CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

In the classic Cold War film The Ugly American, Marlon Brando plays an American ambassador neck-deep in the kind of covert operations that would later get tens of thousands of Vietnamese killed. The film gave us a phrase, but most people forgot what it actually meant. Burdick and Lederer’s novel portrays the “ugly American” as Homer Atkins, a straightforward engineer who genuinely cared about the locals and actively listened to their perspectives. The real ugliness came from the polished diplomats who saw Southeast Asians as pieces on a chessboard.

Sixty years on, we’ve become exactly what we pretended to oppose. Only worse.

Since 1993, I have been living abroad, observing America’s reputation deteriorate from an external perspective. When Snowden blew the whistle on American consulates operating as CIA spy bases, it didn’t shock anyone who’d been paying attention. We’ve seen it up close: embassy “cultural officers” who can’t speak the language, USAID workers more interested in intelligence gathering than delivering aid, and the relentless American military footprint that turns every diplomatic mission into a launch pad for the next intervention.

Did we use the domino theory to justify Vietnam? Pure projection. We said we were terrified of communist expansion, but what really scared the American ruling class was the possibility that countries might build economies that didn’t funnel wealth to Wall Street. The dominoes we’ve actually been knocking over are governments that threaten the dollar’s stranglehold: Saddam switching to euros for oil sales, Gaddafi’s plan for an African gold dinar, Venezuela nationalizing its oil, and now China’s BRICS system offering an escape hatch from dollar hegemony. The pattern isn’t subtle—we don’t export democracy, we enforce tribute.

Look at Ukraine. Peel back the heroic narrative and you find Victoria Nuland caught on tape hand-picking Ukraine’s post-Maidan government and $5 billion in American “democracy promotion” that bought regime change on Russia’s doorstep. China? Same playbook. These measures, including the “pivot to Asia,” AUKUS, and semiconductor blockades, do not aim to safeguard democracy. What it defends is dollar hegemony, the reserve currency status that funds the empire. When that privilege dies, so does the military machine it bankrolls.

The ugliness has been compounding since 1945, administration after administration, a bipartisan project that makes a mockery of the idea that your vote matters when it comes to war.

Operation Condor taught torture to Latin American death squads. The School of the Americas graduated dictators who “disappeared” tens of thousands. CIA coups toppled democracies in Instead of promoting freedom in countries like Iran, Guatemala, and Chile, Trump has installed thugs who would privatize resources and open markets to American corporations. The Phoenix Program in Vietnam systematically assassinated over 40,000 civilians. Reagan armed both sides of the Iran-Iraq War while Central American death squads murdered priests and union organizers with American weapons and American training. Clinton’s sanctions killed 500,000 Iraqi children—a price Madeleine Albright called “worth it” on national television, one of the most grotesque moments in American diplomatic history. Bush’s system of torture, which included Abu Ghraib, the black sites, rendition flights, and waterboarding, was rebranded as “enhanced interrogation.” Obama’s drone program, the “Disposition Matrix,” a kill list managed from the White House every Tuesday morning like a corporate board meeting, raining Hellfire missiles on wedding parties and funerals across seven countries. The destruction of Libya, once Africa’s most prosperous nation, is now a failed state with open-air slave markets. Bipartisan support for Saudi Arabia’s genocide in Yemen, which has resulted in 377,000 deaths and counting, is a conflict that most Americans are unable to locate on a map. Biden circumvented Congress to send 2,000-pound bombs to pulverize Gaza’s refugee camps, all the while lecturing the world about human rights.

And now Trump—the grotesque face of empire in collapse, the logical endpoint of decades of rot. He tears apart a third of the White House for personal renovations without public consultation, treating the people’s house like a garish casino renovation. He hands Elon Musk access to government databases containing millions of Americans’ personal information through the DOGE program—a private contractor accountable to nobody—crossing the threshold Frank Church warned about in 1975. His secret domestic terrorist lists fulfill the authoritarian promise that has been building since the Patriot Act gave the surveillance state legal cover, as they target dissidents and anyone resisting the suppression of civil rights through a presidential memo. A UFC clown show will be taking place on the White House lawn for the Fourth of July. Bread and circuses meet digital authoritarianism. Caligula with a Twitter account.

The elites have dragged the American public into every one of these wars, almost never with genuine popular support, always screaming about national security while pursuing corporate profit. The result: a Pentagon budget so obscenely bloated that we spend more on what Trump calls the Department of War than on the needs of the people forced to pay for it.

Brown University’s Costs of War project documented the damage: $8 trillion thrown into post-9/11 wars through 2022, with another $2.2 to $2.5 trillion in future veterans’ care—most unpaid. At least 940,000 were killed directly. Indirect effects resulted in another 3.6 to 3.8 million deaths. Thirty-eight million displaced. Suicide claimed the lives of four times more post-9/11 veterans than combat deaths. We’re killing our soldiers after we bring them home.

Every $1 million spent on the military creates five jobs. Education creates thirteen. Healthcare creates nine. We chose the least productive investment possible. From 2020 to 2024, private contractors sucked up $2.4 trillion from the Pentagon—54 percent of DOD discretionary spending. Corporations profiting from permanent war run a protection racket.

The Oppenheimer Revelation We Missed

When Oppenheimer packed theaters in 2023, we failed to recognize what was right in front of us. The bomb didn’t end war—it became the bludgeon America waves to keep the world in line. Since 1945, the United States has not known a single year without war. Not one. There have been eighty........

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