Posted on 12/27/2014 8:29:24 PM PST by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
“It’s ending purposeless, perpetual, global warfare, stupid.”
Republican presidential contenders for 2016 should embrace that campaign theme to demolish the ultra-hawkish Hillary Clinton and her Napoleonic complex.
Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign theme, “It’s the economy, stupid,” is obsolete.
Presidential strategists sermonize that voters are instinctively concerned more about jobs, mortgages, and health care than about national security policy. True enough.
But that is because presidential aspirants have failed to discern and to explain the direct connection between, on the one hand, purposeless, perpetual, global warfare and the projection of military force everywhere that has created an exorbitant, inefficient, and corrupt national security state in pursuit of a risk-free existence, and, on the other hand, enormous budget deficits, a sluggish economy, a crippling of civil liberties, too big to fail banks, chronic constitutional transgressions, secret government, and limitless executive power.
Once voters are taught that the purposeless, perpetual, global warfare state is responsible for 90 percent of what ails the nation (including an effete risk-free mentality), they will chorus the campaign theme with gusto.
At present, the United States is implicated in warfare involving Al Qaeda, the Islamic State, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia, Niger, and Ethiopia. We are “pivoting” forces to Asia to defend, among other things, Japan, Vietnam, and the Philippines from maritime encroachments by China.
We have military personnel in approximately 130 countries stationed at approximately 900 overseas bases. We maintain this vast military edifice and a supporting military-industrial-counterterroism complex despite the absence of a single existential threat to our sovereignty. In the history of the world, no nation has ever been safer from foreign aggression than the United States.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtontimes.com ...
Interesting article. I do believe that TARP was only $700 billion, however.
Heya Tolerance...
Nobody ridicules national security more than those who take it completely for granted.
Republican presidential contenders for 2016 should embrace that campaign theme to demolish the ultra-hawkish Hillary Clinton and her Napoleonic complex. …Huh??
“Nobody ridicules national security more than those who take it completely for granted.”
Yeah. One Jihadist nuke can ruin your whole day.
I’d say “devilish”.
Treasonous is the word I'd use.
Her Thighness is only a weathervane. She will charge mindlessly in whichever direction seems most politically advantageous. Calling her “ultra hawkish” is meaningless; she will try to play whatever role benefits her most. Thankfully, she is a buffoon compared with Bubba.
I certainly concur. Dovishness usually entails the “qualities” of devilishness and treason.
“Rand Paul Knocks Out Marco Rubio Like Ali Over Foreman”
Bruce Fein and other conservatives see the horrors that the neocons brought the GOP and the world. I’m sure he’ll be denounced as a “libtard” on this thread.
What the U.S. stepped into after WWII was a strange and fragmented current of the remnants of empires predating the country itself: the French in Indochina, for example, the German and Belgian in Africa, a rather longer-standing commitment in the Philippines snatched from the Spanish and unfortunately mixed with a river of Filipino blood afterward, a similar one in Cuba that we simply let go to some unintended consequences. That latter should warn us against the implications of Fein's policy recommendations:
There would be nothing risky, however, in ending the permanent warfare state. It would return the United States to the foreign policy of President George Washington expounded in his Farewell Address and followed until the post-World War II birth of the American Empire.
Ugh. Neo-isolationism is profoundly anti-historical and Fein should know better than this. For one thing, what Washington was facing was not a tabula rasa but at least seven (and arguably more) "entangling foreign commitments" on the day he took office, some of which were exceedingly awkward, especially for France. You can't return to something that didn't exist. Nor did the country follow any such policy much after Jefferson decided to take on the Barbary pirates.
More to the point, the notion that ending this "warfare state" is riskless is laughable. It is this, in Fein's own words:
In the history of the world, no nation has ever been safer from foreign aggression than the United States.
True - at least for the moment, although the citizens of the British Empires might have made a similar claim at their heights, and the French under Napoleon and Louis XIV before him, and a host of others. It's a very temporary condition and it depends on what place you occupy on the broad arc of empire. But this did not simply flash into existence. To a very great degree this is the result of policies that have other untoward costs, notably money and blood, the discarding of which might save us the latter but at the cost of that safety. One discards the safety of empire when one discards the empire. The tiger is easy to mount but dismounting takes a bit of planning and not a little risk.
I think that it can be accomplished and pray that it will. But it will take a commitment of resources that is well beyond that of a single administration. Getting into this state began with Kennan's Long Telegram, and the people committing to it did so understanding that it was long-term and inevitably costly; it was, on the other hand, the best alternative available at the time. It was also remarkably successful.
We can dismount this tiger, I think, but not in a single election, which is my real complaint about Fein's case here: this is grand strategy, a program of decades, and it will not be resolved in the matter of a single election. No American election has ever hinged on grand strategy. It cannot be a centerpiece of any political campaign lest it be identified with a single party and discarded when that party is out of office. We can't have that. The mess the 0bama administration has made of U.S. foreign policy is what results when that happens.
Best of thread
Now that's a crazy statement to make. We're not safe from aggression. We're being invaded and instead of protecting the US our military is being used to wreak havoc all over the world.
We've become the military for the global elite as they usurp all wealth and power across the globe.
Fein is right - for one thing, we do not have the money to police the world and to protect out own shores by projecting power everywhere on the planet.
The federal government is broke. As Mark Steyn points out, if it paid back $18T, it would still be at zero - broke! It maintains the regulatory and warfare state by printing money, manipulating numbers, and borrowing from countries it cannot possibly ever pay back.
I suppose if they want to forgo defense industry campaign money, sure.
Excellent post!
I have this particular extremely liberal pal, calls himself libertarian, that objects to our military being used solely to enforce foreign policy. He says it should only be used to defend our borders. Dangerous isolationism that allows tyrants worldwide to interfere with commerce says I, and waiting for the enemy to make the first move is not the best defense, especially with the problems that come with international commerce interrupted to the point where much needed resources are limited by what becomes a blockade.
Like this author’s, this is a very short-sighted view.
Eliminating Islam would be a first great step to ending perpetual global war
IF going bankrupt, supporting a civil welfare state, is a catastrophe, then will that bankruptcy be acceptable supporting the military industrial welfare state?
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