Subscribe now

The US bombing of Caracas on January 3 that provided cover for the special forces operation that abducted Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his partner Cilia Flores left at least 100 people dead. US bombs destroyed residential homes in and near the capital city and medical warehouses in La Guaira port. Jonatan Marrolla, a resident of La Guaira state, told Reuters that “it’s sheer luck they didn’t kill my kids.” The apartment where his neighbor Angel Alvarez lived also suffered serious damage. “We’re alive by a miracle,” the young street vendor said.

Add these deaths to the dozens of extrajudicial executions in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific ordered by Donald Trump since mid-2025, along with the establishment of a naval blockade that seeks to further strangle the people of Venezuela—victims of nearly a decade of intensified economic war that has resulted in tens of thousands of excess deaths and an economic contraction “three times the severity” of the US Great Depression. We could say that all of this is illegal under international law. But then again, international law suffered its final blow in Gaza, massacred by the Israeli military and US-European weaponry, money, and diplomatic cover. We are left with, as Trump recently told The New York Times, his “morality” to curb or restrain his power. The type of morality expressed in the open genocidal threats and policies enacted by political leaders against entire peoples and countries in western Asia and the Americas. The type of morality that underscores what I have referred to elsewhere as the “Palestine-Mexico Border:” a line of demarcation between those allowed to live and those who deserve to die.

Trump’s attack on Venezuela is what Yankee isolationism looks like, past and present: the openly naked and violent re-assertion of US imperial power in the Americas—empire coming home to its laboratory—when faced with intractable political, economic, and military challenges elsewhere. As Pete Hegeseth said last year while in Panama, “to put America first, we will put the Americas first.”

Subscribe now

The Donroe Doctrine and a Return to Past Practice

The Monroe Doctrine, or its farcical reiteration as the “Donroe Doctrine,” is unabashedly and embarrassingly back—perhaps, most absurdly, reactivated in its current form by a president allegedly angered by Maduro’s dance moves and his failure to win the Nobel Peace Prize.

In South America, at least, the Monroe Doctrine has returned to an origin point. When Great Britain tried to bully Venezuela in 1895 over a decades-long border dispute with then-British Guiana, it assumed that its neocolonial economic hold over much of South America remained intact. Venezuela had spent the previous decades petitioning the United States for help, citing the original anti (European) colonial spirit of the 1823 doctrine—at least as read by Latin Americans. Unlike his predecessors, President Grover Cleveland did intervene and forced Great Britain to submit to arbitration under a US boundary commission. The commission’s findings, Cleveland insisted, would be enforced “by every means.”

When the commission released its recommendations in 1899, Britain got the better end. Venezuela continued to challenge the border and this dispute over the Essequibo region remains alive and well today. But the US had managed to stare down an imperial peer and forced it to accept a doctrine that, as British Prime Minister Lord Salisbury had argued, was not a legitimate part of international law. A few years later, Venezuela would once again provide the US an opportunity to assert its hemispheric hegemonic status when several European countries blockaded the South American country to collect unpaid debts and damage claims stemming from civil conflicts. In 1903, Theodore Roosevelt convinced (or forced under threat of US naval intervention as he later claimed) the Europeans and Venezuelans to settle via arbitration and prevent violent territorial annexation.

A year later, Roosevelt used this issue (among others)—the consequences of Latin American non-repayment of debts—to justify his corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. The US gave itself unilateral international police power over the Americas.

Over the next three decades, the US invaded Latin America more than thirty times. Constant military interventions to make the region hospitable and profitable for international capitalism and geopolitically secure for US “national security,” defined in hemispheric terms, characterized an era that some politicians and academics continue to label as “isolationist.” Yet in practice, such isolationism looked like violent and brazen racketeering that joined US coercive diplomacy and Wall Street bankers to the military might of the Navy and Marines, especially in Central America and the Caribbean. Gunboats and constant counterinsurgent “small wars” waged by the Marines enabled the seizing of nations’ customhouses and duties collection to pay off Wall Street banks. It then permitted this sort of imperial banking to essentially colonize—as historian Peter James Hudson argues—the so-called “American Mediterranean.”

This project also required the backing of the “dictatorship of the flies” as Chilean poet Pablo Neruda called them: authoritarian local leaders who ensured the smooth accumulation of profits by companies like United Fruit and Anaconda Copper. Local “National Guards” trained by the US worked to violently keep in line workers and peasants harboring thoughts of labor rights, social justice or national sovereignty. And the Marines remained on standby, ready to intervene if local movements had the temerity to think about recuperating resources and sovereignty that somehow belonged to the US. (Shades of Trump recently alleging that Venezuelans stole their own oil and land from the United States.) This was US military intervention for the sake of protecting US financial and commercial interests.

Reflecting on his active participation in this so-called isolationism, a prominent US Marine came to the realization that during his decades of military service throughout Latin America and China he had been “a High Class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the Bankers.” “In short,” Major General Smedley Butler concluded in the early 1930s, “I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.” Unlike Al Capone, the “swell racket” that Butler had worked for “operated on three continents.”

This era is back, as brazen and as clear as ever. Trump and his collaborators are quite clear in their imperialist, gangster intentions and methods. Instead of secret White House meetings and covert energy task forces headed by Dick Cheney, we are treated to public meetings between Trump and oil executives as they openly plot to plunder and divide the Venezuelan spoils. Yet imperial hubris can be self-destructive; just because the president of the US claims that he “runs” Venezuela does not make it a material and political reality on the ground.

The era that Trump now embodies never fully went away, but over the course of the 1930s and the Cold War Latin American resistance to the constant overt violation of national sovereignty forced the US to adopt more subtle (and seemingly cheaper) methods of exercising imperial power. Actual military invasions have remained largely exceptional, limited to the Dominican Republic in the mid-1960s, Grenada in late 1983, and Panama in 1989. More common was a combination of CIA “dirty work” to exacerbate internal political contradictions and social division, the training and backing of local right wing political, police and military forces, and economic war. The Cuban victory at the Bay of Pigs may have influenced Richard Nixon’s later decision to make the Chilean economy “scream” during Salvador Allende’s presidency—a strategy of war against an entire country’s population that we have witnessed in updated form in Venezuela since at least the 2000s.

This is all to say that US empire in Latin America has generated pushback in different forms. There is a reason why every reformist and revolutionary project in the last 100 or so years has put the concepts of national sovereignty and social justice at the forefront despite interruptions and setbacks. “The ghosts of all the revolutions that have been strangled or betrayed through Latin America’s tortured history,” Eduardo Galeano wrote, “return as new experiences, as if the present had been predicted and generated by the contradictions of the past.” Trump loves to talk, to declare, to assert that the way he imagines the world is as it exists. But the people of Venezuela and Latin America will, if history is any guide, struggle to have the last word. Nothing, even in this time of monsters, is settled.

Empire is also not cost free. US colonial policing—in the past reserved for imperial frontiers and hinterlands, the US-Mexico borderlands, and racialized communities inside the US—no longer respects racial, class, and geographic boundaries. “The border is everywhere now in the United States,” a Border Patrol agent deployed to Chicago in late 2025 told The New York Times. When I watched the ICE execution of Renee Nicole Good, I immediately thought of the drone footage that depicts the executions of Latin Americans on boats by US military forces. What connects them is the imperial violence and impunity on full display, in real time, that depicts who gets to live and who deserves to die. The Palestine-Mexico border is everywhere.

Subscribe now

Putting US Empire on Trial

I want to conclude with some short comments about the shaky legal case against Maduro and Flores. After months of US government propaganda in 2025 that falsely alleged mass fentanyl trafficking from Venezuela to the US, led by the abducted president at the head of a mythical “Cartel de los Soles,” neither charge is in the 25-page indictment. The US Department of Justice recently dropped its claim that the cartel even exists. The case against Maduro and Flores thus appears weak and thin, unlike that of recently pardoned ex-president of Honduras Juan Orlando Hernández. US prosecutors convicted Hernández of trafficking more than 400 tons of cocaine into the United States–the ex-president had promised to “stuff the drugs up the gringos’ noses.” Or the case against Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega in the late 1980s and 90s. That case too had extensive evidence of criminal activity. The Americans would know; they had the receipts for two former allies whose criminal activity was tolerated until their utility to US empire withered.

Some decades ago, a young Cuban lawyer provided an insurgent example of how to turn his trial into a broader indictment of an authoritarian state that had jailed, tortured, and murdered his comrades after a failed uprising. In his hours-long courtroom speech, this lawyer provided a legal and philosophical history on the inalienable natural right of peoples to resist tyranny and oppression. The real criminal, he argued, was the dictatorship that had illegally usurped political power and put him on trial for resisting that usurpation.

Maduro most likely knows this history. Perhaps he can use his trial, should it proceed, to indict the violent empire that abducted him and his partner, bombed his country, and now threatens to attack more Latin American nations. He may reassert the validity and urgency of a principle that has long animated Latin American peoples, social movements, and revolutions, and vexed US efforts to implement the Monroe Doctrine and its corollaries: the right of nations to sovereignty and self-determination. The right, as Chilean folk artist Victor Jara once sang, to live in peace.

Subscribe now

This is an adaptation of my old 9/11 essay written for an event on Luke O’Neil’s We Had It Coming book tour. It’s somewhat revised and expanded for the newsletter. You can pick up a copy of the book today and subscribe to his Welcome to Hell World newsletter.

For those of you who don’t know me, I write a lot—almost every day when I’m not taking a break—about what’s happening in the world. It sounds weird to say that I derive satisfaction from that, given how bleak the world seems to be on most days, but I do. It helps me to make sense of things and forces me to pay attention to The News (OK maybe that part isn’t so satisfying). It lets me revisit places I’ve been and learn new things about places I’ve never been and probably will never go. One thing that kind of writing doesn’t do, because it’s so fixed in time and space, is lend itself to this sort of event—so please bear with me. I’m such a neophyte at this that Luke had to explain to me in embarrassing detail what I was supposed to do.

Back in 2019 I wrote a few thoughts on the 18th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Until then I had mostly avoided sharing any thoughts, feelings, or memories of that day publicly because it seemed morbid to me, fixing us all on a terrible event that had become the justification for inflicting so many more terrible events on the rest of the world over the years that followed. I know others felt differently—like Ari Fleischer, who used to recount his 9/11 experience in real time on Twitter every year until he stopped doing that right around the time he started working for the Saudi government.

Good for him. It’s important to stay busy, right?

The 18th anniversary struck a particular chord with me, because I realized that we’d reached the point where people who weren’t alive on that day could nevertheless enlist to fight in the war it sparked, the glorious Global War on Terror. As I thought about that macabre milestone it occurred to me that there were really two 9/11s, one apparent to Americans and one largely hidden from them. The former was full of rage, confusion, and fear—fear of another attack, fear of mosques, fear of the mail. Fear, above all, of the Other. The latter was full mostly of death—over 4.5 million deaths around the world (directly and indirectly caused by the GWOT), according to a study that Brown University’s “Costs of War” project released two years ago.

I revisited those thoughts as I was casting around for something to read to you today and the thing that stuck out to me is that we (and I mean a very collective “we” so I’m not talking about you folks specifically) are still fixed to that day somehow. The rage, the confusion, and especially the fear are all still there. Consider some of the things that are now being done in our names:

• Paramilitary squads, barely trained but very eager and very armed, are roaming our cities and disappearing people our government has decided are Scary, Unworthy, Other. Inhuman. Why are they Other? Because of where they’re from. Or the color of their skin. Or something they believe.

• The lucky disappeared might find themselves deported back to their countries of origin, even if they haven’t been back to those places in decades and even if it means cleaving them from their families. The unlucky are being trafficked, shipped off to places they’ve never been, where they have no one, where they probably don’t speak the language, and where they’ll probably be imprisoned.

• Our government has spent two years facilitating a genocide, supporting an allied government that has been killing and starving children. Its victims are likewise deemed Scary, Other, and ultimately Inhuman. Even now, under a nominal ceasefire, that government continues to restrict their food while our president talks nonchalantly about depriving them of their homes, their land, and their human rights.

• That same president, in the unholy amalgamation of the War on Terror, the War on Drugs, and the War on the Scary Other, now has his military blowing up boats two or three times a week, killing a handful of people each time. Supposedly these boats are carrying drugs and drug traffickers, but we’re just supposed to take his word for that. This is why “due process” exists, because we shouldn’t just have to take the president’s word that the people he kills had it coming. But you can’t give due process to somebody after they’re already dead. And when it comes to Scary Others, the president of the United States has the power to decide which of them get to live and which don’t.

I don’t want to convey the wrong impression here. It’s not like we’ve all supported or even condoned these things. Some of us have, but many have not. But has it mattered? The disappearances continue. The bombings keep coming. The genocide rolls on. Donald Trump has used the opposition to his paramilitary kidnap squad to justify putting soldiers on the streets of US cities, which could just make everything worse. And every day feels like it holds the potential for some new horror. Now we’re going to start testing nukes again? Or not. Maybe we’ll invade Nigeria. Stay tuned!

It’s tempting to blame a lot of this on the meltdown this country experienced after 9/11. The most lasting damage those attacks inflicted was not to our buildings but to our collective psyche. They took a nation of people who’d felt strong, invincible really, the Winners of History, and shattered that fragile sense of confidence. Torture, mass surveillance, and all that killing ensued. As I wrote on the anniversary, “we’ve accepted that war is an inevitable and permanent state of being, that our government may be fighting an undefined conflict with an undefined enemy with an undefined end goal for the rest of our lives. For the rest of our children’s lives.”

What I’ve realized upon reflection is that this is an incomplete picture. The United States in 2025 isn’t the product of 9/11 because this is to some degree what it’s always been. Is it any wonder that a country that was born in genocide centuries ago has no problem helping a buddy carry one out today? Surely our current brutality toward people deemed Unworthy—toward people of color—has obvious historical analogues. Is our xenophobic fear of the Scary Other really stronger now than it was when we threw Japanese Americans into internment camps?

Haven’t we always been the kind of people who scoff at spending millions on fighting malaria in Africa even as we spend trillions on jets that don’t work? Who obsess over the possibility that an undocumented person might accidentally get treated at an ER while our bombs litter the ruins of places like Gaza? Who struggle to imagine anything getting better if it means somebody Unworthy might benefit?

I think so. It feels that way at least. And yet on some level what’s happening now does also feel different.

I can’t explain the dichotomy, and I don’t pretend to speak with any authority. But I find myself worrying more these days, slipping more easily into worst case scenarios in my mind. Maybe that’s a function of age. Maybe it’s a function of parenting an 18 year old and wondering what kind of world she’s going to be entering when she leaves our home to go off to college and beyond. What’s going to happen when our national fear of the Other runs headlong into mass displacement from climate change? What do we do if a president decides that the real terrorist threat isn’t a wedding party in Afghanistan or a speedboat in the tropics, but something much closer to home? How long before AI comes for her job—not because it can do it better, but because it will do it much, much cheaper?

But I do think it goes beyond the personal. We’re bombarded with horrors every day—on The News, online, and increasingly in our own neighborhoods. The most consistent through-line in all of those horrors is that, to borrow a phrase from our former president, nothing fundamentally ever seems to change.

I don’t know how to fix that, but in the moments when I really start to despair I come back, believe it or not, to 9/11. Not because of what happened in 2001, but because it’s my daughter’s birthday. That’s a whole other story, but basically we needed a last minute c-section and, surprise surprise, all the days around September 11 were fully booked. For my family That Day marks a happy occasion, not a sad or scary one. It’s a small thing, but it tells me that life can and does change for the better. I remind myself of it when things seem really bleak. So far, at least, it’s worked. I hope each of us can find a touchstone that we can come back too when that feeling of doom sets in. Thanks for letting me share it with you.

Subscribe now

On October 31, President Donald Trump announced on Truth Social that he was designating Nigeria a “country of particular concern” under religious freedom legislation. “Christianity is facing an existential threat in Nigeria,” his post began. The next day, Trump posted again to say that he was directing the Pentagon to draw up plans for a military intervention in Nigeria. Trump wrote, “If the Nigerian Government continues to allow the killing of Christians, the U.S.A. will immediately stop all aid and assistance to Nigeria, and may very well go into that now disgraced country, ‘guns-a-blazing,’ to completely wipe out the Islamic Terrorists who are committing these horrible atrocities.”

Trump’s outburst may seem like it came out of nowhere, but it is the product of a well-organized push by conservative American Christian activists to frame Nigeria’s multi-sided conflicts as a genocide targeting the country’s Christian population. This campaign has been going on for years, and it had some success in Trump’s first term—he previously declared Nigeria a “country of particular concern” in 2020. The effort revved up again when Trump returned to office, and it recently spilled into the mainstream on a September episode of Real Time with Bill Maher, then in a post on X by Senator Ted Cruz in October decrying “Christian mass murder” in Nigeria.

There are many people in Nigeria, including direct victims of violence, who see conflict there as a genocide targeting Christians. That is understandable, especially for victims whose faith was explicitly referenced by their attackers. Yet leading experts on Nigeria’s conflicts have convincingly rebutted the “genocide” framing—for years, in fact. Maher’s and Cruz’s recent remarks received a lot of pushback, both from independent commentators and from Nigerian officials.

