250 Years of U.S. Wars On The People: A history of U.S. wars and people's resistance for just peace over two and a half centuries of American imperialism

The Great Sioux Wars, "The Custer Fight", Charles Marion Russell, 1903

For two and a half centuries, the United States has waged war to expand its empire across continents and oceans, from the land theft of North America to wars of aggression in the jungles of Southeast Asia and the deserts of West Asia.  The U.S. has the deaths of millions people across the world on its hands.  This long history of military intervention has consistently been met with resistance.  250 years of U.S.-led war must come to an end through the decisive action of the people, united in struggle to win their self-determination, freedom from US imperialism and a just peace.

Wars of Colonization and Westward Expansion (1775–1850s)
America's military history begins with the Revolutionary War (1775–1783) against Britain, followed by the Quasi-War with France, the First Barbary War, and the War of 1812. But the true engine of early U.S. expansion was the violent dispossession of Indigenous peoples through campaigns like the Northwest Indian War and the Seminole Wars, alongside the Mexican-American War (1846–1848), which seized vast territories from Texas to California. These conflicts were galvanized through the ideology of "Manifest Destiny," the doctrine that American settlement across the continent was inevitable and righteous, while committing genocide against Indigenous people and stealing Native land. Ethnic cleansing became the formal policy of the nascent United States under the the Indian Removal Act of 1830, with wide spread barbaric tactics used including famine, displacement, kidnapping, torture, and enslavement. Between 12-15 million Africans were kidnapped and enslaved in the trans-Atlantic slave trade to the Americas, from the 1500's to 1866, enriching slave holding elites, with millions dying in the Middle Passage.

Civil War & Monroe Doctrine (1860s–1910s)
The American Civil War was waged from April 12, 1861 – May 26, 1865, a struggle between dominant classes that put ordinary people to the front lines to fight a war for them. This period also includes the Spanish-American War, through which the US acquired overseas territories. as well as later interventions like the Philippine-American War, killing almost a million Filipinos and using intense torture techniques and genocidal policy to "kill anyone over the age of 10" in effort to extinguish the people's resistance. The Banana Wars in Central America and the Caribbean were waged through U.S. intervention to maintain its sphere of influence and to secure the Panama Canal (which opened in 1914), for the benefit of big agricultural corporations like the United Fruit Company. These wars co-opted or derailed the independence struggles of countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America from European colonization to grab territory and spheres of influence, especially declaring Latin America as the property solely of the United States empire. Battles against the European colonizers were fought and won by Indigenous resistance like in the case of the Battle of Little Bighorn, during the Great Sioux War in 1876.

World Wars (1917–1945)
The US entered World War I late (1917) and used the war to export capital for the reconstruction of Europe and take over spheres of influence since it was the imperialist least materially affected by the war. It was World War II that transformed the nation into a global superpower. Deploying overwhelming industrial and military might across both the European and Pacific theaters, the U.S. emerged in 1945 as the world's preeminent capitalist power. Responding to the inter-imperialist battles, revolutionary wars also took advantage of the crisis to take socialist state power for the first time in history in 1917 in the Soviet Union and anti-colonial movements took hold worldwide, setting the stage for the coming Cold War. WWII was even more deadly than WWI, killing 60 million people and destroying a huge amount of property. But it also resulted in the rise of several more socialist countries and a great wave of national liberation movements, especially those of the Chinese revolution and Vietnam.

Cold War (1945–1991)
The wartime alliance with the Soviet Union quickly dissolved into ideological confrontation, as U.S. leaders viewed any challenge to capitalist hegemony as a threat to their newly won global dominance. The Cold War was actually a series of hot localized proxy wars, which included the big U.S. wars of aggression in Korea (1950–1953), Vietnam (1955–1975), the US-supported Israeli wars on Palestine, and the anti-Soviet wars in Angola, Ethiopia, Nicaragua and Afghanistan. These wars caused the death of millions of people, far exceeding the number of those killed in World War I. The U.S. killed millions, justifying intervention as anti-communist containment. In Latin America, Washington orchestrated coups, backed dictatorships in Chile and Argentina, and invaded Grenada. The 1965 Indonesian massacres, which claimed at least 1.5 million lives, were actively facilitated by US intelligence to secure oil interests and crush the left. These conflicts, coupled with relentless economic blockades against Cuba and economic warfare against sovereign nations, represented an imperialist campaign to suppress national liberation and socialist aspirations through wars of aggression.

