An out of control military has been the death of many systems of representative democracy. Roman analogies for the United States aren’t my favorite, but the decades long transition from Republic to one-man rule was all about over-mighty generals “reluctantly” deciding they had to take control, first of foreign policy, then the entire state. By the end, Rome traveled all the way from a citizen military to a military without citizens.
A more recent example that has terrifying parallels to how the US military is acting in the Middle East and elsewhere is the Japanese empire before World War II. In the first decades of the 20th century many figures in Japanese government and society were consolidating a real representative democracy. The era between 1905 and 1932 has become known as “Taishō Democracy”. Unfortunately there was also a too independent military with its own competing ideas. The military repeatedly acted on its own to drag Japan further into existential conflicts that they believed required authoritarianism at home. Japanese political figures who attempted to constrain the military were often assassinated by soldiers, or those with connections to the military. The military launched a broader war in China in 1931, and murdered the prime minister in 1932, bringing the era of Taishō Democracy to a close.
We used to see pre-World War II Japanese politics as an alien and somewhat pathetic thing. Now it’s beginning to look disturbingly familiar. The US already has a military and foreign policy establishment that drags us into wars abroad that the public and many of our elected figures do not want. The blowback from all these wars is very apparent, weakening our own systems, leading to a $40 Trillion national debt, militarized police, the decline of free speech, and Donald Trump himself. We haven’t gotten to the point where the military industrial complex is assassinating anti-war elected officials yet, but outlets like the New York Post and Fox News are certainly laying the groundwork for that with NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
Donald Trump’s policy has been very loud. It’s done terrible things to most aspects of US government and society. He’s been destructive to everything he touches, from trade policy, to finance, to our alliances, to our elections and the basic functioning of our federal system. All of this is very bad, and is desperately in need of correction, but the US Military is the largest problem. If we don’t course correct massively in 2029, the US republic will become unrecognizable, and may well fall in the lifetimes of some of us.
1989-2016
The United States had already set up a very dangerous military situation before Trump came to power. After the end of the Cold War, Washington, DC scrambled to justify the defense budgets that keep those DC suburbs among the richest in the country. There’s still democratic influence on government policy, or at least there was in the 1990s. So defense budgets did fall a little, and there was a necessary program of Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) after the Soviet Union fell.
In the 1990s the US public was eager for the peace dividend BRAC provided. The Foreign Policy Establishment worked hard to make sure they didn’t get it. Lockheed Martin got Clinton to expand NATO against the advice of very serious cold warriors like George Kennan and Henry Kissinger. Think tanks and defense contractors toiled across the 1990s to make sure that Iran and North Korea, who both had deals with the United States in the earlier parts of the decade, were kept isolated and encouraged to become “rogue states”. It was a bipartisan effort. Bill Clinton killed the signed deal that would have brought US oil companies back to Iran, and Republican congresspeople made sure the US never delivered on its side of the nuclear non-proliferation deal with North Korea.
The September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, DC meant that the foreign policy establishment didn’t have to desperately antagonize marginal states anymore. For a few brief years, the US public was just as bloodthirsty as Washington, DC was. Those years proved to be incredibly damaging.
Most now concede that the invasion of Iraq was a hideous failure. Iraq had nothing to do with the 9-11 attacks, and what the US has produced post-invasion is somehow worse than Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. The country is weak, entirely dependent on the US and Iran for basic security, and falls into chaos that requires the expenditure of more military equipment every couple years. This is great for the Pentagon, but horrible for the US tax payer, the region, and humanity in general.
The War on Terror, which is very much still on-going, was so much bigger and worse than Iraq. In US media we focus on the US lives lost, but not enough on the degradation of US principles, and the very idea of living in peace time for the US and dozens of other countries. Everywhere US military force has been applied, things have gotten much, much worse. Somalia and Yemen were two of the most prominent targets of the US War on Terror. The main products of 25 years of drone bombings to combat terror, are Al Shabab in Somalia and the Houthis in Yemen. Syria is now run by an offshoot of the Al Qaeda organization that did 9-11.
