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As Trump Uses Military to Threaten Democracy, NYT Declares Military Needs More Resources Drew Favakeh ([link removed])


The New York Times published a seven-day series of editorials (12/8/25–12/14/25) meant to examine, as the initial piece ([link removed]) put it, “what’s gone wrong with the US military” and “how we can create a relevant and effective force that can deter wars whenever possible and win them wherever necessary.”

These editorials serve as little more than propagandistic, jingoistic and Sinophobic tools that treat war as a game, turning a blind eye to the very real harms that wars have on civilians.

Devoting seven editorials to boosting the US military when the country’s own democracy is under threat—and Trump is using the military so irresponsibly and illegally that high-level officers are resigning ([link removed] the months since President,gone through four different commissioners.) —the Times demonstrated that its commitment to militarism ([link removed]) knows few bounds.


** ‘Threaten democracies everywhere’
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New York Times: America’s military has defended the free world for 80 years.

New York Times (12/8/25 ([link removed]) ): "America’s military has defended the free world for 80 years," a timespan that includes both the Vietnam War ([link removed]) and the invasion of Iraq ([link removed]) .

In total, the New York Times series referenced China 50 times, Russia 26 times and Israel just twice. It fed into an increasing Yellow Peril hysteria ([link removed]) in a country that has a long history ([link removed]) of hatred towards China ([link removed]) and Chinese people ([link removed]) , and from a news outlet that has repeatedly expressed ([link removed]) anti-China ([link removed]) sentiment ([link removed]) .

The Times (12/8/25 ([link removed]) ) kicked off the series by citing a Pentagon “classified, multiyear assessment,” called the “Overmatch brief," which “catalogs China’s ability to destroy American fighter planes, large ships and satellites, and identifies the US military’s supply chain choke points.” The paper—which didn't disclose how it obtained the brief, and didn’t publish its contents—called it “consistent and disturbing.”

The editorial opined that a “rising China” will “outlast this administration,” and will “require credible US military power as a backstop to international order and the security of the free world.”

A “world in which a totalitarian China achieves military superiority in Asia...would make Americans poorer and threaten democracies everywhere,” a “prospect we should act resolutely to prevent,” the Times continued.


** 'Urgent need for credible deterrence'
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In another installment in the series, the Times (12/13/25 ([link removed]) ) added that China’s “gaming of international trade, rising hostility to neighbors and especially its accelerating military buildup show the urgent need for credible deterrence,” including more collaboration from the “world’s democracies.”
NYT: America was once the world’s industrial superpower. Now it accounts for just 17 percent of global manufacturing.

New York Times (12/13/25 ([link removed]) ): "America...accounts for just 17% of global manufacturing." (Note that this is four times the US percentage of the world's population.)

It's not China, though, that is threatening to annex ([link removed]) its ([link removed]) neighbors ([link removed]) —by force ([link removed]) if need be—or declaring it has the right to replace the leaders ([link removed]) of any country in its hemisphere it disapproves of.

The US has overthrown at least 31 foreign governments ([link removed]) since the late 19th century—with Trump's kidnapping of Venezuela's Nicolas Maduro marking only the latest in that long string—and conducted more than 80 election meddling operations from 1946 to 2000 (NPR, 12/22/16 ([link removed] to Carnegie Mellon University researcher Dov,voters in the target before the election.) ). It has caused, conservatively, nearly a million deaths ([link removed] States Post%2D9/11,%2C journalists%2C and humanitarian workers.) in the post-9/11 wars. By comparison, China has not been directly involved in a major external conflict ([link removed]) since its 1979 invasion of Vietnam.

US special operations forces are deployed to 154 countries (Intercept, 3/20/21 ([link removed]) ), and the Pentagon has at least 750 overseas military bases in 80 countries (Al Jazeera, 9/10/21 ([link removed]) ), many of which surround ([link removed]) China.

China, meanwhile, has just two overseas military bases, one it opened in 2017 in the East African nation of Djibouti (Reuters, 8/1/17 ([link removed]) ; Foreign Policy, 7/7/21 ([link removed]) ) and another it opened in 2025 in Cambodia (Newsweek, 4/7/25 ([link removed]) ).

Moreover, the US currently has imposed some form of damaging economic sanctions ([link removed]) on more than 20 countries, while China has issued no nationwide sanctions.

