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Taking Axe to 'Human Needs Budget', Trump and Musk Nowhere to Be Found at 'Slash the Pentagon' Event
"While the so-called Department of Government Efficiency has been on a rampage to root out 'waste, fraud, and abuse,' they've been ignoring the biggest money pit in the entire federal government," said Rep. Summer Lee.
Feb 12, 2025
As billionaire Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency makes its way through federal agencies with the aim of cutting spending that goes toward protecting workers' rights, providing disaster assistance and healthcare in the Global South, and defending Americans from corporate greed, Democratic lawmakers are demanding to know why Republicans are pushing to increase the already bloated Pentagon budget.
"While American families struggle with skyrocketing healthcare costs and grocery bills, Republicans are gearing up to fork over another $150 billion to the military-industrial complex," said Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) at a press conference titled "Slash the Pentagon" with government watchdog Public Citizen on Tuesday.
The event was held as the Senate Budget Committee prepared to begin a markup Wednesday of Senate Republicans' budget blueprint that was recently released, which could add $150 billion to the Department of Defense (DOD) budget.
The spending would be focused on improving "military readiness," expanding the U.S. Navy, building an air and missile defense system the Trump administration has called the "Iron Dome for America," and investing in nuclear defenses.
The senator said adding to the Pentagon's budget—which already stands at nearly $900 billion—won't make Americans safer, because "the doomsday that Americans fear in the 21st century isn't being vaporized by a nuclear bomb."
"It's the doomsday diagnosis of cancer, it's medical debt, it's housing payments or loan payments, it's grocery bills and heating bills," said Markey. "Let's finally put the people before the Pentagon."
As progressive organizers have noted in recent weeks, despite the fact that President Donald Trump campaigned as a populist—and won the support of a majority of working-class voters while high earners swung toward former Vice President Kamala Harris in the November election—the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has spent the early days of Trump's second term seizing data and pushing for the shutdown of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Department of Education, attempting to take control of a major payment systemat the Department of the Treasury, and looking to cut spending at the Department of Labor.
Meanwhile, the Pentagon—which has failed seven consecutive audits, unable to account for its spending even as it swallows up 14% of the federal budget—has barely registered as a target of DOGE.
"While the so-called Department of Government Efficiency has been on a rampage to root out 'waste, fraud, and abuse,' they've been ignoring the biggest money pit in the entire federal government: the Department of Defense," said Rep. Summer Lee (D-Pa.). "The people want a more efficient government, quality healthcare, housing costs that don't skyrocket, and affordable eggs and groceries—not a bloated military budget that doesn't make us any safer. Maybe DOGE should take a look at that."
Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) added that DOGE's actions so far will leave students with disabilities without resources and threaten senior citizens who rely on Social Security.
"We don't have clean drinking water in our country, but we always have the money for war," said Tlaib. "I'm sick of it. If our government has endless money to bomb people, they have money for clean air and water, guaranteeing healthcare as a human right, and making sure no child goes hungry. Our elected officials are choosing to spend money on endless war instead of the American people."
Trump and Musk have begun answering some questions from the press about whether DOGE will address DOD spending, with the president saying Sunday that DOGE will likely find "hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud and abuse."
Musk has criticized the Pentagon's $12 billion F-35 program as "obsolete," and some lawmakers have drawn attention to exorbitant spending at the department on luxury meals, toilet seats, and soap dispensers.
But Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Tuesday expressed hope that spending cuts would focus on climate programs, saying the Pentagon "is not in the business of climate change, solving the global thermostat. We're in the business of deterring and winning wars."
The DOD is the "single largest institutional producer of greenhouse gases in the world," as the Costs of War project at Brown University said in a 2019 report, and Trump's former defense secretary, Jim Mattis, acknowledged that the DOD must "pay attention to potential adverse impacts" of the climate crisis, related to national security.
On Tuesday, Musk was also questioned about DOGE's priorities at the Pentagon, with a reporter asking whether he has a conflict of interest in examining the DOD's spending, given his role of CEO at SpaceX, an aerospace company that receives about $22 billion in defense contracts from the department.
