NO WAR: Avoiding Disaster at the End of Empire

We must avoid this unnecessary and cruel war.

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The lead-up to the Iraq War in 2003 made me feel insane.

Every day I turned on the television I was surrounded by obvious lies. Our media peddled them without question. Both political parties accepted them as stone-cold truths. Heading towards March and the Shock and Awe campaign, I was overcome with unbelievable rage and indignity. When the strike came, I felt my heart break, but also something that it took much longer to recognize.

At that age, I did not have the understanding or experience necessary to make total sense of what was happening. It was distilled down into a passion play, with George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and an array of Neoconservative warhawks pushing an illegal and immoral war based on lies and the pursuit of resources and profit. That stage of political awareness provided enough insight to see through the lies, but it would take years to grasp something beyond that. Something that is both helpful and horrifying.

Now, in 2025, living in an increasingly authoritarian and totalitarian state, we find ourselves once more on the precipice of a potentially disastrous war also built on lies and profit incentives. Shockingly, the arguments are the exactly same, only more threadbare. Every reputable intelligence assessment tells us Iran is not actually close to producing a nuclear weapon. The opening salvos were sold as “preemptive” and “just.” And, surprise surprise, the same people who championed the invasion of Iraq are out in full force once more.

What has become clear now is where the thrust originates. It is exceedingly clear the decisions come less from powerful men sitting in offices or meeting rooms, and more from an undercurrent that flows through all things. For all of the pomp and circumstance of police, for all of the aggrandizement of leaders and dominant personalities, what drives all of this is the ceaseless push of capitalism toward human annihilation.

Simply put, capitalism and humanity are not compatible. One is an artificial system that forces the direction of history through incentives. It is always heading toward consolidation of power and resources, pitting individuals, groups, companies, and nation states against one another, the stream, like water, finding a way forward, even if it means carving mountains into dust over time. And, the other, humanity, is most ripe for manipulating and, in turn, destruction, by this system.

Presently, we live in the waning of American Empire. Following the Second World War, America emerged from the ruins as the best possible host for capitalism’s needs. For decades, in that position, capitalism rewarded the United States for its efforts as it fed off it as a parasite, like a hairworm controlling an infected cricket, directing the U.S. to eliminate potential adversaries through state-sponsored violence and antidemocratic actions, to construct Neoliberal Globalism as the framework for the acceleration of resource extraction and labor exploitation, and, in the Global War on Terror, a final push by its favorite tool, the military-industrial complex, to open up more markets and solidify the global economic system.

That America’s interests and capitalism’s interests coincided was a momentary feature. Like the parasite’s host, America seemingly benefited from this relationship, but, as is the case, eventually the host would be consumed and left for dead. The American Empire has served its purpose, and now all that’s left is the death-spiral and all of the accompanying damage.

Donald Trump and the MAGA Movement emerged because the moment demanded them. In the midst of that death-spiral, conditions required someone who could lie and manipulate, promising that they could make America “great again” while obviously finishing the demolition. Trump, as a figurehead, is useful in continuing the process of strip-mining America for everything it’s worth because of both his shamelessness and self-dealing. He is willing to do anything as long as it profits or aggrandizes him. Now, in this second administration, is surrounded by others just like him: incompetent, incurious, and cruel shams.

This crisis was created by Benjamin Netanyahu and his criminal accomplices, all of whom are guided by these same forces. The horrors in Gaza, the endless war fronts, the continued push into other sovereign nations, and now, this, an awful smash-and-grab operation with little in the way of planning or vision or even consideration, is the type of breaking that capitalism requires. It is a cycle. For decades at a time there is supposed “stability,” which allows the creation of systems and apparatuses, and then there is chaos, which breaks open that status quo and makes it possible for more consolidation and new paradigms to emerge. The American Empire provided that “stability,” which was really state-sponsored chaos hiding behind the veneer of so-called Pax Americana, but now that the parasite of capitalism has eclipsed the host America, that veneer has fallen by the wayside.

Netanyahu’s actions have revealed something that also became apparent with the invasion of Ukraine: American dominance was brittle and collapsing. Israel, as a client state, depends on the support of the U.S. and, yet, the terrifying momentum of the U.S./Israel partnership created a perfect situation for genocidal violence that American leaders felt powerless to stop. They could have, at any moment, withheld arms or support and brought the assault to a grinding halt, but a myriad of conditions, including the fecklessness of Neoliberal politicians afraid of being painted as “insufficiently loyal to Israel,” which they were called regardless of providing a blank check and almost total fealty, fed into a historic tragedy. Like spiderweb cracks in a windshield, our political discourse and allegiances splintered into so many isolated and contradictory tributaries as a result. It was all downstream of larger material and historical conditions.

