The nature of the American State

US troops before leaving Afghanistan. One of many countries American presidents have invaded to achieve their war plans

How the war against Iran is not a Trump creation but a deep-seated American way of doing things

THE LAST WORD | ANDREW M. MWENDA | US President Donald Trump campaigned on the ticket of “no new wars in the Middle East”. He had argued for many years that these wars create more problems than they seek to solve. In his November 2025 National Security Strategy, Trump argued that the US would be out of the democracy promotion and nation-building business. So why did he go into this war of choice given his very well-known convictions on this subject? For a moment, I got lost in Trump’s unorthodox ways and believed he could make a difference by ending America’s constant violence.

What Trump has done, i.e., begin a new war of choice, is not new for an American president. War and violence lie at the foundation of this criminal state. In its early years, the US was built on the mass extermination of Native Americans (genocide) and the enslavement of African Americans. These crimes against humanity were not a result of any deficit in America’s so-called liberal democracy. On the contrary, they were its foundation. Even when slavery ended, it was by an “Emancipation Proclamation” issued by a president using dictatorial powers. After slavery, the institutions of this “liberal democracy” — a free press, political parties, civil society, an independent judiciary and Parliament — created an apartheid system called “Jim Crow”, which today has transformed into mass incarceration of Black people. The violence continues.

In 1992, Bill Clinton campaigned against George Bush Sr, accusing him of focusing on foreign issues and wars. He said, in his words, “It is the economy, stupid.” But once in power, he invaded Serbia, bombed it and broke it up without UN Security Council approval; bombed Afghanistan and Sudan; not to mention the constant bombing and starving of Iraq into the stone age, effectively carrying out a genocide in that country. To add to this, he began expanding NATO and thereby laid the foundation of the war in Ukraine.

Then George Bush Jr campaigned on the ticket of no more foreign wars. But no sooner had Bush Jr come to power than he invaded Afghanistan and then Iraq, apparently to promote America’s biggest secular religion, democracy. Many think that the Afghanistan war was imposed on the US. On the contrary, declassified US documents show the Taliban were willing to hand over Osama Bin Laden, but America wanted war. In The Afghanistan Papers, a book by Larry Lewis, it shows American leaders had assessed the war as lost as early as 2005, but they kept fighting, with the military and the foreign policy establishment, together with their spin doctors, literally lying to themselves and the American public that the US was winning.

Barack Obama campaigned on the ticket of no new wars in the Middle East as well. He promised to close Guantanamo Bay prison, end the wars in Iraq and begin no new ones. Instead, he escalated the war in Afghanistan through his own surge, kept the one in Iraq going for some years and withdrew. Then he invaded Libya and destroyed the state, replacing it with anarchy, slavery and violence against Black people — so much for the first “Black” president. Then he began bombing Syria and armed militant groups linked to Al Qaeda to overthrow the government of Bashar al-Assad. But when ISIS, one of the violent groups America had helped emerge in Syria, invaded Iraq, Obama returned to fight his former allies.

Meanwhile, Bush’s “terrorist” suspects from Afghanistan, the Arab world, Asia and Africa were being detained without trial and tortured at Guantanamo Bay and other “black sites” across the world. One such black site was at Summit View in Kololo, where Uganda’s CMI worked closely with the CIA to torture and kill many Somali male youths passing through our country. Obama had campaigned against this practice.

Once in power, he adopted a policy of killing suspected terrorists instead of detaining them without trial or torturing them. Using unmanned drones in Somalia, Afghanistan and Pakistan, Obama dropped more bombs in his first year as president than Bush did in eight years. He effectively made himself the investigator, the prosecutor, the judge, the jury and the executioner of the sentence on anyone suspected by the CIA of being a terrorist. His atrocities were hidden from the public by his well-choreographed PR machine. American cruelty had reached its apogee.

Trump campaigned against these forever wars and won in 2016. To his credit, he did not start new wars, although he fought old ones such as in Afghanistan and the bombing of Syria. Then Joe Biden, a hawkish president addicted to violence, came to power with the hubris of a man convinced of moral certainty. Raging with anger against Russian President Vladimir Putin, whom he had told face-to-face, “You have no soul,” he was itching for a new war. His son, Hunter Biden, had been involved in corruption in Ukraine. Trump had tried to expose this but was impeached for it. Biden lured Putin into a trap to invade Ukraine so that he could have his own war. In the three years Biden fought Russia in Ukraine, America spent $300 billion while its own citizens went without healthcare and many became homeless.

Biden was not yet done. His ally, Benjamin Netanyahu, wanted another war to expand Israel’s borders. He had spent years funding Hamas, giving them over $1.5 billion in cash through Qatar. He then turned the attention of his security and military away, allowing Hamas to attack on 7 October 2023. With this casus belli, Netanyahu had the justification to launch a massive offensive in Gaza. Biden was more than willing to help. America supplied Israel with all the munitions needed to carry out a scorched-earth policy in Gaza, bombing schools, hospitals, libraries, mosques, churches, bakeries, water treatment plants, power grids, homes and hotels.

The lesson from the past 35 years of American political history is simple but fundamental. The constant wars, violence, genocides and mass killings America is repeatedly involved in have little to do with individual presidents. They have everything to do with the nature of the state itself. Trump is not fundamentally different from his predecessors. He is only a more crude and unsophisticated representative of a violent state that calls itself a liberal democracy. So when he promised to destroy Iran, he was saying what all his predecessors planned to do but did not say openly.

***

amwenda@ugindependent.co.ug