biggest reason is simple enough: incessant, repetitive, disastrous wars and costly preparations for more of the same have been sapping America’s physical and mental reserves, as past wars did the reserves of previous empires throughout history. (Think of the short-lived Napoleonic empire, for example.)

Known as “the arsenal of democracy” during World War II, America has now simply become an arsenal, with a military-industrial-congressional complex intent on forging and feeding wars rather than seeking to starve and stop them. The result: a precipitous decline in the country’s standing globally, while at home Americans pay a steep price of accelerating violence (2023 will easily set a record for mass shootings) and “carnage” (Donald Trump’s word) in a once proud but now much-bloodied “homeland.”

Lessons from History on Imperial Decline

I’m a historian, so please allow me to share a few basic lessons I’ve learned. When I taught World War I to cadets at the Air Force Academy, I would explain how the horrific costs of that war contributed to the collapse of four empires: Czarist Russia, the German Second Reich, the Ottoman empire, and the Austro-Hungarian empire of the Habsburgs. Yet even the “winners,” like the French and British empires, were also weakened by the enormity of what was, above all, a brutal European civil war, even if it spilled over into Africa, Asia, and indeed the Americas.

And yet after that war ended in 1918, peace proved elusive indeed, despite the Treaty of Versailles, among other abortive agreements. There was too much unfinished business, too much belief in the power of militarism, especially in an emergent Third Reich in Germany and in Japan, which had embraced ruthless European military methods to create its own Asiatic sphere of dominance. Scores needed to be settled, so the Germans and Japanese believed, and military offensives were the way to do it.

As a result, civil war in Europe continued with World War II, even as Japan showed that Asiatic powers could similarly embrace and deploy the unwisdom of unchecked militarism and war. The result: 75 million dead and more empires shattered, including Mussolini’s “New Rome,” a “thousand-year” German Reich that barely lasted 12 of them before being utterly destroyed, and an Imperial Japan that was starved, burnt out, and finally nuked. China, devastated by war with Japan, also found itself ripped apart by internal struggles between nationalists and communists.

As with its prequel, even most of the “winners” of World War II emerged in a weakened state. In defeating Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union had lost 25 to 30 million people. Its response was to erect, in Winston Churchill’s phrase, an “Iron Curtain” behind which it could exploit the peoples of Eastern Europe in a militarized empire that ultimately collapsed due to its wars and its own internal divisions. Yet the USSR lasted longer than the post-war French and British empires. France, humiliated by its rapid capitulation to the Germans in 1940, fought to reclaim wealth and glory in “French” Indochina, only to be severely humbled at Dien Bien Phu. Great Britain, exhausted from its victory, quickly lost India, that “jewel” in its imperial crown, and then Egypt in the Suez debacle.

There was, in fact, only one country, one empire, that truly “won” World War II: the United States, which had been the least touched (Pearl Harbor aside) by war and all its horrors. That seemingly never-ending European civil war from 1914 to 1945, along with Japan’s immolation and China’s implosion, left the U.S. virtually unchallenged globally. America emerged from those wars as a superpower precisely because its government had astutely backed the winning side twice, tipping the scales in the process, while paying a relatively low price in blood and treasure compared to allies like the Soviet Union, France, and Britain.

History’s lesson for America’s leaders should have been all too clear: when you wage war long, especially when you devote significant parts of your resources — financial, material, and especially personal — to it, you wage it wrong. Not for nothing is war depicted in the Bible as one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. France had lost its empire in World War II; it just took later military catastrophes in Algeria and Indochina to make it obvious. That was similarly true of Britain’s humiliations in India, Egypt, and elsewhere, while the Soviet Union, which had lost much of its imperial vigor in that war, would take decades of slow rot and overstretch in places like Afghanistan to implode.

