America has not stumbled into its wars. It has built, funded, lobbied, and legislated its way into every single one.
Fadhel Al Nashmi was a secondary school mathematics teacher in Basra. On the morning of 20th March 2003, he had thirty one students in his classroom, a piece of chalk in his hand, and a quadratic equation on the board behind him. By nightfall, the building had no roof. By the end of the month, eleven of his students were dead, not from a bomb that had targeted them, but from a war that had not considered them at all. Fadhel survived. He spent the next decade teaching in a country that no longer had a functioning state, a reliable electricity grid, or a reason, that he could explain to his remaining students, why the most powerful nation in the history of human civilisation had decided that his city needed to be liberated into rubble.
He was not a statistic. He was a mathematics teacher with chalk on his fingers and thirty one children who deserved to learn how to solve for x.
America solved for something else entirely.
The lie at the centre of every American war is not the specific lie, not the weapons of mass destruction that were not in Iraq, not the Gulf of Tonkin incident that did not happen the way Lyndon Johnson described it, not the domino theory that collapsed the moment the last American helicopter lifted off the roof of the Saigon embassy in 1975. The specific lies are almost beside the point, because they are symptoms of a deeper and more durable dishonesty: the pretence that American military intervention is a response to threat rather than a product of industry.
In 1961, Dwight Eisenhower, a five star general, the Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe during the Second World War, a man who understood military power with an intimacy that no subsequent American president has matched, stood before the nation in his farewell address and named what he saw coming. He called it the military industrial complex. He described it as a conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry, and he warned, with a precision that has only grown more devastating with time, that its influence was felt in every city, every statehouse, every office of the federal government. He was not speaking hypothetically. He was issuing a warning from the inside, from a man who had watched the machine being built and understood, with the clarity of someone about to leave the room, what it would do once it was fully assembled.
The machine is now fully assembled. It has an annual budget that in 2023 exceeded $886 billion, more than the next ten nations combined, more than the entire GDP of countries that constitute the bulk of the world’s population. It employs, directly and indirectly, millions of Americans across every congressional district in the country, which is not an accident of industrial geography but a deliberate design: Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics do not cluster their facilities in one state because the weather is pleasant. They are distributed with the precision of a political strategy, ensuring that no senator, no congressman, no governor who wants to stay employed can afford to vote against the machine without voting against the livelihoods of his own constituents.
This is not a conspiracy. It is a business model. And like all successful business models, it requires a product that sells, which means it requires, with the regularity of a quarterly earnings report, a war.
Consider the timeline without the justifications, stripped of the language of liberation and security and democracy that America wraps around its interventions like a flag around a coffin.
Korea. Vietnam. The support of Saddam Hussein through the 1980s, the same Saddam Hussein who would later become the justification for Gulf War I and, through a chain of manufactured logic, Gulf War II. The arming of the Afghan Mujahideen against the Soviets, which produced the Taliban, which produced the conditions for September 11th, which produced the twenty year occupation of Afghanistan that ended in August 2021 with the Taliban back in Kabul and $2.3 trillion spent and 241,000 people dead. Libya, which was bombed into a failed state in 2011 and has been a slave market and a migrant death trap ever since. Syria, where American weapons fed a proxy conflict that displaced twelve million people, the largest forced migration since the Second World War.
Each intervention justified by the last one’s consequences. Each consequence requiring a new intervention. The machine does not create wars and then walk away; it creates the conditions that make the next war feel inevitable, which is the most elegant feature of the entire architecture. You do not need to plan perpetual war. You simply need to ensure that each war plants the seeds of the next one. The harvest is reliable.
The human cost of this reliability is a number so large it has ceased to function as a number. The Costs of War project at Brown University calculated that the post September 11th wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Pakistan killed approximately 929,000 people directly and contributed to the deaths of three to four million more through displacement, disease, and the destruction of civil infrastructure. These are not enemy combatants. They are Fadhel’s students. They are the people who were in the room when the liberation arrived.
America has never been held to account for a single one of them. Not by an international tribunal. Not by its own legislature. Not by the electorate that returned to power, in 2004, the president who started the Iraq War on a fabrication, and that elected, in 2016 and again in 2024, a man who has taken the machine’s logic and stripped away the last remaining pretence that it was ever about anything other than transaction.
The word that nobody in the polite discourse around American foreign policy will use, the word that the think tanks in Washington and the op ed pages of the papers that supported the Iraq War and the television anchors who embedded with the troops all decline to reach for, is racket.
Racket. Not policy. Not strategy. Not even hubris, which at least implies a kind of tragic grandeur. A racket is a scheme in which the problem and the solution are controlled by the same party, in which the people selling the protection are the people manufacturing the threat. The word was first applied to American militarism not by a foreign critic or an anti war protester, but by Major General Smedley Butler, the most decorated Marine in American history at the time of his death, a man who had fought in the Philippines, in China, in Central America, in the Caribbean, in Mexico, who wrote in 1935, with the authority of someone who had spent thirty three years being the muscle for the machine: “War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious.”
