Ep. 102: Is America The Bad Guy? Exploring the Myth of American Exceptionalism

Jacob Winograd [00:00:00]:
They hate us for our freedom. That’s what we were told after 9, 11, after Iraq, after Afghanistan. But what if that’s not the truth? What if the American experiment which began in rebellion against empire has become the very thing it once condemned? George Washington, in his farewell address warned that the great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations and is to steer clear of permanent alliances. And Thomas Jefferson echoed this morning that the spirit of liberty is incompatible with empire. John Quincy Adams warned us that America should not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. By 1899, William Grant Sumner, a classical liberal and a Yale professor, saw the US exporting monster the same imperial mindset it had used against the Native Americans to the Philippines. And he warned that the plan of benevolent assimilation has proved to be benevolent only to the assimilators. Mark Twain, also outraged at the conquest of the Philippines, said, I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land.

Jacob Winograd [00:01:23]:
Major General Smedley Butler, reflecting on his military career, confessed, I was a high class muscle man for big business, for Wall street and the bankers. And then President Dwight Eisenhower and his famous 1961 farewell address offered a stark warning. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or or unsought by the military industrial complex. In 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. Declared, The greatest purveyor of violence in the world today is my own government. And Ron Paul warned Congress and the country that we have become an empire that is draining our economy, our people and our liberties. Noam Chomsky said it plainly. Everyone’s worried about stopping terrorism.

Jacob Winograd [00:02:19]:
There’s a simple way. Stop participating in it. And in the wake of 9 11, Harry Brown asked the questions no one wanted to hear. When will we learn that we can’t allow our politicians to bully the world without someone bullying back eventually. When will we learn that violence always begets violence? And when will we learn that without freedom and sanity, there is no reason to be patriotic? This episode isn’t about hating America. It’s about telling the truth. It’s about returning to first principles and asking the question we’ve long been afraid to face. Is America actually the bad guy?

Knowledgeable Narrator [00:03:06]:
If Christ is king, how should the Christian consider the kingdoms of this world? What does the Bible teach us about human authority and what it means to love our neighbors and our enemies? Before we render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, let’s know what it means to render unto God what is God’s. This is the biblical anarchy podcast the modern prophetic voice against war and empire.

Jacob Winograd [00:03:38]:
Hello everyone. Welcome back to the Biblical Anarchy Podcast. I’m your host, Joe Jacob Winograd. Just a reminder to everyone to please if you support what I do here at Biblical Anarchy with our podcast, which is part of the Libertarian Christian Institute’s Christians for Liberty Network. It helps us out if you first of all like this video, subscribe to the channel if you haven’t already. Share this around with your friends, your family, on your social media, if you enjoy the content that we’re putting out there. And if you want to support the show, you can go to biblicalanarchypodcast.com and click the donate link, including signing up for $10 or more a month if you so choose to become an LCI insider, which comes with all sorts of perks and, as the name suggests, insider access information. And we would just love to have you guys be part of the growing burgeoning LCI community.

Jacob Winograd [00:04:34]:
If you’re someone who’s generally proud to be American, who believes in liberty, values our Constitution, maybe even gets choked up at a well played national anthem, but lately you’ve started to wonder if something’s gone wrong. This episode is for you. You’ve probably heard conflicting narratives about our country’s history. Maybe you’ve always assumed that, while not perfect, America stood for the good guys. But perhaps you’ve grown uneasy with some of the things that you’ve seen in recent years. And you’ve seen that our military is seemingly always at war, that wars are sold as moral, but rarely seem to measure up to that claim. And you may have noticed blatant political corruption, foreign entanglements that benefit the powerful, and a growing sense that the story being sold doesn’t quite add up. I’m not here to tear down the good in our country.

Jacob Winograd [00:05:40]:
I’m here to ask whether the narrative we’ve been told holds up and what it means for Christians who want to walk in the truth. Because as followers of Christ, we are commanded to expose the unfruitful works of darkness, it says in Ephesians 5:11. Even when those works are cloaked in red, white and blue. We’ve been told our foreign policy is about freedom, about justice, about protecting the innocent, about spreading the American experiment, things like democracy, to other parts of the world. But what if the truth is just more complicated than that? What if some of the worst injustices of our time have not been carried out by our enemies, but in our name, by our government? From the Philippines to Vietnam to Libya to CIA coups to drone strikes. The United States has often acted not as a liberator, but but as an empire, one that arrives as a savior but stays as an occupier, often leaving behind rubble where homes and communities once stood. America claims the stand for democracy while it overthrows elected leaders and backs dictators who serve not only corporate interests, but a broader agenda of control and resource access and geopolitical dominance. So in this episode, we’re going to trace this story and explore the myth at the heart of it.

Jacob Winograd [00:07:11]:
American exceptionalism. And American exceptionalism is this belief that America has some unique calling, that we’re uniquely righteous as a nation, divinely chosen, morally superior to other nations. And I want to expose Shynell, put that under a light, put that to inspection, see if that actually holds true. And I think what we’ll see is that myth was built to be weaponized, to justify violence, occupation and global dominance in the name of freedom, but also in the name of Christianity. And that’s what I’m going to try to draw out here today. And not just from libertarian voices like Robert Higgs or Murray Rothbard or Scott Horton and Tom woods, but also mainstream historians and declassified government records and even official apologies that admit what was done. I’m not going to be able to give you every citation here in the episode, but what I’m going to do is provide in the show notes for this episode. So if you go to biblicalanarchypodcast.com and go for episode 102, I’ll have more than I usually have a long list of additional resources, including my own sort of bibliography for this episode that shows all the different research that I’ve done, books that I’m citing from and whatnot.