Meanwhile, the United States hummed along, denying it was an empire at all, even as it adopted so many of the trappings of one. In fact, in the wake of the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991, Washington’s leaders would declare America the exceptional “superpower,” a new and far more enlightened Rome and “the indispensable nation” on planet Earth. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, its leaders would confidently launch what they termed a Global War on Terror and begin waging wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere, as in the previous century they had in Vietnam. (No learning curve there, it seems.) In the process, its leaders imagined a country that would remain untouched by war’s ravages, which was we now know — or do we? — the height of imperial hubris and folly.

For whether you call it fascism, as with Nazi Germany, communism, as with Stalin’s Soviet Union, or democracy, as with the United States, empires built on dominance achieved through a powerful, expansionist military necessarily become ever more authoritarian, corrupt, and dysfunctional. Ultimately, they are fated to fail. No surprise there, since whatever else such empires may serve, they don’t serve their own people. Their operatives protect themselves at any cost, while attacking efforts at retrenchment or demilitarization as dangerously misguided, if not seditiously disloyal.

That’s why those like Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, and Daniel Hale, who shined a light on the empire’s militarized crimes and corruption, found themselves imprisoned, forced into exile, or otherwise silenced. Even foreign journalists like Julian Assange can be caught up in the empire’s dragnet and imprisoned if they dare expose its war crimes. The empire knows how to strike back and will readily betray its own justice system (most notably in the case of Assange), including the hallowed principles of free speech and the press, to do so.

Perhaps he will eventually be freed, likely as not when the empire judges he’s approaching death’s door. His jailing and torture have already served their purpose. Journalists know that to expose America’s bloodied tools of empire brings only harsh punishment, not plush rewards. Best to look away or mince one’s words rather than risk prison — or worse.

Yet you can’t fully hide the reality that this country’s failed wars have added trillions of dollars to its national debt, even as military spending continues to explode in the most wasteful ways imaginable, while the social infrastructure crumbles.

Clinging Bitterly to Guns and Religion

Today, America clings ever more bitterly to guns and religion. If that phrase sounds familiar, it might be because Barack Obama used it in the 2008 presidential campaign to describe the reactionary conservatism of mostly rural voters in Pennsylvania. Disillusioned by politics, betrayed by their putative betters, those voters, claimed the then-presidential candidate, clung to their guns and religion for solace. I lived in rural Pennsylvania at the time and recall a response from a fellow resident who basically agreed with Obama, for what else was there left to cling to in an empire that had abandoned its own rural working-class citizens?

Something similar is true of America writ large today. As an imperial power, we cling bitterly to guns and religion. By “guns,” I mean all the weaponry America’s merchants of death sell to the Pentagon and across the world. Indeed, weaponry is perhaps this country’s most influential global export, devastatingly so. From 2018 to 2022, the U.S. alone accounted for 40% of global arms exports, a figure that’s only risen dramatically with military aid to Ukraine. And by “religion,” I mean a persistent belief in American exceptionalism (despite all evidence to the contrary), which increasingly draws sustenance from a militant Christianity that denies the very spirit of Christ and His teachings.

Yet history appears to confirm that empires, in their dying stages, do exactly that: they exalt violence, continue to pursue war, and insist on their own greatness until their fall can neither be denied nor reversed. It’s a tragic reality that the journalist Chris Hedges has written about with considerable urgency.

The problem suggests its own solution (not that any powerful figure in Washington is likely to pursue it). America must stop clinging bitterly to its guns — and here I don’t even mean the nearly 400 million weapons in private hands in this country, including all those AR-15 semi-automatic rifles. By “guns,” I mean all the militarized trappings of empire, including America’s vast structure of overseas military bases and its staggering commitments to weaponry of all sorts, including world-ending nuclear ones. As for clinging bitterly to religion — and by “religion” I mean the belief in America’s own righteousness, regardless of the millions of people it’s killed globally from the Vietnam era to the present moment — that, too, would have to stop.

History’s lessons can be brutal. Empires rarely die well. After it became an empire, Rome never returned to being a republic and eventually fell to barbarian invasions. The collapse of Germany’s Second Reich bred a third one of greater virulence, even if it was of shorter duration. Only its utter defeat in 1945 finally convinced Germans that God didn’t march with their soldiers into battle.