To the Times (12/14/25 ([link removed]) ), the “horrors that China has visited on the Uyghurs and Russia has imposed on Ukrainians” were “not only a sign of the immoral core of these regimes,” but also “portents of violent instability to come.” The horrors inflicted by the US in Iraq ([link removed]) , Libya ([link removed]) and Afghanistan ([link removed]) , and the US-backed horrors in Gaza ([link removed]) and Yemen ([link removed]) , did not raise any questions for the Times about the "immoral core" of the military it was calling for expanding.


** Hyping a weapons gap
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NYT: To safeguard liberty, the U.S. must remake its military.

New York Times (12/14/25 ([link removed]) ) : "To safeguard liberty, the US must remake its military."

The New York Times editorials frame China's military arsenal as a growing danger, without putting it in the context of US weapons. The paper (12/14/25 ([link removed]) ) wrote that “China is eyeing regional hegemony in the Indo-Pacific while it rapidly expands its conventional and nuclear arsenals.” China is expanding its nuclear arsenal, but its 600 warheads are dwarfed by the estimated 3,700 US warheads, according to a March 2025 report ([link removed]) by the Federation of American Scientists.

While the US declares a right to use nuclear weapons first in a war (Council on Foreign Relations, 12/16/25 ([link removed]) ), China has maintained a “no first use policy” since it first developed nuclear weapons in 1964—a position it has repeatedly ([link removed]) re-affirmed ([link removed]) , including late last year (Arms Control Association, 12/11/25 ([link removed] a new white paper,weapons in some 20 years.) ).

The Times also warned about hypersonic missiles: “China in recent years has amassed an arsenal of around 600 hypersonic weapons,” compared to the US, which “has yet to deploy a single hypersonic missile,” wrote the Times (12/8/25 ([link removed]) ). FAIR (7/12/19 ([link removed]) ) has written before about media attempts to hype a hypersonic missile gap.

In fact, the US has pursued hypersonic weapons since 9/11, and is now among those “leading the pack” (Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 3/12/24 ([link removed]) ), underscored by Trump’s near ([link removed]) $4 billion request ([link removed]) in 2026 for hypersonic weapons research. Most US hypersonic weapons are being designed for conventional payloads—making them usable weapons rather than deterrents. This means they will take longer to deploy (Congressional Research Service, 8/27/25 ([link removed]) ), and will be more destabilizing if they are deployed.


** 'Push the world into an economic crisis'
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NYT: Help Ukraine Hold the Line

The New York Times' open-ended commitment (4/6/24 ([link removed]) ) to helping Ukraine retake its breakaway territories contrasts sharply with its determination to prevent reunification of China by force if necessary.

The New York Times (12/14/25 ([link removed]) ) also pointed to Taiwan, widely recognized ([link removed]) as part of China but governed independently for the past 77 years, as a reason for increasing US military might. The paper predicted that a “Chinese attack on Taiwan that ends up disrupting or destroying that island’s chip foundries would push the world into an economic crisis.”

It is true that China has ramped up military pressure around Taiwan (Guardian, 1/7/25 ([link removed]) ; AP, 12/29/25 ([link removed]) ). China has framed this as a response to US and Taiwanese provocations (Reuters, 10/7/24 ([link removed]) , 12/30/25 ([link removed] %22Justice Mission 2025%22%2C,drills%2C and past drill areas.) ; Washington Post, 12/30/25 ([link removed]) ), including stationing 500 troops in Taiwan in May 2025, while threatening to send more (Stars and Stripes, 5/27/25
([link removed]) ). The US sold Taiwan more than $11 billion worth of missiles and drones in December (Washington Post, 12/29/25 ([link removed]) ).

How would the US respond if China stationed troops in Cuba (which is about 90 miles away from the Florida Keys, a similar distance between Taiwan and mainland China)? How would the New York Times respond?

The Times' enthusiasm for defending Taiwan from forcible reunification with China contrasts sharply with its commitment to supporting Ukraine ([link removed]) in its efforts to retake breakaway territories. In the Taiwanese case, the right to self-determination is unquestioned, trumping China's sovereignty; in Ukraine's case, the sacredness of national borders renders self-determination claims irrelevant.

