America’s Condottieri Wars
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By Todd Davis
Kill ‘em all, and let God sort ‘em out.
You’ve seen the t-shirt. Read the bumper sticker. The guy expressing it usually is sporting camo pants. Likely toting a gun rack in his vehicle. Maybe you snicker at the testosterone-soaked sentiment of another era. The statement itself now is cliche, so overused that, like many cliches, you may not even remember exactly what it means or was meant to convey.
Would you be surprised to discover that the phrase originated in the Middle Ages and not as a counter-revolutionary statement to the 1960s peace movement philosophy opposing the Vietnam War?
Arnaud Amalric, a Cistercian monk leading a Crusader army at the sacking of Beziers during the Albigensian Crusade, was attributed with saying,
Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius.
From Latin, which translates to Kill them all. For the Lord knoweth them that are his. And Amalric did, putting 20,000 people, irrespective of rank, sex, or age, to the sword.
The context in which Amalric used it essentially means that the distinction between who is a true believer and who is not should be left to God, and therefore, there is no need for careful discernment in the killing. The phrase is often used in a more metaphorical sense today. It can describe a policy of extreme measures, a willingness to accept any consequences, or a fatalistic attitude towards a difficult situation.
In other words, a rather apt description of American foreign policy for the last 75 years.
Strength and Honor, the Western Way
Strength and military power are the only things that the modern geopolitical West respects. And by military power, I don’t mean the doctrine of mutually assured destruction. Having nuclear weapons provides some cover, but the decision-making nerve centers in Washington and Brussels don’t believe anyone will use the Bomb. You must therefore wage war violently with unbridled aggression to get their attention. Because that’s how they fight.
Iraq, twice, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Serbia, Yemen, the half dozen countries Israel has pounced upon, leading up to the current campaign against Iran. When America, Israel, and the tag-along NATO countries who joined whatever iteration of the newest coalition of the willing as assembled decide, often on the flimiest of circumstances needed to generate a casus belli, to go in they break everything they can as fast as they can.
Usually, these are air war missions, the favored provenance of NATO operations. Thousands, tens of thousands of civilians get killed. But who cares, am I right? Amalric didn’t, and the generals and admirals leading these operations sure don’t seem to care either. All civilian concerns are made subsidiary to the mission.
50,000 dead in Gaza? Oh well, gotta get rid of Hamas. And most of those were probably Hamas supporters anyway. Didn’t they elect Hamas fifteen years ago? The idea that almost all these wars would be viewed as religious wars in Amalric’s time doesn’t even phase anyone. Drop the bombs, broadcast to your citizens that you are making the world safer, and let God sort it out.
The West Only Respects Might
Russia made mistakes in its Special Military Operation when it tried a limited action involving less than 150,000 men attempting to secure independence for the DPR and LPR. The Russians thought they could fight a limited war that would restore freedom to Russian-speaking people in Ukraine. That failed when NATO went all in and turned a small regional dispute into a major war.
Even after that, Russia has fought the cleanest war in modern history. Ukrainian civilian casualties are remarkably low. Russia continues to refrain from attacks on civilians and all the arteries that make up a modern state. Electricity, the internet, and water all remain on in Ukraine. All the bridges over the Dnieper are still standing, never having been targeted by Russia. Russia has been the anti-Amalic, exceedingly cautious and careful, asking not God but the Kremlin to ensure that their fellow Slavs aren’t cut down in waves, burning under the fire of Federation bombs.
That restraint is viewed as weakness by the West. Russia doesn’t have any missiles. Russia isn’t as strong as we thought. Russia can’t put away little Ukraine. Russia is weak. You’ve heard variations of this a hundred times.
Had Russia gone into Ukraine the way America went into Iraq, the West would have had a different reaction. Waves of planes blowing up bridges and targeting Ukrainian cities in the shock and awe that the West is infatuated with would have engendered a much different response. But Kiev doesn’t look like Gaza, does it? And that only emboldened the West as they have sent billions (a trillion by now?) of money and munitions to Ukraine. Showing restraint and mercy is weakness. Blowing up pagers is strength.
America’s Mercenaries
Ukraine and Israel. The Neocons call them allies, although what benefit they provide to the United States is difficult to find. At best, it’s ephemeral, an idea of defending democracy against the Asiatic hordes. That itself is an antiquated propaganda-laced idea more fitting of a recruitment poster in 1914 than a reason to support them in 2025.
And yet, support them, we do. Both nations are led by quasi-dictators loathed by large segments of their populations. Why? Because they only know war. Neither has any interest in peace. Zelensky has said, Give us weapons and we’ll do the rest. What do you call someone who fights for money?
Mercenaries. Or, a more appropriate term would be Condottieri.
The Condottieri of the Renaissance were not loyal to cause or creed. They sold their swords to the highest bidder, pledging allegiance not to principle but to profit. Replace the pikes and halberds with HIMARS and F-35s, and little has changed.
Ukraine and Israel posture as embattled bulwarks of freedom, but their true currency is conflict. The steady stream of American arms, aid, and political cover is not charity; it’s the price of keeping the machine running. Their existence as client states depends on the perpetual state of emergency. Peace would bring clarity. War brings contracts.
In Washington, this dynamic is often presented in the familiar guise of “shared values.” The talking heads recite the lines, you know them by heart now: defense of democracy, rules-based order, freedom against tyranny.
Behind the flag-draped platitudes, the reality is one of transactional warfare. Zelensky and Netanyahu are not freedom fighters. They are brokers, managing the flow of American resources to sustain their respective regimes. The grift is open-ended. Each new offensive, each escalation, guarantees another appropriation bill, another round of military-industrial largesse.
