The Continuity of Cain: Why the War Crimes of Obama, Trump, and Biden are One and the Same
To the casual observer of American politics, the shift from Barack Obama to Donald Trump, and then to Joe Biden, and back to Donald Trump, represents a series of seismic ideological ruptures. We are told that we are choosing between hope and isolationism, between “America First” and “Liberal Internationalism.” We hear this claim of a distinction yet again now that Trump has blundered into a disastrous war crime in Iran (from people who remained silent during Genocide Joe’s turn as U.S. Emperor). Yet, when one steps away from the curated theater of the televised podium and looks at the red soil of the Middle East, the Horn of Africa, and the tribal regions of Pakistan, these distinctions vanish.
From the perspective of the Gospel, which commands us to “love our enemies” and declares that “all who take the sword will perish by the sword”, the foreign policies of the last three administrations do not represent a choice, but a continuity. They represent the singular, unwavering face of an Empire that views human life as a secondary concern to hegemony. Whether the order is signed by a Nobel Peace Prize winner, a real estate mogul, or a career institutionalist, the result is the same: the extrajudicial slaughter of the innocent and the normalization of war crimes as “standard operating procedure.”
The Obama Era: The Normalization of the Shadow War
The deception began in earnest with Barack Obama. He was the “anti-war” candidate who inherited two messy conflicts and proceeded to expand them into seven. Obama’s primary contribution to the machinery of state-sanctioned murder was the refinement of the drone program. Under the guise of “surgical precision,” the Obama administration transformed the world into a global battlefield where the Fourth Amendment and the Geneva Conventions went to die.
Under Obama, the “Signature Strike” became a tool of routine war crime. This policy allowed the military to target individuals not based on their known identity, but on “patterns of behavior” that suggested militancy. In practice, this meant that any male of military age in a strike zone was classified as a “combatant” unless proven otherwise after their death. This is a flagrant violation of the principle of distinction in international law.
We must remember the “Double Tap“, the practice of striking a target and then striking again minutes later when first responders and grieving family members arrived to pull the wounded from the rubble. This is not “defense”; it is a calculated atrocity. Obama’s 2011 assassination of Anwar al-Awlaki and his 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman, both American citizens, without a shred of due process, set the stage for a presidency that functioned as judge, jury, and executioner from a remote-control trailer in Nevada.
The Trump Era: Removing the Veil of Restraint
When Donald Trump took office, the “resistance” claimed he would be a uniquely dangerous warmonger. In reality, Trump simply took the lethal tools Obama perfected and removed the PR-friendly guardrails. If Obama committed war crimes with a scalpel and a teleprompter, Trump committed them with a sledgehammer and a tweet.
The Trump administration saw a massive spike in civilian casualties because he consciously decided to “loosen the rules of engagement.” In places like Raqqa and Mosul, the US-led coalition oversaw the “most imprecise” air campaign in decades. Entire city blocks were leveled, burying families alive in the name of “eradicating” ISIS. According to monitors like Airwars, civilian deaths skyrocketed during Trump’s first two years, surpassing the rates seen under the previous administration. See here for details in Afghanistan.
Trump’s support for the Saudi-led genocide in Yemen remains one of the greatest moral stains of the century. By providing the intelligence, the refueling, and the munitions used to strike wedding parties, funeral halls, and school buses, the Trump administration was a full partner in the deliberate starvation of millions. When Congress attempted to invoke the War Powers Act to end this complicity, Trump vetoed it. He valued the “blood money” of arms sales over the lives of Yemeni children, proving that the Empire’s primary god is Mammon.
The Biden Era: The Empire in “Managed” Decline
Many hoped Joe Biden would represent a “return to normalcy.” For the victims of American foreign policy, “normalcy” is exactly the problem. While Biden ended the formal occupation of Afghanistan, he did so with a parting “righteous strike” that killed ten civilians, seven of them children, and then spent weeks lying about it, claiming they had hit an ISIS-K operative. It was only through independent journalism that the world learned the “terrorist” was actually an aid worker carrying water containers.