What will it take to convince Americans to turn their backs on empire and war before it’s too late? When will we conclude that Christ wasn’t joking when He blessed the peacemakers rather than the warmongers?

As an iron curtain descends on a failing American imperial state, one thing we won’t be able to say is that we weren’t warned.

Copyright 2023 William J. Astore

Featured image: 20201005 16 God, Guns & Trump, Western Ohio by David Wilson is licensed under CC BY 2.0 / Flickr

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel, Songlands (the final one in his Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II, and Ann Jones’s They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from America’s Wars: The Untold Story.

If Emissions Continue, Will We All Be Migrants Someday?

Greenville, CA — Pines and firs parched by a three-year drought had been burning for days on a ridge 1,000 feet above my remote mountain town. On August 4, 2021, the flames suddenly flared into a heat so intense it formed a molten cloud the color of bruised flesh. As that sinister cumulus rose above an oval-shaped reservoir, it collapsed, sending red-hot embers down the steep slopes toward Greenville in a storm of torched trees and exploding shrubs. It took less than 30 minutes for the Dixie fire to transform my town’s tarnished Gold Rush charm into a heap of smoldering hand-hewn timbers and century-old brick walls.

Minutes earlier, the last of the nearly 1,000 residents had bolted, some in shirts singed by flames. We fled with what belongings we could take in the face of a fire few believed would ever destroy our town. I was among the evacuees, escaping with a hastily assembled truckload of journals and notebooks, shoes and shovels, laptops and passports. We scattered in the sort of desperate diaspora that has become ever more common in towns like ours across the West.

The Dixie fire left more than 700 residents of Greenville and its surroundings homeless. (While my office in town was demolished, my home on its outskirts escaped the flames.) Displaced by wildfire in a forest both poorly managed and dried by a warming planet, we burned-out residents joined America’s swelling ranks of climate migrants. Many of us found temporary shelter in neighboring small towns. Others went to Reno or Los Angeles, Idaho, Missouri, or Kentucky, where relatives and friends were ready to offer at least temporary safety.

My neighbors in Greenville, Indian Falls, and Canyon Dam weren’t the only victims of climate-driven fires that summer. Near Lake Tahoe, 100 miles to the south, the Caldor fire crossed the crest of the Sierra Nevada mountains, destroying more than 1,000 structures and forcing the entire city of South Lake Tahoe to evacuate. Nor were wildfires the only all-American calamities caused by our rapidly warming planet that year: Hurricane Ida pummeled Louisiana and Mississippi with 150-mile-an-hour winds; a crippling megadrought of a sort not seen in 1,200 years gripped the Southwest; and an unprecedented heat dome in the Pacific Northwest drove temperatures to 121 degrees Fahrenheit (49.5 degrees Celsius).

Think of the destruction of my adopted hometown as a parable for what the next century of climate change holds in store for this country, as Jake Bittle makes all too clear in his book The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration. By the end of 2021, one in three Americans had already experienced some kind of weather disaster driven by climate change and last year alone more than three million Americans lost their homes to climate disasters.

These days, it’s the sort of heartbreaking tale told around the globe, one that will, it seems, only worsen into the distant future. By 2050, it’s now believed that between 31 million and 72 million people across sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Latin America will be displaced due to water stress, sea level rise, or crop failures, according to an estimate in the most recent report of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Unless we dramatically curb greenhouse-gas emissions in the years to come, scientists predict that, by century’s end, climate-change-caused events will affect every last one of us.

Where will we go to find safety from fire, floods, and extreme storms then? How long will those of us uprooted from our homes have to stay in evacuation sanctuaries? Will we ever find home again?

“Unpredictable, Chaotic, and Life-Changing”

The term climate migration has an orderly, almost bucolic ring to it, evoking as it does the age-old seasonal treks of caribou, wildebeests, and other charismatic species. In human terms, it suggests coastal residents dealing with flooding by simply moving inland and continuing their lives, or forest dwellers relocating from burn scars to places where the risk of wildfire is much lower. Unfortunately, in the years to come, count on one thing: climate migration will have a far less peaceful ring to it.