Musk shrugged off the concern, telling the reporter that he isn't personally "the one filing the contract, it's the people at SpaceX," and adding that defense contracts received by his company are "by far the best value for money for the taxpayer."
SpaceX was handed a new $38.85 million contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) on Monday.
Meanwhile, said Public Citizen co-president Robert Weissman, as Republicans head toward the budget reconciliation process, "money for the Pentagon will come directly cutting spending on human needs. The money that will go to Lockheed Martin or Palantir will come directly from Medicaid and food stamps and other programs for the poor and vulnerable."
"But with the plundering of the human needs budget made plain," he said, "the American people are not going to stand for—and will defeat—the Republicans' Pentagon boondoggle proposal."
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The Rise of the Drone-Industrial Complex
A new force — Silicon Valley startup culture — has entered the fray, and the military-industrial complex equation is suddenly changing dramatically.
Feb 11, 2025
Last April, in a move generating scant media attention, the Air Force announced that it had chosen two little-known drone manufacturers — Anduril Industries of Costa Mesa, California, and General Atomics of San Diego — to build prototype versions of its proposed Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA), a future unmanned plane intended to accompany piloted aircraft on high-risk combat missions. The lack of coverage was surprising, given that the Air Force expects to acquire at least 1,000 CCAs over the coming decade at around $30 million each, making this one of the Pentagon’s costliest new projects. But consider that the least of what the media failed to note. In winning the CCA contract, Anduril and General Atomics beat out three of the country’s largest and most powerful defense contractors — Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman — posing a severe threat to the continued dominance of the existing military-industrial complex, or MIC.
For decades, a handful of giant firms like those three have garnered the lion’s share of Pentagon arms contracts, producing the same planes, ships, and missiles year after year while generating huge profits for their owners. But an assortment of new firms, born in Silicon Valley or incorporating its disruptive ethos, have begun to challenge the older ones for access to lucrative Pentagon awards. In the process, something groundbreaking, though barely covered in the mainstream media, is underway: a new MIC is being born, one that potentially will have very different goals and profit-takers than the existing one. How the inevitable battles between the old and the new MICs play out can’t be foreseen, but count on one thing: they are sure to generate significant political turbulence in the years to come.
The very notion of a “military-industrial complex” linking giant defense contractors to powerful figures in Congress and the military was introduced on January 17, 1961, by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in his farewell address to Congress and the American people. In that Cold War moment, in response to powerful foreign threats, he noted that “we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions.” Nevertheless, he added, using the phrase for the first time, “we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”
Ever since, debate over the MIC’s accumulating power has roiled American politics. A number of politicians and prominent public figures have portrayed U.S. entry into a catastrophic series of foreign wars — in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere — as a consequence of that complex’s undue influence on policymaking. No such claims and complaints, however, have ever succeeded in loosening the MIC’s iron grip on Pentagon arms procurement. This year’s record defense budget of approximately $850 billion includes $143.2 billion for research and development and another $167.5 billion for the procurement of weaponry. That $311 billion, most of which will be funneled to those giant defense firms, exceeds the total amount spent on defense by every other country on Earth.
Over time, the competition for billion-dollar Pentagon contracts has led to a winnowing of the MIC ecosystem, resulting in the dominance of a few major industrial behemoths. In 2024, just five companies — Lockheed Martin (with $64.7 billion in defense revenues), RTX (formerly Raytheon, with $40.6 billion), Northrop Grumman ($35.2 billion), General Dynamics ($33.7 billion), and Boeing ($32.7 billion) — claimed the vast bulk of Pentagon contracts. (Anduril and General Atomics didn’t even appear on a list of the top 100 contract recipients.)
Typically, these companies are the lead, or “prime,” contractors for major weapons systems that the Pentagon keeps buying year after year. Lockheed Martin, for example, is the prime contractor for the Air Force’s top-priority F-35 stealth fighter (a plane that has often proved distinctly disappointing in operation); Northrop Grumman is building the B-21 stealth bomber; Boeing produces the F-15EX combat jet; and General Dynamics makes the Navy’s Los Angeles-class attack submarines. “Big-ticket” items like these are usually purchased in substantial numbers over many years, ensuring steady profits for their producers. When the initial buys of such systems seem to be nearing completion, their producers usually generate new or upgraded versions of the same weapons, while employing their powerful lobbying arms in Washington to convince Congress to fund the new designs.
