By Mario Ernesto Almeida Bacallao on June 15, 2026
Gunboat foreign policy is not a personal or partisan quirk, but a strategic line of the American deep state.
During his presidency, Joe Biden ordered rocket fire against Iraq’s Anbar province. foto: France 24
Since the beginning of this century, five presidents have occupied the White House: Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump (first and current terms), and Joseph Biden. In each of these presidencies, with alternating Democratic and Republican governments, armed aggression against sovereign nations has been a constant.
If we talk about the year 2000 to date, Clinton would seem to be the “best off,” but taking into account that his administration began in 1993, his record is not spared from bombings in Somalia (1993), Bosnia (1994, 1995), Sudan (1998), Afghanistan (1998), Iraq and his “Desert Fox” operation (1998), in addition to what remained of Yugoslavia in 1999.
George Bush, for his part, also had a long list of military aggressions that were not worth placing in a specific date, as most of them continued throughout his presidential term.
Afghanistan and Iraq suffered continuous aggression and occupation, while Pakistan was attacked from 2004 onwards. Yemen was bombed in 2002 and Somalia between 2007 and 2008.
Under Obama, the siege of Afghan, Iraqi, and Pakistani territories continued, and Libya was added to the list of targets for bombers and drones starting in 2011, and Syria from 2014 onwards. In both cases, when the much-worked “regime change” occurred, the national flag was transformed.
Likewise, Yemen and Somalia began to be bombed, no longer in isolation but systematically.
During Donald Trump’s first term, starting in 2017, US military “exercises” continued in the aforementioned countries, although Pakistan stopped being bombed in 2018 and Libya in 2019.
Biden kept the military board intact, with the “medal” of having left Afghanistan in 2022, leaving the Taliban in power.
Donald Trump’s return to the White House in 2025 has been marked by an increase in the area of armed conflict with US presence and prominence, with military aggressions against Venezuela, Iran and bombings on Nigerian soil.
The territories militarily attacked by Israel, following the same logic of power and influence as Washington, and with its political, logistical and military support, cannot be left out of the count: Palestine, Lebanon, Qatar…
The data presented so far shows that, while each US administration has its own particularities, the foreign policy of gunboats – aircraft carriers today – is not a personal or partisan singularity, but a strategic line of the deep state, strongly influenced by actors for whom nobody votes, neither inside nor outside the United States, from arms companies to technology companies, including oil companies.
None of the aforementioned military aggressions have been isolated incidents. They have always been, and continue to be, preceded by intense media campaigns, as well as economic and political blockades.
In all of them, the human rights and counterterrorism narrative has been invoked, in ways that are more or less crude, even the supposed war on drugs. In none of the countries attacked to date are there fewer drugs, less “terrorism,” or more rights. We will delve deeper into this in future installments.
Source, Granma, translation Walter Lippmann