The United States military industrial complex is the most powerful force in the world and it operates beyond democratic accountability. The U.S. is still in an active, ongoing military conflict with Iran that began with the joint U.S.-Israeli airstrikes on Iranian nuclear facilities, military leadership, and infrastructure on February 28, 2026, the largest U.S. military buildup in the Middle East since the 2003 Iraq invasion.
In mid-August, U.S. forces disabled a Panama-flagged cargo vessel by firing missiles into its engine room after it allegedly tried to breach a U.S. naval blockade against Iran. The U.S. has continued rotating carrier strike groups through the region, and Trump has said he plans to declare the Strait of Hormuz U.S. territory once the conflict with Iran concludes, a claim Iran has rejected.
The administration has also escalated economic pressure, imposing its eighth round of sanctions on Iran this year, while Iran has retaliated with missile and drone strikes on U.S. embassies, military installations, and oil infrastructure, including vessels in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict has driven gas prices sharply higher, with the large majority of Americans expecting further increases.
Polling has consistently shown more Americans opposing the war than supporting it. Several factors show up repeatedly. One of these is the cost to households. 86% of Americans say the conflict bears significant responsibility for rising gas prices and most expect this to get worse.
A majority of people are of the view that the administration hasn’t clearly explained the war’s goals, and see U.S. service member casualties as unacceptable. They expect the conflict to drag on for many more months, feeding skepticism about an open-ended commitment. Only about a quarter of Americans say the military action has been worth it given its costs and benefits.
Some critics argue that Trump is just following Israel’s lead on foreign policy rather than making his own decisions. This is basically the same claim made by antisemitic voices on the far right who say the war is really about Israel’s interests, not America’s, and accuse Trump of abandoning his “America First” promises.
In fact the war is part of a pattern of military expansion that began with the implementation of NSC-68, a classified U.S. National Security Council policy paper from April 1950, one of the most influential documents of the Cold War. It argued that the Soviet Union was fundamentally expansionist and that the U.S. faced an existential ideological struggle with communism. Its central recommendation was a massive, sustained buildup of American military strength, including conventional forces and nuclear weapons, rather than relying mainly on economic aid or diplomacy to contain Soviet influence.
NSC-68’s central claim was that the threat facing the U.S. was so existential that ordinary budget constraints should not apply and that the cost of underspending on defense was far greater than the cost of overspending. That exact framing reappears whenever officials argue for large increases tied to a new “generational threat” whether it be the Cold War with the USSR, the War on Terror after 9/11 or current competition with China or flashpoints like Iran. Critics call this the “NSC-68 playbook”: invoke an existential ideological rival to make virtually any spending level seem reasonable by comparison. The threat is unknowable, so spend for the worst case.
NSC-68’s key move was arguing that Soviet intentions were essentially unknowable, so U.S. planning had to be based on Soviet capabilities, what they could theoretically do rather than what they were actually likely to do. If you plan against capability rather than intent, there’s almost no natural ceiling, because a rival’s capabilities can always be portrayed as growing. This logic “we must prepare for what they could do” has been the template ever since, applied to the USSR, then to a rising China, then to “rogue states” like North Korea and to Iran.
By casting the conflict as a civilizational struggle between freedom and totalitarianism, NSC-68 made defense spending resistant to ordinary cost-benefit scrutiny so cutting the budget could be framed as insufficient commitment to the cause, not just a fiscal choice. That framing recurs any time a conflict gets cast in civilizational terms (the War on Terror’s “with us or against us,” or today’s framing of Iran and China as authoritarian threats to a “rules-based order”).
Once the buildup happened after Korea, it created a permanent military-industrial base. This is what Eisenhower later famously warned about in 1961 as the “military-industrial complex.” Defense contractors, the Pentagon bureaucracy, and allied members of Congress developed a durable interest in continued high spending, independent of the original Soviet threat.
It set a spending baseline that’s rarely questioned, only added to.
Because NSC-68 normalized a large peacetime defense budget (a novel idea in 1950, the U.S. had historically demobilized sharply after wars), it removed the postwar demobilization pattern as the default expectation. Since then, budgets have mostly ratcheted upward in response to new threats without ever returning to pre-threat baselines, because the institutional and budgetary infrastructure from the last buildup is already in place for the next one.
Applied to today’s Iran conflict, the same structure is visible. A threat is framed as existential (nuclear proliferation by a hostile, oppressive regime) so spending is justified against worst-case capability rather than proven intent, and a conflict that, once started, tends to expand the base spending level going forward rather than reverting once resolved. That’s the mechanism critics point to when they call current defense budgets “the NSC-68 playbook.”
The toll this takes on human life is unacceptable and the damage to our environment is completely unsustainable. It is a cost we cannot continue to bear.
By M Peterson, Image from: