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us imperialism
Standing Witness to University Complicity in Criminal Wars of Aggression
Military-related research at universities like NC State helps the imperialist state find ways to more effectively kill people around the world who resist US domination.
Apr 05, 2026
On February 28, 2026, the Trump administration ordered US military forces to launch a criminal war of aggression against Iran. In the first wave of bombing, a US Tomahawk missile struck a girls elementary school in Minab, collapsing the roof and killing over 100 children. Since the attacks began, over 1,900 people have been killed and 24,800 wounded, according to media reports. The casualty numbers are preliminary, but otherwise these are uncontroversial facts.
Here are a few more observations that should be uncontroversial.
Many, perhaps most, US research universities, public and private, function in part to abet the imperialist state. Military-related research at these universities helps the imperialist state find ways to more effectively kill people around the world who resist US domination. Today, plain talk about these activities is rare, as is protest against them. For the most part, university aid to the capitalist class' projects of imperial domination either goes unmentioned, is normalized as morally unproblematic, or is celebrated under the aspect of nationalism.
Finally, here's a report from the non-Ivy province of academia: On March 12, 2026, the vice chancellor of research and innovation at North Carolina State University (where I am professor emeritus), Krista Walton, sent a campus-wide email titled "Investing in Our Research Infrastructure's Future." NC State, the email said, ranked "steady at 6th place among our peers (public universities without a medical school) in research expenditures." This sounds innocuous enough. The usual sort of institutional cheerleading.
I am thus appalled when universities are suborned into service of an imperial state. To use universities in this way is a betrayal of the enlightenment values that make universities humane institutions.
But where did the money come from? And what will building the university's research infrastructure entail? Walton goes on to explain.
Among the major funding sources noted in the email are the Department of Defense (DOD), Department of Energy, and NASA. In DOD funding, Walton boasts, "NC State ranked second only to Duke University." As for building infrastructure, the email calls for "positioning the university to align with national priorities," and "build[in] on the great work our investigators are already doing in the defense and security sector." More specifically, building on this work will involve creation of a new "defense and security institute," for which faculty are invited to "help develop an aligned vision, mission, and goals."
Again, this email and the invitation to get on board—to help make the university more responsive to the needs of the imperial state—was sent less than two weeks after the criminal attack on Iran began, less than two weeks after the killing of more than 100 school children in Minab and the deaths of many more civilians in subsequent weeks. Though the email of course makes no mention of killing, it implicitly invites faculty, students, and staff to support the kind of reach-across-the-globe military violence that inevitably destroys innocent lives. To put it any other way amounts to moral self-deception.
Analysis is needed to explain how we've gotten to this point. I've done that sort of thing before. I've written about NC State's addiction to tobacco money, its multi-million-dollar deal with the National Security Administration, and its ties with criminal corporations. Administrators and their political backers putting the university's snout into the trough of military funding could be analyzed in the same ways: as the result of cuts in funding from general state revenues, of the nationalist ideologies in which Americans are steeped, of amoral careerism, of bureaucratic structures that let people separate intentions from consequences and thus join in causing great harms—holocausts, genocides, wars. A thorough analysis would consider all of these causes, and more.
But do we need more analysis right now, or are the results in? The facts are as I have stated them. No one should begrudge further good-faith interpretation of these facts and what they imply. Analysis, in this sense, has no end; it is the perpetual motion machine of academia. For now, however, I have reached a point where all I can do is stand as an appalled witness. I speak simply to profess—not to untangle any sociological mysteries but to make a public statement of conscience.
I believe universities should exist to freely create and transmit knowledge useful to all peoples; to promote peace based on rational discourse; and to develop understandings of our common humanity across the divisions created to foster elite domination. I am thus appalled when universities are suborned into service of an imperial state. To use universities in this way is a betrayal of the enlightenment values that make universities humane institutions. It is a revolting reduction of universities to instruments of nationalism and resource control, for the benefit of those who have captured the reins of the state.
