The Gazan beach staging area for the future American "surge" of humanitarian aid to the Palestinians there has already been attacked, according to official reports.
According to U.S. and Israeli sources, United Nations reps who were on the beach prepping the area for the new pier came under limited mortar fire early Thursday. No one was hurt, and there was minimal damage to some engineering equipment. Early reporting from i24 News speculated that Palestinians were targeting Israeli Defense Forces in the area, but that has not been confirmed. The Pentagon did not return a request for comment from RS.
Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Thursday that he believes the risk can be mitigated, though there seems to be outstanding questions on who exactly is providing the security on the beach for this project.
“Nothing we do is risk-free,” the general said during an appearance at Georgetown University in Washington.
The U.S. Army vessels that are supposed to be marshaling the supplies and equipment to build a floating pier and causeway to surge humanitarian aid into Gaza are in place in the Mediterranean. The project, which will ostensibly allow the U.S. to facilitate aid from inspection points in Crete to the floating pier then onto a trident causeway off the beach and into Gaza, will supposedly be ready early-May, according to the DOD.
The U.N. has agreed to serve as the delivery system into the strip. The Biden Administration has insisted no American troops will be operating on the ground.
That last point is the critical one since critics say Washington is playing a dangerous game by getting so close to the battlefield of a brutal conflict. The attack this week, no matter how minimal, underscores the dangers of a spark setting off a situation in which U.S. personnel come under fire and are forced to react.
"Placing American service members in harm's way will not solve the underlying crisis in the Middle East and will continue to escalate tensions," read a statement by Concerned Veterans of America yesterday. "After decades of open-ended missions in the region, @POTUS needs to immediately reevaluate involvement in a crisis that risks American lives, now, before casualties occur."
Interestingly, the Washington Post and others are now reporting that the pier will be near Wadi Gaza, a coastal area near the corridor that the Israelis have established cutting across the Gaza strip and upon which are establishing what appears to be permanent outposts. The Post indicates this will make it easier for aid to travel north and south, but will the location of a new pier allow Israel to deliver supplies and equipment to its own military, too?
Kelley Beaucar Vlahos is the Editorial Director of Responsible Statecraft.
Palestinians on Gaza coast amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas, in Deir Al-Balah, in the central Gaza Strip, on April 24, 2024. (Photo by Majdi Fathi/NurPhoto)NO USE FRANCE
Unlike Alex Garland’s Civil War, his Warfare, co-directed with war vet Ray Mendoza, is not just another attempt at a realistic portrayal of war, in all its blood and gore. Warfare, based on a true story, is really a parable about the overweening ambition and crushing failure of empire, a microcosm of America’s disastrous adventure in Iraq.
A Navy Seal mission reconnoiters a neighborhood in Ramadi. “I like this house,” says the team commander, reflecting the overconfidence of the empire at its unipolar moment. But it soon becomes clear that the mission has underestimated the enemy, that the whole neighborhood has, in fact, been tracking the Seals’ movements. Surprised and scared, the mission requests to be extricated. But extrication becomes a bloody, hellish experience despite the Seals’ technological edge in weapons, IT, and logistics, and it barely succeeds.
For most of the film, the resistance is visible only through the Seal sniper’s lens, but as they emerge from all the neighboring houses after the invaders have been driven out, these faceless folks convey a simple but clear message: Leave, you’re not wanted here. What is notable is how that message is delivered. There is no moralizing or pained explorations of conscience by the combatants. The message is deftly smuggled into a simple story of a platoon that is inserted into an alien environment, entrapped, extricated, and forced into ignominious retreat.
The only film I can compare with a similar indirect, non-didactic approach in delivering an anti-war message—and reaping the rewards in the box office, to boot—was Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down, which was also about a mission gone badly awry during the U.S. intervention in Somalia in the early 1990s. Not surprisingly, there’s already a debate about which is the better film.