The narrative of genocide relies on four distortions. First, the jihadist group Boko Haram and its successors and rivals, such as Islamic State West Africa Province, are framed as anti-Christian militants. Second, herders in Nigeria—who are often ethnically Fulani and religiously Muslim—are framed as the unequivocal aggressors in their conflicts with farmers. Third, herder violence against farmers is depicted as religiously motivated and specifically anti-Christian. And fourth, the victims of jihadist violence and herder violence are conflated in order to give the impression of an astronomical death toll driven purely by hatred of Christians and Christianity.

This framework is false on multiple levels. In reality, jihadists—who mostly operate in Muslim-majority areas of northern Nigeria—have killed far more Muslims than Christians, a point reiterated recently by none other than Donald Trump’s Africa advisor, Massad Boulos. And as for herder-farmer violence, it is fueled far more by resources than religion. Herders—far from being the perpetual aggressors—are often the victims of attacks by farmers, all while being squeezed and discriminated against by state governments.

As the Nigerian writer Elnathan John says, in a long and haunting post that deserves to be read in full,

While Trump thunders about Islamic extremism, I’m more interested in the quieter extremism of the everyday lives of Nigerians—the kind that doesn’t trend. The slow violence of a government that cannot feed or protect its people. The bigotry we print on billboards and call faith. The way every disagreement becomes a holy war because real justice feels unreachable.

And he adds later in the essay:

When Christian groups cry genocide, Abuja replies with arithmetic: others have died too. When Muslim groups cry neglect, Abuja blames bandits or “foreign elements.” The tragedy is managed by press release. No minister resigns; no general loses a pension.

The complexities of Nigeria—the way violence is both multi-directional, shockingly extreme, and depressingly banal—are often drowned out when Nigeria comes up in a US political context. Rather, Nigeria has become one of many battlegrounds in a war over the power to define and enforce “religious freedom” and a media war, since October 2023, to debate who is a victim of genocide and who is not. For someone like Maher, the point of invoking “genocide” in Nigeria seems to be to draw attention away from the genocide in Gaza. For conservative Christians, the aim is partly to consolidate influence within the US government.

Subscribe now

The History and Structure of a Narrative

The narrative of “Christian genocide” in Nigeria has largely emerged from within a certain sphere of US-based Christian media, Christian think tanks, and right-wing think tanks. More broadly, the narrative dovetails with a wider push to lay claim to the very notion of “religious freedom” and the institutions associated with it. “Religious freedom” is a core liberal principle and indeed a foundational element of liberalism historically (which does not make the term unproblematic), so the battle to define it carries a great deal of political significance.

There is a specifically right-wing version of “religious freedom” that seeks to strategically and selectively deploy it on behalf of (certain) Christians and Jews while denying religious freedom to others—and especially, in the age of the “War on Terror” and its hangover, to Muslims. The violence by Islamic State, especially as its “caliphate” peaked in Iraq and Syria in the mid-2010s, invigorated right-wing efforts to declare that it was Christians who were the leading victims of persecution worldwide. Right-wing think tanks have invested considerable resources into influencing narratives around “religious freedom.” For example, the Hudson Institute has a Center for Religious Freedom, and the Heritage Foundation has mobilized the idea of religious liberty to argue for everything from challenging child vaccine mandates to “going on offense” in promoting Catholic education.

Within the battle over who owns religious freedom, important laws and structures dating to the presidency of Bill Clinton have been key prizes. In the foreign policy realm, these structures include the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), a government-appointed body whose findings do not set policy, and the parallel Office of Religious Freedom (ORF) within the State Department, which is a policymaking office. Both USCIRF and ORF can label foreign nations “countries of particular concern (CPC)” when it comes to religious freedom, but it is ORF’s designation that carries legal and policy weight.

During Trump’s first term, there was a major push to advance the “Christian genocide” framing and to have the Trump administration officially designate Nigeria a “country of particular concern.” From 2018 to 2020, articles using the term “genocide” or “mass murder” were published by the Gatestone Institute, Providence Magazine, Tablet Magazine, the Heritage Foundation, and more. The institutions and authors often drew upon one another’s work—Tablet’s article, for example, excerpted a book titled The Next Jihad: Stop the Christian Genocide in Africa, which was also cited in the article by Heritage. The author of the Providence article, Lila Gilbert, also had an affiliation with the Hudson Institute, which partly republished her article; and with the Family Research Council, where she also discussed similar themes about Nigeria.

Similar books continue to roll off the presses. Robert Royal, a conservative Catholic scholar whose second-most recent book was a defense of Christopher Columbus (“whose courage and vision extended Christian Europe and inspired the American spirit”), published The Martyrs of the New Millennium earlier this year. In a Washington Post opinion piece in October, Royal called for more US government pressure on Nigeria.

A key source of data, then and now, regarding the narrative of “Christian genocide” is a site called Genocide Watch, where posts have repeatedly called the violence in Nigeria a “genocide against Christians”; see one example here from 2020. Genocide Watch was founded by academic and ex-State Department official Gregory Stanton, a figure who has been deeply influential—especially through his template of a ten-stage model for genocide—but who also applies the “genocide” label quite broadly.

Genocide Watch is not a right-wing site per se, and Stanton calls Trump a “Nazi.” Yet Genocide Watch’s conclusions and analyses often have striking utility for right-wing activists. Stanton’s stages framework can be broadly applied, for example with South Africa. A favored narrative of right-wingers in America and South Africa (a narrative now emanating from Trump’s White House) is that white South Africans are facing genocide. Although Genocide Watch has not reached that conclusion, its discussions of South Africa argue that the country is heading in that direction—one 2021 report puts the country at “Stage 6: Polarization” and heaps blame upon the provocative but electorally marginal Economic Freedom Fighters of Julius Malema:

The same impunity results from non-prosecution of murders of white farmers. The Marxist, racist Economic Freedom Front party of Julius Malema encourages these murders, which are meant to terrorize farmers into emigrating from South Africa. Many of the murders are hate crimes. The perpetrators torture, rape, and disembowel their victims. They leave Afrikaans Bibles on dead bodies. White farmers are defenseless because South Africa outlawed private gun possession and disbanded the mutual protection cooperatives organized by farmers in the past.

Arguably there are a few right-wing dog whistles here: the idea that being Marxist is inherently troubling, on par with being “racist”; the notion that EFF are the real racists; the graphic images, complete with the image of Bibles being defiled; and the nod to gun ownership as a supposed barrier to victimization.

Meanwhile, after October 7, Genocide Watch was noticeably reticent to pronounce events in Gaza a genocide. As of 2025, Stanton refers to a “double genocide in Gaza,” concluding, “Both Hamas and Israel have committed genocide.” If Stanton’s remarks about Trump and Gaza are not what the Heritage Foundation or the Family Research Council might prefer to hear, Genocide Watch is nevertheless frequently cited by such groups when it comes to Nigeria—in part because none of the major genocide prevention organizations have declared a genocide there. See, for example, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Early Warning Project page for Nigeria, which discusses the country’s violence in a much different way than Genocide Watch does.

Global terrorism “data” have also proven useful to the narrative of “Christian genocide.” In 2015, the Global Terrorism Index, published by the Institute for Economics & Peace, included “Fulani militants,” labeling them “The fourth most deadly terrorist group of 2014.” The problems with that framing ran deep, especially in terms of describing Fulani herders as a cohesive group that could be compared, in an apples-to-apples way, with Boko Haram, Islamic State, and others. At an even more basic level, the idea of “Fulani militants” as “terrorists” made little sense. Although right-wing and Christian coverage of Nigeria has sometimes dismissed the idea of “farmer-herder conflict” as reductive and misleading, “farmer-herder conflict” is the lens used by the most sophisticated academics and research institutions focusing on the topic.

The framing of the Fulani as “militants” and “terrorists” intersected with escalating tensions around ethnicity in Nigeria at that time, as Muhammadu Buhari (a Fulani and a Muslim) successfully ran for president in 2015 after several years as an opposition candidate. Violence at the community level became fuel for conspiracy theories and accusations that Buhari and other Fulani elites were masterminding “terrorism” across Nigeria. Elnathan John writes, “To call a killer ‘Fulani’ in today’s Nigeria is to declare the motive, deliver the judgment, and close the case. Nuance died here long before the victims.” As Fulani are targeted elsewhere in West Africa and profiled as “terrorists” in Mali, Burkina Faso, and beyond, the promoters of the “Christian genocide” narrative risk fueling a kind of anti-Fulani racism, with implications for millions of people in Africa.

Notably, Christian media outlets sometimes have a more subtle and nuanced approach to Nigeria’s violence than do the right-wing think tanks, although these Christian media accounts ultimately point in the same direction. A March 2019 article in Christian Post included quotes from analysts and witnesses with different perspectives on how to understand Nigeria’s violence—but was headlined “Christian Genocide in Nigeria: 5 Facts You Need to Know.” A recent article from Open Doors, a Christian organization that originated as an anti-Communist effort in Europe in the 1950s, also gestured to some of the counterarguments against the “Christian genocide” narrative but included lines such as “elements of the Fulani tribe have been radicalized with violent Islamist ideology that justifies subjugating Christians as infidels.”

Open Doors’ data and data from its peer organizations have, ultimately, been key to the “Christian genocide” narrative—but their methodologies for determining why victims are targeted have been deeply questioned by scholars such as Marc-Antoine Pérouse de Montclos, who points to a widespread “lack of critical scrutiny regarding the quality, reliability, and consistency of the sources used” in shaping the narrative.

Subscribe now

The Policy Picture under Trump, Terms One and Two

Right-wing and Christian lobbying over Nigeria during Trump’s first term was somewhat successful. In December 2020, then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo designated Nigeria a CPC. But the move, coming so late, seemed half-hearted and was easily reversed by the administration of President Joe Biden in November 2021. There are numerous reasons why Trump might have been reluctant to go full-bore on the CPC designation, including Nigeria’s vast oil and critical minerals supplies.

Since Trump returned to office, there have been steady calls for restoring the CPC designation. Representative Chris Smith of New Jersey, a Republican who is highly active on African affairs, urged a new CPC determination in March. The USCIRF, which has labeled Nigeria a CPC for years, continues to call upon the State Department to follow suit. To take another example, in July ex-Department of Justice Lawyer Andrea Picciotti-Bayer, director of the Conscience Project, published an op-ed in the Hill urging Trump to bring back the CPC designation and then to go even further by declaring genocide:

An acknowledgment that the violence against Christians in Nigeria has reached the level of genocide could inspire a global response of humanitarian aid, economic sanctions, diplomatic isolation and even intervention by the UN Security Council, not to mention action by the International Criminal Court to prosecute individuals and regimes responsible.

The CPC designation, as is already clear from Trump’s own rhetoric, is not the end of the campaign but rather one step in it. Trump may have hesitated during his first term to go after Nigeria, but he now appears to be committed to pleasing the segment of his base that cares deeply about the issue, even at the cost of seriously antagonizing Nigeria. Trump’s bluster is unlikely to result in a military intervention, given the many pitfalls such an intervention would face, but further cuts to aid (on top of the devastating cuts Trump has already inflicted) are certainly possible, all in the service of scoring political points at home.

Subscribe now

Feedback Loops Between Nigeria and the US

Trump likely does not think often, or deeply, about Nigeria. As with many of his threats, talk of military intervention could fade as he pivots to other whims and concerns. But that does not mean his decisions and rhetoric around Nigeria won’t do damage.

A report by DW, citing both victims and analysts, includes insightful comments from Samuel Malik of Good Governance Africa regarding the harm that the genocide narrative could do:

It “pressures foreign governments, especially the United States, to adopt punitive and moralistic positions toward Nigeria rather than pursuing constructive, evidence-based engagement,” he said. “Furthermore, it damages the Nigerian government’s international reputation by portraying it as complicit in religious persecution, making it difficult or impossible to get the support it requires to deal with the problem of insecurity.”

One could add that there is explosive potential for genocide claims to collide, once again, with local, state, and presidential politics as Nigeria heads towards general elections in 2027. Electoral violence has been a recurring problem in the country, and 2027 will see a re-election bid by President Bola Tinubu, who won a slim and highly disputed victory in 2023. Framing the country’s security challenges as existential religious conflicts will inevitably turn up the political temperature. More violence in Nigeria would, in turn, only fuel more calls for declaring a genocide there.

Subscribe now

Soon after Jorge Mario Bergoglio assumed the papal name Francis in March 2013, rumors began to swirl of a powerful “gay lobby” in the Holy See. Priests from Latin America let slip that the new pope had confirmed its existence, and several months later Vanity Fair published reports that the issue had been raised already under Francis’s predecessor Benedict XVI over concerns that gay prelates were being blackmailed. Francis acknowledged the concerns, but he struck a far more conciliatory—and humorous—note than Benedict, telling reporters that he hadn’t yet “found anyone with an identity card in the Vatican with ‘gay’ on it.”

Although Pope Francis made headlines a decade later for using the colorful slur “fraggiocine” to refer to gay seminarians, he dedicated much of his pontificate to welcoming LGBTQ people into the Church. His actions—from speaking with trans Italian women to supporting same-sex civil unions to asking “who am I to judge” gay people—enraged conservatives, while giving progressives hope that the institution might be salvageable. At the same time, he struck decidedly revanchist notes on other issues related to sex and gender, categorically rejecting abortion, insisting that gender-affirming surgery violates human dignity, and rejecting a measure that would allow married men in the Amazon to be ordained as priests. A man of contradictions, he embodied the difficulty that Christians have in articulating a coherent view of sex and gender in the twenty-first century.

To believers and non-believers alike, it can seem difficult to pin down what, exactly, Christianity teaches when it comes to the body. The Anglican Communion, a loose grouping of Protestant denominations that dates back to Henry VIII’s schism with Rome in the early sixteenth century, has nearly fractured in recent years over the issue of LGBTQ rights. Likewise, while most Christian churches have remained opposed to abortion—though a growing number of progressive denominations equally oppose legal restrictions on it—the questions of marriage (for clergy) and divorce (for the laity) continue to rive Christian from Christian. All the while, partisans for this denomination or that insist that their way of interpreting Scripture is the one—the only one—sanctioned by God.

While these divisions over sex may seem something new—a product of the internet age, modern morals, or a post-truth society—they are, in fact, a core feature of Christianity, writes Oxford historian Diarmaid MacCulloch in Lower Than The Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity. “There is no such thing as a single Christian theology of sex,” he insists, and “Christian societies and Church bodies have at different times believed totally contrary things about sexuality.” Yet, while MacCulloch tells an often-amusing story about Christians’ many sexual contradictions, he never answers a far deeper question: why should any of us care?

Subscribe now

By turns sparkling with wry wit and drearily encyclopedic, MacCulloch takes delight in pointing out the absurdities of Christian dogma. From the start, the religion was an uncomfortable amalgamation of older traditions. Take the Infancy Narratives of Jesus Christ’s birth. Contained in the Gospels of the disciples Matthew and Luke, they are a tangle of contradicting agendas and historical antecedents. Both insist that he was born in Bethlehem, even though his mother Mary and her husband Joseph hailed from Nazareth, nearly one hundred miles to the north. MacCulloch suggests that both mis-locate his birth because Bethlehem was “the city of David,” in which the prophet Micah had foretold the Messiah would be born. Likewise, both include a detailed genealogy of Jesus. They tie him, through Joseph, to King David of the Israelites. But why, MacCulloch wants to know, should we care about Joseph’s family tree, when both texts “lamely make [it] clear” that Joseph “cannot be Jesus’s biological father.”

Indeed, the patrimony of the Messiah presents a conundrum for the authors of the Gospels. The language of Luke, MacCulloch writes, suggests that Mary may have been “the victim of rape.” A different story began circulating early in the first millennium, after relations between Christians and Jews soured, that his father had, in fact, been a Roman soldier named Pantera. The point, MacCulloch writes, is that “the Holy Family, so apparently familiar from Christmas cards, makes an uneasy fit with the many different views of family that Christian Churches have constructed over the centuries.”

Longstanding belief in Mary’s virginity comes from Matthew’s words, when he quotes the prophet Isaiah that “a virgin shall conceive and bear a son.” For centuries after Christ’s death, it was commonly held that Mary, in the words of the second-century theologian Tertullian, was “a virgin as regards her husband, not a virgin as regards child-bearing.” In a Church that would become increasingly prudish and hostile to sex, however, it would be necessary not only to insist upon Mary’s virginity at the time of her son’s birth, but also her virginity throughout her entire life. Over the years, the cult of Marian devotion grew, and, alongside it, “a centuries-long and risibly solemn Christian debate as to which of Mary’s bodily members or orifices the Holy Spirit employed” to inseminate the mother of God.

Ironically, as Mary’s significance to Christian dogma grew, the role of women in the Church shrank. Here too, nothing in the early teachings suggested that strict gender divisions had to be the way of things. Some of Paul’s epistles refer to female Church leaders. Centuries after Christ’s death, the Eastern Church still ordained female deacons and as late as year 600, women helped to lead the Church on the British Isles. Even after the Western Church—which would become the Roman Catholic Church—banned the ordination of women, they could still play important roles, whether through convents or by participating in the pilgrimages that had become a standard ritual of the faith by the dawn of the second millennium. In fact, nearly half of all pilgrims in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were women.

