By Atilio Boron on March 6, 2026
The US military acts as the world’s policeman, with its own laws. Photo EFE
I am fed up with listening to opinion makers, supposed analysts, and so-called “journalists” from the hegemonic media and their outlets on social media, and even ordinary people of good faith who, in their naivety, are vilely deceived by those who peddle the fairy tale of the United States as the land of freedom, democracy, and human rights. A very important component of this deception is the concealment of the crimes that the “great democracy of the North” has committed throughout its history and continues to perpetrate to this day. Shrouded in a cloud of “lies that seem like truths,” Vargas Llosa dixit, the empire and its vassals are careful to remind the public that the United States is, to date, the only government to have dropped atomic bombs on two defenseless Japanese cities—Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945—killing 210,000 people in an instant.
The figures may underestimate the lethality of that bombing because those who were within a radius of about 600 meters from where the bombs fell were vaporized and turned to ashes in less than a second. No bones or skulls were ever found in that area. The temperature in Hiroshima at the moment of the explosion was 7,700 degrees Celsius, and in Nagasaki about 4,000 degrees. None of the US presidents who succeeded Harry Truman, who ordered the bombing, considered the possibility of apologizing for both crimes. Barack Obama was the only one to visit the Peace Memorial Park in Hiroshima, but he refused to apologize for those crimes. It follows from the above that if there is one country in the world that is disqualified from judging others as “sanctuaries of terrorism” or as “state sponsors of terrorism” — something of which Washington accuses Cuba with infinite malice — that country is none other than the United States.
To dispel any doubt about our argument, it is worth mentioning a brief story personally recounted by former President Jimmy Carter in 2019. During his regular Sunday class at Maranatha Baptist Church in his hometown of Plains, Georgia, Carter revealed that he had spoken with President Donald Trump about China. Carter, who was 94 at the time, said Trump was concerned about China’s economic growth and expressed his concern that “China is overtaking us.” Carter was the one who normalized diplomatic relations between Washington and Beijing in 1979, and he told Trump that much of China’s success was due to its pacifist foreign policy.
“Since 1979, do you know how many times China has been at war with anyone?” Carter asked the congregation. “None, and we, on the other hand, have been at war all the time.” The former president concluded his lecture by saying that “the United States has only been at peace for 16 of its 242 years (249 years, as of February 5, 2026) as an independent nation. If you count wars, military attacks, and military occupations, there have actually only been five years of peace in U.S. history: 1976, the last year of Gerald Ford’s administration, and 1977-1980, the entirety of Carter’s presidency.” The former president concluded his speech by saying that “the United States is the most belligerent nation in the history of the world,” a result, according to him, of forcing other countries to “adopt our American principles” and, we might add, ensuring the predominance of its interests.
The military aggression against Venezuela, the violation of its sovereignty, and the kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Assemblywoman Cilia Flores, is the penultimate link in this sad story. The treacherous aggression against Iran, planned while negotiations were underway that seemed to be coming to a successful conclusion with Tehran’s explicit renunciation of building an atomic bomb, is another example of how “rogue states” (in the lexicon of social sciences) such as the United States and Israel act, trampling on the United Nations Charter and the most basic norms of international law. A war that has already caused the deaths of thousands of innocent people, which overlaps with the fierce genocide practiced by the racist regime of Israel in Gaza and which could lead to a global economic crisis and even precipitate the start of a Third World War.
There are two heads of state, Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, who need war to avoid going to prison to serve time for their crimes. There is a military industry that thrives on wars and the superprofits they generate. Nothing, absolutely nothing, justifies this war. What’s more, Kenneth N. Waltz, a leading academic figure in the field of international relations and father of the neorealist school in that discipline, published an exceptional text in 2012 entitled “Why Iran Must Have Its Bomb,” whose subtitle said it all: “Nuclear balance would mean stability.” In that remarkable article, Waltz demonstrated that there has never been a war between two countries that possessed atomic bombs. There was no war between the United States and the Soviet Union, or today with Russia; nor between India and Pakistan. Nothing could be more contrary to stability and international peace than having a country with an atomic arsenal in the same region surrounded by others that lack it and rightly feel threatened by the former. Unfortunately, his advice was arrogantly ignored and opposed by the deep state that dominates Washington and the Zionist lobby that wields so much influence in the US Congress and the administrative structure of the US government. The result is the tragedy that is unfolding today in Iran and other countries in the region.
foto: Bill Hackwell
Atilio Boron is a Argentine Marxist sociologist and leading anti imperialist author. He has written 17 books including Empire and Imperialism in 2005. In 2009 he received the International José Martí Prize from UNESCO for his contribution to integration of Latin American and Caribbean countries.
Source: Telesur translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English