THE UNITED STATES OF WAR

A wide-ranging survey of the American way of war, expensive and incessant, in support of an empire we’re not supposed to have.

In the last 20 years, writes anthropologist Vine, some 4 million people, combatants and civilians alike, have died in American wars in places such as Afghanistan, Iraq, and Yemen. At the same time, some 2.7 million Americans have been “sent to fight wars that have raged continuously since the U.S. military invaded Afghanistan on October 7, 2001.” When asked if this were a “forever war,” a general replied, “Define forever.” Pentagon planners once called it a “long war.” Now, writes they author, they use the term “infinite war,” which in time may come to embrace China and/or Russia as well as the countless small nations that the U.S. has taken on in recent history. In a fluent narrative, Vine extends this infinite war into the past as well, showing that America was founded on a martial culture that has been at war with someone since well before the nation came into being, with a “permanent frontier” and a penchant for ethnic cleansing in the case of Indigenous nations. At one point in history, courtesy of the Andrew Jackson so admired by the sitting president, the country was fighting five wars at once—not just the second war against Britain now called the War of 1812, but also wars against the Indigenous peoples of the Southeast. This frontier notion meant that “by the middle of the nineteenth century, there were 60 major forts west of the Mississippi River and 138 Army posts in the western territories.” The network of American military bases is no less extensive around the world, and the hundreds of bases and many client states the nation maintains today amount to nothing less than an empire, even if we disavow harboring territorial designs beyond our borders.

Vine offers much to ponder about our militarized foreign policy and its deep antecedents.