For all that modern-day Christians harp on the family—J.D. Vance, for one, seems to think “childless cat ladies” are a scourge of the modern world—MacCulloch underscores just how dismissive early Christians were about it. When Mary and her other children came to hear Christ speak, for instance, he gestured to his disciples as his true family. Luke similarly relays how Jesus contradicted a follower who cried, “Blessed is the womb that bore you.” In fact, there was something undeniably queer about Christ and his disciples, as they rejected their biological relations and associated instead with a chosen family. Hostility to family and marriage would become a ubiquitous trope in early Christian thought and comprises the key sexual preoccupation of Lower Than the Angels. While MacCulloch also traces sodomy laws and fluctuating concern with abortion, the tension between marriage and celibacy is at the book’s heart.

For many centuries, there was no clear Church doctrine on the matter. Priests could be wedded, although they were typically expected to live in chaste marriages, while Christian writers advised even the laity against marriage and the sin of sex. The fourth-century theologian Jerome of Stridon, who detested sex and marriage alike, urged his widowed readers not to remarry, telling them that marriage is “like unwholesome food, and now that you have relieved your heaving stomach of its bile, why should you return to it again … ‘like a dog to its vomit’?”

It was not until the Gregorian revolution of the eleventh century, named for Pope Gregory VII, that the question of marriage was resolved. It was then too that the divide between priesthood and laity was established, as Church leaders set about codifying religious dogma and constructing what Pope Pius X described in the twentieth century as an “essentially unequal society […] comprising two categories of persons, the pastors and the flock.” It was then that the principle of a celibate priesthood was firmly established—which, in turn, necessitated that the laity marry and reproduce. This is the moment too that Western Christianity set upon becoming what the great medieval historian R.I. Moore once termed a “persecuting society.” Sodomy laws began to proliferate, Jews became targets of systematic persecution, heretics were rooted out by a newly founded Inquisition, and eventually a witch craze would take tens of thousands of lives.

In 1517, the equilibrium between a chaste clergy and procreating laity set by the Gregorian revolution was thrown off its axis by an unknown monk in the German university town of Wittenberg. The Protestant Reformation reimagined the place of the priesthood, as clerics insisted that they not only could be married but, in fact, should wed in order to set an example for their parishioners. In 1525, Martin Luther set the precedent by marrying Katharina von Bora, an ex-nun who would bear him six children. Soon the norm was established that we live with today—Catholic priests are celibate while Protestant ministers marry and multiply. Of course, within the different Protestant denominations debate still raged, particularly over polygamy. While some Reformers embraced taking multiple wives—the Anabaptist leader of Münster in southwest Germany had fifteen—most sects ultimately rejected the practice.

In today’s debates over same-sex marriage and its place in the Church, MacCulloch suggests, we can see the echoes of these older divisions over heterosexual marriage. They are simply another iteration of the religion’s longstanding, ambiguous relationship with matrimony. “Same-sex couples throughout much of Western Christianity,” he suggests, “are now in much the same position as heterosexual married couples were in the second-century Church: following a civil ceremony formalizing their relationship, they can come along to their worship community and receive a blessing.” Of course, not everyone is pleased with this state of affairs.

Subscribe now

Well into Donald Trump’s second term, we are likely to hear such arguments intensify, as believers with the ear of the President and access to the courts insist that faith is incompatible with LGBTQ identities and rights. Indeed, the Supreme Court was recently asked to revisit its Obergefell ruling that established a nationwide right to same-sex marriage. The ordination of a new pontiff earlier this year has likewise stirred up questions about the Catholic Church’s approach to queer issues. Will Leo XIV continue Francis’s relatively welcoming policies, or will he revert to more exclusionary teachings on matters of gender and sexuality?

These questions, MacCulloch contends, are not an invention of the modern age, but rather products of divisions that existed even in Christianity’s earliest years. But for all he does to deconstruct the idea of a singular Christian approach to sex, MacCulloch does not grapple with the conundrum at the heart of the book – and, indeed, at the heart of faith in the twenty-first century. If there is no single or consistent Christian teaching when it comes to sex, gender, and sexuality, then why should anyone believe this version or the other? And, if there is no particularly good reason to believe in one flavor of Christian dogma over another, then why should we care about any of them?

At the end of the day, there is something mysterious about faith, which Søren Kierkegaard once aptly described as “the paradox of existence.” There is a divide between those who believe and those who do not, for no rational argument will convince the faithful and no amount of faith will convince those who do not believe. While those of us who have not attended a service in years may be willing to accept MacCulloch’s suggestion that “a more comprehensive understanding of historical process” could help settle religious disagreements, those who believe that they comprehend the Scriptures are unlikely to do so. It may not be a problem unique to our time or to our country, but the divide between those who think and believe differently has once more widened into an unbridgeable chasm.

Subscribe now

[Hey folks, it’s Derek breaking in here to welcome Gretchen Heefner to Foreign Exchanges. Gretchen is a Professor of History at Northeastern University, where she teaches classes on the Global Cold War, The Origins of Today, and Environmental History. She is the author of Sand, Snow, and Stardust: How US Military Engineers Conquered Extreme Environments (University of Chicago Press, 2025) and The Missile Next Door: The Army of the American Heartland (Harvard University Press, 2012). She holds an MA in International Economic Policy from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, and a PhD in History from Yale University. Her work focuses on the surprisingly intimate connections between national security regimes and the everyday, whether it be through the deployment of nuclear ICBMs across the American West, or the construction of massive military bases in some of the most inhospitable places. I’m very excited to have her contributing to FX!]

President Donald Trump has been making noise about buying the world’s largest island, Greenland. Overlooked in the debate about whether this is a good idea and how it would possibly happen is the fact that the US has already been in Greenland for 70 years, and it's been mostly bad for Greenland and a mind-bogglingly expensive quixotic venture for us.

US interest in Greenland goes back to World War II, but it was the Cold War that made the island—then a Danish colony—of particular interest to strategic and military planners. The US Air Force, to be blunt, needed a place to park its bombers close enough to reach targets in the Soviet Union by flying over the North Pole. In 1951 it began construction on Thule Air Base, a giant facility capable of housing 5000 airmen on Greenland’s northwestern coast, well within the Arctic Circle. From there military activities spun out across the frigid land. By the late 1950s, over 20 unique locations were occupied for defense-related programs. A decade later they were nearly all abandoned.

Some of these military sites hugged Greenland’s jagged and rocky coast. Others spread inland, onto the giant ice cap that covers over 80 percent of the island in a white dome roughly three times the size of Texas. In some places the ice is two miles thick. Few people—Greenlander or foreigner—have dared cross it. Winter temperatures plunge to negative 50F, winds are fierce, and much of the year is cast in utter darkness. In the 1930s, a polar explorer and naval officer declared the ice cap the “globe’s greatest curiosity.” Others have labeled it the “white desert”; a “bleak and barren” land; “lifeless”; and the “icy waste.” It is monotonous and terrifying, at the very least. Being on top of Greenland was, the explorer continued, “like standing on the surface of the dead moon, a million years devoid of life, and waiting for a single vagrant meteor to break the spell.”1

The US military confronted these conditions as it made its assault on Greenland. Every aspect of moving, building, living, and operating there was arduous. Construction workers reported that they could not remove their gloves for fear of metal burn, but working with gloves was like “eating grapes while wearing boxing mitts.” The wind could take your breath away; eyelashes froze shut; frostbite set in quickly. Pilots complained that strange currents jolted their planes this way and that and whiteouts came without warning.

It was somewhat surprising, then, that the US military decided to build on the ice cap itself. After a series of experimental projects in ice cap construction, military engineers began the construction of Camp Century in 1959. It was there that the army would send 200 men to live year-round, nestled into subglacial tunnels and caverns where prefabricated rooms were installed and filled with all the comforts of home: hot and cold showers, laundry rooms, a barber shop and cinema, and plenty of steak and potatoes. Camp Century was not a home for seasoned polar explorers, but a mini-America where enlisted men could listen to record players in their shirtsleeves, all powered by a portable nuclear reactor that was hauled slowly across first the ocean and then the ice.

But external efforts to simulate the utterly ordinary could not erase the harsh realities of trying to conquer nature’s extremes. That far north, the same problem that had bedeviled explorers confronted the US military juggernaut: supply. Every item that the Americans needed and wanted had to be shipped from home across long and tenuous supply lines that crossed oceans and bays, often frozen in. The window for supplying northwestern Greenland is exceedingly short—just a few months in the summer. Once ashore at Thule Air Force Base, the materials had to be hauled across the ice to Camp Century. Walter Cronkite, who visited Camp Century in 1961, called the route “the most dangerous road in the world.”

The most dangerous road consisted of 128 miles of ice and snow that, at best, could be traversed in three days. Specially designed tractors crawled slowly up onto the ice, never certain what was solid ground. Crevasses yawned open like stretch marks as the ice shifted, swallowing men and equipment whole. Men were told never to leave their vehicles if stranded, lest they freeze in minutes.

So why do it? Army officials told Cronkite that Camp Century was a research facility, but that was not quite true. Important research did occur in the icy caverns. But the main purpose of the facility was as a base camp for “Project Iceworm,” the army’s top secret, fantastical plan to create a subglacial system of rail tunnels and cars that could shuttle nuclear tipped missiles around, completely invisible from the air above. Deterrence on ice.

“Iceworm” proved unworkable, in part for reasons that a pair of Eagle Scouts discovered during their 6-month publicity trip to Camp Century. Shortly after the portable nuclear power arrived in late 1960, the army invited the scouts—one American and one Dane—to overwinter under the ice. After the initial thrill wore off, the monotony sank in. It was usually too cold and dangerous to leave the ice tunnels. Logistical glitches made news from outside slow in arriving. There was not much for the young men to do. And so they were tasked with doing something no one else had time for: each day they set out to measure how quickly the Camp Century ice tunnels were caving in.

With pegs and wires, they went from trench to trench measuring how much space remained between the floor and the ceiling, and from wall to wall. They noticed the effect of “squeezing in” right away. The engineers who designed Camp Century knew that eventually the walls would collapse, crushing all that remained inside. But they had underestimated how fast that would happen. The mess hall quickly began to slump, probably from the heat of bodies and cooking. The roof above the nuclear reactors was dangerously fragile. And this was just in the first year.

While the camera panned across a plain of windswept ice that seemed to go on forever, Cronkite wondered how long man could try to control the forces of nature. The answer was much shorter than the military had imagined. The nuclear reactor lasted just over two years. Camp Century became a summer-only facility and in 1966 it was simply abandoned. Nearly all materials left inside, including chairs, beds, prefab walls and doors, were meant to be crushed by the moving and morphing ice and snow.

That is not all that the US military left behind, however. At Camp Century, human and radioactive waste and toxic chemicals were simply ejected directly into the ice. In 2016, a team of researchers predicted that melting ice from climate change would eventually expose the materials left below. Elsewhere, too, items the military brought into Greenland were generally on a one-way ticket. Across the island the military has left an abundance of stuff: boxes, cans, wood, plastics, food scraps, and containers. The military produced a lot of trash. Eventually, it would also leave piles of metal car frames, airplane parts, and machines; some buried in the winter snows, others thrown into the nearby waters. Less obvious—but no less significant—was the hazardous waste from the daily operations of the base: used oils and solvents, paint sludge, plating residue, asbestos, jet fuel, PCBs, battery acid, and more besides. Greenlanders have frequently requested that US and Danish authorities clean up the Cold War mess.

The 1968 crash of a B-52 bomber trying to land at Thule is indicative of how insignificant the Greenland environment was to US interests. The aircraft was carrying four thermonuclear bombs. Although the devices did not detonate, the crash into sea ice caused the conventional explosive aboard to ignite, scattering radioactive waste around the area. Since the area was remote and sparsely populated, the US planned to simple leave the wreckage in place, allowing the materials to seep down into the ice and water below. The Danish government protested and demanded a clean-up operation. Contaminated ice was shipped to the United States for disposal. One of the four thermonuclear devices was never found.

As 21st century expansionists foolishly muse about deepening the US presence in Greenland, it would be well to attend to this history. The main reason for leaving Greenland alone, of course, is that Greenlanders who have fought for greater independence from Denmark are not looking for a new colonial overlord. But if democracy and anti-colonialism are not enough to dissuade, a dose of cold reality might be. Strategists and politicians in Washington might dream of mineral rights and access to Arctic shipping lanes. But as the military learned in the 1960s, extreme environments have a way of confounding even the simplest and best-engineered plans.

Subscribe now

I recently gave a talk at City College on antiwar/non-violence thought based on the ideas that have been discussed in this series. I hoped to make the case that there is a distinctive way of understanding this strand of thought from the French Revolution to the present. I stressed that, at least in the United States, antiwar/non-violence thought has been in steep decline since the Vietnam War, with occasional moments of revival such as protests in opposition to the US’ invasion of Iraq and most recently regarding US and Israeli actions in Gaza. In the talk, I highlighted the key ideas and figures in what I see as a distinct tradition of thought, and in doing so I made sure to point out its historical shortcomings and pitfalls based on my engagement with Domenico Losurdo’s Non-Violence: A History Beyond the Myth.

My view is that anyone who wants to defend antiwar/non-violence thought has to take seriously the types of criticism raised by Losurdo. As such, I presented to my audience the manner in which Losurdo showed: how many pacifists of the abolitionist movement opted for violence in the service of defeating slave-holding states; the absurdity of Tolstoy's belief that wars between states would eventually vanish from history; the hypocrisy of Gandhi defending the participation of Indians in Britain’s war efforts, such as in the Boer War; and how Western advocates of perpetual peace often had little problem with American and European imperialism. I did this in major part because I assumed that many in the audience would believe that non-violence and antiwar thought is morally indefensible. As such, one of my aims was to show that in many instances their concerns are justified. Pointing out legitimate criticisms is also why I found entering into dialogue with Losurdo useful, because, despite his many reservations, he makes a realistic case for “non-violence in a world prey to nuclear catastrophe.”

For Losurdo, the best case for non-violence entails a long and committed process of targeting the underlying social and militaristic conditions that give rise to warfare, such as the arms race, policies of war, preparations for war, and the installation of military bases. In my eyes, this seems far from utopian, and does not mesh comfortably with the long trajectory of progressive thinking. The antinuclear movement of the late 1970s/early 1980s would be a good example of trying to prepare for peace but not preparing for war.

Read more

Subscribe now

Amid the cuts imposed by the Trump administration and the “Department of Government Efficiency” (“DOGE”), it has been strange and sad to see the destruction of many programs and institutions that funded my research and made my career possible, along with the careers of countless mentors and colleagues. I think of myself partly as an area studies researcher—that is, someone interested in studying places for their own sake rather than as “cases” that help inform supposedly universal “theories.” Under Trump, the infrastructures that support much area studies research in the United States have been badly damaged. Most worryingly from the perspective of academic freedom, many area studies programs and departments have attracted negative attention from both Washington and their own university administrations—especially Columbia’s Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies.

The destruction has made me think about the ambiguity of area studies as an enterprise. On the one hand, the field took its present form amid and because of the Cold War, with the federal government delivering much of the funding and setting many of the priorities. Area studies also received a late boost from the War on Terror, reinforcing its dependence on federal funding structures and its attachment to “national security.” On the other hand, area studies scholars have often been at the forefront of questioning US foreign policy. Had the decision-makers listened, many mistakes and tragedies might have been avoided, including the Iraq War.

The US, a deeply parochial empire, does not ultimately need regional experts to advance imperial projects. Imperial power is largely exercised from the White House, the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, and the Pentagon—and from fortress embassies on the outskirts of foreign capitals. If the United States is going to bomb Yemen no matter what, across five presidential administrations and counting, then the White House does not need people who have lived in Sanaa or Aden, who speak Arabic, or who understand the significance of 1962 or 1990. In a way, the defunding of area studies institutions represents not just the recklessness of Donald Trump and Elon Musk but also an acknowledgment of the crude reality that the US government can project power without regional specialists. The real loss, then, is not to “national security” but to the depth of connection that American society itself has with the rest of the world.

An Autobiography in Funding

My own experience—that of a provincial intellectual who has nevertheless had significant contact with the state—can offer a small case study of the last gasp of a certain area studies model in the US.

In 2005, I finished my undergraduate studies in Religion and cast about for something to do next. I had written my senior thesis under the supervision of the great Senegalese philosopher Souleymane Bachir Diagne, now at Columbia, and I wanted to move from studying classical Islamic thought to studying living Muslim societies. With Prof. Diagne’s gracious support, I applied to the Fulbright Scholarship and received it, spending nine months in Senegal from 2006 to 2007.

The Fulbright Scholarship is named for Senator J. William Fulbright (1905-1995). Fulbright had been a Rhodes Scholar—which was itself a scholarship that emerged out of Britain’s empire, having been created by British colonialist and mogul Cecil Rhodes (1853-1902), the founder of “Rhodesia.” The Rhodes Scholarship brings rising elites from Britain’s former colonies to study at Oxford. Fulbright envisioned his own scholarship, established through an act of Congress in 1946, as a cultural exchange program that would promote peace in the aftermath of World War II. The emerging Cold War context was also crucial, however. Fulbright himself charted a complex relationship with the Cold War, emerging in the 1960s as a formidable critic of the Vietnam War. The Fulbright program, meanwhile, became a key feeder mechanism for not just academia but also the State Department and the US government more broadly.

