“…For anybody who destroys a single life it is counted as if he destroyed an entire world, and for anybody who preserves a single life it is counted as if he preserved an entire world.” – Sanhedrin 4:9:1
This article is not intended to shock the reader as a means of persuasion, but it does contain some references to war crimes and crimes against civilians. Proceed with caution.
There is nothing valorous about war. It is one of the greatest evils of humanity. In the 20th century alone, well over one hundred million people were murdered in the course of armed conflict, and millions more died of the deprivation and disease war brought to their communities. The vast majority of those casualties were civilians and conscripts who had no way to avoid their lives being destroyed by the tools of warfare.
In the West, fear of another global conflict that could directly touch the U.S. and Europe faded in the three decades following the end of the Cold War. Russia was no longer the leader of an explicitly anti-Western bloc of nations; China was a dependable trading partner of the U.S.; and both allowed the U.S. to enforce its will on the Global South and Middle Eastern countries including Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Yemen. The U.S. exercised its imperial influence on these countries under the guise of “nation -building” or “safeguarding democracy,” with limited success. Media figures and politicians actively encouraged people in the West to ignore the conflicts they engineered elsewhere. They urged us to treat their wars as simultaneously righteous manifestations of democracy, necessary civil rights interventions, distant and ancient conflicts, and complicated statecraft irrelevant to the life of the average citizen.
War no longer feels so distant. In 2022, Russia’s war in Ukraine brought an active war zone to the borders of the European Union for the first time in two decades. The following year, Israel launched a campaign of genocide to permanently end the possibility of an independent Palestine. This campaign has repeatedly expanded into attacks on neighboring states to force them to submit to Israeli hegemony in the Middle East, and the Israeli far right dreams of conquering large swaths of the region.
These developments alone threatened global peace, but it was Donald Trump who took the idea of unlimited war to a new level. He has used his unilateral authority as “Commander-in-Chief” of the U.S. armed forces to illegally seize and destroy boats on the open sea, kidnap the President of Venezuela, repeatedly threaten an invasion of Greenland, illegally blockade the island of Cuba, and launch a war against Iran that began with the assassination of entire sections of the Iranian government, in flagrant violation of the laws of armed conflict. He has also repeatedly floated the idea of using the U.S. military as a domestic occupying force to illegally cement his dictatorial rule.
At a time when global conflict is becoming more common and more likely to escalate, we must remember that there is no such thing as a just war. There is no such thing as a necessary war. Waging war is a crime committed against working people and the most vulnerable in any society.
We must stand up as one and reject war unequivocally.
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All U.S. presidents of the 21st century have unilaterally expanded their military power. After the political and military disaster of the Vietnam War, Congress passed the 1973 War Powers Resolution into law. This law reasserted its authority to regulate the president’s ability to wage war by imposing time limits on the amount of time a military action can continue without congressional approval. In recent decades, Congress has consistently refused to hold the president to account for repeated violations of this law.
In the patriotic frenzy following the September 11th Attacks, Congress granted sweeping powers to President George W. Bush to intervene anywhere in the Middle East through the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF). It was extremely broad, granting the president the authority “to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons”. Bush used this authorization to justify the disastrous invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as military strikes across the greater Middle East. These wars wasted trillions of dollars, killed nearly one million people, destabilized the region, and reasserted a presidential prerogative to wage ill-conceived wars anywhere in the world.
Obama quietly expanded his military authority through his extensive use of drone warfare, asserting his right to order the killing of any person anywhere in the world. Biden made less intensive use of drones than Obama, but he did not take any steps to limit the powers of future presidents. He does deserve some credit for ending of the twenty-year war in Afghanistan, though his long history of support for war, militarism, and empire building, and the subsequent resurgence of reactionary rule in that country, must also be taken into account in any holistic evaluation of his record.
