And here’s the OMG news story that shocked me the other day. At the New York Times, a piece by reporter Constant Méheut had this headline: “The War in Ukraine Has Now Gone On Longer Than World War I.” And here’s how his report began: “The war in Ukraine has often been compared to World War I for its brutal infantry assaults and heavy casualties. Yet the idea that it could, by any measure, surpass a conflict so long and bloody that French soldiers hoped it would be ‘the last of the last’ once seemed unthinkable.”
No longer, unfortunately.
And Russia is anything but alone. After all, my country spent three years in bloody strife in Korea, nearly 9 years in Iraq, almost 20 in Vietnam, and almost 20 more in Afghanistan (and, mind you, that’s hardly the full list of its various conflicts) without a victory in sight. Of course, only recently, “my” president launched the latest all-American conflict, this time with Iran and with an utterly predictable lack of success given our history over the last 80 years. That war is now in a strange, distinctly unsettling holding pattern, and who knows what will come next?
In fact, given the history of this country and war since, in September 1945, it emerged victorious from World War II (having dropped atomic bombs on two Japanese cities to end it), it should be considered beyond remarkable that Americans would still be so willing to let staggering amounts of our tax dollars be eternally “invested” in the U.S. military. That’s year after year after year without the slightest bit of protest. The latest figure offered by Donald Trump: a Pentagon budget that’s no longer the usual almost a trillion dollars (itself nothing short of shocking) but an even more eye-opening (or do I mean eye-watering?) $1.5 trillion (yes, trillion!) dollars.
And how strange, don’t you think, that, in a world where we humans already seem to go to war endlessly with other human beings, we’ve also evidently decided to go to war with this very planet itself? Of course, I’m thinking about what’s come to be known as “climate change,” but should undoubtedly have been labeled something more like “our war on the climate” (or “climate war”). And worse yet, war among us humans has proven to be perhaps the most devastating way of all to also make war on this planet itself, since nothing releases fossil fuels into the atmosphere quite the way war does. In fact, according to the Costs of War Project, the U.S. military is now believed to be “the single largest institutional producer of greenhouse gases in the world”!
After all, whatever it doesn’t accomplish, the one thing that war actually does do remarkably successfully (along with killing so many of us and destroying villages, towns, cities, and sometimes whole countries) is pour ever more fossil fuels into our atmosphere and so add immeasurably to the overheating of this planet. Honestly, could we humans be more dystopian? [...]
It is truly strange, don’t you think? I’m referring to “my” president’s never-ending urge, the second time around, to commit mayhem on this planet. (And yes, I keep putting “my” in quotation marks because I didn’t vote for him and I never wanted him to be president of the United States.) And yes again, every day there’s something, whether it’s the killing of a supposed Latin American gangster-in-chief, the kidnapping of the president of Venezuela and his wife, the blasting of Iran, the increasing threats against Cuba, or... well, I can’t even imagine what truly lies in our future (and, count on it, neither can Donald Trump), but nothing good, that’s for damn sure.
And hey, Pete Hegseth, our secretary of war (which, as a label, is historically one hell of a lot more accurate than secretary of defense), couldn’t have been blunter about our situation back in 2025: “Everything starts and ends with warriors in training and on the battlefield. We are leaving wokeness and weakness behind. And refocusing on lethality, meritocracy, accountability, standards and readiness.”
Yes, there is, it seems, nothing worth the bother but war and more war. That, sadly, is indeed our world and it seems like we just can’t help ourselves. War is and always has been a human addiction -- or should we think of it as an illness? War fever, perhaps?
by Tom Englehardt, Substack | Read more:
Image: A long wall of acceptance. Maya Lin’s Vietnam Memorial, Washington. (David J. Jackson, cc by SA 4.0/ Wikimedia Commons)