After my Fulbright year, I went to Georgetown from 2007 to 2009 for an M.A. in Arab Studies. I had gotten serious about learning the Arabic language and I was also interested in studying religious and political interconnections between West Africa and the Middle East. At Georgetown, my second year was funded through the Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) program, which is (was?) a Department of Education program. FLAS scholarships were created through the 1958 National Defense Education Act (NDEA), itself a response to the Soviet Union’s launch of the Sputnik satellite the previous year. The NDEA funded “hard sciences” as well as social sciences and area studies; one component was what are called Title VI centers, meaning academic units specializing in particular regions of the world.

As I was wrapping up at Georgetown, I received another scholarship, from the Center for Arabic Study Abroad (CASA) based at the University of Arizona. The CASA program was created in 1967 with NDEA funding. I didn’t ultimately accept the CASA scholarship (though I should have!) and instead headed to Northwestern for a Ph.D. in Religious Studies. The history of Arabic instruction in the US is yet another case study of the centrality of government funding and priorities, as well as the intertwined nature of government and universities.

At Northwestern, where my research focused on Islam in northern Nigeria, the funding for my fieldwork in 2011-2012 came from private foundations—namely, the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) and the Wenner-Gren Foundation. But it could have easily come from the US government again. I was rejected for a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship, which has funded many of my colleagues’ work over the years. One should note too that foundations such as SSRC, Mellon, and particularly Ford, along with the National Science Foundation, are part of the same Cold War milieu that produced the Fulbright and those NDEA-funded programs.

There were also various federal awards that I either didn’t apply for or didn’t end up accepting, such as the Boren Fellowship (created through the Boren National Security Act of 1991, named after Democratic Congressman David Boren, who died this February). Long story short, to receive advanced language and area studies training in this country and to conduct overseas fieldwork, the best-funded and most prestigious pathways ran through the federal government or adjacent institutions.

For graduate students interested in advanced language study and overseas fieldwork now, pathways have considerably narrowed. The SSRC has—wrongly in my view—almost completely abandoned area studies in favor of focusing on technocratic, liberal domestic policy initiatives. Federal funding was getting tighter even before Trump returned to power. The collapse of funding structures for fieldwork also reinforces inequalities between universities. Federal funding and foundation funding was never a total equalizer, given that students at elite universities often have multiple advantages when applying for those programs, but now even more than before students at top schools can rely on internal funding resources that students at other schools typically don’t have.

Since finishing my Ph.D., my work has been supported at several moments by federal funding, for example when I spent an academic year at the Wilson Center in Washington. Created by an act of Congress in 1968, the Wilson Center became a key destination for area studies scholars. One of the Center’s most prominent units is the Kennan Institute, created by the famous diplomat George Kennan (1904-2005) in 1974. Kennan was one of the early intellectual architects of the Cold War, including through his famous “long telegram” of 1946. Many of these institutions, then, have a Cold War pedigree and/or echoes back to the period immediately after WWI and the drive to shape the postwar order. The SSRC and the Council on Foreign Relations, the latter of which funded a year-long fellowship I spent at the State Department working on Nigeria, were both founded in the early 1920s.

Many of these opportunities have now been slashed. The Wilson Center, for example, has been reduced to a shell under Trump. I cannot imagine all of the cascading effects for individual scholars—lives rerouted, work disrupted, etc. There will also be systemic effects in terms of greatly curtailing the horizons for writing and research; many books will go unwritten in the coming years due to these disruptions. Some of the funding will eventually be restored, I imagine, but the incentive structures and risk assessments may seriously change in the intervening years. Academia was already a fraught career path, and an area studies focus even more so. I wouldn’t advise anyone to pursue an area studies career now.

Subscribe now

What Is Area Studies For?

During the Cold War, as the government funded area studies, the resulting expertise was always first and foremost valued for what it might contribute to geopolitical dominance. When specialists advanced arguments that were at odds with perceived American national interests, those specialists and their arguments were sidelined—or worse. Both within the government and outside it, regional experts could fall on the wrong side of shifting policy winds. David Halberstam, in his famous book The Best and the Brightest, writes that in the State Department, “All of the China hands…had their careers destroyed with the fall of China [in 1949]. The men who gave advice on China were either Europeanists or men transferred from the Pentagon.”1 In academia, the most infamous champions of the Cold War were political scientists such as Henry Kissinger and Samuel Huntington, who were generalists rather than regional specialists.

My own limited experience in interacting with policymakers suggests that area studies has little impact on policies and decisions. During the Obama administration in particular, I was invited fairly frequently to conferences and briefings. At the time, my theory of change (which now seems so quaint and dubious to me) was that I could introduce some “nuance” into policy discussions and in this way contribute to reducing militarism and Islamophobia—but how exactly that “nuance” was supposed to move from the low-level bureaucrats and analysts at these events (assuming they even cared what I had to say) to senior-level decision-makers was a question I could not have answered. In 2013-2014, an International Affairs Fellowship from the Council on Foreign Relations allowed me to serve in government, as a Desk Officer for Nigeria in the State Department’s Bureau of African Affairs, but even in the meeting rooms of Foggy Bottom, I had effectively no influence. Fresh off of my doctoral fieldwork in Nigeria, I was sure that policymakers would be eager to hear my views. But no senior official displayed even the slightest interest in listening to me during twelve months in government. Inside the State Department, hierarchy was all. So of what good were all these investments in area studies scholars?

Ultimately, there is a tension between the world-remaking aspirations of imperial policymakers and the nuances, cautions, and subtleties that deep area studies concentrations generate—especially in an era of rapid communications and mass-casualty weapons. Whereas earlier empires required local administrators with considerable knowledge of their surroundings, the American empire has primarily featured generalists in Washington attempting to impose projects on the periphery; it is an empire of Donald Rumsfelds, Jake Sullivans, and Jared Kushners, and less an empire of Lawrences or Lugards.

Britain and other colonial powers committed horrendous atrocities and saw the world through a fundamentally distorted and racist lens, but their exercise of power was different from the American version. Throughout much of their empire the British had to rely on the “man on the spot,” who had to have some linguistic, cultural, and political proficiency. The American empire, less about the direct administration of territory than the projection of power, requires neither local competency nor even policy success. Backed by a ridiculously favorable geographic position and tremendous natural and accumulated wealth, US ventures can fail in the peripheries again and again without imposing fundamental costs on the core. The Trump administration’s cuts to federal funding for area studies will be devastating to academia, but ultimately won’t derail the exercise of imperial power. If the colonial model involved weaponized knowledge, the American empire coasts on weaponized ignorance.

The cost of cuts to area studies, I think, is twofold. First, the US will become an even more parochial society. The vast funding opportunities the US government provided may not have resulted in policymakers listening to critics, but those funding structures did produce a deep bench of people who can speak with serious knowledge about different parts of the world, enriching the undergraduate classroom, providing interlocutors for journalists, and yielding many fantastic books. When people ask me for reading lists on West Africa, for example, many of the books I mention are the outgrowth of Fulbright-Hays years, Wilson Center Fellowships, etc.

Now, however, academia is unlikely to pick up the slack as far as area studies funding is concerned. In political science, for example, the prestige topics have to do mostly with “theory” rather than with the generation of empirical knowledge about specific parts of the world. As Michael Desch and others have written, the search for supposedly greater methodological rigor drove political science away from area studies and towards heavily quantitative approaches based on models and abstract theories. That process, unfolding over decades, has marginalized area studies within the top journals and within political science departments.There are still highly active area studies associations—the Middle East Studies Association and the African Studies Association, among others—but their capacity to fund research is a tiny fraction of that of the federal government. Combine the decline of area studies within academia with the cuts to many major newspapers’ staff of foreign correspondents, and you have a society that certainly has more access than ever before to news and perspectives from overseas, but fewer people with the deep training to interpret what events overseas mean. That’s a loss that will be felt well beyond the Trump years.

Second, critically-minded area studies scholars constitute the reserve brainpower of an alternative foreign policy, should that alternative ever get the chance to express itself. “Left Foreign Policy” has often been conceived of as an alternative grand strategy, such as restraint, but that approach mirrors the abstraction of existing grand strategies—which are never consistently applied. By contrast, a patchwork, region-by-region foreign policy, drawing on detailed knowledge of local conditions, can at least help anticipate the unintended consequences that have attended so many US foreign policy choices. The 2015 Iran Deal, in which area experts such as Rob Malley and Ali Vaez played key roles inside and outside government, is just a glimmer of the type of openings that might be possible if the US embraces some sensitivity to the other country’s perspective. (The importance of those experts’ role also helps to explain the high degree of scrutiny they have faced.) Not all area studies scholars are critics, of course, nor are they always effective when brought into government (see Michael McFaul, a thoroughly establishment figure, for example). But without a cadre of people who have done deep research on and in other countries, the US will stumble through the world more blindly than ever.

Subscribe now

Less than a week after taking office earlier this year, President Donald Trump issued an executive order entitled “The Iron Dome for America.” Citing the “threat of attack” by advanced missiles and other “aerial” means as “the most catastrophic threat” facing the country, Trump called for the development of a “next generation missile defense shield.” This, of course, is not the first time that the US government has engaged in “pioneering” the colonization of the stratosphere in the attempt to fortify all dimensions of the American Maginot Line. I discussed some earlier attempts in the first two parts of this series. Indeed, Trump cites Ronald Reagan’s 1980s “Star Wars” fantasy as a precedent to his own equally fantastical plan. “Peace through strength,” the warmongers like to say. Tacitus called out this type of peace long ago.

From a big, beautiful wall to a now-renamed American “Golden Dome,” the imperial boomerang has not stopped its elliptical travels. This time the journey takes us from occupied Palestine to the US stratosphere, from what the Asian-African Conference of 1955 at Bandung called a “bridgehead of Western colonialism” in West Asia to the multidimensional borderlands of the US empire. This Gringo Dome is a farcical repetition of the Israeli stratospheric settler colonial missile border wall that exists and remains only partially effective (as Ansar Allah has demonstrated) because of US taxpayer funds, research, technology, and military munitions. During his first term, Trump cited Israel’s apartheid walls as an effective border model to emulate. Benjamin Netanyahu responded in a tweet, celebrating the wall he “built along Israel’s southern border” as a “great success” and “great idea.” The wall had “stopped all illegal immigration.”

Trump now wants his own version of the Israeli Iron Dome to continue the forever war that is the US-Mexico border—an old, permanent frontier counterinsurgency against individuals and communities that since the early 1800s the US has accused of trespassing and waging “irregular warfare.” Even as the US became a global empire, infamous for not respecting the borders and sovereignty of other nations, it used the “invading” purveyors of “irregular warfare” to justify settler colonialism and imperial expansion abroad, border militarization and undemocratic practices at home. In the nineteenth century it was the Seminoles; today it’s the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang. Fascist expressions exist in the US and they began at the frontier/border—more precisely, they began in the late eighteenth century settler colonization of the Ohio Valley. There, historian Frederick Jackson Turner wrote, “we find the germ of the Monroe Doctrine.”1

Jackson Turner’s frontier was always the blood meridian. And now, as historian Greg Grandin writes, “the blood meridian is everywhere, nowhere more so than the border itself, a place where all of history’s wars become one war.”2

Today, that blood meridian includes the Palestine-Mexico border, a term coined by journalist Jimmy Johnson back in 2012. And it too is everywhere, past and present, in material and ideological manifestations: from the fixed surveillance towers built by Israeli defense company Elbit Systems in Arizona to the dozens of university campuses where administrators and donors weaponized antisemitism, criminalized anti-genocide speech, and called in police to violently eradicate encampments created by their own students. This border extends to private, for-profit migrant prisons in Louisiana—deemed “black holes” by human rights organizations—where university students Mahmoud Khalil, Rumeysa Ozturk and Alireza Doroudi suffer unjust detention for speaking out against the genocide in Gaza.

For now, I’ll focus on what the Palestino-Mexico border looks like and how it functions in Arizona, the state where I live. Gaza and the Sonoran Desert are intertwined, as my comrade-geographer Taylor Miller reminds us, bound by “the logic of Western imperialism” and fueled by the profitability of the technologies of occupation and colonialism. She constantly reminds me that borders are quite profitable. Grandin also argues that talking about frontiers necessitates talking about capitalism.3

Subscribe now

“This is our Gaza”

For some of the border vigilante Minutemen who “guarded” the American Maginot Line during the 2000s, they too saw little difference between southern Arizona and Palestine. They quite clearly imagined a Palestine-Mexico border. “This is our Gaza,” a Minuteman named “Earl” told sociologist Harel Shapira as he pointed to the Sonoran Desert. (His 1980s predecessors, sporting assault rifles and Israeli night vision goggles, might have called the desert “Vietnam” or “Central American communism.”) Another named “Jack” showed the sociologist an “Israeli style” fence that the Minutemen were building along the border. He admired the walls built in the West Bank and Gaza, deeming them worthy of replication in Arizona. The Minuteman fence directly followed the building specifications of those settler colonial walls.4

The Palestine-Mexico border in Arizona embodies past and ongoing histories of violence and settler colonialism. It is a series of physical natural geographies—from Gaza and the West Bank to the Arizona-Mexico borderlands—scarred, plundered, made, and remade by shared genocidal technologies of counterinsurgency and “border security” that profit from destroying local pasts and denying future possibilities. Indeed, the Israeli security and defense companies in Arizona—in particular Elbit—tout their surveillance technology as proven and tested in occupied Palestine. In 2012, the promotional brochure for the Hermes 450 drone included a bright yellow stamp that read “battle proven.” “We have learned lots from Gaza,” IDF Brigadier General Roei Elkabetz explained during a border technology fair in Texas in late 2012, “it is a great laboratory.”

Some of those lessons began arriving in Arizona during the early 2000s. Elbit’s “battle proven” Hermes drones started their aerial patrols over the US-Mexico border for the Customs and Border Police (CBP) in 2004. By 2007 and 2008, as journalist Todd Miller has reported, the Golan Group (composed of former IDF soldiers) had begun training Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and CBP agents in Krav Maga, counter-terrorism, and border security.5 Inveterate racist Sheriff Joe Arpiao contracted NICE Systems (also founded by ex-IDF soldiers) for a closed-circuit television camera network to monitor a jail run by the Maricopa County Sheriff's Department. Other “border control” companies like Magna BSP also won contracts from the US government around the same time.

But it was Elbit that won the big prize in the early 2010s during a moment of increased migration flows that Deporter-in-Chief Barack Obama referred to as a “border surge.” The contract paid Elbit hundreds of millions of dollars to essentially build a “smart wall,” organized around fifty-three integrated fixed surveillance towers outfitted with the latest surveillance technology (cameras that included heat sensing, motion sensors, radar systems, and a GPS system). A border patrol agent told Miller that one tower was a “force multiplier” capable of doing the work of “100 agents.”6 This type of integrated smart wall technology had been tested and forged in the West Bank before making its way to Arizona.

Yet Elbit is just one part of a broader border security complex in southern Arizona that includes numerous multinational Israeli and US defense contractors in this profitable forever war that links the Sonoran Desert to Palestine. Some, like Anduril Industries and Palantir Technologies, are explicitly animated by a fantasy of “defending western civilization”—a defense that starts at the border. Plugged into this complex, public universities like the University of Arizona and Arizona State University (entities that continue to profit from plundered indigenous lands) have received government contracts to develop border security technology and think tanks. Army forts and Air Force bases, too, participate in the making of the Sonoran Desert into a bellicose and profitable border workshop of technological terror and subjugation.

This has been the plan for years—at least according to Bruce Wright, CEO of the University of Arizona Tech Parks, back in 2012. That year, he informed Miller that “his operation was trying to form the largest cluster of border-technology companies in North America” in southern Arizona. Miller followed up by asking him where the largest cluster in the world existed. “Wright didn’t hesitate: Israel.”7

Subscribe now

Barbarians at the Gates

Despite all of Trump’s talk of invading Canada or even Greenland, it’s the US-Mexico border—as a perpetually open demarcation of US civilization walls and brown “barbarians at the gate”—that animates the president and his political-social base. It matters not that we have seen historically low numbers of undocumented migration since late 2023. It matters not that physically the US-Mexico border is the most dangerous migrant route in the world, awash in counterinsurgent military technology, border police who brutalize migrants with impunity, and weaponized landscapes like the Sonoran Desert. It matters not that militarizing the borderlands and border enforcement policies since the 1970s shut off the circular migration flows of mostly male Mexican workers who crossed the border for seasonal employment and thereby generated a millions-strong population of undocumented migrants forced to remain inside the US “golden cage.” It matters not that past and present US imperial policies and economic warfare against Latin American and Caribbean countries also generate the very refugees that the Palestine-Mexico border works to violently keep out.

The southern border is and must remain a perpetual Maginot Line, always open and infiltrated, capacious enough to include new threats like those that haunt the work of borderologist and frontier colonial policing expert Taylor Sheridan. When the CIA protagonist of his show Lioness explains to her daughter why she works for the Company after a violent incident at the US-Mexico border, she says “I do this so you don’t have to learn Chinese or Russian.”