Biden has not ended the drone war; he has merely moved it further into the shadows. More importantly, the Biden administration has presided over the continuation of the “maximum pressure” sanctions regimes, economic warfare that targets the most vulnerable. Sanctions on countries like Venezuela, Iran, and Syria are war crimes by another name. They are designed to make life so intolerable for the civilian population that they rise up against their leaders. To intentionally deprive a civilian population of medicine, clean water, and food is a violation of the most basic tenets of humanitarian law, yet Biden has maintained the “Trump-era” sanctions with almost total fidelity.
Furthermore, Biden’s unwavering military support for the bombardment of Gaza has shown that the “Rules-Based International Order” is a fiction. When the US provides the 2,000-pound bombs used to level residential high-rises and refuses to draw a red line even as tens of thousands of children are slaughtered, it is not an “observer” to war crimes. It is an active participant.
Trump 2.0
Now that we have Trump again we see that he has only gotten worse. He has continued the Biden Administration’s unstinting support of Israel and extended it even to a place even Biden was not ignorant enough to go, starting a war against Iran, a nation of 93 million in a land twice the size of Texas. It is still unlikely that Trump will put boots on the ground. Instead, Trump will likely just keep escalating until he either realizes that he cannot inflict enough pain on Iran to make them quit, or until he feels enough political and monetary pain that he walks away (as of April 7 it looks like the pain has gotten too high for Trump, but we shall have to wait and see). Either way he will be following the war criminal path of his predecessors. New boss, same as the old boss.
The Triple Cord of Iniquity
Why are these three men, so seemingly different, so identical in their bloodguilt? It is because the Presidency has become an office of the Military-Industrial Complex, not the people.
All three presidents fell in love with the “cleanliness” of distance. Drones, cruise missiles, and cyber-warfare allow the American public to remain insulated from the horror of what is being done in their name. This “bloodless” war for the home front is what allows the war crimes to continue indefinitely.
Obama, Trump, and Biden all share the heretical belief that America is exempt from the laws it demands others follow. They believe the “City on a Hill” has the divine right to designate anyone, anywhere, as an “enemy combatant” and dispose of them without trial.
In each administration, the “national interest”, which is usually just a euphemism for corporate profit and global dominance, takes precedence over the biblical command to do justice.
A Call to Repentance
From the perspective of the Gospel, we must stop falling for the partisan trap. The “Left” will decry Trump’s brutality while ignoring Obama’s drones. The “Right” will decry Biden’s weakness while ignoring Trump’s expansion of the surveillance state and the bombardment of civilians.
The Word of God tells us, “Put not your trust in princes, in a son of man, in whom there is no help” (Psalm 146:3). Whether the face of the Empire is charismatic, brash, or grandfatherly, the hands are stained with the blood of the innocent.
The foreign policies of Obama, Trump, and Biden are not a series of zig-zags; they are a straight line leading toward a global culture of death. They have normalized the assassination of citizens, the bombing of hospitals, the starvation of nations, and the “collateral damage” of children. To the victims in the Global South, there is no difference between the drone that bears a “Hope” sticker and the one that bears an “America First” slogan. Both bring fire from the sky. Both represent a rebellion against the Prince of Peace.
As believers, our allegiance is not to a flag that shields war criminals, but to a Kingdom that demands account for every drop of blood spilled. We must call these actions what they are: crimes against humanity and sins against God. The continuity of war between these three administrations is proof that the system cannot be reformed from within; it must be judged by the standard of Truth.
Until people stop making excuses for “our side’s” atrocities, they are complicit in the machinery of death. Obama, Trump, and Biden are not rivals in this regard; they are successors in a long line of those who have traded their souls for the sake of an earthly throne. We must obey God rather than men, and God commands us to have no part in the unfruitful works of darkness.
Praise Be to God
