One of more ironic moves by the Trump administration was the rebranding of its main military institution, the Department of War, no longer of defense, a name that had preexisted from the early years of the republic until 1947. In that year, the Truman administration enacted a facelift for the department to portray US interventionism throughout the world as not acts of war but of defense or as necessary “police actions” to preserve peace. Trump has now restored “original intent” to the name change, enabling the US to continue on its path of global hegemony without such pretentions and rhetorical and fictional encumbrances of national defense and “democracy promotion.”  

The US led the formation of NATO in early 1949, it claimed, not to threaten the Soviet Union with its momentary sole possession of atomic weapons, but to defend western Europe from potential Soviet aggression. Not since World War II has the US declared a war on any nation, though it has intervened in well over 200 countries since then without such a declaration. Even after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and with no conceivable national enemies, the US refused to dismantle the outdated militarist organization; indeed it expanded NATO throughout the rest of Europe right to the door of the Russian Federation, all in the name of defense and peaceful intentions. 

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NATO has grown from an original alliance of 12 countries to 32 countries, Ukraine being the most recent candidate whose membership would represent to the Russians as well as to rational observers throughout the world an existential threat to the Federation’s sovereignty (cf UN Charter, Articles 2(4) and 51). Under international law, every country has a right to defend itself from threats to such sovereignty. In fact, the US has exercised and abused this right on multiple occasions whenever it interpreted acts of other states or non-states as threats to its security, the illegal attacks on fishing boats in the Caribbean and Pacific and the kidnapping of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro being among the most recent and crudest examples.

Soviet efforts to locate a missile base in Cuba in 1962 was perceived as such a threat, a more palpable one, and very far from America’s shores, Saddam’s non-existing WMD was another. The multiple annihilations of Native American nations were defended by the claims of Indian threats to white “pioneers.” Annihilations of Native American tribes left less than 5% of their pre-European contact aggregate alive by 1900, a genocide that whetted the racist and imperialist appetite for further conquests of Cuba and the Philippines. 

America’s war with Mexico, severing half that country was justified by alleged threats to American citizens on the border. Regular hemispheric abuses of the Monroe Doctrine were among the countless other invasions based on invented provocations. Its sponsorship of the IDF genocide in Palestine, American and US-sponsored Israeli attacks on Iran, and the proxy war in Ukraine are the main current features of its transparent global aggression. 

Appointed by Trump to Make America Unipolar Again, Pete Hegseth’s loyalty oath to the president was a sufficient credential to make him war secretary, the second most powerful world figure, next to the godfather himself and not counting the Israeli chief human exterminator, Netanyahu. Last August on Fox News, the unofficial organ of right-wing state media, Hegseth blithely claimed:

“We won World War I, and we won World War II, not with the Department of Defense, but with a War Department.”

Did Trump select him precisely for his blind ignorance?

A better rationale for the name change would be the reality-based history of US foreign policy. Hegseth might have defended the name change by referencing America’s total destruction of North Korea, the slaughter of nearly five million people, mostly civilians, in Indochina, the invasions of Iraq, Afghanistan, Grenada, Kuwait, Somalia, and Lebanon, the unprovoked bombing of Serbia, Bosnia, Libya, Syria, Yemen, and Iran and covert interference in dozens of other countries. The American war machine, initially expressing its violence upon indigenous Americans, has since the Nuremberg war crimes trials committed sovereign rape more than 200 times. Noam Chomsky once famously said:

“If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged.”

In America’s 250-year history, the country has been out of war for only 18 years.

As part of their global military arsenals, the US has some 800 military installations in 130 countries. Its tugboat ally, the UK, runs at least 145 military base sites in 42 countries and is itself host to 13 US facilities and more than 10,000 American military personnel. In military terms, the UK is otherwise seen as an overseas “US aircraft carrier.” In major wars, such as in the Gulf and Afghanistan, the British armed forces put themselves firmly under the command structure of the US. In intelligence operations, MI6 operates as the CIA’s bagman and is one of the components of the US-British Commonwealth Five Eyes) coordinated spying alliance (the others being intelligence branches from Australia, New Zealand, and Canada). 