In a sense, of course, migration has always been the story of humanity. Throughout history, people have moved for a myriad of reasons. But what sets today’s growing climate-driven migration apart is the way it involuntarily displaces people, increasingly often at an unprecedented pace and scale. The more the planet warms, the more pressure so many of us will face to move, as those IPCC scientists made clear in their 2022 report.

According to the IPCC, most climate migration is still occurring within countries rather than across borders (though that, too, is growing). And while people of every income bracket will be hit by climate disasters, overall such migrants are only expected to increase social inequities. As the IPCC summary for policymakers puts it, “Across sectors and regions, the most vulnerable people and systems are observed to be disproportionately affected.”

But count on one thing: climate migration will be increasingly hard on everyone. As those scientists add: “Through displacement and involuntary migration from extreme weather and climate events, climate change has generated and perpetuated vulnerability.” In translation, that’s bureaucratese for widespread trauma to come.

And that, claims Bittle, is putting it mildly, since the fossil-fuelization of the atmosphere (and the oceans) is already creating disasters of a frequency and intensity that have no precedent in living memory. Over the past decade, the United States has, typically enough, experienced a succession of monumental climate disasters. Hurricanes have obliterated parts of the Gulf Coast, dumping more than 50 inches of rain in some places. Wildfires have denuded the California wilderness and destroyed thousands of homes. A once-in-a-millennium drought has dried up western rivers, even forcing farmers to stop planting crops.

As Bittle puts it, “The real story of climate change begins only once the skies clear and the fire burns out.” In fact, he insists, migration isn’t even the right word for the phenomena already taking place across this country. It implies an intentional action, while the response to ever-increasing climate disasters will be tumultuous and frenzied, as victims try to cope with the destruction of their homes and dreams, while searching for safe and affordable shelter.

His term for it is displacement, which, he adds, is “unpredictable, chaotic, and life-changing.” (Scientists are similarly now using the term “climate displaced” rather than “refugee.”) And such displacement is already altering American geography. In the decades to come, he suggests, climate change will displace more people than the six million Blacks who began moving north in the 1920s to escape the Jim Crow regimes of the former southern plantation states — in other words, a population relocation greater than what became known as the Great Migration.

Where do people go and what do they do after an evacuation? “We’re just beginning to sort that out,” Deb Niemeier, a transportation engineer at the University of Maryland, told me. They almost always end up in places where they have connections, whether family ones or otherwise, and those, Niemeier points out, tend to be in urban settings.

One of only a handful of studies documenting where climate migrants have gone was launched in 2018 by civil engineer Sarah Grajdura, previously a student of Niemeier’s. She began interviewing evacuees in shelters only three weeks after the Camp fire, California’s deadliest blaze, killed 85 people in the sadly named town of Paradise. She followed up eight months later.

Where people settled and how long they stayed, she found, varied with income, age, and race, especially as time elapsed. Those with greater financial resources were able, in the end, to resettle nearer their original homes. Younger white evacuees accepted housing farther away, on average 117 miles from their original residences, while Black residents and other people of color generally couldn’t afford to move more than 21 miles from their burned-out town.

Retreat or Adapt?

The human upheaval underway should make it obvious to even the most skeptical that our world is changing — that we, in fact, are changing it — in a remarkably radical fashion. Carbon dioxide and other gases that trap heat in the Earth’s atmosphere have raised the average temperature of the planet about two degrees Fahrenheit (1.1 degrees Celsius) since the late nineteenth century. The ocean has absorbed much of this increased heat, with the top 328 feet showing warming of 0.67 degrees Fahrenheit (0.37 degrees Celsius) just since 1969. Ice sheets are shrinking, glaciers are melting, and snow cover is decreasing. Global sea level has risen about eight inches in the last century, with the rate in the last two decades nearly double that of the century as a whole.

