The
United States, as the near unanimous vote to
provide nearly $40 billion in aid to Ukraine
illustrates, is trapped in the death spiral of
unchecked militarism.
No high speed
trains. No universal health care. No viable
Covid relief program. No respite from 8.3
percent inflation. No infrastructure programs to
repair decaying roads and bridges, which require
$41.8
billion to
fix the 43,586 structurally
deficient bridges,
on average 68 years old.
No forgiveness of
$1.7 trillion in student debt.
No addressing income inequality. No program to
feed the 17
million children
who go to bed each night hungry. No rational gun
control or curbing of the epidemic of nihilistic
violence and mass shootings.
No help for the 100,000 Americans
who die each year of drug overdoses. No minimum
wage of $15 an hour to counter 44 years of wage
stagnation.
No respite from gas prices that are projected to
hit $6 a gallon.
The permanent war
economy, implanted since the end of World War
II, has destroyed the private economy,
bankrupted the nation, and squandered trillions
of dollars of taxpayer money. The monopolization
of capital by the military has driven the U.S.
debt to $30
trillion,
$6 trillion more than the U.S. GDP of $24
trillion. Servicing this debt costs $300 billion
a year.
We spent more on
the military, $813
billion for
fiscal year 2023, than the next nine countries,
including China and Russia, combined.
We are paying a
heavy social, political, and economic cost for
our militarism. Washington watches passively as
the U.S. rots, morally, politically,
economically, and physically, while China,
Russia, Saudi Arabia, India, and other countries
extract themselves from the tyranny of the U.S.
dollar and the international Society for
Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication
(SWIFT), a messaging network banks and other
financial institutions use to send and receive
information, such as money transfer
instructions.
Once the U.S.
dollar is no longer the world’s reserve
currency, once there is an alternative to SWIFT,
it will precipitate an internal economic
collapse. It will force the immediate
contraction of the U.S. empire shuttering most
of its nearly 800 overseas military
installations. It will signal the death of Pax
Americana.
Bi-Partisan Rot
Democrat or
Republican. It does not matter. War is the
raison d’état of the state. Extravagant military
expenditures are justified in the name of
“national security.” The nearly $40 billion
allocated for Ukraine, most of it going into the
hands of weapons manufacturers such as Raytheon
Technologies, General Dynamics, Northrop
Grumman, BAE Systems, Lockheed Martin, and
Boeing, is only the beginning.
Military
strategists, who say the war will be long and
protracted, are talking about infusions of $4 or
$5 billion in military aid a month to Ukraine.
We face existential threats. But these do not
count. The proposed budget for
the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
(CDC) in fiscal year 2023 is $10.675 billion.
The proposed budget for
the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is
$11.881 billion.
Ukraine alone gets
more than double that amount. Pandemics and the
climate emergency are afterthoughts. War is all
that matters. This is a recipe for collective
suicide.
There were three
restraints to the avarice and bloodlust of the
permanent war economy that no longer exist. The
first was the old liberal wing of the Democratic
Party, led by politicians such as Senator George
McGovern, Senator Eugene McCarthy, and Senator
J. William Fulbright, who wrote The Pentagon
Propaganda Machine.
The self-identified
progressives, a pitiful minority, in Congress
today, from Barbara Lee, who was the single vote
in the House and the Senate opposing a broad,
open-ended authorization allowing the president
to wage war in Afghanistan or anywhere else, to
Ilhan Omar now dutifully line up to fund the
latest proxy war.
The second
restraint was an independent media and academia,
including journalists such as I.F Stone and Neil
Sheehan along with scholars such as Seymour
Melman, author of The Permanent War
Economy and Pentagon Capitalism: The Political
Economy of War.
Third, and perhaps
most important, was an organized anti-war
movement, led by religious leaders such as
Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King Jr. and Phil and
Dan Berrigan as well as groups such as Students
for a Democratic Society (SDS). They understood
that unchecked militarism was a fatal disease.
None of these
opposition forces, which did not reverse the
permanent war economy but curbed its excesses,
now exist. The two ruling parties have been
bought by corporations, especially military
contractors. The press is anemic and obsequious
to the war industry.
Propagandists for
permanent war, largely from right-wing think
tanks lavishly funded by the war industry, along
with former military and intelligence officials,
are exclusively quoted or interviewed as
military experts.
NBC’s
Meet the Press
aired a segment May 13 where officials from
Center for a New American Security (CNAS)
simulated what a war with China over Taiwan
might look like. The co-founder of CNAS, Michèle
Flournoy, who appeared in the Meet the Press war
games segment and was considered by Biden to run
the Pentagon,
wrote in 2020
in Foreign Affairs that the U.S. needs
to develop “the capability to credibly threaten
to sink all of China’s military vessels,
submarines and merchant ships in the South China
Sea within 72 hours.”
