From Indigenous genocide and continental conquest to corporate-backed interventions abroad, the United States has repeatedly pushed the human costs of war onto other people while powerful interests reap the rewards.
Don’t Sh*t Where You Eat: How America
Learned to Wage War Somewhere Else
Sharon Kyle / LA Progressive
(August 26, 2026) — My mother had a warning for her children that was crude,
even by our family’s standards, but impossible to forget:
“Don’t shit where you eat.”
She meant: Don’t create trouble in the place where you have to live. Don’t poison the relationships you depend upon. Don’t make a mess you’ll eventually have to sit in.
She would even tell us to watch the animals. They don’t shit where they eat.
Whether that observation would withstand scientific scrutiny was beside the point. We understood her perfectly. The image of the maxim left an indelible mark.
Lately I’ve been thinking that my mother’s maxim explains something about the United States and war that shelves of foreign-policy books make considerably more complicated than need be.
For much of its history, America has become remarkably adept at making its biggest messes someplace else.
The United States was quite literally born in war. The Revolution began in 1775, before independence was declared, and continued until 1783. From its birth in war to the present, the United States has spent an extraordinary proportion of its history engaged in:
- wars
- armed conflicts
- military interventions
- envasions
- occupations
- or engaged in other uses of military force
Although there have been periods of genuine peace, I ask the broader question—Has warfare been an unusually persistent feature of the American national experience?—and I think the answer is unmistakably yes.
Consider the arc.
The Revolution occupied 1775 to 1783. The 1790s brought wars against Native confederacies and an undeclared naval war with France. From 1801 through 1815 came the Barbary conflicts and the War of 1812. The following decades brought Indigenous wars, military interventions and the Mexican-American War. The 1850s and 1860s brought still more Indigenous warfare and the Civil War. Western Indian wars continued through the end of the nineteenth century.
Then came the Spanish-American War in 1898, followed almost immediately by war in the Philippines and repeated interventions throughout the Caribbean and Central America.
Then World War I. World War II. Korea. Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. The Gulf War. Afghanistan. Iraq. And throughout the twenty-first century, counterterrorism operations and smaller military actions conducted in countries many Americans would have difficulty locating on a map.
This litany of military engagement highlights that American war-making did not begin when the United States became a superpower after World War II. It is woven into the fabric of the nation beginning with the continental expansion of the country from its earliest years.
I think of that history as three overlapping stages.
First came continental expansion
Here, my mother’s maxim requires an important qualification. America initially did make war where it intended to eat.
Settler colonists wanted the land Indigenous people occupied. The solution was frequently removal, forced displacement, destruction of villages and food supplies, confinement to reservations and warfare. Often times it went further—to massacres and campaigns intended to annihilate whole Indigenous populations.
In other words, genocide was part of the settler-colonial story.
Historians debate how broadly the word genocide should be applied to the entire Indigenous experience of European and American colonization, and Indigenous nations experienced that history differently. But there are specific episodes for which the evidence of genocidal intent is powerful. In California, for example, state-supported militias, vigilantes and federal troops participated in killing campaigns during a period in which the Native population collapsed catastrophically. Historian Benjamin Madley has documented this history explicitly as an American genocide.
So the first American solution to my mother’s problem was brutal: If you want to eat where someone else already lives, remove the people, confine them, drive them away—or, in some cases, destroy them.
Wars against Indigenous nations and Mexico helped create the territorial United States.
Then Came Imperial Expansion
By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, American military power was reaching Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Central America, the Caribbean and the Pacific.
Now something changed.
America increasingly wanted influence, markets, resources, strategic control and access without necessarily intending to populate conquered territory with millions of American settlers.
The mess could remain somewhere else.
But it is important to ask who benefited from that arrangement.
Because when we say that American military power protected American “interests” overseas, the phrase can create the impression that ordinary Americans were somehow the beneficiaries—that the factory worker in Detroit, the domestic worker in Mississippi and the farmer in Nebraska all had some material stake in controlling a Caribbean customs house or protecting an oil concession halfway around the world.
