"America Reaps What Trump Sows:
The Price of Policing the Globe"
By John & Nisha Whitehead
“In a sense, blowback is simply another way
of saying that a nation reaps what it sows.”
- Chalmers Johnson
"What goes around comes around. That is the terrible law of blowback. When the United States bombs another country, threatens its government, kills its people, occupies its territory or attempts to dictate its future, the consequences do not remain safely contained thousands of miles away.
They come home. They come home in flag-draped coffins and shattered military families. They come home in retaliatory attacks on American bases and embassies. They come home through terrorist plots, cyber sabotage, disrupted shipping lanes, higher energy prices, depleted weapons stockpiles, and trillions of dollars in debt. They come home through hacked water systems, vulnerable power grids, heightened domestic surveillance, militarized police and government demands that the American people surrender still more freedom in exchange for the promise of protection from dangers the government itself helped create.
This is blowback. Blowback isn’t just about war. It’s about the consequences of the rash, heedless and heartless decisions made every day by the actors of the American police state -and the fact that it is “we the people” who will be paying the price for those terrible decisions for years to come.
President Trump’s war with Iran is only the latest reminder that no government can bomb, threaten and police the world indefinitely without eventually bringing the consequences home. For months, the Trump administration has lurched between war and threatened war, massive bombing campaigns and aborted strikes, demands for surrender and claims that peace is imminent. There appears to be no coherent plan for ending the conflict.
There is, however, a mounting bill - and it will be paid in American lives, American dollars, American security and American freedom. This is what happens when a government appoints itself judge, jury, executioner and police officer to the world. The government creates enemies faster than it can kill them. It destabilizes one country, then uses the resulting chaos to justify intervening in another. It bombs in the name of peace, occupies in the name of freedom, surveils in the name of security, and retaliates against retaliation in an endless cycle of violence that serves the war machine while leaving ordinary people everywhere less safe.
We have seen this before. Every president promises that the next military intervention will be limited, targeted, necessary and decisive. Every president promises that overwhelming force will restore order. Every president assures us that the experts know what they are doing. Yet the wars continue, the enemies multiply, the costs rise, the Constitution contracts, and the American people are left to cope with the consequences.
The blowback from Trump’s wars may not look like the blowback from wars of the past. Retaliation may not arrive in the form of a missile - it may arrive through a computer terminal connected to a small-town water plant. In recent days, hackers reportedly targeted water and wastewater systems in at least seven states. More than 30 community water systems in Minnesota were attacked, while additional systems in Michigan were compromised. Pumps were disrupted. Remote-control systems were accessed. Some communities temporarily lost normal operations. Officials reported no contamination and no resulting threat to public health. We were fortunate this time. But what happens next time?
Although Iran is suspected of plotting attacks on water and energy infrastructure nationwide, the Trump administration has rejected suggestions that the recent cyberattacks were retaliation for the war. Whether or not Iran is behind these cyberattacks, the warning could not be clearer: in an age of networked infrastructure, the battlefield is everywhere. It is the water treatment plant. The electrical grid. The hospital. The bank. The airport. The communications network. The family car. The phone in your pocket.
That is the danger of pouring America’s resources into policing the globe while neglecting the systems on which ordinary Americans depend at home and leaving the homeland dangerously exposed. That imbalance is no accident. It is the inevitable consequence of empire.
American troops remain stationed across the world, operating from a sprawling network of foreign bases and carrying out missions that most Americans never hear about, much less debate or authorize. As of June 2025, roughly 170,000 active-duty American military personnel were stationed around the globe, along with tens of thousands of reservists and civilian Defense Department employees. Even those figures may understate the true scope of America’s overseas military presence, given the Pentagon’s policy of not fully disclosing where and how many troops are deployed for the sake of “operational security and denying the enemy any advantage.”
The official explanations change with every administration. We are told that the troops are protecting democracy, preserving stability, defending freedom, securing vital interests, deterring aggression or preventing the next attack. In practice, the United States intervenes in one country after another, guards foreign oil supplies and shipping routes, protects corporate interests, arms favored regimes, topples disfavored governments and leaves American taxpayers responsible for the cost.
This is not national defense. It is empire. And empire always generates blowback. Every country bombed, every government threatened, every civilian population terrorized, and every community reduced to rubble creates new grievances, new enemies and new reasons for retaliation.
That retaliation does not always come from another army. It comes through terrorist cells. It comes through lone actors radicalized by images of dead children and destroyed cities. It comes through hackers probing water systems, electrical grids, hospitals, banks, transportation networks and communications systems. It comes through attacks on American troops, embassies, ships and businesses. It comes through oil shocks, disrupted trade routes, depleted military stockpiles, emergency appropriations, and still more national debt.
