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military spending
Military Budget Bill Would Ramp Up Israel Aid to Fill In 'Gaps' When Other Countries Impose Embargoes Over Genocide
The House Armed Services Committee said in September that the measure "combats antisemitism."
Dec 09, 2025
A little-reported provision of the latest military spending bill would direct the US to create a plan to fill the "gaps" for Israel whenever other nations cut off arms shipments in response to its acts of genocide in Gaza.
As Prem Thakker reported Monday for Zeteo, the measure is "buried" more than 1,000 pages into the more than 3,000-page National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which is considered by lawmakers to be “must-pass" legislation and contains a record $901 billion in total spending.
Republicans are shepherding the bill through the US House of Representatives, where—as is the case with most NDAAs—it is expected to pass on Wednesday with Democratic support, even as some conservative budget hardliners refuse to back it, primarily over its $400 million in military assistance to Ukraine.
Since the genocide began following Hamas' attack on October 7, 2023, the US has provided more than $21.7 billion to Israel, including hundreds of millions that have been supplied through NDAAs.
The new NDAA includes at least another $650 million to Israel, an increase of $45 million from the previous one, even though this is the first such bill to be introduced since the "ceasefire" that went into effect in October. This aid from the Pentagon comes on top of the $3.3 billion already provided through the State Department budget.
But this NDAA also contains an unprecedented measure. It calls for the “continual assessment of [the] impact of international state arms embargoes on Israel and actions to address defense capability gaps."
The NDAA directs Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard to assess “the scope, nature, and impact on Israel’s defense capabilities of current and emerging arms embargoes, sanctions, restrictions, or limitations imposed by foreign countries or by international organizations,” and “the resulting gaps or vulnerabilities in Israel’s security posture.”
As Drop Site News explains, "this means the US would explicitly use federal law to step in and supply weapons to Israel whenever other countries cut off arms to halt Israel’s ongoing violations across the region."
"The point of this assistance, to be clear, is to make up for any identified insufficiencies Israel may have due to other countries' embargoing it as a result of its ongoing genocide in Palestine," Thakker wrote.
A similar provision appeared in a September version of the NDAA, which the House Armed Services Committee praised because it supposedly “combats antisemitism"—explicitly conflating a bias against Jewish people with weapons embargoes that countries have imposed to stop Israel from continuing its routine, documented human rights violations in Gaza.
Among the nations that have cut off weapons sales to Israel are Japan, Canada, France, Italy, and Spain. Meanwhile, other major backers, such as the United Kingdom and Germany, have imposed partial freezes on certain weaponry.
While official estimates from the Gaza Ministry of Health place the number of dead from Israel's military campaign at over 70,000, with more than 170,000 wounded, an independent assessment last month from the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Germany and the Center for Demographic Studies in Spain found that the death toll “likely exceeds 100,000." This finding mirrored several other studies that have projected the true death toll to be much higher than what official estimates show.
Embargoes against Israel have been called for by a group of experts mandated by the United Nations Human Rights Council, including Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories. Meanwhile, numerous human rights organizations, including the leading Israeli group B’Tselem, have said Israel’s campaign in Gaza has amounted to genocide.
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Trump, Violence, and 'Hubris Syndrome'
People who gain a significant amount of power over others lose the ability to empathize with people in general, isolating the powerful into their own stereotypes and egotistical certainties, which lessens their ability to make good, or even rational, decisions.
Nov 21, 2025
What is power?
I dedicate this question, which is at the core of the book with which I am struggling, to Donald Trump.
When we think of power, the word itself commands that we carve the concept into something isolated and wieldable: a sword, a gun, a scepter. Power means power over. There is no basic concept of power—no word for power in the English language—that also means collaboration, collective participation: people working together, individually empowered at the same time that they are part of a larger whole.
Even when we examine the dark side of power—as in, power corrupts—the examination seems to hover as a warning rather than open up to larger awareness. Some years ago, Jerry Useem wrote an article in The Atlantic titled (fasten your seatbelts!) “Power Causes Brain Damage,” which discusses the concept he calls “hubris syndrome.”
Collective hubris syndrome still dominates global politics.
The essential point the article makes is that people who gain a significant amount of power over others lose the ability to empathize with—or mime, as the article puts it—people in general, the lesser mortals who must follow the boss’ orders. This inability, it turns out, is serious. It isolates the powerful into their own stereotypes and egotistical certainties, which lessens their ability to make good, or even rational, decisions. And hubris syndrome isn’t merely psychological; it’s also physiological.