Often the interests being protected were considerably more specific.
They belonged to those who occupied the privileged ranks of banks, oil companies, fruit companies, sugar companies and other private corporations.
Few people understood this better than Major General Smedley Darlington Butler.
Butler was no pacifist looking at war from the sidelines. He spent more than three decades in the United States Marine Corps, participated in American military interventions across several continents and received the Medal of Honor twice.
After retiring, he looked back at what he had been doing and reached a devastating conclusion.
He called war “a racket.”
His argument in his 1935 book War Is a Racket was essentially that “a few profit—and the many pay.” Elsewhere that same year, Butler described himself as having been a “high-class muscle man for Big Business.” He then supplied the examples from his own career: Mexico for American oil interests, Haiti and Cuba for banking interests, Nicaragua for Brown Brothers, the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests and China for Standard Oil.
That is quite an indictment coming from the general who actually helped carry out the interventions. This brings us to the third phase – military power.
Finally came global military power.
After 1945, the United States constructed a permanent worldwide military-security infrastructure capable of operating virtually anywhere on Earth.
America isn’t the first nation to behave this way, nor are Americans uniquely warlike people. History has given us Rome, the Mongols, the Ottoman Empire, Spain, Britain, France and Russia.
Britain is probably America’s closest historical comparison. At the height of its empire, British military power reached an astonishing portion of the globe. France also has an extensive history of colonial warfare and postcolonial military intervention.
But an intriguing succession took place.
Britain was probably the world’s foremost interventionist military power during the nineteenth century. The United States assumed something resembling that role during the twentieth.
That isn’t entirely coincidental. Each was, in its era, a dominant naval, commercial and financial power.
Which raises an uncomfortable question: How much military intervention has really been about defending the homeland, and how much has involved protecting markets, trade routes, investments, resources and an international economic system from which powerful interests benefit?
My mother’s maxim helps illuminate what happened next.
America learned to externalize the physical consequences of its foreign policy.
Bombed buildings, destroyed electrical grids, displaced populations, unexploded ordnance, contaminated land, devastated cities and civilian deaths overwhelmingly occur thousands of miles from the American mainland.
Consider Vietnam.
Americans experienced the deaths of more than 58,000 American service members, grieving families, protest, political upheaval and enormous expenditures.
Vietnamese people experienced those things plus the war happening in their villages, fields, homes and cities.
The same distinction applies, with variations, to Korea, Laos, Cambodia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and numerous smaller interventions.
America has fought overwhelmingly where it doesn’t live.
Geography has helped enormously. Two oceans separate the continental United States from most of the places where its military operates. British forces fought sustained campaigns here during the Revolution and invaded American territory during the War of 1812, even burning Washington. But no foreign army has conducted a prolonged, large-scale ground war on the U.S. mainland since the nineteenth century.
Most living Americans therefore have no conception of war as something happening outside the kitchen window.
War happens over there.
And geography isn’t the only distance involved. There is social distance too.
The people beneath American bombs usually speak another language. We don’t know their names. We don’t attend their funerals. Their children don’t attend school with ours. Their destroyed neighborhoods aren’t part of our commute.
We may hear that a strike killed thirty civilians.
Thirty is a number.
Thirty funerals would be something else.
That distance makes intervention politically cheaper.
The United States has repeatedly been able to separate the people who decide upon war, the people who pay for war, the people who fight the war, and the people upon whose land the war is actually fought.
Imagine if destroying an Iraqi power station meant turning off electricity in Chicago.
Imagine if contaminating farmland in Vietnam meant contaminating Iowa.
Imagine if every American bombing campaign meant Americans listening for incoming aircraft at night.
Our tolerance for military solutions might look very different.
This is where my mother’s crude little maxim becomes something much more serious.
During continental expansion, America sometimes solved the problem of shitting where it intended to eat by violently removing the people who already lived there.
Once America became a global power, it discovered an easier arrangement.
It could shit somewhere else.
There is only one problem.