Over the years, non-governmental organizations like the National Priorities Project and the Friends Committee on National Legislation have heroically tried to persuade lawmakers to resist the MIC’s lobbying efforts and reduce military spending, but without noticeable success. Now, however, a new force — Silicon Valley startup culture — has entered the fray, and the military-industrial complex equation is suddenly changing dramatically.
Along Came Anduril
Consider Anduril Industries, one of two under-the-radar companies that left three MIC heavyweights in the dust last April by winning the contract to build a prototype of the Collaborative Combat Aircraft. Anduril (named after the sword carried by Aragorn in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings) was founded in 2017 by Palmer Luckey, a virtual-reality headset designer, with the goal of incorporating artificial intelligence into novel weapons systems. He was supported in that effort by prominent Silicon Valley investors, including Peter Thiel of the Founders Fund and the head of another defense-oriented startup, Palantir (a name also derived from The Lord of the Rings).
From the start, Luckey and his associates sought to shoulder aside traditional defense contractors to make room for their high-tech startups. Those two companies and other new-fledged tech firms often found themselves frozen out of major Pentagon contracts that had long been written to favor the MIC giants with their bevies of lawyers and mastery of government paperwork. In 2016, Palantir even sued the U.S. Army for refusing to consider it for a large data-processing contract and later prevailed in court, opening the door for future Department of Defense awards.
In addition to its aggressive legal stance, Anduril has also gained notoriety thanks to the outspokenness of its founder, Palmer Luckey. Whereas other corporate leaders were usually restrained in their language when discussing Department of Defense operations, Luckey openly criticized the Pentagon’s inbred preference for working with traditional defense contractors at the expense of investments in the advanced technologies he believes are needed to overpower China and Russia in some future conflict.
Such technology, he insisted, was only available from the commercial tech industry. “The largest defense contractors are staffed with patriots who nevertheless do not have the software expertise or business model to build the technology we need,” Luckey and his top associates claimed in their 2022 Mission Document. “These companies work slowly, while the best [software] engineers relish working at speed. And the software engineering talent who can build faster than our adversaries resides in the commercial sector, not at large defense primes.”
To overcome obstacles to military modernization, Luckey argued, the government needed to loosen its contracting rules and make it easier for defense startups and software companies to do business with the Pentagon. “We need defense companies that are fast. That won’t happen simply by wishing it to be so: it will only happen if companies are incentivized to move” by far more permissive Pentagon policies.
Buttressed by such arguments, as well as the influence of key figures like Thiel, Anduril began to secure modest but strategic contracts from the military and the Department of Homeland Security. In 2019, it received a small Marine Corps contract to install AI-enabled perimeter surveillance systems at bases in Japan and the United States. A year later, it won a five-year, $25 million contract to build surveillance towers on the U.S.-Mexican border for Customs and Border Protection (CBP). In September 2020, it also received a $36 million CBP contract to build additional sentry towers along that border.
After that, bigger awards began to roll in. In February 2023, the Department of Defense started buying Anduril’s Altius-600 surveillance/attack drone for delivery to the Ukrainian military and, last September, the Army announced that it would purchase its Ghost-X drone for battlefield surveillance operations. Anduril is also now one of four companies selected by the Air Force to develop prototypes for its proposed Enterprise Test Vehicle, a medium-sized drone intended to launch salvos of smaller surveillance and attack drones.
Anduril’s success in winning ever-larger Pentagon contracts has attracted the interest of wealthy investors looking for opportunities to profit from the expected growth of defense-oriented startups. In July 2020, it received fresh investments of $200 million from Thiel’s Founders Fund and prominent Silicon Valley investor Andreessen Horowitz, raising the company’s valuation to nearly $2 billion. A year later, Anduril obtained another $450 million from those and other venture capital firms, bringing its estimated valuation to $4.5 billion (double what it had been in 2020). More finance capital has flowed into Anduril since then, spearheading a major drive by private investors to fuel the rise of defense startups — and profit from their growth as it materializes.