The frontier-border is closed and the many barbarians are allegedly storming the gates. As (now former) Congressman Duncan Hunter told a crowd south of San Diego in December 2017, while standing in front of Trump Wall prototypes: “Yemenis, Iraqis, Pakistanis, Chinese, name your former Soviet satellite states, they all come in through Mexico…they come across the border here and that’s what the wall stops and that’s why we need the wall.”

As imagined by the imperialists and genociders who have spent almost two years denying genocide while simultaneously reveling in it (think here of Matt Miller’s Joker grin) and justifying the unjustifiable, the Palestine-Mexico border is a civilizational divide that protects civilization from barbarism; the “West” from the barbaric Rest; the gardens from the jungle; “human” from “subhuman.” It is the global, colonial “color line” that ensures, to recall W.E.B. Du Bois, that “whiteness is the ownership of the world forever and ever, Amen!”

To maintain that ownership has required, and continues to require, the mass death of peoples on the wrong side of the color line. “Exterminate all the brutes,” said Kurtz. “Kill them all” says Senator John Fetterman, during one of his brief and fleeting moments of mental acuity—a lucidity achieved via his genocidal desires.

The world is upside down; time is out of joint. We are told that the live streamed genocide we watch is not a genocide; that Israeli settler colonialism is at best a fabrication, at worst antisemitic blood libel; that the extermination of Palestinian children is a collateral accident, not a systematic campaign to snuff out the future of Palestine; that hospitals in Gaza are actually Hamas bases; that Red Crescent medical workers are Qassam fighters; that exploding pagers that maimed children in Lebanon constitute a “daring” Israeli military operation, not a horrific violation of international humanitarian law.

(International law, by the way, what is that? Where is this international liberal rules-based order they keep talking about? That chatter has lessened of late.)

Conversely, Palestinian efforts to live, to survive—to exercise their natural and legal rights to resist tyranny using a variety of methods including armed struggle—cannot and must not be understood on their own terms, much less supported or deemed worthy of solidarity. Any support for or expressions of solidarity within Western countries must be criminalized, and Palestinian expressions of resistance to genocide in order to exist must be antisemitic. Even minimalist calls for a ceasefire, as the Texan city of San Marcos recently made, can produce political and economic blackmail from genocide supporters like Governor Greg Abbott. The Palestine-Mexico border also runs through Texas.

I naively believed that limits to genocide existed. Never Again, though, has an asterisk. The extermination of Palestinians perpetrated by Israel is allowed, cheered, fueled, armed, financed, and supported by those geographer Linda Quiquivix refers to as the heirs of “Columbus and Them.”8 More than five hundred years of genocide. The “problem from hell” is not an aberration but a structural feature of empires and settler countries founded by Columbus and Them.

These US accomplices and collaborators of genocide really seem to think that they can smash, violate, and brutalize their way out of this foundational contradiction. That waging and supporting genocide in Gaza has no consequence. Perhaps they are right in the short term. But to do so has required them to burn down their own houses—our houses—as they continue to build more political, ideological, and material borders. They are furiously trying to expand the Palestine-Mexico border.

In the next installment, we’ll take a look at what the Palestine-Mexico border looks like immediately south of the American Maginot Line.

Subscribe now

The entries devoted in this series to Domenico Losurdo’s Non-Violence: A History Beyond the Myth would suggest that he is a biting critic of non-violent/antiwar thought. As discussed, Losurdo showed how many pacifists of the abolitionist movement opted for violence in the service of defeating slave holding states. Additionally, Losurdo thought absurd Tolstoy's belief that wars between states would eventually vanish from history, just as dueling between individuals was beginning to vanish during the Count's time. Losurdo was also quick to point out that, prior to World War I, Gandhi defended the participation of Indians in Britain’s war efforts, such as in the Boer War. And as with his more famous book, Liberalism: A Counter History, Losurdo’s Non-Violence shows how Western advocates of perpetual peace often had little problem with American and European imperialism. In this sense Losurdo takes up Lenin’s insight that the end of World War I would see a transition involving “a turn from imperialist war to imperialist peace” as demonstrated by the League of Nations and its Mandate System.

Yet the conclusion to Non-Violence does make a case for what he describes as a “realistic non-violence in a world prey to nuclear catastrophe.” Here I will discuss just one of his realist approaches to non-violence. Losurdo argues that to be credible, anti-violence advocates must understand that, to quote Thomas Hobbes, “the nature of war, consisteth not in actual fighting, but in the known disposition thereto, during all the time there is no assurance to the contrary.” This is to say that antiwar activists must target the underlying social and militaristic conditions that give rise to warfare, such as the arms race, policies of war, preparations for war, and the installations of military bases.

Read more

Subscribe now

A hundred years ago, if someone desired to be a Liberal Protestant minister and attended one of the nation’s leading divinity schools—Union Theological Seminary (associated with Columbia University), Yale Divinity School, or Harvard Divinity School—they would have been surrounded by pacifists ministers and theologians who believed that war was the antinomy of the Christian faith. Today, such divinity schools exist on the margins of their respected universities, which are resoundingly secular. Back then, however, they played not only an integral role in the university but also had a towering influence in American society. Few today remember Harry Emerson Fosdick, the Union Theological Seminary trained pastor of Riverside Church in Morningside Heights. Fosdick was perhaps the most popular minister in America during the 1930s, and a well known public figure. He gave perhaps the most famous sermon of that decade, namely his 1933 anti-war homily “The Unknown Soldier.” If a minister today gave a sermon of this nature regarding the war in Ukraine, they would be accused of being a rightwing enabler. Back, then, however, antiwar liberal theology was at the heart of the American progressive movement.

It is perhaps not by chance that the decline of mainline liberal Protestantism in the United States, going back to the 1960s, has coincided with its turning away from the millenarian pacifist and anti-war theologies of the late 19th/early 20th centuries during the Cold War. In short, liberal Protestantism made peace with the American security state and lost its prophetic voice. Indeed, perhaps the movement’s last major political moment in the US came by way of supporting Martin Luther King’s non-violent protest against racial segregation and injustice.

What intellectual factors led to the decline of the antiwar wing of liberal Protestantism? The simple answer is that pacifism seemed morally irresponsible amid the rise of Bolshevism and fascism. Unlike today, millions of white liberals attended Church during World War II and the early Cold War. Liberal Protestant ministers and congregants, who before and after World War I touted pacifism and participated in the largest global antiwar movement in the history of the world, had to be reprogrammed to embrace a theology that accepted the United States’ new role as a world superpower. This would necessitate jettisoning a liberal theology of pacifism and antiwar resistance for a Cold War theology that defended the necessity of violence for containing small wars so as to prevent total wars. This transformation required that the New Testament—and specifically the pacifist message of the gospels, which was hard to avoid—be reread along spiritual lines; that is, as a heavenly ideal not relevant for this fallen world.

As mentioned, liberal Protestants made an exception for the Civil Rights movement, which allowed antiwar liberal protestants to remember, with nostalgia, the pacifist commitments of their youths. The moment, however, when King applied his non-violence critique to the Vietnam War, those same liberals rejected him. No thinker did more to transform the old antiwar liberal Protestantism into a Cold War liberal movement than the Union Theological Seminary theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, who rebelled against the liberal anti-war Social Gospel theology in which he was originally trained.

Read more

Subscribe now

The unprecedented violence of World War I, and the emergence of anti-imperial movements in its wake, made the 1920s one of the most fecund decades of the twentieth century for antiwar and nonviolent thought. This decade witnessed a rich diversity of moral, spiritual and religious visions of pacifism—as for instance, represented by the thought of such anti-war luminaries as Gandhi, Roman Rolland, and Jane Addams, all of whom were influenced by the religious pacifism of Tolstoy as discussed in my last entry. However, the 1920s also gave birth to elitist technocratic and utopian visions of peaceful governance that also had considerable influence, especially in Europe.

This was no doubt a time of excitement for advocates of European internationalism: the League of Nations was proving to be a facilitator of European unity; the Locarno Pact signed on December 1, 1925, treated Germany and France as equals; Foreign Minister Aristide Briand's involvement with the League improved Franco-German relations, and Germany received membership in the League in 1926. Many economists, diplomats and statesmen, in fact, hoped that the League of Nations would eventually give birth in Europe to a federation that would embody Kant’s notion of “perpetual peace.”

These advocates of a European Union argued that in order to prevent another World War, European nation-states and their respected political parties must accept and adjust to the realities of their economic and industrial interdependence. Economic interdependence, for advocates of the Pan-Europe movement, called into question the salience of political divisions between Left and Right, which they associated with the fading nineteenth-century era of autonomous nation-states. What was needed, advocates of the Pan-Europe movement argued, were technological experts who could rationally coordinate the economies of Europe’s myriad nation-states. Technocratic governance, rather than the violent patriotism of politicians representing their respective nation-states, would, in turn, allow for the peaceful administration of Europe. This vision of peace is well illustrated by leading thinkers of the Pan-Europe movement like Count Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi, who was the founder of the movement and Francis Delaisi, the General Secretary of its French branch.

Read more

Subscribe now

The last two entries in this series addressed questions concerning the relationship between fascism, non-violence, and anti-war thought during the period between the World Wars in Europe and, in particular, France. These reflections were inspired by Donald Trump’s recent re-election to the White House and the fears that he would establish an authoritarian, and even fascist, regime. We will further address the question of non-violence and World War II in the weeks to come. I want to return with this entry, however, to Domenico Losurdo’s book Non-violence: A History Beyond the Myth. To recall, a major claim of this series is that the study of modern non-violence/antiwar thought involves a rich historical dialogue between thinkers and activists spanning from the French Revolution until the present.

Losurdo’s book has the virtue of demonstrating how the non-violent thinking of one generation was picked up and reappropriated by another. The second entry in this series, for instance, unpacked his discussion of how visions of perpetual peace in Europe inspired by the French Revolution influenced the Abolitionist movement in the US. Moreover, perhaps the major aim of Losurdo’s Non-violence is to show how many pacifist and anti-war movements ended up jettisoning non-violence for holy wars against enemies that they came to perceive as less than human–a major point in case being the absolutist William Lloyd Garrison’s decision to use violence against Southern slave owners.

Yet there are weaknesses to Lorsurdo’s argument, which is perhaps most glaringly on display in his discussion of perhaps the most famous modern pacifist of all, namely Leo Tolstoy. During the 1870s, the famous Russian writer had experienced a full blown religious conversion to a form of Christianity that was in part of his own making, but was also profoundly influenced by the American Abolitionists. His non-violent religious philosophy was most famously expressed in the publication of his 1893 book, The Kingdom of God is Within. It argued that the church was too implicated in the violence of the state, while true Christianity was to be found in Jesus’s teachings on non-violence. This message, for Tolstoy, was directly accessible to the human consciousness without need of mediation from religious authorities compromised by their collaboration with the violent political state.

Read more

Subscribe now

The American Left—and here I mean anyone from social democrats to communists—was generally excluded from shaping Joe Biden’s foreign policy. And the Left achieved zero influence over the Kamala Harris campaign’s foreign policy positions, as Harris tacked to the right on immigration, abandoned an earlier pledge to ban fracking, promised to uphold Biden’s policies in the Middle East, pointedly excluded Palestinian and pro-Palestinian voices, and embraced Dick and Liz Cheney. With all that said, the victory of Donald Trump—and his emerging cabinet of hawks—leaves the Left in an even bleaker place.

How can the Left build power and influence foreign policy between now and the 2028 presidential campaign? For the sake of simplicity, we could talk about an “insider track” (attempting to influence Democratic presidential and congressional candidates) and an “outsider track” (protest and criticism aimed at U.S. foreign policy as a whole).

Neither of these options offers a panacea. To start with the insider track, it must be understood that the Democratic Party is hostile to the Left, both at an institutional level and among its leading politicians and professionals. Democratic presidents have borrowed selectively from Left thinking on economics and have incorporated a few Left-leaning voices into economic policymaking, albeit within serious limits—I will leave it others to break down how “Bidenomics” was far different in practice than how it was originally billed. On foreign policy, meanwhile, the dismissal of Left viewpoints is nearly complete. Indeed, much of the bipartisan foreign policy establishment in Washington (meaning both Democrats and neoconservatives, which are increasingly overlapping categories) refuses to even engage seriously with Left views on foreign policy, preferring to dismiss its criticisms and alternatives as “isolationism.”

Yet, with all that said, the Democratic Party remains the most plausible vehicle for bringing any kind of Left viewpoint into actual foreign policymaking. It remains virtually impossible for a third party to break through into electoral viability. And the across-the-board viciousness of the Republicans precludes the Left from taking that party seriously. So leftists hoping to influence policy are stuck with attempting to find a path into the heart of Democratic power circles. Perhaps some 2026 and 2028 candidates will be open enough—or desperate enough—that they might listen.

The Insider Track

Building an Infrastructure to Influence Campaigns

There already exists a range of Left-leaning organizations relevant to promoting foreign policy views, especially in terms of peace, immigration, and climate. This includes organizations such as Win Without War, Peace Action, Jewish Voices for Peace, the National Immigration Project, the Climate and Community Institute, 128 Collective, and numerous others. Left and left-leaning views are also increasingly represented within the DC think tank circuit, from the Quincy Institute (which includes both left and right anti-militarist voices), the Carnegie Endowment’s American Statecraft Project, and the Center for International Policy. However, the Left lacks a coordinating, cross-sector, overtly campaign-oriented infrastructure.

Between 2025 and 2028, I think the insider track requires a Left equivalent of National Security Action, the foreign policy vehicle created by Jake Sullivan and Ben Rhodes while Democrats were out of power. National Security Action was in some ways an empty husk, functioning primarily as a framework for assembling a foreign policy team-in-waiting, but it also had some think tank and rapid response capabilities. The Left needs to be able to offer 2026 congressional candidates and 2028 presidential candidates a similar kind of ready-to-go bench, but with several key differences: (1) more substantive messaging, designed not just to serve candidates but to mold and pressure them, (2) a mass outreach component designed to build ties to grassroots leftists and organized labor, and (3) a media strategy aimed not at promoting the Democratic Party but at promoting a Left foreign policy worldview.

Such a framework would allow for a coordinated, two-front attack on both the Sullivan crowd (Rhodes is somewhat to the left of Sullivan, it should be noted) and the Trump administration. The Left should not get drawn into a generic anti-Trump coalition in which establishment Democrats are the leaders—rather, leftists should vigorously debate the Sullivan crowd across the pages of influential publications and in the think tank and podcast world, while also mounting a full-throated condemnation of Trump policies.

Designing Compelling Messages

It is going to require careful thought to develop simple messages that resonate with voters but that don’t fall into any traps. “End foreign wars and invest at home” is one message that seems to resonate with some voters, for example, but that message can easily be coopted by the Right and is not sustainable, given that the climate crisis in fact calls upon the United States and the Global North broadly to invest ambitiously in climate change mitigation abroad. “Rebuild our alliances and restore American moral leadership” is a message that falls flat with ordinary people, as demonstrated by the struggles of the Biden administration and the Harris campaign in connecting with voters. “A foreign policy for the middle class”—Sullivan’s line—stumbled in its execution but also in its conceptualization, remaining vague and unconvincing. (And the Left, for its part, is not merely interested in the fortunes of the middle class.) Nor should the Left be tempted by the frame of “national security,” which flattens foreign policy concerns and limits foreign policy horizons while also embracing a right-coded, fear-based atmosphere. Progressive efforts to rebrand “natsec” thinking end up playing on right-wing turf.

The most promising messaging to me involves stressing the existential stakes of the climate crisis and the shared humanity of all people. “Let’s survive this together” is the sort of message I would use as a starting point. And I would leave American leadership and exceptionalism out of it—I’m not sure ordinary voters, especially Left-curious voters, care that much, and I think talk of American moral leadership inevitably shades into talk of “the national interest” in ways that undermine global solidarity and that conjure up the interests of Washington over the interests of Americans.

Every story needs an enemy, and I think for the Left, the enemy of our story about global politics should be climate change and corporate power, rather than singling out countries such as Russia or China. That doesn’t and shouldn’t mean any coziness with Russian or Chinese imperialism, but it does mean pragmatism when it comes to dealing with Moscow and Beijing and, at the level of messaging, less talk about the “liberal order” (a fantasy anyway) and more talk about a shared future for all people.

Fleshing Out the Policy Prescriptions

Much has been written about “progressive foreign policy,” and some of that writing has been compelling. Yet there are many critics of existing foreign policy and not as many voices when it comes to building a detailed alternative vision. It is significant that a lot of Left and progressive prescriptions boil down to “stop doing X, Y, Z” and “do more diplomacy.” To be clear, “stop doing X, Y, Z” is a crucial message and there is no path to a Left foreign policy (or to a survivable world) without the cessation of American militarism and aggression. The Century Foundation, for example, has laid out a long list of actions the U.S. should cease doing in the Middle East (and to be fair, TCF also includes some suggestions of what to do instead). But “do more diplomacy” is neither specific nor compelling.

There can be something of a disconnect between the search for a Left global strategy and the generation of specific Left policy prescriptions. A leftist presidential candidate shouldn’t take the stage in Democratic primary debates in 2027 and seem like they’re fudging their answers on Ukraine, Gaza, Iran, or Taiwan and calling in vague terms for “diplomacy.” That candidate should be well prepared by a team of advisors to deliver devastatingly precise recommendations for how to proceed, issue by issue, and then connect those answers back to the overall vision. The aura of foreign policy competence cannot be ceded to the likes of Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, or even Chris Murphy. Fortunately, I think a great deal of work is already unfolding at the issue level, and so the task may be more organizational than intellectual—how to better connect and coordinate, in other words, the work that is already being done, while continuing to push the intellectual frontiers of what can be imagined.

