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american empire
Dear Canada: Beware of Peter Hoekstra!
As long as U.S. policy is one of annexation and domination, Hoekstra deserves to be treated as a hostile guest—not an ambassador worthy of distinction or trust.
Mar 08, 2025
On February 22nd, the Michigan Republican Party met in Huntington Place in Detroit to elect a new chair. After the ballots were counted, State Senator Jim Runestand prevailed over President Donald Trump’s choice, “fake elector” Meshawn Maddock. Even though he had delivered Michigan to the GOP column, incumbent Peter Hoekstra didn’t run again. He couldn’t, because as of November he is awaiting confirmation by the U.S. Senate to be Trump’s ambassador to Canada.
During his three-decade plus career in government, Hoekstra has amassed quite the right-wing record. In the 90s, he was a fierce foe of workplace safety and union reformers. Teamster warehouse director Tom Leedham called Hoekstra “a congressman who tried to eliminate the forty-hour workweek, and gut overtime and job safety laws.” As chair of the House Committee on Education and Workforce, Hoekstra led a witch hunt into the Teamsters that ended up removing Ron Carey, the only reform president ever elected in Teamsters history, from office shortly after the union won a hard fought battle against UPS. Hoekstra proclaimed in 2000 that if he and his allies “had not acted, Ron Carey would still be president of the Teamsters.”
On foreign policy, Hoekstra’s tenure was similarly malicious. After voting for the Iraq War, Heokstra remained convinced well into 2006 that Iraq had possessed weapons of mass destruction. To that effect, he announced that U.S. troops had actually found WMDs that year. Too bad for Hoekstra they turned out to be defunct weapons that predated the Persian Gulf War. The WMD lie remained just that, a lie. He also palled around with David Yarushalmi, an anti-Muslim bigot who once called Blacks “the most murderous of peoples.”
Hoekstra’s views and previous tenure as a diplomat should make his appointment a complete joke, but there’s danger in his appointment as well.
In 2012, Hoekstra attempted to unseat Democratic Senator Debbie Stabenhow. His campaign’s Super Bowl ad featured an Asian woman, bicycling through a rice paddy, who castigated “Debbie Spend It Now” in broken English. A clear attempt to resuscitate the “Yellow Peril,” a journalist called it “the most racist political ad of the year.” Heokstra’s campaign floundered and he lost in a landslide.
Hoekstra’s post-Congress years saw him argue that the CIA’s torture program, euphemistically referred to as “enhanced interrogation,” produced “actionable intelligence.” He took time in 2016 to defame Hillary Clinton advisor Huma Abedin over her “egregious” ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. After co-chairing Donald Trump’s winning Michigan campaign in 2016, Hoekstra was back in government. For his services, he was rewarded with an ambassadorship to the Netherlands, his birthplace.
As Trump’s ambassador, Hoekstra was dogged by reporters over his false 2015 claims that there were Muslim “no-go zones” in the Netherlands, in which cars and politicians were “being burned.” In 2020, the official Twitter account for the U.S. Ambassador to the Netherlands posted a bizarre image of a graveyard containing German soldiers from World War II. The account said the graves were a “terrible reminder of the cost of going to war and why we must always work towards peace,” seemingly forgetting what side the U.S. was on during the war. The whole thing was reminiscent of when President Reagan went to a graveyard containing bodies of Hitler’s SS to declare the dead Nazis were “victims just as surely as the victims in the concentration camps.”
Hoekstra’s tenure was marked by accusations that he openly interfered in Dutch politics. In 2019 he hosted a party for the far-right Forum for Democracy whose anti-Islam, anti-immigrant views nicely dovetailed with his own. Diplomats are prohibited from interfering in their host countries politics by the 1969 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties. Although other political parties in the Netherlands complained, Trump lost the following year’s presidential election and Hoekstra was out. Or was he? Hoekstra’s reward for helping Trump win the Mitten State, is once again, an ambassadorship, but this time to Canada.
Hoekstra’s views and previous tenure as a diplomat should make his appointment a complete joke, but there’s danger in his appointment as well. Given that he has already violated diplomatic protocol via his involvement in the domestic politics of the host country, and that a stated goal of the Trump administration is the annexation of Canada as the 51st state, it stands to reason that Hoekstra will use any available means to further that project as ambassador. In short, he will attempt to undermine Canadian sovereignty under the guise of diplomacy.