I am further appalled at the violence this entails, and at how this violence is obscured or normalized. The NC State email from which I quoted earlier cheerfully asks us to align the university with "national priorities"—set by whom?—by building our research infrastructure in the areas of defense and security. And for what? To make the venal and powerful—the capitalist class or, as some have taken to calling it, the Epstein class—more powerful, if necessary by destroying the lives and infrastructure of others. To this, I object.
I object, too, to the hypocrisy of conducting this violence-abetting work behind the veil of liberal values, while the violence is perpetrated at a distance, so far away that it is hard to see the links between research done for the Department of Defense or military contractors, illegal wars of aggression, and dead schoolchildren. To refuse to see these links is not merely head-in-the-sand hypocrisy; it is rank dishonesty hidden inside an institutional shell that claims the pursuit of truth to be its distinctly virtuous mission.
North Carolina State University is just an example, and no special villain. The big leaguers at the military trough are MIT, Johns Hopkins, Cal Tech, Harvard, Columbia, UC Berkeley, Stanford, and Maryland. To the extent that these institutions claim greater prestige—based on touting humane values and scientific achievements—their hypocrisy is all the more rank. To the extent that these institutions help to legitimate war-making research at less prestigious institutions like NC State—pretending it is compatible with freedom, equality, and democracy—the damage they do is all the worse.
In The Mass Psychology of Fascism, Wilhelm Reich argues that the psychic force driving fascism is repressed sexuality. As a social psychologist trained in sociology, I never put much stock in this argument. Most of what conduces to participation in collective acts of destruction can be traced to culture and social organization. Yet I think Reich was right when he said, looking back at the 1930s, "While we presented the masses with superb historical analyses and economic treatises on the contradictions of imperialism, Hitler stirred the deepest roots of their emotional being." Critical intellectuals offer similar analyses today. But if at the end of analysis we can't connect to our own emotional being—the part of us that stands appalled and says, No, enough!—those analyses will wither without effect, as they too often have in the past.
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The US War on Cuba's Doctors
The US is forcing countries to end decades-long relationships with Cuba to further isolate the island from the world, all at the expense of the access and quality of healthcare for millions of people.
Apr 04, 2026
“Cuban eye doctors in Jamaica are the only reason why my grandmother didn’t go fully blind in one eye after she got a botched surgery. The work they’ve done for rural and poor Jamaicans is immeasurable,” wrote a Twitter user last week after the first set of Cuban doctors and nurses left Jamaica.
Two weeks ago, hundreds of Jamaicans marched in a “gratitude walk” to thank Cuba for the 50 years of medical solidarity that they have received. Meanwhile, others on the island have been reportedly rushing to get eye treatment at clinics before Cuban doctors were set to depart. A few weeks ago in Honduras, people were in tears as they applauded and thanked Cuban doctors for their years of service, particularly in providing free eye surgeries. If this is clearly contrary to the interests of people, why are all Cuban doctors, nurses, biomedical engineers, and technicians leaving?
They are not leaving because these countries want them to, but because the United States is forcing them to.
Last year, the United States threatened to cancel US visas for leaders of countries that have Cuban doctors working in them, as part of a decades-long campaign of aggression to destroy Cuba’s medical solidarity, which has saved over 12 million lives across the world. In reaction to this coercion, the governments of Jamaica, Honduras, Guatemala, Paraguay, the Bahamas, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and Guyana have formally ended the Cuban medical missions after decades. The governments of Grenada, Antigua and Barbuda, and Calabria in Italy have committed to gradually reducing Cuban medical missions. The US is forcing countries to end decades-long relationships with Cuba to further isolate the island from the world, all at the expense of the access and quality of healthcare for millions of people.
Cuba’s ability to provide medical missions, despite the 66-year-long genocidal blockade, is a testament to the indestructible resolve of the Cuban people and the country’s commitment to humanity.
