In 1934, a best-selling book called Merchants of Death made a simple and outrageous argument: that arms manufacturers had conspired to drag the United States into World War I because war was good for their business. The accusation was not entirely fair — the book's own authors admitted munitions makers were not the sole cause of American involvement — but it captured something real about the profit motive in warfare. The Senate convened the Nye Committee to investigate. Senator Gerald Nye declared that the committee had found men "striving to defend acts which found them nothing more than international racketeers, bent upon gaining profit through a game of arming the world to fight itself."
Ninety years later, the accusation deserves updating. The merchants of death have new products and new distribution channels. They don't sell weapons. They sell confusion.
Consider what happened in March 2026, when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sat in a Jerusalem café and held up his hands.
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