Although Peter Hoekstra will almost certainly be confirmed by the U.S. Senate, that’s no reason for him to be treated as just another ambassador in Canada. As long as U.S. policy is one of annexation and domination, Hoekstra deserves to be treated as someone who will undermine Canadian independence in the service of American empire.
The Mercenaries Who Fight for American Empire
Private military contractors are now an essential part of America's increasingly privatized wars and will continue to be so, in seemingly ever greater numbers.
May 09, 2023
The way mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin and his private army have been waging a significant part of Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine has been well covered in the American media, not least of all because his firm, the Wagner Group, draws most of its men from Russia’s prison system. Wagner offers “freedom” from Putin’s labor camps only to send those released convicts to the front lines of the conflict, often on brutal suicide missions.
At least the Russian president and his state-run media make no secret of his regime’s alliance with Wagner. The American government, on the other hand, seldom acknowledges its own version of the privatization of war — the tens of thousands of private security contractors it’s used in its misguided war on terror, involving military and intelligence operations in a staggering 85 countries.
At least as far back as the Civil War through World Wars I and II, the Korean and Vietnam Wars, and the first Gulf War, “contractors,” as we like to call them, have long been with us. Only recently, however, have they begun playing such a large role in our wars, with an estimated 10% to 20% of them directly involved in combat and intelligence operations.
Contractors have both committed horrific abuses and acted bravely under fire (because they have all too often been under fire). From torture at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq to interrogations at the Guantánamo Bay detention camp, from employees of the private security firm Blackwater indiscriminately firing on unarmed Iraqi civilians to contractors defending a U.S. base under attack in Afghanistan, they have been an essential part of the war on terror. And yes, they both killed Afghans and helped some who had worked as support contractors escape from Taliban rule.
The involvement of private companies has allowed Washington to continue to conduct its operations around the globe, even if many Americans think that our war on terror in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere has ended. I tried looking for any kind of a survey of how many of us realize that it continues in Iraq and elsewhere, but all I could find was pollster Nate Silver’s analysis of “lessons learned” from that global conflict, as if it were part of our history. And unless respondents were caring for a combat-wounded veteran, they tended not to look unfavorably on sending our troops into battle in distant lands — so scratch that as a lesson learned from our forever wars.
None of this surprises me. American troops are no longer getting killed in significant numbers, nor are as many crowding the waitlists at backlogged Veterans Affairs hospitals as would be the case if those troops had been the only ones doing the fighting.
At points during this century’s war on terror, in fact, the U.S. used more civilian contractors in its ongoing wars than uniformed military personnel. In fact, as of 2019, according to Brown University’s Costs of War Project, which I co-founded, there were 50% more contractors than troops in the U.S. Central Command region that includes Afghanistan, Iraq, and 18 other countries in the Middle East, as well as Central and South Asia. As recently as December 2022, the Pentagon had about 22,000 contractors deployed throughout that region, with nearly 8,000 concentrated in Iraq and Syria. To be sure, most of those workers were unarmed and providing food service, communications aid, and the like. Even more tellingly, roughly two thirds of them were citizens of other countries, particularly lower-income ones.
In 2020, retired Army Officer Danny Sjursen offered an interesting explanation for how the war on terror was then becoming ever more privatized: the Covid-19 pandemic had changed the Pentagon’s war-making strategy as the public began to question how much money and how many lives were being expended on war abroad rather than healthcare at home. As a result, Sjursen argued, the U.S. had begun deploying ever more contractors, remote drones, CIA paramilitaries, and (often abusive) local forces in that war on terror while U.S. troops were redeployed to Europe and the Pacific to contain a resurgent Russia and China. In other words, during the pandemic, Washington placed ever more dirty work in corporate and foreign hands.
(Not) Counting Contractors
It’s been a challenge to write about private security contractors because our government does anything but a good job of counting them. Though the Defense Department keeps quarterly records of how many civilian contractors it employs and where, they exclude employees contracted with the Central Intelligence Agency or the State Department.
