By Philip Giraldi
June 22, 2022:
Information Clearing House
-- So
Honest Joe Biden is now going to give
another $1.2 billion to the Ukrainians on
top of the sixty or so billion that is
already in the pipeline, but who’s counting,
particularly as Congress refused to approve
having an inspector general to monitor whose
pockets will be lined. The money will be
printed up without any collateral or
“borrowed” and the American taxpayer will
somehow have to bear the burden of this
latest folly that is ipso facto driving much
of the world into recession. And it will no
doubt be blamed on Vladimir Putin, a process
that is already well under way from
president mumbles. But you have to wonder
why no one has told Joe that the whole
exercise in pushing much of the world
towards a catastrophic war is a fool’s
errand. But then again, the clowns that the
president has surrounded himself with might
not be very big on speaking the truth even
if they know what that means.
Having followed the
Ukraine problem since the United States and
its poodles refused to negotiate seriously
with Vladimir Putin in the real world, I
have had to wonder what is wrong with
Washington. We have had the ignorant and
impulsive Donald Trump supported by a cast
of characters that included the mentally
unstable Mike Pompeo and John Bolton
followed by Biden with the usual bunch of
Democratic Party rejects. By that I mean
deep thinkers about social issues who would
not be able to run a hot dog stand if that
were what they were forced to do to make a
living. But they are real good at shouting
“freedom” and “democracy” whenever
questioned concerning their motives.
Indeed, opinion polls
suggest that there is a great deal of unrest
among middle and working class Americans who
see a reversion to Jimmy Carter era
financial instability, at that time caused
by the oil embargo. Well, there is a new
energy embargo in place brought about by the
Biden Administration’s desire to wage proxy
war to “weaken” Russia. Analysts predict
that the costs for all forms of energy will
double in the next several months and
surging energy costs will impact the prices
of other essentials, including food. Given
all that, the fundamental issue plaguing
both Democrats and Republicans is their
inability to actually explain to the
American people why the country’s foreign
and national security policy always seems to
be on the boil, searching for enemies and
also creating them when they do not exist,
even when the results are damaging to the
interests of actual Americans.
That a serious
discussion of why the United States needs to
have a military that costs as much as the
next nine nations in that ranking combined
is long overdue and rarely addressed outside
the alternative media. The 2023 military
budget has been increased from this year’s,
totaling $858 billion, and, if one includes
the constantly growing largesse to Ukraine,
approaching a hitherto unimaginable trillion
dollars. The military budget has become a
major driver of the country’s unsustainable
deficits. The deaths of millions of people
directly and indirectly in the wars started
in 9/11 aside, the wars of choice have cost
an estimated $8 trillion.
The Constitution of
the United States makes it clear that a
national army was only acceptable to the
Founders when it was dedicated to defending
the country from foreign threats. Do
Americans really believe that bearing the
burden of having something like 1,000
military bases scattered around the world
really makes them safer? The recent rapid
collapse of the security situation in
Afghanistan suggests that having such bases
turns soldiers and bureaucrats into
potential hostages and is therefore a
liability. One might also suggest that the
insecurity currently prevailing in the
country can in large part be attributed to
the government’s depiction of numerous
“threats” in order to justify both the
commitment and the expense.
So where does all the
money go? And what are the threats? Starting
with a war that the United States is de
facto though not de jure
involved in, Ukraine, what was the Russian
threat that demanded Washington’s
intervention? Well, if one discards the
nonsense of a “rules based international
order” or a plucky little democracy Ukraine
fighting valiantly against the Russian bear,
Moscow did not threaten the United States in
any way before the missiles starting flying.
Putin sought to negotiate a settlement with
Ukraine based on a number of perceived
existential Russian national security
interests, all of which were negotiable, but
the US and its friends were uninterested in
compromise while also plying the corrupt
Zelensky regime with weapons, money and
political support. The final result is a
conflict that will likely only end when the
last Ukrainian is dead and it includes the
possibility that a misstep by the United
States and Russia could lead to a nuclear
holocaust. To put it succinctly, what is
going on does not enhance US national
security, nor does it benefit Americans
economically.
