What goes around comes around.

That is the terrible law of blowback.

When the United States bombs another country, threatens its government, kills its people, occupies its territory or attempts to dictate its future, the consequences do not remain safely contained thousands of miles away.

They come home.

They come home in flag-draped coffins and shattered military families. They come home in retaliatory attacks on American bases and embassies. They come home through terrorist plots, cyber sabotage, disrupted shipping lanes, higher energy prices, depleted weapons stockpiles, and trillions of dollars in debt.

They come home through hacked water systems, vulnerable power grids, heightened domestic surveillance, militarized police and government demands that the American people surrender still more freedom in exchange for the promise of protection from dangers the government itself helped create.

This is blowback.

Blowback isn't just about war. It's about the consequences of the rash, heedless and heartless decisions made every day by the actors of the American police state—and the fact that it is "we the people" who will be paying the price for those terrible decisions for years to come.

President Trump's war with Iran is only the latest reminder that no government can bomb, threaten and police the world indefinitely without eventually bringing the consequences home.

For months, the Trump administration has lurched between war and threatened war, massive bombing campaigns and aborted strikes, demands for surrender and claims that peace is imminent.

There appears to be no coherent plan for ending the conflict.

There is, however, a mounting bill—and it will be paid in American lives, American dollars, American security and American freedom.

This is what happens when a government appoints itself judge, jury, executioner and police officer to the world.

The government creates enemies faster than it can kill them.

It destabilizes one country, then uses the resulting chaos to justify intervening in another. It bombs in the name of peace, occupies in the name of freedom, surveils in the name of security, and retaliates against retaliation in an endless cycle of violence that serves the war machine while leaving ordinary people everywhere less safe.

We have seen this before.

Every president promises that the next military intervention will be limited, targeted, necessary and decisive. Every president promises that overwhelming force will restore order. Every president assures us that the experts know what they are doing.

Yet the wars continue, the enemies multiply, the costs rise, the Constitution contracts, and the American people are left to cope with the consequences.