The Replicator Initiative
Along with its success in attracting big defense contracts and capital infusions, Anduril has succeeded in convincing many senior Pentagon officials of the need to reform the department’s contracting operations so as to make more room for defense startups and tech firms. On August 28, 2023, Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks, then the department’s second-highest official, announced the inauguration of the “Replicator” initiative, designed to speed the delivery of advanced weaponry to the armed forces.
“[Our] budgeting and bureaucratic processes are slow, cumbersome, and byzantine,” she acknowledged. To overcome such obstacles, she indicated, the Replicator initiative would cut through red tape and award contracts directly to startups for the rapid development and delivery of cutting-edge weaponry. “Our goal,” she declared, “is to seed, spark, and stoke the flames of innovation.”
As Hicks suggested, Replicator contracts would indeed be awarded in successive batches, or “tranches.” The first tranche, announced last May, included AeroVironment Switchblade 600 kamikaze drones (called that because they are supposed to crash into their intended targets, exploding on contact). Anduril was a triple winner in the second tranche, announced on November 13th. According to the Department of Defense, that batch included funding for the Army’s purchase of Ghost-X surveillance drones, the Marine Corps’ acquisition of Altius-600 kamikaze drones, and development of the Air Force’s Enterprise Test Vehicle, of which Anduril is one of four participating vendors.
Just as important, perhaps, was Hicks’ embrace of Palmer Luckey’s blueprint for reforming Pentagon purchasing. “The Replicator initiative is demonstrably reducing barriers to innovation, and delivering capabilities to warfighters at a rapid pace,” she affirmed in November. “We are creating opportunities for a broad range of traditional and nontraditional defense and technology companies… and we are building the capability to do that again and again.”
Enter the Trumpians
Kathleen Hicks stepped down as deputy secretary of defense on January 20th when Donald Trump reoccupied the White House, as did many of her top aides. Exactly how the incoming administration will address the issue of military procurement remains to be seen, but many in Trump’s inner circle, including Elon Musk and Vice President J.D. Vance, have strong ties to Silicon Valley and so are likely to favor Replicator-like policies.
Pete Hegseth, the former Fox News host who recently won confirmation as secretary of defense, has no background in weapons development and has said little about the topic. However, Trump’s choice as deputy secretary (and Hick’s replacement) is billionaire investor Stephen A. Feinberg who, as chief investment officer of Cerberus Capital Management, acquired the military startup Stratolaunch — suggesting that he might favor extending programs like Replicator.
In a sense, the Trump moment will fit past Washington patterns when it comes to the Pentagon in that the president and his Republican allies in Congress will undoubtedly push for a massive increase in military spending, despite the fact that the military budget is already at a staggering all-time high. Every arms producer is likely to profit from such a move, whether traditional prime contractors or Silicon Valley startups. If, however, defense spending is kept at current levels — in order to finance the tax cuts and other costly measures favored by Trump and the Republicans — fierce competition between the two versions of the military-industrial complex could easily arise again. That, in turn, might trigger divisions within Trump’s inner circle, pitting loyalists to the old MIC against adherents to the new one.
Most Republican lawmakers, who generally rely on contributions from the old MIC companies to finance their campaigns, are bound to support the major prime contractors in such a rivalry. But two of Trump’s key advisers, J.D. Vance and Elon Musk, could push him in the opposite direction. Vance, a former Silicon Valley functionary who reportedly became Trump’s running mate only after heavy lobbying by Peter Thiel and other tech billionaires, is likely to be encouraged by his former allies to steer more Pentagon contracts to Anduril, Palantir, and related companies. And that would hardly be surprising, since Vance’s private venture fund, Narya Capital (yes, another name derived from The Lord of the Rings!), has invested in Anduril and other military/space ventures.