As more and more of us are uprooted by floods, rising seas, ever fiercer storms, and brutal wildfires, how we view the natural world has become ever more essential to our collective future. Our relationship to the places where we live needs to be re-envisioned. Historically, we Americans have sought to control nature with dams, sea walls, and an all-out federal campaign to suppress Western wildfires. Clearly, none of that is working any longer.

A handful of communities are starting to think differently about the ecosystems they share and how they interact with them. Several Gulf Coast communities are, for instance, accepting the inevitability of flooding and designing schools that float to keep their children protected. In New Orleans and elsewhere, entrepreneurs are experimenting with installing plastic water containers and manufactured dock floats inside the structural subframe of a house. The house and subframe would then be anchored to vertical guideposts, allowing that structure to rise and fall without floating away. In California, dozens of fire-prone communities are adopting the long-outlawed practices of Native Americans by setting small, controlled burns along forest edges to thwart future town-destroying fires and improve wildlife habitat.

Other communities are starting to accept that the places they chose as home and the houses they’ve built are simply in the wrong place at the wrong time for a rapidly warming planet. If it’s not a fire on the horizon, it’s a flood. If not tomorrow, next month, or next year. Instead of waiting to become inadvertent climate migrants evacuating under duress, they are moving in what’s becoming known as a managed retreat.

Soldiers Grove, Wisconsin, is an early example. In 1978, 600 residents retreated from the Kickapoo River to avoid its rising flood waters. After Superstorm Sandy swamped New York City in 2012, killing 24 people, homeowners in several neighborhoods on Staten Island decided not to wait for the inevitable future. They took buyouts from the state’s Office of Storm Recovery, moving to new homes away from the coast. Today, more than 600 properties in that area are being returned to nature and a salt marsh created where deer and turkeys, rabbits and racoons are already moving in. That marshland will, in turn, create a buffer for the homes that remain.

For Erica Gies, who reported on that Staten Island retreat, the possibility of living safely in a time of extreme storm events is transforming our relationship with water. “What does water want?” she asks in her book Water Always Wins: Thriving in an Age of Drought and Deluge. Re-envisioning the way we live with water, and with nature more generally, she says, will help create a better world “in which people are happier and communities more adaptable.”

Some places, however, are already beyond retreat. On the Bering Sea in 2019, thawing permafrost and erosion forced 380 villagers from Yup’ik, Alaska, to abandon homes where they had lived for centuries. And what about towns like Paradise and Greenville, each destroyed once by wildfire and still all too vulnerable? They are among the communities built “in a particular historical context that no longer exists,” as Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA, puts it. “Whatever risk tolerances that we collectively decided were acceptable, for whatever reason, in whatever context, are no longer valid,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 2022.

The Pull of Home

For all the documentation of the threats posed to ecosystems that humanity has so violently altered, for all the dangers so many of us have experienced living in them, and for all the uncomfortable questions raised about their future vulnerability, such places often still hold a powerful, almost magnetic draw for us. Gabrielle Wong-Parodi, a Stanford University behavioral scientist, calls such feelings place attachment, a powerful commitment to the community people have — or had. Some of that attraction is, of course, simply the security of the familiar. Some is intangible: the smell of coastal fog, the sound of wind in the tops of sugar pines, the sag of wet sand underfoot. It’s the draw of home.

As Jake Bittle puts it, “For a lot of people, a hometown is a really essential part of their identity.” He reports on a man who lost his entire neighborhood to a wildfire in Santa Rosa, California. He spent four years with family in Kentucky, but eventually rebuilt in his old neighborhood. The winding road home was even longer for a family that evacuated after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and other Gulf of Mexico communities in 2005. Even while forced to live elsewhere, they couldn’t help but envision going back “home.” It took them about eight years, but eventually they did so.

In our present world, sadly enough, the question always remains: For how long?

The importance of place and the compulsion to go back, despite ever-worsening odds, have Wong-Parodi and other scientists thinking about what resources are available when people do return. How can they better prepare for the known risks and the certainty that, over time, given our overheating planet, they’ll only increase?