In the US, we rarely talk about the malign effects on the countries we were supposedly helping to free of terrorism. We never talk about the terrible effects this had on the rest of the world. Much like the British Empire’s Scramble for Africa that created a poisonous international environment that led to World War I, the US’s Terror War has brought scared nationalist bullies to power across the world. Bush’s Iraq war, and Obama’s betrayal of the UN over Libya are the two most egregious single acts, but the whole trend of US foreign policy this century has been to convince Russia and China to arm up and get belligerent. Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin would either not be in power, or would be very different politicians without the US’s quarter century of insane aggression.
By 2016, the US public was waking up to this orgy of failure from the Pentagon and the foreign policy establishment. The US’s participation in the removal of a democratically elected pro-Russia president of Ukraine in 2014, had led to Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Obama, our last president of sound mind and body, was uncomfortable with the idea of proxy war with a peer nuclear power, and tried to settle the Ukraine issue with the Minsk agreements of 2014 and 2015. The Islamic State was very scary, and superficially helped build the case for US military spending, but two seconds of reflection made it very, very obvious that the Islamic State was a direct product of US policy. It quickly dried up and blew away after the CIA stopped funding it.
By 2016 it looked like there was finally a real chance of a reckoning. The Democratic electorate had long been sick of our wars, and in 2015, an early front-runner in the race for the Republican presidential nomination was Libertarian Rand Paul, one of the few consistently anti-war Republicans.
The War on Terror had been such an obvious, egregious failure. It had clearly made everything worse. Surely, nothing could save the Pentagon and the broader US foreign policy establishment from some real reckoning, real transparency, real punishment, and real defunding.
Nothing but Donald Trump, that is.
2017-2021 Trump I
Trump provided such a diversionary spectacle that no one in Washington, DC was ever held accountable. All of a sudden the monstrous failures that ran our national security state were media darlings. The CIA and the FBI woke up in January 2017 to find themselves sacrosanct heroes that Democrats were supposed to fall in love with! A bit of this was a rational response to the godawful corruption and criminality that is Donald Trump, but mostly it was the Russia Hoax.
There was very real mass revulsion at the idea of Donald Trump as president. I remember standing in an apartment in downtown San Diego (San Diego!) in January 2017 as tens of thousands of protesters streamed by in the first Women’s March. I was in the crowds that almost shut down LAX a few weeks later. #Resistance was a mass movement. It's the selfish elites that channeled that rage into farcical conspiracy failures that miserably failed to stop Trump.
Hillary Clinton and her supporters couldn’t bring themselves to admit that they were less popular than Donald Trump, and the National Security state desperately needed a glow-up after 15 solid years of nightmarish failure… so the US establishment decided to blame the election of Donald Trump on Russia. Nothing was ever proven, because nothing was ever really there. The only serious cases against Russian figures were dropped for “security reasons”. I’m not sure what Clinton got out of this farce, but it’s clear that the military industrial complex profited mightily.
Our national security sector was no longer the hapless twits who had pointlessly wasted 40 trillion dollars burning down half the world. They were now our heroes against an “authoritarian axis” of Russia, China and Donald Trump.
Instead of being forced to answer for the complete failure of the War on Terror, they were allowed to hit the reset button, with almost no public scrutiny. The Pentagon adopted an explicit policy of starting wars with Russia and China. It was called “Great Power Competition”. There’s no way they would have been allowed to adopt this insane policy without the idea, never proven, that foreigners had somehow inflicted Donald Trump on us. China has been smart enough not to play our game by our rules. Vladimir Putin, unfortunately, is a fucking idiot, who jumped right into the trap the US foreign policy establishment laid for him.
