Like many Americans, Saturday morning I woke up with a sense of déjà vu. Footage of military strikes against Venezuela, authorised by President Donald Trump, gave me flashbacks to the “shock and awe” I witnessed when we invaded Iraq. My stomach turned, not just as a sometime-foreign policy analyst, but as an Appalachian. I’ve seen this film before; it does not end well for rural communities like mine.
Almost immediately, anti-war protests broke out in small towns and cities across the heartland, including Johnstown, Pennsylvania and Iowa City, Iowa. Some protestors, perhaps even most, will have turned out to oppose Donald Trump, “blood for oil,” and what to me seems a clear violation of international law.
Those are important points, but I will leave it to others to litigate them.
For many protestors, though, I don’t doubt their reasons were more personal. My first thoughts went not to the geopolitical implications of the extraordinary rendition of a sovereign head of state, however cruel and brutal he may be, but to the boys and girls who will be called upon to fight these neo-imperial wars should the Trump administration’s expansionist policies escalate as White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller indicated in an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper on Monday.
Already, the impact of the action in Venezuela is falling disproportionately on the shoulders of rural Americans. On Sunday, the Telegraph – a British right-wing newspaper sympathetic to MAGA and the Trump administration – published a piece exploring how the president’s economic policies are hurting rural America. Given how Trump has framed this action explicitly as a desire to seize Venezuela’s oil, that framing matters; by Trump’s own admission, this was an act of economic imperialism as much as it was the arrest of a violent dictator on drug charges.
We’re already seeing the fallout. The day after the attack, MarketWatch reported how military actions in Venezuela may worsen the affordability crisis, especially in rural America, where increasing diesel prices as a result of Trump’s actions. This comes amidst a growing rural economic emergency in which our farmers are being squeezed, our hospitals are closing, our homes are becoming unaffordable, and crackdowns on immigration and the rollback of Covid-era developments and assistance risk tanking rural economies in 2026.
But to policymakers in Washington, these boys and girls are known as “troops.” They are routinely thanked for their service, but it is increasingly evident that this is a meaningless platitude. To rural Americans, these troops are our sons and daughters, friends and neighbours. We thank them for their service, too, but we mean it. Unlike politicians in Washington, we understand what that service costs them.
Rural patriotism is often confused with jingoism. I won’t deny a strain of nationalistic hubris running through the rural body politic; I see it every day in the aggressive bumper stickers and performative flag-waving of local businesses, churches, and public officials.
I was a junior in high school in 2003. Opposed to “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” I found myself a lone voice of dissent in my eastern Kentucky classrooms. Teachers called me “anti-American,” while classmates compared me (unfavourably, though I took it as a badge of honour) to The Chicks.
Yet let me be clear: None of us were under any illusions. We knew the war would touch us, and many of my peers and teachers supported the invasion not so much because they supported its aims but because they supported the troops – troops they knew would disproportionately come from rural communities like ours.As the Daily Yonder reported in 2009, we were correct: Rural young men and women were injured and killed at disproportionately high rates in the Bush-era wars. We mourn their sacrifices, but we celebrate their heroism. In my hometown of Leslie County, Kentucky, our swimming pool is named for Willie Sandlin, a World War I hero and Medal of Honor recipient. Richard Nixon, aside from Watergate, is remembered for his nefarious machinations in Vietnam; still, he made his first public appearance post-resignation in our county when we named our high school gym after him. In 2018, our rugged and rural county of just over 10,000 people was made home to a state veterans cemetery, set on 42 acres in the beautiful Cumberland Mountains.
My own brother served 20 years in the U.S. Army, seeing combat in Iraq and Afghanistan. Classmates of mine brought back wounds, some visible, many hidden, that have yet to, and perhaps never will, heal. That is the price they paid, but they paid it willingly, and for many, they would pay it again.
Working with active duty servicemembers at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, I learned how many enlisted not primarily, or not even, for a job and the promise of upward mobility – though certainly that is appealing – but because they saw the military as a calling, an act of public service, a patriotic way to give back to the country they love. They believe in liberty, in the promise of the Declaration of Independence, in the guarantees of the Constitution.
This, I insist, is admirable. It is also a massive reason I felt sick watching bombs drop on Caracas. An unabashed war for oil against a petrol state? Like I said, I’ve seen this film before.
At my 20-year high school reunion in 2024, I struck up a brief conversation with a classmate who served in Iraq. He carried the scars of that war in his psyche, and it was clear the years had not all been kind to him. Yet he was proud of his service, and underneath the pain, I saw the boy I remembered – traumatized, yes, but still proud of his service to a country he loved. I thought about him six months later when Trump’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (“DOGE”) hacked away at the services he earned, the very least we owed him for the hell he experienced on behalf of an increasingly ungrateful nation.
Rural America needs investment, not imperialism. There are many things this administration and Republican-controlled Congress should focus on to help rural communities, but one of the most pressing ones is getting HR 3951 – the bipartisan Rural Veterans’ Improved Access to Benefits Act – passed through the Senate and signed by the president. The bill will expand the list of providers who can perform disability exams and allow greater access to VA benefits for rural Americans who may live far from a VA hospital or facility.
Our communities are hurting, but even in times of great pain rural America has always stepped up for this country. Our boys and girls have bled for us. As men and women, they deserve fairer treatment.
Trump’s expansionist policies risk falling disproportionately on the shoulders of a new generation of rural patriots. The least we can do is help those who sacrifice for the country they love afford healthcare and homes in the communities they love.
Skylar Baker-Jordan is a columnist and essayist covering international and domestic politics, public policy, and culture in the USA and UK. His work has appeared at The Independent, Newsweek, Huff Post UK, and elsewhere. He lives in East Tennessee.
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