And, here we are again. Trump, who isn’t and has never been a true leader, enjoys the ceremonial distinction of being President of the United States of America but lacks vision or the skills necessary to navigate a situation that was created by Netanyahu, who has weaponized his country to pursue his own personal ambitions and needs, and so we are all lashed together, bound at the wrist and ankles, and sprinting in tandem toward the edge of a cliff. We do not know what will happen if the U.S. joins the war. Israel has no idea what it will do to win the war or what would happen if it did win the war. Nobody has any plans and everyone feels as if they are being pulled along by the riptide of history.

So it is.

American’s are vehemently against this war. YouGov puts the number opposed at 60% with only 14% in favor. Oddly enough, those supporting the war in discourse aren’t even members of Trump’s MAGA alliance, with the possible exception of Christian Nationalists who literally want to end the world. Instead, it is the remaining Neoconservatives the MAGA Movement has eschewed, including Republican castoffs like Tom Nichols or David Frum who even remotely consider any of this is even the least bit acceptable. And that is because we are often at the mercy of individuals who have gained their power, wealth, and influence because they have served in positions supported by capitalistic aggression and have demonstrated the kind of cruel, unreasonable, and honestly pathetic willingness to create wars and coups and violence necessary for this insidious machine to roll on.

All along, the military-industrial complex, which is now essentially the military-industrial-tech complex, is another embodiment of the will of capitalism, a project that has gobbled up the vast majority of American spending since the end of the Second World War. Its purpose is not defense, but carrying out offensive maneuvers around the world in order to facilitate the flow and consolidation of capital. The profit incentives continue, creating more and more weapons and industries, now accelerating the exact kind of undue influence Dwight Eisenhower warned about in 1961 and that has now brought us to the verge of an oligarchical-led authoritarian existence.

The profit motive here is astounding, because the United States, as a superpower, has been reduced in its operation to function primarily as an arms dealer and manufacturer. That is, as has been the case in all of these parasite/host interactions, not in the country’s or its people’s best interest, but in the capitalist interest at large. And those who are profiting from the production and selling are not beholden to America beyond its utility. They are mercenaries, willing to sell whatever to whomever has the cash. This has been the same for the weapons manufacturers and the tech oligarchs who have now become one in the same.

Big War is Big Business for Big Tech.

Especially with the newfound reliance on emergent technologies, including Artificial Intelligence, which is the beating heart of cutting-edge warfare and will be instituted and installed into everything if this were to happen, accelerating the exhausting sales pitch we’ve all been inundated with for years now.

Having read this far, I want to speak directly to you, the reader. In talking about geopolitical forces and, by proxy, the underlying current of capitalist interests, these things can feel so far beyond our control as to immobilize us. We are, in essence, attempting to fight against an artificial force that has controlled our modern world since its emergence. But that does not mean we are powerless. The solutions to fending off this war are the same as defeating authoritarianism, particularly because they all emerge from the same source: capitalism.

Just as we oppose the growing police state, the destruction of what remains of the social safety net, this shameless and corrupt regime, we oppose this war. We know it will make all of it worse and by so many degrees. And we also feel that democracy itself is fading. These unpopular and cruel policies continue to mount and worsen even as a vast majority of people do not want them. Here, liberal democracy does not hold much in the way of accountability. If this war is to happen, it will happen well before the 2026 Midterms, if we’re going to have them and if they’re even going to be free and fair. And, as you know, our leaders and institutions have been thoroughly corrupted.

If Trump is going to follow the capitalistic incentives and carry out this war, we must be ready to shove a stick into the spokes and disrupt that system. Mass action, including a general strike, is one of our only means of pushing our thumb onto the scale. Highlighting capitalist disruption as the result of both this war and continued authoritarianism will change the paradigm and the conditions, creating a showdown between democracy and authoritarianism. This is a huge ask and we do not currently have the apparatus to carry it out. So we must build it. We must talk to our coworkers, make it known that we will not accept this war or the continued authoritarian push. We must commit to taking care of one another, engaging in mutual aid, and engaging in pure solidarity at all costs.

What we have on our side is not only our humanity, but that this is such a bold-faced debacle. There is no defending this. No painting this in a positive light. It is a farcically obvious situation in every possible way. They require us to acquiesce. They require us to believe it is inevitable. For our sake, and for the people of the world who do not deserve to suffer like this, we must take a stand and link arms. Together we can face this destructive undercurrent and dam it up before it swallows us whole.