There’s still a perception that the first Trump term was somehow good for Russia. This is completely false. Trump said some nice things, but he’s a complete incompetent. The main through line of his two terms is his inability to exert his will anywhere. The US congress, working with the “adults in the room”, the standard military industrial complex goons like Mike Pompeo Trump hired in his first administration, attacked Russia mercilessly. The Minsk agreements between Russia and Ukraine put together under Obama were trashed. The US & NATO began a massive military build-up in Ukraine. The US congress introduced sweeping new sanctions aimed at destroying the Russian Defense industry. This set a time-bomb that would go off in February 2022.
The War on Terror was completely unleashed in Trump’s first term. Obama had put a veneer of legality on the chaos of Bush’s assassination programs, and claimed that every strike was carefully justified. Trump did away with all of the legality, and stepped up the strikes, carrying out more in his first term than Obama did in his two terms, with dramatically reduced oversight. This “gloves off” approach led to even more failure, producing the rebellion of the Sahel countries, where US built militaries threw out their governments and then threw out US military forces across the years of the Biden administration.
Perhaps the worst policy of Trump’s first term would be the “Abraham Accords”. Israel did a series of deals with weak, authoritarian governments, to isolate the Palestinians and move closer to a war on Iran. These agreements were a formalization of the priorities of CENTCOM, the US military organization that runs the Middle East. The main fruit of these accords was of course October 7th. So far, only one of the four initial signatories, Sudan, has fallen into horrific civil war, but it could just be a matter of time before the UAE, Bahrain and Morocco disintegrate similarly.
One of the worst legacies of the first Trump administration was the way that figures like Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley and other government bureaucrats were outright celebrated for ignoring Trump’s orders. When Trump requested changes to Middle East policy, his underlings simply ignored him and lied to him to maintain CENTCOM’s troop presence in Syria. Trump is a bozo, but he is the elected president and commander-in-chief. If one president can be disobeyed without consequences, the following presidents will be disobeyed as well.
2021-2025 Trump II
Joe Biden was a sad joke. He was inflicted upon us by a Democratic Establishment that didn’t see anything wrong with the pro-business and pro-war fundamentalism that had brought us Donald Trump in the first place. Biden was so unexciting ( as illustrated by the song above ) that what should have been a titanic Covid-fueled blue wave in 2020 was a damp squib, leaving the Democrats with vanishingly slim control of Congress.
Any sensible reining in of the military forces Trump had set free was at the mercy of Bob Menendez, the powerful chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Menendez was a nominal Democrat, so his vote was crucial to anything that Biden wanted to do in a 50-50 congress with VP Kamala Harris as the tie-breaker. Menendez was also a paid agent of the US’s Middle East military forces, CENTCOM, through the more direct payments he was taking from Egypt and Israel among others. Menendez is now in jail, as the only Senator ever convicted of being a foreign agent.1
There was so much Trumpian wreckage to clean up, from Covid to the climate, that it was easy for the foreign policy establishment to keep wreaking chaos with no oversight. They were heroes against Trump after all, and Biden had always been a notably stupid foreign policy hawk. Constitutional governance of the US military continued to disintegrate. It’s against the law to appoint a recently retired general to run the Department of Defense. When Trump appointed Jim Mattis in 2017, there was some controversy. When Biden appointed Lloyd Austin in 2021, there was almost none.2
Biden, despite campaigning on reining in the national security state, did nothing of the sort. He refused to rejoin the Iran nuclear deal, which Obama had put together and Trump had trashed. He did nothing to roll back any of Trump’s anti-Palestinian provocations, and tried to expand the Abraham Accords. He did nothing to return to Obama’s Minsk process diplomacy over Russia and Ukraine, and continued Trump’s arming up of Ukraine.
Predictably, all of this international vandalism by the US led to blow-ups. After giving Biden a year to return to Obama’s more peaceful course, Putin invaded Ukraine. CENTCOM’s Prime Minister of Israel, Netanyahu, let Israeli security fall to the extent that the October 7th massacres were possible. Biden fully endorsed CENTCOM Israel’s response of stepped up genocide, damning his soul, and probably ending his presidency. Not that there was much else to recommend him.
