Reprinted from Bracing Views with the author’s permission.
America has a nasty – and uncoincidental – pattern of bombing and intervening in countries largely populated by nonwhite peoples. These are, essentially, exercises in neocolonial power. Recent targets include Venezuela, Yemen, Somalia, Nigeria, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Libya and now Iran. In U.S. political and media discourse, these nations are often framed as breeding grounds of “terrorists” and “militants” or as backward and unstable, words that carry unmistakable racial overtones.
An obvious component to this is what resources America can extract or extort from these less-than-fully-deserving peoples, most often fossil fuels but also lithium, uranium, gold, and other precious metals. It’s the year 1900 all over again, complete with a crusader’s mentality with prayers to God serving as cover for naked greed and wanton aggression. Here, one could imagine Pete Hegseth reciting Mark Twain’s bitterly satirical “War Prayer” with total and unthinking conviction.
(Consider, as an aside, Greenland, an island populated mainly by Inuit peoples. As President Trump floated the idea of acquiring it, discussion in the media centered on its strategic and resource value. The implication – rarely stated outright but easy to infer – was that the Inuit didn’t deserve to exercise sovereignty over land deemed valuable by great powers like the USA.)
Racial (or racist) dimensions to Trump’s violent policies should be recognized and denounced for what they are. Too often, his references to “shithole countries” and the like are explained away as Trump being Trump, i.e. personally rude and politically crude. Yet Trump very much means what he says; his rhetoric of white superiority aligns perfectly with his predatory policies and actions.
A question we might consider is when America last bombed predominantly white populations. The obvious example remains World War II and the bombing of Nazi Germany. A more recent example was NATO’s campaigns in the Balkans in the 1990s – but even there, the targets were often portrayed in Western discourse as marginal or brutal or otherwise not fully part of the civilized (white) European core. Race, of course, isn’t the sole factor in U.S. military action, but the death toll from bombing since 1945 has rarely included white peoples in significant numbers. Are whites somehow “better” and less deserving of being bombed and killed?
Remember, at the outset of the Russia-Ukraine War, how some in the Western media expressed shock that war was happening in a country described as “civilized,” “European,” and even “blonde-haired and blue-eyed.” Comments like this revealed an implicit hierarchy: that some lives, some places, the white lives, the white places, are presumed to be more civilized and thus further removed from violence – and that their wartime suffering was therefore both more notable and more tragic.
Wars often defy simple analysis, yet complexity shouldn’t obscure patterns. The neocolonial and racial dimensions of America’s global use of force isn’t the whole story but it sure is part of it. Recognizing that sordid reality is a necessary step toward understanding how and why these wars are fought. It may also serve as a way to attack these wars for what they often are: nakedly immoral exercises in racialized neocolonial dominance and resource extraction.
Postscript: George Carlin in 1992 put this sentiment in his usual pungent and memorable way. America’s “new job in the world – bombing brown people.”