As neither country has any real enemy, this overstretched militaristic presence in the world can only mean that both countries are engaged in an upgraded high-tech military-industrial complex strategy with hopes of restoring a global Pax Americana and a subaltern British-led version for Europe. Britain has hitched its wagon to the American train in hopes of retaining some respectability as a moderately important force in Europe and in the world. In Cyprus, for example, the British GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters) operates a spy center, which along with other overseas installations, serve as a forward operating base for the US military. Declassified documents reveal that UK officials have argued that “possession of them contributes significantly to the transatlantic relationship.”

Why do both countries relentlessly regularly engage in regime change operations in the Global South, even though they almost always lead to destabilization and failed states? Couched in language of security, stability, and “democracy promotion,” the real reasons are rooted in neocolonial objectives, including the plunder of raw materials (mining and energy in particular), the assertion of global hegemony, opening up recalcitrant countries to foreign investment, and pursuit of a new Cold War against Russia and China. In the name of national interests, the US-led alliance has by some estimates killed 20 to 30 million people in the Global South since World War II. As the Vietnamese learned, asserting national liberation from an imperialist state involves enormous human and environmental costs.

The collective West has drained the Global South from 1960 to 2018 of $62 trillion (constant 2011 dollars) in assets, “or $152 trillion when accounting for lost growth.” This created an enormous subsidy from South to North in the form surplus energy, low food prices, and cheap access to strategic metals that go into making their laptops, iPads, cell phones, smart TVs, and other electronic devices. Countries with strong state-directed planning such as China, Japan, South Korea, and Singapore were able to rise out of poverty, which formed a model for other countries in the Global South. Without a strong state, the less industrialized countries fall prey to foreign monopolies over technology (almost 100% are controlled by patents in the Global North) and finance. The latter is the world which global hegemonists like the US and UK wish to preserve.

America’s Junior Partner

Today, Britain acts in ways to try to recapture its once gloried stature as an imperialist state, even as a subaltern military power subordinate to the US empire.

It invaded its former colonial territory Iraq (2003-2011), sent troops to Afghanistan (2001-2021) and Kuwait (1990-1991), bombed Libya (2011), Yugoslavia (1998-1999), and Yemen (2024-2025) and followed the US into several other conflicts over the course of the “postwar” years. The original source of conflict in Palestine with the Balfour Declaration (1917), Britain has been one of the arch defenders of Zionism. And while no longer a world empire, Britain continues to retain 14 “overseas territories” (10 of them de facto colonies) and remains imperialist, particularly in its governing mindset. 

Since 2022, Britain has sent an array of advanced weapons systems as well as soldiers to Ukraine in a coordinated NATO proxy war designed to destabilize Russia and open it to regime change. Britain backs and arms the settler land confiscations and apartheid and genocide policies of Israel. Its former prime minister, Tony Blair, was appointed head of Trump’s fantasy “Gaza on the Riviera” scheme. Like the US, and conscious of its own imperialist past and role in NATO and the UN Security Council, Britain is becoming a fulltime warfare state, leading Europe together with France toward a confrontation with Russia and nuclear Armageddon.

Discussing the subordinate functions the UK takes on in the international division of military labor, British sociologist and political communication scholar Emma Briant has argued that “Britain’s defence strategy was pragmatically steered towards complementing US capabilities and spinning its ‘expertise’ in counter-insurgency warfare… to engineer inroads for relative influence.” In Ukraine, for example, while the US has supplied shells, rockets, missiles, tanks, and surveillance and targeting data, Britain has provided missiles, tanks, artillery, and a number of military trainers and advisors. Ukraine provides the corpses. 

Image: Boris Johnson and Volodymyr Zelensky (Creator: syllogi Admin / No10 Downing Str)

The British government has another function in foreign affairs – to act as a conduit to third countries on behalf of US interests, possibly engaging in the attack on the Putin residence in December 2025, as Russian officials claimed. In April 2022, soon after the start of the Russian “special operation” in Ukraine, British prime minister Boris Johnson secreted himself to Kiev to meet with Volodymyr Zelensky and warned the Ukrainian president against signing a Russian-initiated peace agreement, i.e., the Istanbul negotiations. According to a Ukrainian news website, Johnson told Zelensky:

“Pressure must be put on him [Putin]. No negotiations are possible. And secondly, if you are ready to sign any agreement with him, then we will not be part of it. We can have agreements with you, but not with him,” i.e., do what we tell you or lose foreign aid.

