“Viewpoints” is a place on Chapelboro where local people are encouraged to share their unique perspectives on issues affecting our community. All thoughts, ideas, opinions and expressions in this series are those of the author, and do not reflect the work, reporting or approval of 97.9 The Hill and Chapelboro.com. If you’d like to contribute a column on an issue you’re concerned about, interesting happenings around town, reflections on local life — or anything else — send a submission to viewpoints@wchl.com.
Foreign Policy Helps Form Domestic Policy
A perspective from Chris Mayfield
When our news every day is filled with horror stories of Trump’s fascistic assaults on ordinary people and civic institutions in this country—from masked ICE agents pepper-spraying a dad and his baby in their car to drastic cuts in health and nutrition supports—it can be hard to focus on the crimes our country is perpetrating or enabling beyond our borders. Yet in many crucial ways, these evils are related.
Acts of foreign and domestic violence are clearly related financially, and it’s not all due to Trump. Militarism has been a two-party endeavor. Currently, the Pentagon budget for 2026 is at least a trillion dollars, and its starting point was the almost $900 billion that Biden requested. For comparison, Russia’s 2025 military budget was approximately $155 billion, and China’s about $250 billion.
The US operates about 750 military bases in at least 80 countries. Russia has 21, mostly in the Middle East. China has one. (Yes, one.) The US has spent about $174 billion so far on the war in Ukraine, hoping to weaken Russia but mostly achieving a weakened, blood-soaked Ukraine. The US has also funded Israel’s genocide in Gaza, to the tune of $21.7 billion in the past two years. And then there are the US attacks on Iran and Yemen, bombing campaigns in Somalia, war games in the Baltic and the Pacific, and now the ominous and expensive buildup in the Caribbean.
Meanwhile, the 2024 SNAP (food stamps) budget was $100 billion. The 2025 budget for ACÁ heath care benefits was about $138 billion. The 2024 US Department of Education budget was $79.1 billion, and the 2024 budget for the Environmental Protection Agency was $20.7 billion.
The point, obviously, is that our government is choosing to prioritize developing its military over supporting the health, education, and environmental safety of its people.
The connections between militarism abroad and at home run deeper, however. Thousands of police departments—including some here in NC—have sent officers to Israel for training, especially since the initiation of the so-called War on Terror. There, police are trained in tactics of surveillance and crowd control that Israelis have honed through decades of suppressing Palestinian resistance to occupation. This approach often includes training in surveillance software such as Palantir. We see this now on our streets when immigrants—including citizens—are “identified “ by ICE agents using a cellphone camera app. Drones now fly above many of our cities.
And beyond these specific links, the (ongoing) Gaza genocide—and US support of it under both Biden and Trump—seems to have erased many national and international taboos on things like indefinite detention without charge; denial of freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and the right to assembly; the rights of all people to humane treatment.
We often associate gross violations of these rights with societies like that described in George Orwell’s 1984, with its mass surveillance, its encouragement of citizens to turn each other in, and the state’s unfettered power to define what is true: “War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery,” etc.
Here in the US , we often think that such excesses only occur in other societies—Stalin’s USSR, Iran, North Korea. But we have been seeing increasing infringements on our civil rights, and on state support for our well-being: university professors hauled before congressional committees, student activists kidnapped and threatened with deportation, immigrants hustled to deportation hubs, lists of organizations threatened with huge tax penalties. . . . We can all recite these lists. Under Trump, these assaults have intensified exponentially.
In my opinion, while events like the No Kings protests serve the valid purpose of reminding each of us that we are not alone, they fall short in that the primary message seems to be that if we could just get rid of Trump, we could return to a golden age when —with some unfortunate exceptions—America was a land of unrivaled opportunity and freedom. Black and brown people have always known better. Now perhaps it’s time for us all to act on the fact that the woes of our beautiful, beloved country extend far beyond Trump, and that we may have to do more than carry signs, more even than vote. We may need to rediscover or develop ongoing strategies of active civil disobedience.
“Viewpoints” on Chapelboro is a recurring series of community-submitted opinion columns. All thoughts, ideas, opinions and expressions in this series are those of the author, and do not reflect the work or reporting of 97.9 The Hill and Chapelboro.com.
