How the United States Became a Warmonger

Points of Departure

It seems an opportune time to scrutinize how it has come to pass that the U.S. has become a menace to others as well as to itself. Remembering its early vision of being a peaceful democracy that confined itself to the Western Hemisphere without entangling alliances and suspicious of a standing army that was institutionalized as part of governance and national security, other than in conditions of wartime.

This was not the whole truth, which blurs this mythified positive self-image of ‘greatness’  or ‘American exceptionalism’ by reminding dogmatic patriots of genocidal policies toward America’s native peoples and how imported slave labor sustained its agricultural productivity. In addition, geography helped sustain this peaceful image of a country welcoming to immigrants and skeptical of engagement in the European rivalries of its early experience as a sovereign state, a former colony until it broke away from the mighty British Empire in its War of Independence. Its earlier period as an exploited colony made the talented architects of the American public sensitive, above all, to the arbitrary rule and militarism of European rulers legitimized by the absolutist pretensions of royalism with special attention to the British instance as an influential negative model.

This early image of a guardian of hemispheric autonomy in relation to Europe was never an accurate portrayal of American foreign policy. The United States, once a sovereign state, flirted with the adoption of a foreign policy that included a colonial project of its own devising, focused on both the Caribbean and Pacific regions, seeking hegemonic controls, basing rights, and natural resources. Yet that did not challenge the core character of its foreign policy, which remained committed to isolationism with regard to European wars and general contentment with its successful emergence as an industrial giant.

The two world wars of the 20^th Century began a transformative process that reached its climax at the end of the Cold War, when the U.S. emerged as a globally engaged superpower with no credible challengers possessing the requisite geopolitical muscle to back up strategic ambitions and fears. Yet its domestic identity remained rooted in the savior imagery of exceptionalism, which highlighted benign claims to be ‘a light unto the nations’ or, as all American politicians of right and left still affirm, ‘the greatest country ever,’ almost in the spirit of a loyalty oath. It is this transformation from a relatively peace-oriented republic to a globe-girdling militarist superpower that needs to be better understood if a demilitarized future identity is to become a realistic project of reform. Dwight Eisenhower recognized the domestic problems of this militarization in his 1961 Farewell Address as President, encapsulated in his memorable warnings to democracy of a peacetime ‘military-industrial-complex.’ This warning was a 20th-century echo of concerns about whether a free society could co-exist with what the Federalist Papers referred to as ‘a standing army.’ Such a sensitivity to the fragility of democratic governance has been lost in the long period of belligerency that stretched from World War II to the Cold War, and then was soon resuscitated as neoliberal globalization and increasing inter-civilizational tensions rationalized an expanding military budget and the global projection of American power, resulting in 750 foreign military bases in 85 countries.

From Engagement to Warmongering

The path leading from America’s reluctant engagement in the two world wars to becoming the leading practitioner of wars of choice can only be explained by several converging factors, including a reinvigoration of its mythic past. Each factor deserves a fuller treatment than can be given here, but the complexity of this toxic emergence of a warmongering foreign policy seems important to clarify, if only to appreciate the formidable challenges posed. A primary purpose is to confirm the intensifying and erratic relevance of Trump and the MAGA worldview, but to do so without neglecting the reality that the main elements of the current warmongering posture carried to new extremes systemic pre-Trump developments supported by both major political parties. This pre-Trump consensus is important to acknowledge as it tends to be minimized in public debate as the process evolved, with significant media complicity.

The Militarization of the State

The governing bureaucracy experienced an uninterrupted period of war and geopolitical rivalry dating from the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 to the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, a half-century of preoccupation with national security priorities. The advent of the nuclear age, the struggles against European colonialism, and the growing interdependence of the world economy produced important adjustments, and the pause in geopolitical rivalry created an opportunity to establish a more peace-oriented world order.

Among these opportunities was a global setting more amenable to a democratic organization of the United Nations that treated all sovereign states equally. A UN reform process along these lines would have needed to arrange the management of global security free of control by geopolitical actors. This would have required the winners of World War II to adopt a farsighted view of global security in the nuclear age.  It would need to end of or greatly restrict the right of veto and eliminate permanent membership in the Security Council that paralyzed the UN in situations of serious threats to peace and security. It also froze the Organization in its 1945 mold, given the applicability of the veto to the Charter amending process. These design features of the UN architecture became more serious and perhaps unavoidable in the bipolar setting of the Cold War, where conflict pervaded international life and opposing ideological worldviews made conflicts on the peripheries of world power structures of crucial significance to whether Western liberal democracy was winning the war for ‘hearts and minds’ in Europe and the Global South. As Soviet interventions in Eastern Europe and the U.S. efforts to avoid a Vietnamese alignment with Moscow demonstrated, the Cold War was a more genuine global war than either of the so-called ‘world wars’ that are more accurately interpreted as regional wars for changing the hierarchies of power in Europe, with a side event involving the encounter with Japan. In this sense, the Soviet Union, despite its communist identity, was itself European as post-Cold War Russia with its underlying white Christian character. Mikhail Gorbachev and Putin both recognized this European regionalism in their official pronouncement. [See also Richard Sakwa, The Culture of the Second Cold War (2025]

