Tag: iran

The American predicament: Why the Empire seems doomed [American Politics #21]

~ Ted Grimsrud ~ 7 Comments

Ted Grimsrud—October 21, 2026

I keep paying attention to our current global situation, but I have not found clarity about what to say so have been pretty quiet. But I have some thoughts today. It is almost exactly fifty years that I have been a critic of the United States’s foreign policies and general stance in the world. I came of age at the end of the Vietnam War when my growing awareness of the evils of that war combined with new understandings of the message of Jesus to lead me to take a pacifist stance. My Jesus-inspired pacifism and my antipathy about the American Empire have continued to reinforce each other and deepen in the years since.

I have a book newly published (see comments for a link) that tells much of this story—Love is the Way: A Christian Pacifist in the American Empire. What I offer here is kind of a coda to that book (or maybe the outline for a sequel). In all these years since my epiphany about Empire and the gospel, I have believed that the Empire’s days were numbered. Now, those days are fewer than ever before. I have brainstormed a list of reasons why the end seems nigh.

This is just a beginning of a thought process. The list is suggestive, not complete. I don’t have a particular order of importance yet.

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Takeaways from the US/Israel attack on Iran [American Politics #18]

~ Ted Grimsrud ~ 15 Comments

Ted Grimsrud—March 2, 2026

The fog is still way too thick in the very early days of our new war to draw any stable conclusions about it. However, I believe that it is not too soon to see ways already about how the US/Israel attack on Iran underscores many of the problems humane people see with the current American Empire’s way of being in the world. Let me suggest five points.

  • We do well to redouble our work against warism. American warism created a society with an enormous military and with constant prowar propaganda so that we live in a kind of tinderbox waiting for a spark that set the fire off. Now that the nation has allowed an apparently quite war-oriented person to become president we have little potential for derailing the momentum toward an enormous disaster. What is needed, if we somehow survive the current crisis, is a concerted effort to empty the tinderbox. I don’t know how that can happen, but it is needed to prevent another similar crisis.
  • We do well to assume that the US government regularly lies, especially in relation to international affairs. We have lived with decades-long propaganda campaigns of dishonesty that have facilitated antipathy toward China, Iran, and Russia. They make it easy for our government to pursue destructive policies toward those countries with little resistance from the American people. So, we see an ongoing willingness among the American people to believe numerous mistruths regarding each of these countries as events unfold in the present.

Continue reading “Takeaways from the US/Israel attack on Iran [American Politics #18]” →