Citing the research of neuroscientist Sukhvinder Obhi, Useem writes: “And when he put the heads of the powerful and the not-so-powerful under a transcranial-magnetic-stimulation machine, he found that power, in fact, impairs a specific neural process, ‘mirroring,’ that may be a cornerstone of empathy. Which gives a neurological basis to what [psychologist Dacher] Keltner has termed the ‘power paradox’: Once we have power, we lose some of the capacities we needed to gain it in the first place.”
Useem quotes authors David Owen and Jonathan Davidson, who define hubris syndrome as “a disorder of the possession of power, particularly power which has been associated with overwhelming success, held for a period of years and with minimal constraint on the leader.” Its 14 clinical features, he adds, include: “manifest contempt for others, loss of contact with reality, restless or reckless actions, and displays of incompetence.” (Remind you of anyone, Donald?)
The idea is that we’re naturally connected and subconsciously “mimic” others: We laugh when others laugh, tense up when others grow tense. It’s not faking an emotion to fit in; it’s participating in, feeling, the collective emotion that fills the room. “It helps trigger the same feelings those others are experiencing and provides a window into where they are coming from,” Useem writes. But: Powerful people “stop simulating the experience of others,” leading to what the psychologist calls an “empathy deficit,” which saps the powerful of most, or maybe all, of their social skill, leaving them, even as they generate endless obeisance, socially isolated souls.
The conclusion to be drawn here is that what is commonly thought of as power—power over others, aka, dominance—isn’t power at all. It’s an illusion of power that weakens, and perhaps destroys, those who hold it. Consider the rise and fall of dictators, the toppling of empires, the comeuppance of kings and queens. Let them eat cake.
The article does an excellent job pointing all this out, but at a certain point it falls into a linguistic trap. Useem writes despairingly: “This is a depressing finding. Knowledge is supposed to be power. But what good is knowing that power deprives you of knowledge?”
Knowledge in all its basic innocence is, indeed, power, but rarely is this “power over” someone. Knowledge of how to walk, how to read... this is a child claiming her life. And the entire family is empowered. As the child learns how to function independently, Mom and Dad learn how to parent. Yes, knowledge—power—can be used to further the interests of our darkest impulses. We can use what we learn to blackmail, extort, cheat, bully, win, etc., etc. But let’s break the automatic linguistic link right now between power and dominance. True power enlarges the whole; it doesn’t isolate.
No one says it better than Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: “Driven by the forces of love, the fragments of the world seek each other so that the world may come into being.”
The fragments of the world! This makes me think immediately of the world’s, or at least the state’s, social outcasts, for whom there are also many other names: from bums and losers to criminals and gangbangers. They are expelled into the category of Other, joining all our various enemies: terrorists, commies, savages, whatever. They are out to get us. We must be ready to defend ourselves against them, and here on the home front be ever in control of them. This requires the massing of counterviolence and stern directives.
We all know how well this has worked over the centuries. Violence has won! Our geopolitics are organized around the inevitability of violence: the good kind (ours) vs. the bad kind (theirs). Military spending and its domestic equivalents utterly blitz more constructive forms of social spending and even more troubling, we define ourselves, at least at the state and national levels, primarily by our enemies. The worse they are, the better we are. It’s called projection. It eliminates the need for self-reflection: What matters is the skill to strike back, not look within, change, and grow.
It’s so easy to sink at this point into the quicksand of cynicism. We’re stuck. Nothing’s going to change. Read the following quote and you might believe this even more intensely. In February 1945, President Franklin Roosevelt, on his return from the Yalta Conference with Great Britain and the Soviet Union, and two months before he died, said these words to Congress:
The Crimea Conference was a successful effort by the three leading nations to find a common ground for peace. It ought to spell the end of the system of unilateral action, the exclusive alliances, the spheres of influence, the balances of power, and all the other expedients that have been tried for centuries—and have always failed. We propose to substitute for all these a universal organization in which all peace-loving nations will finally have a chance to join. I am confident that the Congress and the American people will accept the results of this conference as the beginning of a permanent structure of peace.
He was talking, of course, about the agreement the three powers had just reached on the creation of the United Nations: “the beginning of a permanent structure of peace.”
Yes, the cynicism ignites. Six months after Roosevelt’s words, the United States leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki with atomic bombs. World War II ended but the Cold War—and the nuclear arms race—began. The UN has hardly created peace over the last 80 years. Collective hubris syndrome still dominates global politics.
