These are the three social evils Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. warned would destroy America from within: Militarism, materialism, and racism. Decades later, they help explain the divisions in our country that led to the January 6 attack by protesters on the U.S. Capitol. Of the three, however, the role our recent wars have played in exacerbating these conditions is often the most overlooked.
Video produced by Khody Akhavi.
American forces invaded Panama in 1989 to capture Manuel Noriega, a former U.S. ally whose rule over Panama was marred by drug trafficking, corruption and human rights abuses.
But experts point to another, perhaps just as critical goal: to cure the American public of “Vietnam syndrome,” which has been described as a national malaise and aversion of foreign interventions in the wake of the failed Vietnam War.
On both fronts, the operation was a success. With Noriega in custody and democracy restored, President George H. W. Bush could make the case that the U.S. military was back to peak performance and that force — including regime change — could be used effectively for good, commencing a new era of foreign interventionism in America.
Nearly four decades and several disastrous conflicts later, the public has overwhelmingly become skeptical once more, especially after the 20 years of war following the 9/11 attacks in 2001.
President Donald Trump first latched onto this sentiment in 2016, calling the Iraq War a “failure” and promising to get the country out of the business of regime change and forever wars. But just under a year into his second term, Trump seems determined instead to do his part in kicking America’s “Iraq syndrome,” using extraordinary military might to shock adversaries into submission.
The administration went back to the Panama model last week, bombing military and civilian targets in Venezuela and capturing President Nicolás Maduro and his wife to face criminal charges in the U.S.
And as was the case with Panama, the operation was less about accomplishing certain political objectives and more about “employ[ing] military force as a way to restore a sense of confidence in the military,” according to Professor of History at Texas A&M University Gregory Daddis, who is also an Iraq War veteran and author of “Faith and Fear: America's Relationship with War Since 1945.”
“I think what you're seeing [with the Venezuela invasion] is a similar gesture of trying to use military force as a way to demonstrate the armed forces now under the Secretary of Defense's leadership as a more lethal force, and that somehow is intended to make Americans feel better about themselves and have confidence in their ability to project power overseas,” Daddis said.
Catherine Lutz, a professor of International Studies at Brown University and founder of the Costs of War Project there, agrees.
With the operation, Trump wanted to show that a military that he “disparag[ed]” during conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan was now “competent” under his leadership.
“That's his psychology: that everything he touches turns to gold, and that if he were to use the military, as he has in many different ways already in the first year of his administration, he would do it right. He would do it with overwhelming force,” Lutz said.
But the invasion of Panama received plenty of criticism at the time and the Venezuela invasion won’t be immune from the same. How the invasion will be received by the American public — and what this could mean for the future of interventionism in America — depends on several different factors, Lutz said.
“We live in such a fragmented news environment that if you're watching Fox News, you take away that America is back, that we are a strong nation whose strength lies in its military,” Lutz said. “If you're watching MSNBC or CNN or a number of other outlets, you are disgusted. You see this as violating his promise to be less interventionist militarily, taking him at his word that Iraq was a mistake and that we didn't need to do it better; we needed to do it not at all.”
The American public’s response, Daddis said, will influence whether the Venezuela invasion will “restore a sense of honor” in the armed forces and be parlayed into an era of interventionism, or whether the operation will further “undermine the confidence” of an American public already disillusioned with military force.
In order to kick the Iraq War syndrome, an aversion to long, open-ended conflicts that involve regime change, American boots on the ground, and nation building, Trump has to make sure Venezuela is anything but.
He is off to a good start. For one, both the stated goals of the Venezuela invasion and its military footprint are much smaller than other American conflicts. Around 1.5 million U.S. service members were sent to Iraq during the course of the war, whereas a smaller number of Delta Force commandos and federal law enforcement engaged in the hours-long raid and capture of Maduro, leaving no U.S. boots left on the ground.
Additionally, “democracy” fell behind drugs and oil as the chief motivators for the invasion, signaling that a full regime change which might require forces on the ground and U.S. physical presence would not be required, according to senior analyst at the National Security Archive and the director of the Cuba Documentation Project Peter Kornbluh.
“He’s not claiming that there are any goals to promote democracy or human rights or stability,” Kornbluh said. “He is simply saying the United States is the bully on the block, the most powerful country; might makes right. We want that oil, and we’re just going to take it.”
