The Trump administration’s illegal bombing of Iran and murder of school-children has underscored for millions of people the perils of the U.S. warfare state.
At the end of the Cold War, with the Soviet “threat” gone, the American public had been promised a “peace dividend” by which public money would be spent on education, health care, parks and other public goods.
Unfortunately, since that time, new national security “threats” were invented and the military budget was increased substantially for 25 out of the next 34 years.
John Rachel[1] argues in his book America’s Hijacked Peace Dividend: Long Overdue and Immediately Payable that the exorbitant amount of money spent on “national defense” was effectively stolen from American taxpayers in what is among the “biggest scams in world history.”
The public as such has the right to demand repayment of the money, which enriched the military contractors and Wall Street bankers that invested in them.
Rachel estimates, based on the defense budgets since 1992, that the U.S public is owed $9.12 trillion. This amounts to a lump sum payment of $27,552 for each of the roughly 332 million U.S. citizens.[2]
Rachel notes that the $9.12 trillion was not used to defend the U.S. from any real foreign enemies but went “directly from people’s pocketbooks, wallets and family budgets into the coffers of major corporations…and bank accounts of their rich and powerful investors.”
According to Rachel, “all the unnecessary wars, 700+ military bases, and upgrade of the nuclear arsenal” were “not the result of honest mistakes or miscalculations or errors in judgment. No. They were all intentional, carefully cultivated fruits of calculated deceptions, patently misleading propaganda, shrewdly designed ruses, pre-meditated lies, false narratives, disinformation campaigns, massive brainwashing, serving shrewd priorities and agendas we the people certainly never voted for.”[3]
The $9.12 trillion figure, Rachel said, is just what Americans have been bilked out of since 1992.
If we go back further in time, the figure would include the $840 billion that was used to destroy Vietnam and billions of dollars that were spent on nuclear weapons in the Cold War based on fear-mongering lies about the alleged Soviet “threat.”
Rachel conceives of his peace-dividend strategy as a practical one that should appeal to everyday working Americans struggling to put food on their tables who are deserving of public relief.
He believes that all politicians should be compelled to sign a peace-dividend contract and that, if they refuse to do so, should be removed from office or told they could not be elected.
According to Rachel, the peace dividend refund would not increase the current $38 trillion U.S. government deficit, but would drive reforms that would help to reduce and then eliminate this deficit over time.
As Rachel envisions it, the peace refund would be paid out over four years and would be accompanied by cuts in the existing yearly defense budget by $600 billion, which would make up some of the difference.
Additionally, Rachel advocates for cutting the State Department and USAID budget by $43 billion per year; the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) budget by $40 billion; and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and National Security Agency (NSA) black budgets by $32 billion.
Some 110 billion could also be raised annually by closing tax loopholes on the rich and by effectively taxing off-shore money; another $100 billion by ending corporate welfare; and $400 billion annually by making corporations pay their fair shares of taxes.
Another $140 billion could be raised from a new financial transaction tax on public trading, $196 billion from a carbon tax, $400 billion by issuing peace bonds, and $600 billion by issuing domestic-use-only U.S. peace dollars.[4]
Rachel highlights how the U.S. government issued liberty bonds to raise money for both World Wars I and II, and specifies that, “if we can raise money for war, we sure as hell can raise money for peace.”[5]
Rachel further envisions the creation of a domestic version of JFK’s Peace Corps in which college graduates could engage in community work in places across the U.S. that have been devastated by the exporting of jobs, grotesque wealth inequality and systemic racism.
Neo-Conservative Horror Show
According to Rachel, many of the horrific foreign policies since the end of the Cold War have been guided by the so-called Wolfowitz Doctrine, issued in 1992 by then-Undersecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, which called for pre-emptive U.S. military action to thwart any potential rival to U.S. global power.
Zbigniew Brzezinski’s 1997 book The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives provided an additional important “theoretical framework for justifying U.S. supremacy and world domination,” according to Rachel.[6]
Brzezinski, who served as National Security Adviser to Jimmy Carter, placed a key emphasis on controlling Eurasia because it accounts for an estimated three-fourths of the world’s known energy resources. This viewpoint has helped drive the policy of NATO expansion and U.S. efforts to try to weaken and undermine Russia, resulting in the deadly Ukraine conflict.
