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afghan war
Trump’s Plan for Gaza Would Make Colonial Plunder Great Again
In an interview, economist James K. Boyce discusses the relationship between war and economics, and how Trump’s talk of taking over Gaza and turning it into the “Riviera of the Middle East” is similar to the U.S. dispossession of Native Americans.
Feb 27, 2025
Can economics fuel conflict and war? Absolutely, and history is full of such examples. But economics can also pave the way to lasting peace, according to progressive economist James K. Boyce.
In the interview that follows, professor Boyce discusses the economics of war and the role that economics can play in peacemaking, including in places like Ukraine and Gaza, although he acknowledges that daunting challenges lie ahead for these two war-torn areas of the world. As for U.S. President Donald Trump’s plan for Gaza, Boyce puts it side by side with the dispossession of Native Americans in the United States.
James K. Boyce is professor emeritus of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a senior fellow of the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI). He is the author of Investing in Peace: Aid and Conditionality after Civil Warsand editor of Peace and the Public Purse: Economic Policies for Postwar Statebuildingand Economic Policy for Building Peace: The Lessons of El Salvador.He received the 2024 Global Inequality Research Award and the 2017 Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought. This interview is based on his seven-part video series released by the Institute for New Economic Thinking.
C. J. Polychroniou: Conflicts across the world have surged since 2020, making this one of the most violent periods since the end of the Cold War. The wars in Ukraine and Gaza have been most visible in the news, but there have been dozens of other conflicts, too. What lessons can we draw from history about the economics of war, the topic of your recent video series from the Institute for New Economic Thinking? How about if we start with the wars of conquest during the era of colonialism?
James K. Boyce: Economics is not just about mutually beneficial exchanges entered into by mutually consenting adults, though you could be forgiven for thinking so if your only acquaintance with the subject was a typical textbook. Real-world economics also is about coercive relationships in which one side benefits and the other loses. Such interactions—which can be grouped under the general rubric of plunder—involve not only outright force but also the manipulation of governments and markets, often occurring in the grey area between what is legal and what is not.
Trump often is described as “transactional” with good reason: For him, policy is about making deals.
The colonial wars of conquest were a particularly naked example of plunder. Slavery, the appropriation of lands and minerals, and the monopolization of commerce were common features of the time, thinly cloaked, if at all, by the pretense of a “civilizing” mission. But it would be wrong to imagine that plunder disappeared with the end of formal colonial rule. It remains a ubiquitous feature of the world economy, now sometimes cloaked by the veneer of “modernization” or “development.” Because plunder is inherently antagonistic—it pits the plunderers against the those whose resources and livelihoods are plundered—it can and often does morph into violence and war.
C. J. Polychroniou: What about more recent conflicts, like the wars in Bosnia (1992-1995) and Afghanistan (2001-2021)? How did economics figure into these?
James K. Boyce: Economics is not the whole story in these or most conflicts, but it is an important part of why they begin, how long they persist, and how they finally end.
Bosnia emerged as an independent nation during the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Some commentators blamed “ancient ethnic hatreds” for the violence that accompanied Yugoslavia’s dissolution, but tensions arising from economic disparities among its provinces were also at play. Within Bosnia, three main “ethnic” groups lived side by side—Muslim Bosniaks, Catholic Croats, and Orthodox Serbs—and the fighting largely devolved along these lines (I place “ethnic” in quotation marks, because apart from religious origins the three were hard to distinguish). But another underlying axis of conflict was the deep economic gulf between urban Bosnians (often Bosniaks), who benefited in Yugoslavia from good education, health, and pension systems, and rural Bosnians (often Serbs), who were excluded from the benefits of engagement in the formal economy.
Once war broke out, opportunities for plunder became a key driving force in the conflict. Hardliners who engaged in ethnic cleansing—killing minorities and driving them out—not only sought to establish homogeneous enclaves for “their” people but also to gain personally from seizing the businesses, homes, land, and other property the victims left behind.
Economic incentives, in the form of promises of postwar reconstruction aid, played a key role in the end of the war, too, persuading the warring parties to sign the 1995 Dayton Peace Accord. Dayton, in a sense, was an aid-for-peace bargain. So economics was very much implicated in all phases of the Bosnian conflict.
The 2001-2021 war in Afghanistan was in many ways a resumption of the 1979-1989 war, with the difference that now it was the United States instead of the Soviet Union that occupied Kabul while the countryside largely remained under the control of the Taliban and regional warlords. As in Bosnia, pronounced economic disparities between urban and rural areas fueled the Afghan conflict, and the Taliban tapped into rural discontent. Wide disparities between Kabul and the rest of the country predated the Soviet and American invasions, and were further exacerbated by the wartime influx of foreigners and their money. Meanwhile, by controlling the opium traffic and taxing cross-border trade, the Taliban built a viable economic base of their own.
Economics played a central role in the U.S. war strategy, but it was not a pretty picture. In 2002, then-U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld instructed his senior aides to come up with “a plan for how we are going to deal with each of these warlords—who is going to get money from whom, on what basis, in exchange for what, what is the quid pro quo, etc.” The U.S. government poured nearly $1 trillion into Afghanistan—$145 billion in reconstruction aid plus $837 billion in military expenditures—this in a country with a GDP of less than $20 billion. War “became the Afghan economy,” as The New York Times put it. The Afghan leadership, unsurprisingly, was more attentive to the demands of foreign donors than to the needs of their own citizens. Massive corruption fueled by external assistance fatally undermined any possibility of building a legitimate and effective state. “Our money was empowering a lot of bad people,” a senior U.S. official recalled. “There was massive resentment among the Afghan people. And we were the most corrupt.”
Today 85% of Afghanistan’s people subsist on less than one dollar a day. Whether the Taliban government or the so-called international community will act to address their deprivation and build a lasting peace is an open question.
C. J. Polychroniou: What role can economics play in peace building?
James K. Boyce: There is much to be said on this topic—it is the focus of the video series—and space precludes a full answer here. Let me highlight just two points.
First, economic policies can either reduce inequalities and the accompanying tensions or exacerbate them. This means not only “vertical” inequality between rich and poor, but also “horizontal” inequalities between groups defined on another basis, such as region, ethnicity, race, or religion. A single-minded focus on the total size of the economic pie—the conventional goals of growth and efficiency—is misplaced when conflicts over how it is sliced threaten to smash the pie.
Second, economic policies can either strengthen or weaken the bargaining power of pro-peace forces vis-à-vis those who seek to perpetuate the conflict. In Bosnia, for example, a crucial postwar issue was the return of refugees and internally displaced persons to their former homes. In some municipalities, local leaders welcomed them; in others, they actively obstructed returns, in part to protect their ill-gotten loot. In its “Open Cities” program, the United Nations High Commission for Refugees used reconstruction aid to reward municipalities that welcomed returns and to induce leaders on the fence to come down on the pro-peace side. The program’s implementation was not perfect, but the idea was sound. Again, “who” matters as much as “what.”
C. J. Polychroniou: How can we apply economics to the wars in Ukraine and Gaza? Can economic policies help to drive peace in those two war-torn areas?
James K. Boyce: The Trump administration’s “America first” stance seems likely to lead to a U.S. pullback from engagement in the tasks of peace building and state building in war-torn societies. In part, this reflects a disillusionment born of the dismal failures in Afghanistan and Iraq, and as those experiences suggest, disengagement may not be entirely a bad thing. But Ukraine and Gaza continue to loom large on the U.S. foreign policy agenda.
Trump often is described as “transactional” with good reason: For him, policy is about making deals. In both Ukraine and Gaza, economic considerations will be a big part of any deals we see. But it is by no means clear that forging a lasting peace will be the top priority for the dealmakers. If not, the end of the current wars could merely set the stage for future ones.
The Ukraine war is exhibit No. 1 of the dangers of fossil-fueled oligarchy. In addition to enormous environmental costs, fossil fuels carry a high political cost: They enable the autocratic rulers of petrostates to govern with little accountability to either their own citizens or norms of international law. Vladimir Putin’s Russia is a case in point. As Ukraine illustrates, fossil fueled-oligarchy can metastasize into fossil-fueled war.
Putin has oil and gas; Netanyahu has the United States.
