Trump responds to a reporter’s question on the Iran peace deal. (Screengrab of video posted to X.)
For the past 60 years, U.S. presidents have used and misused the concept of threat to justify the use of force on a massive scale. U.S. presidents in the post-World War II era were so fearful of a congressional and public return to isolationism that the threat of communism was exaggerated to justify increases in defense spending and maintenance of hundreds of unneeded military bases and facilities. In the current era, we are devoting large sums of money to defense spending as well as justifying military bases vulnerable to attack from third-rate military actors such as Iran.
The Truman Doctrine in 1947 exaggerated the Soviet threat to southeastern Europe to justify involvement in Greece and Turkey. It paved the way for the creation of NATO in 1949. The Reagan Doctrine exaggerated the threat of repressive “Marxist-Leninist” regimes to justify record military spending in peacetime as well as a global role for U.S. military forces. U.S. politicians and pundits became comfortable with the notion that the military-industrial complex was responsible for our overreaction in the international arena.
In actual fact, however, it was nonmilitary theorists—all leading U.S. policymakers—such as Dean Acheson, Paul Nitze, John Foster Dulles, the Bundy brothers, the Rostow brothers, and so many others who were preoccupied with issues of military security. This preoccupation led to obscene spending on U.S. strategic forces as well as the use of the Central Intelligence Agency in covert actions that included political assassination and regime change. President Dwight D. Eisenhower may have warned against the military-industrial complex, but he gave the order to “eliminate” Patrice Lumumba, the leader of the Congolese independence movement. President John F. Kennedy and his advisors share responsibility for the assassination of South Vietnamese leader Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963.
U.S. uncertainty and fear about the international arena, particularly the Soviet threat, led to immoral and illegal actions that should have branded three American presidents—Lyndon Johnson, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump—as war criminals. Johnson exaggerated the threat of Soviet and Chinese actions in Southeast Asia to justify going to war against Vietnam. The Gulf of Tonkin resolution was based on false claims that North Vietnam had launched unprovoked attacks on American destroyers in August 1964. The true price of the Vietnam war is impossible to calculate, but more than 1.5 million Vietnamese civilians were killed in the ten-year period between 1965 and 1975.
There was no more pernicious lie in U.S. strategic policymaking than the Bush administration’s false claims of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction to justify the U.S. invasion in 2003. A U.S.-Iraqi withdrawal agreement in 2024 called for most U.S. forces to be out of Iraq by the end of this year, but there will still be several hundred U.S. forces remaining in Iraqi Kurdistan in an “advise and assist” capacity. The Iraq war has already cost nearly $2 trillion, which far exceeds the projected cost of $50 billion that I received in a briefing while serving on the faculty of the National War College in 2003. Projected medical care for veterans of the Iraq war could add an additional $1 trillion to the overall costs of the war. Once again, there were hundreds of thousands of civilian fatalities.
Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu used the false charge of an “imminent threat” from Iran to justify their attack in February 2026. The threat of Iran’s “wicked, radical dictatorship” supposedly included a strategic program, ballistic missiles, and the Iran-backed militia in Lebanon, but the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) did not directly address any of these issues. Such memoranda, moreover, are not legally binding, and refer to intentions and goals in a shared framework for collaboration. Time will tell the success of this particular MOU, but once again a war that was designed to be brief and comprehensive has cost thousands of lives and billions of dollars. The costs to consumers the world over is simply not calculable.
Meanwhile, Israel has stated unequivocally that it will not be bound by the agreement, and there is no sign that Netanyahu is interested in a genuine ceasefire with Hezbollah. There was no greater blunder on Trump’s part than going to war with Israel, which favors the total destruction of Iran. Not even Bush I and Bush II were this stupid in going to war against Iraq in 1991 and 2003, paying huge sums to Israel to stay out of the U.S. wars. In the current war with Iran, the United States has become both the military and the financial instruments of Bibi’s war.
The United States enjoys a greater deal of security than any other major power on earth, facing no genuine geopolitical threat. Nevertheless, national security has been used to justify the use of force and even extra-constitutional powers of decision making to go to war as in the case of Trump and Iran. Nuclear alarmism and the threats of terrorism have justified unneeded increases in defense spending. The prospects for disorder remain in the international setting, but there are no genuine threats to U.S. national security. The United States must stop thinking of itself as a nation with the preeminent responsibility for maintaining world order.