Jacob Winograd [00:08:35]:
So you can go and do the research for yourself. Because as much as I do the research for myself and try to give you this information, I don’t expect you to just blindly trust anything anyone says. But here’s how we’re going to break it down. We’re going to break it down and this is probably going to be more than one episode, but we’re going to break down the rise of the empire, how the US abandoned its anti imperial root and embraced global dominance. And we’re going to explore key episodes in the American history, World War I, World War II, the Cold War, the post 9 11, the terror wars, what really happened and what the price of those wars were. And then the theological challenge at play here, how Christians must reevaluate things like patriotism, foreign policy. As I’ve talked about in previous episodes, War and the idea of just war and the use of violence in general in light of the kingdom of God and our citizenship in it. And I want to emphasize this point.

Jacob Winograd [00:09:37]:
This episode isn’t about rewriting history, it’s about reading it honestly in the light of Scripture, in the light of knowing that history is often written by the victors and those with power and an agenda. Think about current events and how much people don’t tend to agree even on things that are happening right now in front of us. And history is often the same way. So if you’re ready to trade comforting myths for hard truths, let’s begin. And I want to start with modern headlines. Let’s first talk about Gaza, where US support has helped fund military operations that have killed thousands of civilians. Entire neighborhoods have been flattened, infrastructure obliterated, children buried under rubble, and it’s all justified with broad language about self defense and fighting terrorism. Human shields, even when that’s what’s happening, looks a lot like collective punishment.

Jacob Winograd [00:10:38]:
Now as Christians, we should be the first to say that collective guilt is not justice. Scripture, like Ezekiel 18 makes it clear that each person is accountable for their own sin, and to punish civilians in mass for the crimes of a few, for the crimes of their governments is not only immoral, but it’s anti Christian. And we’ve talked about this recently in episode 99 did a whole episode on just war theory. And so I I did it in relation to the conflict going on between Israel and Gaza. So I do recommend checking that out for more on this specific conflict and on the Christian tradition of just war theory. Although this ongoing war in Gaza and the escalations against Iran and neighboring countries have been done by Israel’s government, there’s no doubt that Israel operates as aggressively as it does because it gets aid from the US financially as well as militarily and politically, as the US protects Israel from the UN and other international bodies and pushback over the past year, Israel’s undeclared war on Iran has escalated into open confrontation, including targeted assassinations, sabotage operations and airstrikes deep into Iranian allied infrastructure in Syria, Iraq and even inside Iran. While Israel pulls the trigger, the US often loads the gun, supplying the arms, the intelligence and the international cover. At the time of recording and writing this episode out, Israel has now drawn America and Trump into the conflict.

Jacob Winograd [00:12:15]:
And it’s very likely, although a little bit unclear right now as to what kind of retaliation we’re going to see from Iran and how much of this is still being played out and negotiated. But the point is that there are American bases and ships in the region that are very much within Iran’s capability to retaliate towards and strike against, although Iran has never actually attacked Americans on American soil. And so that’s an important factor to consider, which is that Iran is not actually over here in America messing with our nation or our neighbors. And this reminds me of the thing that the great Ron Paul once said when asked about his response to the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. And he said, they don’t hate us for our freedom, as was often argued back then. They hate us because we’re over there. But back to focusing on Iran because I’m going to get to the war on terror. More later.

Jacob Winograd [00:13:15]:
These are framed as preemptive strikes. This is a preemptive defense. But the truth is, and I’ve talked about this in previous episodes, but the US And Israel have actually spent decades trying to neutralize Iran’s influence across the region. And not because of unprovoked aggression, but from Iran, but because Iran refuses to bow to the regional order dominated by Washington and Tel Aviv. That campaign has included backing Saddam Hussein during the Iran Iraq War, imposing crippling sanctions that often punish civilians, and turning a blind eye to regional escalation as long as it serves US Or Israeli strategic interests. What’s more, the US has labeled Iran a state sponsor of terrorists, which, to be fair, is true. We do this while the US Is actually funding terrorism. The US Backs Sunni jihadist groups in Syria and even turned a blind eye to bin Ladenite elements in Chechnya who were fighting against Russia simply because their enemy aligned with America’s rivals.

Jacob Winograd [00:14:28]:
And I’ll touch on more this later in the episode when we talk about sort of the new Cold War with Russia. But the, the truth is that after 9 11, Putin was optimistic, going to Bush and thinking that, hey, now, can we please combine and fight against Islamic Jihad and these bin Ladenites? Because Putin well knew that he’d been fighting a terrorist problem on his own borders. Those terrorists, those the. Had been supported and backed up and armed and funded by America, by our government. So it’s, it’s just a little bit rich, right? The, the speck in someone else’s eye. Well, there’s a giant plank in your own. Why is it considered legitimate statecraft for Israel and America to fund and support terrorists, but ultimately an unforgivable sin when Iran does the same, or to put it differently, if Iran’s actions justify regime change? Well, why doesn’t that same logic apply to Israel and America? Like, why can’t other countries or groups look at America and go look at how much they’ve funded terrorism. And we often hear this claim that like, Iran is the number one state sponsor of terrorism in the world.

Jacob Winograd [00:15:43]:
But if you press people to explain that, like, what statistics, what calculation have they done for that? They don’t give it much. They don’t really give anything as a response to that. They point out examples of where Iran does. Iran has supported Hezbollah and other groups, but those groups don’t really go after America. Their primary target is Israel. And it’s 100% pertaining to Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians in Gaza. And so they don’t view it as we’re attacking Israel for no reason. They’re viewing it as we’re resisting a government which is committing mass violence or genocide, oppression and occupation of our own people.

