{"id":58820,"date":"2026-04-20T04:23:48","date_gmt":"2026-04-20T12:23:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/?p=58820"},"modified":"2026-04-20T04:23:48","modified_gmt":"2026-04-20T12:23:48","slug":"william-astore-on-americas-neocolonial-wars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2026\/04\/20\/william-astore-on-americas-neocolonial-wars\/","title":{"rendered":"William Astore on America’s Neocolonial Wars"},"content":{"rendered":"

Reprinted from Bracing Views<\/a> with the author\u2019s permission.<\/i><\/p>\n

America has a nasty \u2013 and uncoincidental \u2013 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 \u201cterrorists\u201d and \u201cmilitants\u201d or as backward and unstable, words that carry unmistakable racial overtones.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s the year 1900 all over again, complete with a crusader\u2019s mentality with prayers to God serving as cover for naked greed and wanton aggression. Here, one could imagine Pete Hegseth reciting Mark Twain\u2019s bitterly satirical \u201cWar Prayer\u201d with total and unthinking conviction.<\/p>\n

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(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 \u2013 rarely stated outright but easy to infer \u2013 was that the Inuit didn\u2019t deserve to exercise sovereignty over land deemed valuable by great powers like the USA.)<\/p>\n

Racial (or racist) dimensions to Trump\u2019s violent policies should be recognized and denounced for what they are. Too often, his references to \u201cshithole countries\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s campaigns in the Balkans in the 1990s \u2013 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\u2019t 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 \u201cbetter\u201d and less deserving of being bombed and killed?<\/p>\n

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 \u201ccivilized,\u201d \u201cEuropean,\u201d and even \u201cblonde-haired and blue-eyed.\u201d 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 \u2013 and that their wartime suffering was therefore both more notable and more tragic.<\/p>\n

Wars often defy simple analysis, yet complexity shouldn\u2019t obscure patterns. The neocolonial and racial dimensions of America\u2019s global use of force isn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

Postscript: George Carlin in 1992 put this sentiment in his usual pungent and memorable way<\/a>. America\u2019s \u201cnew job in the world \u2013 bombing brown people.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reprinted from Bracing Views with the author\u2019s permission. America has a nasty \u2013 and uncoincidental \u2013 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, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":290,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"none","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"coauthors":[758],"class_list":["post-58820","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"0","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58820","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/290"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=58820"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58820\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":58824,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58820\/revisions\/58824"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=58820"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=58820"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=58820"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=58820"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}