To Win Against the Right, We Must Challenge U.S. Militarism
By
Diana Duarte , Christine Ahn and Marie Berry Article published:June 11, 2025
“The Feminist Peace Playbook” charts a path to real security, which is grounded in human rights, collective care, and community safety.
The full frontal assault on human rights and democracy we’re seeing in the U.S. today is animated by the militarism that has plagued policymaking for more than a century. Under Republican and Democratic administrations alike, the massive Pentagon budget has leached resources from health, housing, and other human needs. As a country, we have grown accustomed to the lie that we can bomb our way to security. Millions have paid the price, from communities worldwide on the frontlines of U.S. wars to marginalized communities here at home deprived of basic services.
The need to challenge U.S. militarism has never been more urgent. Authoritarians rely on militarism to stoke fear, silence dissent, and concentrate control. Trump has done this expertly—treating both migrants and political opponents as security threats, all while pumping billions into a war machine that bankrupts our social safety net. He’s doubled down on military spending in preparation for the next war, reinforced border controls to keep out those fleeing conflict, and used fear to create a pervasive sense of insecurity in many people’s minds.
His playbook is clear—but we have our own playbook to help us challenge Trump and the authoritarian movement he propels: the Feminist Peace Playbook: A Guide for Transforming US Foreign Policy. The Playbook outlines concrete strategies to challenge militarized U.S. foreign policy by advancing a feminist peace framework. Noting the urgency of the current threats to democracy, we offer a clear choice: Double down on fear and militarism or redefine the United States’ place in the world through feminist principles of care, human rights, and justice.
Download the Feminist Peace Playbook (PDF)
Who made the Feminist Peace Playbook, and why?
The Feminist Peace Initiative—co-founded by MADRE, Women Cross DMZ, and the Grassroots Global Justice Alliance—came together in 2020 to grapple with the decades-long harms of militarized U.S. policy, and to think strategically together about what transforming that policy would require. In 2024, we partnered with the Inclusive Global Leadership Initiative at the University of Denver to hold a Feminist Peace Summit, bringing together almost 250 participants drawn from movement leaders, researchers, funders, media, and policymakers in several sectors. The Playbook emerged from that summit, and from months and years of debating and strategizing with feminist peace allies.
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Our approach aligns with broader progressive efforts to transform policymaking, contributing to this ecosystem while maintaining a specific focus on the role of gender and feminist values in our analysis, organizing, and recommendations. It centers the leadership of directly impacted communities and diasporas, here at home and across borders. And crucially, it demands that we work together across silos in a cross-sectoral strategy to build movement power.
We developed the Playbook because we recognized the urgent need for a strategy to challenge authoritarians that is not solely reactive. We need a strategy that isn’t focused only on winning midterm elections in 2026 or thwarting the MAGA surge in U.S. politics. Instead, any successful strategy to challenge Trump will need to grapple with the way that militarism has propped up illiberal interests and forces in American politics across both parties for decades—otherwise, a resurgence of right-wing populists will never be far from the horizon.
Our work will need to build a visionary alternative—an effective counterweight to the strongman version of security that equates more safety with more weapons, more walls, and more wars. Real security is grounded in human rights, collective care, and community safety.
Obstacles to centering militarism
To be sure, there are also significant obstacles to bringing discussions of war and militarism to the foreground in our organizing. First, as domestic crises dominate our headlines, it can be hard to draw attention to US militarism and war-making, especially when it is seen as a threat against people far from home. But the boundary between domestic and foreign issues is often an illusion, as evidenced when we see local police deploy military equipment to target protestors or when we see the increasing militarization of our borders and immigration policies.
Another obstacle to feminist peace movement-building is frankly that militarism is too complicated and opaque. Some have ably researched the military-industrial complex that has rooted into all aspects of our life, and the resulting picture can easily overwhelm. Combined with common narratives that U.S. militarism is not only all-encompassing but that it’s also essential to our national security, people can be easily lulled into a comfort with the status quo. What’s more, the peace and demilitarization movement is perennially under-resourced and now confronted with authoritarian backlash against vital organizing work.
We name these obstacles so as to clearly lay out the landscape ahead, with all its pitfalls and obstacles—and determine our best strategies to navigate them as we move forward.
What are the Playbook’s strategies, and how can we bring them to life?
The Feminist Peace Playbook identifies a set of core strategies: increasing public awareness of militarism; redefining national security; bridging divides to build power, and grounding policymaking in movements. We offer ideas on initial “plays” to enact those strategies, directed at activists, researchers, policymakers, funders and media.
Increasing Public Awareness of Militarism
We have an unprecedented political opening right now as Americans are wearier of war than ever. Public opinion about past U.S.-led wars has shifted. Today, for example, 62% of Americans believe the Iraq War was not worth fighting. Younger generations are especially disillusioned with militarized U.S. policy, with the majority of Gen Z and Millennials believing that the Pentagon budget should be reduced. Even Trump came to power with the promise of ending war—a position that exploited this public frustration with endless war, albeit without any real commitment to ending the systems that fuel it.
In the Playbook, we argue that the first step towards countering militarism will be to raise public awareness of those systems. Some progressives have sounded alarms for decades over the dangers of a highly-militarized society, from overdependence on the military and police to safeguard community safety, to the normalization of violence in everyday life. Many Americans have gotten used to military recruiters at high schools, police responding to mental health crises, and the mobilization of the National Guard at our southern border.