The larger picture framing Warfare was President George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003 to take out Saddam Hussein and remake Iraqi society into an American-style liberal democracy with a neoliberal economy. Although initially welcomed by some sectors, almost all of Iraqi society had turned against the United States by 2007. But the social arrangements in place during Saddam’s rule also crumbled, turning the battle into a four-cornered pitched battle between the United States, Sunnis, Shiites, and the Kurds. The levels of violence against U.S. troops reached unprecedented levels, with only the so-called Green Zone in Baghdad under secure U.S. control.
Top U.S. officials, both military and civilian, recommended disengagement from Iraq. A strategy called “the Surge,” was adopted under Gen. David Petraeus, the key elements of which were temporarily raising the number of U.S. troops, shifting the focus from military tactics to political efforts to reconcile warring Iraqi groups, and setting a firm date for withdrawal. This was meant to buy something like the “peace with honor” the United States negotiated with North Vietnam that went into effect in 1973 to allow an “honorable” withdrawal of American forces. By December 2011, most U.S. troops had left Iraq, forced out by the realities of resistance that are sketched in microcosm in Warfare, having accomplished nothing but to leave a society in ruins, hundreds of thousands dead, and a government solidly aligned with U.S. adversary Iran.
There have been a number of films about the Iraq War, the most notable of which were Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker and Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper. Both are gripping stories, and both do a good job depicting the stresses veterans face in adjusting back to civilian life. But both largely evade the bigger picture, meaning what the Americans were doing in Iraq in the first place. (Moreover, Eastwood’s reputation as a director was nearly ruined by that scene that most remember from American Sniper: Brad Cooper manipulating the hand of the doll that Eastwood inexplicably substituted for a real baby.)
As for films about the war in Afghanistan, America’s longest war, there are hardly any worth watching, except perhaps documentaries like HBO’s Escape from Kabul and BBC’s Leaving Afghanistan.
It is perhaps coincidental that Warfare was released in April 2025, 50 years after the devastating defeat of the United States in Vietnam, symbolized by the frantic clawing by U.S. collaborators onto a helicopter on the rooftop of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon. Looking back, the debacle in Vietnam was the decisive defeat of American arms from which the United States never really recovered. The empire did seem to have a second wind with the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq in 2001 and 2003, respectively, but that illusion was shattered by the panicked withdrawal from Kabul in 2021, which was visually almost a replay of the retreat from Saigon decades earlier.
The disastrous adventures in Vietnam and the Middle East have been instrumental in creating a significant isolationist sector in the so-called MAGA movement that Donald Trump appealed to successfully in his three quests for the presidency. Despite his aggressive rhetoric and his penchant for trade war, Trump is gun-shy, knowing that nothing could better undermine his presidency than his unleashing the dogs of war. Still, given the well-known short memory of the American public, it is by no means certain that the era of Western imperial interventionism is over. Let’s hope that Warfare will contribute to underlining the foolishness and recklessness of the bipartisan elite that has dominated U.S. foreign policy over the last eight decades.
Top photo credit: Washington, DC, May 24, 2024: A visitor reads the names of the fallen soldiers at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial at the National Mall ahead of Memorial Day. (A_Kiphayet/Shutterstock)
This Memorial Day comes a month after the 50th anniversary of the Fall of Saigon, which was largely used to recall the collapse of the entire American project in Vietnam. In short, the failure of the war is now viewed as both a rebuke of the American Exceptionalism myth and the rigid Cold War mentality that had Washington in a vice grip for much of the 20th Century.
“The leaders who mismanaged this debacle were never held accountable and remained leading players in the establishment for the rest of their lives,” noted author and professor Stephen Walt in a RS symposium on the war. “The country learned little from this bitter experience, and repeated these same errors in Iraq, Afghanistan, and several other places.”
Today, after 20 years of those post-9/11 wars, the American people — including many of the veterans who fought there — have seemingly got the message. In poll after poll, they reject the use of force as the first tool in the toolbox. They eschew the idea of prospective war with Iran, and China over Taiwan.
But do our leaders “get it”?
Donald Trump swept into office in 2016 on the idea that he would end “endless” conflict and shared the national disdain for being lied to in order to invade Iraq, and for spreading American troops too thin to fight Washington’s wars of choice overseas. Now in his second term he has made similar exhortations — recently he rebuked the “neocons” who “spent trillions and trillions of dollars failing to develop Kabul, Baghdad, and so many other cities” in his recent Middle East trip.
