Peace Through Strength Was Never Peace

The last ten years of Trump tweets and rants have left us understandably numb, but even the most jaded of us were shaken by his post on Tuesday morning, where the President of the United States announced, “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” As a point of clarity, he added, “I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.”

As if his hands were tied. It’s not his fault, the empire demands blood—always has, always will.

All day Tuesday I had a queasy lump in my gut. Trump’s word vomit brought us closer to nuclear war than we’ve been in my lifetime and showed a stunning disregard for human life. Iran is a country of 100 million souls, about 10 million in Tehran, the city which would likely be obliterated as the first target in Trump’s imagined nuclear scenario. 10 million people. People nursing babies and getting married. People who kiss, and love, and cook fragrant Persian meals. People working on spreadsheets, people walking dogs, people with deep smile lines who bring joy into every room. Beautiful people just like people everywhere else in the world—just like you and me.

Iran is also the home of some of the great cultural and architectural wonders of the world. From shimmering Medieval mosques to ancient Persian palaces, there is irreplaceable beauty spanning thousands of years.

The destruction of all that art, of all those people, of a “whole civilization,” Trump casually tweeted as if it was the most natural thing in the world. The hubris is unimaginable. And yet, from the perspective of the American Empire, he is absolutely right.

Here is what we must not miss, and what I wish we would all deeply reckon with: as much as we would all like to put all this madness at Trump’s feet, the chaos of the last few days does not simply reveal the cruelty and stupidity of one man, but of the death-dealing logic that has always been at the heart of the American Empire. Of every Empire. I call empire logic “death dealing” because empires deal in death and they deal out death.

When I say we deal in death, I mean that ours is a logic that ranks and trades human lives. In this framework, when 3,000 Americans are killed in NYC, we say “Never Forget,” but when 3,000 people were bombed in Lebanon during our supposed ceasefire on Wednesday, we barely blink. In this system, 175 slaughtered Iranian schoolgirls do not have the same value as 175 white American girls. We did not bomb Iran in defense of human life, but for oil. For economic exploitation. Human life, made in the image of God—in other words, the closest thing to God we have—is treated as a commodity to be traded, up or down. We have Polymarket betting on the possibility of nuclear war, and admin officials surely profited on their insider knowledge. One CNBC host asked on air, “How does an investor process [the death of a civilization]? Is it a bigger downside risk or upside risk?” Our empire does not value life—we deal in death.

We also deal it out. This is a system held together by death and the threat of death. Trump’s negotiation was not “win-win,” it was “Give us what we want, or we will blow you up.” Our leverage does not come from cooperation or mutual benefit, it comes from overwhelming violence. In this century alone, the US is responsible for 900,000 deaths from our post-9/11 wars, with 38 million people displaced. We have been dealing out death, systematically, for decades. And we have built a massive apparatus to continue doing it. The U.S. accounts for 39% of global military spending—more than the next ten countries combined. Meanwhile, we’re the only wealthy nation without universal healthcare. Ours is not a life-sustaining system. The goal is not the flourishing of people and planet. The goal is power and domination, secured by death.

None of this is new. Trump is merely saying things out loud, and in public that are normally said in subtle tones behind closed doors. The shock is not in his strategy—that’s standard doctrine—the only surprise is the lack of a social media handler. Flippantly tweeting mass death is a PR nightmare, but other than that it is imperial business as usual.

As someone raised a deeply conservative Christian, it’s certainly familiar to me. I was raised with the fundamental belief that America must have the largest and most lethal army in the world. Reagan called this doctrine, “peace through strength,” but it wasn’t new for him either—every empire has had this perspective. The Romans called it “Pax Romana,” or the Roman peace they believed their conquest achieved. They dominated every culture and nation, and called it peace. They forced them to pay tribute and taxes to Caesar to fund the lavish lifestyles of the Roman elites and the massive Roman military that established “law and order” through the threat of violence. Dissenters were crucified.

Roman peace was not sustained by justice, equality, and the flourishing of all people. It was a peace brought about by threat of violence. Peace through strength. This is the logic of every empire that has ever existed, so much so that the historian John Dominic Crossan calls it, “the normalcy of civilization.”