But now we’re witnessing in real time the Trump administration deploying U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to abduct, incarcerate, and deport legal residents without due process. Police and government agents are targeting immigrants and students protesting genocide. And as if that weren’t enough, the Republicans are slashing Medicaid, SNAP, and other vital programs—on top of the programs that the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) decimated—and proposing a $1 trillion handout to the Pentagon.
We call for strengthening research and education on militarism and its costs. One way to do this is by elevating the various projects that help to educate the public about militarism and threat of nuclear war, such as The Costs of War Project, the National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies, or the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists. We need to stress the ways militarism can feed displacement, gender violence, ecological harm, climate change, substance abuse, intergenerational trauma, and more.
We also need to tell stories about the way people are resisting militarism, and to collaborate with artists and cultural influencers to promote these stories in popular media. There are countless examples that can inspire us, such as the activists tirelessly protesting the expansion of U.S. military bases overseas or the veterans’ groups advocating for alternatives to war.
Redefining national security and bridging divides to build power
The Playbook calls for social movements to actively redefine our paradigm of national security and to organize key constituencies to build support for our perspective and program.
Feminists and progressives have long outlined the way that safety must be rooted in care for people and the planet we live on. Movements need to collaborate with media justice organizations to advance a narrative strategy about real safety.
If there was ever a time for progressives to lean into the “divest to invest” narrative, it’s now. We have to both make clear militarism’s harmful impacts and demand alternatives that tangibly improve Americans’ welfare and safety. The good news is that most Americans support cutting Pentagon spending and reinvesting the money in jobs, healthcare, and other programs that directly improve Americans’ lives.
A major obstacle to actually cutting Pentagon spending is the perception that deterrence—maintaining massive military power, and especially nuclear readiness, to intimidate other countries from attacking—is vital to securing peace. The problem with this logic is that deterrence is not synonymous with peace and instead triggers a counter-reaction from adversaries, further fueling a dangerous and out-of-control arms race. For example, every spring and fall, the U.S. and South Korea hold provocative joint military exercises, deploying B-2 bombers, nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, and submarines; and conducting pre-emptive strikes simulating “decapitation measures” against the North Korean regime. The U.S. says these are for “readiness,” but North Koreans view them as rehearsals for war. Not surprisingly, studies show that these war drills create a more threatening security environment and elicit greater provocation from Pyongyang.
Here’s where progressives have an opening to advance a positive vision for the U.S. role in the world. As President Trump upends U.S. foreign policy and trashes historic alliances, he’s willing to buck the bipartisan consensus against engaging historic adversaries. That’s because the majority of Americans want the U.S. to engage in diplomacy to reduce tensions. According to an April 2025 Harris Poll commissioned by AFSC, 70% of Americans say President Trump should meet Kim Jong Un and 66% say the U.S. should engage China to defuse tensions.
That’s why the Playbook calls for an intersectional approach to tackling militarism by coalescing key movements, such as anti-war veterans, diaspora groups, and those working on climate justice, migration, and abolition to transform U.S. foreign policy. For example, diaspora-led organizations, representing communities whose homelands have been devastated by U.S. wars, can educate policymakers and the public about the impact of militarized U.S. foreign policy on their families abroad and the costs of forever-war on us at home.
Grounding Policymaking in Movements
In the Playbook, we name a fatal flaw in our efforts to demilitarize U.S. policymaking: “To date, we have lacked a sufficiently strong, accountable, locally rooted, and transnational constituency to hold U.S. policymakers responsible for the impacts of militarized policy, including their complicity in human rights violations and war crimes.” If we can strengthen all the strategies named above—using research and media to build awareness of U.S. militarism, redefining national security, and building movement power—we will begin to fill that gap and build that constituency.
But movement power and a larger constituency do not automatically translate to transformed policy. For that, we need to build and strengthen on-ramps and tools to bring that feminist peace analysis and movement power into policy spaces.
Many organizations have worked for years to create those channels. The Korea Peace Now! Grassroots Network has connected peace organizers across the U.S. and the Korean diaspora to build Congressional support for peace efforts. MADRE’s Feminist Policy Jumpstart has bridged the demands of feminist peacebuilders from Haiti, Colombia, Iraq, Palestine, Sudan, and beyond with opportunities to influence U.S. policymaking.
Right now, some progressive policy champions are stepping up to confront a rising oligarchy and attacks on our democracy. When we launched the Feminist Peace Playbook in Washington, DC earlier this month, U.S. Representatives Ilhan Omar and Delia Ramirez spoke with great urgency at our press conference about the need to confront policies that default to violence and war. While their progressive position is currently disempowered in our politics, it speaks to a majority constituency that is tired of U.S. war-making and hungry for policies that invest in human well-being. There are new and urgent possibilities for collaboration with allies in domestic and international movements to connect that popular drive with policymaking potentials.
What Comes Next?
The future, while marked with all these new and old dangers, also holds many vital opportunities to enact the strategies contained in our Feminist Peace Playbook. In the months ahead, we will be doing just that. We will join and create convening spaces to share information and bridge divides across movements, and channel the resulting insights into progressive policy spaces. We will organize with philanthropic allies to create new vehicles for mobilizing funding for alternatives to militarism. We will seed our narrative into media and popular education.
No one individual or organization can take on all these options. But we must each understand our roles and how to better collaborate. We can pick the path we want to prioritize for the journey ahead, and remember all the allies accompanying us to the point on the horizon we seek: a peaceful, just and demilitarized U.S. foreign policy.
