America’s guiding principle isn’t freedom — it’s violence

The US has become a serious threat to global peace

Photo by Daniel on Unsplash

I recently wrote a post on X/Twitter claiming that the US has become the greatest source of political instability in the world. The post was coupled with a map that reveals all 101 US-backed regime change operations across the world between 1949 and 2014.

The post sparked intense debate and reactions. Obviously, the fact that my claim pushes against a mainstream narrative that the US maintains peace and order in the world had something to do with that. But it was mostly the map itself that was the subject of debate. Among those whose ire I drew, there was one recurring reaction: my statement, coupled with the map, doesn’t highlight those instances when US-backed regime change has been a force for good.

One could certainly make the case that some US-backed regime change operations have been ‘better’ than others. However, this sidesteps the main point of the map I presented, which is that the US has a troubling history of blatantly disrespecting the sovereignty of other nations. 101 regime change operations in other countries is a frighteningly high number. In fact, no other country is remotely close to this number.

While the nature of US-backed regime change operations differs, a majority of them have involved supporting violent and repressive forces in order to maintain US geopolitical interests — either through direct military interference or covert operations involving support for local proxies. Numerous times, the US actually toppled democratically elected regimes by supporting state coups. This was the case in Chile in 1973, Brazil in 1964, and Guatemala in 1954, to name a few examples.

The history of US intervention abroad to protect US interests is much murkier than simply supporting regime change operations. The US has officially acknowledged the use of military force in over 70 countries since WWII. The most violent among these were the US invasion of Vietnam in the 1960s and the US invasion and consequent occupation of Iraq in the 2000s. In Vietnam, hundreds of thousands of civilians were directly killed by US forces. In Iraq, tens of thousands of civilians were directly killed by US forces.

As of 2023, the US had a total of 902 active military bases abroad, as shown in the figure below. The UK has the second-most military bases, with 141, a number far below that of the US. China, a country that US officials routinely refer to as a growing military threat, has one active military base abroad.

Source: https://globalinequality.org/imperial-power/

US leaders will often defend their violent interventions abroad by saying they were made in the interest of protecting ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’. This is simply not true. If it were, the US would not be supporting a majority of the world’s authoritarian regimes: a recent study found that the US provides military assistance to 73% of the world’s dictatorships.

In the post-WWII era, the US is the undisputed champion of using violent intervention abroad to protect its geopolitical interests. Based on the evidence I have presented, this is not an opinion, it is a fact.

US support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza

My analysis so far does not cover the most egregious violent crime of this century: the unequivocal support provided by the US for Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

According to Reuters, since October 7, 2023, Israel has killed more than 65,000 people in Gaza (the numbers could be much higher), most of whom are civilians. The UN recently launched an independent legal analysis of the conduct of Israel in Gaza, finding that there is clear evidence that Israel’s actions constitute genocide:

It is clear there is an intent to destroy the Palestinians in Gaza through acts that meet the criteria set forth in the Genocide Convention.

Page 63 of the report is especially disturbing:

Israeli security forces shot at and killed civilians, including children who were holding makeshift white flags. Some children, including toddlers, were shot in the head by snipers.

Realising that it has the full backing of the most powerful country in the world (the US), Israel has carried out strikes in five other countries in the Middle East in just the past year — Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Yemen, and Qatar — in a quest to annihilate any regional opposition or military threat to its regime. Numerous civilians and journalists have been killed in these strikes.

The US is the only country in the world giving Israel full, consistent backing across all dimensions: military, diplomatic, economic, rhetorical. The US is also the only country that has voted against UN Security Council resolutions for a ceasefire in Gaza — by now, it has opposed a ceasefire a staggering six times.

Why does Israel receive such strong and unequivocal support from the US? Part of the reason is the wealthy and powerful Israel lobby in US politics, known as AIPAC. But the US supports Israel also because Israel is a strategic and useful proxy force for them in the Middle East. Using Israel in this way allows the US to advance its geopolitical interests in the Middle East more easily. The political economist, Jason Hickel, explains this well:

So Israel is not an "ally" of the US in the conventional sense of the term. It is a proxy force — an attack dog. This relationship is particularly useful to the US because it allows them to have a degree of distance from their actions, and plausible deniability. The US can send weapons to Israel and directly coordinate military strategy with them, and then claim it’s not responsible for the violence and destruction and war crimes that Israel perpetrates in the region.

Given the destruction that Israel has caused in Gaza, it should come as no surprise that the International Criminal Court (ICC) has issued an arrest warrant for Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Israel’s Defence Minister, Yoav Gallant, for alleged war crimes.

How has the US responded to condemnation of Israel by the UN and the ICC? Believe it or not, the US is officially attacking these international organisations now. The geopolitical analyst, Benjamin Norton, has written a great analysis of this. He outlines how the US has effectively become a rogue state, withdrawing from numerous UN bodies and sanctioning the ICC. These are Norton’s words:

The United States is sponsoring a livestreamed genocide in Gaza, while sanctioning international legal institutions and waging war on multilateral organizations. This is the behavior of an out-of-control rogue regime.

There is hope for the US to change its violent nature, both through change within and through pressure externally. The US public has been critical of its country’s military operations for decades. With respect to Israel’s genocide in Gaza, a recent Gallup poll found that 60% of people in the US explicitly disapprove of Israel’s military actions in Gaza. Political movements that display international solidarity are also becoming more popular in the US. Zohran Mamdani, the new superstar in progressive US politics, ran on an explicit pro-Palestine platform when campaigning in the 2025 New York City Democratic mayoral primary. He won against established Democrats, campaigning for the position of Mayor in the city with the second-largest Jewish population in the world, after Tel Aviv.

Internationally, in the wake of Donald Trump’s tariff havoc, many countries are seeking to strategically decouple from the US economically and politically, taking a more cautious approach to US cooperation. We are also seeing the rise of a new superpower, namely China, that will not shy away from publicly condemning violent actions by the US and refuses to be a vassal state serving US interests, unlike many European superpowers. If what we are witnessing is a global power rebalancing that entails a more equitable distribution of power between nation states, that is certainly desirable.

While there is hope for change, we need to be clear-eyed about the violent nature of US foreign policy. The country’s record of relentless intervention, regime change, and open support for war crimes underscores a sobering reality: the US is the most consistent violator of sovereignty, stability, and peace in the modern era. From toppling elected governments in Latin America, to devastating wars in Asia and the Middle East, to its current sponsorship of genocide in Gaza, the US has demonstrated again and again that its guiding principle is not freedom, but violence.