“Therefore let him who desires peace prepare for war”. – Vegetius’s work Dē Rē Mīlitārī (On Military Matters)

In international relations, war is not an aberration. It is a recurring reality of human history and political struggle. To wield power, states and peoples must understand that violence—whether economic, political, or military—is often the arbiter of outcomes. For African America, however, an obsession with peace, forgiveness, and moral suasion has become both an ideological anchor and a strategic handicap. At a time when the world is rapidly destabilizing, and when U.S. domestic politics is openly threatening African American existence through agendas like Project 2025, the inability of African American institutions to grapple with the inevitability of conflict leaves the community structurally unprepared for survival, let alone power.

This is not a call for bloodlust or warmongering. Rather, it is a recognition that the ability to navigate, prepare for, and—when necessary—deploy forms of power that are adversarial is essential to any people who wish to endure in a world defined by struggle. War, in all of its manifestations, is part of the ecosystem of power. To ignore it is to render oneself permanently vulnerable to those who do not.

African Americans have long tied their identity to the moral language of peace. From the nonviolence strategies of the civil rights movement to the emphasis on reconciliation after centuries of enslavement and terror, there has been a deep-rooted cultural assumption that peace is not only morally superior, but strategically viable as a pathway to liberation. The problem is that while peace may have symbolic weight, power respects capacity—not virtue.

The United States itself offers the clearest contradiction to African American pacifism. No country is more celebrated for its military prowess, no society more comfortable with the use of force to maintain and extend its influence globally. Yet African Americans, who live within this empire and are disproportionately sent to fight its wars, often imagine that the empire can be reformed through rhetoric and moral witness rather than institutional counterweight. This imbalance has left African America open to repeated betrayals. After Reconstruction, appeals to national conscience did not prevent the rise of Jim Crow. After civil rights legislation, moral appeals did not stop the rise of mass incarceration. And in our contemporary era, African America remains perpetually shocked that American democracy, whose flaws it has endured since inception, would produce a Project 2025 openly promising to roll back rights, purge dissent, and consolidate authoritarian control.

Project 2025 is not simply a conservative policy document—it is a domestic declaration of war. Its architects envision a sweeping dismantling of protections and institutions that safeguard African American advancement, from civil rights enforcement to access to higher education and economic opportunity. To imagine that such a program can be met with peace rhetoric is a tragic miscalculation. For African Americans, Project 2025 should be read in the same way states read foreign doctrines that threaten their sovereignty. The playbook is clear: weaken the institutional capacity of the opposition, consolidate resource control, and eliminate spaces of independent resistance. Public HBCUs, Black nonprofits, and civil rights organizations are already in the crosshairs, with attacks on DEI initiatives and federal funding channels. The battlefield is political, cultural, and financial, but it is still a battlefield. What makes African America’s position precarious is not simply that it is under threat—it is that it has almost no counter-strategy. There is little in the way of institutional war-gaming, no economic war chests designed for long-term political independence, and almost no organized preparation for scenarios where federal protections collapse. Peace as default orientation makes it difficult for leadership to even imagine that such preparation might be necessary.

The irony is that while African America clings to peace, U.S. foreign policy—the very policy executed in its name and with its sons and daughters in uniform—has never abandoned war. From Ukraine to Taiwan, from the Sahel to Gaza, American power is defined by its willingness to deploy force, manipulate governments, and impose sanctions to preserve its interests. These policies have direct implications for the African Diaspora. The instability in Haiti, worsened by decades of U.S. intervention and neglect, is not an abstraction; it is the frontline of African-descended people being left to chaos. In Africa, American policy oscillates between neglect and militarization, often leaving the continent vulnerable to external powers like China and Russia, both of whom openly treat Africa as a contested zone for resources and influence. For African Americans to ignore these dynamics is to accept passivity in a world where every other group is aligning institutions to global strategies. Jewish Americans have leveraged U.S. foreign policy to ensure the security and expansion of Israel. Cuban exiles in Florida shaped U.S. policy toward Havana for generations. Even Ukrainian Americans, once a marginal diaspora, mobilized institutions and networks to push Washington into massive aid commitments. African America, by contrast, has no institutional equivalent—no lobbying infrastructure, no sovereign funds, no aligned HBCU research apparatus—that can insert Diaspora interests into the machinery of American foreign policy.