When it comes to Greenville, my California town now in ruins, the pull to return, as Sue Weber, chair of the Dixie Fire Collaborative, points out, combines a yearning for the physical beauty of the place with a sense of community and hope. “I wouldn’t build back,” she says, “if I didn’t think there was a way to actually work collectively to create a safer environment.”

Less than two years after the Dixie fire, a third of the residents who fled Greenville are committed to rebuilding their homes and businesses. More than 20 already have. They are, however, applying Dixie’s harsh lessons to reconstruction, often using cross-laminated timber, Hardie board, and other less flammable materials. And when it comes to restoring the forests that surround the town, they are repurposing Gies’s question about water by asking what forests want. Answers are coming from the legacy of the Native Americans who managed these forests when they were far more resilient to fire and drought. The blackened specters that still haunt our hillsides will soon come down; the seedlings that take their place will be native species planted not in lines but in clumps. There will be space for fire to burn through, clearing out decadent brush and small trees to cleanse the land for new growth.

Climate disaster, Weber points out, inspires climate mitigation. “We are in a constant conversation about what that looks like for us… It’s going to take years to know whether we really survived or not.”

If humanity continues to emit greenhouse gases at anything like the current rate globally, all too many of the rest of us may not have to wait that long. We may once again become climate migrants embarking on our own torturous journeys, following in the footsteps of last year’s three million Americans.

And home will be that elusive pot of gold at the end of a climate-driven rainbow.

Andrew Bacevich, Seduced by War -- Yet Again

Let me just express my concern about the war in Ukraine by wondering what “victory” might actually mean for the Ukrainians. Let’s assume for a moment that the coming, much-publicized Ukrainian counteroffensive will indeed punch serious holes in the lines of a battered and demoralized Russian military and that Ukrainian forces won’t just bloodily win back significant parts of their territory (even, say, endangering the Russian position in Crimea), but cause that country’s military to begin to collapse. Think of such developments as something like the ultimate victory scenario (or perhaps dream) of both Kyiv and Washington.

My own worry is that, should such a thing happen — and I’m not faintly predicting it — how might Russian President Vladimir Putin respond? We’re talking about the leader of one of the two most over-armed nuclear powers on the planet who has, in these months, implicitly threatened to use tactical nuclear weapons on the battlefield, even if a Ukrainian nuclear plant doesn’t go up in smoke in the fighting to come.

It’s been more than three-quarters of a century since such weaponry was used twice to utterly devastating effect to end a war, a period in which the great powers have nuclearized on an almost unimaginable scale. Worse yet, in recent years, all the nuclear agreements between the U.S. and Russia, the two countries with 90% of the planet’s nuclear weapons, have essentially been canceled, even as both of those powers continue to “modernize” their arsenals to the tune of trillions of dollars. Now, we find ourselves at a moment when a future “victory” for Kyiv could, depending on how Putin responds, be a historic catastrophe for Ukrainians, Russians, and the rest of the world with the possible introduction of such weaponry on a European battlefield. It’s both hard to imagine and all too conceivable.

But as TomDispatch regular Andrew Bacevich, author most recently of On Shedding an Obsolete Past: Bidding Farewell to the American Century, points out today, Joe Biden’s Washington is all too ready to take a chance on just such a future, rather than focusing on how to bring peace to a Europe in ever greater chaos. Tom

The Compulsion to Intervene

Why Washington Underwrites Violence in Ukraine

Allow me to come clean: I worry every time Max Boot vents enthusiastically about a prospective military action. Whenever that Washington Post columnist professes optimism about some upcoming bloodletting, misfortune tends to follow. And as it happens, he’s positively bullish about the prospect of Ukraine handing Russia a decisive defeat in its upcoming, widely anticipated, sure-to-happen-any-day-now spring counteroffensive.

