Importing Empire: Why America’s Legacy of Dehumanization in Foreign Wars Is Now a Reality at Home

By Melek Zahine
BORDEAUX, France, Jan 12 2026 (IPS)

Before military aid is appropriated, troops deployed, or bombs dropped, the United States lays the groundwork for its political violence by first stripping adversaries of their humanity. Diplomacy is sidelined, legal restraints are treated as inconveniences, and profit is valued over human life. This machinery of dehumanization, imposed around the world for decades and honed in Gaza the past three years, has now returned home, turned inward against Americans by the elected officials and systems meant to protect them.

The human and financial costs of America’s addiction to war were a constant presence in my childhood. For my generation, war was relentlessly pursued by the political establishment, laundered through media narratives, and imposed on the working class and the poor in taxes and blood. I was not yet two when my family immigrated to the United States in April 1970, as the Vietnam War raged and Nixon ordered the invasion of Cambodia. By the time those wars ended, new interventions, proxy wars, coups, and “wars on terror” followed, with the language of dehumanization used to sell and sustain each conflict. Vietnamese civilians were reduced to “free-fire targets,” and indigenous farmers in Cold War Latin America were labeled “peasants and subversives” to justify massacres. After 9/11, Iraqis were written off as “collateral damage,” and during America’s longest war, Afghan “military-age males” were presumed “terrorists” and “guilty by default.” In every instance, dehumanization preceded and justified the violence.

The Laboratory for Dehumanization

And always, decade after decade, lingered U.S. patronage for Israel’s own wars, especially towards Palestinian self-determination. Israeli human rights abuses in the occupied Palestinian territories—excessive force, collective punishment, illegal settlement expansion, and arbitrary detention—have been documented in U.S. State Department reports since the 1970s. Yet Washington continued to expand military aid, making Israel the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign assistance in history. After October 7, despite warnings from multiple U.S. government officials that Israel’s response to Hamas amounted to the collective punishment of Gaza’s 2.1 million population, nearly half of which is children, both the Biden and Trump administrations approved tens of billions of dollars in emergency arms transfers. These transfers proceeded despite evidence that U.S.-supplied arms, including chemical weapons and 2,000-pound bombs, were being used by Israel on Gaza’s densely populated civilian neighborhoods—violating both international law and domestic laws, namely the U.S. Arms Export Control Act and the Leahy Law. Over decades of support, but especially the past three years, U.S. support to Israel helped refine its own language of dehumanization towards Palestinians by consistently framing the killing of civilians as nameless and “unavoidable” incidents of Israel’s right to self-defense and laying the rhetorical foundation for the genocide in Gaza.

The Empire Comes Home

The militarized ICE raids now taking place across the United States rely on tactics, equipment, and doctrines supplied by the very military industrial complex that has profited from Gaza. The same officials who reduced Palestinians to “terrorists” or those shielding them now use that language at home, casting Americans protecting their communities as “threats to be neutralized” rather than citizens with inalienable rights. President Trump’s reluctance to say Renée Good’s name after a federal ICE agent fatally shot her in Minneapolis last week—framing the encounter as “self-defense”—echoes how Palestinians killed in Gaza by U.S.-supplied weapons and political cover are discussed as abstract, unnamed casualties. Naming the powerful while rendering the vulnerable nameless shields perpetrators and exposes the persistent logic of dehumanization that now bridges U.S. foreign policy and domestic policing.

Reclaiming Our Humanity

In his 1961 Farewell Address, Dwight D. Eisenhower warned that an unchecked military-industrial complex could distort democratic governance at home. Yet even as he spoke, he oversaw the very coups and interventions that entrenched permanent militarization. We are now living in the reality he feared. Washington’s ongoing complicity in Gaza, its increasingly aggressive posture toward Venezuela and Greenland, and its authoritarian behavior at home are a stark reminder: when dehumanization goes unchecked in U.S. foreign policy, it is only a matter of time before it goes unchecked domestically.

If Gaza and America’s long history of dehumanization have taught us anything, it’s that Americans cannot depend on their political elites to restrain their appetite for abusive authority. Average citizens must move beyond mere condemnation and toward sustained civic action. This means voting out officials beholden to war-profiteering lobbies, reasserting congressional power over the executive branch, and demanding the enforcement of laws designed to prevent U.S. complicity in human rights abuses overseas and the rule of law at home. The challenge ahead is truly immense—but ending the machinery of dehumanization is not inevitable and remains within the reach of those Americans determined to reclaim their shared humanity for one another and the world.

Melek Zahine is a writer and advocate focusing on the intersection of humanitarian assistance and U.S. foreign policy.

IPS UN Bureau