Cuba has carried out 30 million medical consultations in Honduras, 900,000 surgeries, and 80,000 eye surgeries. Many of the doctors were working in a free ophthalmology clinic in San Jose de Colinas in Santa Barbara as part of the Venezuelan-Cuban Operation Miracle, which provided free eye care to millions. Now, 150 Cuban doctors have left the country after the newly elected right-wing government immediately cancelled the medical mission.
In Guyana, 200 doctors have left after 50 years of providing health access for people who otherwise would not have had any. Last week, Cuban doctors began leaving Guatemala after the government ended Cuban medical missions, which began in 1998 following Hurricane Mitch to provide critical health services to Indigenous communities underserved by the Guatemalan health system. Now, 412 Cuban health personnel are beginning to end their service following a closing of ties with the government of Guatemala and the United States, and a clear willingness to bow down to coercive measures. The Bahamas has terminated its Cuban brigades, opting for discussions with the United States over building a workforce based in Canada to serve the medical system.
In Jamaica, Cuban doctors cared for more than 8,176,000 patients, undertook 74,302 surgeries, attended the births of 7,170 babies, and saved 90,000 lives. Now, the Jamaica Cuba eye care program is ending after 16 years of solidarity and 25,000 instances of people regaining their sight.
Despite initially saying that “I will prefer to lose my visa than to have 60 poor and working people die,” the prime minister of St. Vincent and the Grenadines has chosen to let the 60 patients receiving dialysis and critical care from Cuban doctors lose their care with the end of the Cuban medical missions to the country.
Not all countries are accepting this attempted coercion and sacrifice of the health of their nation. Trinidad and Tobago and Calabria in Italy have refused to cancel the Cuban medical missions. The Trinidadian president said, “I just came back from California, and if I never go back there again in my life, I will ensure that the sovereignty of Trinidad and Tobago is known to its people and respected by all.”
History of Medical Solidarity
In 1960, medical aid was sent to Chile after the Valdivia earthquake. But it was 1963 that marked the start of Cuban medical brigades. 58 medical personnel traveled to Algeria to support in rebuilding the health system after the victory of the independence movement in booting out French colonialists. Fidel Castro gave a speech at the opening of a new medical school in Cuba, hours after meeting Ben Bella, Algeria’s President:
Most of the doctors in Algeria were French, and many have left the country. There are 4 million more Algerians than Cubans, and colonialism has left them with many diseases, but they have only a third—and even less—of the doctors we have…That’s why I told the students that we needed 50 doctors to volunteer to go to Algeria.
I’m sure there will be no shortage of volunteers…Today we can only send 50, but in 8 or 10 years’ time, who knows how many, and we will be helping our brothers… because the Revolution has the right to reap the rewards it has sown.
This act of revolutionary solidarity, just four years after the revolution, marked the start of decades of solidarity from Cuba to the world. Since then, more than 600,000 Cuban doctors and health workers have provided healthcare to 165 countries. In fact, there are still Cuban medical brigades operating in 15 Algerian provinces, mainly to reduce maternal and infant mortality.
In 2004, Cuba and Venezuela launched Operación Milagro (Operation Miracle), aimed at providing free eye care and surgeries for people suffering from preventable blindness and other visual impairments. The program restored vision to more than 4 million people across 34 years in just 15 years. This historic program is being forcibly shut down as the US pushes Cuban doctors out of countries today, breaking one of the world’s most remarkable progressions in health provision.
In 2005, following Hurricane Katrina’s devastating impacts in the United States, Cuba created the Henry Reeve International Contingent to respond to natural disasters and health epidemics. While the Bush administration refused Cuban help in responding to Hurricane Katrina, this incredible mission has sent 90 brigades to 55 countries to respond to Covid-19 in Europe and Latin America, Ebola in West Africa, cholera in Haiti, and more. In 2020, the Henry Reeve International Contingent was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.
