The Washington Monthly at War 

America is at war—again. Donald Trump’s war of choice. 

U.S. armed forces are dying. Your tax dollars blew up an Iranian girls’ school. Oil tankers are lined up to get through the Strait of Hormuz.  

This is no time for corporate media that plays it safe and is afraid to speak truth to power. That’s where the Washington Monthly comes in.  

We’ve always been independent media.  

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Born 57 years ago during the Vietnam War, this magazine has been on the cutting edge of military issues ever since. But as a non-profit, we need the support of readers like you to keep going.  

As Trump’s war on Iran roils the world, read Matthew Cooper on how the international deal forged by Barack Obama and our major allies, while hardly perfect, stymied Tehran’s nuclear ambitions by keeping inspectors on the ground, until Donald Trump walked away from it. Or Pentagon expert Mike Lofgren on why we spend almost $1 trillion on defense, but we can’t make ammunition, and how the proposed Trump-class of naval warships are a gold-plated disaster that will make us less safe. And Bill Scher on the cocky hawks of the Iraq War, who are just as unapologetically wrong when it comes to Pete Hegseth’s war in Iran. 

This isn’t the Washington Monthly’s first war. The magazine opposed the Vietnam War from the start. Still, unlike other liberal magazines, it raised tough questions about military deferment and how wealthier kids were getting away with not serving. James Fallows wrote his legendary “What Did You Do in the Class War, Daddy” about trying to fail his draft physical and his regret over it. Other pieces included “Let Those Hillbillies Go Get Shot” and devastating portraits of the Kennedy-Johnson liberals who got us into the big muddy in Southeast Asia and the Nixon administration’s continued prosecution. It probed and asked about what weapons systems worked and which didn’t. 

During the run up to the Iraq War, while much of the media, even the liberal media, thought taking out Saddam Hussein was a great idea, the Monthly asked all the right questions, including former NATO Allied Supreme Commander Wesley Clark on the madness of going into Baghdad without allies, Josh Marshall on the George W. Bush administrations many deceptions, and Peter Bergen on the delusions that led the neoconservatives to think they could handpick a Saddam Hussein successor. The very same delusions now plague the Trump administration. 

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By finding real experts who know what weapons systems work and which don’t, and seeing the connections between trade and security agreements, the Monthly has always had a different take on war and peace. See Tamar Jacoby’s brave, heroic reporting embedded with Ukraine’s drone-fighting infantry. 

Our editor, Paul Glastris, covered the war on the ground in Bosnia as a journalist in the mid-1990s, then worked as a White House speechwriter during the war in Kosovo. He saw firsthand how Bill Clinton’s administration used military and diplomatic power in coordination with allies to end bloody ethnic conflicts while avoiding American casualties—unlike the current group of malevolent fools who cannot even articulate what our objectives in Iran are. 

Why are we in Iran? How do we get out? And how do we have the right military, trade, and diplomatic policies for a better national defense?  

Read all about it in the Washington Monthly, but we need your help to keep going. 

We don’t know when this war will end. But we need your help to shine a light on it. Can you help us? Your contribution is fully tax-deductible, something to think about as April 15 approaches. Just $50 gets you a subscription to our print issues and all the daily online coverage of this war, and an archive of stories from our 57 years of telling the truth. Please. Do it today. Thank you. 

All the best, 

The Editors 

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