War Hurts Us All

By Austin Headrick
American Friends Service Committee (AFSC)

War hurts us all. It always has. As President Dwight Eisenhower said nearly three years into the Korean War, “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.” The millions of Koreans who experienced the destructive costs of the Korean War know this truth acutely. Seventy-six years later, the cost—in lives and dollars—spent on that war has not produced peace for Koreans. Today, the billions of dollars and thousands of lives taken by the U.S. and Israel’s illegal war against Iran will not produce peace for the people of Iran or the rest of the world. We must use our voice to say no to more wars.


This war is illegal

On February 27, 2026, the U.S. and Israel launched airstrikes on cities across Iran, killing Iranian leader Ali Khamenei and hundreds of civilians. Just one day earlier, Oman’s foreign minister had announced a diplomatic breakthrough: Iran had agreed to stop stockpiling enriched uranium and to accept full verification by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). An agreement was within reach. Talks were scheduled to resume on March 2. Then the United States and Israel began a war without Congressional approval. The IAEA confirmed there was no evidence of Iran building a nuclear bomb and urged the return to diplomacy and negotiations. This war did not happen because diplomacy failed. It happened because the U.S. abandoned diplomacy.

The war against Iran is illegal under both U.S. and international law and opposed by most people in the United States. President Trump bypassed Congress and began this war without authorization—an executive war-making precedent set by Truman at the start of the Korean War. In 1950, Truman sent U.S. troops to Korea without a congressional declaration of war, calling it a “police action” rather than a war. That decision cost 3 million lives and set a precedent that presidents have since used to wage war without the consent of the American people or their representatives. Trump is following the same playbook—and the consequences, as Koreans know too well, can last for decades. The Trump administration’s disregard for the rule of law endangers all of us.

The war costs too much

Koreans are already paying for this war through reduced crude oil imports, historic stock market drops, and rising grocery bills, heating bills, and gas prices. On top of this, the U.S. has taken the THAAD missile defense system—the system that cost Korea $7.5 billion in economic damage when China retaliated in 2017—out of Korea and redeployed it to the Middle East to fight a war Koreans never asked for


Among the administration’s claims justifying the attacks against Iran was the need to intervene following the Iranian government’s killing of thousands of its own citizens in the streets in January. Such horrific state violence is abhorrent. As a Quaker advocate of peace, I mourn this loss of life. I must hold two truths in tension: that the Iranian regime committed brutal acts, and this war is illegal and catastrophic. The Trump administration’s claims about helping the Iranian people fall flat when the U.S. government is dropping bombs on over 600 Iranian schools and hospitals and the President is threatening that “a whole civilization will die” in Iran. In five weeks, U.S. and Israeli strikes have killed over 1600 civilians and displaced millions of people. Bombing Iranian civilians does not help people—it kills them.

Koreans have seen this story unfold before. An estimated 3 million people, approximately 20 percent of the population on the Korean Peninsula, were killed in the Korean War. American bombers targeted “everything that moved in North Korea, every brick standing on top of another,” according to senior State Department official Dean Rusk. Both Koreas were left in devastation and destitution. The Korean War has cost the U.S. and South Korea over a trillion dollars over the past 76 years. South Korea spends $1 billion annually just to host 28,500 U.S. troops. Now we hear the Pentagon tell Congress that the first week of the Iran war cost more than $11.3 billion, then requested $200 billion more from American taxpayers. Trump then requested warships from South Korea and other allies (though he was dissatisfied with their response). All that money spent on war has not and will not bring peace—not to Korea nor to Iran. War takes resources away from caring for the elderly, educating children, housing families, and providing infrastructure. No one wins in war because war hurts us all.

What we can do

Sixty-one percent of people in the U.S. oppose the war against Iran. This is the most unpopular U.S. war has ever been at its inception. In South Korea, 55 percent oppose their government’s support of the war, and 89 percent worry the war will continue. This is an opportunity to turn opposition into action.

Because Koreans are bearing many costs from this war, they have justification to urge their government to refuse further involvement and support an end to the war. The National Assembly has constitutional authority over overseas military deployments. Civil society can advocate that lawmakers exercise that authority by standing firm that there will be no Korean naval deployment to the Strait of Hormuz and no transfer of Korean-made weapons systems to countries participating in this war. Spain has given a powerful example of what principled refusal looks like by denying the U.S. use of its military bases and closing its airspace to U.S. aircraft involved in strikes against Iran, even under threat of trade retaliation. South Korea can and should follow that example.

Civil society must ask for more than refusal, they must call for peace. A fragile two-week ceasefire was reached on April 8, but it is already at risk of collapse. We must all call on our elected leaders to support a permanent ceasefire. How many more lives and how much more money are we willing to spend on a legacy of wars that prove, time and again, that war hurts us all?

※Austin Headrick is the Public Education and Advocacy Coordinator for Asia at American Friends Service Committee. Prior to joining AFSC, Austin lived in South Korea for seven years, working on peace education. Austin obtained an MA in Korean Studies from Hankuk University of Foreign Studies in Seoul.

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