Americans have a dysfunctional relationship with 21st-century wars. Most of us do not fight in them, see the carnage or live with their physical and psychological ruins. Yet we cannot heal our own nation unless we reckon with their monstrous futility.
For Graham Platner, that reckoning began when he was a 20-year-old infantryman in Iraq. His company was constructing a patrol base near Falluja. To build it, they hired locals who often brought their kids to the work site. One day, a mortar round fired by insurgents landed where they were congregated. There can be no more senseless death than losing a child, a reality Mr. Platner had to confront as he administered first aid and then encountered distraught parents at a casualty collection point. He still remembers the sight, smell and feel of those lost children, as well as the anguish in their parents’ eyes.
Mr. Platner recalled this experience to me as he drove his truck through Maine, campaigning for the Democratic nomination for Senate. Last fall, his candidacy was rocked by revelations from his past. As a young Marine, he got a skull and bones tattoo on his chest that resembled a Nazi symbol (he denied knowing its meaning). His history on Reddit includes offensive comments that he attributes to a long process of dealing with the trauma of war. Yet while Democratic insiders in Washington were prepared to write him off, today he packs town halls, and polls show him leading Gov. Janet Mills of Maine by around 30 points.
One reason for this success is that Mr. Platner sounds radically honest by the standards of American politics, including when he talks about his own service. “There’s this thing I often think about,” he said, recalling the incident near Falluja. “Those kids were killed because we were spending money to build this base that probably doesn’t exist anymore.” His voice slipped into the present tense as he put himself back into the moment when the mothers arrived to pick up the remains, his own life in front of him like a storm cloud. “How horrifically wasteful this is.”
It’s an apt turn of phrase. Yes, we have prevented another catastrophic attack in the 25 years since Sept. 11. To do that, we spent more than $6 trillion fighting wars that killed over 7,000 Americans and hundreds of thousands of civilians, inflicting trauma on countless people. The destruction has displaced tens of millions; as refugees sought safety in the West, it fueled a right-wing backlash to democracy. Meanwhile, what have we built in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, Libya and now Iran? And what could we have built at home with those trillions of dollars?
Visceral outrage over that reality infuses Mr. Platner’s opposition to the war in Iran. Sure, at campaign stops, he talks about high gas prices and the Trump administration’s incompetence. But the core of his message is an unflinching disgust for the forever war we have waged since 9/11. “Nobody is going to be able to convince me that what I did in Iraq and Afghanistan did anything for the people of Sullivan, Maine,” he told me, punctuating his point with an obscenity. “I don’t want other young Americans to go through what I’ve been through. And I don’t want to send other young Americans to inflict the horror that I had to inflict on people.”
Polling suggests that most Americans agree with him. So does the feedback he gets day to day. The people he meets overwhelmingly oppose the war; many are furious or heartbroken about it. That includes his fellow veterans. “I don’t know a single guy I served with who thinks this thing in Iran is a good idea,” he told me. Many of those guys are MAGA. “This was one of the reasons they were big Trump supporters — he was the antiwar or ‘America first’ candidate.”
While that suggests a policy and political imperative for Democrats to be the antiwar party, such a movement has not fully materialized. Some Democrats do express a sense of moral outrage and urgency over the war: Ro Khanna, Jason Crow and Yassamin Ansari in the House, or Chris Murphy, Chris Van Hollen or Tim Kaine in the Senate. But many others, including the party’s leadership in Congress, have shown less passion in opposing the war than they bring to fights over Obamacare subsidies. Turn on right-wing commentators like Tucker Carlson or Megyn Kelly and you hear a more aggressive stance.
Mr. Platner has a particular scorn for this dynamic. He decried party leaders who focus on President Trump’s failure to seek congressional authorization: “There’s a big difference between saying the war shouldn’t be happening because it is bad and saying the war shouldn’t be happening because they didn’t ask permission.” He lamented the tendency to leaven statements against the war with lengthy condemnations of the Iranian regime that “lay the ideological and propaganda basis” for what Mr. Trump is doing. He also noted rightly that many Democrats have been longtime hawks on Iran, supporters of the Israeli government and allies with pro-war groups such as AIPAC.
All this undercuts Democrats’ ability to credibly argue for a fundamental shift in the nation’s priorities. The same dynamic applies to defense spending. For decades, Democrats joined Republicans in voting for an ever-growing Pentagon budget. Now, Mr. Trump has proposed an eye-popping $1.5 trillion in spending for his “Department of War” on top of the $200 billion the Pentagon has already requested for his war in Iran. Meanwhile, prices continue to rise, and cuts to health care, education and much else have left communities struggling to fill the gap
The absurdity of these priorities makes Washington feel distant and obtuse, an imperial capital cloistered from its subjects with National Guard troops patrolling the city. “Here in the real world, most people get it,” Mr. Platner says of his campaign events. “Do you think this country should spend more on schools and hospitals and less on bombs? A lot of people are like, yeah, that’s pretty obvious.”
And yet the wars keep happening. The money keeps flowing to defense contractors. Traders keep profiting from bets on the rise and fall of oil prices while the working class can’t afford to pay for a tank of gas. Insiders make ghoulish bets about the war on prediction markets while children are killed by American weapons in Iran and Lebanon.
“If the Democratic Party is to flourish in the future,” Mr. Platner told me, “it needs to be an antiwar party.” As talks to end the latest disastrous war focus on reopening a narrow strait of water that was open before the war began, this seems like an obvious conclusion. And yet many Democratic politicians would most likely be wary of embracing it.