Israel and CENTCOM were allowed to parlay their horrific October 7th security failure into attacks on or outright invasions of half a dozen of Israel’s neighbors. The stepped up invasions & occupations of the West Bank, Lebanon and Syria had nothing to do with October 7th, but the Biden, and now Trump administrations were powerless to stop them. Like Japan’s Kwantung Army in 1931, the interests of CENTCOM, the US military in the Middle East, have become much more powerful than our democratically elected leaders. The absurd, failed from day one war in Iran is a great example. It has served no interest other than driving our defense budget up to the previously laughable figure of $1.5 Trillion a year.
Absurdly, horrifyingly, thanks to all this wreckage, Donald Trump was able to campaign in 2024 as the peace president.
2025-???? Trump III
How can we even begin to enumerate the many ways out of control militarism is rampaging all over the country and the planet in Trump’s second administration?
Many compared the run-up to Trump’s war with Iran to the insanity of George W. Bush’s rush to war on Iraq in 2003. But our republic has fallen so far since then. Trump’s imperial presidency didn’t feel the responsibility to do any of the persuasion (swindling) that the Bush White House did back in 2003.
Bush’s invasion of Iraq was approved by Congress and largely popular. Most Americans, even many Republicans, were against the idea of Trump’s Iran war from the start. Congress had nothing to do with it at the beginning, and has even voted against it a couple of times since. It doesn’t matter, we’re in a war with Iran anyway.
The Rampage of ICE across our country, trampling time-honored freedoms, is impossible to imagine without the War on Terror. As everybody with half a brain predicted at the time, the post-9-11 formation of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has produced an American Gestapo. Traumatized veterans of our failed CENTCOM wars are among the most enthusiastic foot-soldiers of this vile system of repression and mass murder. The shell-shocked veterans of Trump’s Iran War will no doubt be beefing up the DHS for decades to come.
The very real flood of migrants that ICE is supposedly confronting is also a product of out of control US militarism. The pressure on the Southern Border is Central and South American, certainly, but refugees from the US brutalizing of the Middle East and Africa are also well represented. The two leading populations of the Biden migration wave were Venezuelan and Cuban. Cuba and Venezuela may have bad governments, but the massive refugee exodus didn’t come until Trump’s Venezuela sanctions of 2017 and 2019, and his rescinding of Obama’s opening to Cuba. Bob Menendez kept Biden from correcting either of these idiotic policies.
One of the greatest blind spots of my coverage of Trump II has been the vast stepping up of US special operations south of the border. I hope to address this a bit in the coming weeks. There’s been the open mass murder of fishermen and smugglers on the high seas. Far worse has been a dramatic stepping up of pressure on weak Latin American governments, for “partnership” in special forces raids and drone strikes against “drug smugglers”. I haven’t had the time to do the necessary research but it all seems strikingly reminiscent of the US Yemen policy that produced the Houthis.
If we wanted to build a military dictatorship in the United States, it’s hard to think of a better strategy than building a bunch of Yemens in South America, creating mounting pressure on the US border, and infinite funding increases for ICE and other Department of Homeland Security thugs. But perhaps I’m straying into tin foil hat territory here.
And I don’t need to drift into conspiracy theorizing to point out how horrifyingly out of control the US military is becoming. I’ve got Pete Hegseth.
Appointing recent four-star generals like Jim Mattis and Lloyd Austin as the head of the Defense Department is pretty bad. They’re almost all very close to the defense contractors, the only people who profit from US wars. Trump’s Defense secretaries after Mattis were worse. Patrick Shanahan was a 30 year veteran of Boeing. Mark Esper moved directly from a role as a Raytheon Vice President to close out most of Trump’s term heading the DOD. Pete Hegseth is somehow even worse.