Oil and gas revenues have sustained the Putin regime, notwithstanding international sanctions. The sanctions do, however, drive a wedge between the world market price and what Russia receives, so the prospect of lifting them could act as an incentive for Russia to accept a negotiated settlement. But if the Trump administration eases the sanctions without a peace agreement, while at the same time cutting military and financial aid to Ukraine, this will tilt the terms of the settlement in Russia’s favor.
On the Ukrainian side, the prospect of large-scale reconstruction assistance—as well as an end to the carnage—may provide an incentive, too. It now appears that the responsibility for funding Ukraine’s postwar reconstruction will fall mainly on Europe; whether the European nations will be willing and able to shoulder this burden remains to be seen. In an effort to shore up U.S. support, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has offered a minerals-for-aid deal that would give the U.S. access to Ukraine’s deposits of lithium, uranium, and other critical minerals. But the minerals will be in the ground regardless of who controls the land above them, and it is not evident that the Trump administration will care much about that.
In Gaza, the latest war tragically illustrates what I call the “partition dilemma.” The 1994 Oslo Accord sought to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by establishing the Palestinian Authority as a step toward a two-state solution. In the short run, partition can be an appealing way to stop the shooting. But in the longer run, it can set the stage for renewed conflict, as demagogues on both sides invoke fear of the other to enlist public support from their own people. Partition severely undermines the viability of leaders and parties that would appeal to pro-peace constituencies on both sides.
It is not surprising that 30 years after Oslo, we find Hamas on one side and the Netanyahu government on the other. The two feed off each other in a de facto alliance, each holding up the other as justification for its own politics of demonization. This helps to explain why the Netanyahu government not only tolerated but actively facilitated the flow of cash from Qatar to Hamas. In a candid moment back in 2015, Bezalel Smotrich, who is now Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s finance minister, said that “Hamas is an asset.”
The chances that partition will lead to a lasting peace grow even slimmer if one side receives large-scale financial and military support with no strings attached—without peace conditionality—while the other does not. By emboldening one side and embittering the other, the resulting imbalance is a recipe for renewed conflict. Putin has oil and gas; Netanyahu has the United States. Rather than a negotiated settlement, the Israeli government now appears to be seeking a winner-take-all victory. Under the new U.S. administration, Netanyahu will face even fewer constraints than under the last one.
Trump’s talk of taking over Gaza and turning it into the “Riviera of the Middle East” is reminiscent of plunder during the colonial era, including the dispossession of Native Americans in the United States. Yet in purely economic terms it makes a certain amount of sense: Beach resort development would indeed be a more profitable use of the land than maintaining Gaza as a place of confinement for 2 million refugees. Where other politicians see territory, Trump sees real estate.
The problem, of course, is what to do with Palestinians. There is one place that many of them might go willingly: the land of their grandparents, Israel. The fact that option this is unmentionable, even unthinkable, tells us a lot.
If the war in Gaza and ongoing displacement in the West Bank do not end with the complete expulsion or annihilation of the Palestinians—a prospect that still seems inconceivable—the eventual outcome will be a single state in which the surviving Palestinians have a subordinate and marginalized status. Their struggle will then become one for equal rights. Economic policies could prove helpful at that point, but history suggests it will be a long, hard road.
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Now It Can Be Told... After All the Harm Has Been Done
Timing is crucial in media and politics—and never more so than when war is at stake. It’s completely unsatisfactory for journalists to toe the war line for years and then finally report on atrocities.
Dec 26, 2024
This week, The New York Times reported that the U.S. government made war in Afghanistan while helping to “recruit, train, and pay for lawless bands of militias that pillaged homes and laid waste to entire communities.” Those militias “tortured civilians, kidnapped for ransom, massacred dozens in vendetta killings, and razed entire villages, sowing more than a decade of hatred toward the Afghan government and its American allies.”
Written by a former Kabul bureau chief for the Times, the article appeared under a headline saying that “U.S.-backed militias” in Afghanistan were “worse than the Taliban.”
Now they tell us.
The new reporting made me think of a chapter in my book War Made Invisible titled “Now It Can Be Told.” Here’s an excerpt:
* * * * *
Timing is crucial in media and politics—and never more so than when war is at stake. It’s completely unsatisfactory for journalists to toe the war line for years and then finally report, in effect: Now it can be told—years too late.