When Costs of War first tried to count contractor deaths by searching official government sources, we came up short. The spouse of a gravely wounded armed contractor directed me to her blog, where she had started to compile a list of just such deaths based on daily Google searches, even as she worked hard caring for her spouse and managing his disability paperwork. She and I eventually lost touch and it appears that she stopped compiling such numbers long ago. Still, we at the project took a page from her book, while adding reported war deaths among foreign nationals working for the Pentagon to our formula. Costs of War researchers then estimated that 8,000 contractors had been killed in our wars in the Middle East as of 2019, or about 1,000 more than the U.S. troops who died during the same period.
Social scientists Ori Swed and Thomas Crosbie have tried to extrapolate from reported contractor deaths in order to paint a picture of who they were while still alive. They believe that most of them were white veterans in their forties; many were former Special Forces operatives and a number of former officers with college degrees).
Limited Choices for Veterans
How do people of relative racial, economic, and gendered privilege end up in positions that, while well-paid, are even more precarious than being in the armed forces? As a therapist serving military families and as a military spouse, I would say that the path to security contracting reflects a deep cultural divide in our society between military and civilian life. Although veteran unemployment rates are marginally lower than those in the civilian population, many of them tend to seek out what they know best and that means military training, staffing, weapons production — and, for some, combat.
I recently spoke with one Marine infantry veteran who had completed four combat tours. He told me that, after leaving the service, he lacked a community that understood what he had been through. He sought to avoid social isolation by getting a government job. However, after applying for several in law enforcement agencies, he “failed” lie detector tests (owing to the common stress reactions of war-traumatized veterans). Having accidentally stumbled on a veteran-support nonprofit group, he ultimately found connections that led him to decide to return to school and retrain in a new profession. But, as he pointed out, “many of my other friends from the Marines numbed their pain with drugs or by going back to war as security contractors.”
Not everyone views contracting as a strategy of last resort. Still, I find it revealing of the limited sense of possibility such veterans experience that the top five companies employing them are large corporations servicing the Department of Defense through activities like information technology support, weapons production, or offers of personnel, both armed and not.
The Corporate Wounded
And keep in mind that such jobs are anything but easy. Many veterans find themselves facing yet more of the same — quick, successive combat deployments as contractors.
Anyone in this era of insurance mega-corporations who has ever had to battle for coverage is aware that doing so isn’t easy. Private insurers can maximize their profits by holding onto premium payments as long as possible while denying covered services.
A federal law called the Defense Base Act (1941) (DBA) requires that corporations fund workers’ compensation claims for their employees laboring under U.S. contracts, regardless of their nationalities, with the taxpayer footing the bill. The program grew exponentially after the start of the war on terror, but insurance companies have not consistently met their obligations under the law. In 2008, a joint investigation by the Los Angeles Times and ProPublica found that insurers like Chicago-based CAN Financial Corps were earning up to 50% profits on some of their war-zone policies, while many employees of contractors lacked adequate care and compensation for their injuries.
Even after Congress called on the Pentagon and the Department of Labor to better enforce the DBA in 2011, some companies continued to operate with impunity vis–à–vis their own workers, sometimes even failing to purchase insurance for them or refusing to help them file claims as required by law. While insurance companies made tens of millions of dollars in profits during the second decade of the war on terror, between 2009 and 2021, the Department of Labor fined insurers of those contracting corporations a total of only $3,250 for failing to report DBA claims.
Privatizing Foreign Policy
At its core, the war on terror sought to create an image of the U.S. abroad as a beacon of democracy and the rule of law. Yet there is probably no better evidence of how poorly this worked in practice at home and abroad than the little noted (mis)use of security contractors. Without their ever truly being seen, they prolonged that global set of conflicts, inflicting damage on other societies and being damaged themselves in America’s name. Last month, the Costs of War Project reported that the U.S. is now using subcontractors Bancroft Global Development and Pacific Architects and Engineers to train the Somali National Army in its counterterrorism efforts. Meanwhile, the U.S. intervention there has only helped precipitate a further rise in terrorist attacks in the region.