Jacob Winograd [00:16:23]:
It’s also worth talking about some of the hypocrisy that’s at play here regarding Iran’s nuclear program. The double standard between Israel and Iran is really glaring. See, Israel is widely understood to possess between 80 to 200 nuclear warheads developed in secret at its Daimona Factor facility with early help from France and the US but it has never signed the Nuclear Non Proliferation Proliferation Treaty, the npt. And it does not allow international inspections. And it maintains a policy of strategic ambiguity. Yet it faces no sanctions, no global outrage, and continues receiving billions in United States financial aid. Now, Iran, on the other hand, is an NPT signatory and has confirmed that no nuclear weapons and has submitted to years of International Atomic Energy Agency the IAEA oversight. When it signed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the JCPOA in 2015, it agreed to strict limits on enrichment in exchange for sanctions relief.

Jacob Winograd [00:17:38]:
All parties, including the iea, verified its compliance until President Trump unilaterally withdrew from the deal in 2018. Only after that betrayal did Iran increase its enrichment beyond 20%. And this move is just widely understood to be a bargaining chip and not a rush to weaponization. It is somewhat what people will call a latent nuclear deterrent to sort of say, well, we don’t have a nuke, but if someone wanted to try to invade us, we want to be close to a position where we could build a nuke, right? But even then, they’re willing to. They’ve always been willing to negotiate off of that point and strike a new deal like the one that Barack Obama had created with them, which was honestly one of the few good things Barack Obama did in his presidency. But yet, despite being within the legal framework in the past and being completely willing to negotiate all this time, other than they’re not willing to completely abandon their nuclear program. They want to keep their nuclear energy and to keep their equipment and to be able to continue to enrich uranium, but they are willing to negotiate to how much and to submit to inspections. And they’re part of these international treaties, which Israel doesn’t do any of that.

Jacob Winograd [00:19:00]:
And so. And despite all that, Iran is portrayed as the existential threat. So while one country has undeclared weapons is coddled, another without them is demonized. And the message is clear here that the rules are made by those with power, and peace is only upheld for the friends of empire. Iran is regularly painted as a nuclear threat, even though it’s a signatory to these treaties, like I talked about, and submits to these inspections. It doesn’t have a nuclear weapon and has consistently said its program is for civilian purposes, for energy and medical isotopes. And even the US Intelligence community, community has repeatedly affirmed over the decades that Iran hasn’t made the decision to build a bomb. I mean, Benjamin Netanyahu has been saying since the 90s that they’re three weeks or three months or three years or 10 years.

Jacob Winograd [00:19:53]:
He’s constantly changing it, close to getting a nuclear weapon, but it never comes to pass. I know people want to say that’s because there’s been interventions or accidents or whatnot, but. But the point is, nothing like that has ever materialized. They’re willing to negotiate. They’re being. They’re willing to be transparent. They just. They don’t want to be bullied.

Jacob Winograd [00:20:14]:
Right. They want to have their sovereignty recognized. Now, contrast that with Israel, again, a country that does have nuclear weapons but has never officially acknowledged it, it is not a member of the npt, doesn’t allow inspections, and has operated with this strategic ambiguity since the 1960s. And they have dozens, if not hundreds of warheads. But Israel has no sanctions, no oversight, and they don’t get lectured about it. And by all accounts, under the jcpoa, the deal that Obama had that Trump pulled out of Iran was complying completely. There was no issues with that deal other than complaints from people that have just clearly wanted war with Iran for a very long time, because only after the US Backed out of that deal that Iran began enriching uranium beyond the 20% threshold. So that latent nuclear capability has always been a bargaining chip, but not a pathway to war.

Jacob Winograd [00:21:08]:
But it’s leverage for diplomacy. So the question is, why is one nation with actual nukes and no transparency considered an ally? And Another with no bomb and active oversight is cast as a pariah. Part of it is that they have supported some terrorism. But again, there’s hypocrisy there too. And so the answer is really not about justice or global stability, it’s about alignment. Israel plays a strategic role in maintaining U.S. dominance in the Middle east, serving as a military and intelligence partner that reinforces American influence across the region. Iran, by contrast, opposes that order.

Jacob Winograd [00:21:45]:
Its resistance, though often its government, is often authoritarian. But its resistance to American hegemony is a problem not because of its religion or rhetoric or anything. It’s just that it won’t submit. And keep in mind that Russia, it’s part of the bricks, right? So China and Russia, India. So I mean, Russia is a predominantly a Christian country, more of the Eastern Orthodox, Russian Orthodox, but it’s not a jihadist threat. They’ve been fighting jihad, right. But Iran. And again, there’s a certain hypocrisy here because if you’re going to.

Jacob Winograd [00:22:24]:
Because like the only objection people will have is that, well, Iran is a, they have elements of a Sharia law government, right? It’s an Islamic state. And that’s certainly true. And Iran is certainly repressive in many ways, but so are many of America’s allies in that region. Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the uae, Jordan, all are Muslim majority nations with poorer human rights records. But they play ball with US Foreign policy, so they’re given a pass. And so this isn’t about morality. That’s not about the rights violations that these governments commit. It’s about empire and imperial interests.

Jacob Winograd [00:23:07]:
Speaking of empire, and we’re going to pivot off the Middle east, but we’ll come back to it. Let’s talk about Ukraine, where the narrative is that America is helping a sovereign people resist tyranny. But if we scratch beneath the surface, the picture becomes far more complicated. See, after the fall of the Soviet Union, U.S. officials assured Russia that NATO would not expand 1 inch eastward. Those promises were repeatedly broken as NATO pushed into former Soviet territories and Russia issued repeated warnings drawing red line around Ukraine’s NATO ambitions. Right. This is the means net memo which you probably heard about.