His Vice President JD Vance is a veteran who has admonished the interventionist impulses of the past. Delivering the commencement speech to U.S Naval Academy class of 2025 on Friday, he said his boss wants only to send men and women into conflict with clear goals rather than “undefined missions” and “open-ended conflicts” of the past.
The new administration incorporates other veterans, however, like his Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who is still giving off mixed signals when it comes to the use of force purely in the national security interest (see his threats against Iran, his responses in the Yemen airstrike Signalgate chats).
So if Memorial Day is for remembering, what do we want the Trump administration to “remember” about our past wars and the policies that led to them. How do we want Trump and his top people in the Pentagon, the National Security Council and State Department — three institutions that play a critical role in our foreign policy, to remember?
RS asked a number of recent veterans — including those who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan – what they would say to Trump, today, about the importance of Memorial Day.
“My one wish for this administration is that they understand veterans and the sacrifice of the military, and the cost of war. Not just focus on the so-called ‘wins’ he wants to honor,” said James R. Webb, who served in Iraq as a Marine Corps rifleman, referring to Trump’s desire to designate victory days for the two world wars.
“In short, the cost of war is high, and although there are times when it must be paid, we should never be eager to settle up that account,” said Robert Givens, a retired Air Force officer who served in both Persian Gulf I and II wars.
“I would hope this administration avoids the mistakes of its predecessors, including the first Trump administration, which for decades have unhesitatingly sent Americans to die in overseas conflicts that did not make us safer or more prosperous,” said Harrison Mann, a former U.S. Army major who resigned a post at the Defense Intelligence Agency last year in protest of his office’s support for Israel's war in Gaza.
“The President should honor our war dead by learning from (past) mistakes and resisting appeals to send more Americans to die for nothing in Iran, Mexico, and elsewhere.”
Others want Trump to take his pledge to “America First” seriously in that he realign military policy toward defending the country and away from using (and abusing) the Armed Forces to pursue political goals, nation building, democracy promotion or fight on behalf of partners or even allies when the mission or risk is not clearly defined.
Dan Davis, who served in the first Persian Gulf War as well as Afghanistan, said he would like the President to “remember that we all signed up to defend our country. We did not sign up to guard Syrian oil. We did not sign up to ‘put pressure’ on Russia in Eastern Europe. We did not sign up to take out violent actors who threaten African regimes. We did not sign up to die on the Taiwanese islands or shores.”
None of that, he said “used to be controversial. Today my views are considered heresy, by some,” he added. “How dare I suggest that I or my sons wouldn't volunteer to fight and die for some other country and their interests, even when our security is not materially threatened.”
John Byrnes, who served in the Army in Iraq shortly after the invasion in 2003, had a similar message.
“To President Trump and his national security team: Please continue with a national security strategy focused on keeping America safe without unnecessarily risking our troops. To the civilian and military leadership at the Department of Defense, please honor the White House's public commitments to avoiding and ending unnecessary wars — you above all others know the value of the young lives you lead.”
“And to the troops: Thank you for stepping up and into the shoes of the men and women we honor this Memorial Day.”
For the last several years, the U.S. military has been dealing with a recruiting problem of which there is not one single cause. Even this issue has been politicized, but the bottom line is, despite the Hegseth DoD heralding a boom in new recruitment, the forces have scaled back their recruitment targets and the fundamental issues remain. Costly interventions overseas — which continue today in Syria and Iraq and the proxy war in Ukraine — unresolved problems affecting health and well being of soldiers and their families on military bases here in the U.S., and the specter of war, do not help.
Adam Weinstein, who served in Afghanistan with the Marines and is now a Quincy Institute fellow, said “military leaders often remind us that Memorial Day is about more than barbecues and long weekends and they’re right to do so. But the weight of our collective loss must not only be honored in remembrance; it should shape our choices.”