Butler named it ninety years ago. The machine has spent ninety years ensuring that the word does not enter polite conversation, because the moment it does, the entire structure of justification collapses. You cannot call a racket a crusade for democracy. You cannot send Fadhel’s students to their deaths for a quarterly earnings report. You need the language of threat, of freedom, of civilisational duty, the language that makes the arms manufacturer’s profit feel like the soldier’s sacrifice, that makes the congressional vote for the defence budget feel like patriotism rather than constituency management.
That language has always been the machine’s most powerful weapon. More powerful than anything Lockheed Martin has ever built.
Donald Trump did not invent the racket. What he did, and this is his singular, inadvertent contribution to clarity, is remove the language.
Every president before him, from Truman to Obama, understood that the machine required a story. The story changed, containment, democracy promotion, the war on terror, the responsibility to protect, but the requirement for a story was constant, because the story was what made the machine’s appetite appear as the nation’s conscience. Trump looked at the story and found it inconvenient. He is, at his core, a transactional man, and transactions do not require narratives. They require leverage.
So he stood in front of NATO allies and told them, with a businessman’s bluntness, that their security was a product and they needed to pay for it. He sold $110 billion in arms to Saudi Arabia, a country that was, at that precise moment, using American bombs and American targeting intelligence to kill Yemeni civilians at a rate that the United Nations described as a possible war crime, and described the deal in terms of jobs, not justice. He threatened to withhold military aid from Ukraine unless its president announced an investigation into his political rival. He called American soldiers who died in the First World War “suckers” and “losers”, and the remark landed with such force not because it was monstrous, but because it was, in the cold arithmetic of the machine, simply accurate. The machine does not mourn its consumables.
In his second term, Trump has advanced what his advisers call “America First” foreign policy and what the rest of the world experiences as the weaponisation of economic dependency. Tariffs deployed as geopolitical coercion. Alliance structures treated as protection rackets, Smedley Butler’s word, finally wearing its correct owner’s face. The suggestion, floated with a casualness that should have caused global alarm and instead caused a news cycle, that Greenland should be acquired, that Canada might become the 51st state, that Panama’s canal is available for renegotiation. These are not the statements of a man who believes in the international order. They are the statements of a man who has looked at the machine, understood it completely, and decided that the story was always the inefficient part.
He is not wrong about the story. He is catastrophically wrong about what should replace it.
Because the story, flawed, hypocritical, instrumentalised, was at least a constraint. It required that the violence be justified. It required that the liberation produce something other than rubble. It required, at minimum, the performance of accountability, which is not accountability but is at least the acknowledgement that accountability exists as a concept. Trump has dispensed with the performance. What remains is the machine, running without the story, which is the most dangerous version of the machine that has ever existed, not because it is more violent than previous iterations, but because it no longer feels the need to explain itself.
There is a version of this argument that ends with hope, with the suggestion that American civil society will correct, that the electorate will reckon, that the machine will be dismantled by the democratic mechanisms that were always supposed to constrain it. That version of the argument has been available for sixty years, since Eisenhower gave his speech, and for sixty years it has not come true.
So this essay does not end there.
It ends with Fadhel Al Nashmi, the mathematics teacher in Basra, who in 2023, twenty years after the liberation, gave an interview to a journalist from a European newspaper. He was still teaching. The school had been rebuilt, partially, with funds from an NGO. He had twenty three students now, fewer than before. He was asked what he taught them, and he said he taught them mathematics because mathematics was the only subject that still told the truth. Two plus two was still four, he said, regardless of what anyone decided to do about it.
He was asked if he had ever been given an explanation, by anyone, at any level, in any language, for why his city had been destroyed and his students killed in the service of a lie about weapons that did not exist.
He had not.
The most powerful nation in the history of human civilisation has never found it necessary to explain itself to a mathematics teacher in Basra. It has found it necessary, however, to maintain its $886 billion defence budget, its network of eight hundred military bases across eighty countries, its unbroken chain of interventions from Korea to Yemen, and its latest version of itself, louder, cruder, stripped of the story, standing at a podium in Washington, telling the world that the bill is coming due.
Duniya bhugat rahi hai. The world is paying the price.
The machine does not care. The machine is solvent. The machine has never been more solvent.
And somewhere, a teacher is still standing in front of a classroom with chalk on his fingers, explaining to children how to find the unknown quantity, the variable that changes the entire equation, the one that has been missing from every calculation Washington has ever made.
The variable is them. It has always been them.
Washington has never solved for it.