Seeking Institutional Leadership

Almost definitionally, the Left cannot and should not replicate the kind of infrastructure that the Sullivan crowd has—one could envision a Left-leaning foreign affairs consultancy, actually, but it would not look anything like the very troubling WestExec Advisors firm where Antony Blinken and others cashed in during the interval between the Obama and Biden years. The Left has some perches now within the think tank scene in Washington, although liberals and neocons continue to have far more institutional influence.

One challenge for the Left, then, is to think about what kinds of opportunities exist within other institutions—from professional organizations to city councils to community groups, there are platforms and roles available that could feed into a broader Left foreign policy strategy. Indeed, even the (now very remote-seeming) capture of the presidency itself would be a hollow victory for the Left without a massive popular and infrastructural base to lend support to a leftist president. So building power at the local level (not just in a geographical sense, but in terms of one’s own professional milieu too) is critical. Here it is worth giving thought to which kinds of sleepy organizations out there might be politicized and refashioned into tools of power for a rising Left. The local level—city councils, for example—can also be mobilized and attuned more to global issues, from passing resolutions to divesting to putting pressure on state and national officials and politicians.

Subscribe now

Share

The Outsider Track

Maintaining Distinct Channels of Resistance to Trump

In the tradeoff between building a broad coalition and maintaining clarity of message, I think clarity is the higher priority. As many have warned, we may now see some liberals shift away from supporting the Biden-Harris policies towards Israel and towards opposing the genocide in Gaza (and reverberating through the West Bank and Lebanon as well). The Left should look to draw in more ordinary people while not platforming fair-weather elite allies.

There are lessons to be learned here from the Bush era and Trump’s first term. In the mid-2000s, the spectrum of resistance to Bush and the Iraq War eventually blurred Left, progressive, and liberal voices in ways that the Democratic Party capitalized on to win the 2006 and 2008 elections, only to govern from the center if not the center right. Under Trump, the distinctions between Leftists and liberals were starker and firmer, in large part because of the 2016 Democratic primary and because of the groundswell of Left media in the second half of the 2010s. But the elected “democratic socialists” in Congress, most prominently Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, were folded into Biden’s coalition in ways that make the Left’s foothold in Congress—especially after the defeats of Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush—even slimmer than that foothold was circa 2021.

It will be crucial to maintain distinctions between the Left and liberals heading into the 2027-2028 Democratic primaries, and the Left should not easily be persuaded to back an Obama-esque liberal in the primaries just because that person makes vague nods towards leftist rhetoric and ideas. The goal, however, far-fetched it may seem, is to see a genuinely Left candidate win that primary. Outside pressure will be vital not just in trying to deny the nomination to a centrist, but also to win it for someone with solid commitments.

In this spirit, Left outsiders should castigate Trump and his team and blast the Democratic leadership—particularly when Democrats enable Trump—and should also push the “progressives” and insiders to do better. Outside criticism will keep insiders on their toes and, hopefully, give them some cover to argue that their own ideas are not actually “extreme.” Insiders should not punch left, in my view, nor should Left candidates in 2026 and 2028 disavow the support of a rowdy online or offline Left. But a constructive insider-outsider dynamic on the Left could help shift the overall terms of debate.

Building Non-Establishment Power

The Left needs to get its perspectives, at least from time to time, into the pages of elite outlets like the New York Times and Foreign Affairs. But those publications also do a tremendous amount of harm. The New York Times’ role as a mouthpiece for American and Israeli power has been particularly evident during the ongoing war on Gaza. Although the “death of expertise” hurts ordinary people in many ways—for example as in the anti-vaccine movement—the de-centering of elite journalism and “foreign policy experts” could benefit the Left. (The difference, in case it needs to be clarified, is that scientifically backed medical interventions such as vaccines reflect a kind of expertise that is fundamentally more sound and reliable than the idea that someone is an expert on foreign policy simply because they have spent a lifetime talking about it—see Biden, Joe.) So directly attacking bastions of elite foreign policy influence while building up alternative publications, podcasts, and institutions is necessary. Ultimately, too, the nurturing of fundamentally outsider institutions will end up benefiting “Left Candidate 2028” by providing spaces where that candidate can reach and mobilize non-voters.

It is easiest (although not easy!) to build up alternative media institutions. But other kinds of alternative institutions are needed—particularly spaces where the Left can plan and strategize. So if you’re thinking of starting an organization, I say go for it (and I should take my own advice!). And then, too, connections between organizations are just as vital. Pace Ezra Klein and Adam Jentleson, the Left is not just “the groups”; being on the Left means having a worldview that is in fact much more cohesive and forward-looking than that of any other political strand. But to the extent that the Left does exist as “groups,” stronger connective tissue will help to build strength and to resist assaults from the center and the right.

Summing Up

The best-case scenario and most ambitious goal is to not merely survive the Trump era, but also emerge into the campaigns of 2026-2028 with a formidable set of insider and outsider spaces that position the Left to take power in 2029. Success would mean (a) pushing congressional candidates left, including on foreign policy, in 2026 and 2028, (b) having a meaningfully Left candidate emerge to contest the Democratic primaries in 2028, (c) winning the primaries while advancing Left ideas, and (d) winning the presidency. The foreign policy message, I’ve argued, should accent what the Left wants to do proactively just as much as it highlights what the Left wants to curtail and end. And the broad foreign policy platform should be backed and underpinned by well-developed ideas regarding specific foreign policy issues. Getting from this dark moment to that brighter future is partly an intellectual and analytical exercise, but it is much more an organizational challenge, necessitating levels of coordination that the Left currently lacks but seriously needs.

Having a Left president in 2029, or even a president willing to seriously listen to the Left and take on some Left advisors, might be unrealistic. But major swings have happened in America’s past, and in any case the urgency of a world on fire demands bold and imaginative efforts from the factions with the best ideas. The risk of inaction—of a Left that contents itself with analysis and criticism, rather than organization and competition with liberals and reactionaries—is greater than the risk of being overly ambitious.

Subscribe now

Last month I suggested, by examining the infamous political views of the collaborationist Marcel Déat, that in the run up to and aftermath of the fall of France in 1940 a kind of pacifism developed there that was based entirely in defeatism and a sense of fatalism. Nothing could be done to resist the juggernaut of Nazi imperialism, Déat insisted, as its military might was unmatched and it would soon dominate all of Europe, if not the world. Rather than throwing millions of lives away for nothing, Déat encouraged the French people to resign themselves to defeat, with the belief that France could play an integral role in Hitler’s new European order.

In today’s entry, I want to look at a rather different French pacifist response to Nazi imperialism. At the outset, you will find this form of pacifism difficult to grasp, as it accepted some level of violence for the purpose of defeating domestic fascist movements in France–which it connected to the French empire–while denouncing the use of military force against Nazi Germany. The essential context for understanding this paradoxical position is Hitler’s rise to power in 1933.

The subject of Hitler’s foreign policy intentions, after his election as chancellor, caused widespread debate in France and particularly for French pacifists. Part of the confusion lay in differing interpretations of Hitler’s early public speeches. They affirmed Nazi Germany’s desire to live in peace with Europe and the rest of the world—utterances blatantly at odds with the belligerency of Hitler’s Mein Kampf and its promise to seek revenge on France. Rejecting foreign war at all cost, some French pacifists took Germany’s new leader at his word.

One such thinker was the philosopher and adamant anti-colonialist Félicien Challaye, who defended “unarmed peace even in the face of Hitler.” To grasp Challaye’s position first entails understanding that he was an integral pacifist. This group of pacifists typically consisted of left-wing anti-fascists who sought to inform the general public that the Versailles peace settlement that ended World War I was a sham. They argued that the Allied Powers themselves had sinister economic and geopolitical motives that contributed to sparking the Great War. Their efforts in the war, judged integral pacifists, were equally as unjust as those of the Central Powers. The Allied Powers had thus established an unjust peace settlement, which integral pacifists viewed as the source of Europe’s divisions and were quick to connect to its imperial ambitions abroad.

Read more

This is the kind of undertaking that cannot be completed without the support of paid FX subscribers. With that in mind, I’ve decided to release Mike’s piece to the public but the rest will be behind the paywall for our subscribers. If you’re already one of those, thank you for your support and please share the newsletter with anyone you think might appreciate it. If you’re not a paid subscriber yet, please consider becoming one today to get access to this piece and so much more, while supporting the newsletter:

Subscribe now

It’s the (Political) Economy (of US Foreign Policy), Stupid

by Michael Brenes

“It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them.” Bernie Sanders wrote these words two days after the 2024 election, earning him an interview on The Daily podcast and some plaudits among Democrats in Washington, D.C. for (correctly) diagnosing why Kamala Harris lost to Donald Trump.

Others saw Bernie’s words as disingenuous, even apocryphal. Biden was “the most pro-labor president in 60 years,” said one commentator. (Sanders has also called Biden “the most progressive president on domestic issues since FDR.”) 

Both are true. Biden rejected neoliberalism and embraced pro-labor policies. He strengthened the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), supported strikes by the United Auto Workers (UAW), and pushed back against anti-union policies—all things that benefit working Americans. As the journalist and biographer of John Maynard Keynes, Zachary Carter, pointed out in July, Biden created a near full employment economy that saw significant gains in Black and Latino employment and ameliorated income inequality. 

But in an election that hinged predominantly on economic, “kitchen table” issues, the question remains why Biden’s economic platform—“Bidenomics”—did not resonate with voters. Harris touted the administration’s pro-labor record and the impact the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) had—or would have—on the economy, but to no end. Did economic conditions come down to subjective experiences? Vibes? Inflation made people feel the economy was not working; the policies did not matter. 

The answer, I believe, is not “vibes” or inflation alone. Bidenomics failed as a long-term vision of economic recovery for working Americans—to fortify the working- and middle-class in the United States after decades of neoliberalism. First framed as a comprehensive post-neoliberal order, Bidenomics became an industrial strategy to out-compete China on climate and technology. If Bidenomics was subterfuge for “great-power competition” with China—which Van Jackson and I think it was, among others—it could never be a program for the working-class and would fail to remake the Democratic coalition, let alone win the presidency for Kamala Harris.

Biden came to office wanting his presidency to be compared to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s. But unlike FDR’s New Deal, Biden’s “Build Back Better” lacked a vision that could be sold to the American people—even the name had less punch than “a New Deal.” Biden’s “Build Back Better Framework” initially had elements of an expansive social welfare project: universal childcare, maternity leave, good jobs for Americans without a college education. But then that framework ran into Congress. FDR had supermajorities in Congress; Biden had senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema to deal with, along with a sizable Republican minority. 

To get aspects of Build Back Better (BBB) passed through the Senate, Biden discarded its welfarist elements and argued that federal spending on infrastructure and climate were investments in national security. The CHIPS and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) emerged from this shift. “This is not designed to be stimulus,” said head of the Council of Economic Advisers, Cecilia Rouse, after the passage of the IRA. “It’s designed to be the most strategic, effective investments so that we can continue to compete against China and other countries that are making bigger investments in their infrastructure.” The result was a package of tax credits, corporate incentives—and, to be fair, some labor protections—that did not benefit the working-class directly or affect them in the short term, but were constraints to China’s global influence. Then Biden’s enthusiasm for BBB waned after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and in the face of opposition within his own party, and he rolled out climate and labor policies in piecemeal fashion rather than as a unitary, ambitious response to economic insecurity and inequality. High consumer prices overtook the news cycle and outweighed the proposed benefits of what Biden/Harris had to offer, even in a “full employment” economy.

Americans were told in the last weeks of the 2024 presidential campaign that to vote for Trump would mean voting for a fascist. But Harris’s economic strategy was not a bulwark against fascism. As historian Eric Rauchway has argued, FDR’s New Deal offered an attack on a corrupt, oligarchical order, but also a conspicuous vision of social democracy that “gave Americans permission to believe in a common purpose that was not war.” Joe Biden failed to give Americans that chance. And Harris did not have “a thing that comes to mind” that she would have done differently.

But if you want to fight fascism, the lesson of the New Deal is clear: only an affirmative, bold vision of social democracy, one framed in terms of domestic security—not war—and dependent on populist rhetoric, can stave off fascism. A repackaged form of Cold War liberalism—welfare spending through the national security state—is not enough to thwart the neo- or quasi-fascists, the autocrats, or whatever you want to call Donald Trump. This is a lesson the Democratic Party must learn.

Michael Brenes teaches history at Yale University. His new book, The Rivalry Peril: How Great-Power Competition Threatens Peace and Weakens Democracy (co-written with Van Jackson), will be published in January.

Read more

Subscribe now

Donald Trump’s dominant victory in this month’s US presidential election has naturally given rise to much soul searching amongst liberals and leftists. As a professional historian, I have particularly been interested in how my fellow historians have sought to provide answers. Not surprisingly, one group has stood out given their prestigious institutional affiliations, awarding winning books and major media network appearances since Trump’s election in 2016. The so called “resistance historians”—notably Timothy Snyder (Yale), Ruth Ben-Ghiat (New York University), Kathleen Belew (North Western University), Heather Cox Richardson (Boston College), Kevin Kruse (Princeton), and Eddie Glaude (Princeton)—generally see Trump’s rise as a product of white supremacy, misogyny, fascism, information wars, Russian meddling, the post-truth society, conspiracy theories, etc. On this reading, Trump’s electoral success has little to do with policy and even less to do with any substantive failure by Democrats. The threat is external from the Democratic Party even as “MAGA” works within the liberal parliamentary system to undermine it. Hence, there is a need to resist the forces of evil working to bring about the death of democracy for the purpose of establishing an authoritarian regime. 

For their own part, historians who are critical of “resistance historians” believe that they fail to adequately acknowledge how the policies of the Democratic Party itself have played an integral role in Trump’s elections in 2016 and 2024. In the latter contest, it was the Democrats’ inability to respond to inflation–which, in some parts of the country, doubled the costs of groceries and rents–combined with funding two expensive wars, that pushed voters in Trump’s direction. Anyone who had the courage to go on social media following the election witnessed firsthand the rancor between historians as they debated something like the gists of these two perspectives. 

Given this heated debate, I would like to discuss one element of it as it relates to the theme of this series, namely nonviolence and the antiwar movement. One of the more contentious issues that divides contemporary historians is whether Trump is a fascist. “Resistance historians” typically argue in the affirmative and regularly make recourse to the demise of the Weimar Republic as an example of what is happening in the US. Indeed, Vice President Kamala Harris embraced these very claims in the last weeks of the election, after retired General Mark Milley said Trump was “fascist to the core.” Milley’s remark was followed a week or so later by John Kelly, Trump’s former chief of staff, saying that Trump fits the definition of a fascist and prefers a “dictator approach.” Kelly, in particular, recalled Trump saying that he wanted his generals to obey him like Hitler’s obeyed him.

Commentators have suggested that Harris’s negative messaging might have played a role in costing her the election–few Americans even know what fascism actually is, and instead proved more concerned with paying their grocery bills. But for the sake of argument, let’s say the “resistance historians” are right: Trump is a fascist who is undermining liberal democracy the same way that the Nazis undermined the Weimar Republic, and that soon Trump will destroy the constitution and establish something akin to the Fourth Reich. 

If you are an advocate of anti-war and nonviolence, how should you respond to someone who has been likened to Hitler? The Nazi führer presented a major dilemma for pacifists and this series will address the key voices who wrestled with it: Simone Weil, Martin Buber, Gandhi, Bertrand Russell, and scores more. Indeed, the  reputation of pacifism–which had a long and vibrant history throughout the 19th century and into the period between the World Wars–never recovered fully from the Third Reich, whose extraordinary violence forever discredited the idea of pacifism in the eyes of many. Pacifist responses to Nazism, however, were much more complex than often is assumed, and regularly called for self-defense.

Read more

Subscribe now

The major assumption of this series is that there is an anti-war/non-violence political tradition that, even as it has informed anti-war movements around the globe for centuries, has been neglected in the study of the history of political thought. Yes, there have been myriad books and articles devoted to the history of the antiwar movement. But there has been much less of an effort to frame it within the history of political thought—like, for instance, with republicanism, liberalism, democracy, Marxism, etc. To this end, the series aims to discuss the key thinkers and ideas of non-violence, while also bringing attention to the work of practitioners and scholars of nonviolence. But to set this up, I believe it is necessary to devote a number of essays to what constitutes the core features of this tradition. My earliest pieces will be devoted to addressing this matter and specifically in dialogue with Domenico Losurdo’s book, Non-Violence: A History Beyond the Myth.

Losurdo—a highly regarded Italian Historian of a Marxist persuasion who died in 2018—is most well known in the US for his 2005 book Liberalism: A Counter-History. It presents a damning account of the history of liberalism suggesting that its pretense to freedom, rights, and liberty in reality produced forms of exclusion that empowered imperialism, racism, and genocide. As with his work on liberalism, Losurdo’s book on the history of non-violence sees it as flawed and riven by contradictions that, in many instances, led to the inverse of what it had originally proclaimed.

