Posted on 06/23/2016 12:21:51 AM PDT by vannrox
Let’s admit it. As political provocateur, Donald Trump has a dizzy kind of genius. He feints to the right, then he spins to the left. Either way, the hot subject for political chatter becomes Donald Trump.
This week, while people everywhere were fretting over his violent talk, the candidate came to Washington and dropped a peace bomb on the neocon editorial writers at The Washington Post and the war lobby. Trump wants to get the United States out of fighting other people’s wars. He thinks maybe NATO has outlived its usefulness. He asks why Americans are still paying for South Korea’s national defense. Or Germany’s or Saudi Arabia’s.
“I do think it’s a different world today and I don’t think we should be nation-building anymore,” Trump said. “I think it’s proven not to work. And we have a different country than we did then. You know we have $19 trillion in debt. We’re sitting probably on a bubble, and, you know, it’s a bubble that if it breaks is going to be very nasty. And I just think we have to rebuild our country.”
“I do think it’s a different world today and I don’t think we should be nation-building anymore.”—Donald Trump
Will anybody give him an amen? Yes, lots of folks. People who read The Nation (myself included) have been saying something similar for a long time. So have libertarian Republicans on the right. But this sort of thinking is mega-heresy among the political establishment of both parties. The foreign-policy operators consider themselves in charge of the “indispensable nation.”
This new Trump talk is definitely career-threatening for the military-industrial complex. It was particularly playful of Trump to choose The Washington Post as the place to drop his bomb; after all, it’s the Post that has made itself such a righteous preacher for endless war-making.
The Donald, usually bellicose in style and substance, is singing, “Give peace a chance.” What does his detour portend for national policy? We can’t know for sure, since Trump also has a tendency to casually contradict himself before different audiences. Later on the same day, he addressed AIPAC’s convention and sounded like a warrior for Zion. He got thunderous applause after making the ritual promises that candidates from both parties always make at AIPAC meetings.
But Trump has, in his usual unvarnished manner, kicked open the door to an important and fundamental foreign-policy debate. It is far more profound than the disputes we usually hear between hawks and doves. He’s proposing a radical standard for testing US policy abroad, both in war and peace: Is it actually in America’s interest? Or has US global strategy become a dangerous hangover from the glory years, when Washington armed and organized nations for the Cold War?
Trump has, in his usual unvarnished manner, kicked open the door to an important foreign-policy debate. Whatever happened in past decades, Trump insists that this US ambition always to be in charge is now actively damaging our country, wasting scarce treasure and drawing us into other people’s conflicts. The Post opinionators must have choked on his words.
“I watched as we built schools in Iraq and they’d be blown up,” Trump told the editors. “And we’d build another one and it would get blown up. And we would rebuild it three times. And yet we can’t build a school in Brooklyn.… at what point do you say hey, we have to take care of ourselves. So, you know, I know the outer world exists and I’ll be very cognizant of that but at the same time, our country is disintegrating, large sections of it, especially in the inner cities.”
Trump has thus shrewdly articulated what ought to be a vital subject for debate in 2016. Instead, I suspect, he will be inundated with lordly rebukes by the policy elites. And the editorial writers will explain how half-baked and dangerous his ideas are to the future of mankind.
We can imagine the labels they’ll haul out from history: Protectionist. Nationalist. Isolationist. America Firster. His challenging proposition reminds me of my childhood, because I grew up in idyllic small-town Ohio, where those skeptical views of “foreign entanglements” defined the Republican Party (there weren’t many Democrats in my home town, and they mostly kept quiet).
As teenagers, we grew up as Robert A. Taft Republicans and deeply suspicious of the “Eastern Establishment,” who looked down on us as Midwestern bumpkins. The decisive election was 1952, when Taft lost the GOP nomination to a genuine national hero, Gen. Dwight Eisenhower. We were heartbroken. In the Midwest we lived in the middle of a great big country and could reasonably feel that we should stay out of other people’s troubles. The Cold War pretty much destroyed that common sense.
Ike’s victory ratified America’s commitment to developing a new world order of global alliances and foreign military deployments. That order seemed like the right thing to do 60 years ago, but now it falls to an outsider named Trump to demand fundamental reconsideration.
I suspect most Americans would agree with Trump’s tough questions, but are not sure of the answers (neither, perhaps, is he). Plus, in these insecure times, people do not wish to sound unpatriotic. In my hometown, we quickly fell in love with Eisenhower the moderate Republican, who resisted the party’s hard right (who thought Ike was a commie).
At the end of his second presidential term, Eisenhower, the general who won World War II in Europe, was warning us about the dangers of something he called the “military-industrial complex.” I wonder what he would tell us today.
If you read between the lines. I truly believe Trump will dump F-35. Its one of the most expensive military spending and not something the air force wanted
I’m okay with downsizing our presence abroad and shrinking our bases where possible but it isn’t something that can be done in just a couple of terms. It would need to happen slowly over a couple of decades to do correctly so we didn’t overshoot the size needed in the various places.
If we are paying to keep our troops at these foreign bases then a renegotiation of terms might be in order if our presence helps the host country even more than it helps us. Just common sense really.
