From Asia to the Middle East, US Bombs Are a Failed Foreign Policy Choice

The U.S.-Israeli war on Iran opened not with a declaration, not with diplomacy exhausted, but with airstrikes.

Among the first confirmed casualties were more than a hundred schoolchildren killed in a strike on their elementary school in southern Iran. Within a month, 850 U.S.-made Tomahawk missiles were used to strike Iran. President Donald Trump has delivered on his promise to bomb Iran “back to the Stone Ages,” with U.S. and Israeli missiles targeting bridges, pharmaceutical and steel plants, and civilian infrastructure like schools and hospitals. The bombing campaign has struck civilian oil infrastructure in Tehran, engulfing a city of 10 million people in toxic black rain. Thousands of Iranians and Lebanese have been killed, and hundreds of thousands of workers have lost their jobs as factories and basic infrastructure have been destroyed.

Washington calls this national security. The historical record calls it something else entirely.

For more than 75 years, the United States has reached for airpower as its preferred instrument of foreign policy — a tool that promises decisive results without the political costs of ground occupation; the illusion that enough bombs, dropped with enough precision, can produce the outcomes that diplomacy did not. Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Iran: the targets have changed, the doctrine has not.

The Failure of U.S. Doctrine

As a Korean American, Cathi Choi of Women Cross DMZ knows this history personally. From 1950 to 1953, during the Korean War, U.S. forces dropped 635,000 tons of bombs and 32,000 tons of napalm, burning 80 percent of North Korean cities to the ground. One year into the war, U.S. Maj. Gen. Emmett O’Donnell testified in the Senate, “There are no more targets in Korea.” More than 4 million people were killed, the overwhelming majority of them Korean civilians. Choi, whose grandfather fled the north during the war, is among millions of Koreans from separated families. The division of the peninsula left an estimated 10 million Koreans cut off from relatives on the other side, unable to exchange phone calls or letters or reunite, with the exception of a few state-sponsored family reunions during periods of détente. Seventy-three years later, the war has only ended in a ceasefire, not a treaty, and the peninsula has remained in a stalemate ever since.

Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Iran: the targets have changed, the doctrine has not.

“The Korean War didn’t just leave its mark on the peninsula,” Choi explained. “It left deep scars among divided families, inaugurated the U.S. military-industrial complex, quadrupled the Pentagon budget in three years, and set a course from which Washington has never turned back.” Today, the Trump administration is proposing a $1.5 trillion Pentagon budget while slashing investments in diplomacy, development, and domestic programs like Medicaid and food stamps. Meanwhile, 1.2 million land mines are still buried across the world’s most militarized border, keeping Korean families — like Choi’s — separated, and both sides heavily militarized while on the precipice of nuclear war.

Danae Hendrickson, chief of mission advancement and communications at the advocacy group Legacies of War, has spent years documenting what the United States left behind in Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam — not as history, but as present danger. From 1964 to 1973, U.S. pilots flew 580,000 bombing missions over Laos alone — the equivalent of a planeload of bombs every eight minutes, around the clock, for nine straight years. An estimated 80 million unexploded cluster munitions remain in the soil. Less than 10 percent has been cleared. During Hendrickson’s 2025 visit to Laos, five boys digging for crabs struck a cluster munition. One was completely blinded. Another lost his hand. Hendrickson visited a fourth-grade classroom where children asked her: “Why did the U.S. drop the bombs? Why is it taking so long to clean them up? Do you think Laos will ever be bomb-free?” The war, for them, is not over.

In Afghanistan, two decades of bombing produced not stability but the conditions for its opposite. The Taliban were ousted in 2001 and returned to power in 2021, inheriting a country whose institutions had been hollowed out by an occupation that killed tens of thousands of civilians — and that, according to the Congressional Research Service, cost U.S. taxpayers over $146 billion. Halema Wali, the co-founder of Afghans For A Better Tomorrow, watched this unfold with a clarity that Washington never mustered. “The war started with the United States saying we needed to free Afghan people,” she said, “and the war ended by saying, ‘Your freedom’s over.’” The peace deal was negotiated directly with the Taliban, excluded Afghan civil society, and handed power back to the very force the bombs were supposed to have defeated.