The global presence created by such contractors also manifests itself in how we respond to threats to their lives. In March 2023, a self-destructing drone exploded at a U.S. maintenance facility on a coalition base in northeastern Syria, killing a contractor employed by the Pentagon and injuring another, while wounding five American soldiers. After that drone was found to be of Iranian origin, President Biden ordered an air strike on facilities in Syria used by Iranian-allied forces. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin stated, “No group will strike our troops with impunity.” While he later expressed condolences to the family of the contractor who was the only one killed in that attack, his statement could have more explicitly acknowledged that contractors are even more numerous than troops among the dead from our forever wars.
In late December 2019, a contractor working as an interpreter on a U.S. military base in Iraq was killed by rockets fired by an Iranian-backed militia. Shortly afterward, then-President Trump ordered an air strike that killed the commander of an elite Iranian military unit, sparking concern about a dangerous escalation with that country. Trump later tweeted, “Iran killed an American contractor, wounding many. We strongly responded, and always will.”
I can’t believe I’m saying this, but Trump’s tweet was more honest than Austin’s official statement: such contractors are now an essential part of America’s increasingly privatized wars and will continue to be so, in seemingly ever greater numbers. Even though retaliating for attacks on their lives has little to do with effective counterterrorism (as the Costs of War Project has long made clear), bearing witness to war casualties in all their grim diversity is the least the rest of us can do as American citizens. Because how can we know whether — and for whom — our shadowy, shape-shifting wars “work” if we continue to let our leaders wage an increasingly privatized version of them in ways meant to obscure our view of the carnage they’ve caused?
Pick Your Poison: Clinton Vs. Trump on Foreign Policy
Jun 16, 2016
In their remarks to the nation following the Orlando massacre, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump made their differences--and disturbing similarities--crystal clear.
Trump attacked Hillary Clinton for refusing to label the violence carried out by mentally disturbed American-born gunmen of Muslim background as a manifestation of "radical Islam." He reiterated his call to ban Muslims from entering the United States and to subject American Muslims to special surveillance and restrictions.
To her credit, Hillary Clinton rejected such bigotry. However, she called for returning to the "spirit of 9/12," ignoring how that reaction to 9/11 resulted in a major crackdown on civil liberties and preparation for war. She stated:
"The attack in Orlando makes it even more clear, we cannot contain this threat. We must defeat it."
Though there is no evidence of any operational ties between ISIS and the lone Orlando gunman, she piled on, saying:
"We should keep the pressure on ramping up the air campaign, accelerating support for our friends fighting to take and hold ground."
Sam Adler-Bell, a journalist and policy associate with The Century Foundation, observed:
"I fear we've already begun to enlist the 49 dead into the project of American empire, here and abroad, into the endless, borderless war that began on 9/12."
In previous weeks, both incipient nominees had given what has been called "major foreign policy addresses." Though both lacked detail and substance, Clinton made a strong case that Trump really does not have the experience, knowledge, or temperament to be commander-in-chief.
Still, while former Secretary of State Clinton would be among the most experienced and knowledgeable nominees on foreign policy in modern history, she is probably the most hawkish Democratic nominee in decades.
Phyllis Bennis of the Institute for Policy Studies noted:
"She talked about all of the crazy stuff that Donald Trump has said. That's easy to do, [but] the choice between the kind of chaos of Trump's policy, that's so incredibly dangerous, versus a very clear militaristic commitment to regime change and U.S. domination in [Clinton's] foreign policy, is not much of a choice."
In certain areas, Clinton has even placed herself to the right of the incipient GOP nominee. For example, Trump has questioned why Americans must pay for overseas bases, carrier groups, and other forward deployment to defend wealthy European, Middle Eastern, and Western Pacific allies who could afford to defend themselves, but whose military budgets are only a fraction of those of the United States. Clinton has denounced what she refers to as his threat "to abandon our allies in NATO."
She has denounced Trump for wanting to negotiate directly with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and calls instead for a U.S.-led military buildup in East Asia, including a costly missile defense system in Japan. Harkening back to the rhetoric once used against liberal Democrats by their hawkish electoral opponents, Clinton said that if her opponent is elected, "they'll be celebrating in the Kremlin."
Rather than support collective security arrangements, a stronger United Nations, expanding nuclear-free zones, or other multilateral efforts, Clinton insists that "if America doesn't lead, we leave a vacuum--and that will either cause chaos, or other countries will rush in to fill the void." Anything short of U.S. primacy "is not an outcome we can live with."