In 2014, Cuba provided the only permanent brigade to support Sierra Leone, Guinea-Conakry, and Liberia in dealing with the Ebola epidemic. No other country or international organisation provided long-term support for the countries. It was Cuban doctors who managed to successfully contain the epidemic.
In March 2020, as Covid-19 was declared by the World Health Organization as a pandemic, Cuban doctors immediately traveled to Lombardy in Italy, the epicenter of the pandemic; Angola; as well as Latin American countries, including Venezuela and Suriname, to provide support. When a Covid-19-positive cruise ship with over 600 people onboard was refused docking in every Caribbean country, it was Cuba that allowed them to dock in “a shared effort to confront and stop the spread of the pandemic.”
As the US blockade prevented Cuba from accessing vaccines, they manufactured their own—and five of them at that. The blockade slowed down the process significantly, given the lack of medical equipment permitted into the island, the limited research laboratories, and the inability to access enough syringes for mass vaccination.
It is only because of the resilience and humanity of Cuban doctors and researchers and the international solidarity of organisations, including CODEPINK, in donating syringes, that Cuba managed to not only protect its population from the pandemic but also export them to the world. In fact, the vaccines produced by Cuba did not require refrigeration, unlike most manufactured in the Global North, given the lack of access to facilities, particularly as they were distributed far across the island. This meant that the vaccine could be sent successfully to countries across the Global South with similar lack of access to refrigeration to protect those otherwise shut out of Global North supply chains. In the face of attacks, Cuba’s resilience is a benefit for all humanity.
Campaign of Destruction
The United States has sought to interrupt, discredit, and dismantle this enormous feat as part of its attempts to destroy the Cuban revolution. Cuba’s ability to provide medical missions, despite the 66-year-long genocidal blockade, is a testament to the indestructible resolve of the Cuban people and the country’s commitment to humanity.
On February 23 of this year, the State Department sent a sensitive memo to Marco Rubio, which outlined a strategy of coercing countries in Latin America to boot out Cuban medical missions over the next 2-4 years. These attacks on Cuba’s medical missions were an escalation in the US’ war of imperialist aggression on the island for daring to commit to solidarity and peace, rather than welcome greed and destruction. On March 2, Congress approved a law to impose sanctions on any country that has Cuban health workers operating in it. Last August, the Trump administration imposed restrictions and revoked visas from countries working with Cuba on medical missions. Since then, countries have been pulling out of medical missions in fear of US retribution.
Under George W Bush’s presidency, the US set up the “Cuban Medical Professional Parole Program,” which aimed at getting Cuban doctors to desert from their mission and get residency in the United States. This ended under President Barack Obama’s administration.
This policy has been carried by a vicious propaganda war that has sought to label Cuban medical missions as “forced labor” and Cuban doctors as “slaves.” While this is a frankly offensive and disrespectful attempt to discredit a revolutionary act of solidarity, it is not only a ruse to justify attacks on Cuban doctors but also a fundamental revelation about the US. The descendants of slave owners can tell Cubans they are slaves for supporting countries made victims of colonialism and imperialism, but refuse to acknowledge that the transatlantic slave trade was the greatest crime of our time.
It is no wonder that healthcare is a significant target of the US empire’s attacks. Cuba maintains that healthcare is a right, whereas the US affords it as a privilege and arena for profits.
Cuba’s medical missions, beyond providing critical health services for millions of people, also provide support for the Cuban healthcare system and economy. When doctors are paid in the countries where they work, their money goes into the public healthcare system to pay the doctors, provide support for their families, as well as patients, doctors, and the healthcare system for the entire island. This is a remarkable act of solidarity for Cubans and the world.
The Cuban health system works; in fact, it works so well that Cuba has the highest rate of doctors per capita in the entire world. Whereas, in the United States, people survive depending on whether a company decides they can have a medicine, or if they can afford to pay another large corporation thousands of dollars for the privilege of treating an illness. The US dares to lecture Cuba while more than one-third of Americans cannot afford to access healthcare; while 1.3 million diabetic people ration insulin because the price skyrockets year on year as greedy pharma execs decide; and while over 66% of bankruptcies in the US are because of the costs of healthcare.