In a recent column reported from the Ukrainian capital — headline: “I was just in Kyiv under fire” — Boot writes that actual signs of war there are few. Something akin to normalcy prevails and the mood is remarkably upbeat. With the front “only [his word!] about 360 miles away,” Kyiv is a “bustling, vibrant metropolis with traffic jams and crowded bars and restaurants.” Better yet, most of the residents who fled that city when the Russians invaded in February 2022 have since returned home.

And despite what you might read elsewhere, incoming Russian missiles are little more than annoyances, as Boot testifies from personal experience. “From my vantage point in a hotel room in the center of Kyiv,” he writes, “the whole attack was no big deal — just a matter of losing a little sleep and hearing some loud thumps,” as air defenses provided by Washington did their work.

While Boot was there, Ukrainians repeatedly assured him that they would cruise to ultimate victory. “That’s how confident they are.” He shares their confidence. “In the past, such talk may have contained a large element of bravado and wishful thinking, but now it is a product of hard-won experience.” From his vantage point in a downtown hotel, Boot reports that “continued Russian attacks on urban areas are only making Ukrainians angrier at the invaders and more determined to resist their onslaught.” Meanwhile, “the Kremlin appears to be in disarray and mired in the blame game.”

Well, all I can say is: from Boot’s prayerful lips to God’s ear.

Courageous Ukrainians certainly deserve to have their stalwart defense of their country rewarded with success. Yet the long history of warfare sounds a distinctly cautionary note. The fact is that the good guys don’t necessarily win. Stuff happens. Chance intervenes. As Winston Churchill put it in one of his less well-remembered “always remember” axioms: “The Statesman who yields to war fever must realize that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events.”

President George W. Bush for one can certainly testify to the truth of that dictum. So too, assuming he’s still sentient, can Vladimir Putin. For either Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy or Joe Biden to suppose that they’re exempt from its provisions would be daring indeed.

Boot is hardly alone in expecting the much-hyped Ukrainian operation — with June upon us, will it become a summer counteroffensive? — to break the months-long stalemate. The optimism voiced throughout Western quarters stems in significant part from a belief that new weapons systems promised to but not yet actually fielded by Ukraine — Abrams tanks and F-16 fighter jets, for example — will have a decisive impact on the battlefield.

There’s a term for that: It’s called cashing a check before it clears.

Punching Holes?

Even so, for Boot, the operational imperative appears obvious. With the Russian army currently defending a 600-mile front, he writes, “they cannot be strong everywhere.” As a consequence, “the Ukrainians just have to find a weak spot and punch through it.”

However unintentionally, Boot thereby recalls the infamous theory of warfare devised by German General Erich Ludendorff to break the deadlock on the Western Front in 1918: “Punch a hole and let the rest follow.” In their spring offensive that year, German armies under Ludendorff’s command did indeed punch a gaping hole in the Allied trench lines. Yet that tactical success yielded not a favorable operational result but exhaustion and ultimate German defeat.

Punching holes is a poor substitute for strategy. I make no pretense to be able to divine the thinking that prevails within senior Ukrainian military circles, but the basic math does them no favors. Russia’s population is roughly four times greater than Ukraine’s, its economy 10 times larger.

Western support, especially the more than $75 billion in assistance the U.S. has so far committed, has certainly kept Ukraine in the fight. The West’s implicit game plan is one of mutual attrition — bleeding Ukraine as a way to bleed Russia — with the apparent expectation that the Kremlin will eventually say uncle.

Prospects of success depend on either of two factors: a change in leadership in the Kremlin or a change of heart on the part of President Putin. Neither of those, however, appears imminent.

In the meantime, the bloodletting continues, a depressing reality that at least some in the U.S. national security apparatus actually find agreeable. Put simply, a war of attrition in which the U.S. suffers no casualties while plenty of Russians die suits some key players in Washington. In such circles, whether it comports with the well-being of the Ukrainian people receives no more than lip service.