Virtually the entire U.S. media establishment gave full-throated support to the U.S. attack on Afghanistan in early October 2001. Twenty years later, many of the same outlets were saying the war was ill-conceived and doomed from the start.
Immediately after the invasion of Iraq began in March 2003, with very few exceptions, even the mainstream news organizations that had been expressing trepidation or opposition swung into line to support the war effort. Two decades later, many of the same media outlets were calling the invasion of Iraq the worst U.S. foreign-policy blunder in history.
A pattern of regret (not to say repentance or remorse) emerged from massive U.S. outlays for venture militarism that failed to triumph in Afghanistan and Iraq, but there is little evidence that the underlying repetition compulsion disorder has been exorcized.
But such framing evades the structural mendacity that remains built into the military-industrial complex, with its corporate media and political wings. War is so normalized that its casualties, as if struck by acts of God, are routinely viewed as victims without victimizers, perhaps no more aggrieved than people suffering the consequences of bad weather.
What American policymakers call mistakes and errors are, for others, more aptly described with words like catastrophes and atrocities. Attributing the U.S. wars to faulty judgment—not premeditated and hugely profitable aggression—is expedient, setting the policy table for supposed resolve to use better judgment next time rather than challenging the presumed prerogative to attack another country at will.
When the warfare in Afghanistan finally ended, major U.S. media—after avidly supporting the invasion and then the occupation—were awash in accounts of how the war had been badly run with ineptitude or deception from the White House and the Pentagon. Some of the media analysis and commentaries might have seemed a bit sheepish, but news outlets preferred not to recall their prior support for the same war in Afghanistan that they were now calling folly.
A pattern of regret (not to say repentance or remorse) emerged from massive U.S. outlays for venture militarism that failed to triumph in Afghanistan and Iraq, but there is little evidence that the underlying repetition compulsion disorder has been exorcized from America’s foreign-policy leadership or major news media, let alone its political economy. On the contrary: the forces that have dragged the United States into an array of wars in numerous countries still retain enormous sway over foreign and military affairs. For those forces, over time, shape-shifting is essential, while the warfare state continues to rule.
The fact that strategies and forms of intervention are evolving, most conspicuously in the direction of further reliance on airpower rather than ground troops, makes the victims of the USA’s firepower even less visible to American eyes. This presents a challenge to take a fresh look at ongoing militarism and insist that the actual consequences for people at the other end of U.S. weaponry be exposed to the light of day—and taken seriously in human terms.
Despite all that has happened since President George W. Bush vowed in mid-September 2001 to “rid the world of the evil-doers,” pivotal issues have been largely dodged by dominant U.S. media and political leaders. The toll that red-white-and-blue militarism takes on other countries is not only a matter of moral principles. The United States is also in jeopardy.
That we live in one interdependent world is no longer debatable. Illusions about American exceptionalism have been conclusively refuted by the global climate emergency and the Covid-19 pandemic, along with the ever-present and worsening dangers of thermonuclear war. On a planet so circular in so many ways, what goes around comes around.
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Who Wants to Kill and Die for the American Empire?
Instead of acting as an alternative to ground wars involving U.S. forces, U.S. proxy wars have spawned ever-escalating crises that are now making U.S. wars with Iran and Russia increasingly likely.
Sep 06, 2024
The Associated Pressreports that many of the recruits drafted under Ukraine’s new conscription law lack the motivation and military indoctrination required to actually aim their weapons and fire at Russian soldiers.
“Some people don’t want to shoot. They see the enemy in the firing position in trenches but don’t open fire... That is why our men are dying,” said a frustrated battalion commander in Ukraine’s 47th Brigade. “When they don’t use the weapon, they are ineffective.”
This is familiar territory to anyone who has studied the work of U.S. Brigadier General Samuel “Slam” Marshall, a First World War veteran and the chief combat historian of the U.S. Army in the Second World War. Marshall conducted hundreds of post-combat small group sessions with U.S. troops in the Pacific and Europe, and documented his findings in his book, Men Against Fire: the Problem of Battle Command.