It is no wonder that healthcare is a significant target of the US empire’s attacks. Cuba maintains that healthcare is a right, whereas the US affords it as a privilege and arena for profits.
Another critical dimension to Cuba’s medical solidarity is its world-renowned Latin American School of Medicine (ELAM). Founded in 1999, the school provides tuition-free medical education for students from across the world who might otherwise not have access to medical studies. They gain a free medical degree in Cuba, then return to serve their communities back home to develop medical self-sufficiency and sovereignty for their countries. There are over 250 Palestinian students from Gaza studying medicine in Cuba, completely free of charge, in the hopes they will travel back to Palestine and care for their people. Today, there are more than 31,000 doctors in 120 countries who have been trained at ELAM. This truly extraordinary and selfless act of material solidarity is also met with attacks. The US has told St. Lucia to stop sending doctors to Cuba for medical studies, which the prime minister has warned would cause a “major problem.”
I visited ELAM last year and spent time speaking with two female medical students from Sri Lanka, who were quite excited to see someone else from South Asia in Cuba! I asked them how they found studying at ELAM, living in Cuba, and being taught medicine for free to go back to their communities. They were ecstatic and told me how much they loved being there, and what a unique opportunity it was to become doctors from backgrounds where they otherwise would not have been able to. Their only issue with Cuba was the lack of spicy food!
Also on this trip to Cuba, I met with doctors working in a local hospital outside of Havana. They each shared with pride the different countries they had served in: Angola, Venezuela, Bolivia, and Italy. A similar situation you might find in the United States, or elsewhere in the Global North, is of someone in the military who might tell you with pride how they served in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria. While Cuba’s missions save lives and serve people, US missions massacre people and serve Lockheed Martin.
As more US soldiers are sent to West Asia as part of threats to invade Iran and to kill for the interests of imperialism, it is truly devastating to see Cuban doctors leave hospitals in the Caribbean to the tears of locals who have been helped by them.
The poles could not be more stark. Cuba, the most blockaded country in history, has saved more than 12 million lives with its medical missions. The US, a belligerent empire with the biggest economy in the world, has killed as many as 23 million people in 28 countries since the 1950s.
Cuba reveals the unfettered barbarity of the United States. That is why they fear a tiny island 90 miles off the coast of Florida. Cuba shows us that the world does not have to be dominated by one empire that violently exploits people, extracts resources, and imposes its own will through F-35s and 2,000-pound bombs. Cuba reveals humanity to people who have been propagandized into believing that every person has to look out for themselves, and there is danger and violence at every corner. Cuba unravels the lies that the United States is based on.
So, every single time the US attacks Cuba, discredits its government, its economy, its people, its society, it is trying to protect itself. This has nothing to do with Cuba and everything to do with the US. The only future for humanity is an end to the US empire.
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Americans Must Oppose Trump's Iran War for Humanity and for Our Own Sake
History tells us one thing: When we wage unjust wars that terrorize distant populations in far-off lands, the violence rarely remains confined there. Sooner or later, in one form or another, it returns.
Apr 03, 2026
What will the costs of the latest round of illegal, ill-fated US military adventurism in the Middle East amount to? Some of the toll is already clear. Washington has squandered billions of dollars on a reckless war of aggression against Iran. A merciless campaign of aerial bombardment has driven millions from their homes. American and Israeli airstrikes have rained destruction on 10,000 civilian sites and already killed more than 3,000 people in Iran and Lebanon. Among the dead are more than 200 children, many killed in a US strike on a girls’ school, a war crime that evokes the grim precedent of such past American atrocities as the 1968 My Lai massacre in Vietnam or the 1991 Amiriyah shelter bombing in Iraq.
The latest war has also dealt a potentially fatal blow to our already battered democratic institutions. It’s a war neither authorized by Congress nor supported by the public. Instead, it was launched by a president who refuses to submit to the law or heed the will of the people, claiming in true authoritarian fashion that he is the law, and that he alone embodies the popular will.