The inability to influence U.S. policy is not proof of moral superiority—it is proof of strategic weakness. To be moral without power is to be ignored. To be moral with power is to be respected. War is not always about armies; it is about positioning, preparation, and leverage. African America must begin to think in these terms:

1. Institutional Wargaming: Just as the Pentagon runs simulations of conflict scenarios, African American think tanks, HBCUs, and policy organizations should model the impacts of political rollbacks like Project 2025. What does higher education look like under authoritarian rule? What happens if federal student aid is gutted? What if voting rights are curtailed in half the country? Peaceful wishes will not provide answers—serious planning will.
2. Economic Armament: Nations prepare for war by building stockpiles and reserves. African America must adopt the same mentality. This means establishing capital pools, sovereign-like funds, and cooperative economic mechanisms that allow for independence when hostile forces seize control of government. An institution without financial autonomy is always vulnerable.
3. Diaspora Diplomacy: African America must recognize that its fate is tied to African-descended populations globally. Diplomatic relations, whether through chambers of commerce, academic consortia, or cultural treaties, must be institutionalized between HBCUs and Caribbean/African states. Without this, U.S. foreign policy will continue to shape the Diaspora without African American input.
4. Cultural Reorientation: The narrative that peace equals progress must be broken. The community must embrace the reality that peace is a goal, but power is the means. To reverse the order is to live in perpetual defeat.

History offers countless examples of groups who understood that survival required preparation for conflict. Jewish institutions after World War II built financial, political, and military mechanisms to ensure that never again would they be defenseless. Irish Americans organized politically to keep Irish independence alive in U.S. foreign policy debates. Even smaller ethnic groups have formed PACs, think tanks, and lobbying firms that act as shields against political erasure. African America, with its 40 million people and trillions in GDP footprint, has the capacity to do the same—yet peace obsession diverts energy away from building such instruments. Instead, resources are spent on moral appeals, diversity trainings, and symbolic gestures that crumble at the first sign of hostility.

The 21st century is not trending toward peace. Great power conflict is on the rise. Climate change is creating resource wars. Migration crises are destabilizing borders. Authoritarian movements are growing in the United States and abroad. In this environment, the absence of preparation is not neutrality—it is surrender. Project 2025 is a domestic battlefield. U.S. foreign policy is a global battlefield. In both arenas, African America remains largely unarmed—not in the sense of physical weapons, but in the institutional, economic, and diplomatic tools necessary to survive and influence outcomes.

To be prepared for war is not to abandon peace. It is to recognize that peace is preserved only by those who can defend it. To fetishize peace without preparation is to confuse aspiration with strategy. African America’s obsession with peace is not a harmless cultural preference—it is a strategic liability. The world is already at war, and the United States is already shaping policies that destabilize the Diaspora. Project 2025 is not a hypothetical—it is a battle plan. The moral high ground without power is a graveyard. If African America wishes to be more than a footnote in history, it must shed the illusion that peace alone will save it. Power, preparation, and the willingness to engage in the hard realities of conflict—political, economic, and diplomatic—are the only pathways to survival and influence. War is part of the reality of power. To deny this is to deny history itself. The future will not be won by those who hope for peace, but by those who are prepared for war.

This is the moment for HBCU leaders, think tanks, business chambers, and cultural institutions to act as architects of strategy rather than caretakers of symbolism. Every boardroom, faculty senate, and philanthropic trust tied to African America must begin redirecting resources toward building institutional resilience and offensive capacity. The cost of waiting is irrelevance. The cost of unpreparedness is annihilation. The time to prepare is not when the war arrives, but now—before the community is once again caught with nothing but peace in a world that respects only power.

If African America is to endure in a world that is already at war, it must abandon the false comfort that peace alone can protect it. The moral high ground does not stop bullets, sanctions, or policies that weaken the Diaspora — power does. This moment demands that we build and fortify institutions that can think, plan, and act with the seriousness of nations: endowments that serve as war chests, schools and think tanks that train the next generation in strategy, and alliances across Africa and the Caribbean that expand our reach. We cannot afford to be sentimental when others are sharpening weapons; we must turn discipline into defense, resources into resilience, and unity into leverage. Peace will not be granted — it must be secured, and only those prepared for conflict will have the authority to declare it.

Disclaimer: This article was assisted by ChatGPT.