Blowback carries a staggering price tag - and the war profiteers are not the ones expected to pay it. The American people are. War spending is bankrupting America. The United States maintains a global network of foreign bases, overseas installations, weapons systems, intelligence operations and permanent deployments that costs taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars year after year. That is before the government launches another war.
Once the bombing begins, the costs multiply. Missiles must be replaced. Weapons stockpiles must be replenished. Damaged ships must be repaired. Troops must be deployed. Contractors must be paid. Foreign governments must be subsidized. Emergency spending bills must be rushed through Congress. The military-industrial complex profits from every deployment, every missile launched, every weapon depleted and every new enemy created.
Meanwhile, the politicians claim there is never enough money to secure vulnerable water systems, modernize the electrical grid, repair collapsing infrastructure, provide affordable health care, or protect communities from disasters here at home. This is the economic face of blowback: the government spends trillions of dollars making enemies abroad, then pleads poverty when asked to protect the American people from the consequences.
Talk about fiscally irresponsible: the U.S. government is spending money it does not have on a military empire it cannot afford while leaving the country it is supposed to defend dangerously exposed. But those staggering costs tell only part of the story, because the Pentagon repeatedly cannot account for the money it is allotted. Decades of failed audits, missing funds, contractor overcharges, waste and outright profiteering have transformed war into one of the most lucrative forms of government welfare ever devised.
That corruption is not merely wasteful - it is deadly. Every dollar squandered on an overpriced weapons system or lost in the Pentagon’s accounting maze is a dollar unavailable to safeguard a water plant, secure a hospital network, strengthen the electrical grid or rebuild a community devastated by disaster. The consequences are not merely financial. Decades of bombing, occupation, drone killings, regime change and support for brutal governments have also fueled rage against the United States. The 9/11 attacks were blowback. The Boston Marathon bombing was blowback. The attempted Times Square bombing was blowback. The Fort Hood shooting was blowback.
To recognize this as blowback is not to excuse terrorism. There is no justification for murdering innocent people. Yet neither can we pretend that terrorist attacks emerge from a historical or political vacuum. The perpetrators were responsible for their crimes, but in each instance, American wars and foreign policy formed part of the grievance used to justify violence. Refusing to acknowledge that connection does not make Americans safer. It merely ensures that the cycle continues. And the cycle does not end with retaliation.
Every new threat becomes a justification for more surveillance, more secrecy, more military equipment, more emergency authority and fewer constitutional restraints. Indeed, the most dangerous blowback may be the government’s ongoing efforts to turn America into a battlefield - militarizing the police and treating the American people like suspects and enemy combatants. The government creates the danger abroad, then uses the danger it created to demand more power at home.
James Madison warned that “no nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.” Perpetual war, Madison understood, gives birth to armies, debts, taxes and instruments of domination. It concentrates power in the hands of the few while forcing the many to submit, sacrifice and pay.
More than a century later, President Dwight Eisenhower echoed Madison’s warning, observing that the machinery built to wage those perpetual wars had become a danger in its own right. He called it the “unwarranted influence” of the military-industrial complex—an influence capable of endangering our liberties and democratic processes. Eisenhower understood that a permanent war machine must continually invent new missions, new threats and new enemies in order to justify its existence. We failed to heed his warning.
Just as dangerous as a government capable of waging war without end is a government determined to ensure that no one responsible will ever be called to account. The United States insists on the power to police the world, punish foreign leaders, bomb foreign countries and dictate the rules of international conduct. Yet when those same rules threaten to be applied to American officials or their allies, the government rejects the authority of international courts, sanctions their judges and attempts to cripple their ability to investigate alleged war crimes. The double standard could not be clearer.
The American government claims the right to sit in judgment over the world while refusing to be judged for its own actions. As I make clear in my book "Battlefield America: The War on the American People" and its fictional counterpart "The Erik Blair Diaries," a nation that abandons the rule of law abroad will eventually find that the rule of law has little power to restrain its government at home. This, too, is blowback: unchecked power, diminished freedom and a government that ceases to serve its people.
More than half a century ago, Martin Luther King Jr. warned where this cycle of hatred, retaliation and unchecked power would lead. In his 1967 “Beyond Vietnam” speech, delivered at Riverside Church in New York, King declared: “We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. And history is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate… We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent coannihilation. We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace … and justice throughout the developing world, a world that borders on our doors. If we do not act, we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark, and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.”
There can be no confusion about the path President Trump has chosen: empire over republic, violence over peace, and personal glory over the lives and liberties of the American people."
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