Betrayal, Refusal, and the Yes that Follows

In the 2024 Presidential election, only one of the two main candidates voiced an anti-war position: Donald Trump. Here are some of the things he said:

“I’m not going to start wars, I’m going to stop wars.”

“We’re going to end these endless wars.”

“We will turn the page forever on those foolish, stupid days of never-ending wars. They never ended.”

“I will expel the warmongers from our national security state… and stop the war profiteering.”

“He [his predecessors] sent our blood and treasure to back regime change in Iraq, regime change in Libya, regime change in Syria and every other globalist disaster for half a century.

“We believe that the job of the United States military is not to wage endless regime-change wars around the globe, senseless wars. The job of the United States military is to defend America from attack and invasion here at home.”

“These endless wars keep going and going, people getting killed all over the place, spending billions and billions.”

“There must be a complete commitment to dismantling the entire globalist neocon establishment that is perpetually dragging us into endless wars, pretending to fight for freedom and democracy abroad…We should have never gone into the Middle East. Under my leadership, we will turn the page forever on those foolish, stupid days of never-ending wars…. Stupid, senseless, endless wars…”

He didn’t just start saying those things in 2024 either. In 2019 he said, “Lindsey Graham would like to stay in the Middle East for the next thousand years, with thousands of soldiers, fighting other people’s wars. I want to get out of the Middle East.” In 2013 he said, “The US should stay out of Syria.” In 2011, “The United States spent $2 trillion in Iraq and thousands of lives. Now we’re bombing Libya and giving aid to rebels. What are we doing?” And in the mid-2000s, “We should never have been there [Iraq].”

Trump concluded his 2024 campaign by saying in his victory speech: “I’m not going to start wars, I’m going to stop wars.”

I hoped that he would follow through on those words. Sometimes I am naive and tend to believe the best of people, but I wasn’t the only one who took his anti-war rhetoric seriously. Neoconservative war hawks believed him also, which is why many of them endorsed his opponents in the primaries and general election. Bill Kristol, Max Boot, Robert Kagan, David Frum, John Bolton, Liz Cheney, and Elliot Abrams all publicly opposed him. A year later, Trump has fulfilled their dearest fantasies.

What happened? Is there some dark secret behind his abject fealty to Israel? Did he gravitate toward the most war-obsessed neocons like Lindsey Graham, Tom Cotton, and Ted Cruz because he needed their political support? Was it that his narcissistic ego and delusions of grandeur made him susceptible to manipulation by flatterers promising glory? Or were his anti-war statements going back to the mid-2000s mere pretense from the beginning?

I’ll leave it to others to figure that out. What is important now is to end this war before it spins further out of control. One way or another, the old world order is dead. Either the United States will lose this war, or it will “win” by means so inhumane that it will destroy what is left of its soul. Either way, US hegemony is over. The more the war spirals out of control, the more that Chaos will determine what comes after. Things can get much worse. Is there anything in the President’s actions or temperament that would assure us he won’t deploy nuclear weapons? The deranged, truculent, juvenile, unhinged statements coming from the White House offer little comfort.

Our first priority must be to stop this war. Maybe the firestorm of negative public opinion coupled with economic turmoil will be enough to cause him to, absurdly, declare victory and pull back his forces, but at the present writing he seems to be moving in the opposite direction: toward further escalation.

If so, we’d better get active, and fast. I am skeptical that mass street protests will be adequate. The last truly effective marches and protests date back to the civil rights and Vietnam era. Since then they have become a kind of theater. Moreover, the authorities are adept at neutralizing them with agents-provocateurs, media blackouts, or “free speech zones” where people blow off steam before going home again. Certainly traditional street actions have a part to play, but I think we are going to have to get more creative. We live today in a digitized society, and new forms of digital protest can have massive immediate impact.

I’m not talking about online petitions and letter-writing campaigns. I’m talking about wielding the most powerful symbol available to us: money. The public can quickly bring corporations, financial institutions, and governments to their knees through various forms of electronic action: boycotts, debt strikes, and tax protests, to name a few. On Friday, BlackRock’s stock fell by 7% when it had to freeze withdrawals from one of its flagship private credit funds, because investors (apparently many from Arab countries) pulled out just 10% of the fund’s value. The financial system is so tightly wound that even a loss of 10% of deposits or funds under management can threaten the entire system as institutions scramble for liquidity. I’m not sure exactly where to apply this tactic, but I’m putting the idea out there to fuel a discussion. Which institutions are especially culpable? Which are the most systemically important? Which actions will deliver the most pressure to the political establishment?

Another form of mass protest is a debt revolt. What happens when even ten or twenty percent of debtors skip their loan payments? Creditors face a sudden liquidity crisis and have to quickly find cash to meet their own obligations. The effects ripple outward instantly. If only a few people do this, they get crushed. Their credit is ruined, they are taken to court and their assets are seized. If tens of millions of people do it though, they bring the system to its knees. We are powerful. As helpless as we may seem, as helpless as we have learned to be, still the powers that rule us depend on our consent.

Such an action must be coherent, organized, purposeful, and well-timed. It will require more courage than signing a petition. It won’t feel symbolic. It will feel real. It will feel like you are putting yourself on the line, and you will be.

What does it take for people to say, “Screw the consequences. I’ve had enough!” What will it take before we say “No!” and back that no with real non-compliance. Was the “double-tap” strike on a girls elementary school enough? (The first missile killing 165 schoolgirls, the second killing the medics and parents who arrived at the scene to tend the wounded and search for survivors.) Will the last two days’ bombing of Tehran, a city of 9-10 million people, of its fuel depots that are spewing toxic smoke into the city causing oil to rain down from the sky, of a desalinization plant providing drinking water to countless civilians… will that be enough? Will we say no if, in desperation because he is losing the war, President Trump unleashes nuclear weapons?

A mass uprising is coming, a mass “No!” It will end this war and it will bring down the Trump administration. It will dismantle the system that produced that administration in the first place, and which waged the endless imperial wars that Trump himself criticized in his campaign. It will follow the Epstein files and all the other threads of global power to their source. We have an opportunity to unravel the fabric of power, now that all can see it for what it is. Total domination. Child rapists and the war machine both enact that selfsame principle. Here are the words of Secretary of War Pete Hegseth: “Flying over their capital. Death and destruction from the sky all day long. We’re playing for keeps. Our warfighters have maximum authorities granted personally by the president and yours truly. Our rules of engagement are bold, precise, and designed to unleash American power, not shackle it. This was never meant to be a fair fight, and it is not a fair fight. We are punching them while they’re down, which is exactly how it should be.” This statement distills the darkest essence of power: to take pleasure in the suffering and humiliation of others.

That is what our uprising will say no to. Then the question will arise, “To what shall we say yes?” The new yes starts from the way we say no. We leave behind the mentality of war starting now. No longer do we see the world in terms of allies and enemies, conflicts and battles, heroes and villains. No, not even Pete Hegseth, Lindey Graham, or Donald Trump. We refuse to dehumanize these men, no matter the fury and anguish we feel at their crimes. We do not seek vengeance; we seek change. We do not deploy war narratives in our movement for peace. We do not seek to justify harm to anyone, for we understand that war is always justified (in the sense that the aggressor always justifies himself). We do not wish that anyone suffer. We do not take pleasure in the suffering and humiliation of others. Instead, we say yes to dignity. We say yes to consent. We say yes to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We know every human being, regardless of race or nationality, as equally sacred. These are the yes’s that we will build into the next version of our nation.