This drew a rebuke from Columbia University's Jeffrey Sachs:
"This kind of arrogance--that America and America alone must run the world--has led straight to overstretch: perpetual wars that cannot be won, and unending and escalating confrontations with Russia, China, Iran, and others that make the world more dangerous. It doesn't seem to dawn on Clinton that in today's world, we need cooperation, not endless bravado."
Clinton falsely accused Trump of saying he would "stay neutral on Israel's security." In reality, Trump said that in order to effectively mediate the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, the United States should take a more neutral position in the negotiations. A longstanding assumption in the field of conflict resolution is that mediators shouldn't take sides.
The sad fact is that American voters this November will probably be forced to choose between a Republican nominee who thinks the United States should ban Muslims from entering the country versus a Democratic nominee who thinks the United States has a right to invade Muslim countries, a Republican nominee who agrees with George W. Bush that it's okay to torture prisoners in the name of fighting terrorism versus a Democratic nominee who agrees with Benjamin Netanyahu that it's okay to bombard crowded civilian neighborhoods in the name of fighting terrorism; a Republican nominee who supports building a wall on the border to keep Mexicans out of the United States versus a Democratic nominee who supports Israel building a wall far beyond its border to keep Palestinians out of Palestine.
Overall, Trump may be the bigger militarist. Though he has attacked Clinton for backing the invasion of Iraq and the bloody counter-insurgency war that followed, archived interviews have indicated that Trump did not actually oppose the war as he's claimed. Same with the U.S. intervention in Libya. Indeed, in both cases, Trump called for an even greater use of force, including the seizure of oil fields for U.S. economic benefit. He also agrees with Clinton to militarily intervene in Syria to create "safe zones" for refugees and to escalate U.S. bombing against ISIS.
Trump's call for pulling U.S. forces back from overseas is accompanied by a call for such countries as Japan, South Korea, and Saudi Arabia to develop their own nuclear weapons. He opposes the nuclear agreement with Iran. He has falsely accused President Obama of having "supported the ouster of a friendly regime in Egypt . . . and then helped bring the Muslim Brotherhood to power in its place." He charges that Obama, whose administration has given unprecedented amounts of aid to Israel and blocked the United Nations from addressing human rights concerns, "has not been a friend to Israel," saying the President has "snubbed and criticized" what he calls "the one true Democracy in the Middle East."
Trump also claims "our nuclear weapons arsenal"--on which Obama plans to spend nearly $1 trillion over the next thirty years--"has been allowed to atrophy and is desperately in need of modernization and renewal." He has criticized Obama's cancellation of the missile defense program despite extraordinary cost and highly dubious efficacy. He pledges to dramatically increase military spending.
"Our military," he laments, "is depleted, and we're asking our generals and military leaders to worry about global warming"--which, according to Trump, does not exist.
Clinton, throughout her career, has been a hawk. Not only did she support the Iraq War, but she also backed the Israeli and Moroccan occupations, the Honduras coup, various allied dictatorships, higher military spending, and a more interventionist foreign policy. She's thumbed her nose at the International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court, and various reputable international human rights and arms control agencies.
Yet, ironically, her foreign policy agenda will likely be treated as the "left" wing of the debate by the mainstream media this fall, and perhaps for the next four to eight years.
This is why those of us who have a truly progressive vision of foreign policy need to mobilize and put on the pressure.
The good news is that Clinton has been forced to downplay her hawkish tendencies in order to get the Democratic nomination, while Trump is on the verge of winning the Republican nomination by exaggerating his dovish tendencies. This indicates that an increasing number of American voters are questioning the militarization of U.S. foreign policy.
With only a few exceptions, virtually every change in U.S. foreign policy--including ending the Vietnam War, accepting the Central American peace plan, imposing sanctions on apartheid South Africa, curbing the nuclear arms race, ceasing support for Indonesia's occupation of East Timor, and phasing out most U.S. involvement in Iraq--came not from the initiative of enlightened politicians but from the American public.
Elections are important. Yet just as important are the other forms of pressure we can provide to force a saner and less militaristic foreign policy.
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