Johnson was not speaking for Britain alone, as such an agreement would have required US backing. Later that year, he wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed: “The war in Ukraine can end only with Vladimir Putin’s defeat.”

In a 2022 article in Foreign Affairs, US National Security Council official Fiona Hill and former National Intelligence Officer for Russia and Eurasia Angela Stent, affirmed that Russia and Ukraine had “tentatively agreed on the outlines of a negotiated interim settlement” of the conflict prior to the Johnson visit. The US and UK thus ended the chance for a peaceful resolution of the conflict in which Zelensky was prepared to accept neutrality status for Ukraine, Russia’s chief demand. Instead, Joe Biden, who has a history of having extorted favors from the earlier Poroshenko government while serving as vice president, was committed to bleeding Russia with sanctions and a war of attrition. The hope was to bring about regime change and produce a more compliant Russian state like that of the feeble government under Yeltsin. The US and British triumphalist foreign policy establishments remain attached to an aggressive Russophobia and apparently won’t let go until the world is nuclear vaporized.

Cold War II and the M-I-C

Russia has long been a bugbear for UK and US foreign policy elites. British Tory and Labour politicians and their friends in the tabloid press, apparently enamored by the Russia-bashing rhetoric by the Democrats and the American mainstream media (MSM) and no strangers to the practice themselves, have in recent years put on a show of their own cold warriorship. Under the Keir Starmer government (2024-present), Labour has displaced Trump’s America as Russia’s leading adversary. 

During Theresa May’s tenure (2016-2019), the Conservatives and the Tory press had publicly accused former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn (2015-2020) and former London mayor Ken Livingstone (2000-2008) of being former spies for the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia. Tory defense secretary Gavin Williamson repeated the false claim, charging that Corbyn had once had meetings with an alleged Czechoslovakian spy, declaring it, McCarthyite style, “a betrayal of this country.” The government’s security minister at the time (2018) Ben Wallace compared Corbyn to the infamous British double agent Kim Philby, who defected to the Soviet Union in 1963. Then Conservative Party vice-chairman Ben Bradley asserted that Corbyn “sold British secrets to communist spies.”

Neither Williamson nor Wallace apologized for their false accusations. Bradley was taken to court and forced to pay a “five-figure sum” to charity, pay Corbyn’s legal fees, and issue an apology to the Labour leader. Starmer has since enacted a massive purge of the left wing of the party and in the process become the most unpopular prime minister in British history.

A pillar of the imperial policies of both countries is their respective military-industrial complex (MIC). The British MIC doesn’t compare to America’s, but it nonetheless serves as a reliable junior partner in interventionist activities, such as in Iraq, Iran, Libya, Syria, and Afghanistan. The UK has the world’s 6^th largest military budget of around £62.2 billion in 2025-2026, the biggest in Europe, though about one-eleventh that of the US. Britain’s BAE Systems is the world’s third largest military contractor. Indeed, the actual threat to Britain or the US or the whole of NATO for that matter is virtually non-existent in terms of the rationale for maintaining the organization. NATO’s combined military budget amounts to $1.6 trillion in 2025, including $901 billion spent by the US, compares to Russia’s greatly expanded budget that year of $198 billion – more than eight times as much.  

Western military imperialism is a leading global industry and is becoming increasingly privatized. Almost a quarter of the world’s private security firms are located in the US, but the UK is also a major player. One London-based international conglomerate, G4S, is the leading private security services corporation and with 800,000 employees one of the largest private employers in the world. It has gained notoriety for human rights abuses, in one case leading to the Birmingham (UK) Prison riot in 2016. It has also been involved in the use of torture in Israeli prisons and detention centers holding Palestinian prisoners and charged by UNICEF and Amnesty International for engaging in the “widespread, systematic and institutionalized” abuse of Palestinian children in these facilities. Some 75% of personnel working for the US in Afghanistan and 50% in Iraq in 2013 were under private security contracts, operating with little government oversight. 

