In a recent newsletter to readers of The Progressive, Publisher Norman Stockwell blasted the Biden Administration’s decision to provide cluster munitions to the Ukrainian military, calling it a “shocking escalation and a potentially deadly legacy for the civilian population.” Stockwell pointed out the glaring hypocrisy in which the U.S. government considered Russia’s use of cluster bombs in the conflict a potential war crime, yet claimed that the lower dud rate for U.S.-provided munitions justified such a decision. However you spin it, there is no rationale for the use of cluster munitions in war.
While this is but one instance of the U.S. military-industrial complex trumping good judgment at humanity’s expense, in this issue of The Progressive, we delve deeper into the theme of U.S. domination and meddling in countless regions across the globe.
Jim Carrier recalls that in May, President Joe Biden paid tribute to the victims of the atomic bomb dropped by the United States on Hiroshima by meeting with a survivor, planting a tree, and laying a wreath at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial. It was a noble and solemn occasion, yet at the same time, a “new nuclear arms race is underway—more treacherous, expensive, and unpredictable than the one the United States set in motion seventy-eight years ago,” Carrier writes. While we have pointed this out before, it bears repeating that the Doomsday Clock, set each year by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, is now at ninety seconds to midnight—“the closest to global catastrophe it has ever been.”
Alfred Meyer explains how the United States—with bipartisan support—is rebuilding its nuclear weapons complex in order to modify and redesign old weapons into new, more usable ones with different capabilities. “These programs are driving a new international nuclear arms race,” he observes.
Dan Bejar
In an interview with John Nichols, U.S. Representative Ro Khanna, Democrat of California, who recently cast the sole “no” vote when the House Armed Services Committee considered an $886 billion defense bill, criticized a glaring lack of oversight when it comes to U.S. military spending, noting that “the reality is that you have price gouging and price inflation for at least $400 billion of the defense budget that’s in acquisition. That money’s going into the pockets of defense contractors.”
David Vine looks at the Biden Administration’s “building spree” overseas, which focuses on a combination of U.S. military bases, added forces, and weaponry. This “forward strategy,” Vine writes, is a “flawed attempt to hold onto U.S. global dominance amid China’s rapid rise.”
As in all things relevant to understanding our current situation, it is helpful to look to the past. John Dinges provides a personal account to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the overthrow of Chile’s democratically elected president, Salvador Allende, on September 11, 1973. “The most destructive effect of the U.S. approach,” he writes, “was U.S. acquiescence to seventeen years of Chilean dictatorship, which resulted in the execution and disappearance of more than 3,000 people, the systematic use of torture and mass imprisonment, and a generation of Chilean exiles.”
In Argentina, Amelia Rayno reports on the ongoing fight for justice by victims of that country’s brutal military coup, also supported by the United States, nearly a half-century ago.
Speaking of anniversaries, Yohuru Williams marks the sixtieth anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom by linking its legacy to prominent movements of recent years, including Black Lives Matter and the fight for civil rights by the LGBTQ+ community.
In an address at the 1967 National Conference on New Politics, in Chicago, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. noted that a “nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” He added, “The issues of civil rights cannot be separated from the issues of peace.”