Trump has taken the power to wage war to the extreme, untethered as he is by any sense of morality or propriety. He imagines his powers as president to be nearly absolute, and there is no telling how far he may escalate his military recklessness as he becomes increasingly unpopular, embattled, and unhinged.
All presidents have known on some level that what they are doing is morally and legally indefensible. The U.S. does not recognize the authority of the International Criminal Court (ICC), in large part because politicians fear it could prosecute U.S. military and civilian leaders for the numerous war crimes they have committed over the last five decades.
The Bush administration took this exceptionalism a step further. In 2002, Bush signed a law (nicknamed the “Hague Invasion Act”) authorizing the President to “to use all means necessary and appropriate to bring about the release of any person […] who is being detained or imprisoned by, on behalf of, or at the request of the International Criminal Court,” which includes the use of military force to invade the headquarters of the ICC in the Hague, Netherlands. This law is still on the books today and could be invoked by Trump or any future president.
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Liberals have justified war for centuries, treating it as another tool in the geopolitical arsenal. This is why Democratic establishment figures like Chuck Schumer have quietly cheered Trump on in Iran from the sidelines. They disagree with Trump’s procedural ineptitude, not his stance on the necessity of bombing Iranian cities. They see war as an extension of normal political levers of power.
Meanwhile, the far-right treats war as a rite of passage, the ultimate way to prove valor, courage, and loyalty to their ultranationalist project. To that end, they use the violence of war as a way to motivate their followers to interpersonal violence, turning the methods of imperial domination perfected thousands of miles away on their own people.
Trump has repeatedly shown that he engages with the seriousness and tragedy of war as if it were an exercise in childish imagination. He has repeatedly insisted that military personnel killed in action are “suckers” and “losers.” His administration spliced footage from the video game Call of Duty into a montage of missile strikes on Iran. He nonsensically claims that a new class of U.S. battleships (widely considered to be nearly a century out-of-date in an era of drones and high-altitude precision air strikes) will be “100 times more powerful than any battleship ever built,” as if he were taunting a schoolmate on the playground.
If it is true that “war is all hell,” as the famous and earnestly serious appeal to peace by Civil War-era General William Tecumseh Sherman has it, then Trump, self-styled “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth, and their brand of chickenhawks imagine themselves to be the Doom Slayer. In their minds, they are the macho heroes of a video game, gunning down endless waves of demonic enemies with no sense of danger, consequence, or moral weight.
As central as violence is to the far-right project in America, Trump has normalized engaging with it in a totally unserious way. The Bush administration spent nearly a year lying to sell the war in Iraq to the American people; Trump launched his strikes on Iran effectively without warning, and has faced no consequences for doing so.
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The reality both factions deliberately obfuscate is that civilians always bear the overwhelming cost of war. The numbers are horrific in their own right, but they get worse when we consider that record numbers of civilians have been displaced by armed conflict – over 122 million as of 2025. War crimes against civilians are also rising at an alarming rate, in part due to a lack of regard for international agreements and the tendency of far-right governments to use dehumanizing rhetoric and escalating violence to achieve foreign policy goals.
These trends have only become more acute in the era of unrestricted drone warfare, where soldiers use modified Xbox controllers to pilot weapons of war from air-conditioned bases. The use of enormously powerful explosives to “mistakenly” destroy civilian targets no longer requires risking the lives of U.S. military personnel. These drones are the bane of the existence of millions across the Middle East, parts of Africa, and across the world, and they are the ultimate expression of the U.S. war machine’s demand that it be allowed to violate the sovereignty of any nation anywhere in the world to assassinate its enemies.
Most of the wars raging around the world today are not conflicts between two well-defined nation states. They are most often messy civil wars with multiple competing sides that drag on for decades with no end in sight. There is no valor to be had in such a war, only grinding death.