But in presenting defenders of nonviolence in such a critical light, Losurdo often shows how they adjusted, morphed, and adapted it to address new ethical dilemmas and political changes. Indeed, it is these adjustments and attempts at redefinition that offer readers a kind of rise and fall narrative of the non-violent thought. In this sense he sees a clear throughline that connects American Abolitionists, Tolstoy, Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., the Dalai Lama, and so on. Losurdo’s schema is valuable, as not only does he reveal the limitations of non-violence but—in his critique—shows at the same time how it became a tradition in the history of political thought. He also attempts to carve out a space for what he calls “A Realistic Non-Violence in a World Prey to Nuclear Catastrophe.”

I limit myself in this entry to the book’s first chapter, which focuses on the American Abolitionist Movement of the first half of the 19th century. Of crucial importance is the reason why Losurdo commences with the Abolitionist Movement, which is twofold. First, he argues that it marks the advent of the first group committed to building a social political order based entirely on nonviolence. He points to David Dodge’s 1815 book War Inconsistent with the Religion of Jesus Christ, as well as the formation of the American Peace Society (1828) and the founding, by William Lloyd Garrison, of the New England Non-Resistance Society (1838).

Read more

Subscribe now

Let’s start with something I hate doing, which is writing about myself. Normally when I take a few days away from the newsletter I do so hoping that nothing major will happen before we get back to our regular schedule. This time, when I announced on Friday that I was taking a little time off, it was with full awareness that the situation in the Middle East was about to get worse. So I knew it was not an opportune time to step away, but I also knew that my brain was running on ‘E’ and that there probably wouldn’t be a “good” time to recharge in the coming weeks. There hasn’t been a “good” time for a while now, which is how I wound up letting things get to the point where I could barely think straight before I finally tapped out.

Anyway, this brings us to today, and suffice to say this definitely was not an opportune time to take a break. Let’s try to recap what’s happened over the past several days. As most or all of you have no doubt heard, Friday’s Israeli airstrike in the Dahiyah suburb in southern Beirut did in fact kill Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, along with other Hezbollah officials including the group’s southern commander, Ali Karaki, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ senior officer in Lebanon, Abbas Nilforoushan.

We still don’t know how many other people the strike killed, at least partly because of the difficulty Lebanon’s almost non-existent government is having with overseeing a recovery operation in a crowded residential neighborhood that had possibly “dozens” of 2000 pound US-made “bunker buster” bombs dropped on it. The Israeli military estimated that the strike killed some 300 people, but Lebanese officials have so far only confirmed 33 deaths, with 195 wounded and many people apparently still missing. Those same Lebanese officials acknowledge that they’re struggling to assess the destruction. At this point we may never get a full accounting of the toll.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called Nasrallah’s death a “turning point” for his country. The Israeli military (IDF) then resumed pounding Lebanon relentlessly, killing over 100 people in one 24 hour period from Sunday into Monday and carrying out an airstrike in central Beirut for the first time since its 2006 ground invasion of southern Lebanon. Speaking of 2006, news broke Monday evening that the Israeli military (IDF) had invaded Lebanon again, and by Wednesday there were definitive reports of clashes between Israeli forces and Hezbollah fighters (at least one of which didn’t go so well for the Israelis). So far that invasion has taken the form of raids across the border, but the likelihood of a full blown invasion is high. So if Nasrallah’s death was a turning point for Israel, it certainly did not mark much of a change for the Lebanese civilians who are now being killed, maimed, and displaced by Netanyahu’s year long (and counting) violence spree.

(For what it’s worth US officials, and we’ll come back to them below, reportedly believe the Israeli invasion will be “limited.” The reader would be forgiven for wondering if it will be “limited” in the same way the IDF’s assault on Rafah was “limited,” which is to say not limited at all except to willfully blind members of the Biden administration and US media establishment.)

Tuesday brought a whole new avenue for escalation in the form of an Iranian missile strike on Israel, its second such attack this year following a one-round exchange of fire with the IDF back in April. In comparison with April’s incident this Iranian attack was more forceful and apparently more effective. The IRGC eschewed the slow-moving drones it employed last time and instead fired somewhere in the neighborhood of 180-200 ballistic missiles at several military targets, including the IDF’s Nevatim and Tel Nof airbases and Mossad’s headquarters in Tel Aviv. Israeli air defenses (with US help) intercepted many of these missiles but not all of them, as videos circulating on social media showed. Casualties seem to have been light—one person killed in the West Bank, apparently by falling missile debris, with a few people injured by debris in Jordan and Israel. Damage is impossible to assess, particularly given Israeli media censorship, but clearly there were missiles that did score hits on or around the targets noted above.

(Mossad headquarters is, to be fair, located in Tel Aviv’s Glilot neighborhood. CNN pointed out that this is a “densely populated” area, which is correct and thus there was a risk to civilians. There’s no point dwelling on it, but if you were to change a few details of this story one could easily imagine CNN reporting on the devious use of “human shields” to try to protect a legitimate military target. I just figured that might be worth pointing out.)

In short, Tuesday’s attack was more intense than the attack the Iranians made in April, but it was not a drastic escalation. It seems the intent was once again to demonstrate Iranian capabilities while offering the Israeli government a chance to make its own limited response and then push back from the table. The low casualty figure among Israelis gives Netanyahu cover to respond cautiously, and the Biden administration’s efforts to talk down the effectiveness of the attack are presumably intended to gently steer the Israeli leader in that direction, talk of “severe consequences” notwithstanding.

(I guess it might also be worth mentioning the tone of derision that I’ve seen among some in the broadly “pro-Israel” camp when referring to the low casualty count, which kind of gives the game away in suggesting that, as far as Israel and its supporters are concerned, high civilian casualties are a marker of success. I don’t want to make too much of this since it would require nutpicking random social media accounts, but you’ll see an example of what I mean in this piece from The Guardian.)

For those who still care about international law, Iranian officials have justified this strike as as response to the Israeli assassination of former Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran in July, and the assassinations of Nasrallah and Nilforoushan last week. They’ve also referred to their “legitimate right to self-defense under the UN Charter.” Unsurprisingly there’s been a fair amount of disagreement that any of these things justifies this strike under international law. But in a world in which even the US government acknowledges that Israel has probably been violating international law in Gaza but refuses to do anything about it, who really cares anymore? Certainly not the Israelis or Americans.

Right now it doesn’t look like Netanyahu is going to avail himself of the chance to limit further escalation. “Israeli officials” on Tuesday told everyone’s favorite leakee, Axios’s Barak Ravid, that they’re planning a “significant retaliation” to Tuesday’s attack. Ravid reports that Iranian oil facilities are “a likely target,” though “targeted assassinations” and “taking out Iran's air defense systems” are also on the table. That’s a wide range in terms of provocation and within each of those scenarios the options range from symbolic to genuinely destructive, so I don’t want to get into the prediction game here. Systematically striking Iranian oil infrastructure is different from carrying out a damaging but not destructive strike on a single refinery, which is different from attacking a few air defense batteries or taking out some IRGC officers (something the Israelis have done before). All I’m saying is that the rhetoric right now is not looking promising if you’re hoping to avoid a full fledged war with Iran.

There’s been less attention paid to the possibility of an Israeli strike on Iranian nuclear facilities though that’s also in the wind. There’s no question that such a strike would risk a severe Iranian retaliation and paradoxically would probably convince Iranian leaders that the time has come to transition from “nuclear threshold state” to plain old “nuclear state.” But Ravid’s reporting suggests the Israelis are reserving a strike on nuclear facilities for a next round of escalation, should one manifest.

I think my pessimism about all of this is fairly well-founded at this point. If you’ve been paying attention to his actions since October 7, then you know that with the singular exception of that April exchange of fire with the Iranians Netanyahu has at every turn opted to escalate—in Gaza, in the West Bank, in Yemen, and in Lebanon. He’s turned his back on and/or actively undermined every attempt to deescalate the crisis and has forsworn simple retaliation in favor of intensifying the violence of the IDF’s campaigns.

And why not? Through it all—the shocking number of children the IDF has killed in Gaza, the intentional denial of humanitarian aid to civilians, the likely murder of an American citizen, and on and on—the Biden administration has continued to enable whatever the Israelis have done rather than dissuade them from pushing the envelope further (occasional and completely ineffectual expressions of “frustration” notwithstanding). The US secretary of state has gone so far as to lie in violation of US law in order to protect Israeli arms shipments. Every time Netanyahu has taken a precipitous action the Biden administration has not only kept the weapons flowing, it’s dispatched more US military forces to the Middle East to shield Israel from any repercussions. Given that level of pampering it’s no wonder Netanyahu has refused to take any steps that might deescalate regional tension but might prove politically risky at home. He, and Israel, have nothing to lose. The US government has made sure of it.

With all that in mind I still, until the last couple of weeks, would have counted the Biden administration among those who were hoping in the final analysis to avoid a regional war. Its spokespeople and senior officials keep saying so, after all. Even taking into account the extent to which this administration has indulged every Israeli impulse to date—hell, even taking into account Joe Biden’s career-long (and careerist) fixation on pandering to Israel—basic political considerations would argue against enabling a war in the Middle East on the eve of a US presidential election. Joe Biden ran for president on the idea of ending the “forever wars,” of restoring US prestige, of being a steady hand on the rudder in a perilous global age. He’s now manifestly failed on the second and third of those counts and if he shepherds a war with Iran into being he will have failed at all three. I assumed there was some reluctance left within the administration to burn everything down on Israel’s behalf.

I no longer believe the above to be true and I’m kind of chagrined that I ever did, though there are still reporters asserting that Biden tried to talk the Israelis out of invading Lebanon and was essentially told to get bent. Maybe he did, but a report from POLITICO’s Erin Banco and Nahal Toosi on Monday suggested that either Biden’s supposed opposition to a Lebanon invasion is performative or something more disturbing is happening within his administration.

According to Banco and Toosi, senior figures within the administration—chiefly Amos Hochstein, the special envoy who’s supposed to be trying to prevent a war in Lebanon, and National Security Council Middle East coordinator Brett McGurk—have been quietly encouraging Israeli officials to ramp up their campaign against Hezbollah despite “opposition from people inside the Pentagon, State Department and intelligence community who believed Israel’s move against the Iran-backed militia could drag American forces into yet another Middle East conflict.” Either they’re doing that with Biden’s blessing or they’re taking advantage of a lame duck (and maybe cognitively impaired) president to conduct their own foreign policy.

What’s most disturbing about this report is that it suggests Hochstein and McGurk have decided to revive a recurring fad within US foreign policy circles, namely that it’s finally Time To Reshape The Middle East. The basic contours of this vision are always the same—Iran humbled and on the verge of regime change, its nonstate partners broken and scattered to the wind, Israel normalizing relations with Saudi Arabia, Palestinians left in the geopolitical equivalent of Purgatory—only the mechanism changes. One day invading Iraq is supposed to Reshape The Middle East, on another day sanctioning Iran is supposed to get the job done, and right now the crew is humming over the idea of eliminating Hezbollah. Then everything will transform, and surely for the better.

Spencer Ackerman, who has much more direct experience interacting with the sorts of dizzying foreign policy minds who dream up these grand transformative scenarios, also sees the parallels between the Biden team and the neoconservatives many members of that team used to hold in contempt. For McGurk it’s not even as significant a shift as all that—he’s been advising US presidents consistently (and terribly) on the Middle East since the neocon-packed George W. Bush administration so this isn’t an ideological thing for him. Some men just want to watch the world burn, I guess.

Atlantic Council CEO Frederick Kempe perhaps inadvertently contributed to this discourse as well on Tuesday, when he opined that recent events could open the door “to a new order for the Middle East” and that policymakers should focus on “turning gathering threats into historic opportunity.” When people in The Blob start talking like this it rarely ends well.

So it seems that the wars will continue indefinitely, because the Israeli government refuses to stop them and the US government refuses to pressure the Israeli government into stopping them. With that in mind, I guess my main question is pretty basic: where does this all end? Netanyahu and Biden cast everything they’re doing (and, in Biden’s case, not doing) as necessary to secure Israel. But if that’s actually the goal, how do they envision achieving it?

Because at this point there’s no evidence of a plan that’s any more forward thinking than “who should we kill next?” Just let us kill a bunch of Hamas fighters and Israel will be safe. Just let us kill Ismail Haniyeh and Israel will be safe. Just let us kill Hezbollah’s senior command and Israel will be safe. Just let us kill Nasrallah and Israel will be safe. Just let us kill a few thousand Palestinian kids and a few thousand more Lebanese civilians and Israel will be safe. Through all of this Israel is somehow never made “safe.” Safety, and peace, are always just over the horizon, at least one more dead body away. Luckily, in the absence of an actual plan, Netanyahu and Biden can rely on the fact that there always is somebody else to kill.

When asked, Biden and Netanyahu will claim that the current conflict began on October 7, when Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups stormed out of Gaza and attacked military and civilian targets throughout southern Israel, and October 8, when Hezbollah began firing rockets into northern Israel. This is as self-serving as it is wrong. Stripping away the context of the Nakba, the Occupation, the Lebanese Civil War, and the daily insults of apartheid helps preserve the myth of perpetual Israeli innocence and casts those attacks as unprovoked assaults from peoples with whom they had no quarrel and to whom they’d given no offense. It lets Biden and company claim that “there was a ceasefire on October 6” when there most certainly was not.

Loading everything onto October 7 also lets Netanyahu and company avoid answering the “how does this end” question. Because if history began on October 7 then the bad guys who did bad things on that day and the next represent a finite threat, and it may be possible for Israel to kill its way to a resolution. But if we view those events as another cycle of violence in a conflict that dates back more than a century, then it’s clear that Israel cannot kill its way to a resolution, it can only keep killing in perpetuity. The only possible resolutions in that case lie in ideas the Israeli government has never really considered and probably never will—ideas like a genuine and full (not partial, not staged) end to the Occupation and full recognition of Palestinian personhood, not just statehood—unless necessity demands it.

People may read this and feel that I’m intentionally minimizing the October 7 attacks and the subsequent shelling by Hezbollah that displaced tens of thousands of people from northern Israel. While I would push back against rhetoric that casts those events as existential threats to a nuclear-armed, US-backed Israeli state I do not mean to minimize their significance to the Israeli people and especially to those who have been directly impacted. One of the arguments Foreign Policy Sages make when they’re trying to excuse Biden’s refusal to put any guardrails on Israel’s retaliation is that there’s an imbalance in terms of how he and Netanyahu viewed October 7. In the generous interpretation Netanyahu saw it as a threat to the very survival of Israel. In the more cynical interpretation he saw it as a threat to the survival of his own political career. But either way he saw it in catastrophic terms, and I think it’s fair to say so did most Israelis. I’m certainly in no position to say they were wrong to do so, even as I criticize the violence of their government’s response.

Biden, this argument goes, just never had the kind of leverage necessary to push Netanyahu onto a less apocalyptic path because it was much more important to Netanyahu that he respond to October 7 with genocidal violence than it was to Biden to prevent that. Or, rather, Biden did have the leverage but he was never prepared to exercise it for any of a variety of reasons—his sympathy for Israel, his fear of the perceived political costs, his genuine and stubborn (to the point of arrogance) belief that his “bear hug” approach was the right idea, his (admittedly speculative) cognitive decline. For whatever reason or reasons, stopping all the killing just wasn’t important enough to him to risk leaving his own mental and political comfort zone.

I think this is where we should end, on the by now inescapable fact that when it comes to the killing of Arabs (or Iranians, or Turks) Joe Biden just doesn’t care. He’s incapable of seeing those deaths as losses in the same way he views the loss of, say, an Israeli life or a Ukrainian life. This is even true when the Arab (or Turk) in question happens to be a US citizen. He doesn’t even care enough to stop Netanyahu from thoroughly and repeatedly humiliating him. And while it’s perhaps more blatant in Biden’s case he’s not alone in this—much of the US foreign policy establishment feels likewise, which is why the Atlantic Council’s Kempe can wax optimistically about “a new order for the Middle East” that, in the unlikely event it were to come about, would be founded on the bodies of thousands of dead Palestinian and Lebanese civilians who didn’t ask to be sacrificed on the altar of the Brave New World that Amos Hochstein and Brett McGurk are hoping to birth.

This inability to acknowledge the personhood of the people Israel keeps killing is the reason why Joe Biden refuses to lift a finger to stop it. It’s the reason why his administration can talk at length about supporting Israel’s “right to defend itself” and Israel’s “right to exist” while ignoring and tacitly rejecting the notion that Palestinian or Lebanese individuals might possess those same rights. It’s the reason why Benjamin Netanyahu and the rest of the Israeli political elite never have to articulate a real plan for peace. There’s always somebody else to kill, and the US government is always happy to support their killing.