One of Slam Marshall’s most startling and controversial findings was that only about 15% of U.S. troops in combat actually fired their weapons at the enemy. In no case did that ever rise above 25%, even when failing to fire placed the soldiers’ own lives in greater danger.
We must refuse to volunteer our bodies and those of our children and grandchildren as their cannon fodder, or allow them to shift that fate onto our neighbors, friends, and “allies” in other countries.
Marshall concluded that most human beings have a natural aversion to killing other human beings, often reinforced by our upbringing and religious beliefs, and that turning civilians into effective combat soldiers therefore requires training and indoctrination expressly designed to override our natural respect for fellow human life. This dichotomy between human nature and killing in war is now understood to lie at the root of much of the PTSD suffered by combat veterans.
Marshall’s conclusions were incorporated into U.S. military training, with the introduction of firing range targets that looked like enemy soldiers and deliberate indoctrination to dehumanize the enemy in soldiers’ minds. When he conducted similar research in the Korean War, Marshall found that changes in infantry training based on his work in World War II had already led to higher firing ratios.
That trend continued in Vietnam and more recent U.S. wars. Part of the shocking brutality of the U.S. hostile military occupation of Iraq stemmed directly from the dehumanizing indoctrination of the U.S. occupation forces, which included falsely linking Iraq to the September 11th terrorist crimes in the U.S. and labeling Iraqis who resisted the U.S. invasion and occupation of their country as “terrorists.”
A Zogby poll of U.S. forces in Iraq in February 2006 found that 85% of U.S. troops believed their mission was to “retaliate for Saddam’s role in the 9/11 attacks,” and 77% believed that the primary reason for the war was to “stop Saddam from protecting Al Qaeda in Iraq.” This was all pure fiction, cut from whole cloth by propagandists in Washington, and yet, three years into the U.S. occupation, the Pentagon was still misleading U.S. troops to falsely link Iraq with 9/11.
The impact of this dehumanization was also borne out by court martial testimony in the rare cases when U.S. troops were prosecuted for killing Iraqi civilians. In a court martial at Camp Pendleton in California in July 2007, a corporal testifying for the defense told the court he did not see the cold-blooded killing of an innocent civilian as a summary execution. “I see it as killing the enemy,” he told the court, adding, “Marines consider all Iraqi men part of the insurgency.”
U.S. combat deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan (5,429 killed) were only a fraction of the U.S. combat death toll in Vietnam (47,434) or Korea (33,739), and an even smaller fraction of the nearly 300,000 Americans killed in the Second World War. In every case, other countries suffered much heavier death tolls.
And yet, U.S. casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan provoked waves of political blowback in the U.S., leading to military recruitment problems that persist today. The U.S. government responded by shifting away from wars involving large deployments of U.S. ground troops to a greater reliance on proxy wars and aerial bombardment.
After the end of the Cold War, the U.S. military-industrial complex and political class thought they had “kicked the Vietnam syndrome,” and that, freed from the danger of provoking World War III with the Soviet Union, they could now use military force without restraint to consolidate and expand U.S. global power. These ambitions crossed party lines, from Republican “neoconservatives” to Democratic hawks like Madeleine Albright, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden.
In a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in October 2000, a month before winning a seat in the U.S. Senate, Hillary Clinton echoed her mentor Albright’s infamous rejection of the “Powell Doctrine” of limited war.
“There is a refrain…,” Clinton declared, “that we should intervene with force only when we face splendid little wars that we surely can win, preferably by overwhelming force in a relatively short period of time. To those who believe we should become involved only if it is easy to do, I think we have to say that America has never and should not ever shy away from the hard task if it is the right one.”
During the question-and-answer session, a banking executive in the audience challenged Clinton on that statement. “I wonder if you think that every foreign country—the majority of countries—would actually welcome this new assertiveness, including the 1 billion Muslims that are out there,” he asked, “and whether or not there isn’t some grave risk to the United States in this—what I would say, not new internationalism, but new imperialism?”
When the aggressive war policy promoted by the neocons and Democratic hawks crashed and burned in Iraq and Afghanistan, this should have prompted a serious rethink of their wrongheaded assumptions about the impact of aggressive and illegal uses of U.S. military force.