The Neocons have simply updated the medieval system. Instead of dukes and popes hiring mercenary companies, today’s patrons are Lockheed, Raytheon, and the Hill. Instead of Florentine gold florins, payment comes in the form of billion-dollar aid packages. And just like their Renaissance forebears, these Condottieri care little for the political consequences so long as the flow continues. Peace would ruin them.
The Permanent War Priesthood
Despite President Trump being elected by a MAGA base exhausted by forever wars that lead to nowhere, the familiar snake oil salesmen of the war machine have emerged from their dank rocks. Perpetually wrong John Bolton, a man who’s never been involved in a winning war and still gets booked on CNN constantly as an “expert”, is once again proclaiming that Iran is weak and we need only kick in the door and a positive regime change will follow.
New Gingrich, another fossilized relic of the Grand Old Party, said,
The replacement of the theocratic dictatorship in Iran with a secular government committed to peace with neighbors, prosperity for Iranians and a non-nuclear future is the only outcome of the current Israeli-Iranian war that would be a success.
One struggles to express how maddening this has become. We are in a bizarro world where Neocons pretend all their 57 other failed attempts at regime change never happened. Tell me, bright boy, Newt, how are you occupying Tehran to make this happen?
The Neocons’ favorite narcotic remains regime change. No matter how many times it fails, no matter how catastrophic the outcome, they return to it like degenerate gamblers chasing losses at a rigged table. Iraq was supposed to be a shining beacon of freedom. Today, it’s a fragmented vassal state tethered more closely to Tehran than before a single American boot touched sand. Libya? A failed state now ruled by warlords and human traffickers, its streets flowing with African migrants and jihadis. Afghanistan? Twenty years, trillions spent, thousands of American lives lost, only for the Taliban to return in less than two weeks after our retreat.
Syria? Yemen? Somalia? Pick your graveyard. The playbook remains unchanged.
And yet, men like Bolton and Gingrich continue to issue their fraudulent prescriptions as though none of this ever happened. Their memories are conveniently short, their arrogance infinite. Bolton, with his Yosemite Sam mustache and adolescent fantasies of empire, imagines that Iran, ancient Persia, with a population of 90 million, a national identity forged over millennia, can be kicked in like some brittle door in Fallujah.
He’s never been right once, but somehow still sits under studio lights lecturing a numb public as an expert. Gingrich, puffed up with half-digested Claremont talking points, casually proposes the wholesale restructuring of an entire civilization from the comfort of a Fox News green room.
They talk of toppling regimes as if it’s some off-the-shelf software upgrade. Just swap out the dictator, and democracy will bloom. Reality is harsher: these projects always leave America bleeding treasure and credibility while the “liberated” descend into chaos. The American taxpayer foots the bill. The veterans bury their friends. The contractors cash the checks. The Beltway think tanks hold panel discussions and write white papers on lessons learned that nobody reads.
It’s not simply strategic failure; it’s a pathology. A priesthood that worships at the altar of neoliberal hegemony, addicted to the fantasy that with one more drone strike, one more CIA project, one more military intervention, paradise is just around the corner. There are not going to be any timeshare condos and tourist traps in Tehran or Gaza.
Meanwhile, the empire frays at home: infrastructure crumbles, cities rot, the border dissolves, and yet we are told that regime change on the other side of the planet is somehow vital to our national interest. If this is grand strategy, then the madhouse is calling the shots. Where is America First in this? How do any of us benefit from these endless mercenary entanglements?
The Tragedy of America’s Condottieri Wars
The ultimate irony of America’s Condottieri Wars is that while Ukraine and Israel wage war instead of accepting peace, funded, armed, and politically shielded by Washington, for America, these proxy wars inevitably become real wars. Wars we lose.
Ukraine bleeds Russian and Ukrainian men on battlefields far from our shores, but the cost to America metastasizes: depleted weapons stockpiles, an overstretched defense industry, endless debt-financed aid packages, and a growing risk of confrontation with a nuclear power. Israel levels Gaza, sparks regional escalation, and drags us deeper into conflicts that have burned for centuries before the United States even existed. Tel Aviv didn’t even wait this time; it started the war and attacked Iran. Now they claim they are “defending themselves.”
Their objective isn’t victory. It’s our involvement. That’s the true game.
For the Condottieri, American involvement is the prize. They want us there, always. The money flows, the weapons arrive, and their domestic enemies are silenced under the banner of external threats. Ukraine will never fully defeat Russia. Israel will never fully destroy its enemies. Neither wants peace. Peace would collapse the financial and political scaffolding that keeps their regimes afloat. The perpetual state of war is not a tragedy for them. It’s a strategy.
But for us, it is a tragedy. These limited wars inevitably mutate into open-ended commitments with no achievable objectives. We aren’t hiring Condottieri. We are the Condottieri now, selling American blood, treasure, and prestige to sustain foreign rulers who have mastered the art of keeping us on the hook. They control the tempo; we supply the resources. Every escalation, every fresh crisis, ensures the machine keeps spinning. They make the moves, and we are forced to react. They control our geopolitical policy. And when it fails, as it always does, it is not Zelensky or Netanyahu who pay the price. It is the American soldier, the American taxpayer, and the slow death of American strategic credibility.
This is the real cost of America’s Condottieri Wars: a self-inflicted bleeding that weakens the empire while enriching its parasites. We are not liberators. We are not defenders of democracy. We are the hired muscle for regimes that long ago realized they could play us like fools. And every year we continue, we move one step closer to becoming what every declining empire ultimately becomes: a bankrupt enforcer, fighting wars that aren’t ours, in places we don’t belong, for people who laugh at our stupidity.
Curtis Scoon is the founder of ScoonTv.com Download the ScoonTv App to join our weekly livestream every Tuesday @ 8pm EST!
