The (Department of) War on American Cities, Ukraine, Gaza, and the Imperial Boomerang

Historical lessons for American citizens on how colonial violence returns home.

President Donald Trump signed an executive order yesterday renaming the Department of Defense to the Department of War. Shortly thereafter, he posted to Truth Social threatening the city of Chicago, writing, “I love the smell of deportations in the morning…” and “Chicago is about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR,” including an AI-generated graphic riffing on Apocalypse Now. Perhaps the most ironic aspect (which is really saying something) of Trump’s post is that reference—itself a film depicting among other things the futility, absurdity, and interminability of the Vietnam War.

Declaring war on a city in the nation you lead ought to be a red line. This feels so blindingly obvious I don’t know what else to write, so I’ll leave it at that.

For as long as most of us have been alive, the United States has preferred to call its central military bureaucracy the Department of Defense. It’s a bit of linguistic sleight of hand, suggesting a reactive posture: protection, shelter, safety. But before 1949, the Pentagon was officially home to the Department of War. In the post-WWII context, this renaming was meant to emphasize national security rather than overt war-making in the nuclear age. What that older name lacked in finesse it made up for in raw honesty: American power has never been purely (or even mostly) defensive. It has always been outward-facing, shaping distant conflicts and securing global conditions favorable to its dominance. And what is enacted abroad—tactically, technologically, and ideologically—rarely remains abroad. It returns home, altered but recognizable, in what Aimé Césaire once described as the “boomerang effect” of empire, also referred to as the “imperial boomerang.”

In Discourse on Colonialism (1950), Césaire argued that the violence Europe unleashed in its colonies would inevitably reverberate back into Europe itself, reshaping its institutions and corroding its civic life. The colony served as a laboratory where new modes of domination were tested on racialized populations. Once normalized, these techniques migrated back to the metropole. Although the United States is not the direct aggressor in Ukraine and Gaza—casting these as somewhat slanted examples—we can discern similar patterns in the United States today. In these two profoundly different contexts—linked by their function as sites of experimentation—we find examples of how the imperial boomerang will look when it whips back to American soil.

Ukraine and Gaza

Ukraine has become a crucible of modern warfare, where U.S. and NATO investment in advanced surveillance, satellite-guided logistics, and proxy war is stress-tested at scale. Gaza, by contrast, demonstrates the logic of siege: the regulation of food, water, medicine, and movement as weapons of war, alongside the use of biometric data and AI-assisted targeting. Achille Mbembe’s notion of “necropolitics”—the sovereign right to dictate who may live and who must die—resonates acutely in this context.

I want to add a quick caveat here: what is happening in both Gaza and Ukraine is horrific. Especially devastating are the harms being committed against civilians, a reality true in both places but especially so in Gaza, where tens (and possibly hundreds) of thousands of civilians, including children, are being subjected to unconscionable trauma, ranging from outright killing to maiming and starvation. I want to be clear: I do not intend to say they only matter because of what they can teach Americans. What is happening in both places is appalling and unacceptable; both are an affront to human decency. We should care about them—and speak out against them—in their own rights. To acknowledge the lessons they hold for Americans is not to minimize their atrocities, but to increase awareness among American civilian populations about these realities so that they can prepare for what’s coming here.

In fact, this has already been happening; the United States has both been indirectly participating in these campaigns and learning from what is occurring in them. Surveillance systems trialed in Palestine and Gaza are marketed to American police departments. Border technologies refined in counterinsurgency campaigns are deployed along the U.S.-Mexico border.

The militarization of urban policing, which first became evident at the national scale in the Ferguson and Standing Rock protests, is not an aberration but the homeward arc of imperial technique. Frantz Fanon once remarked that colonialism dehumanizes not only the colonized but also the colonizer’s own society. The boomerang slices both ways.

This return rarely arrives as a cataclysmic rupture. More often, it seeps in gradually: budget reallocations funnel billions toward militarized policing while schools and public health are starved. Language shifts, with democratic dissent recast as domestic extremism. Technologies once used abroad—drones, biometric databases, predictive policing software—become routine at home. The line between counterinsurgency overseas and the management of populations domestically has thinned almost to disappearance.

