Is it Un-Patriotic to Want Your Country to Lose a War?

The emerging liberal consensus

You may have heard politicians in the U.S. and Europe, as well as liberal commentators state some version of the following:

I’m opposed to Trump’s war on Iran. He should have sought Congressional authorization. But I’m glad the tyrant Ali Khamenei [Iran’s 86 y.o. supreme leader] is dead and hope Iran’s capacity to build a nuclear weapon is ended. Naturally, my thoughts and prayers are with the brave U.S. soldiers sent to the Middle East and I wish them Godspeed.

Here’s another expression of the emerging consensus:

Under what authority is Trump conducting this war? I’m worried about mission-creep. He needs to immediately come before Congress and provide a rationale for his bombing campaign and a plan for its successful completion.

The sentiments above are hypocritical if not non-sensical. If a war is illegally waged, there’s no point demanding a rationale or hoping for a successful outcome. That’s like condemning a burglar but hoping he makes a big score!

There are many reasons to oppose the president’s actions. Here’s ten:

1) Iran is an independent state and U.N. member that has never waged war against the U.S. Therefore, the U.S. attack was an “act of aggression,” according to the Charter of the United Nations. The Charter was approved by the U.S. Senate (89-3) in 1945 making its provisions binding under U.S. law (Constitution, Article VI, Clause 2).

2) The U.S. Constitution grants Congress the sole power to declare war. The U.S. War Powers Act (1973) further requires that absent such a declaration, the President must: a) consult with Congress before sending armed forces into combat; b) submit to House and Senate leaders within 48 hours a rationale for the deployment; c) halt military intervention after 60 days unless there is formal approval by Congress to continue.

There has been no Congressional declaration of war against Iran, minimal consultation with Congress, and no coherent rationale submitted.  What justifications have been given are contradictory. Last week, Defense Secretary Pate Hegseth said he wouldn’t speculate about what “we will or will not do” in the war, adding however: “This is not a so-called ‘regime change war’, but the regime sure did change.”  This week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Rubio said the war was launched in support of Israel; then, contradicted by his boss, said it was because of Iran’s weapons stockpile. Trump in the meantime said it was because Iran was a “global threat.”

3) Assassinating foreign military or civilian leaders, however noxious they may be, is a violation of U.S. Executive Order 12333 signed by Ronald Reagan in 1981. “No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in or conspire to engage in assassination.” Though Trump could overturn the Executive Order, he has not, so it remains binding on the Executive branch. Assassination of a foreign leader is also a violation of international law.

4) Thousands of people of people in Iran and nearby countries – most of them civilians – have already been killed by U.S. and Israeli bombings. (The U.S. bombed a school, killing over 175 children and teachers.) If the bombardment of Iran lasts for months, or is followed by civil unrest, thousands (potentially millions) of people in the region may be displaced from their homes and become refugees.

5) The expenditure of U.S. lives and treasure in an illegal war is senseless. Money and labor are better spent protecting American health and safety and conserving the environment. The president and Congress are already planning a supplemental appropriation to pay for the war, despite a projected 2026 structural deficit of nearly $2 trillion, about 6% of GDP.

6) War in the Middle East is exacerbating tensions with China, India and Russia making a wider war (even nuclear war) more likely.

7) The attack against Iran was launched beneath the cloak of peace negotiations. The U.S. and Israel decided the date they would attack before the negotiations with Iran even began. During the subsequent faux talks, Iran agreed to limitations on its nuclear program more stringent than those worked out in the effective pact negotiated with the Obama administration which Trump abrogated in 2018. The implications are profound, and not just for Iran: Why would any nation undertake good faith peace negotiations with the U.S. when the latter may already have decided upon a plan of attack? Why would any country trust in negotiating with the U.S?

8) Most nations quietly oppose U.S. and Israeli actions, with even traditional U.S. allies expressing lukewarm support at best. The U.K. Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, true to form, opposed military support for the Americans before he was for it. He stands resolutely in both pro and antiwar camps.

9) Suggesting Iranian security forces surrender their arms, as the Trump administration has done, makes no sense because there is no occupying power to surrender them to. Encouraging Iranian citizens to seize state power – though they lack weapons and organization — is bad faith. Trump and Secretary of State Rubio have no intention of sending in U.S. troops to support student or other freedom fighters. Indeed, they have no interest in popular sovereignty at home or abroad.

10) The U.S. attacks on a non-nuclear Iran – and its accommodating approach to North Korea – indicate that the only countries in the world safe from U.S. imperialism are nuclear-armed ones. Far from reducing the likelihood of nuclear proliferation, the war on Iran makes it a certainty.

The politicians and commentators who whisper opposition but shout accommodation to Trump’s war are both cowards and fools. They know the war is illegal and immoral but fail to offer full throated dissent out of fear of seeming unpatriotic while their country is at war.  They think they can win over voters by being on both side of the issue – in fact, they will alienate all constituencies.

True patriots must hope the U.S. loses its war against Iran to stymie Trump’s imperial aggression. Since taking office in 2025, his administration has bombed Somalia, Iraq, Yemen, Iran, Venezuela, Syria, and Nigeria. It has also blown-up supposed drug smuggling boats in the Caribbean and Pacific killing sone 200. While wishing for U.S. failure in Iran, American patriots should support the formation of a democratic Iranian government that is unallied with – indeed, opposed to — the current U.S. administration.