Though popularity ([link removed]) of a war hardly seems to matter to US administrations, intervening to protect Taiwan separatism remains largely unpopular ([link removed]) among US citizens (although more are in favor of intervention this year than last).


** ‘Transformation of the American military’
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New York Times depiction of gold coins flowing into a golden Pentagon.

New York Times (12/10/25 ([link removed]) ): Trump "has shown an eagerness to disrupt old bureaucratic habits, and the Pentagon needs disruption."

US politicians often leverage the alarmist message of "imminent military threats" to increase military spending (Defense News, 2/17/21 ([link removed]) ). The New York Times took on that role in these editorials. To achieve this country's foreign policy goals, it argued (12/8/25 ([link removed]) ), requires not just maintaining current obscene levels of military spending, but increasing them: "In the short term, the transformation of the American military may require additional spending, primarily to rebuild our industrial base."

In 2024, the US spent ([link removed]) $997 billion on its military—more than the next nine countries’ spending combined, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute ([link removed]) , a fact the Times (12/10/25 ([link removed]) ) acknowledged. What it didn't state was that China—the second-biggest military spender—spent only $314 billion in 2024. Why must the US spend even more than three times more on its military than China? The Times never addressed this obvious question.

While the paper occasionally criticized military spending—calling the 2026 defense budget “loaded with pork for unnecessary programs” (12/11/25 ([link removed]) )—its issue wasn’t the amount spent, but rather how it was spent—“a stronger US national security depends less on enormous new budgets than on wiser investments” (12/8/25 ([link removed]) ).

Ultimately, the Times (12/11/25 ([link removed]) ) suggested spending $150 billion more on “manufacturing capacity” to rebuild the US naval industrial base, despite noting that the US has already spent nearly $6 billion ([link removed]) on the industry over the past decade.

The editorial board didn’t seem to consider what the public wants in our nominal democracy: Only one in ten ([link removed]) voters want a bigger military budget (Jacobin, 12/15/25 ([link removed]) ).

Rather than funding an arms race, the US could focus more on diplomacy and turn its investments towards more popular measures like government-subsidized ([link removed]) housing ([link removed]) , healthcare ([link removed]) for all, universal childhood education, infrastructure, clean energy, and/or community college. A 2023 report ([link removed]) published by ([link removed]) Brown University's Costs of War ([link removed]) project showed reducing military spending and diverting funds to these areas would create 9% to 250% more jobs than the military.


** The killer robot gap
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NYT: This Is the Future of War

Faced with the prospect of "swarms of robotic aircraft that work in unison to find and kill targets without any human oversight, the New York Times' response (12/9/25 ([link removed]) ) is that "the Pentagon must embrace technological change."

Another area where the New York Times wants the US military to spend more money is autonomous weapons systems.

The Times (12/9/25 ([link removed]) ) wrote that “China is testing how to fly drones in sync. Soon such swarms could hunt and kill on their own.” To counter this “growing threat,” the US “must simultaneously win the race to build autonomous weapons and lead the world in controlling them.” To do so, "Congress needs to expand funding for research and development into technologies with military applications" and Trump needs to "bring private industry into the mission."

The Times wrote that they "join the United Nations secretary general and the International Committee of the Red Cross in their call for a new treaty to be concluded by 2026 on autonomous weapons systems." The editors then say the treaty should include

limits on the types of targets, such as outlawing their use in situations where civilians or civilian objects are present; and requirements for human-machine interaction, notably to ensure effective human supervision, and timely intervention and deactivation.

But that's far short of what the secretary general and the Red Cross recommend: a ban ([link removed]) on all ([link removed]) autonomous weapons used to attack humans. This humanitarian goal doesn't square with the Times' enthusiasm for the US to "win the race to build autonomous weapons," even if it says it also wants to "win the race to control them."

Then again, there's nothing about the Times' editorial series that suggests any honest consideration of humanitarian concerns—just adding another notch on its belt ([link removed]) of ([link removed]) warmongering ([link removed]) on ([link removed]) behalf ([link removed]) of ([link removed]) the ([link removed]) State ([link removed]) .
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ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the New York Times at [email protected] (mailto:[email protected]) or via Bluesky: @NYTimes.com ([link removed]) . Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your message in the comments thread here.
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