Depending on where you live, this might already sound familiar.

Ukraine and Gaza must not be collapsed into a single story, but from the vantage point of Trump’s Department of War they serve as parallel laboratories, each refining methods of control destined for eventual domestic use. In addition to the aforementioned theorists, Hannah Arendt also warned that imperial logics abroad corrode republican institutions at home after witnessing the atrocities committed in WWII. With Trump’s threats against Chicago—following the military occupation of Los Angeles and Washington, D.C.—we witness manifestations of the boomerang’s return.

Potential Threat Vectors

If Ukraine and Gaza serve as testing sites for twenty-first century warfare, then U.S. cities deemed opponent “blue cities” by the Trump administration are increasingly positioned to become the proving ground for their domestic application. The executive renaming of the Department of Defense to the Department of War is more than symbolic. It billboards the ongoing shift toward treating internal dissent, poverty, and urban disorder not as social problems to be addressed but as enemies to be vanquished through force.

Trump has already shown a proclivity for way of thinking about his perceived domestic enemies. In his 2022 memoir A Sacred Oath, former Defense Secretary Mark Esper claims that during the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, Trump asked, “Can't you just shoot them? Just shoot them in the legs or something?” This sentiment reverberates in a recent claim by an Border Patrol agent that they were going to “end up shooting some of them”—them meaning folks suspected of having immigrated illegally to the United States.

Here are some of the “lessons” the Trump administration has no doubt picked up, and the techniques they might deploy, in these environments.

From Ukraine: the Digitization of the Battlefield

Ukraine has demonstrated the centrality of surveillance, networked logistics, and drone warfare to contemporary conflict. Commercial satellite imagery, battlefield apps, and real-time intelligence sharing have collapsed the distance between soldier, strategist, and technologist. When transposed onto an American city, these tools suggest the emergence of “total visibility” policing.

Imagine an urban grid where drones hover as persistent eyes in the sky, their feeds integrated with police dashboards that fuse cell phone metadata, license plate readers, and predictive algorithms. Protest marches are mapped in real time; “anomalous” movements flagged for intervention. Instead of treating neighborhoods as civic spaces, they are managed as battlegrounds, with residents reduced to nodes in a security diagram. Chicago under a Department of War could easily become a beta test for this kind of saturation surveillance.

From Gaza: the Inhumane Logic of Siege

The Gaza Strip has long been a site where restriction of movement, resources, and basic survival needs has been weaponized by Israel as a form of control. Food trucks are delayed or denied entry. Fuel and medicine are rationed according to political calculations. Biometric databases categorize populations into tiers of risk.

If these tactics migrate home, American cities could be subjected to “conditional access” regimes in moments of crisis. Already, during protests, authorities have shut down transit lines, declared curfews, or cut cell service. Escalated under a War Department, these techniques could evolve into systematic siege: neighborhoods cordoned off with checkpoints; water or electricity temporarily withheld to “restore order”; residents forced into biometric registration systems to prove loyalty or compliance. Siege does not need to look like rubble and famine to function—it can appear as rolling blackouts, blocked highways, and digitally enforced curfews.

Necropolitics Within U.S. Borders, Normalization of the “Enemy Within,” and Corrosion of Democracy

Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics resonates when applied domestically. In Gaza, this often takes the form of targeted killings and deliberate deprivation. In Ukraine, it manifests through artillery barrages that flatten cities deemed strategically expendable. In the U.S., necropolitics may manifest less through spectacle and more through selective abandonment: which neighborhoods get militarized protection and which are left to deteriorate; which populations are targeted for raids, deportations, or lethal police encounters; whose children breathe clean air and whose are consigned to toxic waste sites. The militarization of governance allows the state to formalize these life-and-death hierarchies under the guise of national security.

Perhaps the most dangerous import from these conflicts is not technological but discursive. In both Ukraine and Gaza, war is sustained through narratives that dehumanize the other side—“terrorists,” “orcs,” “human shields.” Once such language migrates inward, dissenters in Chicago or Los Angeles become “domestic extremists,” immigrants become “invaders,” and unhoused populations become “biothreats.” In fact, this rhetoric is already on display. Multiple of Trump’s executive orders already use the term “invasion” as justification for increasing crackdowns and detaining and deporting migrants.