The handful of
anti-militarists and critics of empire from the
left, such as Noam Chomsky, and the right, such
as Ron Paul, have been declared persona non
grata by a compliant media. The liberal class
has retreated into boutique activism where
issues of class, capitalism and militarism are
jettisoned for “cancel culture,”
multiculturalism and identity politics.
Liberals are
cheerleading the war in Ukraine. At least the
inception of the war with Iraq saw them join
significant street protests. Ukraine is embraced
as the latest crusade for freedom and democracy
against the new Hitler.
There is little
hope, I fear, of rolling back or restraining the
disasters being orchestrated on a national and
global level. The neoconservatives and liberal
interventionists chant in unison for war. Biden
has appointed these war mongers, whose attitude
to nuclear war is terrifyingly cavalier, to run
the Pentagon, the National Security Council, and
the State Department.
Since all we do is
war, all proposed solutions are military. This
military adventurism accelerates the decline, as
the defeat in Vietnam and the squandering of $8 trillion in
the futile wars in the Middle East illustrate.
War and sanctions, it is believed, will cripple
Russia, rich in gas and natural resources. War,
or the threat of war, will curb the growing
economic and military clout of China.
These are demented
and dangerous fantasies, perpetrated by a ruling
class that has severed itself from reality. No
longer able to salvage their own society and
economy, they seek to destroy those of their
global competitors, especially Russia and China.
Once the militarists cripple Russia, the plan
goes, they will focus military aggression on the
Indo-Pacific, dominating what Hillary Clinton as
secretary of state, referring
to the Pacific, called “the American Sea.”
The Economic
Interest
You cannot talk
about war without talking about markets. The
U.S., whose growth rate has fallen to below 2
percent,
while China’s growth rate is 8.1
percent, has
turned to military aggression to bolster its
sagging economy. If the U.S. can sever Russian
gas supplies to Europe, it will force Europeans
to buy from the United States.
U.S. firms, at
the same time, would be happy to replace the
Chinese Communist Party, even if they must do it
through the threat of war, to open unfettered
access to Chinese markets. War, if it did break
out with China, would devastate the Chinese,
American, and global economies, destroying free
trade between countries as in World War I. But
that doesn’t mean it won’t happen.
Washington is
desperately trying to build military and
economic alliances to ward off a rising China,
whose economy is expected by 2028 to overtake
that of the United States, according
to the
U.K.’s Centre for Economics and Business
Research (CEBR). The White House has said
Biden’s current visit to Asia is about sending a
“powerful message” to Beijing and others about
what the world could look like if democracies
“stand together to shape the rules of the road.”
The Biden administration has invited South Korea
and Japan to attend the NATO summit in Madrid.
But fewer and fewer
nations, even among European allies, are willing
to be dominated by the United States.
Washington’s veneer of democracy and supposed
respect for human rights and civil liberties is
so badly tarnished as to be irrecoverable. Its
economic decline, with China’s manufacturing 70
percent higher than that of the U.S., is
irreversible.
War is a desperate
Hail Mary, one employed by dying empires
throughout history with catastrophic
consequences. “It was the rise of Athens and the
fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war
inevitable,” Thucydides noted in The History
of the Peloponnesian War.
Running Out of
Troops
A key component to
the sustenance of the permanent war state was
the creation of the All-Volunteer Force. Without
conscripts, the burden of fighting wars falls to
the poor, the working class, and military
families. This All-Volunteer Force allows the
children of the middle class, who led the
Vietnam anti-war movement, to avoid service. It
protects the military from internal revolts,
carried out by troops during the Vietnam War,
which jeopardized the cohesion of the armed
forces.
The All-Volunteer
Force, by limiting the pool of available troops,
also makes the global ambitions of the
militarists impossible. Desperate to maintain or
increase troop levels in Iraq and Afghanistan,
the military instituted the stop-loss policy
that arbitrarily extended active-duty contracts.
Its slang term was the backdoor draft.
The effort to
bolster the number of troops by hiring private
military contractors, as well, had a negligible
effect. Increased troop levels would not have
won the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan but the
tiny percentage of those willing to serve in the
military (only 7
percent of
the U.S. population are veterans) is an
unacknowledged Achilles heel for the
militarists.
“As a consequence,
the problem of too much war and too few soldiers
eludes serious scrutiny,” writes historian and
retired Army Colonel Andrew Bacevich in After
the Apocalypse: America’s Role in a World
Transformed.
“Expectations
of technology bridging that gap provide an
excuse to avoid asking the most fundamental
questions: Does the United States possess
the military wherewithal to oblige
adversaries to endorse its claim of being
history’s indispensable nation? And if the
answer is no, as the post-9/11 wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq suggest, wouldn’t it
make sense for Washington to temper its
ambitions accordingly?”
This question, as
Bacevich points out, is “anathema.” The military
strategists work from the supposition that the
coming wars won’t look anything like past wars.
They invest in imaginary theories of future wars
that ignore the lessons of the past, ensuring
more fiascos.