Instead, the response of the U.S. political class to the blowback from its catastrophic wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was simply to avoid large deployments of U.S. ground forces or “boots on the ground.” They instead embraced the use of devastating bombing and artillery campaigns in Afghanistan, Mosul in Iraq, and Raqqa in Syria, and wars fought by proxies, with full, “ironclad” U.S. support, in Libya, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and now Ukraine and Palestine.
The absence of large numbers of U.S. casualties in these wars kept them off the front pages back home and avoided the kind of political blowback generated by the wars in Vietnam and Iraq. The lack of media coverage and public debate meant that most Americans knew very little about these more recent wars, until the shocking atrocity of the genocide in Gaza finally started to crack the wall of silence and indifference.
The results of these U.S. proxy wars are, predictably, no less catastrophic than the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The U.S. domestic political impacts have been mitigated, but the real-world impacts in the countries and regions involved are as deadly, destructive, and destabilizing as ever, undermining U.S. “soft power” and pretensions to global leadership in the eyes of much of the world.
In fact, these policies have widened the yawning gulf between the worldview of ill-informed Americans who cling to the view of their country as a country at peace and a force for good in the world, and people in other countries, especially in the Global South, who are ever more outraged by the violence, chaos, and poverty caused by the aggressive projection of U.S. military and economic power, whether by U.S. wars, proxy wars, bombing campaigns, coups, or economic sanctions.
Now the U.S.-backed wars in Palestine and Ukraine are provoking growing public dissent among America’s partners in these wars. Israel’s recovery of six more dead hostages in Rafah led Israeli labor unions to call widespread strikes, insisting that the Netanyahu government must prioritize the lives of the Israeli hostages over its desire to keep killing Palestinians and destroying Gaza.
In Ukraine, an expanded military draft has failed to overcome the reality that most young Ukrainians do not want to kill and die in an endless, unwinnable war. Hardened veterans see new recruits much as Siegfried Sassoon described the British conscripts he was training in November 1916 in Memoirs of an Infantry Officer: “The raw material to be trained was growing steadily worse. Most of those who came in now had joined the Army unwillingly, and there was no reason why they should find military service tolerable.”
Several months later, with the help of Bertrand Russell, Sassoon wrote Finished With War: a Soldier’s Declaration, an open letter accusing the political leaders who had the power to end the war of deliberately prolonging it, which was published in newspapers and read aloud in Parliament. The letter ended:
On behalf of those who are suffering now, I make this protest against the deception which is being practiced upon them; also I believe it may help to destroy the callous complacency with which the majority of those at home regard the continuance of agonies which they do not share and which they have not enough imagination to realize.
As Israeli and Ukrainian leaders see their political support crumbling, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy are taking increasingly desperate risks, all the while insisting that the U.S. must come to their rescue. By “leading from behind,” our leaders have surrendered the initiative to these foreign leaders, who will keep pushing the United States to make good on its promises of unconditional support, which will sooner or later include sending young American troops to kill and die alongside their own.
Proxy war has failed to resolve the problem it was intended to solve. Instead of acting as an alternative to ground wars involving U.S. forces, U.S. proxy wars have spawned ever-escalating crises that are now making U.S. wars with Iran and Russia increasingly likely.
Neither the changes to U.S. military training since the Second World War nor the current U.S. strategy of proxy war have resolved the age-old contradiction that Slam Marshall described in Men Against Fire, between killing in war and our natural respect for human life. We have come full circle, back to this same historic crossroads, where we must once again make the fateful, unambiguous choice between the path of war and the path of peace.
If we choose war, or allow our leaders and their foreign friends to choose it for us, we must be ready, as military experts tell us, to once more send tens of thousands of young Americans to their deaths, while also risking escalation to a nuclear war that would kill us all.
If we truly choose peace, we must actively resist our political leaders’ schemes to repeatedly manipulate us into war. We must refuse to volunteer our bodies and those of our children and grandchildren as their cannon fodder, or allow them to shift that fate onto our neighbors, friends, and “allies” in other countries.
We must insist that our mis-leaders instead recommit to diplomacy, negotiation, and other peaceful means of resolving disputes with other countries, as the United Nations Charter, the real “rules-based order,” in fact requires.
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