Such democratic backsliding has, however, been decades in the making, a predictable result of longstanding imperial impunity. Yet we may rapidly be approaching a point of no return. Even George W. Bush, in launching his catastrophic wars of choice in the region, sought to manufacture consent and present the case before the United Nations. Today, there is neither the pretense of legality nor of legitimacy.
The costs associated with this latest criminal war, measured in human lives; the misappropriation of national resources; and the erosion of the rule of law will only continue to mount. Yet there is also a less visible, less immediate price tag for such wars. If the history of American interventions in the region offers any guide, the full bill will likely not become apparent for months, years, or even decades. When it finally arrives, however, it will carry a familiar name: blowback.
In case after case, conflicts initiated or intensified by the United States appeared to subside, only to reemerge in new, more volatile forms.
For that reason, it’s important at this moment to recall the lessons Washington appears determined to forget. From Afghanistan to Iran, Iraq to Libya, the record is unmistakable. Yet as long as the historical amnesia that grips this country’s political establishment remains unchallenged, the same cycles of escalation and reprisal will undoubtedly persist in the years to come, threatening to once again draw the United States (and much of the world) ever deeper into the abyss of forever war.
Oil and the Engine of Empire
While the post-9/11 “war on terror” is often invoked as the starting point of US militarism in the Middle East, the roots of conflict there stretch back nearly a century. The violence and instability unleashed after the attacks of September 11, 2001 represented less a rupture with the past than a continuation of long-established patterns of US policy. The seeds of the forever wars had, in fact, been planted decades earlier in the oil-rich soil of the region.
Direct American involvement began in the previous century in the years between the First and Second World Wars. By that point, petroleum had become not merely a valuable commodity but a strategic necessity for sustaining a modern industrial economy. The vast oil reserves discovered in the United States had propelled the American economy to global prominence and played a decisive role in fueling the Allied war effort during World War I. Yet policymakers in Washington understood that domestic reserves were finite. As petroleum became synonymous with power, economically, militarily, and politically, the United States increasingly turned abroad to secure new sources.
The Middle East emerged as a critical frontier in that search, drawing the region ever more tightly into the orbit of an expanding American empire. In 1933, Standard Oil of California secured an exploratory concession with the conservative monarchy of Saudi Arabia. The agreement created the Arabian American Oil Company (ARAMCO), laying the groundwork for the 1945 US-Saudi oil-for-security partnership that would become central to Washington’s future influence over the region’s geopolitical order.
Over the years, the insatiable thirst for oil only drew the United States ever deeper into the region. By 1953, American intervention assumed more overtly coercive forms. That year, in coordination with British intelligence, the CIA orchestrated the overthrow of Mohammad Mossadegh, Iran’s popular prime minister, who had committed a cardinal sin in the emerging Cold War years. In 1951, he presided over the nationalization of his country’s oil industry in an effort to return sovereign control of its resources to the Iranian people by wresting them from the exploitative grip of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, the precursor to British Petroleum.
Despite his staunchly nationalist rather than communist credentials, a fact understood in Tehran, London, and Washington, Mossadegh would then be cast as, at worst, a dangerous proxy of the Soviet Union and, at best, a threat to regional stability (as in, American hegemony). The coup that followed ended Iran’s fragile democratic experiment, secured continued access to Iranian oil for Western companies, and restored the Shah of Iran to power. His regime would then be sustained by a steady outward flow of oil and a nearly endless influx of US weaponry. With CIA backing, his secret police, SAVAK, would terrorize and torture a generation of Iranians.
Yet Washington celebrated this new arrangement, claiming that Iran had been transformed into an “island of stability,” and a cornerstone of the “twin pillar strategy,” in which Washington would outsource regional Cold War policing to compliant authoritarian allies in Iran and Saudi Arabia. Such subversion of nationalist movements and support for despotic monarchies, as well as the increasingly unequivocal backing of Israel, would generate intense backlash. Among the most visible early expressions of that was the 1973 OPEC oil crisis, demonstrating how US policy in the Middle East could reverberate domestically.