For sure, the parades and wreath laying ceremonies at military cemeteries are one way to remember, symbolizing both national regard and grief for those who had been lost. Too often, however, there is a disconnect between the official rituals, somber but devoid of true reflection, and what Americans believe to be the core lessons learned. The end result is, well, nothing durable in the way of shifting behavior or policy in any meaningful way.
“The memory of the fallen should not be tucked away, brought out only once a year,” Weinstein added. “It must remain present, especially when the call to war returns. Memorial Day should be a solemn warning as much as a tribute — a reminder that war is not abstract, and its cost is paid in lives.”
Seth Harp, a U.S. Army veteran who served a tour in Iraq, wants the administration to recall the existential impact of our interventions on the rest of the world.
“I would like the Trump administration to remember not just the soldiers who died, but also the millions of innocents who were killed, the trillions of dollars squandered, and the cataclysmic decline of America's standing in the world as a result of the last quarter century of endless wars.”
As Vietnam Veteran and Quincy Institute co-founder Andy Bacevich said in that aforementioned Vietnam War symposium, “American foreign policy elites have spent the last 50 years engaged in a concerted effort to evade their responsibility for that disaster…Yesterday's mistakes become the basis for tomorrow's actions.” Breaking the cycle might be the best thing Trump can do for our veterans, for all of America, today.
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Top image credit: HC FOTOSTUDIO via shutterstock.com
Since the beginning of President Donald Trump’s second term, there have been ongoing diplomatic efforts to broker a peace settlement in the three-year-long war between Russia and Ukraine. So far, however, negotiations have failed to bridge the stark divide between the two sides.
Two of the key contentious issues have been post-war security guarantees for Ukraine and the political status of Ukrainian territory claimed or annexed by Russia. Specifically, regarding territorial sovereignty, Ukraine and Russia have rejected the United States' proposal to “freeze” the war along the current line of conflict as a de facto new border. Ukraine has refused to renounce its claims of sovereignty over territories occupied by Russia (including Crimea, which was annexed in 2014). Russia, in turn, has demanded Ukraine’s recognition of Russia’s territorial claim over the entirety of the four Ukrainian regions, which Russia annexed in 2022.
For advocates of a peace settlement, the behaviors of Ukraine and Russia may appear irrational, prolonging the war in the pursuit of costly, even unrealistic objectives. Ukraine, especially amid a possible reduction in U.S. support, appears unlikely to successfully repulse Russian forces from its sovereign territory. Russia, in turn, has achieved only incremental, costly successes in its recent military advances. Despite losing some ground, Ukrainian forces still control substantial territory in the four regions annexed by Russia.
As Harvard professor Graham Allison already observed during the early stages of the war, if future military operations are likely to alter the final territorial boundaries only marginally, the warring parties may be better off settling the war at present. So why don’t they?
Applying the prospect theory may help better understand the psychology of Russian and Ukrainian leaders. The prospect theory, derived from behavioral economics and psychology, explains why policymakers may be inclined (or disinclined) to certain policy decisions. The theory assumes people, including policymakers, assess their circumstances relative to a psychological reference point, determining whether they are operating in a domain of "gains" or "losses." If people perceive the circumstance as below the reference point, they are less likely to accept the status quo. Instead, people are more prone to engage in risk-seeking behaviors to improve their present circumstances.
Negotiating a war settlement faces a challenge when belligerents perceive themselves to be in the domain of “losses.” Leaders are averse to settlement terms that would consolidate their present losses, including territorial losses. For Ukraine, the territorial reference point is the restoration of its sovereign border before Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Though Ukraine has supported a temporary ceasefire, it has opposed a formal settlement that entails international recognition of a newly drawn border between Ukraine and Russia. Not only are Ukrainian leaders averse to permanent losses of their sovereign territory, but they also face domestic political pressure, as some polling shows that a majority of the Ukrainian public is opposed to territorial concessions as a condition for peace.