But if you listen deeply, you can hear the heart of peace still beating beneath the rubble. Step one: Do not give up.
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After 'Years of Neglected Oversight,' House Votes to Repeal Authorization Used by Presidents to Wage 'Forever Wars'
One foreign policy expert said these congressional authorizations "have become like holy writ, documents frozen in time yet endlessly reinterpreted to justify new military action."
Sep 11, 2025
Almost exactly 24 years after the September 11, 2001 attacks, the US House of Representatives voted Tuesday to finally repeal a pair of more than two-decade-old congressional authorizations that have allowed presidents to carry out military attacks in the Middle East and elsewhere.
In a 261-167 vote, with 49 Republicans joining all Democrats, the House passed an amendment to the next military spending bill to rescind the Authorizations for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) passed by Congress in the leadup to the 1991 Persian Gulf War and 2003 War in Iraq.
The decision is a small act of resistance in Congress after what the Quincy Institute's Adam Weinstein described in Foreign Policy magazine as "years of neglected oversight" by Congress over the "steady expansion of presidential war-making authority."
As Weinstein explains, these AUMFs, originally meant to give presidents narrow authority to target terrorist organizations like al-Qaeda and use military force against Saddam Hussein, "have been stretched far beyond their original purposes" by presidents to justify the use of unilateral military force across the Middle East.
President George W. Bush used the 2002 authorization, which empowered him to use military force against Iraq, to launch a full invasion and military occupation of the country. Bush would stretch its purview throughout the remainder of his term to apply the AUMF to any threat that could be seen as stemming from Iraq.
After Congress refused to pass a new authorization for the fight against ISIS—an offshoot of al-Qaeda—President Barack Obama used the ones passed during the War on Terror to expand US military operations in Syria. They also served as the basis of his use of drone assassinations in the Middle East and North Africa throughout his term.
During his first term, President Donald Trump used those authorizations as the legal justification to intensify the drone war and to launch attacks against Hezbollah in Iraq and Syria. He then used it to carry out the reckless assassination of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani in Iraq.
And even while calling for the repeal of the initial 2001 and 2002 authorizations, former President Joe Biden used them to continue many of the operations started by Trump.
"These AUMFs," Weinstein said, "have become like holy writ, documents frozen in time yet endlessly reinterpreted to justify new military action."
The amendment to repeal the authorizations was introduced by Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-N.Y.) and Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas).
Meeks described the authorizations as "long obsolete," saying they "risk abuse by administrations of either party."
Roy described the repeal of the amendment as something "strongly opposed by the, I'll call it, defense hawk community." But, he said, "the AUMF was passed in '02 to deal with Iraq and Saddam Hussein, and that guy's been dead... and we're now still running under an '02 AUMF. That's insane. We should repeal that."
"For decades, presidents abused these AUMFs to send Americans to fight in forever wars in the Middle East," said Rep. Chris Deluzio (D-Pa.) shortly before voting for the amendment. "Congress must take back its war powers authority and vote to repeal these AUMFs."
Although this House vote theoretically curbs Trump's war-making authority, it comes attached to a bill that authorizes $893 billion worth of new war spending, which 17 Democrats joined all but four Republicans Republicans in supporting Wednesday.
The vote will also have no bearing on the question of President Donald Trump's increasing use of military force without Congressional approval to launch unilateral strikes—including last week's bombing of a vessel that the administration has claimed, without clear evidence, was trafficking drugs from Venezuela and strikes conducted in June against Iran, without citing any congressional authorization.
Alexander McCoy, a Marine veteran and public policy advocate at Public Citizen, said, "the 1991 and 2002 AUMFs" are "good to remove," but pointed out that it's "mostly the 2001 AUMF that is exploited for forever wars."
"Not to mention, McCoy added, "we have reached a point where AUMFs almost seem irrelevant, because Congress has shown no willingness whatsoever to punish the president for just launching military actions without one, against Iran, and now apparently against Venezuela."
In the wake of Trump's strikes against Iran, Democrats introduced resolutions in the House and Senate aimed at requiring him to obtain Congressional approval, though Republicans and some Democratic war hawks ultimately stymied them.
However, Dylan Williams, the vice president of the Center for International Policy, argued that the repeal of the AUMF was nevertheless "a major development in the effort to finally rein in decades of unchecked use of military force by presidents of both parties."
The vote, Williams said, required lawmakers "to show where they stand on restraining US military adventurism."
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