Self-Delusion
The political class
is as self-deluded as the generals. It refuses
to accept the emergence of a multi-polar world
and the palpable decline of American power. It
speaks in the outdated language of American
exceptionalism and triumphalism, believing it
has the right to impose its will as the leader
of the “free world.”
In his 1992 Defense
Planning Guidance memorandum,
U.S. Under Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz
argued that the U.S. must ensure no rival
superpower again arises. The U.S. should project
its military strength to dominate a unipolar
world in perpetuity.
On Feb. 19, 1998,
on NBC’s Today Show, Secretary of State
Madeleine Albright gave the Democratic version
of this doctrine of unipolarity. “If we have to
use force it is because we are Americans; we are
the indispensable nation,” she
said.
“We stand tall, and we see further than other
countries into the future.”
This demented
vision of unrivaled U.S. global supremacy, not
to mention unrivaled goodness and virtue, blinds
the establishment Republicans and Democrats. The
military strikes they casually used to assert
the doctrine of unipolarity, especially in the
Middle East, swiftly spawned jihadist terror and
prolonged warfare. None of them saw it coming
until the hijacked jets slammed into the World
Trade Center twin towers. That they cling to
this absurd hallucination is the triumph of hope
over experience.
There is a deep
loathing among the public for these elitist Ivy
League architects of American imperialism.
Imperialism was tolerated when it was able to
project power abroad and produce rising living
standards at home. It was tolerated when it
restrained itself to covert interventions in
countries such as Iran, Guatemala, and
Indonesia. It went off the rails in Vietnam.
The military
defeats that followed accompanied a steady
decline in living standards, wage stagnation, a
crumbling infrastructure and eventually a series
of economic policies and trade deals,
orchestrated by the same ruling class, which
de-industrialized and impoverished the country.
The establishment
oligarchs, now united in the Democratic Party,
distrust Donald Trump. He commits the heresy of
questioning the sanctity of the American empire.
Trump derided the invasion of Iraq as a “big,
fat mistake.” He promised “to keep us out of
endless war.” Trump was repeatedly questioned
about his relationship with Vladimir Putin.
Putin was “a killer,” one interviewer told him.
“There are a lot of killers,” Trump retorted.
“You think our country’s so innocent?” Trump
dared to speak a truth that was to be forever
unspoken, the militarists had sold out the
American people.
Noam Chomsky took
some heat for pointing
out,
correctly, that Trump is the “one statesman” who
has laid out a “sensible” proposition to resolve
the Russia-Ukraine crisis. The proposed solution
included “facilitating negotiations instead of
undermining them and moving toward establishing
some kind of accommodation in Europe … in which
there are no military alliances but just mutual
accommodation.”
Trump is too
unfocused and mercurial to offer serious policy
solutions. He did set a timetable to withdraw
from Afghanistan, but he also ratcheted up the
economic war against Venezuela and re-instituted
crushing sanctions against Cuba and Iran, which
the Obama administration had ended. He increased
the military budget.
Trump apparently
flirted
with carrying out a missile strike on Mexico to
“destroy the drug labs.” But he acknowledges a
distaste for imperial mismanagement that
resonates with the public, one that has every
right to loath the smug mandarins that plunge us
into one war after another. Trump lies like he
breathes. But so do they.
Steep Price to Pay
The 57 Republicans
who refused to support the $40 billion aid
package to Ukraine, along with many of the 19
bills that included an earlier $13.6 billion in
aid for Ukraine, come out of the kooky
conspiratorial world of Trump. They, like Trump,
repeat this heresy. They too are attacked and
censored.
But the longer
Biden and the ruling class continue to pour
resources into war at our expense, the more
these proto-fascists, already set to wipe out
Democratic gains in the House and the Senate
this fall, will be ascendant. Marjorie Taylor
Greene, during the debate on the aid package to
Ukraine, which most members were not given time
to closely examine,
said:
“$40 billion dollars but there’s no baby formula
for American mothers and babies.”
“An unknown amount
of money to the C.I.A. and Ukraine supplemental
bill but there’s no formula for American
babies,” she added. “Stop funding regime change
and money laundering scams. A U.S. politician
covers up their crimes in countries like
Ukraine.”
Democrat Jamie
Raskin immediately attacked Greene for parroting
the propaganda of Russian president Vladimir
Putin.
Greene, like Trump,
spoke a truth that resonates with a beleaguered
public. The opposition to permanent war should
have come from the tiny progressive wing of the
Democratic Party, which unfortunately sold out
to the craven Democratic Party leadership to
save their political careers. Greene is
demented, but Raskin and the Democrats peddle
their own brand of lunacy. We are going to pay a
very steep price for this burlesque.
Chris Hedges is
a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a
foreign correspondent for 15 years for The
New York Times, where he served as the
Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief
for the paper. He previously worked overseas
for The Dallas Morning News, The
Christian Science Monitor and NPR. He
is the host of show “The Chris Hedges Report.”
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