[Megan Jelinger/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images]

By Megan Russell

The US is at war. It has always been at war.

Whether a world war, a proxy conflict, an armed intervention, psyop, or regime change mission, the United States has not enjoyed a single moment of true, unadulterated peace.

And it's not just at war with nations abroad. The US is also at war with itself.

Positive peace is not just the absence of violence, but also the absence of oppression. In all the years of this country’s existence, oppression has flourished, leaching away the lies told about the land of the free. Many pretend not to see the institutional apartheid and chronic subjection of minorities, but it lurks in every city and town and neighborhood, right under the nose of the social theater we all take part in.

Well, the US is in hospice, and it's lashing out—a last gasping breath of the inhumane, psychopathic systems that perpetuate violence, at home and abroad.

As Ariel Durant wrote, “A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.” No country needs to declare war on the United States—it’s caught in its own self-destructive web.

There are many casualties in war other than people. Truth was killed a long time ago, a necessary death for the proliferation of our military and the subjugation of countries and people that act against our interests. The next casualties will be the very values we tell ourselves we stand for, written boldly in our Constitution—though weren’t they also a lie? Overseas, human rights are meaningless. We’ve bombed and murdered scores of people, over and over and over again, and we’ve smiled with rotting teeth and declared it was all for the greater good.

Turns out the rot was coming from within.

If the US is at war with the world and itself, then every battlefield is a frontline—Ukraine, Gaza, China, the entire exploited global south, the self-declared allies with no true sovereignty… and here, university campuses are merely one more frontline.

Universities have a particular power in the US. They generally enjoy the ability to intellectually critique the US, its subjection of people, and the crimes it has inflicted on the global population. They are meant to have a level of separation from government interference and operate as beacons of education and places of global interaction and community. This doesn’t always happen, but sometimes it does.

Why are educational institutions a threat? Because they have the tools needed to see through the cognitive shroud of militarized capitalism and talk about it. Students are the real change-makers because they haven’t spent a lifetime beaten down by the system, exhausted by its impossibilities, and bent hopeless by the apparent futility of trying to make change. Change is slow, but students are young, energized, hopeful, open-minded, and visionary. They are also the future.

Students observe injustice, and they act on it. They’ve protested every war we’ve decided was wrong long after the fact—Vietnam, Korea, Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Palestine. And every time, the government has cracked down on students, demanding arrests and university compliance with its global agenda. The Trump administration is not doing anything new—they’ve just crossed a few more lines and been obvious about it.

University protests and encampments protesting the Gaza genocide were the major catalyst for the most recent crackdowns on academia, providing the government justification for launching probes to investigate “antisemitism” on campuses. The Trump administration has also been actively targeting what they perceive to be “anti-American” fields of study, like postcolonialism, critical race theory, gender studies, and social theory—the very fields that act as tools to outthink the militarized capitalism thinking bubble. They emphasize a need for “patriotic education,” which is the newest terminology for imperialist propaganda.

These actions coincided with unprecedented persecution of students and professors who have actively criticized the Gaza genocide and the United States’ role in funding it. Visa and green card holders alike have been arrested and face ongoing deportations merely for having an opinion that acts in opposition to state interests… the very definition of fascism.

Harvard is an interesting case. Widely seen as a symbol of American elitism, it almost seems counterintuitive for an oligarchic government to oppose. But there are no rules here, and the internal power systems have gone rabid, turning on themselves in an effort to choke out their own active failings. Trump plays the populist card well, but he’s hiding behind a mirror of his own gross corruption. He calls to “drain the swamp,” while bringing his ragtag group of billionaire friends into the White House and giving them political power they should never have—a blatant contradiction many choose to ignore.

Initially, Harvard University refused to capitulate to Trump’s demands, arguing they directly violated the university’s independence and constitutional rights. In response, Trump ordered federal agencies to freeze over $100 million in funds and attempted to revoke Harvard’s ability to enroll international students.

Harvard president Alan Gerber remains steadfast in his refusal to surrender, saying that Harvard must “stand firm” and set an example for other universities that will continue to be targeted.

To counter Harvard’s steadfastness, the administration’s most recent move reached absurd new heights. Last week, a joint letter from three congressional committees accused Harvard of partaking in global supervillain-esque activities such as training genocidal paramilitary groups from China, partnering with the Chinese military using US defense funds, collaborating with Iranian government-backed scientists, and even potentially helping to develop next-gen spy robots and transplant technology with illegal organ-harvesters.

The letter was ridiculous, reading less like a serious national security inquiry and more like a bureaucratic fever dream fueled by a conspiracy-laced Wikipedia binge. The “training” of a Chinese paramilitary group was actually a public health course that was attended by members of a Chinese administrative body. The accusations of Iran funding was regarding medical research on the bacterial properties of particles done in conjunction between Imam Khomeini International University, Harvard Medical School, and Zhejiang University-University of Edinburgh Joint Institute—a great display of an international, collaborative scientific study that could help improve the lives of all people (There is clearly a profound misunderstanding on how scientific and medical research works. These fields are collaborative by design, and all nearly of these studies are public, peer-reviewed work).

And the most bizarre claim of all is that Harvard’s liver regeneration research is somehow aiding and abetting organ harvesting conspiracies. Do I even need to speak to that?

Ultimately, this letter has nothing to do with national security concerns and is merely another weapon for the current administration to throw at Harvard in its efforts to get it to capitulate to their demands. And if the anti-China warhawks can push their agenda a bit more by using their red-baiting, xenophobic grab-bag of buzzwords, then what’s stopping them? They will conflate academic exchange with espionage, collaboration with treason, and conference panels with covert operations as long as it helps obtain their end goal of wiping independent thinking off syllabuses and replacing it with strictly I-love-America propaganda. At the end of the day, they don't want you to know how to think—they want to tell you what to think.

If the Trump administration thinks that defunding our top academic institutions will improve the already lagging education systems, and that censoring free speech and prohibiting collaborative research will be a boon for progress and productivity, they have another thing coming. These actions will only hurt the US and drag it further behind on its last-ditch efforts to maintain its slipping grasp on world domination.

Montesquieu wrote, “The corruption of each government almost always begins with that of its principles.” Well, the US has never represented the principles that it’s long claimed to stand for. Men have never been treated equally, speech has never been free, and liberty and liberation have always been things to strive for, never things that are. This is not a change that spontaneously occurred, but something that is inherent within the imperialist system. And now the decay is becoming visible, and the empire with its “immoderate greatness” is turning on itself—eating itself—and we are all vulnerable to its collapse.

Tell Elbridge Colby: Nuclear war is never an option! Demilitarize the Pacific!

Megan Russell is CODEPINK's China is Not Our Enemy Campaign Coordinator.

Megan graduated from the London School of Economics with a Master’s Degree in Conflict Studies. Prior to that, she attended NYU where she studied Conflict, Culture, and International Law. Megan spent one year studying in Shanghai, and over eight years studying Chinese Mandarin. Her research focuses on the intersection between US-China affairs, peacebuilding, and international development.