Sipri’s annual analysis of global arms transfers also underlined how the US had cemented its position as the world’s top arms exporter, increasing its share of exports from 35 per cent to 43 per cent over the five-year period.

US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is a self-declared “crusader” who believes the United States is in a “holy war” against the left, China, and Islam.

In his 2020 book American Crusade: Our Fight to Stay Free, Hegseth vowed that, if Trump could return to the White House and Republicans could take power, “Communist China will fall—and lick its wounds for another two hundred years”.

Hegseth declared that the Chinese “are literally the villains of our generation”, and warned, “If we don’t stand up to communist China now, we will be standing for the Chinese anthem someday”.

In Hegseth’s conspiratorial worldview, Chinese communists and the international left are conspiring with Islamists against the United States and Israel, which are sacred countries blessed by God.

Under Trump’s leadership, Hegseth promised, “Israel and America will form an even tighter bond, fighting the scourge of Islamism and international leftism that will never fully abate”.

“Islamists will never get a nuclear weapon but will be preemptively bombed back to the 700s when they try”, he added. (...)

House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Brian Mast (R-Fl.) has instructed GOP committee staffers to refer to the West Bank by its Hebrew name, Judea and Samaria.

Heading one of Washington’s most powerful committees, Mast sent a memo outlining the language change to the nearly 50 Republican Foreign Affairs Committee staffers on Tuesday; Democratic staffers did not receive the request. Mast’s Washington.-based office confirmed the validity of Axios’ reporting in a phone call to RS; the memo sent to staffers has subsequently circulated on social media.

Critically, the memo repeatedly emphasizes Israelis’ right to the West Bank, a territory it occupies illegally, as their homeland. (...)

The amount of fraud and deception that goes into maintaining this ideological, implicit institutional purpose of the American military is difficult to overstate. Nor is it even a real secret: as far back as 2015, the Army War College published a report on this very issue, in which the authors laid out their findings of widespread juking of stats and lying about requirements, personnel levels, and so on.⁷ This widespread epidemic of lying—already serious enough back in 2015—was not due to individual moral failings, nor “bugs in the system”; more ominously, most of the lying actually formed a sort of institutional grease that was increasingly becoming required just to keep the wheels turning. The more recent New York Times article on military suicides gives a particularly macabre example of how this works in practice: here, a unit commander compels a soldier with acute suicidal ideation to deploy overseas just so he can include that soldier in the readiness statistics. Once he arrives, he is then immediately sent back stateside again, as he cannot actually legally participate in the exercise or even be trusted in the presence of any loaded firearms.

Yet again, from a warfighting perspective, this behavior shouldn’t actually be happening. But it is happening, because within the institutional setting of the military—which is heavily shaped by the expectations set by a deeply ideological civilian and uniformed leadership—this sort of behavior not only makes sense, it is often required. To buttress this point with a non-Army example, a major theme covered in the reporting of the 2010s USS Fitzgerald and USS McCain collisions (which together led to the loss of seventeen sailors and constitute two of the most serious disasters the Navy has ever suffered in peacetime) was that ship captains were expected to sail even if their personnel situation or maintenance backlogs should not have allowed it; captains lied to their admirals who in turn lied to their political superiors. Rather than grapple with how lying had become an institutional requirement inside the Seventh Fleet, the Navy instead chose to blame these accidents on the ship captains themselves, even though the captains had repeatedly issued warnings to their superiors about the risk of serious accidents.⁸

Here, we must finally make a very basic critique of the entire national security establishment in America, and particularly of the people intending to bring about reform. No thinker, no policy wonk or international relations buff inside the Beltway, would have any problem whatsoever with the suggestion that the military apparatus inside a rival country like Russia, China, or Iran was in fact not a “pure” kinetic instrument but also a tool of ideology. Indeed, the suggestion that modern-day Russia possesses a “pure” military, completely shorn of any function as a tool of regime legitimacy and regime ideology, would typically be dismissed inside the Beltway. Of course the Russian military faces a steady flow of demands on its behavior conditioned by the Kremlin’s desire to appear credible and tough; of course this happens even in cases where this competes with the practical demands of warfighting. This dual nature of the Russian or Chinese militaries—both tools of kinetic warfare and tools of ideology—is simply accepted without argument in D.C., just as everyone willingly accepts, without the need for any particular evidence, that the tension between these two functions often results in a meaningful degradation of capability and readiness for these militaries. Yet for all this casual acceptance of the very real nature of this dangerous and destructive institutional dynamic abroad, America’s most serious thinkers generally display a shocking naïveté and lack of awareness about how this same sort of dynamic plays out inside America itself.

The purpose of an institution is what that institution actually does. The Army and Navy today both prepare for war, and also sacrifice their own resources and cannibalize their own readiness in order to maintain a Potemkin village of capability for public and congressional consumption. In the case where these two demands intersect, narrative maintenance tends to win over practical warfighting concerns. The Army unit commander who sends a suicidal soldier to Poland or Romania for thirty-eight hours in order to juke the stats is only punished if the media get ahold of the story; the commander who refuses to do so and voluntarily files poor readiness reports to his superiors is punished by default. America’s military brass regularly respond to impractical or nonsensical demands from the political leadership through lying or juking the stats. Army unit commanders and Navy ship captains, faced with similarly impossible requirements, lie to their superiors. Their subordinates, in turn, lie to their commanders, and so on it goes all the way down through the ranks. In this context, reform is impossible without first addressing why this entire sprawling network of institutionalized lying has come into being in the first place.

February marks the 126th anniversary of the beginning of the Philippine-American War. The conflict crushed the fledgling Philippine republic and reduced a nation of more than 7 million people to an American colony. The United States stepped onto the world stage as an imperialist power at the dawn of the twentieth century, caked with the blood of hundreds of thousands of Filipinos.


The American president responsible for setting the United States down the path of imperialist conquest was William McKinley. The Republican Party candidate for President in 1896, McKinley ran on a platform of high tariffs to promote the interests of American corporations. His campaign was the first in US history to run with massive financial support from major capitalist interests.

In his second inaugural address on January 20, President Donald Trump called McKinley a “great president,” and announced that he was reimposing McKinley’s name on Mt. Denali, the highest peak in North America. Trump has repeatedly praised McKinley and clearly sees the long dead president as a model. Trump hailed McKinley as a president of tariffs and a “natural businessman” who made possible the construction of the Panama Canal under his successor Theodore Roosevelt.

Trump’s admiration for McKinley is apt. Trump speaks openly of colonizing Gaza, of the territorial annexation of Greenland and Panama, and wields tariffs as an instrument of economic warfare to browbeat rival powers into submission to the dictates of American capitalism. The presidency of McKinley was the fulcrum in the transformation of the United States into an imperialist power. It was under McKinley, that the United States annexed Hawaii in 1898, took Guam, Cuba, and Puerto Rico in the Spanish-American War, and launched a war of conquest in the Philippines that continued long after McKinley himself was dead. (...)