As he’ll get into below, Daniel’s initial contribution to FX will come in the form of a monthly series on the anti-war movement. Beyond that my hope is that he’ll continue to turn up as our other contributors do, whenever they’ve got something to share. Today’s introduction to the series and to Daniel himself is open to all readers, but the remainder of his anti-war work will be reserved for paid Foreign Exchanges subscribers. As a rule I leave contributors’ pieces free to the public, but this series is a unique project and as such we’re offering it as a reward for our paid subscribers, who are the folks who make this newsletter possible. If you want to support FX and get access to Daniel’s series please subscribe today:

Subscribe now

I’m grateful for the opportunity that Derek has afforded me to run a monthly feature here at Foreign Exchanges devoted to the “anti-war political tradition.” I have the strong conviction that this tradition is critically needed in this moment. Whatever hope there might have been under Joe Biden to halt the US’ forever wars—a pledge that marked his 2020 presidential campaign—has been upended by the wars in Ukraine and Palestine, in which the Democratic president has approved nearly limitless financial assistance for the Ukrainian and Israel war efforts. However justified these wars might be in the eyes of their defenders, the question arises as to what has happened to the anti-war wing of the Democratic Party.

The fact of the matter is that anti-war protests have been in decline since the end of the Vietnam war with few exceptions along the way, perhaps most notably the nationwide protests against George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq. Most Democratic politicians, however, backed that war, perhaps most notably Hillary Clinton—a fact that Barack Obama was able to successfully use against her in the 2008 Democratic presidential primary. Obama himself, though, would continue the country’s forever wars, particularly through a drone bombing campaign that involved nearly six hundred airstrikes across three countries—Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen. 

As the Israeli campaign in Gaza threatens to spill over into a larger Middle East war, and fears mount over nuclear escalation in Ukraine, US forever wars—whether through direct or indirect intervention—show no signs of ending. The anti-war movement proves to be in desperate need of revival. And there are signs that it might be experiencing such a revival: the Floyd protest against police violence went global, for example, and student protests against the Israeli campaign in Gaza invoked for many the memory of 1968. Yet the anti-war political tradition is one that is hardly taught in political science and history departments. Instead, if one were to survey the classes being offered this fall in schools around the country, one would find ample offerings on rightwing nationalism, violence, fascism, nativism, etc., but few on the anti-war movement.

This is a shame, as the anti-war political tradition has a rich and deep history. It can be traced back to antiquity as represented by the words of the Mahavira, the Buddha, and Jesus; passages in the Hebrew Bible; ancient Greek philosophical texts; and so on. Fast-forwarding to more recent history, the 20th century witnessed powerful anti-war/non-violence movements in India, Russia, throughout Western Europe, the US, South Africa and elsewhere. During the years between the World Wars, anti-war movements gained millions of adherents from around the world.

What makes anti-war thought unique, in other words, is its unusual global scope and representation. Some of the most noted anti-war thinkers, for instance, were women: Bertha von Suttner, Jane Adams, Dorthy Day, Simone Weil, G.E.M. Anscombe. It also is an ecumenical tradition in this sense that it has brought atheists, agnostics and theists together to resist the evils of war: Bertrand Russell, Tolstoy, Martin Buber, Albert Schweitzer, Dorothy Day. And of course, some of the leading anti-war thinkers were Indian anti-imperialists, most notably Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore.

Subscribe now

Share

In the US, the anti-war tradition was key both to the abolitionist movement, which was significantly influenced by Quaker pacifist thought, and the Civil Rights movement led by Martin Luther King Jr. Indeed, there is a way to write a modern global history through the lens of non-violence. It might start with doctrines of perpetual peace advocated by the Quaker William Penn in An Essay Towards the Present and Future Peace of Europe (1693) and the more secular Immanuel Kant in Perpetual Peace (1795). Such a project would then show how doctrines of perpetual peace and anti-war influenced abolitionist thinkers such as Elihu Burritt. It was Burriett who played a major role in shaping the anti-war and pacifist outlook of Leo Tolstoy whose writings, such as The Kingdom of God is Within You (1894), had a fundamental influence on Gandhi who, in turn, influenced the non-violent social philosophy of MLK.

At the same time, the anti-war tradition has substantial baggage, which is something this series will address at length. Marxists have long accused the pacifist variant of anti-war thought of being a bourgeois doctrine and prop for European imperialism. Moreover, there were many anti-war thinkers in Europe who appealed to non-violence as a way of justifying Nazi occupation and collaboration—it would be a lesser evil to acquiesce to Nazi defeat, thought Marcel Déat, one of France’s most infamous collaborators, than to fight and risk losing millions of French lives. Arguments like Déat’s went a long way to discrediting the anti-war political tradition after World War II, and especially pacifism. Like any political tradition, anti-war thought and history has its promises and perils. But we have gone to the other extreme today, by generally ignoring it at a time when today’s collaborators are pro-war.

After World War II in the US, the anti-war tradition was perceived by Cold War liberals as empowering isolationism and defeatism. For a Cold War liberal like Reinhold Niebuhr anti-war thought proved a significant liability to liberal regimes threatened by dangerous ideologies. Through his and others efforts, American Liberalism Progressivism, which had been marked by the Social Gospel and pacifist Kingdom of God theology of the late 19^th/early 20^th century, transformed into a Cold War liberal defense of the American security state. Similar dynamics played themselves out elsewhere as the security dynamics of the global Cold War transformed Buddhist (Sri Lanka), Jewish (Israel), Hindu (India) political movements once committed to pacifism into instruments of national state violence.

Put differently, religious infused anti-war movements that marked the first half of the twentieth century—Christian, Hindu, Jewish, Buddhist, etc.—have been replaced by religious nationalist movements that embrace violence. This would suggest that one way to overcome violent forms of religious nationalism would be to work to return these religions to their anti-war and peace-making traditions, instead of using them as justifications for the violent national security state.

One goal this series hopes to accomplish, then, is to play a small role in reviving the anti-war political tradition. As such, my monthly entries might highlight the thought of a key anti-war figure. Or they might discuss an important anti-war movement that has been forgotten. I might also offer commentary on recent literature devoted to this tradition. In addition to these monthly entries, I will conduct a regular interview series for the American Prestige podcast devoted to the anti-war movement. My goal will be to offer discussions with activists and commentators devoted to this tradition.

In conclusion, I should say something about my own personal interest in this topic. I’m a professional historian whose work principally concentrates on western European intellectual history. But prior to my decision to become a historian, I actually was considering a ministerial career, and received my MA in theology from a protestant seminary in the mid-2000s. The War in Iraq had gone completely awry, and I had become disillusioned with American foreign policy. The most influential theologian writing at this time was Stanley Hauerwas, who was an uncompromising pacifist famous for his biting critiques of how Cold War liberal protestantism was basically an idolatrous doctrine of the American security state.

Given the widespread support for the Iraq debacle amongst both Republicans and Democrats, I became very influenced by Hauerwas’s diagnosis. After moving away from the divinity school world, I enrolled at Columbia for a PhD in European history. The book I’m almost finished writing, based on my dissertation about the French liberal Raymond Aron, took me far away from my divinity school studies. At the same time, I remained very influenced by the anti-war tradition I discovered in the mid-2000s. I now believe that I can use my training as a historian to look at anti-war thinkers and movements through the prism of the history of political thought and intellectual history. As such, my next scholarly project is a global history of the anti-war/non-violence political tradition, and as a teacher I would like to see this tradition taught more in my respected field. I hope this series might be a resource for readers of Foreign Exchanges.

Subscribe now

Reading and watching mainstream US media coverage of Mexico’s recent elections reminded me of two infamous albeit hilarious moments in American presidential history. During his 1976 presidential campaign, Gerald Ford made a stop in San Antonio, Texas to visit that mythical cornerstone of Texan identity, the Alamo. When someone handed the president a plate of tamales, he quickly took a bite—without removing the cornhusk. “He nearly choked,” a CBS correspondent recalled. The mayor of San Antonio would later comment that “it was obvious he didn’t get a briefing on the eating of tamales.”

At least Ford avoided an international incident, his faux pas committed on US soil. Three years later, the candidate who defeated him for the presidency found himself in Mexico City during a tense moment in US-Mexico relations caused by oil prices and migration. The trip did achieve some notable successes. Jimmy Carter addressed the Mexican Congress in Spanish, acknowledging that the US was “the fourth largest Spanish-speaking nation” in the world. Taking Leonard Bernstein with him to conduct the Mexico City Philharmonic and lead a concert described as “pure magic” also proved quite popular. In private, both Carter and Mexican president José López Portillo “got along well.”

But during a luncheon upon arriving in Mexico City, Carter erred. After his Mexican counterpart bluntly levied a series of grievances and criticisms during a toast, the one-time peanut farmer from Georgia responded by recounting the time he got “Montezuma’s revenge” during a previous trip to the country. Sitting next to Carter, his wife Rosalynn “blushed and covered her face in embarrassment.”

“It’s not easy living next door to a superpower,” Mexican poet Octavio Paz wrote in 1987, particularly when “twin sisters, ignorance and arrogance, characterize a general American attitude toward its southern neighbor.”1 Ignorance and arrogance, alive in the past as demonstrated by Ford and Carter, continue to thrive in the present. And not just because Todd Richman—co-chair of a Zionist Democratic Party advocacy group—tweeted that President-elect Claudia Sheinbaum “is not involved in the Jewish community and thanked Jesus for her victory.” Sheinbaum indeed thanked Jesus for her victory: Jesús María Tarriba, her husband.

On a more serious note, the 2024 elections demonstrate, yet again, that key segments of US media—those writers and commentators consumed most by policymakers and political elites—look at our southern neighbor through ominous sepia-colored lenses. Similar to some movies—perhaps most famously in Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic (2001)—the view of Mexico they offer is darker and hazier than the reality. “Everything in the United States is technicolor, it’s neat and beautiful, while Mexico is sepia, old, and shadowy,” Mexican politician Dulce Maria Sauri remarked after that movie’s release.

Subscribe now

Share

Sticking to the Script

While much of mainstream media focused on President-elect Sheinbaum’s identity as the first woman and Jewish president of Mexico, some commentators relied on old tropes and framings in their attempt to understand her victory—and that of the MORENA-led political coalition, “Let’s Keep Making History,” that backed her. MORENA, allied with the Labor and Green parties, scored big victories in congressional and gubernatorial elections.

How could a country wracked by violence and narcos vote for more of the same? If Mexico is sepia and democracy has spent six years dying at the hands of incumbent President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), why did Mexicans overwhelmingly choose continuity? As David Leonhardt and Ian Prasad Philbrick wrote in the 3 June edition of “The Morning Newsletter” for The New York Times, “when foreigners hear news from Mexico, it can often sound chaotic, involving cartels, crime or migration surges.” I wonder why. In their defense, Leonhardt and Prasad Philbrick did attempt to understand the seeming contradiction by interviewing knowledgeable reporters and researchers on the ground in Mexico (but not without the usual, flattening identification of AMLO as a populist “like Narendra Modi in India, Viktor Orban in Hungary and Donald Trump in the U.S.”).

In contrast, David Frum is peak sepia. Writing in The Atlantic the day after the elections, the Axis of Evil speechwriter argued that our southern neighbor is on the verge of simultaneously becoming a failed and an authoritarian state. Mexico, he warns, is “heading fast toward authoritarianism and instability.” He’s been on this beat for the last year or so. Frum attributes this slide into state failure and authoritarianism to AMLO’s single-minded effort to end “the multiparty competitive democracy” that Mexico “achieved in the 1990s.” In this formulation, the current president is the cause—not the effect—of the failure of the country’s decades-long “democratic transition.” What remains unexplained is why AMLO and the social movement-turned-political-party MORENA he founded has generated overwhelming electoral victories in two presidential election cycles. Instead, we get an image of a country about to fall into the hands of criminal insurgencies, ruled by a supportive narco-president who’s about to hand over power to a successor whose lack of charisma or political skill will force her to be authoritarian. Taylor Sheridan may have found his script for Sicario 3.

Frum’s arguments are not new nor original. The election results seemingly intensified the sort of failed state, narco state representations that US commentators have trafficked for more than a decade. Frum’s colleague Anne Applebaum took a break from Saving Western Civilization in Eastern Europe to report on AMLO’s destruction of democracy “from the inside” in early 2023. The Wall Street Journal’s resident Pinochet fan Mary Anastasia O’Grady has offered a grave assessment about  “socialist” AMLO and Sheinbaum, thereby threatening us with a good time. New York Times Op-Ed author Bret Stephens has long written about the country in these terms. Raised in Mexico as the son of a wealthy US chemical company executive, he has argued that the country is on the road to becoming the next Venezuela. To avoid a “fast track to failed state,” he even advocated an “Iraq-style surge” to defeat “drug-cartel insurgents.”

Frum, et al. are joined by a few elite Mexican commentators who act as native whisperers for gringo audiences. Shuttling between wealthy Mexico City neighborhoods, television studios, and New York City/Washington DC, these commentators have demonstrated an inability or unwillingness to seriously and critically engage the electoral results. Instead, they forecast the end of democracy and the return of the “perfect dictatorship” as Enrique Krauze recently argued; in other words, democracy has suffocated democracy. Writer and professor Jorge Castañeda did at least acknowledge the key role of minimum wage increases and social welfare programs for MORENA’s overwhelming victory after decades of inequitable neoliberal economics. Yet in an essentialist turn, he explained Mexicans’ preference for short-term cash handouts over improved public services and infrastructure by citing the country’s “traditional ethos of individualism and skepticism.” The voting poors simply do not know what’s good for them.

A prolific writer in numerous English-language outlets, political scientist Denise Dresser echoed that paternalism when she provided some sort of historical explanation during a television roundtable the night of the elections. Distressed, she lamented that Mexicans had chosen, “to once again put on the chains that we had liberated them from, in the 1980s and 90s.” In this mythical, top-down rendition of the history of struggles against the decades-long dictatorial rule of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), it was the enlightened elite few who conquered democratic reform for the working masses. “Mexican Khaleesi,” breaker of chains and bringer of democracy, was betrayed by the very people she sought to liberate. This rendition not only marginalizes the role of everyday people and popular movements in challenging PRI rule. It also flattens the very “democracy” that they fought, sacrificed, and in many cases, died for—an array of definitions that was sometimes socialist, mostly social democratic, but always more than a nominal, bare exercise of voting for the alternance of political parties in power.

Subscribe now

Share

Moving Beyond the “Bolshevism-Iran-Venezuela-Failed-Failing State Next Door” Narrative

It’s long past time to remove the sepia filter and to understand Mexico within its own complex historical and political terms, its own promises and contradictions, to move beyond the long list of labels that Americans have deployed to characterize our southern neighbor. What purpose do these labels serve? As future president Plutarco Elias Calles told The New York Times in 1921, the American charge of “Bolshevism made against the Mexican government is a ‘mere term of political reproach’ and a ‘phantom to scare fools.’”

This is not to deny that the country and the incoming Sheinbaum administration face crucial challenges when she assumes office in October. There are many open questions:

• How will they manage US-Mexico relations? Will Sheinbaum and MORENA continue to serve as a de facto Border Police for the Americans? Migrants subject to brutal state and cartel violence say they “would rather cross the Darien Gap 10,000 times than cross Mexico.”

• How will the president-elect, an environmental scientist by training, tackle the catastrophic consequences of capital-induced climate change in the form of drought and the lack of water, in a country where export-oriented agriculture consumes most of the water resources?

• Will Sheinbaum maintain the current militarized, lethal approach to violence, organized crime and drug trafficking that only generates more violence and has politically and economically empowered the Mexican military?

• Can MORENA implement a progressive taxation and redistributive model that raises taxes on the country’s wealthiest citizens, including the twenty or so billionaires (some of whom are quite friendly with the current administration)?

• Will Sheinbaum’s brand of capitalism with a human face—what she terms “conscious capitalism”—reduce poverty rates amidst low economic growth and looming public deficits? How will her government calibrate its proposed, far-reaching reforms package—including a controversial overhaul of the country’s judicial system—with the disciplinary power of foreign capital and USMCA (NAFTA 2.0) nation-states?

Sheinbaum has a mass democratic mandate. What will she do with it?

Reducing such complex, deep-rooted issues to the whims of “populist” leaders with authoritarian dreams and failed state results is not only intellectually dishonest. It’s also politically dangerous. The framings and tropes advanced by US commentators like Frum tend to generate disastrous US policy proposals—and even popular American support for them. In the last two years, representing Mexico as some sort of failed narco-state willfully poisoning Americans with fentanyl has allowed GOP presidential candidates and politicians to advocate for an absurd laundry list of military actions against our southern neighbor. Throughout 2023, opinion polls consistently and unsurprisingly showed high support from GOP voters for military intervention (regardless of party affiliation, a majority of Americans supported such action, though the number tended to drop if the US intervened without Mexican permission).

Moreover, such reduction ignores the transnational nature of these pressing issues. Mexico could implement the most progressive, cutting-edge approaches to illicit drug trafficking (an actual “hugs not bullets” approach) and yet still fail because it shares a nearly 2,000 miles-long border with the world’s largest narco-state, awash in military-grade weaponry. The Biden administration does recognize the interconnected dimensions of these issues but their solutions remain superficial, militarized, and punitive. Its hard-right tack on so-called border security—a euphemism for the system of migrant brutalization and torture that currently exists at the US-Mexico border—depends on Mexico willingly acting as colonial Border Police while refusing to address the factors that rob migrants of the right to stay home. Latin American and Caribbean migrants, past and present, remain the “harvest” of the US empire.

An irony of this US sepia filter approach to understanding Mexico is that these two countries possess a multitude of deep, strong connections: historical, cultural, political, and socio-economic. And yet Mexico seemingly remains, in the words of my Arizona State University colleague Andrés Martínez, “the stranger next door.”