Perhaps the most notable difference with previous conflicts like Iraq or the invasion of Panama is that Venezuela is part of Trump’s plan to reassert “American dominance in the Western Hemisphere,” as Trump said in a recent news conference at Mar-a-Lago.
“Under our new national security strategy, American dominance in the Western Hemisphere will never be questioned again,” Trump said in the press conference.
The invasion was a display of power designed to “transparently open the door to a new era of U.S. imperialism,” according to Kornbluh. While the conflict in Iraq took place halfway across the world, Venezuela is a country right in America’s backyard.
Thus, it is the responsibility of a “great power,” like America to intervene, Vice President J.D. Vance said in a social media post Sunday.
“I understand the anxiety over the use of military force, but are we just supposed to allow a communist to steal our stuff in our hemisphere and do nothing,” Vance said in a post on X. “Great powers don't act like that. The United States, thanks to President Trump's leadership, is a great power again. Everyone should take note.”
But will the successful operation be enough to convince an American public scarred from costly conflicts to become war hawks once more? Early polls are saying possibly.
Based on data collected in an Economist/YouGov survey, still only a quarter of Americans say they strongly or somewhat support the invasion of Venezuela using military force. However, this is up seven percentage points from data collected before the invasion.
And while still more Americans oppose the intervention than support it, the amount in favor has risen 11 percentage points in the last two weeks, increasing most among Republicans.
While this data is preliminary and public opinion can still change as events develop, the success of this operation could encourage a wary American public to be more forgiving toward interventionism, if given the resonating justifications for the use of force — just like Panama in 1989.
“Panama mattered because it showed the U.S. would continue intervention even after the Cold War,” said Stephen Zunes, professor of politics and Program Director for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of San Francisco. “Many people thought the end of communism meant the U.S. would become a good world citizen and stop violating international law. Panama showed the Cold War was more an excuse than the reason, and that the U.S. would continue as an imperial, interventionist power.”
But where Trump might scare away a cautious population is with impulsive comments in which he says the U.S. could “run” Venezuela for years. “What makes Venezuela more serious on certain levels is that this is not a one-and-done,” Zunes said.
It remains to be seen whether Trump successfully made intervention great again and cured the American public of its “Iraq syndrome,” or if a years-long foreign commitment will be too much for an American public warily coming back around to interventionism.
When the Trump administration announced that Thierry Breton — former EU commissioner and a French national from President Emmanuel Macron’s party — and four more EU citizens faced a U.S. visa ban over accusations of "extraterritorial censorship," official Brussels erupted in fury.
Top EU officials condemned the move as an attack on Europe's sovereign right to regulate its digital space. Breton himself depicted it as an expression of McCarthyism." The EU vowed to shield its digital rules from U.S. pressure.
Irrespective of the rights and wrongs of this U.S. decision, there is another, far more consequential chapter on which the EU has been markedly more timid. The United States unleashed far heavier sanctions — not just visa bans, but also financial sanctions — against the International Criminal Court (ICC), targeting its prosecutor and judges for pursuing accountability related to alleged Israel’s war crimes in Gaza. For the same reason, Washington has also sanctioned the U.N. Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese.
These measures are designed to cripple the ICC’s and Albanese’s operations and intimidate those pursuing accountability. Here, however, the EU, a self-proclaimed guardian of the rules-based international order and international law, responded not with fury, but a revealing spinelessness. Beyond generic professions of support for the ICC, the EU failed to enact a powerful legal instrument it designed in 1990s to nullify the extraterritorial effect of such third-country sanctions — the "Blocking Statute."
This instrument was introduced to protect the EU against extraterritorial overreach. Since the ICC is located in The Hague, Netherlands, it would be effectively deployable in this case. The statute forbids EU entities from complying with listed foreign sanctions. It was first activated against extra-territorial U.S. sanctions on Libya and Cuba in 1996, proving its utility as a shield for European economic and foreign policy interests.
The contrast is not an oversight; it is the issue’s core. It exposes the EU’s highly selective commitment to sovereignty, the rule of law, and freedom from foreign coercion. It is invoked when European elites feel targeted, yet abandoned when the cost of defending those same principles, such as angering the U.S. government, becomes inconvenient.
