“All murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.” Voltaire

“I’m fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in.” – George McGovern (Politician, USA)

We seem in this age, in what is deceptively described as the West, to be constantly at war with someone. Indeed, the leader of the West, the US, has launched 469 foreign interventions since 1798, amounting to an average of more than two a year throughout that entire period. It has also been involved in 80% of the conflicts on the planet since 1945, according to the US Congressional Research Service. President Jimmy Carter (the only US president to complete his term without starting a war, a military attack or an occupation) said in 2019 that the US is, “The most warlike nation in the history of the world”. He went on to say that “the US has been at peace for only 16 of its 242 years as a nation”, when speaking to Donald Trump. “Counting wars, military attacks and military occupations, there have actually only been five years of peace in US history – 1976, the last year of the Gerald Ford administration and 1977-80, the entirety of Carter’s presidency.”

It turns out that the US has started 251 conflicts since 1945 and has overthrown governments and interfered in elections in more than 80 countries, has assassinated dozens of leaders and has military bases in every country on the planet except four. (US Congressional Research Service)

Prior to the US, the UK held the record for starting wars, but the US passed that record in the 1950s with Korea, Cambodia and Laos. No other country in human history gets even close to that extended record of mass violence.

And it is not as though the world has not noticed. The presence today in the West of the phenomena of public opinion polling, designed to tell the politicians what they should have been able to easily observe for themselves, has made it difficult but not impossible to not see what is blatantly obvious to the citizen. A 2013 poll in a range of countries around the world by the WIN/Gallop company found that in the majority of these countries the US was clearly identified as the greatest threat to world peace. This, and other poll findings by Pew and others since then have confirmed this finding by identifying that record numbers of people in the countries surveyed viewed US power as a “major threat”.

The US in its endless quest to spread the benefits of the democracy that hasn’t existed in the US itself in any recognisable form for decades, has supported financially and militarily “almost every single right-wing dictatorship in the world since the end of World War 11”. It has also overthrown dozens of governments around the world, most of them more democratic than the US itself, and has crushed or sought to crush almost “every single people’s liberation movement over that same period". That is not to even mention their often quite open meddling in many countries’ elections whether they are allies or enemies, to ensure the government they approve of is elected. Henry Kissinger’s aphorism come to mind in these circumstances. He said: “It may be dangerous to be America’s enemy, but to be America’s friend is fatal.” Ukraine is an example where the US was caught admitting it had spent $5 billion to overturn the democratically elected government and was caught discussing whom it would make president, and who subsequently and magically became president; the country is now on the brink of collapse.

In addition, the US has spent $8 trillion dollars on invasions of other countries since 9/11 (Brown University Costs of War project). Whilst the US fights hard to keep all these activities secret, it has been increasingly confounded by the provisions of the US Constitution regarding freedom of speech and of the press which it has been assiduous in trying to circumvent at every turn, with increasing success now that the division of powers that are the foundations of a functioning democracy have been largely eliminated by Trump’s control of the Supreme Court and the Congress.

Turning to the US “enemy” du jour, China, we see that since 1798 it has been involved in 14 conflicts, a good part of which, unlike the US, involved attacks on its territory by colonialist powers from the West. That amounts to about one conflict every 33 years. China’s propensity for armed conflict has been about 3% of that of the US. In the same period, Russia has been involved in 24 wars, at an average of one war every 19 years or about 5% of the US numbers. The question that this comparison appears to answer is which of the current great powers the US, China and Russia leads in the initiation of and participation in armed conflicts.

That being the case what can we make of the current attempts by the US to paint China as this war-like state intent on invading and subduing the US and the rest of the world? One glaringly obvious difference between China and the US is that the bulk of the Chinese wars were fought on its borders or in defence of invasions of its homeland, whereas the bulk of the wars in which the US has participated occurred on the territory of other nations and were initiated by the US as an aggressor.

What about expenditures on the military? The current US military and military-related budget, when all the appropriations for such purposes in both the Pentagon and a range of other US government institutions are totalled, amounts to more than a trillion dollars. The Chinese expenditure revealed by their budget information amounts currently to US$246 billion. Assuming there are the same proportion of Chinese military expenditures sequestered in the budgets of other departments as there are in the US, that would give a total of about US$307 billion, well under a third of US expenditure on the military and defence in a country with a population substantially more than four times that of the US, and a useful indicator of propensity for aggression.

The best estimates of Russian military expenditure are that it amounted to US$140 billion in 2024. Again, applying the same factor to additional expenditures that are not an announced part of the defence budget as applied to the US and China, the total would be US$175 billion or about 17% to 18% of the US expenditure for a country with a population of about 42% of the US.

The US has 4790 military sites in countries around the world, of which about 800 are full military bases (DoD), while China has one confirmed military site in Djibouti and Russia has about 10 that are known outside Russia (Wikipedia).

The facts do appear to speak for themselves. The US is by far and away the unquestionable leader in the war game. No other country even comes close. The propensity of the US to see aggressors everywhere suggests a policy elite living in a hall of mirrors. Wherever they look, they see their own image reflected back. Trump appears to have recognised that and appears determined to cut the vast drain on US national wealth that has been in place since the 1960s and that has enriched the military-industrial complex first identified by President Eisenhower in his retirement address. Almost every president since has ignored his warnings of the danger of giving free reign to that greedy metastasising cancer at the heart of US policymaking ever since. If this is only thing that Trump succeeds at among his many inane and dangerous projects, it will be a lasting contribution to the spread of peace around the world.

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.