Even after withdrawing from Afghanistan, the United States remains a nation at war. The Biden administration recently renewed its commitment to unchallenged U.S. military supremacy via the Department of Defense’s annual “Global Posture Review,” which emphasizes greater military competition with China and Russia in their respective regions of influence. As of July 2021, the United States maintains 750 foreign bases in 80 countries worldwide. Congress appears poised to pass a massive defense spending bill that would increase the Pentagon’s already massive, bloated budget. This militarization is not a reflection of Gen Z’s priorities.
Political Correctness killed the so-called “anti-war movement” in the US. The people who decried President Bush for invading Iraq in 2003 are largely the same people who voted the Obama-Biden Administration into office in 2008, and then watched the Obama-Biden Administration torpedo our withdrawal from Iraq, foment revolutions, arm and fund jihadi terrorist insurgencies, deliberately orchestrate humanitarian catastrophes, destroy nations, etc. Their only problem was any and all criticism of the administration’s foreign policy, which they figured could only be explained by “racism,” on account of President Obama being half-Black. They did not give the slightest damn about the suffering of the tens of millions of people displaced by Obama-Biden’s policies, or the countless thousands of lives lost to mass murder, ethnic cleansing, genocide, slavery, and various other horrors perpetrated by the Obama-backed jihadi terrorists.
To a large extent, the people who once counted themselves among the so-called “anti-war movement” are the same people who watched all of this go down throughout Obama’s first term before voting in 2012 to keep it all going for another four more years. When Bill Clinton’s wife campaigned for the presidency in 2016 on the promise of deliberately starting nuclear World War III, these same people had no problem voting for the nuclear holocaust of all humanity–because she is a woman, and we have never had a woman president, so it is time for a woman president, because we have never had a woman president, and she is a woman, so it is time for a woman president.
The so-called “anti-war movement” in the US would have been reignited if a president like Trump did something like what Obama did to Libya. But a president like Trump would have vetoed such an absolutely insane program. Anti-war is conservative. War on all fronts is “progressive.” It is unlikely that “Gen Z”–who have been spoon-fed with Political Correctness throughout their formative years–will form as a cohesive bloc, or do anything else different than other generations. As long as there is a Democrat in the White House, there will be no reignited anti-war movement in the US.