Though Russia may appear to have achieved significant territorial gains (occupying nearly 20% of Ukraine’s territory), the Russian government perceives its failure to prevent Ukraine’s geopolitical alignment with the West (even without formal NATO membership) as a “geopolitical loss.” While continuing to demand Ukraine’s “neutrality” and “disarmament,” Russia appears most determined to attain international (and Ukraine’s) recognition of its annexation of Crimea and Ukraine’s four southeastern provinces as compensation for Russia’s losses. The territorial expansion would also serve as a display of a public victory in justifying the “special military operation” that was launched under the pretext of protecting the self-determination of the Russian-speaking populace and regions in Ukraine.
For the Trump administration, impatient for a quick end to the war, the challenge lies in convincing Ukraine and Russia to accept a territorial border that falls below their respective reference points. Ukraine would not retake Russian-occupied territories, while Russia would not achieve complete control over its claimed annexed territories. A commonly proposed strategy is for the United States to apply coercive pressure on both parties. The U.S. suspension of support for Ukraine, increased sanctions on Russia could shift the balance on the battlefields, increasing tactical dilemmas for each side to decide between accepting the current conflict line or risking greater territorial losses and rising military/economic costs.
The drawback of the coercive strategy, however, is that belligerent countries may choose to withstand U.S. pressures, rather than to abandon their territorial demands. To increase the likelihood of a war settlement, the Trump administration should also engage in a parallel strategy, allowing ambiguity regarding the future political status of the disputed territories.
While establishing the military demarcation line and the surrounding demilitarized buffer zone (which may be monitored by international, even European peacekeepers), the settlement should avoid requiring either Russia or Ukraine to formally renounce their territorial claims. Instead, political governance over the disputed territories (four regions plus Crimea) should be deferred to future post-war negotiations. Such ambiguity would allow Russia and Ukraine to provisionally accept the military demarcation line, yet continue to advocate, domestically and internationally, for their territorial claims.
The ambiguity over territorial control can pose a significant challenge to the maintenance of a war settlement. Ukraine and Russia are likely to remain committed to future territorial “liberation” — prolonged diplomatic impasse could incentivize hardline factions in both countries to pursue coercive, even military means to achieve their objectives. However, it is debatable whether requiring formal territorial concessions, even if successful, would then significantly increase the prospects of a durable peace. As Germany did after the Versailles Treaty, the USSR after the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, a country forced to formally cede territory to an adversary may still seek to revise or overturn the settlement in the future.
The ambiguity over territorial status, while frustrating for those who seek a conclusive settlement outcome, offers two potential hopes for sustaining a peace settlement. First, it provides hope for the country that the current losses can be recovered with the changes in future geopolitical circumstances. Ukraine may retain hope that future political change within Russia would increase prospects for territorial recovery, similar to the Baltic states’ eventual achievement of independence after the USSR’s dissolution.
Second, even if the territorial status remains unresolved, there is an alternative hope that the countries’ reference point may shift over time. The domestic politics may eventually come to accept the status quo as the new reference point. As an example, shortly after the Korean War armistice, the South Korean government initially advocated for a militant “pukchin”(advance northward) reunification strategy. Today, though affirming the goal of reunification, contemporary South Korean politics display greater restraints and caution toward inter-Korean relations.
Should Ukraine’s pro-Western alignment, Russia’s occupation of Ukraine’s territory, become entrenched, future Ukrainian and Russian governments may continue to perceive each other as adversaries but display greater restraints in destabilizing the new de facto status quo.
Critics may question whether Ukraine or Russia could be persuaded to accept a settlement (assuming other contentious issues are resolved) with an open-ended question on their core territorial claims. The two countries, especially Russia, are unlikely to accept such terms willingly, necessitating increased pressure from the U.S. and the West.
Nevertheless, the prospect of a war settlement is more likely with the inclusion, rather than the exclusion, of territorial ambiguity. This approach accommodates the two countries’ aversion to conclusive acceptance of their present losses. Such a settlement framework may appear manipulative and be accused of postponing the key conflict issue to future uncertainty.
However, after three years of Russia-Ukraine War, the United States and the international community face a difficult strategic choice: to continue the risks and costs of a prolonged war for a more conclusive territorial outcome or convince the two countries to accept the risks of a peace with an inconclusive territorial settlement.
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