It’s shocking when we see it punched out in fat-fingered stupidity in a short tweet, but if we zoom out and get really honest with ourselves, this has always been the story, and many of us have bought into this same logic. We believe that we can only survive as a country by being the strongest, by staying at the top and insisting that everybody get in line under the threat of our overwhelming violence.

Trump is a symptom, a natural result of the system this country has created. Some of us don’t like him simply because he forces us to confront who we have been globally for a very long time. He is an accurate face of the American empire—all masks off.

But let me be clear—”peace through violence” may be conventional wisdom, but it does not work. It has never worked. It is unsustainable. It leads to escalatory violence—an ever ratcheting upwards march of atrocities, and a downward spiral of inhumanity that will ultimately end our species if it remains uninterrupted.

And it is based on a lie. The lie it is based on is that my country can win while another country dies. It ignores the interconnectedness at the heart of all things. Many of us were not aware until the last several weeks how dependent we all are on one small piece of water—the Strait of Hormuz. That narrow passage carries roughly 21% of global petroleum. Its closure leads not only to massive oil shortages, but the collapse of fertilizer supply chains, disruptions in global food distribution, breakdowns in pharmaceutical production, and shortages of essential medical equipment. A prolonged closure could trigger famine in food-import-dependent nations and medical crises in regions relying on global supply chains. The interconnectedness isn’t abstract; it’s life and death. Martin Luther King Jr. understood this when he said, “before you finish eating breakfast in the morning, you’ve depended on more than half the world. This is the way our universe is structured, this is its interrelated quality. We aren’t going to have peace on Earth until we recognize this basic fact of the interrelated structure of all reality.” Violence against one people threatens the stability of all people, because at the end of the day we rise and fall together, and over and over again we have to learn this the hard way.

For Christians, it is all the more grievous that Jesus is being used as a divine stamp on these systems of death. Warmonger Pete Hegseth brings up Jesus every chance he gets (when he’s not listing the names of targets he’s had killed). But make no mistake, the logic of peace through violence bears no resemblance to the way of Jesus.

The cosmic, counterintuitive, unconventional idea that Jesus presented is the exact opposite of the imperial logic of domination. Jesus’ message was ‘the kingdom of God,’ which you might also translate ‘the empire of God.’ In other words, Jesus invited us into a different kind of empire—a kingdom without domination, without violence, where the humanity of everyone is recognized. A kingdom made for humans. For life. The formula in the kingdom is not peace through strength, but peace through communion. Peace through justice—which means pursuing a world where everyone is treated equally and everyone has enough. Peace, not because people are punished, brutalized, and bombed if they rebel, but peace because people have their basic needs met. Peace because people are at ease, and experiencing belonging, and are cared for and are caring for others. Peace, not through dominating my enemy, but through loving my enemy. Jesus wanted us to see the world with new eyes—as a world of neighbors.

Until we address this fundamental broken logic at the heart of our empire, we will continue this downward spiral. Simply voting blue (while certainly far preferable to the obscene violence of MAGA) is not enough. We do not need a younger, more polite, or more diverse face to be the spokesman for this same tired logic of domination. We do not just need a female president ordering the strikes, or more black pilots dropping the bombs—we need to ask why we feel the need to have more bombs than any other country, yet won’t give our citizens healthcare.

We need a totally new imagination for what it means to share this planet with one another. Where the logic is not “give us what we want or die,” but “there is enough, and we can work together for the good of all.” It would look like funding schools, healthcare, and secure food for every child, rather than endless wars of extraction and exploitation.

This is not naïve. It is literally the only way we make it out of this alive (and by we I mean our planet and the human species). Those of us who benefit from the current system are most in need of a hard long look in the mirror. If we are living well only because others are made expendable, we are ignoring our fundamental interconnectedness and walking in blindness. When we see that Iranian mothers and American mothers grieve just the same when their children are killed in schools, we can see that we are not enemies with our global neighbors—we are one with them.

Every empire has practiced peace through domination, but these empires also have something else in common: They end. From Babylon, to Alexander's Macedonian empire, to Rome, to the British empire, there is no version of security built on domination that does not eventually collapse under its own weight. We know where that road ends. It's time to take the other one.