Jacob Winograd [00:23:50]:
And these warnings were ignored. Own our own US like Departments of State and Intelligence were telling Clinton and Bush and Obama and then Trump that Ukraine was an absolute red line. And on top of that, US was placing missile systems near Russia’s borders. And this was upsetting the Cold War era balance of mutually assured destruction. And so if you put dual purpose rocket launchers on the, on the border of Russia or close to it, like in places like Poland, and that they can launch both anti missile missiles like anti ballistic missiles and they can also launch Tomahawk missiles which can be armed with a nuclear payload. Like just reverse the roles. Like what if Russia was building these kind of missile launchers in Mexico near our border? Do you think the US government would just roll over and take that? They wouldn’t. They absolutely wouldn’t.

Jacob Winograd [00:24:51]:
But so to continue, as I brought up when I was talking about Iran and the Middle east, for decades Washington has supported Chechen insurgents, some many of them linked to bin Ladenite networks as a way to bleed Russia and keeping it bogged down with these internal and external conflicts. Now this doesn’t make Russia’s response of invading Ukraine justified. As the book to my my left here for you video watchers. Provoked by Scott Horton. It doesn’t say justified, but it does say provoked. And it absolutely was provoked. It’s not justified. But we do see that through examining all this, it’s revealed that America is not like a neutral force for peace and democracy.

Jacob Winograd [00:25:38]:
It is acting as a global power, a world empire with military alliance that spreads all the way across the world, that is provoking, escalating, manipulating circumstances and agents and nations, all while claiming the moral high ground. It’s not about freedom. I mean, you just can’t have a limited libertarian Christian constitutional republic that is also a part of a giant military apparatus that goes, that covers three fourths of the world. You just can’t have both those things at once. What makes better sense of the data again, once we start seeing how a lot of the moral language, Right, these are like euphemisms, I think, that are being used, like democracy, liberty, human rights, right. These are used to cloak strategic interests. None of this, not the campaigns in the Middle east nor the provocations in Eastern Europe, reflect the actions of a government genuinely committed to peace, justice or Christian ethics. These are not the hallmarks of a nation exhausting diplomacy or loving its enemies.

Jacob Winograd [00:26:54]:
They are the fingerprints of empire. Destabilize, isolate, punish in the name of peace, but too often at the cost of it. And these aren’t isolated failures in the modern era we live in. They’re symptoms of a deeper disease and just the latest in a long pattern. To understand the scope of the modern American empire, we have to return to the sort of the catalyst for what turned it into what it is today, even though we can continue to trace those roots further back. But what really created the modern sort of American hegemony we live under was 911 and not just as a historical marker, but a turning point in how America justified its actions. September 11th was a national trauma. But beyond the grief and the fear, it became a moment of moral transformation, or what I would really say is more moral compromise.

Jacob Winograd [00:27:52]:
Because in the wake of the attacks, Americans were desperate for security, for justice, and for action to be taken. And the government channeled that desperation into a crusade where patriotism fueled with militarism and fear displaced careful discernment and proportional responses. It didn’t take long for the calls for justice to harden into demand for war. Within weeks, the groundwork for global intervention was being laid, and not just against the actual perpetrators, but against any regime deemed uncooperative or oppositional. The Bush administration fused patriotism with vengeance. You’re either with us or you’re with the terrorists became sort of the political on quasi theological like purity test or litmus test. Flags went up and jets took off and the war drums drowned out nearly every dissenting voice. And it was all seen as this righteous, this righteous war, this righteous response.

Jacob Winograd [00:28:56]:
Swift, strong, and it was unquestionable, right? Like you either love America and love freedom and you’re going to war, or you hate all this. You hate everything that’s good. You hate God and you just love the terrorists. You love those who brought the buildings down. And this momentum of moral certainty and patriotic fervor quickly turns its sights on Iraq. And the narrative shifted almost seamlessly. Saddam Hussein was framed not only as a tyrant, but as a looming threat tied through implication and not evident to the trauma of September 11th. The case for war rested on manufactured intelligence, emotional manipulation, and a media apparatus that was too willing to play along.

Jacob Winograd [00:29:45]:
But here’s the truth. Iraq had nothing to do with September 11th. There were no weapons of mass destruction. They did find old, unusable, degraded weapons from the 80s, that and like very early 90s pre 91. And they covered this up because of how embarrassing the situation was compared to the propaganda campaign they launched to justify the war. The war was based on lies. Over 200,000 civilians died and millions were displaced. And the vacuum created by our invasion directly led to the rise of isis.

Jacob Winograd [00:30:19]:
And this wasn’t just a strategic mistake. It was a calculated deception sold to the American public through fear and manipulated intelligence. As Robert Higgs and Scott Horton both point out, the war not only destabilized Iraq, but strengthened Iran’s regional influence. In fact, even the Israeli government itself was was like they wanted to go to Iran first after 9, 11. And so then when the plan became Iraq, they were like, fine, go to war in Iraq, but only if you’re going to go take down Iran right after. Because they knew that going to Iraq first would just strengthen Iran’s influence in the region. So the very opposite of what the architects promised happened. So instead of justice or security, what we got was blowback, instability and a generation haunted by moral and geopolitical ruin.

