Here is my six-category rundown of what I would call American extremity on a global scale: There is US violence at home and abroad.

Garrisoning the globe: The U.S. has an estimated800or so military bases or garrisons, ranging from the size of American small towns to tiny outposts, across the planet. They exist almost everywhere – Europe, South Korea, Japan, Australia, Afghanistan, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America – except in countries that are considered American foes (and given the infamous Guantnamo Bay Detention Center in Cuba, theres even an exception to that). At the moment, Great Britain and France still have small numbers of bases, largely left over from their imperial pasts; that rising great power rival China officially has one global garrison, a naval base inDjiboutiin the horn of Africa (near an American base there, one of itsgrowing collectionof outposts on that continent), which much worries American war planners, and anaval base, in the process of being built, in Gwadar, Pakistan; that other great power rival, Russia, still hasseveral basesin countries that were once part of the Soviet Union, and a single naval base in Syria (which similarly disturbs American military planners). The United States, as I said, has at least 800 of them, a number that puts in the shade the global garrisons of any other great power in history, and to go with them,more than 450,000military personnel stationed outside its borders. It shouldnt be surprising then that, like no other power in history, it has divided the world – every bit of it – as if slicing a pie, into six military commands; thatssix commandsfor every inch of the globe (and another two forspaceandcyberspace). Might all of this not be considered just a tad extreme?

Funding the military: The U.S. puts approximately atrillion dollarsannually in taxpayer funds into its military, its 17 intelligence agencies, and whats now called homeland security. Its national security budget islarger thanthose of the next eight countries combined and stillrisingyearly, though most politicians agree and many regularly insist that the U.S. military has been badly underfunded in these years, left in a state ofdisrepair, and needs to be “rebuilt.” Now, honestly, dont you think that qualifies as both exceptional in the most literal sense and kind of extreme?

Fighting wars: The United States has been fighting wars nonstop since its military invaded Afghanistan in October 2001. Thats almost 17 years of invasions, occupations, air campaigns, drone strikes, special operations raids, naval air and missile attacks, and so much else, from the Philippines to Pakistan, Afghanistan to Syria, Libya to Niger. And in none of those places is such war making truly over. It goes without saying that theres no other country on the planet making war in such a fashion or over anything like such a period of time. Americans were, for instance, deeply disturbed and ready to condemn Russia for sending its troops into neighboring Ukraine and occupying Crimea. That was considered an extreme act worthy of denunciations of the strongest sort. In this country, though, American-style war, despite invasions of countries thousands of miles away and the presidentially directed targeting of individuals across the globe forassassination by dronewith next to no regard for national sovereignty is not considered extreme. Most of the time, in fact, itsseldom thought aboutat all or even seriously debated. And yet, isn’t fighting unending wars across thousands of miles of the planet for almost 17 years without end, while making the president into aglobal assassin, just a tad extreme?

Destroying cities: Can there be any question that, in the American mind, the most extreme act of this century was the destruction of those towers in New York City and part of the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., on September 11, 2001, with the deaths of almost 3,000 unsuspecting, innocent civilians? That became the definition of an extreme act by a set of extremists. Consider, however, the American response. Across significant parts of the Middle East in the years since, the U.S. has had a major hand in destroying not just tower after tower, but city after city – Fallujah,Ramadi, andMosulin Iraq,Raqqain Syria, Sirte in Libya. One after another, parts or all of them were turned into literal rubble. A reported20,000 munitionswere dropped on Raqqa, the capital of the brief Islamic State, by U.S. and allied air power, leaving at least1,400 civiliansdead, and barely a building untouched or even standing (with the Trump administrationintenton not providing funds for any kind of reconstruction). In these years, in response to the destruction in whole or part of a handful of buildings, the U.S. has destroyed (often with a helping hand from the Islamic State) whole cities, while filling the equivalent of tower after tower with dead and wounded civilians. Is there nothing extreme about that?

Displacing people: In the course of its wars, the U.S. has helped displace arecord numberof human beings since the last days of World War II. In Iraq alone, from the years of conflict that Washington set off with its invasion and occupation of 2003, vast numbers of people have been displaced, including in the ISIS era,1.3 million children. In response to that reality, in the homeland, the man who became president in 2017 and the officials he appointed went to work to transform the very refugees we had such a hand in creating into terrifying bogeymen, potentially the most dangerous and extreme people on the planet, and then turned to the task ofensuringthat none of them would ever arrive in this country. Doesn’t that seem like an extreme set of acts and responses?

Arming the planet (and its own citizens as well): In these years, as with defense spending, so with the selling of weaponry of almost every imaginable sort to other countries. U.S. weapons makers, aided and abetted by the government, have outpaced all possible competitors in global arms sales. In 2016, for instance, the U.S. took58%of those sales, while between 2002-2016, Washington transferred weaponry to167 countries, or more than 85% of the nations on the planet. Many of those arms, includingcluster bombs, missiles, advanced jet planes, tanks, and munitions of almost every sort, went into planetary hot spots, especiallythe Middle East. At the same time, the citizens of the U.S. themselves havemore armsper capita (often of a particularlylethal military sort) than the citizens of any other country on Earth. And appropriately enough under the circumstances, they commitmore mass killings. When it comes toweaponry, then, wouldnt you call that extreme on both a global and a domestic scale?

And thats only to begin to plunge into the topic of American extremity. After all, we now have a president whose administration considers it perfectly normal, in fact a form of deterrence policy, toseparateparents from even tiny children crossing our southern border or tocut food aidandraise the renton poor Americans. Were talking about a president with a cult-like following whose government is ideologicallycommittedtowiping outenvironmental protections of every sort andpushingthe further fossil fuelization of the country and the planet, even if it means the long-term destruction of the very environment that has nurtured humanity these last thousands of years.

Think of this perhaps as a new kind of death cult, which means that Donald Trump might be considered the superpower version of an Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. As with all such things, this particular cult did not come from nowhere, but from a land of growing extremity, a country that now, it seems, may be willing to preside over not just cities in ruin but a planet in ruin, too. Doesnt that seem just a little extreme to you?

Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of theAmerican Empire Projectand the author of_The United States of Fear_as well as a history of the Cold War,The End of Victory Culture. He is a fellow of theNation Instituteand runsTomDispatch.com. His latest book isShadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.His next book,A Nation Unmade by War(Dispatch Books), will be published later this month.

This article first appeared on TomDispatch.com

Copyright 2018 Tom Engelhardt