American enthusiasm for punishing Russia might actually have made strategic sense if the zero-sum logic of the Cold War still pertained. In that case, the Ukraine War might be seen as a sort of do-over of the 1980s Afghan War. (Forget what the next version of that war did to this country in the twenty-first century.) Back then, the U.S. used the Afghan mujahideen as proxies in a campaign to weaken Washington’s principal Cold War global adversary. In its time (and overlooking the subsequent sequence of events that led to 9/11), it proved a brilliant stroke.

In the present moment, however, Russia is anything but America’s principal global adversary; nor is it obvious, given the pressing problems facing the United States domestically and in our own near abroad, why baiting Ivan should figure as a strategic priority. Beating up on the Russian army on battlefields several thousand miles away won’t, for example, provide an antidote to Trumpism or solve the problem of this country’s porous borders. Nor will it alleviate the climate crisis.

If anything, in fact, Washington’s preoccupation with Ukraine only testifies to the impoverished state of American strategic thinking. In some quarters, framing the present historical moment as a contest between democracy and autocracy passes for fresh thinking, as does characterizing American policy as focused on defending a so-called rules-based international order. Neither of those claims, however, can withstand nominal scrutiny, even if it seems bad form to cite close U.S. ties with autocracies like the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and Egypt or to point out the innumerable instances in which this country has exempted itself from norms to which it insists others must adhere.

Granted, hypocrisy is endemic to statecraft. My complaint isn’t with President Biden fist-bumping Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman or conveniently forgetting his support for the illegal 2003 invasion of Iraq. My complaint is more fundamental: it concerns the apparent inability of our political establishment to wean itself from obsolete thinking.

Classifying the survival and well-being of the Saudi monarchy as a vital U.S. security interest offers a specific example of obsolescence. Assuming that the rules that apply to others need not apply to the United States is certainly another more egregious one. In such a context, the Ukraine War offers Washington a convenient opportunity to wipe its own slate clean by striking a virtuous pose as it defends innocent Ukraine against brutal Russian aggression.

Think of U.S. participation in the Ukraine War as a means of washing away unhappy memories of its own war in Afghanistan, an Operation that began as “Enduring Freedom” but has become Instant Amnesia.

A Pattern of Intervention

The gung-ho American journalists summoning Ukrainians to punch holes in enemy lines might better serve their readers by reflecting on the larger pattern of American interventionism that began several decades ago and culminated in the disastrous fall of Kabul in 2021. To cite a particular point of origin is necessarily arbitrary, but the U.S. “peacekeeping” intervention in Beirut, its 40th anniversary now fast approaching, offers a convenient marker. That bizarre episode, today largely forgotten, ended with 241 U.S. Marines, sailors, and soldiers killed in a single devastating terrorist attack, their sacrifice neither keeping nor making peace.

Frustrated by developments in Beirut, President Ronald Reagan wrote in his diary on September 7, 1983, “I can’t get the idea out of my head that some” U.S. Navy fighters “coming in at about 200 ft… would be a tonic for the Marines & at the same time would deliver a message to those gun happy middle east terrorists.” Alas, by blowing up the Marines’ barracks, the terrorists delivered their message first.

Yet Reagan’s belief that the application of force could somehow provide a tidy solution to dauntingly complex geopolitical problems expressed what would become a continuing all-American theme. In Central America, the Persian Gulf, the Maghreb, the Balkans, and Central Asia, successive administrations embarked on a series of interventions that rarely produced any long-term successes, while exacting staggering cumulative costs.

Since 9/11 alone, U.S. military interventions in distant lands have cost American taxpayers an estimated $8 trillion and still counting. And that’s not even considering the tens of thousands of G.I.s killed, maimed, or otherwise left bearing the scars of war or the millions of people in the countries where the U.S. fought its wars who would prove to be direct or indirect victims of American policy-making.

Memorial Day commemorations, such as those just past, should remind us of the costs that result from punching holes, both real and metaphorical. With something close to unanimity, Americans profess to care about the sacrifices of those who serve the nation in uniform. Why don’t we care enough to keep them from harm in the first place?

That’s my question. But don’t look to the likes of Max Boot to provide an answer.