Jacob Winograd [00:31:06]:
Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, we spent 20 years, billions of dollars and thousands of US lives only to watch the Taliban retake the country in days once we left, the same Taliban we armed in the 80s as part of our Cold War chess game with the Soviets. And then there were of course, the drone wars, Obama’s wars, Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, the list goes on. Syria, drone strikes justified by secret kill lists, often approved without any sort of due process. And according to the whist blowers and investigative reports on this, civilian death rates in some of These operations reached 90%. Entire families incinerated by algorithms and signature strikes. And let’s also talk about the CIA’s role in Libya and Syria, where the US funneled arms to moderate rebels, many of whom turned out to be radical Islamic extremists. And in Syria, these groups often worked side by side with, with Al Qaeda affiliates. And in Libya, the removal of Gaddafi plunged the country into chaos, creating open slave markets and lawless zones exploited by jihadists.

Jacob Winograd [00:32:18]:
By the way, Libya is such a disaster, and it was preceded by Libya denuclearizing, which even neoconservative interventionist apologists like Douglas Murray admit that it was a disastrous intervention which set up a terrible precedent for what happens to countries which don’t have nuclear weapons to defend themselves. Which, by the way, going back to Iran is kind of why they have a right to be fearful and why they, they don’t. I mean, beyond just their energy deterrence, they are actually showing some restraint and reasonability and saying, we’re just going to stop at a latent nuclear deterrent. We’re not even going to build weapons. But you can see how like to completely give up the nuclear program at all, right, and to just weaken their position. There’s bad precedent for that. What happens, what America does to you when you decide to show your, the roll over and just show your exposure, your soft side to the mercies of the American empire. All of this was framed, going back to all these drone wars and the war in Afghanistan, Iraq.

Jacob Winograd [00:33:30]:
It was all framed as promoting democracy and human rights, but it created the very instability we claimed to be fighting against. And this is where again, just war theory A cornerstone of Christian moral tradition provides a necessary lens for judgment because it teaches us that for a war to be just, it must meet strict criteria. A just cause, right. Intention, last resort, proportionality, and competent authority, among others. And let’s be Honest, the post September 11th wars fail on nearly every count. Was there a just cause for invading Iraq? No. There were no weapons of mass destruction, no connection to September 11th. Were our intentions right? The moral fervor might have felt righteous, but it was rooted in vengeance and fear, not in justice or restoration.

Jacob Winograd [00:34:23]:
Was war truly a last resort? No. Diplomacy was sidelined, inspections cut short, alternatives ignored. There were people who knew Iraq didn’t have weapons of mass destruction, and they were just pleading, they were begging people to like, let’s just go and do inspections. And Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi officials were like, yeah, come check it out. We all got any of this, right? There was no interest in diplomacy. Right. And I know again, there’s this, the double standard of, well, Saddam Hussein was a dictator. Cool.

Jacob Winograd [00:34:54]:
Like, we’ve already established America is fine with the dictators as long as you play ball with American foreign policy in the region. So it’s, if you’re going to say we have to overthrow dictators, then I mean, why isn’t Saudi first on the list? It’s pure hypocrisy. And as for proportionality, the devastation wrought on by these wars on the civilian populations, it was horrible. I mean, we. Devastation of civilian populations, destabilization of the entire regions, the ripple effects on the. What happened afterwards. Like when ISIS just takes over. I mean, I think these, these results speak for themselves.

Jacob Winograd [00:35:31]:
If so just war theory means more than just like theological window dressing. More than just this sort of people say, oh, like just war theory just means like all we do is calculate when we’re allowed to go to war, then once we go to war, all bets are off. There’s no rules. Do whatever you want. You just got to win. That’s not the Christian tradition of just war theory. So if we believe in it, and we believe in it means some things, then we must say plainly that these wars were not just. They were political ventures dressed up in moral language.

Jacob Winograd [00:36:00]:
Now Afghanistan, a bit more complicated because if any military response could have been justified after September 11th, it would have been targeting the people who did September 11th. Right. Which would have been targeting the Taliban for harboring Al Qaeda. But even then, the execution was not just. The US quickly moved from retaliatory strikes to nation building, staying for 20 years without ever addressing the root causes of terrorism. Or the reasons why 911 happened in the first place. No serious reflection was made on the role of American foreign policy in the Middle east, including decades of intervention, support for brutal regimes and the military occupation. And let’s be clear, the war in Afghanistan did not pass the test of proportionality.

Jacob Winograd [00:36:44]:
We didn’t surgically target Al Qaeda and exit. We blanketed a country with bombs, turning wedding parties into target practice, and created another generation of orphans and militants. Over 240,000 people were killed in the US war in Afghanistan, including more than 70,000 civilians. And these numbers only reflect direct deaths, not the many more who died from starvation or disease or displacement. Experts estimate that in modern conflicts, indirect deaths often exceed either match or often exceed direct ones by a ratio of 2 to 1 or 3 to 1. And that would put the real toll potentially above 600,000. And upwards of a million Afghanis. Among the dead were not just soldiers and militants, but thousands of children and young men who were forced into fighting by the Taliban or manipulated by militias and warlords on both sides.

Jacob Winograd [00:37:44]:
And even US backed Afghan forces at times use child soldiers, a practice the US turned a blind eye to, waiving laws to keep the funding flowing. These are not the fruits of a just war. They are the fruits of a moral blindness and an imperial convenience. In the end, the Taliban returned to power stronger than ever, more radicalized than ever. And Afghanistan is just one piece of the puzzle. When we zoom out across the broader post September 11th War on Terror landscape, the death toll becomes staggering. According to the Costs of war project, approximately 940,000 people have died directly from US led military interventions in countries like Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Somalia and Pakistan. And those are just immediate fatalities.

