There is a question that refuses to go away, no matter how many press conferences are held, no matter how many flags are draped over coffins, no matter how many speeches invoke freedom and democracy and the protection of interests. The question is this: when the smoke clears, who is actually lying in the rubble?
The answer, consistently, is not the soldiers.
Brown University’s Costs of War Project has spent years counting. Its conclusion is not comfortable reading for anyone who still believes that modern warfare is primarily a military affair. Researchers estimate that over 940,000 people were killed by direct post-September 11 war violence in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Pakistan between 2001 and 2023. Of these, more than 432,000 were civilians. And that figure is only the direct toll. The project estimates that indirect deaths, those resulting not from combat but from the devastation wars leave behind, from wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen have reached between 3.6 and 3.7 million.
Women. Children. Farmers. Teachers. People who never held a weapon in their lives.
Meanwhile, 38 million people have been displaced by the post-September 11 wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, and the Philippines. Thirty-eight million human beings, uprooted, scattered, reduced to statistics in a report that most governments would rather not discuss at their next summit.
This is what some are now willing to name plainly: not collateral damage, not the tragic cost of liberty, but a pattern. A recurring one. One that seems to follow a particular logic, and that logic has a very specific geography. The wars are never in the capitals of those who start them.
When Did Your Interests Fly to Niger?
The question deserves to be asked loudly, and asked again. When France announced it would protect its interests in Niger, when Washington spoke of its interests in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Syria, a simple follow-up never seemed to make it into the press conference: whose interests, exactly? And when did those interests cross an ocean and plant themselves in someone else’s soil?
This is not a new argument. It is, in fact, one of the oldest and most documented critiques of Western foreign policy. What is changing is the willingness to say it plainly, without the softening language of diplomacy.
The Other Battlefield: Debt
The military dimension is only half of the story. The second front is financial, and it is arguably more durable in its consequences.
The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) reported in June 2025 that global public debt reached an all-time high of US$102 trillion in 2024, with developing countries’ debt having grown twice as fast as that of advanced economies since 2010. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank sit at the centre of this architecture.
The IMF and World Bank policies are often structured to ensure that the loans or assistance they provide yield returns. Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs), introduced in the early 1980s, were designed to address interest rate spikes and high commodity prices in developing countries, but have faced significant criticism for their long-term consequences on African economies.
Nigeria’s long engagement with the IMF illustrates a pattern that critics describe as cyclical. Between 2015 and 2024, Nigeria’s public debt surged, with over 90 percent of revenue at one point dedicated to debt servicing. IMF-advised reforms, including fuel subsidy removals and value-added tax increases, while aimed at fiscal balance, sparked widespread protests and disproportionately burdened the poorest households.
A March 2025 study found that the Global North has approximately nine times more voting power at the IMF than the Global South when adjusted for population size. The United States accounts for 16.49 percent of votes on the IMF board while representing only 4.22 percent of the world’s population.
An institution that governs the financial futures of billions of the world’s poorest people, in which those people have almost no voice. One might ask what word applies to that arrangement.
The Conscience Question
What is striking about the most powerful critiques of this system is not their anger, it is their precision. The argument is not that all Americans are cruel, or that all Western governments act in bad faith on every issue. The argument is structural. It is about systems that have been designed, over generations, to extract value from the Global South and concentrate it elsewhere. Systems that use the language of development while producing the conditions of dependency. Systems that speak of peace while funding the machinery of war.
From 2020 to 2024, private firms received US$2.4 trillion in contracts from the Pentagon, approximately 54 percent of the department’s discretionary spending of US$4.4 trillion over that period. War, in other words, is not simply a political choice. It is an industry. And industries require customers, raw materials, and markets. The Global South has provided all three.
None of this means that every conflict is manufactured, or that no intervention has ever served a legitimate purpose. Complexity is real. But complexity cannot be used as a permanent excuse to avoid accountability.
The voices now asking the hardest questions are not coming from the margins. They are coming from economists, historians, United Nations special rapporteurs, and from the streets of Nairobi, Lagos, Accra, and Dakar, where people are paying the price of debt-servicing agreements they had no hand in negotiating, for loans whose terms were written in cities they have never visited.
The question of who benefits from war, and who pays for it, is no longer an abstract one. The numbers are in. The dead have been counted. The displaced have been tallied.
What remains is the question of what, if anything, the world intends to do about it.