But the first unmistakable case of blowback arrived in 1979 with the Iranian Revolution. In that country, discontent had been simmering beneath the seemingly stable façade of the Shah’s rule for years. When the monarchy collapsed after months of protests and repression, the Islamic Republic would fill the political vacuum, drawing on the theological language of Shi’ism and the political rhetoric of opposition to the Shah, the United States, and Israel.
In the US, those developments were largely stripped of their historical context. Americans were instead cast as the innocent victims of irrational fanaticism. Why do they hate us? was the refrain that echoed across the Western media and the answers offered rarely confronted the long history of intervention and exploitation. Instead, they defaulted to a supposed civilizational conflict with Islam, which was portrayed as inherently antagonistic to “Western values.”
Such explanations obscured an uncomfortable reality—that the US had repeatedly undermined democracy across the region (as well as in other parts of the world) to advance its own interests. As a Pentagon commission report in 2004 acknowledged, the problem was not that people “hate our freedoms,” as President George W. Bush had reductively claimed, but that many “hate our policies.” In other words, the attacks on New York City and the Pentagon in Washington on September 11, 2001 were the ultimate, if deeply disturbing, expression of blowback.
Revolution and Counterrevolution in the Persian Gulf
Those widely resented policies from Washington were reinforced by its overreaction to the 1979 upheaval in Iran. That country’s new leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, sought not only to transform Iranian society internally but envisioned the Islamic Republic as the opening move in a broader anti-imperialist struggle across the Middle East. For Washington and its reactionary regional allies, the specter of such potential revolutionary contagion posed a profound threat.
In January 1980, in an attempt to contain the Iranian regime, President Jimmy Carter articulated a new foreign policy position that placed the US on a collision course in the region. The Carter Doctrine declared the Persian Gulf a “vital interest” of the United States, warning that any attempt by an outside power to gain control would be repelled by “any means necessary, including military force.” In that fashion, Washington asserted an explicit claim to a protectorate thousands of miles from its shores. The United States, Carter made clear, was prepared to send soldiers there to ensure uninterrupted access to oil.
The strategic reorientation that followed proved violent and far-reaching, while marking a shift away from East and Southeast Asia as the principal theaters of Cold War conflict. As Andrew Bacevich observed in his book America’s War for the Greater Middle East, if you were to measure US involvement by the number of troops killed in action, the transformation was striking. From the end of World War II to 1980 almost no American soldiers were killed in the region. Since 1990, however, virtually none have been killed anywhere except in what Bacevich termed the “Greater Middle East.”
Measured in American lives alone, the subsequent costs would number in the thousands. Measured in civilians killed across the region, the toll would be vastly greater. Over the past several decades US-led or -backed wars have contributed to the deaths of millions of people and the displacement of tens of millions more, producing one of the most devastating population catastrophes since the end of World War II.
Proxy Wars and the Escalation Trap
The American shift toward the Middle East ensured that the United States would become deeply entwined in a cascade of conflicts. As regional actors moved either to defend a fragile status quo or exploit the upheavals that followed, Washington began instigating new conflicts in the region.
In Baghdad, Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein opposed the new government in Tehran on ideological and strategic grounds. The emergence of a revolutionary Shi’a state next door threatened his Sunni-dominated Ba’athist regime that ruled over a Shi’a majority in Iraq. At the same time, Saddam sought to exploit what he perceived to be Iranian weakness, pressing longstanding revanchist claims to the oil-rich borderlands of southwestern Iran.
Saudi Arabia viewed these developments with similar alarm. In the capital Riyadh, policymakers feared that revolutionary Shi’ism might threaten the legitimacy of the kingdom’s Sunni Wahhabi monarchy. The call for a Shi’a revolution also raised concerns about unrest in its oil-rich Eastern Province, where Shi’a workers faced economic exploitation and near colonial conditions. Similar anxieties reverberated across the other Gulf monarchies.