What sustains the Anglo-American Cold War II? Britain and the US want to increase weapons exports, one of their last remaining comparative advantages, as a driver of their respective economies. War and the threat of war makes for good business in the arms industry. Devotees of neoliberalism (expansion of markets globally) and neoconservatism (imposing the American or British political and economic system on other countries) work together in the Anglo-American foreign policy arena, most recently in Ukraine. However, what most people might think is aid to Ukraine is actually simply money laundering of billions of dollars appropriated by Congress and ending up in the hands of the MIC tycoon class. The Center for Strategic and International Studies reported that “aid to Ukraine” disguises the fact that “90 percent of [US] military aid is spent in the United States,” and only 25% of total assistance to that country is spent internally.  

British escalation of tensions with Russia has no reality basis. They are engaging in deception and self-deception, first about their ability to take on Russia as an adversary and second about the unproven claims portraying Russia as a threat to western Europe. Does anyone in Britain remember that before and after the days of Napoleon, the West has invaded Russia at least eight times (Sweden, 1707; England, 1807; France, 1812; Britain and France in Crimea, 1854; Germany and allies in 1914; US, UK, Canada, Italy and allies in the 1918 intervention to overthrow the Bolsheviks; Germany and its allies in 1941, the US/UK proxy war in Ukraine, 2022), while Russia has never put a military boot on western Europe’s soil? Russia’s inability and/or unwillingness to move upon the whole of Ukraine hardly suggests its ambitions to take on the NATO countries. 

Meanwhile, Britain’s spending on its military went from 2.1% of GDP in 2020 to a projected 2.6% in 2027 and 5% in 2035. And its defense equipment exports reached a record high in 2025, valued at £20 billion ($27 billion). Under Trump, there is less rhetoric about confrontation with Russia, with supposed plans for reduced real spending on the military budget. But in his unstable state of mind, that could abruptly change, especially if he commits further aggression in Latin America (and possibly Greenland). On the question of future war between the US and Russia, however, the geopolitical tensions have somewhat diminished compared to the hawkish Cold War propaganda of the Biden White House.

People, Not Oligarchs

It was a former soldier, Dwight Eisenhower, who declared that the security state threatens the very foundations of American democracy:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.

These common-sense remarks of the former president, and a conservative no less, puts the Democrat and Labour war hawks to shame. Both parties have resuscitated the Cold War with the aim of winning it, that is, returning to a unipolar world. 

Most of the world rejects the status quo. Among 24 non-US nation states surveyed, the United States is the most commonly perceived threat to their way of life. They include some of America’s closest allies, Canada, Mexico, Spain, and Argentina, as well as Brazil, South Africa, and Indonesia. Twenty of the 24 states polled listed the US as one of the top three state threats, political or economic. The Global Peace Index for 2025 ranked the US near the bottom at 128^th. 

Under Biden, the U.S. carried out “counterterrorism” combat and air strike operations in 78 countries between 2021 and 2023. His administration organized a western proxy war in Ukraine and massively increased military assistance to Israel for its genocide in Gaza. And despite his campaign promises about ending global conflicts, Trump initiated bombing assaults on at least seven countries, not including proxy wars, carrying out 622 sorties during just the first year of his second term. The UK, a fellow warfare state, has provided support to the US in many of these aggressions, including the interventions in Gaza and Ukraine. 

Given its menacing conduct and rejection of public opinion around the world and the deterioration of social democracy and basic human needs amongst their own people, the leaders in the US and UK cannot expect to retain a position of world leadership. The Charter of the United Nations states that nation states must resolve conflicts not by war but through “negotiation, enquiry, mediation, conciliation, arbitration, judicial settlement, resort to regional agencies or arrangements, or other peaceful means of their own choice.” If the world is to survive, this is the way forward.

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Gerald Sussman is professor emeritus of international politics and urban development at Portland State University. He is author or editor of seven books, the most recent being British and American Electoral Politics in the Age of Neoliberalism: Parallel Trajectories (Routledge, 2025). Professor Sussman can be reached at [email protected]

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