A Progressive Reformation Against War
I have an essay out in Dame Magazine calling for a progressive reformation against war. In it, I try to jar us into updating our priors about America and its role in the world by exposing the reader to bits of the often un-narrated brutality of US foreign policy. The US security state is like a child incapable of admitting wrongdoing. In its refusal of responsibility, it necessarily fails to learn anything; a tragic spiral.
The problem of American militarism is at the heart of global darkness. Getting right with the world means relating to it peacefully. The essay explains the strategic logic of least-harm; the political formations that make this alternative viable; and the blueprint for how to actually do it via policy.
The message is as simple as it is urgent: No peace, no democracy or equality. ✌️
What If American Power is The Problem?
By Van Jackson, July 15, 2026
Every day smuggles fresh horrors into our timelines, from war crimes to wage theft to the growing government repression of peace protests.
U.S. extraterritorial claims to Greenland, Canada, and the Panama Canal foreshadow a grim future, but the deeds of US foreign policy consist of a growing list of already actualized nightmares. In the past 24 months, the U.S. has directly attacked or materially supported bombings in Ecuador, Somalia, Haiti, Nigeria, Yemen, Venezuela, Syria, Iran, Iraq, and the Caribbean. A blockade of Cuba—an act of war—continues to ripen the island nation for an invasion in search of a rationale that would square it with the “national interest.” All the while, the Gaza genocide that U.S. foreign policy underwrites hums ominously in the background like so many data centers.
Small wonder that world net approvals of “U.S. leadership” are at a record low (-15 percent) while most Americans (59 percent) reported in April 2026 that “America’s best days have passed.” It all tempts wistful yearnings for the world of yesterday.
But there never was a Pax Americana.
Today’s violence looks less exceptional in light of what the world inherited from the post-Cold War era of American dominance: A legacy of unrepaired harm and poor judgment. Whatever achievements U.S. foreign policy can claim—AIDS medicine to Africa, slowing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—they are not the seed corn of the present; a history of militarism is. Only by seeing that can we design something better. There is no security in redirecting insecurity toward others.
A BLOODY UNIPOLAR MOMENT
To live through the ’90s meant witnessing the rise of coffee chains and erotic thrillers, grunge and the golden age of hip-hop. It also meant taking for granted something unprecedented: An extreme concentration of global power in the hands of a single nation-state that faced no serious threats abroad.
It was never meant to last. As Ta-Nehisi Coates lamented in The Message, “the privilege of a great power is incuriosity about those who lack it.” The trouble all along was the failure of Washington elites to see at whose expense America’s “unipolar moment” came; a blind spot that ensured its undoing. Middle-class comforts in the metropole masked a darker reality fermenting underneath the veneer of stability at history’s end…
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