Uses of Armageddon

The US was built on—and for—war. Without wars, the US would be a poorer country, technologically less advanced, and culturally adrift.

The first wars American colonial settlers fought using European firearms were against Native Americans. The bows and arrows Native Americans possessed were no match. They were pushed into Reservations—closed-off, designated areas where nearly five million Native Americans still live today in abject poverty.

American colonial settlers now turned their attention to Mexico, invading it and seizing half its territory following the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848. War was not only territorially lucrative but helped institutionalise America’s future military-industrial-complex (MIC) that would wage global wars from the 1900s to the present day, almost without pause.

Europe built its wealth on colonial exploitation. America built its wealth on war. US President Donald Trump’s revised blueprint to turn the Gaza rubble into a Middle East riviera was leaked recently. The plan proposes Gaza be placed under US-Israel control, relocating the residents of Gaza to other countries, offering each $5,000 to move.

The brazenness of the Gaza riviera plan has shocked most people, including many in the US, despite the rock-solid popular support Israel enjoys in America. But it shouldn’t shock anyone. America has done the same thing, in varying degrees, over and over again. After it entered World War II in December 1941, the US government incarcerated 1,12,000 Japanese-Americans living lawfully as US citizens. Their houses and belongings were confiscated, their US citizenship revoked, and thousands deported.

World War II ended the Great Depression that devastated America from 1929 to 1939. American factories started humming again as a desperate Europe sought weapons, munitions and fighter jets. During World War II, America produced 3,00,000 aircraft; 1,42,000 ships; and several million pieces of artillery. The foundation of defence contractors, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon, was laid amid the war’s death and destruction.

World War II over, America quickly found new wars. First, in Indo-China in the early 1950s, and a decade later, in Vietnam. The war scarred a generation of young American men drafted to fight in the jungles of Vietnam. Many dodged the draft, including the 22-year-old Donald Trump in 1968.

American planes dropped an estimated 7.5 million tonnes of bombs on Vietnam during the decade-long war. The 1972 image in Time magazine of a young unclothed Vietnamese girl fleeing an American napalm bomb attack shocked the world. But not America. It sought new wars to fight and profit from.

The Middle East obliged. Having lost the 1967 and 1973 wars to Israel, Arab monarchies became US protectorates. American military bases sprang up across West Asia searching for war. Iran and Iraq were obvious targets. So were Libya, Lebanon and Yemen.

Further away, in southeast Europe, the Balkans beckoned. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the US co-opted former Soviet satellite states. NATO membership doubled from 16 to 32 between 1991 and 2025. Yugoslavia was dismembered into seven new countries. Those that resisted US supremacy were bombed into submission. Serbia suffered 78 days of daily US and British bombardment in 1999. It scarred a generation of Serbs, including Serbian tennis superstar Novak Djokovic who was 12 years old at the time.

Iraq, however, remained the big prize. Though the fiction of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) was soon exposed, the illegal US and British invasion of Iraq in 2003 opened the gateway to new lands for endless wars. Syria would be next. NATO was already in Afghanistan. It took Washington 20 years to realise that the Afghans who had defeated the Soviet Union would also defeat the US. NATO troops withdrew in disarray in 2021.

But the wars haven’t ended. Nor has America’s appetite been satiated. The gleam in the eyes of generals in the Pentagon speaks of the promise of Gaza and Ukraine. Russia will fight on, the Pentagon knows. So will Israel. Both Ukraine and Israel are American proxies.

Lockheed Martin and other US war factories are getting ready for future wars in the Indo-Pacific. An invasion of Taiwan by China could trigger yet another war, fought directly or, as in Ukraine and Gaza, by proxy.President Trump covets the Nobel Peace Prize. America’s impulse to wage war, not peace, will ensure he won’t get it.  

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