Patriotism = nationalism + camp

American patriotism is unfit for purpose and has been for some time.  That’s because it’s comprised of two unstable compounds:  nationalism + camp.

The nation, according to Benedict Anderson, its chief modern theorist, is an imagined political community. No modern state is an organic development from an ancient nation. None share with their supposed progenitors common ethnicity, language and traditions. Nations are instead, hybrid entanglements, unfixed and volatile, whose populations may nevertheless be persuaded to believe – to imagine – they possess a unity. Citizens of a modern state in thrall to nationalism, often make huge sacrifices – including life itself – on behalf of that myth. Nationalism is often the font of war.

As an adjective, “camp” has for more than 100 years signified, according to the OED: “mannerisms, speech, etc. [that is] flamboyant, arch, or theatrical, esp. in a way stereotypically associated with some gay men.” That original meaning has broadened significantly in recent decades. In Susan Sontag’s famous essay “Notes on Camp” (1964), she describes it as a “sensibility…a certain mode of aestheticism.” She continues: “It is one way of seeing the world as an aesthetic phenomenon. That way, the way of Camp, is not in terms of beauty, but in terms of artifice, of stylization….It goes without saying that the Camp sensibility is disengaged, depoliticized, or at least apolitical.”

Since at least the end of World War II, the combination nationalism + camp has permeated American political culture in the form of a “depoliticized” patriotism. When I was growing up – during the era of the Vietnam War – patriotic slogans included “America, love it or leave it,” “my country right or wrong,” and the ominous “law and order.” These and other expressions of patriotism are truculent, tautological, and mischievous. They are to be taken both seriously and parodically — as “stylization.”  If somebody said to a ‘60s civil rights or anti-war protester (as was regularly said to me): “If things are so bad here, why don’t you go back to Russia?” both the speaker and hearer would know it wasn’t a serious question; it was performative more than interrogative, theatrical more than political.

American patriots of 1960s and ‘70s had their own, peculiarly camp styles. Men cut their hair in crewcuts while women wore bouffants. To signal they were hawks (pro-war) men wore American flag pins on their lapels, saluted any soldiers they saw, and sang the national anthem with gusto (if they remembered the words) every chance they had.

Patriotism had its own camp musical and cinema styles. Here’s an example of each: On Sunday night, Oct. 6, 1963, Kate Smith sang “God Bless America” on The Ed Sullivan Show on CBS TV. (It made more of an impression on me than the Beatles’ appearance on the show a few months later.) The song was sung low, in the key of B, as if by a male tenor, conveying some of its transvestic origin. It was written by Irving Berlin in 1919 for a show called Yip, Yip, Yahank and performed by soldiers returned from the war, some dressed in drag and others in blackface.

John Wayne, whose performance of cowboy masculinity fueled a queer culture of leather and chaps, announced his support for the Vietnam War in 1965, and three years later starred in a film, The Green Berets (1968) that celebrated the American combatants. In one scene, the Japanese American actor George Takei (Sulu in the original Star Trek), playing a South Vietnamese Captain, says to Wayne’s Colonel Mike Kirby: “”I go home too some day. You see. First kill all stinking Cong. Then go home.” American patriotism relied upon stereotypes, role playing and masquerade.

Today, MAGA patriotism is also camp. The Trump industry pitches baseball caps, gold coins, bitcoins (faux money), medallions, watches, t-shirts, belt buckles and other swag to fleece and organize its followers. The White House itself, especially the Oval Office, has become a veritable Liberace stage set with gilt cherubs, moldings, candelabras, and other neo-Versailles-style embellishments. It’s no wonder MAG is fracturing – can such ostentatiously camp patriotism compel conviction for long?

Defeat the Americans, democratize Iran 

Patriotism wasn’t always thus. In the 18^th century, when the word begins to appear frequently, it meant embrace of civic virtue, not blind love of country. In France, La Patrie signified support for the common good above any parochial interests. When Benjamin Franklin visited the French court, he wore a simple brown suit, rough, coonskin cap, and bi-focals (almost never worn in public) to project simplicity, modesty and honesty as patriotic virtues.

Thomas Jefferson likewise understood patriotism as self-sacrifice, civic duty, and rejection of unjust laws. Rebellion against the nation-state itself was contenanced. In the U.S. Declaration of Independence, he wrote:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness….That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government.

Opposition to one’s own government – to its unjust wars, imperial aggression, corruption and cruelty — is fundamental to the Enlightenment conception of patriotism that the U.S. was founded on.

The first fate that befalls the apprehended criminal is seizure of ill-gotten gain. The U.S. was criminally wrong to go to war against Iran. Justice demands it be deprived of the fruits of that violence. The best we can hope for is that rising commodity prices resulting from the war, combined with moral outrage at the bombing of schools, the sinking of ships in the open ocean, and wanton killing of potential Iranian leaders, will quickly stop the American bombardment and drive the electorate away from Trump and the party of fascism.

American opponents of the war in the meantime, can hope that a young generation of patriots will emerge in Iran, seize power and drive out the conservative and murderous clerics, Revolutionary Guard, army, and volunteer, Basji militia that together have governed and terrorized the people of Iran for two generations.  The alternative – assuming leading clerics and Revolutionary Guard officers are all killed or kept from power — is a complete fracturing of Iranian society as occurred in Iraq, Libya, and Syria after U.S militarily interventions.  That would of course, represent another American failure or defeat, but one so terrible that no one could ever wish for it.

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