The consequences don’t necessarily stay there – far away. Wars produce refugees, retaliation, terrorism, enormous debt, traumatized veterans, destabilized regions, domestic militarization and new enemies. The intelligence world has a term for unintended consequences of foreign intervention that eventually return to affect the country responsible for them:
Blowback – a term we heard often during 9/11
Which brings me back to my mother.
Her rule works only if there really is someplace called “far away.” For a global superpower in an interconnected world, there isn’t a “far away”. Eventually, you discover that the whole world is where you eat.
Resources and Further Reading
Continental Expansion, Settler Colonialism, and Indigenous Dispossession
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States
An essential reframing of American history from the perspective of Indigenous peoples. Dunbar-Ortiz examines settler colonialism, territorial conquest, warfare, forced removal, and the destruction of Native communities as central—not peripheral—to the creation of the United States.
An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States — Beacon Press/Penguin Random House
Benjamin Madley, An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846–1873
Madley documents the catastrophic destruction of California’s Indigenous population and the involvement of state authorities, militias, vigilantes, and federal forces. It is particularly important to the article’s discussion of genocide as part of America’s settler-colonial expansion.
An American Genocide — Yale University Press
Ned Blackhawk, The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History
Blackhawk places Native nations at the center of the American story, showing how Indigenous resistance, warfare, diplomacy, dispossession, and survival shaped the development of the United States. The book won the 2023 National Book Award for Nonfiction.
The Rediscovery of America — Yale University Press
Kelly Lytle Hernández, City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771–1965
Hernández connects settler conquest to later systems of policing, racial control, immigration enforcement, and incarceration. Focusing on Los Angeles, she demonstrates how institutions created in the wake of conquest continued to control Indigenous people, Mexicans, immigrants, and other marginalized populations long after territorial acquisition was complete.
City of Inmates — University of North Carolina Press
Empire, Corporate Power,
and the Economics of Intervention
Smedley D. Butler, War Is a Racket (1935)
The classic short antiwar work by the two-time Medal of Honor recipient and retired Marine major general. Looking back on his own career in U.S. military interventions, Butler argued that ordinary people bore the costs of war while banks, corporations, and investors frequently reaped the benefits. His famous conclusion was blunt: “War is a racket.”
Read War Is a Racket online
John Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
Perkins describes a system in which international lending, development projects, corporations, and U.S. geopolitical power can combine to draw poorer nations into debt and economic dependency. Whether one accepts every element of Perkins’s interpretation or not, the book has become influential in discussions of the relationship between corporate power and American foreign policy.
Confessions of an Economic Hit Man — Penguin Random House
John Perkins, The Secret History of the American Empire
A follow-up to Confessions of an Economic Hit Man that focuses more explicitly on multinational corporations, international finance, natural resources, and the exercise of American power throughout Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.
The Secret History of the American Empire — Penguin Random House
Primary Sources and Historical Documentation
Congressional Research Service, Instances of Use of
United States Armed Forces Abroad, 1798–2023
A detailed chronology documenting hundreds of occasions on which U.S. armed forces were used abroad in conflict, potential conflict, or other significant military circumstances. It demonstrates why counting only formally declared wars gives a profoundly incomplete picture of American military activity.
Read the Congressional Research Service report
U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States: Guatemala, 1952–1954
A collection of declassified U.S. government records surrounding President Jacobo Árbenz, the CIA-backed 1954 overthrow of his government, Carlos Castillo Armas, and the political and economic environment in which the United Fruit Company operated. These documents provide primary-source evidence for examining the intersection of Cold War policy and American corporate interests.
Foreign Relations of the United States — Guatemala documents
U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States: Iran, 1951–1954
Declassified U.S. government records concerning Prime MinisterMohammad Mosaddegh, the nationalization of Iran’s oil industry, the CIA-supported 1953 operation that removed him from power, and the subsequent international oil settlement. The post-coup arrangement gave five American petroleum companies a combined 40 percent share in the new oil consortium.
The opinions expressed here are solely the author’s and do not reflect the opinions or beliefs of the LA Progressive.