Named by Trump to direct the as-yet-to-be-established Department of Government Efficiency, Elon Musk, like Anduril’s Palmer Luckey, fought the Department of Defense to obtain contracts for one of his companies, SpaceX, and has expressed deep contempt for the Pentagon’s traditional way of doing things. In particular, he has denigrated the costly, generally ill-performing Lockheed-made F-35 jet fighter at a time when AI-governed drones are becoming ever more capable. Despite that progress, as he wrote on X, the social media platform he now owns, “some idiots are still building manned fighter jets like the F-35.” In a subsequent post, he added that “manned fighter jets are obsolete in the age of drones anyway.”
His critique of the F-35 ruffled feathers at the Air Force and caused Lockheed’s stock to fall by more than 3%. “We are committed to delivering the world’s most advanced aircraft — the F-35 — and its unrivaled capabilities with the government and our industry partners,” Lockheed declared in response to Musk’s tweets. Over at the Pentagon, Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall had this to say: “I have a lot of respect for Elon Musk as an engineer. He’s not a warfighter, and he needs to learn a little bit more about the business, I think, before he makes such grand announcements as he did.” He then added, “I don’t see F-35 being replaced. We should continue to buy it, and we also should continue to upgrade it.”
President Trump has yet to indicate his stance on the F-35 or other high-priced items in the Pentagon’s budget lineup. He may (or may not) call for a slowdown in purchases of that plane and seek greater investment in other projects. Still, the divide exposed by Musk — between costly manned weapons made by traditional defense contractors and more affordable unmanned systems made by the likes of Anduril, General Atomics, and AeroVironment — is bound to widen in the years to come as the new version of the military-industrial complex only grows in wealth and power. How the old MIC will address such a threat to its primacy remains to be seen, but multibillion-dollar weapons companies are not likely to step aside without a fight. And that fight will likely divide the Trumpian universe.
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Trump's Big, Bad, Destructive, and Unpeaceful Imperialism
It may seem laughable to hear Trump lusting after Canada and Greenland, but his vision of U.S. domination indicates we need to take him and his imperial threats very seriously.
Jan 31, 2025
Even as Donald Trump and his MAGA movement have seized virtually complete control of the Republican Party, there remain at least two factions competing for dominance of foreign policy: an isolationist gang and a warmongering interventionist cabal. The strains between them seemingly remain unresolved, and there are real strategic debates and disagreements about what direction Trump’s foreign policy should take.
But what Trump himself is signaling as most important—more than which side wins any particular debate—is the proud (re)commitment to an expansionist (and expanding) U.S. empire dominating the world. That commitment to imperialism, more explicit than we’ve seen for a while, remains a crucial unifying point among his supporters. Disagreements over whether to prioritize economic power and pressure vs. military threats and direct engagement—along with reliance on presidential fiat in either situation—matter far less than the strategic agreement on the ultimate goal.
Empire, after all, is not a new idea—Trump’s version is simply to be much more publicly embraced, indeed celebrated.
It started a few days before Christmas, less than a month before he would be sworn in as president. In a Phoenix speech and later in social media holiday greetings, Trump named the presents he was hoping for: Canada, Greenland, and the Panama Canal. (Soon he would add the Gulf of America and Denali, the “Tall One” in the local Indigenous language, now to be called Mt. McKinley once again, as it was before Biden officially recognized the name that the Koyukon people have called it for centuries.)
While old and new forms of colonialism are a longstanding part of U.S. history, the public pronouncement of a plan not only to carry the U.S. flag to new horizons, but actually to “expand our territory” is new for the 21st century.
As is so often the case with Trump, inconvenient facts—that Canada had no interest in becoming the 51st state, Greenland was not for sale, and the Panama Canal belonged to, well, Panama—had no bearing on his holiday wish list. And for a while it seemed that even in the context of his extremist plans (not to mention the Heritage Foundation’s 900-page opus of implementation instructions for those plans), Trump’s global aspirations seemed just a bit too far over the top to have to take them seriously.