Iraq followed the same arc. “The 2003 invasion of Iraq did not find weapons of mass destruction because they never existed,” writes Dena Al-Adeeb, an Iraqi-born scholar twice driven into exile by U.S.-backed wars. “What it found was Iraq itself — and it proceeded to destroy it: perhaps a million dead, millions more displaced, buildings bombed and museums looted, a society torn apart along sectarian lines. Two decades later, Iraq still hasn’t recovered.”

Iran Trap

The U.S. war in Iran is following the same script. Airstrikes cannot weaken a government sufficiently to produce regime change. As University of Pennsylvania international relations scholar Farah N. Jan notes in The Conversation, “decades of research on rally-around-the-flag effects — the tendency of populations to unite behind their government when attacked by a foreign power — confirms that external attacks fuse regime and nation, even when citizens despise their leaders.” Force does not topple governments. It consolidates them.

Force does not topple governments. It consolidates them. The Iranian state has grown more repressive, not less.

The Iranian state has grown more repressive, not less. Young dissidents are being executed on charges of being foreign agents. The 2022 “Woman, Life, Freedom” uprising — a genuinely powerful, internally generated movement for political transformation — has been set back by years. U.S. military escalation handed the Iranian government exactly the external enemy it needed. As organizer Hoda Katebi writes in Jacobin, “This unjustifiable war on the Iranian people has undermined decades of social uprisings and peoples’ struggles in Iran, and our revolutionary struggles have been interrupted and replaced with a nationalism that has emboldened hardliners.”

This is the reliable product of U.S. airpower: hardened adversaries, devastated civilian populations and infrastructure, and the suppression of the very internal movements that might otherwise produce genuine change.

The War Comes Home

The costs of this doctrine are not confined to the countries being bombed. Katebi put it plainly to Truthout: “The war is actually already at home. Every single weapon that Israel is using to be dropped on young kids in Gaza, Lebanon, Iran, Yemen — is built by people who live in this country. Transported by people who live in this country. Designed by people who live in this country.”

You cannot sustain a permanent war economy abroad without it reshaping your politics at home.

The Pentagon’s own briefing to Congress put the cost of the first days of the U.S. war on Iran at nearly $2 billion a day. As vital programs face cuts, immigration agents are targeting communities of color, and a security state is turning inward with the same logic it turns outward. You cannot sustain a permanent war economy abroad without it reshaping your politics at home. The diaspora leaders I work alongside are not simply critics of U.S. foreign policy. They are architects of an alternative — one grounded in the actual conditions for peace rather than the illusion that force can substitute for it.

Diaspora-led peace organizations — such as Women Cross DMZ, Afghans For A Better Tomorrow, Legacies of War, and the National Iranian American Council — share a premise: that genuine security is built through relationships, accountability, and political resolution — not through bombardment.

Katebi offers the clearest frame for what it would mean to orient U.S. foreign policy differently: “We should not be viewing the State of Iran as our ally when it is the people of Iran with whom we should be building solidarity,” she told Truthout. This is not naïveté. The alternative to domination is not weakness — it is the harder, slower, more durable work of diplomacy, investment in civil society, and engagement with the people inside repressive states who are already working toward liberation.

The historical record is not ambiguous: Bombs don’t build peace. They never have. The question is whether Washington is willing to read it.

The United States faces a genuine choice. It can continue to reach for airpower each time it confronts a government it dislikes, perpetuating a cycle in which bombs kill civilians, harden regimes, destroy internal movements, and leave behind unexploded ordnance for generations of children to find. Or it can reckon honestly with what 75 years of this doctrine have produced, and begin building a foreign policy grounded not in the fantasy of force, but in the reality of what peace actually requires.

The historical record is not ambiguous: Bombs don’t build peace. They never have. The question is whether Washington is willing to read it. The diaspora communities bearing the longest memory of what this doctrine costs already know the answer. The time is now to ensure their voices and analysis form the basis of a new U.S. foreign policy.