Some of these design flaws represented good-faith efforts to avoid the mistakes of the past. In the case of the UN, its design was based on overcoming the failures of the League of Nations, particularly the exclusion of the Great Powers and the related assumptions that major states were ready to compromise their sovereign rights by subordinating national security to the will of international institutions. Some influential persons thought the League had failed because several major states of the day either failed to join, were expelled, or withdrew their membership. The U.S. role was somewhat typical. It was both the principal supporter of establishing the League, as championed by its wartime president, Woodrow Wilson, and its most notable defector due to the refusal of Congress to ratify the League Covenant. Franklin Roosevelt, as a wartime president, overtly sought to avoid what he believed to be Wilson’s mistake. Accordingly, the drafters of the UN Charter set as a primary goal a universal framework that would encourage all states, including geopolitical actors, to join and remain, no matter what. The goal of inclusivity was achieved and managed to weather many political storms over the more than 80 years since the UN was established. This is a remarkable achievement, but it came with a high price tag. The effectiveness of the UN was undercut where it was most needed. This hamstringing of the UN was evident throughout the Gaza genocide, and at least partly due to geopolitical alignment with the perpetrator government.

Another impediment to a peaceful future after 1945 was associated with the ideology of foreign policy elites in dominant countries. This ideology, known in academic circles as ‘political realism,’ stuck to the belief that it was military ascendancy that shaped world history, and that all alternatives associated with ideas of disarmament, respect for international law, and world government were a mixture of wishful thinking and a misunderstanding of the persistence of conflict and the priority accorded strategic national interests. This ideology was congenial with both the militarized bureaucracy and private sector interest in a large military establishment. This consensus was insulated from self-criticism that nurtured a political culture of ‘group think’ in which dissent and alternate views of national security were effectively excluded from internal policy debates.[Irving Janis, Victims of Groupthink, 1972] In recent years this rigid version of political realism has stubbornly ignored the moderate voices of such prominent political realists as John Mearscheimer and Stephen Walt because they advocated a responsible statecraft, along the lines of the Quincy Institute, which conceived of national security interests more cautiously and were more sensitive to the record of military frustration in anti-colonial settings.

As if this ideological closure were not enough, it is strongly reinforced by numerous Washington ‘think tanks,’ funded by defense contractors and foreign governments that give backing to the prevailing narrow views of militarist geopolitics under the guise of objective research but in conformity with the slant of foreign policy elites. These assessments are made in convincing detail by William Hartung and Ben Freeman in their important book The Trillion Dollar War Machine: How Runaway Military Spending Drives America into Foreign Wars and Bankrupts Us At Home (2025). I would argue that spending is the outcome rather than the explanation of American warmongering, which I associate more with a twisted, insular notion of political realism as given enthusiastic endorsement by a militarized state bureaucracy in league with private sector interests driven by the quest for profitability. This bipartisan consensus is reinforced by a compliant media, by the leverage of pro-Israeli lobbying groups overlapping with strategic ambitions, and by the career incentives associated with revolving door relations between top armed forces officials, militarized bureaucrats, executive appointments to top defense contractors, and fancy consultancies in media or research venues.

To gain a seat at the table at the pinnacles of power, you must be willing to validate wars of choice and, in the process, discard the relevance of international law, the UN Charter, and the Nuremberg Principles except as a propaganda tool to wield against adversaries. There are some surprising implications of this warmongering. Of primary importance is profitability rather than political victory. Although regime-changing and state-building militarism as in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran, should be looked upon as defeats despite the overwhelming military they avoided any serious rethinking of U.S. foreign policy because they were great successes from the perspectives of profitability. Such a mixed outcome is a barrier to learning the lessons associated with political defeat despite total domination of the military battlefield. Losing wars without heavy American casualties results in little pushback. This was the major lesson learned in the wake of the American defeat in Vietnam. Minimize casualties by relying on weapons innovations that can cause widespread devastation, require heavy spending, and are okay if the results are politically disappointing.

For the United States and the West, the Vietnam War was an ambiguous turning point, at once illustrating the limits of military agency in the post-1945 setting and generating a series of adjustments that consolidated the militarization of the state and its symbiotic relationship with private sector interests in arms sales and a growing ‘peacetime’ military budget. The professionalization of the armed forces, a growing emphasis on weaponry and tactics that did not result in serious U.S. casualties, is orienting the mainstream media to the brand of political realism that prevailed in Washington among the private sector think tanks and political foreign policy elites in government.

Perhaps the least acknowledged and most instrumental explanation of US peacetime militarism is the combination of the collapse of European colonialism in Eurasia and the impacts of shifts from industrial to finance capitalism. This shift has contributed to adverse domestic effects of increasing inequalities between the very rich, the 1%, and everyone else with declines in the standard of living among workers and middle-class professionals. As a result, billionaires have emerged as an ultra-right political influence. Additionally, finance capital flowing to the global south via trade, investments, and markets tends to lend a justification for the vast network of foreign military bases and a global naval presence enabling military operations anywhere on the planet.

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