Trump and Biden’s appointees at the Department of Defense (now War) were hopelessly corrupt. But they at least had a veneer of professionalism. They at least paid lip service to concepts like victory, legality, and humanitarian concerns. Hegseth is a pure ideologue who worships violence for the sake of violence. His call for “Lethality rather than Legality” is disgusting, and just as much a recipe for failure for the United States as it was for the Imperial Japanese and the Nazis.
Hegseth has no idea how to run anything. His military career was undistinguished. He ran “Vets for Freedom”, an outfit doing propaganda for the War on Terror as the country soured on it, critiquing Obama’s half-hearted attempts to close it down. From 2014 to 2024 he worked at Fox News, where his greatest accomplishment was convincing Trump to pardon a bunch of convicted US War Criminals. In 2020 I called out those pardons as among the most openly fascist things Donald Trump had ever done. Imagine my horror to find the main instigator of those atrocities running the defense department in 2025.
As a republic declines, it’s not just the political system that gets worse, the military gets worse too. In the first Trump term, and the Biden-Trump term, honorable seeming men like Jim Mattis and Lloyd Austin were the prime authors of our destruction. As the process continues, the villains get more clownish.
Pete Hegseth is a clown, but don’t doubt for a second that he’s very effectively making the military worse. He’s famously firing any woman or person of color he can find in the military leadership, but he’s also firing most of the white men with principles and respect for the Constitution as well.
We already had an obscene amount of foreign policy wreckage and backlash to clean up in 2016. It’s going to be so much worse by 2029.
What to do?
What’s striking about all this, is how unnecessary it all is. Rome had always been militarily aggressive. A strong military is why there was a Rome. The Japanese military made many insane choices, and ended up getting Japan nuked, but the general principle that Japan needed a strong military in a world of aggressive European empires wasn’t wrong. Neither Japan nor Rome had the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, or reached the heights of power and success by staying out of foreign wars as the United States did.
If Japan or Rome had eviscerated their military budgets there would have ceased to be a Japan or a Rome. If the US eviscerates our military budget, we’ll instantly get richer and more powerful.
We should keep paying to maintain the nuclear submarines and B-2 bombers we already have. I’m not enough of a pacifist to believe there’s no value in the US remaining a terrifyingly powerful military power. But we can probably maintain those weapons, and a whole lot more on a couple hundred billion dollars a year. The Trump jump, from spending 1 trillion to 1.5 trillion dollars a year is absolutely insane, and should be stopped. Will we be at 2 trillion by 2029? It’s certainly possible. The world’s unlikely to get less chaotic.
Defense budget money is the fuel that allows all this destruction to happen. Keep in mind that all the horror and failure I described in this article was wrought by a military that was spending under a trillion a year. What do you think will happen when it has 50% more money to waste? Or 100%?
There are many other things that need doing after Trump, but the most essential thing is cutting the defense budget.
Before it’s too late.
It may already be too late.
I’m grateful to Matt Duss, speaking as a guest on the American Prestige podcast, for highlighting the role of Menendez in constraining any positive movements the Biden Administration tried to make.
Congress granted waivers for both appointments, but with less controversy the second time. This is how small-r republican traditions of constitutional government die.
I appreciated the pod moment where you described CENTCOM as a modern day Kwantung Army. What I find particularly funny is that, after they moved back to Florida due to uhh technical reasons, they became the first work-from-home Kwantung army
I generaly agree with the anti-war message her, but i think you are a bit off when i come to the history of Japan.
The military had wide democratic support in that era. For an example Fukoku kyōhei as an idea startet in the Meji restoration and was a big part of the culture before the Taisho era.
And if the people support the army it is still democracy even when you diagree with what they are doing. As democracy is majority support of a thing or policy and so Japan becoming more autocratic was more or less inevitable as the culture was already there. btw nothing against japan.