This opportunism does more than stain the bloc’s credibility. Once the principles become contingent on geopolitical expediency, it enables Brussels to turn its coercive tools inward against those deemed threatening to the mainstream consensus. The result is the construction of a domestic apparatus of censorship under the guise of fighting "foreign interference."
This is most evident in how the EU is increasingly using its Russia sanctions framework — an inherently political instrument requiring no criminal trial — to target EU citizens, residents, and journalists for their dissenting views. Individuals like French journalist Xavier Moreau and Swiss analyst Jacques Baud have seen their assets frozen and financial lives destroyed not for any criminal offense, but for sharing geopolitical analysis deemed favorable to Russia.
These actions transform sanctions from a tool of foreign policy into a mechanism of extralegal domestic political control. It creates a parallel punitive system where the executive branch, acting through the Council (the EU member states), can brush aside all the usual judicial safeguards — presumption of innocence, right to a defense and to face the accuser, proportionality, and access to the file — to punish what is a legally protected speech, however objectionable the Council and Commission bureaucrats may find it.
The only recourse for those accused is an appeal to the European Court of Justice, which reviews only for formal errors, not the justice of the sanction itself. The result is a social and economic death sentence for dissent.
This arbitrary practice does not exist in the vacuum. The ground was prepared by a justifying narrative supplied by initiatives like the Von der Leyen Commission’s European Democracy Shield and its arm in the European Parliament: Special Committee on the European Democracy Shield, itself a bureaucratic extension of the former “special committee on foreign interference.”
While presented as a defense against foreign information manipulation, the committee, chaired by French MEP Nathalie Loiseau, a close ally of President Macron, functions as a vehicle to marginalize and stigmatize broad categories of dissent. In a revealing interview to the French daily Le Figaro, Loiseau has framed her mission mostly as hunting "nefarious Russian influence."
Her targets, however, are tellingly broad. They include not just the “right-wing populists” threatening Macron’s hold on power in France, but also Russian-speaking minorities in the Baltic states, foreign policy realists who advocate for diplomacy and restraint in Ukraine and even those who “romanticize Russian culture.”
This is not a sensible security policy; it is political McCarthyism. It creates a deliberate rhetorical environment where skepticism of the EU's consensus on Ukraine and Russia or criticism of its foreign policy decisions are reflexively treated as evidence of being a de facto agent of Moscow and treason.
By casting entire communities and schools of thought as inherently suspect and vulnerable to foreign manipulation, the EU is constructing the censorship complex designed to surveil, denounce, pressure, stigmatize, and now, ultimately, also sanction dissent. By making an example of the likes of Jacques Baud, the EU sends a chilling message: anyone who disagrees with whatever happens to be the mainstream EU consensus of the day is potentially vulnerable to having their livelihoods and reputations destroyed.
Policing thought is a tragic symptom of the current European trajectory. It speaks of a political elite so insecure in its own policies and frightened of dissent that it must criminalize debate. The blunt weapons, like sanctions, initially limited for foreign adversaries, are now deployed against domestic critics. And all that, instead of protecting those who, like the ICC, defend the values the EU claims to uphold.
If this path continues, the vibrant, contested, and free European public sphere will be the most tragic casualty of the “geopolitical Europe.”
This past week, President Trump removed any remaining ambiguity about his intentions toward Greenland. During a White House event, he declared he would take the Arctic territory “whether they like it or not.” Then he laid down what sounded like a mobster’s threat to Denmark: “If we don’t do it the easy way we’re going to do it the hard way.”
Trump also reportedly ordered special forces commanders to come up with an invasion plan, even though senior military officials warned him it would violate international law and NATO treaties. In an interview with the New York Times, Trump said, “I don’t need international law.”
Behind closed doors, Secretary of State Marco Rubio has been trying to calm Congress, saying all this military posturing is just a way to pressure Denmark to negotiate. Meanwhile, Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff, dismissed Denmark’s authority over Greenland claiming, “nobody is going to fight the United States militarily over the future of Greenland.”
Meanwhile, seven European countries issued a joint statement that “Greenland belongs to its people” and some NATO allies hope to temper Trump by offering to station a military force on the island to counter Russia and China in the Arctic.
