A list of U.S. offenses abroad since World War II might look like a shapeless frenzy of subversion, lies, bribery, assassinations, sanctions, embargoes, asset thefts, travel bans, wiretapping, election-rigging, coups d’état, bombings, and outright invasions.
These eighty years have had a definite pattern, however, with four phases beginning in 1945, 1968, 1991, and 2014. So far, each phase has been twenty-three years long.
The pattern offers a clue to reining in Washington’s current rampage.
Phase 1: 1945-1968
At the end of World War II, the United States was the only big nation not shattered by the war, and the only one with nuclear weapons. Washington decision-makers saw this as an opportunity to make U.S. dominance permanent. Their policy would be to attack any nation unwilling to subordinate itself to Washington.
The first step was to scare everyone by showing what U.S. nuclear weapons could do. It dropped atomic bombs on two undefended Japanese cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing more than 200,000 civilians. Then, the U.S. fought long bloody wars against North Korea, Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, and nearly blundered into a nuclear war with the Soviet Union over Cuba.
Phase 2: 1968-1991
After twenty-three years of this, in 1968, the Vietnamese Tet Offensive finally convinced Washington it could not conquer Vietnam. U.S. Army deaths had risen to an average of 324 a week. American public opinion had turned against the war. The peace movement was spreading quickly, and the Pentagon was losing control of its troops.
U.S. policymakers changed course. The new policy was to attack only nations that couldn’t shoot back, such as El Salvador, Nicaragua, Grenada, Panama, and Lebanon, hire surrogate armies, rely on air attacks rather than ground operations, end the military draft, and agree to a series of nuclear arms control treaties with the Soviet Union.
Phase 3: 1991-2014
Washington saw another big opportunity when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. It reverted to the full-blast 1945 policy of hunting down independent nations. This time, they would not have to worry about the Soviet Union, the counterweight.
Washington went on a killing spree, toppling a string of governments across North Africa, the Middle East, and Afghanistan, leaving millions of people dead. It also decided it was time to dismember Russia itself. To prepare for this, it added a dozen nations to NATO closer to the Russian border and began scrapping its arms control treaties with Russia.
Phase 4: 2014 –
In 2014, the United States went off the deep end. It used Ukrainian neo-Nazis to overthrow the duly elected president of Ukraine and chase him out of the country. His successor invited NATO to turn Ukraine into a staging ground for aggression against Russia. In 2022, after eight more years of provocations and bad-faith negotiations, the stand-off with the Russians became a hot war, with the U.S. and its Ukrainian surrogate army losing badly.
Washington should have realized the world had changed. Now, two big independent countries were too strong to intimidate: Russia and China. Far from isolated, they were founders of a big economic cooperation group called BRICS. Together, the ten current member nations – Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia, the United Arab Emirates, and Indonesia – govern half of the world’s population.
Instead of adapting to this new reality, Washington decided to try to provoke wars with three nuclear powers, Russia, China, and North Korea. It also provided weapons, money, and political cover for Israel’s genocidal mayhem in Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria, with Iran also in its crosshairs. Next maybe Mexico, Venezuela, or Yemen.
With public opinion turning against the Ukraine war in the United States and much of Europe, one would expect the elected officials responsible for the war to be in electoral peril, and they are. Of the six most prominent politicians who decided to provoke the war in 2022, none may still be in office by the end of 2025.
Two have already resigned (Boris Johnson, UK Prime Minister, 2022; Mario Draghi, Italian Prime Minister, 2022), one has announced his intention to resign (Justin Trudeau, Canadian Prime Minister, 2025), one has declined to run for re-election (Joe Biden, U.S. President, 2024), and two are now clinging to office with their governments in turmoil (Emmanuel Macron, French President, and Olaf Scholz, German Chancellor).
Despite this, the six governments have only gotten more trigger-happy. Tossing out top officeholders is apparently not enough.
What could make a difference?
Since 1945, only once has Washington changed to a less belligerent foreign policy. It happened in Phase 2, following 1968, in a situation like today, with the United States facing military failure despite having colossal armed forces.
A decisive factor in 1968, however, is not present today. In that year, U.S. decision-makers were unnerved by a large and complex social movement, combining a civil rights movement, peace movement, student movement, women’s movement, and gay rights movement.
The peace movement itself had several strands, including draft resistance, nationwide student and faculty strikes, immense antiwar demonstrations, church activism, and GI resistance. U.S. combat soldiers, sailors, and air force crews resisted through insubordination, going absent without leave, desertion, refusing to fight, incapacitating themselves with heroin, and assaults on officers.
By 1968, the peace movement’s power had begun to destabilize the normal workings of the society itself. The establishment changed course on foreign policy because it was afraid of what was happening at home. (Often, literally at home: Spontaneous dinner-table debates, led mostly by teenagers, were repeated in millions of homes throughout the war.)
There is reason to think the movement made the difference. Only big social movements have had the power to bring about the most significant changes, such as ending slavery, winning women’s suffrage, ending child labor, achieving the eight-hour workday, creating industrial unions, or ending Jim Crow segregation. Stopping a major war is just as difficult.
This is not well understood today because voices of the status quo have been busy trying to obscure it. Public officials, news reporters and commentators, Hollywood studio executives, documentarians, academics, and think tank experts have all done their part to reduce the Sixties to a senseless montage of police chasing freaks, free-form dancing, marijuana smoking, and assassinations.
A good antidote to poisoning-by-montage is to learn what happened in past social movements directly from people who took part or from the many memoirs and reminiscences now in books, articles, and video interviews.
One source worth singling out is Beyond Revolution: A New Theory of Social Movements, by Daniel Foss and Ralph Larkin (1986). When the book appeared, City University of New York Professor Stanley Aronowitz called it “a new standard against which all other books on social movements should be measured.” That remains true today.
People who come to understand the power of social movements ask, “When will the movement come?” In ancient times, the answer would be, “It will not come by waiting for it.”
Paul Ryder has been research assistant to attorney Leonard Weinglass, Pentagon Papers Legal Defense; national staff, Indochina Peace Campaign; policy director for Ohio Governor Richard Celeste; and organizing director for Ohio Citizen Action. He is the editor and principal author of The Good Neighbor Campaign Handbook (2006) and co-editor with Susan Wind Early of Tom Hayden on Social Movements (2019).