Stephen Miller’s Worldview Is Straight Out of “Starship Troopers” 

“Violence, the supreme authority from which all other authority is derived … Naked force has resolved more issues throughout history than any other factor. The contrary opinion—that violence never solves anything—is wishful thinking at its worst. People who forget that always pay.” 

Those aren’t the exact words of Stephen Miller, the Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and Homeland Security Advisor, offered in defense of Donald Trump’s military capture of Venezuelan President Nicholas Maduro. They are the words of Jean Rasczak, the soldier-turned-high school teacher-turned military squad leader in the 1997 dystopian movie Starship Troopers.  

I suspect those words rang in Miller’s ears when he told CNN’s Jake Tapper, “You can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else. But we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world.” If Miller is a fan of the movie, it doesn’t mean he got its point, which is to expose the fatal fallacy of Rasczak’s authoritarian logic. 

Released 20 years before Donald Trump took office, the world Starship Troopers depicts is a plausible embodiment of the president’s rule-by-force ethos. A military dictatorship, The Federation, governs Earth, and early scenes are set in an English-speaking Buenos Aires, suggesting an imperial extension of American power. 

Rasczak lectures his class about the “failure of democracy” after “social scientists brought our world to the brink of chaos.” But then “the veterans … took control and imposed the stability that has lasted for generations since.” Society is cleaved between “citizens” who served in the military and can vote, and “civilians” who didn’t serve and can’t vote. After all, as Rasczak explains, “When you vote, you are exercising political authority. You are using force. And force, my friends, is violence”—the supreme authority.  

Verhoeven’s Buenos Aires looks like an authoritarian utopia—a clean city with spacious homes, technological and telepathic advancements, and even gender equality (with co-ed school sports teams), but there’s a looming cost. The movie’s protagonist, the graduating high schooler Johnny Rico, joins the military against the wishes of his parents, who warn, “people get killed in the Federal Service.” Rasczak lost a limb, and when Rico reports for duty, he’s told by a triple amputee, earnestly, “The mobile infantry made me the man I am today.” 

Earlier in the classroom, responding to anti-violence arguments, Rasczak said, “I wonder what the city fathers of Hiroshima would have to say about that.” The answer delivered with great authority makes no sense. Imperial Japan’s leaders were not pacifists; they started an imperialist war that led to the city’s nuclear annihilation. And (spoilers ahead) the Federation would soon suffer its own Hiroshima.  

In the Starship Troopers universe, Earth has quarantined giant outer space arachnids on a faraway planet. (Did I mention this movie is awesome?) The space bugs retaliate, shooting a meteor that obliterates Buenos Aires.  

Rasczak meets a karmic demise. Near the end of the movie, a bug maims him, and he orders Rico to put him out of his misery. Like Buenos Aires, Rasczak paid the price for a worldview that put power above all else.  

By portraying the comically fascistic humans as the “good guys” and ending the movie with a Federation victory, Starship Troopers director Paul Verhoeven avoided heavy-handed sermonizing but confused contemporaneous audiences. 

A 2014 look-back for the magazine Empire noted: “Starship Troopers would become Verhoeven’s most fundamentally misunderstood film. Much to the director’s dismay and irritation, the majority of American critics failed to see the film’s precisely calibrated irony, accusing the director of himself being guilty of right-wing tub-thumping. ‘We were accused by the Washington Post of being neo-Nazis!’ he says, obviously still irked. ‘It was tremendously disappointing. They couldn’t see that all I have done is ironically create a fascist utopia.’”  

Clancy Brown, who played a sergeant in Starship Troopers, told Smith that Verhoeven’s message was, “Be careful. This mindset is going to get you in trouble.” Trump and Miller are deaf to such a warning.  

Starship Troopers is not a sufficient counterargument to Miller’s articulated “iron law” worldview. But 80 years of rules-based international order is.  

There’s a reason why America led the world to create the United Nations in 1945 and supplemented it with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1949: two horrific world wars provoked by imperialist powers that killed over 100,000,000 people. The U.N. Charter created a body that could enforce international law, unwind empires, bolster sovereignty, and peacefully resolve conflicts. NATO gave the United States and Europe the means to restrain the Soviet Union’s expansionism, which threatened the U.N.’s decolonizing spirit.  

The U.N. is imperfect and can’t consistently impose good behavior among nations, least of all an expansionist Russia.  But as I have written previously, the rules-and-norms world has been much better to live in than the rule-by-force world, with much more freedom and much less war. Global war-related deaths plummeted from 240 per million in 1950 to less than 10 in 2007. 

Miller offers the bully’s myopic tautology. In the moment, the strong have power over the weak. But that only creates incentives for many parties to gather more power, leading to conflicts. One might think we can carve out spheres of influence among America, Russia, and China, but you can never trust a power-hungry authoritarian to stay in their lane. The wiser alternative is to balance and spread power, minimizing conflict.  

International agreements are only as good as the parties’ adherence to their terms. To the bully, treaties are “only as good as the paper they’re printed on.” For example, Trump could render NATO null and void by storming into the territory of fellow NATO signatory Denmark and claiming Greenland, thereby validating—in the short run—Miller’s declaration that force decides all. But that hardly guarantees that the consequences will be in America’s long-term interest. Most likely it will not be: NATO could well dissolve, depriving the U.S. of the force multiplier that are our allies and leading to the closure of American bases from the United Kingdom to Turkey. 

There’s no evidence that Trump considers long-term interests. He governs by narcissistic impulse. He justified military intervention in Venezuela because America should have access to its oil reserves. Oil isn’t a high-minded justification, and it doesn’t even make sense as a crass one, because American oil companies weren’t even asking for it and aren’t sure the investment is worth it.  

Regarding Greenland, by any rational calculation, seizing it—militarily or otherwise—is unnecessary. Trump claims we need Greenland for “national security,” but Denmark already allows America to maintain a military base there. Yet Trump told The New York Times that ownership is “what I feel is psychologically needed for success.” This is not long-term strategic thinking. It’s the immediate gratification of one man’s ego without regard to what might follow.  

Starship Troopers ostensibly has a happy ending. The Federation wins a battle and captures a bug leader who appears in a Federation propaganda broadcast, which assures that its troopers are on the march: “They’ll Keep Fighting, and They’ll Win!” But moviegoers aren’t supposed to take that literally. They’re supposed to recognize that the violence-drenched Federation hasn’t learned anything. The news broadcast doubles as a recruitment ad. “We need soldiers,” urges the narrator, as “Lieutenant John Rico,” whom we see exhorting his new squadron into battle: “C’mon, you apes! You want to live forever?!” A narrator delivers the final sales pitch: “Service guarantees citizenship!”  

This is not the future anyone should want, but it is the future Miller’s iron laws would deliver. 

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