Jacob Winograd [00:38:37]:
The bombs, the bullets and the drone strikes. When you count for indirect deaths from famine, disease and destroyed infrastructure and displacement, that number can balloon to 2 million, upwards of 4 and a half to 5 million people. These are men, women and children who perished not in combat, but in the slow grinding collapse of societies torn apart by war. Many of them living in nations where the United States intervened in the name of humanitarianism or democracy, only to leave behind chaos and sectarian violence and broken institutions. Listen. This is the legacy of the war on terror. Not peace, not stability, but a grim arithmetic of endless war and human suffering, all justified under the banner of freedom. We’re often under the banner of Christianity and the blowback is ongoing.

Jacob Winograd [00:39:34]:
Again, we funded these groups, right? The Mujahideen was funded in the 80s, praised as freedom fighters against the Soviets, and that later gave rise to Al Qaeda, who We continue to support against Russia even into the 90s and the 2000s. And that support included weapons and training and encouragement from American officials who believed that they were striking a blow against communism. But those same networks and ideologies, once empowered, turned their sights on US. Throughout the 1990s, Osama bin Laden repeatedly cited US troop presence in Saudi Arabia and support for Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land and the devastating sanctions in Iraq, which contributed to the deaths of hundreds of thousands as provocations. In his mind, September 11th was retaliation, not unprovoked aggression. Now, that doesn’t justify it, but it underscores a powerful and sobering point. If any nation had done to us what we’ve done to these people, what we’ve done to so many in that region, the funding of insurgents, the imposing of devastating sanctions supporting foreign occupations, bombing people’s homes and neighborhoods, we’d call that an act of war, wouldn’t we? If thousands of our civilians were killed in drone strikes, if our cities were occupied, if our children were conscripted into war, we would demand vengeance. Yet America has inflicted exactly those horrors on others.

Jacob Winograd [00:41:10]:
And when the blowback comes, we feign innocence, we kill indiscriminately, we justify it with slogans. And then when it breeds hatred, we call it irrational. But violence begets violence. And in the post September 11th era, America has sown a whirlwind across the Middle east and beyond, a whirlwind we ourselves would never accept if the roles were reversed after September 11th. Instead of asking why the attacks happened, instead of grappling with the moral costs of our own foreign policy, like people like Harry Brown challenged us to do, we doubled down. We expanded our military footprint, we toppled more regimes. We created new generations. We exponentially increased the amount of people who have every reason in the world to hate us.

Jacob Winograd [00:41:59]:
When our government is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands, even millions of innocent men, women, and children across the globe, especially in the Middle east, we can’t pretend to hold the moral high ground ground anymore. We just can’t. Yes, on September 11, with a tragic loss of innocent life here on our soil. And we rightly grieve those who died. But it also revealed something deeply unsettling. How insulated we are as Americans from the consequences of our own government’s actions. We mourn our dead, yet often ignore or remain ignorant of, or worse, celebrate the far greater toll our foreign policy has exacted on others. We rushed to war after September 11th almost instinctively.

Jacob Winograd [00:42:46]:
Now imagine growing up in a part of the world where events like September 11th weren’t a rare shock, but a regular occurrence, where bombings and drone strikes and occupation and the loss of your loved ones and your neighbors just was a regular Tuesday. If we can understand how quickly American Christians turned to violence in the face of one horrific day, then it shouldn’t be hard to grasp how men like Bin Laden and the many who followed him found justification for their rage in decades of devastation inflicted by US Foreign policy. Their hatred wasn’t born in a vacuum. It was forged in the fire of repeated suffering. None of this reflects a foreign policy guided by Christ’s commands to love our neighbors and our enemies and to seek peace, to be the peacemakers, and to pursue justice. It reflects a foreign policy of empire, and its fruits are death, chaos, and moral rot. And this is why it’s a clumsy maybe, analogy to make, but I think if Jesus said this once in an interview with Scott Horton, that if Jesus came and walked the earth today and walked up to the Christians on Capitol Hill, he would have the same words for them as he had for the Pharisees. They are whitewashed tombs filled with clean and looking extravagant on the outside, but on the inside containing nothing but bones and death and that which is unholy.

Jacob Winograd [00:44:17]:
This cycle of moral justification masking raw power didn’t start with September 11th. Again, this is part of a much longer story. September 11th and the wars that followed were merely the blowback and sort of the refining and the expansion of the tactics that had been sharpened during the Cold War, because that’s when America first learned how to package domination and empire as defense and spreading freedom and to cloak regime change in the language of liberty. From Iran to Latin America, from Vietnam, the rhetoric was always the same. Protect democracy and stop communism. But behind the slogans were coups, assassinations, and secret wars, all orchestrated to preserve American interests under the illusion of moral necessity. To understand how America became a global empire in the first place, we have to look at the Cold War, the era where fighting communism became the excuse for empire building on a global scale. And this wasn’t just about missiles in Cuba or tanks in Berlin.

Jacob Winograd [00:45:23]:
It was about secret wars and puppet dictators. All of this carried out in the name of freedom. Let’s start with the CIA coups. In 1953, the US overthrew Iran’s democratically elected prime minister, Mohammed. I can never pronounce his last name but Mosaddegh. And after he nationalized British oil interest and the CIA installed the Shah, who ruled with an iron fist for decades, paving the way for the 1979 Islamic Revolution. By the way. Defend democracy while overthrowing democratically elected leaders and installing dictators is a pattern like that’s not the exception.

Jacob Winograd [00:46:02]:
That’s pretty much the norm of American interventions. A year later, in 1954, the CIA did the same in Guatemala, toppling Jacabo Arbenz, who dared to challenge the United Fruit Company. The coup led to a 36 year civil war in the depths of over 200,000 people. Then in 1973 was Chile’s turn. The US backed military coup that replaced socialist President Salvador Allende with General Augusto Pinochet, ushering in a brutal dictatorship known for torture, disappearances and neoliberal economic shock therapy. This pattern continued across the globe. Indonesia, the Congo, El Salvador. America propped up dictators who were loyal to Washington, no matter how violent or oppressive they were.