The line between citizen and enemy thus blurs in the media narrative, granting the War Department rhetorical license to deploy extraordinary measures. What begins with militarized police presence can slide into outright military occupation, justified by the claim that the homeland itself has become a warzone.

The most immediate image of war coming home is a soldier on a U.S. street corner—a sight most recently seen in Los Angeles, Washington D.C., and, if we take him at his word, soon Chicago. But the deeper danger is structural: a society reorganized around permanent war logic. Budget priorities shift toward armament rather than welfare (see: ICE’s new $45B budget while healthcare is left to crumble); urban planning takes its cues from counterinsurgency rather than civic life; legal norms erode as emergency powers harden into routine governance. Arendt’s warning about imperial logics corroding republican institutions feels prescient here. What is coming may not be a sudden imposition of martial law but a gradual hollowing out of democratic life until war becomes the ambient condition of everyday governance.

Ukraine and Gaza show us two faces of empire’s laboratory: one defined by hyper-modern digital warfare, the other by the ancient weapon of siege. Together, they sketch the contours of possible futures for American cities under the Department of War.

What Can We Do About It?

Naming the danger is only a first step. The harder task is imagining and enacting forms of resistance robust enough to meet and mitigate it. If the Department of War is preparing to treat American cities as battlefields, then the question becomes: how do we prevent our neighborhoods from being militarized into submission? There are not easy answers to this question, but there are tactics and overarching strategies we must consider now.

First, we must refuse the discursive frame that recasts dissent as terrorism and communities as enemies. Language matters. The more the public accepts metaphors of “war” on crime, drugs, or immigrants, the easier it becomes to accept actual war footing against fellow residents. Counter-narratives—art, journalism, organizing, even basic conversations with relatives who may not have the media exposure that you do—are essential in preserving the civic language of solidarity rather than the martial language of annihilation.

Transparency campaigns can also expose the tools of militarization before they become normalized. Police contracts with surveillance firms, federal grants for “counterterrorism” equipment, budgetary reallocations toward militarized units—all can be documented and challenged, even at the municipal level. Sunlight, as they say, is the best disinfectant; we must drag the quiet implementation of imperial techniques into the light.

Third, local coalitions must link struggles that are often siloed: anti-surveillance advocates, immigrant rights groups, environmental justice organizers, abolitionist movements. All are confronting different faces of the same war-making state. Cross-pollination of strategies—legal defense, mutual aid, digital security, direct action—will be critical in building a broad-based front. This is a key aspect of what I call polycritical foresight, a threatcasting methodology that foregrounds systems thinking.

Cities and states can serve as counterweights to federal overreach. Sanctuary policies, municipal ordinances limiting police access to military equipment, and state-level refusals to cooperate with federal overreach are not silver bullets, but they create friction against the totalizing reach of the Department of War’s logic.

We see hints of this resistance in efforts like California’s “sanctuary state” laws, which restrict state and local law enforcement from collaborating with federal immigration raids; in New York City’s ban on predictive policing tools like “gang databases” that disproportionately target Black and brown youth; and in the dozens of municipalities that have passed ordinances refusing military surplus equipment from the Pentagon’s 1033 program. We also see it in states such as Oregon and Illinois, which have limited or outright banned facial recognition technologies in policing, and in local campaigns from Seattle to Minneapolis that have demanded budget cuts to police departments and reinvestment in housing, health, and education. And hopping topics, we also see it in multi-state collaborative efforts like the West Coast Health Alliance.

Finally, we must cultivate practices of care that make communities resilient in the face of siege: neighborhood food distribution networks, medical mutual aid, decentralized communication systems. If Gaza teaches us the cruelty of siege, it also teaches us the power of survival strategies under impossible conditions. Building them now—before the crisis escalates—is itself a form of resistance. This is why I have argued (and will continue to!) that the left needs to appropriate the notion of prepping, wresting it away from survivalist lonerism and broadening it to emphasize community resilience and preparedness.

Empire’s boomerang is real, but it is imperative that we refuse the notion that it is inevitable. What happens next will depend on whether people in American cities accept the logic of permanent war—or do everything they can to refuse it.