The Period of Unipolar Dominance (1991-2012)
The 9/11 attacks provided the pretext for a permanent "War on Terror" that would reshape U.S. military engagement for the 21st century. Under neoconservative doctrine, the U.S. invaded Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003), the latter based on fabricated claims of weapons of mass destruction and ties to Al Qaeda. The real motives of the Bush regime and the so-called neoconservatives were to take over the second largest oil resources of the world in Iraq, keep secure the US dollar as the currency of oil transactions, increase US control over Saudi Arabia and the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), use US military bases in centrally located Iraq to control the entire Middle East and remove Iraq as a threat to the US-Israeli collaboration. In this period, the U.S. deployed troops to Kenya, Uganda, Liberia, Cote d'Ivoire, Sierra Leone, Guinea-Bissau, Congo, Gabon, Rwanda and the Central African Republic. Drone warfare, covert operations, and support for allied regimes have extended operations across Libya, Syria, Somalia, Yemen, and Iran, while US- Israeli genocidal offensive in Gaza continue massacring civilians. Rather than peace, the post-9/11 era has seen an expansion of the U.S. global military footprint, with 14,000 of military installations worldwide and massive annual defense budgets.

Multipolar Decline (2012- Present)
The period spanning the 2010s and 2020s has been defined by the fracturing of the US-led unipolar order, with China's rising economic and military power and the emergence of rival economic blocks like BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), prompting the U.S. to launch its strategic military "Pivot to Asia". Deepening crisis of neoliberalism under U.S. imperialism fueled the rise of a distinctly US fascist movement embodied by Trump, and the international "Rules Based Order" faced existential challenges, with any guise of U.S. democracy laid bare by the genocide in Gaza.

In this period the U.S. waged war on 3 major fronts; against China and the DPRK in Asia using a web of alliances in Asia including JAKUS (Japan, Korea and the US) and JAPHUS (Japan, Philippines and the US) and AUKUS (Australia, the UK and the US); against Russia using NATO (North America Treaty Organization) and Ukraine as proxy; and against Iran and the Axis of Resistance using Israel. Flashpoints included the Syrian civil war, the grinding campaign against ISIS amid ongoing Iraqi instability, genocidal proxy wars in Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo, War on Terror drone campaigns in Somalia, Mali and Pakistan, the humiliating US defeat in Afghanistan, the proxy war in Ukraine, the genocidal war against the Axis of Resistance in Gaza, and escalating war games against China, while the US simultaneously maintained blockades against Cuba and Venezuela and conducted extensive military exercises, training and war drills to expand their interoperability worldwide.

These conflicts are waged through advanced technological means including long-range land, sea, and air missiles, massive drone and counter-drone warfare, cyber warfare (notably in hybrid warfare against Iran and Venezuela), and the integrated JADC2 command network, yet they are continually undercut by resilient resistance by state forces and people's warfare tactics on land, water, and air.

Resist to defeat U.S. led war
Throughout these 250 years, resistance has remained constant. Nations like Cuba and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea have survived decades of blockade, subversion, and military encirclement, upholding socialist sovereignty against U.S. aggression. Palestine, Iran, Venezuela, and others invoke national independence to resist U.S. economic blackmail and political impositions. The two and a half centuries have shown that history, in the end, and the terms of peace do not belong to the colonizer, the empire, or to genocidal regimes. Instead they belong to the anti-colonial armed struggles in the colonies and semi-colonies, to the Vietnamese victory over U.S. forces, to the defense of Iran and the Axis of Resistance, to the anti-war solidarity movements everywhere that have contested U.S. empire.

The US will not win "peace through strength". It will be the people's mass resistance that will overcome American militarism with the material force of the struggle for peace based on justice and self-determination.