Why is the United Stated constantly engaged in war? Jeffrey Sachs answered this question in a discussion with Glenn Greenwald:

The fundamental problem is that American foreign policy is against the interests of the American people, and therefore it is based on continuous lying. This is not new to Ukraine or to Gaza. Of course, it was part of the Iraq War. It was part of Syria. How many Americans understand that Obama ordered the CIA to overthrow the Syrian government? Almost not discussed. U.S. foreign policy is based on the idea that the U.S. should be the world's hegemonic power, the unchallenged, unrivaled power in every region of the world: full-spectrum dominance, meaning economic, military, technological, diplomatic, and financial dominance in every part of the world. It's completely delusional. It's delusional. Well, maybe there was a brief period after World War II when the U.S. stood dominant because the U.S. hadn't been destroyed militarily. Maybe there was a moment, and there was, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, when the U.S., in a way, was unrivaled. But life is a little bit more complicated than the United States holding all the pieces in the world. Since we don't, trying to do so means nonstop wars. And if it was explained to the American people, “Hey, Americans, how do you feel about nonstop wars so that the U.S. can be the unchallenged power of the whole world?” People would say, “Are you crazy? Leave me alone. I gotta go back to work. I'm trying to raise my kids. You stop sending us so many threats, taxes, trillions of military spending, and so on. They never buy this stuff.

And so, the whole thing is based on lies. We have to go into Iraq. We know it's not us in Syria, it's the Russians in Syria. It's not us in Ukraine, it's Putin, unprovoked, and on and on. It's such sad nonsense. But since it's based on lies, it has to be secret. Also, it cannot be that there's open discourse. You cannot allow open discourse when the lying is so relentless. And so, it comes naturally that if you want to do something that is not possible, that is delusional and is not what the public wants, and you have at least a formal structure of democracy that we have elections and so forth and there's supposed to be some voice of the people, then you have to lie, and when you have to lie, then everything has to be confidential. Then the worst crime in America, as you know very well because you reported on it more than anyone else in our country, is that you have to make the greatest criminal, the one who tells the truth, or the one who leaks the truth, or the one who exposes the lie, and that becomes the modus operandi of the Imperial State. So, to my mind, the whole thing starts with the wrong premise, which is that the only way the United States can be safe in the world is to run the world, which is both impossible extraordinarily costly, and extraordinarily threatening to our survival.