Embargos and sweeping economic sanctions are warfare by other means. They are more palatable in foreign policy circles because they are a relatively “easy” way to politically coerce smaller, less powerful economies that do not require commitment of soldiers or materiel. But the overwhelming costs of embargoes are felt by the poorest civilians, not leaders. As one academic report puts it: “Economic sanctions are the modern equivalent of a siege.” Sanctions impose immense hardship on civilian populations and often cause mass deprivation and even starvation.
Sanctions are also a way to “punish” left-wing governments for adopting pro-worker policies that harm foreign interests. For example, the U.N. estimates that the U.S. has drained $130 billion from the Cuban economy since the blockade was imposed in the early 1960s; without the blockade, it is easy to imagine that Cuba’s economy could be as strong as Vietnam’s, which has experienced immense growth in the past few decades. An example of socialism “working” in a country with so much cultural contact with the U.S. would be destabilizing to neoliberal and neo-fascist political narratives, however, which is why our government has repeatedly intervened to sabotage left-wing governments around the world innumerable times in the last hundred years.
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Trump’s war in Iran deserves special consideration in all this, in part because it is arguably the most ill-conceived war in American history. Even David Frum, the morally detestable cheerleader for the Iraq War, openly states that Trump started this war on a “whim.”
In addition to serving as a billion-dollar market manipulation to enrich himself and his allies, Trump’s Iran war is a test to see if his political base will let him get away with genocide, as evidenced by his suggestion last month that he would destroy Iranian civilization. Every indication shows that they will.
Right now, the only thing preventing the president from launching an unprovoked nuclear strike against a non-nuclear state is the kind of unwritten consensus Trump loves to violate. Even the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the organization that created and maintains the “Doomsday Clock,” is expressing alarm at the possibility. Trump recently insisted that he has no intention to use a nuclear weapon against Iran, but there is no reason to think he wouldn’t change his mind at any time in the next two and a half years.
A nuclear strike on a civilian population is unquestionably a method of genocide carried out in a matter of hours rather than months or years. It also inflicts unimaginable and wholly unnecessary physical suffering on survivors. Contrary to popular consensus, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not militarily justifiable. Seventeen years ago, comedian Jon Stewart rightfully stated that Harry Truman should be considered a war criminal for his decision to use nuclear weapons on civilians. America being what it is, he was forced to apologize for his remarks.
The world is now one tweet away from Trump declaring that the preemptive use of nuclear weapons against his enemies anywhere in the world is permissible under U.S. and international law. Such a proclamation and the accompanying use of nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear state would unleash an unimaginable new era of terror on the world.
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We live in a dangerous time. As tempting as it might be for the left to cheer on the collapse of the American global military hegemony, what follows will almost certainly be worse. Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, Trump, and any number of tinpot authoritarians cannot be left to carve up the world into political and economic spheres of influence. This is exactly what the current international system was set up to prevent. We must remember that the laws of that system were written in the blood spilled by countless millions in the Second World War. If we allow those institutions to crumble, that horror will descend on a new generation.
There is not a single armed conflict the United States has waged since the Second World War that was morally or politically justified against its human cost. In most U.S. political discourse, this would be considered an eminently radical statement. But if we are to stand with oppressed people everywhere around the world, the victims of war are among the highest on the list of those who need and deserve our solidarity.
There is no such thing as a just war, or a justifiable war. We do not need to be “bleeding hearts” to recognize that war has never served our interests as working people, and that innocents bear the overwhelming cost of wars waged for territory, wealth, geopolitical influence, “regime change,” and genocide.
International law is unusually sweeping in allowing United Nations member states to prosecute war crimes and crimes against humanity committed anywhere in the world. Trump, Netanyahu, Putin, and all manner of other butchers and warmongers can and must be held accountable for their horrible deeds. There is no statute of limitations to expire. Every war criminal is subject to prosecution for the rest of their natural life.
It is up to us to build a world where justice for the victims of war is not only possible, but inevitable – a world in which war itself is rendered obsolete as a tool of punishment, extraction, and oppression.