Violence begets violence, and imperial war has a way of boomeranging back upon those who initiate it.
The United States responded by doubling down on support for the remaining pillars of its regional order, Saudi Arabia and Israel, while seeking to contain and roll back the perceived threat posed by Iran. Still interpreting regional upheaval through the prism of the Cold War, US policymakers also expanded their involvement elsewhere. In Afghanistan, the CIA launched the largest covert operation in its history, channeling weapons and support to the Afghan mujahideen resisting the Soviet Union’s occupation of that country that began in December 1979.
The Soviet intervention itself was shaped by the shockwaves of the Iranian Revolution. Leaders in Moscow feared a militant Islam on their southern flank that might embolden similar currents within Muslim-majority regions of the Soviet Union.
In Iraq, the US publicly tilted toward Saddam Hussein while simultaneously engaging in illegal weapons sales to Iran, with the funds received being rerouted to bankroll another American-backed war in Nicaragua. Meanwhile, the Lebanese Civil War, worsened by Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, created the conditions for the rise of Hezbollah, which presented itself as a defender of marginalized Shi’a communities against Israeli military aggression and sectarian violence.
By 1986, after escalating regional violence and spillover, the administration of President Ronald Reagan took a step that paved the way for what would, in the next century, become Washington’s “War on Terror.” In April of that year, Reagan launched airstrikes in the dense heart of Tripoli on the home of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, holding him responsible for acts of non-state terrorism abroad, including support for armed movements from the Palestine Liberation Organization to the Irish Republican Army.
That operation marked a significant escalation in the region and its justification would later be formalized as the Bush Doctrine: the claim that Washington could wage preemptive war anywhere against any state accused of supporting terrorism inside its country or outside its borders. That doctrine was no less illegitimate, illegal, or dangerous in the 1980s than it would become two decades later. As Daniel Ellsberg observed then (a point he would continue to press throughout his life, including after President Barack Obama ordered similar strikes on Libya in 2011), it seemed that the US had “adopted a public policy of responding to state-sponsored terrorism with US state-sponsored terrorism.”
In each instance, deeper involvement in the region produced deeper backlash. The US-backed Afghan jihad helped give rise to al-Qaeda in 1988 and paved the way for the Taliban’s seizure of power in 1996 and the failed 20-year American war in Afghanistan. The Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s set in motion a chain of events that culminated in the Gulf War of 1991, which laid the groundwork for the criminal 2003 US invasion of Iraq. The instability that followed not only expanded Iran’s regional influence but contributed to the emergence of the Islamic State. In Lebanon, the power vacuum that Hezbollah came to fill resulted in the 1983 barracks bombing in Beirut, the deadliest day for US Marines since Iwo Jima.
The Lesson Not Learned
The pattern is difficult to ignore, despite our government’s persistent efforts to do so. Many of the actors Washington came to identify as its principal adversaries emerged either in direct response to US policies or had themselves once been cultivated by Washington in pursuit of short-sighted strategic aims. In case after case, conflicts initiated or intensified by the United States appeared to subside, only to reemerge in new, more volatile forms. Intervention produced instability; instability served to justify further interventions; and the cycle only repeated itself thereafter.
There is little reason to believe that Donald Trump’s war against Iran will prove any different. By now, the historical record should make that clear, which is why we must oppose the violence being carried out in our name, as it is wrong, criminal, and immoral. We must oppose it for the sake of our common humanity, but also for our own sake.
After all, history tells us one thing: When we wage unjust wars that terrorize distant populations in far-off lands, the violence rarely remains confined there. Sooner or later, in one form or another, it returns. Violence begets violence, and imperial war has a way of boomeranging back upon those who initiate it. We reap what we sow; the chickens, in time, invariably come home to roost.
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