And then there is
China. Biden let the cat out of the bag on
his recent trip to the Far East. He stated
that the United States would defend Taiwan
if China were to attempt to annex it. In
saying that, Biden demonstrated that he does
not understand the strategic ambiguity that
the US and the Chinese have preferred over
the past fifty years as an alternative to
war. The White House for its part quickly
issued a correction to the Biden statement,
explaining that it was not true that
Washington is obligated to defend Taiwan.
Some uber hawkish congressmen have
apparently found the Biden gaffe appealing
and are promoting
a firm US commitment to defend Taiwan,
coupled with a $4.5 billion military
assistance package, of course.
At the same time,
some officials in the Pentagon and the usual
gaggle of congressmen also keep warning
about the over the horizon threat from China
as an excuse to boost defense spending. Most
recently, there was alarm over Chinese
participation in a meeting in May in
Fiji to consider a China-Pacific Islands
free trade pact! In reality, the only
serious current threat from China is as an
economic competitor. A trade war with China
would be a disaster for the US economy,
which is heavily dependent on Chinese
manufactured goods, but Beijing, with its
relatively small military budget, does not
pose a physical threat to the United States.
And let’s not ignore
Iran which has been hammered by economic
sanctions and also through the covert
killing of its officials and scientists. The
US/Israeli war on Iran has also spilled over
into neighboring Syria, where Washington
actually has troops on the ground occupying
the country’s oil producing region and
stealing the oil. Iran’s possible expansion
of its nuclear program to produce a weapon
was effectively impeded through monitoring
connected to a multilateral 2015 agreement
called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of
Action (JCPOA) but Donald Trump, unwisely
and acting against actual American
interests, withdrew from it. Joe Biden has
been warned by Israel not to re-enter the
agreement, so he will no doubt comply with
Prime Minister Naftali Bennett’s
determination to have Washington continue to
apply “extreme pressure” on the Islamic
Republic. Does either Iran or its ally Syria
threaten the United States in any way? No.
Their crime is that they are in the same
neighborhood as the Jewish state, which
finds the US government easy to manipulate
into acting against its own interests.
Finally, in America’s
own hemisphere there is Venezuela, which has
been elevated to the status of Washington’s
most hated nation in the region. Venezuelans
have been subjected to increasingly punitive
US sanctions, including some new ones just
last week, which hurt the poorer citizens
disproportionately but have not brought
about regime change. Why the animosity?
Because the country’s leader Nicolas Maduro
is still in power in spite of a US assertion
that the country’s opposition leader Juan
Guaido should rightfully and legitimately be
in charge after a possibly fraudulent
election in 2018. The latest therapy applied
by the United States on Caracas consisted of
blocking the country as well as
Nicaragua and Cuba from participating in the
recent meeting of the Ninth Summit of the
Americas which was held in Los Angeles. A
State Department spokesman explained that
the move was due to the three countries
“lacking democratic governances.” Mexican
President Lopez Obrador protested against
the move and removed himself from his
country’s delegation, saying “There can’t be
a Summit of the Americas if not all
countries of the American continent are
taking part.” The despicable US Senator
Robert Menendez of the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee then felt compelled to
add his two cents, criticizing the Mexican
president and warning that his “decision to
stand with dictators and despots” would hurt
US-Mexico relations. So where was the threat
from Venezuela (and Cuba and Nicaragua) and
why is the US involved at all? Beats me.
What all of this
means is that there is absolutely no
standard of genuine national security that
motivates the US’s completely illegal
aggression in many parts of the world. What
occurs may be linked to a desire to dominate
or a madness sometimes described as
“exceptionalism” and/or “leadership of the
free world,” neither of which has anything
to do with actual security. And the American
people are paying the price both in terms of
decline in standards of living due to the
upheaval created in Ukraine and elsewhere as
well as a completely understandable loss of
faith in the US system of government. By all
means, let us shrink the US military until
it is responsive to actual identifiable
threats. Let’s elect a president who will
follow the sage advice of President John
Quincy Adams,
who declared that “Americans should not
go abroad to slay dragons they do not
understand in the name of spreading
democracy.” At this point, one can only
imagine an America that is at peace with
itself and with what it represents while
also being considered a friend to the rest
of the world.
Philip M. Giraldi,
Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council
for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax
deductible educational foundation (Federal
ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more
interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the
Middle East. Website is
councilforthenationalinterest.org,
address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA
20134 and its email is
inform@cnionline.org.