Why don’t more Democrats talk about war the way Graham Platner does?
Part of the reason is the explosion of money in politics since the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision empowered special interest groups, including AIPAC, defense contractors and fossil fuel companies, that favor a hawkish foreign policy. The power of donors has risen relative to everyone else’s.
Another part of the reason is a seemingly pathological fear of being called weak, particularly among an older generation of Democrats, who remember how successfully Republicans cast them as soft on terrorism through the 2002 midterms and the 2004 presidential election. Those losses left them immune to what the electorate has conveyed ever since: In each presidential election since 2004 — with the possible exception of 2020 — the candidate who declared himself most committed to ending and avoiding wars has won.
Still, many Democrats seem to fear being seen as antiwar. What if they vote against wartime funding, and then an Iranian attack targets U.S. troops or the homeland? Or what if Mr. Trump bombs Iran, and the regime collapses and is replaced by something better? You could feel this calculation within the Democratic Party as the war began — a hedging that only dissipated when the war’s brutality and insanity became clear. Behind it is a perverse logic: Both Iranian strength and Iranian weakness can justify war.
To be fair, the blame for this dynamic extends far beyond elected officials, to commentators who are at turns jingoistic, credulous of fearmongering and inclined to cover any harm done to Americans or our interests around the world as a political crisis; to think tanks who cast events particularly in the Middle East as problems that can be solved by U.S. intervention; to an entertainment industry that often valorizes American military and intelligence operations; and to people like me who have filled the ranks of Democratic administrations.
To bookend his story about Iraq, Mr. Platner told me about his last time in a war zone. It was 2018, in Kabul, and he was a contractor working on the security detail of the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan. He hadn’t been to the country since his 2011 deployment. As he overheard conversations among the diplomats and military officers, he thought: Is this a joke?
“We were literally doing the same thing seven years later,” he told me. Still kicking down doors in Special Operations raids. Still dropping bombs that killed Afghan civilians. Still backing corrupt Afghan politicians. Still telling the same story about training Afghan security forces who remained dependent upon U.S. support. “The people running the war didn’t even seem to know the point of the war. It was a self-licking ice cream cone.” He quit, disgusted, after a few months and returned to Maine, convinced that American foreign policy needed a complete overhaul.
Listening to him talk, I knew intuitively what he was saying. I would have been one of those people back in 2011, believing that what we were doing was helping Afghans.
What might this new foreign policy look like?
More work needs to be done to turn critiques like Mr. Platner’s into credible Democratic policy. Truly ending the forever war is an essential starting point. Rescind the post-9/11 authorization that allows the president to use military force globally against terrorists without coming back to Congress for approval. Commit to going to war only in self-defense, with congressional authorization. Slash a bloated and out-of-control Pentagon budget. Draw down the sprawling American defense installations across the Middle East. End all military assistance to an Israeli government committed to territorial expansion and hostile to international law. Restrict the use of use of artificial intelligence in autonomous weapons or mass surveillance.
Beyond that, we must re-engage the world as something other than a hegemon. Rebuild diplomatic and development capabilities hollowed out under Mr. Trump. Buttress NATO as a defensive alliance. Negotiate the outlines of a new international order with other major powers, focusing on the existential risks of nuclear weapons, artificial intelligence and climate change.
More than any of this, though, Americans must change their relationship to war itself. One reason we have a hard time reckoning with the forever war is that it undermines our own story. We like to think of America as a force for good, acting out of enlightened self-interest, our military fighting for freedom around the globe. Is that really what’s been happening?
Mr. Trump makes this reckoning easier because he has dropped the pretense of virtue. The typical language about Iranian freedom disappeared after the first bombs fell, replaced by threats of the genocidal erasure of an ancient civilization. Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, boasts about blowing up Iranian missiles and boats that posed no threat to the people of Sullivan, Maine. No apology was made for killing well over a hundred schoolgirls. This is where American exceptionalism attached to American power can lead: We kill people because we can, and boast about it.
“We are so broken emotionally when it comes to our politics that we’ve literally created this story that it’s inherent in being a competent political leader to kill civilians,” Mr. Platner told me. “If you’re not willing to do some hard things and drop some bombs, then you’re not up to the task of power. I think it’s the opposite. You’re not up to the task of being in power if you do not think about the cost of violence. If that’s not at the front of your mind, then I don’t think you are morally in the right place to be in positions of power.”
We like to frame our wars as virtuous, but they are not. Instead, they resemble a declining empire sowing chaos along its periphery as a matter of strategy: Economic and political elites profit while the Americans who fight suffer along with the places they attack. “The only way we change that is by talking about it publicly,” Mr. Platner told me. “If we start to revisit the morality of military conflict and how we use violence, that’s going to have a direct correlation to what is good for America.”
Put another way, the forever war has been destroying America from within, like an organism that must keep growing to survive, filling us with fear of outsiders and contempt for one another. War does that to societies: Once you normalize taking human life abroad, you tend not to value it at home.
That is why we must listen to voices like Mr. Platner’s. The kind of visceral and moral reckoning he advocates is the only way to truly dismantle the forever war, change our priorities and detoxify our country. To save ourselves, we must stop this cycle of violence. We must find meaning not in our capacity to kill or control others, but in each other.
Ben Rhodes is a contributing Opinion writer and the author of the forthcoming “All We Say: The Battle for American Identity.” He was deputy national security adviser under President Barack Obama.
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