As a veteran of the United States Navy, I Fought for This Country. But I Can No Longer Be Complicit in Its Foreign Policy Hypocrisy was taught to revere duty, honor, and fidelity to the ideals enshrined in our Constitution. But as I survey the wreckage of our foreign entanglements over the past century (many of which I once believed were necessary), I am confronted by a truth as uncomfortable as it is undeniable: the United States has become an empire more concerned with hegemonic preservation than human dignity.
For decades, our foreign policy has been defined not by altruism or the pursuit of global stability, but by opportunism disguised as liberation. And increasingly, those decisions seem less motivated by the interests of the American people and more by the imperatives of an unspoken geopolitical alliance that has evaded serious scrutiny.
We have sown chaos under the banner of democracy. In 1953, we orchestrated a coup in Iran, toppling Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh for the audacity of nationalizing his country’s oil. The result was a brutal monarchy, followed by a revolutionary backlash that has destabilized the region ever since. In 1963, we facilitated the removal of South Vietnam’s President Diem, catalyzing a war that cost over 58,000 American lives and millions of Vietnamese.
In 1973, we backed General Augusto Pinochet’s overthrow of Chilean President Salvador Allende, the Western Hemisphere’s first democratically elected Marxist. The junta that followed was a regime of torture, censorship, and state-sponsored murder. In 2003, we invaded Iraq under a pretense of weapons of mass destruction, a phantom menace that, once unmasked, left a power vacuum filled by sectarian violence, ISIS, and generations of trauma.
In 2011, we helped depose Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, leading to the collapse of civil society and the reemergence of open-air slave markets. We did not spread freedom. We exported anarchy.
These are not aberrations. They are patterns.
Yet amid these calamitous campaigns, one constant remains unchallenged: our unwavering and at times unfathomable deference to the state of Israel. The United States sends $3.8 billion annually in military assistance to Israel, even as we slash aid to nearly every other foreign nation, from humanitarian support in Sub-Saharan Africa to infrastructure investments in Latin America.
Why is Israel uniquely immune to austerity? Why is its influence over American foreign policy so pervasive that questioning it invites accusations of bigotry or disloyalty?
To ask these questions is not antisemitic.
It is democratic. It is imperative.
We are not obliged to bankroll or defend the actions of any foreign government, especially one whose policies often run counter to international law and the ethical standards we claim to uphold. A nation confident in its righteousness does not fear accountability.
And yet we remain captive to a status quo that conflates alliance with obedience. We act not as a sovereign superpower, but as a vassal in a global chess game whose rules we no longer write. The rhetoric of “shared values” becomes increasingly hollow as we silence dissent, criminalize critique, and ignore the suffering of those caught in the crossfire of our projections.
We call others “terrorists” while conveniently forgetting our role as the architect of their rage. We depose, destabilize, and then disavow.
I do not write this as a provocateur or as a partisan. I write as someone who has worn the uniform, who has saluted the flag, and who now grieves the betrayal of the ideals I once fought to protect. I want to live in a country that values transparency over pretext, humility over hubris, and peace over perpetual war.
Empire is unsustainable. Hegemony breeds resentment. And complicity, especially when cloaked in patriotic fervor, is corrosive to the soul of a republic.
We must confront our legacy with honesty. We must extricate ourselves from alliances that demand our silence rather than our scrutiny. And we must rediscover a foreign policy rooted not in domination, but in decency.
Anything less is a disservice to the nation we claim to love, and to the world we insist we’re trying to save.
Nkozi Knight 