We are in crippling debt thanks to the last two Presidents. Now we have hard choices to make.
Commies for Trump?
I would say, eye-glazing. Just more BS from the Nation.
I believe that a country, no matter what its intentions were/are, can “nation-build” when that ‘building’ becomes a steady drain of bribe money that does no good.
Evil nations are rebuilt when their tyrannies are completely routed and DESTROYED - no backed into a corner where they have to take ungodly sums of money just to ‘go along’ with the current whatever administration and their own power grabs.
To build, you have to raze and excavate. Foundations. New materials. When that is done, get the hell out and stop meddling.
Shortly after the turn of the new Millenia, a book titled The Pentagon’s New Map, was published. Not exactly a smash hit, it proposed a national role change for the military after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
(The author was a policy wonk working for the G.W.Bush Administration.)
Frankly, it read like propaganda for the New World Order. International corporations were increasingly being established and would need global military protection. The proposal involved sending the sons and daughters of American workers overseas to fight and die in order to protect the companies which would replace American workers with foreigners.
The military-industrial complex established during WWII at least employed Americans. This proposal basically was to eliminate the United States work force.
Right.
Ike would tell us that you’re a commie, Greider.
NO SALE.
What is the author talking about here? When and where has Trump ever spoken "violently"?
As for the author of this article: he should probably look long and hard at which party gets us embroiled in more questionable military actions. Leftists willfully misunderstand the purpose of the military; they think it is nothing more than a tool for showing off one's muscle. Thus, we have leftist presidents who love to send troops off here and there, with no clear rationale for doing so. And when real problems come up, they don't recognize them--because they've never learned that the military exists to solve very specific problems. Thus, we had the situation where Bill Clinton ordered military attacks on Kosovo and other places for no discernible reason, while he (knowingly) allowed Bin Laden to build up a terrorist network which directly led to 9-11. And we currently have the situation where Obama is using the military to bring down [relatively] stable countries in the middle east--again, for no discernible reason. Leftists only want to do things "differently", with no real rationale other than to avoid real problem-solving since thinking about rational solutions never leads to perfect solutions.
“I’m okay with downsizing our presence abroad and shrinking our bases where possible but it isn’t something that can be done in just a couple of terms.”
The US has some 800 bases on foreign soil; more bases on foreign soil than all the rest of the world combined. But a large number of those bases are tiny, consisting of a landing strip in a jungle or desert and probably a few service buildings. I doubt all of them are continuously manned. They are there for various reasons. For example, if it became necessary to launch a rescue mission into, say, Somalia, a base could be activated, manned and supplied in just hours. Men would fly in from next door as opposed to spending 18 hours on aircraft coming from the US or Europe. These bases give the US a spectacular reach that can’t be duplicated by any other country. If they were suddenly abandoned probably China or Russia or Iran would step in to fill the vacuum.
It is amazing how many hands are in the multi-trillion dollar booty fedgov hands out. In so many cases we are funding our own downfall. We can no longer say “no” to anyone, because we have to be there to fix every sob story.
We are no longer a nation of adults. We are teenagers on a mission to set the world right with a credit card. We have no discernment, like “The Jerk” buying new leather seats for someone’s airplane. To do any less is heartless and cruel.
We can muster concern for every cause except what we are going to leave for our own children.
I agree - when you discount overseas ‘adventures’, our military footprint around the world is MUCH SMALLER than it has been at any time since World War 2. We can’t tell because we’re not there...but our active base count is way down, as are the number of US troops at those bases.
I don’t have an issue with stationing troops overseas (has advantages and disadvantages), but I have a HUGE PROBLEM with going into countries like Serbia (Kosovo) and Syria, just to support people that HATE AMERICANS - and with no absolutely no benefit to this country (rather just the opposite).
The article devolved into having the writer praising Eisenhower. Isn’t it wonderful how Trump is upending the entrenched ideologues from both ends of the spectrum?
They’re panicked because they’ll no longer be able to easily slide into comfortable niches and rest there for the the remainder of their careers.
But then the UK will not have a plane for their new shiny aircraft carrier. /sarcasm
That plane program needs to be cancelled. And if not all of it, the stovl version needs to be killed.
It has been interesting to observe. I’m just glad that a Trump-like candidate did not emerge from the Left (the danger was there). We truly would have been screwed, then.
Don’t be fooled. There are two of these “America won’t have a military if Trump wins” articles.
Folks, this shows you Trump is winning. THEY CAN’T FIND ANYTHING TO STICK. They are flailing away.
Nation building must be considered in light of VALUES. It worked in Germany and Japan because there were enough shared values that it could work—acceptance of property rights, the free market, and better yet, Christianity or at least not a hatred of Christianity.
Islamic countries don’t have those things.
Trump has talked endlessly about making sure our armed forces have only the best equipment available. He has a “Carry a big stck” philosophy. The same philosophy as Reagan BTW.
I see this as a boon for the military industrial complex.
In the 8 years of Reagan zero terror attacks.
If it is truly a hopeless lemon, Trump will cut it off. He may reopen production for an updated F-22 Raptor to include a fighter-bomber version. Back to the drawing boards...
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