Jacob Winograd [00:46:49]:
The justification, they’re anti communist. That’s all it took. The actual moral character of these regimes didn’t matter. They were on our side. And Vietnam took this logic to its ultimate conclusion. The Gulf of Tonkin incident, the spark for full US military involvement was built on a lie. The second alleged attack on the USS Maddox likely never happened, as confirmed by declassified NSA documents and later admissions from officials involved. Yet Congress swiftly passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, effectively handing President Johnson a blank check for war.

Jacob Winograd [00:47:27]:
This act of deception launched a conflict that would kill over 2 million Vietnamese and more than 58,000. The pretext was fear, not fact. And that’s a familiar tactic that’s been repeated as recently as Iraq and beyond. Beyond the lies, the tactics used in Vietnam were nothing short of brutal. From the widespread use of napalm and Agent Orange to the Phoenix Program, a CIA led operation including torture and assassinations and targeting of civilians. Suspecting and aided, suspected of aiding the Viet Cong. This war showed how the logic of empire corrupts every tool it touches. This was not a war for democracy, it was a war for domination.

Jacob Winograd [00:48:09]:
The justification is again just, just the we’re the last hope for freedom. But like what freedom? Like what’s the cause? If to defend freedom you have to become what you hate, like what are you defending anymore? And this wasn’t even an accident. I mean the, the people of the time, and you even saw this rhetoric repeated by the neocons in their writings. They basically often will say that in order to really defend freedom, what we have to do is realize the enemy we’re fighting, in this case the communists were these giant were fighting a bureaucratic totalitarian surveillance state abroad. And so they would Say, well, we have to become that. We have to become that ourselves. We have to become a totalitarian bureaucratic surveillance state at home to defeat the one abroad, right? If you lose the thing you’re trying to defend, to fight. Because I’m not saying communism was good.

Jacob Winograd [00:49:02]:
I’m not here to give cover for the Soviets or Islamic fundamentalism or anything. But if the west is best, then we can’t lose what makes us best. And if you lose your morality in fighting immorality, I mean, this is just again a broken record. But this is exactly what Romans 12 warns against. To not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good. And sure, maybe that’s harder, but that doesn’t mean that you. Just because it’s harder doesn’t mean that it’s not the right thing to do. It’s kind of almost, isn’t it obvious that often the right way is harder than the wrong way? No one would if doing what was right was always easy.

Jacob Winograd [00:49:40]:
Everyone would do what was right. But often doing what is right is harder and to do what is wrong is easier. Like it’s easy to do that. But then you can’t claim to be a force for good or the that our culture is better than theirs. It just doesn’t. It’s special pleading now. When the Cold war ended in 1991, America had a choice, right? We could have at that point decided to end the totalitarian bureaucratic surveillance state at home, to end this giant global struggle for power. Because maybe you could even say, you know what? We had to do it and, but now it’s done.

Jacob Winograd [00:50:17]:
Now we can, like, go back to the way things used to be and we can try to befriend this former communist Soviet state. So we could have done that. We could have pursued peace and respected the sovereignty of the the former Soviet states that separated and welcomed Russia into a new cooperative world order. Instead, we expanded NATO despite repeated promises to the contrary. And we treated Russia not as a potential partner, but as a defeated enemy that we could bully and take advantage of. The US imposed brutal economic shock therapy through institutions like the IMF and the World bank, which it didn’t help Russia’s economy liberalize or become more capitalistic. Instead, what it does it did was enabled oligarchs and foreign entities to loot the country and mobsters to loot the country while millions fell into poverty. American advisors, often connected to the intelligence agencies, helped guide these policies.

Jacob Winograd [00:51:17]:
Meanwhile, the US funded color revolutions across the former Soviet sphere in Ukraine, Georgia and elsewhere, not merely to support democracy but to ensure that pro Western governments came to power. I’m covering a lot of history here over once. I really recommend again the book provoked and I did a eight week book club like live stream series on that. If you end up reading it or if you don’t and you want to get a lot of the main gist of it. But I’m just condensing for the sake of time. But then fast forward past the the color revolutions in places like Georgia and surrounding areas. You had the maidan uprising in 2014 and that was the culmination of years of US influence. In Ukraine, the elected president was overthrown with heavy Western support, triggering a civil war which prompted Russia’s annexation of Crimea.

Jacob Winograd [00:52:10]:
And since then the US has poured weapons and money and political capital into the region and not to defend democracy, but to hem in Russia and maintain strategic control and organ. This was all exposed by the way, like one of the few things that Doge did was expose all this, which we already knew as libertarians. But organizations like the National Endowment for Democracy and USAID acted as arms for American soft power. They funded civil society groups and media outlets and political campaigns aligned with U.S. interests. For all the talk about Russia buying Facebook ads and interfering in our elections and whatnot, like it’s again the pot killing the kettle black. There were leaked calls between US officials, notably Victoria Nuland and Ambassador Jeffrey Piatt, revealing Washington’s direct role in shaping the post Maidan Ukrainian government. And this wasn’t just incurred from afar.