In an apparent effort to stave off Trump’s appetite for Greenland, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer reportedly told Trump that he shares his view on Russia’s threat to the region and that he would consider sending troops to help defend against it. Meanwhile, Germany is proposing establishing a joint Arctic NATO mission and Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said a U.S. takeover of Greenland would mark the end of NATO.
Given the massing opposition to Trump’s quest for Greenland, and questionable security benefits from annexing the island, what’s really going on here?
The Trump administration can’t seem to decide why it needs to seize Greenland. At first, the president claimed “Russian and Chinese ships are all along the coast,” a claim rejected by senior Nordic diplomats: “I have seen the intelligence. There are no ships, no submarines.” Later, Trump warned, “If we don't take Greenland, Russia or China will, and I’m not letting that happen.”
Vice President JD Vance has pivoted to missile defense, arguing “the entire missile defense infrastructure is partially dependent on Greenland.” There is no debating the strategic value of Greenland. The U.S. base on the island, Pituffik Space Base, provides early-warning radar coverage of Russian or Chinese bombers and missiles.
However, boosting that capability does not depend on Washington taking ownership of the island itself. Existing defense agreements already allow the U.S. to project power and modernize its capability without the diplomatic catastrophe of annexation.
The mainstream media has extensively covered Trump’s Greenland ambitions, emphasizing Arctic security competition with China and Russia as well as strategic shipping routes opening due to melting ice. Most mention Greenland’s vast deposits of critical minerals essential for electric vehicles and renewables.
But they stop short of examining the forces that may be actually driving the minerals agenda: tech billionaires like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, who see Greenland not just as a source of rare earths, but as a laboratory for their libertarian economic and social experiments. These tech-billionaires envision unregulated “freedom cities” in Greenland, free from democratic oversight, environmental laws, and labor protections.
Ken Howery, Trump’s ambassador to Denmark and a PayPal co-founder with Thiel and Musk, has reportedly been in talks to set up these low-regulation zones.
There’s an ironic clash of interests here: the national security establishment wants strong state control over strategic territory. The tech-billionaire funding Trump want the opposite: a deregulated playground for their anarcho-capitalist experiments. Both share a common blindness to Greenlandic sovereignty and Indigenous rights.
It’s profoundly disturbing how the climate crisis is being reframed as opportunity. Greenland’s ice sheet is melting faster due to rising temperatures. Indigenous Greenlanders are watching their traditional way of life vanish as the ice disappears.
The 56,000 Greenlanders, 89% of whom are Indigenous Inuit, have made their position clear: 85% oppose joining the U.S. The last parliamentary elections delivered victory to parties that openly reject Trump’s advances. But you wouldn’t know it from the way Washington talks about Greenland. Their voices are barely a whisper in all these discussions of annexation. At the same time, most Americans oppose the idea of buying or invading Greenland.
The White House is trying every angle to get its way. U.S. officials have discussed paying every Greenlander a lump sum from $10,000 to $100,000, essentially trying to buy approval from a population that keeps saying no.
The White House is also trying to enter a Compact of Free Association (COFA) agreement with Greenland. In such an agreement, the U.S. only provides mail delivery and military protection operations in exchange for the U.S. military to operate freely and duty-free trade.
Such agreements exist with islands like Palau, the Marshall Islands, and Micronesia. However, this arrangement is unlikely to succeed with Greenland. COFA agreements have previously been inked with independent countries, and Greenland would need to separate from Denmark for such a plan to proceed.
This crisis extends far beyond Greenland. This is about what kind of country America wants to be, and how it leads on the world stage. Will the U.S. lead through partnership and mutual benefit, or through threats and coercion? Does Washington respect self-determination (a principle we claim to champion) or only when it’s convenient?
This obsession with annexation reduces everything to a resource grab. Missing entirely is any recognition of Greenland as a home to people with their own dreams, rights, and hopes for the future.
President Trump promised to end forever wars and take on the foreign policy establishment. But these threats over Greenland show the same old thinking that might makes right and that other countries’ independence only counts when it serves our perceived interests. America’s true interests lie not in reviving imperialism but in demonstrating that partnership and mutual benefit offer a better path than aggressive unilateralism.
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