In 1997, neo-conservatives formed the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) which, according to Rachel, “spelled the death knell” of the peace dividend that had been promised at the end of the Cold War. Rachel wrote that PNAC consisted of some of the “fiercest and most ruthless militarists and empire builders in American history.”[7]
Following the 9/11 attacks, the PNAC pushed for the invasion of more than a half-dozen Middle East countries, with cataclysmic effects. While purporting to be fighting Islamic terrorists in the Global War on Terror, the U.S. supported Islamic terrorists in Syria and Libya against secular nationalist leaders who had enjoyed considerable support among their populations.
Both Syria and Libya suffered similar kinds of biblical devastation as Iraq and Afghanistan along with Lebanon, Somalia and Yemen, which the U.S. invaded by proxy.
Though vilified in U.S. mainstream and even alternative media, Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi (1969-2011) had adopted particularly enlightened policies centered on using revenues from the nationalization of Libya’s oil industry to finance free education and health care that were reversed in the 2011 U.S.-NATO war.
The Obama administration (2009-2017), which spearheaded this war, staffed its foreign policy team with warmongers like Hillary Clinton and Samantha Power who had earlier written a book calling for the U.S. to intervene more in countries around the world to stop genocide.
Power’s concern for the victims of genocide did not extend to Libya under the post-Qaddafi order or Gazans whose murders were financed by U.S. taxpayers to the tune of at least $22 billion.[8]
Additionally, Power supported U.S. sanctions against Venezuela, Cuba and Syria that were designed to starve those populations into submission, and Ukrainian Army attacks in the Donbass, which were carried out with more U.S. weapons.
At the end of his book, Rachel underscores the need for a large-scale program to better educate the public about the lies, deceit and hypocrisy of government leaders like Power and their complicity in war crimes, which people never voted for.
With both parties faithfully serving the interests of Wall Street and the military-industrial complex, it is indeed well past time for a political revolution.
The public should demand compensation in the amount Rachel suggests and the belated implementation of the post-Cold War “peace dividend”—by a fresh cadre of leaders untainted by any association with the past six administrations.
Rachel is a novelist who has traveled to 34 countries and lives near Osaka, Japan. His website discusses the “peace dividend” here. ↑
Rachel’s calculation is based on the number of U.S. citizens, roughly 332 million, from the 2020 Census. The number is now estimated to be 342 million! Additionally, the number of “U.S. citizens” at this time is considerably less than the “population”; it is currently estimated to be 318 million. That would increase the lump sum payment by more than a thousand dollars. ↑
John Rachel, America’s Hijacked Peace Dividend: Long Overdue and Immediately Payable (Los Angeles: Literary Vagabond Books, 2026), 5. ↑
Ibid., 15. ↑
Ibid., 18. ↑
Ibid., 34. ↑
Ibid., 38. ↑
Ibid., 71. Besides weapons and equipment, the U.S provided military logistical support and helped the Israelis with surveillance and intelligence and to identify targets for bombing. ↑
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About the Author
Jeremy Kuzmarov holds a Ph.D. in American history from Brandeis University and has taught at numerous colleges across the United States. He is regularly sought out as an expert on U.S. history and politics and co-hosts a radio show on New York Public Radio and on Progressive Radio News Network called “Uncontrolled Opposition.”
He is Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine and is the author of eight books, including Obama’s Unending Wars (Clarity Press, 2019), The Russians Are Coming, Again, with John Marciano (Monthly Review Press, 2018), Warmonger. How Clinton’s Malign Foreign Policy Launched the U.S. Trajectory From Bush II to Biden (Clarity Press, 2023); with Dan Kovalik, Syria: Anatomy of Regime Change (Baraka Books, 2025), and Political Assassinations in America: The Intricate Nexus of Deep State Crime (Clarity Press, 2026).
Besides these books, Kuzmarov has published hundreds of articles and contributed to numerous edited volumes, including one in the prestigious Oxford History of Counterinsurgency .
He can be reached at jkuzmarov2@gmail.com and found on substack here.