Jacob Winograd [00:53:08]:
It was managed regime change conducted under the banner of democracy. And this pattern mirrored the earlier Cold War tactics. But the CIA no longer needed to send in troops or stage overt coups. It learned to outsource and obscure influence through front groups, economic pressure, and carefully cultivated dissent. And just like in the Cold War, the real goal wasn’t liberty, it was leverage. And so this is how the new Cold War with Russia really started and how it’s continued, how it’s fought up until even today with proxy wars, media manipulation and economic coercion and replacing direct confrontation. But again, this is all about American hegemony at any cost, even if it means funding far right, basically Nazi adjacent militias in Ukraine installing missile systems that I talked about on Russia’s doorstep, stroking tensions in the Taiwan Strait. The strategy is clear.

Jacob Winograd [00:54:08]:
It’s America first in the wrong ways. It’s not about like the civilians and our liberties, things like that, but it’s about the American empire and power and control, all under the cloak of things like freedom and democracy and human rights. So we know that all of this is given a really. It’s given a lot of spin, right? Like there’s ways that the elites try to sell this, but it’s still just as imperial as it was during the Cold War. It’s just polished, right? It’s a. It’s. The empire is one that wears a smile while it swings the sword around. So as we close this episode out, it’s worth stepping back and reflecting on the deeper roots of the myth of American exceptionalism.

Jacob Winograd [00:54:55]:
Because if we want to understand why so many Christians defend American foreign policy despite its horrors, we have to confront the stories that we were raised on, the stories that shaped our national identity and moral vocabulary. We were told that America defeated fascism, that we liberated the Jews from the Holocaust, that we stood as a beacon of righteousness in the face face of evil. And yes, there were real evils that America has fought against. But were we morally pure in fighting them? In World War II, we allied with Joseph Stalin, a man whose regime killed more people than Hitler, and we gave him half of Europe at Yalta. We bombed civilians in Tokyo and Dresden. We interned over 120,000 Japanese Americans and dropped nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, even though Japan was already seeking surrender. Were these actions of a nation guided by Christ? World War I gave birth to America’s crusading spirit. Woodrow Wilson framed it as a war to make the world safe for democracy.

Jacob Winograd [00:56:00]:
But it was also a war sold through propaganda and censorship and mass arrests. Dissenters were jailed. Actually, the Whole America first slogan comes from this era. It was the non interventionists who used that slogan. The Committee on Public Information manipulated the public with psychological warfare. The draft and liberty bonds fused nationalism with obedience, birthing a civic religion that equated faith in God with loyalty to the state. Even the Civil War, while rightly remembered for ending slavery, is often mythologized. It wasn’t a pure battle of good versus evil.

Jacob Winograd [00:56:39]:
It was a war that centralized federal power, suspended civil liberties and destroyed civilian infrastructure and included destruction or even violence towards civilians. Lincoln jailed dissenters and suspended habeas corpus. And even the American Revolution itself, which we celebrate as the birthplace of modern liberty, might not have been the only path that was available. Could independence and freedom been achieved without war, without the bloodshed? Again, these are questions. I’m not even saying on that question of the American Revolution that I’m saying that it was wrong. But there are actually legitimate points of view from people like Bryan Kaplan who actually create at least interesting and somewhat compelling counter narrative to say that Perhaps the American Revolution was not justified, that there were better ways to achieve peace and independence. At the very least. We see Canada eventually did that, and it didn’t take a war, Right? So.

Jacob Winograd [00:57:45]:
So these stories are often containing true events and they even often contain elements of like, people doing good things, which we like. But that doesn’t mean that they’re not mythologized, that they’re not used to craft this narrative that America and American power is uniquely righteous and that our wars are always just and that our cause is always holy. But when examined biblically and logically, they just don’t pass the test. Means matter. Violence done in the name of good is still violence. And compromise with evil doesn’t become virtue just because it’s wrapped in red, white and blue. And yet this doesn’t mean that we must hate America. And this doesn’t mean we discard all the good that has come from the founding or from the American people.

Jacob Winograd [00:58:36]:
There is beauty in the American experiment, especially at its best moments. Its commitment to liberty, its suspicion of power, its openness to innovation, its defense of free speech and conscience. But these virtues don’t justify or always necessarily outweigh our sins. And patriotism doesn’t mean blind allegiance. In fact, I would argue that true patriotism requires the opposite. True patriotism is about telling the truth. It reckons with history and it calls for introspection and repentance and reform when needed. It separates what is admirable from what is idolatrous.

Jacob Winograd [00:59:20]:
Because when we confuse America with the Kingdom of God, we betray both. But when we submit our national story to the scrutiny of Scripture and the biblical worldview, we can begin to redeem it. It we can learn from our failures. We can call our nation to its better angels and we can point to what is truly exceptional about America. The parts that reflect Christ, not Caesar. That is all I have for you guys for today. I do plan to do a follow up episode where I go more into detail about World War II, World War I and the Civil War. I do plan on at some point interviewing Brian Kaplan about his views on the American Revolution.

Jacob Winograd [01:00:05]:
But hopefully this is a call to consider the tension between patriotism that’s held in its proper place with our true identity and loyalty being to the Kingdom of God with a type of nationalism that I think would veer off into idolatry and moral compromise. So again, if you like this episode, please give this a thumbs up. Share it leave 5 star reviews we always appreciate it and that’s all I have for you guys. So live at peace. Live for Christ. Take care.

Knowledgeable Narrator [01:00:36]:
The Biblical Anarchy Podcast is a part of the Christians for Liberty Network, a project of the Libertarian Christian Institute. If you love this podcast, it helps us reach more with a message of freedom when you rate and review us on your favorite podcast apps and share with others. If you want to support the production of the Biblical Anarchy Podcast, please consider donating to the Libertarian Christian Institute@biblicalanarchypodcast.com where you can also sign up to receive special announcements and resources related to Biblical Anarchy. Thanks for tuning in.ima

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