During the 2020 presidential election, when millions of Americans were being bombarded with appeals from Joe Biden and Donald Trump, Brittany Ramos DeBarros called out a glaring flaw in both candidates: neither was genuinely antiwar.

As an Afghanistan veteran, DeBarros could not forgive Biden for supporting open-ended warfare in the Middle East. Writing on behalf of About Face, a network of post-9/11 veterans and active-duty service members, the thirty-one-year-old former army captain lamented the fact that neither major party had fielded an antiwar candidate. “Many of us deployed under the Obama-Biden administration,” she wrote, and witnessed a supposedly anti-occupation White House’s “devastating expansion of militarism.”

President Trump, on the other hand, was “doubling down on those wars” by dropping “record-breaking numbers of bombs on Afghanistan and beyond,” negotiating the largest arms deal in US history, and expanding “terrifying state violence” at home against police brutality protesters.