The last time the Panama Canal was a U.S. electoral issue was almost 50 years ago, about three-quarters of a century after France began building the Canal in the 1880s. The U.S. had taken over the project in 1904, and the so-called “Canal Zone”—actually a piece of Panama’s own territory—remained a U.S. colony. Negotiations over ending U.S. control sputtered on and off for decades, and in 1976 Reagan tried to bolster his presidential campaign by loudly rejecting anything that smacked of “giving away” the canal. In language taken directly from the playbooks of far-right racist southern senators Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms, Reagan thundered “we built it, we bought it, and we’re going to keep it.” It didn’t work. Treaties to end U.S. control of the Canal were signed a year later. And Reagan lost.
Trump had tried to buy Greenland during his first term, but the Greenlanders’ immediate “we’re open for business, not for sale” put an eventual stop to that campaign. And Canadian officials shrugged off the idea of a U.S.-Canadian union as a joke, something Trump had raised numerous times during his first term, only to be consistently rebuffed by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
But then came Trump’s inaugural speech. Far from the traditional anodyne calls for post-electoral unity, and even going significantly beyond the “American carnage” themes of his first term, his 2025 speech included not only a full-throated proclamation of U.S. grievances and a glowing image of those problems disappearing under his presidency, but a clear checklist of what he planned to do to get there. It may have seemed laughable to hear Trump lusting after Canada and Greenland, but his vision of U.S. domination—global, not limited to the Arctic and our northern border—as laid out in his inauguration speech, indicates we need to take him and his imperial threats very seriously.
Trump described a set of multi-faceted, interconnected crises. At home, the U.S. government fails to protect its own citizens “but provides sanctuary and protection for dangerous criminals” that have illegally entered the United States. Our health care system doesn’t deliver for people but is the most expensive in the world. Our education system teaches children “to be ashamed of themselves … to hate our country.”
And internationally, the United States has allegedly been so feeble that other nations have taken advantage of our weakness.
But now, Trump went on, “America’s decline is over.” With him in the White House, a “golden age of America begins right now.”
“From this day forward,” he said, “our country will flourish and be respected again all over the world. We will be the envy of every nation, and we will not allow ourselves to be taken advantage of any longer.” In that golden age, the quests of empire will concurrently solve the domestic crises and make the U.S. “the envy of every nation.”
U.S. citizens, now emerging from both personal/national and global carnage, will soon see the simultaneous end to those crises as the country rebuilds its strength at home and reclaims its rightful hegemonic place in the world. “So as we liberate our nation, we will lead it to new heights of victory and success. We will not be deterred. Together, we will end the chronic disease epidemic and keep our children safe, healthy and disease free. The United States will once again consider itself a growing nation.”
And this homage to future growth was very direct—the kind of enlargement “that increases our wealth, expands our territory, builds our cities, raises our expectations and carries our flag into new and beautiful horizons.” All the language of 19th century empire was there: “the spirit of the frontier is written into our hearts.” Americans are “explorers” and “pioneers.”
Despite the claimed long decline, Trump continues to weave U.S. exceptionalism through his rhetoric. “Our American ancestors turned a small group of colonies on the edge of a vast continent into a mighty republic of the most extraordinary citizens on Earth. No one comes close.”
Oh yes, Manifest Destiny and racist western expansion make explicit appearances, as “Americans pushed thousands of miles through a rugged land of untamed wilderness. They crossed deserts, scaled mountains, braved untold dangers, won the Wild West…” Indigenous peoples who were slaughtered to “tame” the land were not mentioned. Seizing half of what was then Mexico was ignored. “We are going to be changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf America,” he said. Because it’s ours. Renaming the Alaska peak Mt. McKinley was not only an attack on the Indigenous communities who had long fought for Denali—it was also designed to honor the U.S. president responsible for expanding the U.S. empire across the oceans, claiming Cuba, Guam, Hawai’i, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines.
And bringing his 19th century-style imperial dreams into the 21st century, Trump promised to “pursue our manifest destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars.” The moon isn’t good enough anymore. (Of course, at that mention the cameras all swiveled away from Trump to his tech-bro Elon Musk, ensconced with the rest of the billionaire boys club just behind the president.)
Those astronauts almost certainly won’t be sent by NASA, it will be Musk’s SpaceX or another private company that will plant the U.S. flag in space. Neo-colonial resource extractivism isn’t really as “neo” as it sometimes appears; the privatization of colonial exploration and land-seizures is actually an old story. Europe’s royals, in particular, often outsourced their colonial campaigns to private companies—Britain gave key rights to the British East India Company to claim India and encouraged the Jamestown settlement by the Virginia Company, the Dutch East India Company managed the colonization of Indonesia.
It was all done with the approval and collusion of the Roman Catholic church, whose 15th century Doctrine of Discovery assured Europe’s would-be explorers that any land inhabited by non-Christians—no exception for other planets—was fair game for colonial theft. It would not be until March 2023 that Pope Francis formally repudiated the doctrine—but apparently Trump never got the memo.
With a secretary of defense beholden to a president driven only by personal wealth and power, and unaccountable to any faction of the U.S. ruling class, the danger of a new military escalation looms.
So while old and new forms of colonialism are a longstanding part of U.S. history, the public pronouncement of a plan not only to carry the U.S. flag to new horizons, but actually to “expand our territory” is new for the 21st century. So while Trump’s calls for absorbing Canada, renaming the Gulf of Mexico, buying Greenland and/or reclaiming Panama’s canal may seem performative (and as specific examples do not seem like serious threats), they do reflect an eagerness to assert global as well as domestic power. And these broad commitments to a future of global domination do not even include the immediate international crises and challenges (Palestine, Ukraine, Taiwan) that Trump has pledged to “solve on day one” (or at least quickly), often at the expense of the peoples most impacted.
Certainly Trump’s long-threatened tariffs will be imposed as part of that power policy, supposedly to replace higher taxes on corporations and billionaires. In his inauguration speech, he bragged that “instead of taxing our citizens to enrich other countries, we will tariff and tax foreign countries to enrich our citizens. … It will be massive amounts of money pouring into our treasury coming from foreign sources.” Not quite the way tariffs work, of course.
But that doesn’t mean tariffs will replace the military. Trump’s plan, once he reverses all efforts to desegregate and build equity into the armed forces, is to “build the strongest military the world has ever seen.” Within 24 hours of his speech, he had issued an executive order to halt all foreign aid—leaving refugees who had gone through and passed exhaustive vetting by United Nations and United States agencies, and were in many cases en route to airports to catch flights to the U.S. to start their already-approved new lives, stuck in limbo with nowhere to turn for safety. But an exception was made to continue billions of dollars of military aid to Israel and to Egypt, and Trump made sure to reverse Biden’s May 2024 temporary hold on a shipment of additional 2,000-pound bombs Israel used to destroy homes and neighborhoods in Gaza and Lebanon.
And with the Senate’s confirmation of Pete Hegseth to head the Pentagon, the angry veteran accused of sexual assault and known for financial mismanagement and an utter lack of managerial experience is now empowered to oversee 3.2 million employees and overrule or get rid of any generals he finds annoying. This is the same man who called the rules of war “burdensome” and claimed they “make it impossible for us to win these wars.” Hegseth said he “thought very deeply about the balance between legality and lethality,” and clearly lethality won out. His job, as he understands it, is to ensure that the troops “have the opportunity to destroy…the enemy, and that lawyers aren’t the ones getting in the way.” Between that understanding, the power to dismiss officers who follow the laws of war, and Hegseth’s commitment to follow whatever Trump demands, the world may soon face a potentially out-of-control military, bolstered by 750+ military bases scattered across the globe and a budget approaching a trillion dollars.
With a secretary of defense beholden to a president driven only by personal wealth and power, and unaccountable to any faction of the U.S. ruling class, the danger of a new military escalation looms. At some rather random point in his speech Trump claimed that his “proudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker.” But in his drive for empire, he will be describing an imperial scenario much closer to that passed down by the great historian Tacitus: “the Romans brought devastation, and they called it peace.”
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