Posted on 06/01/2026 8:25:41 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
As tensions with Iran once again push the US toward the possibility of further involvement in Middle Eastern conflicts, a novel brand of anti-interventionism has swept American politics. After two decades of costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, both the populist right and progressive left have grown more willing to question the assumptions underpinning American military engagement abroad. Politicians as ideologically diverse as Thomas Massie and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez now openly criticize interventionist foreign policy, while public fatigue with the post-9/11 wars has become increasingly visible across the political spectrum. Yet even as Americans tire of foreign interventions, cuts to the defense budget are politically untouchable. Wars end, defense spending does not.
At first glance, this would suggest that the United States is entering an era of military restraint and fiscal austerity. In practice, the opposite is happening. In April, the White House released its budget blueprint for fiscal year 2027, requesting roughly $1.5 trillion for defense. That is a 44 percent increase, and the largest single year jump since the Korean war. The same blueprint proposes a non-defense discretionary spending cut of around 10 percent, with housing and healthcare programs among the targets.
Despite growing anti-war sentiment, the political impossibility of materially reducing the defense budget remains nearly absolute. Pentagon spending continues to rise, procurement programs survive repeated public criticism and even politicians who oppose intervention abroad often continue to support enormous military appropriations at home.
Bernie Sanders, one of the Senate’s most reliable critics of militarism, fought to base the F-35 (a program he has elsewhere highlighted as an example of excess and waste) at Burlington International Airport in Vermont.
This apparent contradiction reveals the reality that the Armed Forces no longer function solely as a military institution designed to project power abroad. They have evolved into one of the largest systems of domestic wealth redistribution in American political life. The US does not merely use defense spending to fight wars or deter adversaries, it uses the defense economy to sustain regional employment, subsidize industrial production, stabilize local economies, train and employ the underserved and maintain a broad political coalition.
In this sense, defense spending increasingly resembles a hidden welfare state. Rather than redistributing wealth through direct transfers, the state does so indirectly through military contracts, bases, supply chains and federally subsidized employment. This helps explain why anti-interventionist sentiment has failed to translate into meaningful cuts in military expenditure. Americans may be increasingly skeptical of foreign wars, but few in the political sphere are willing to threaten the economic architecture built around permanent military spending.
The modern defense budget functions, in many respects, as a form of industrial policy. Major weapons programs are often dispersed across congressional districts, ensuring thousands of firms, subcontractors and workers become economically dependent upon continued military procurement. The F-35 program depicts this dynamic clearly; production of the aircraft is intentionally dispersed across dozens of states and hundreds of congressional districts. The aircraft becomes more than a weapons system, evolving into a nationwide economic ecosystem upon which businesses, families and entire communities depend.
A defense bill can more easily pass a Congress that would never approve an equivalent housing or jobs program. When redistribution is obscured behind a patriotic shroud, it can more easily survive political instability.
Military bases perform a similar function. Across large swathes of the United States, bases act as economic anchors supporting businesses, housing markets, schools, logistics networks and local tax revenues. Entire communities become structurally dependent upon the continued physical and economic presence of the Armed Forces. The political consequences of this have been felt before. Following the end of the Cold War, policymakers attempted to shutter redundant bases through the BRAC (Base Realignment and Closure) process.
Even where military planners viewed certain installations as redundant, members of Congress fought closures aggressively. The BRAC system was largely designed to overcome this political resistance, as legislators routinely opposed the closure of bases that functioned as major employers within their districts. Military bases increasingly functioned less as purely defense assets and more like federally subsidized economic development zones.
The economic role of the American defense apparatus extends beyond bases and contracts. The military itself increasingly functions as a substitute for parts of the civilian welfare state. For millions of Americans, military service provides stable employment, healthcare, vocational training, subsidized education and a pathway into the middle class that might otherwise remain inaccessible. In a rapidly deindustrializing America, and amid growing fears that AI may disrupt segments of the labor market, the Armed Forces continue to represent one of the few guaranteed routes to upward mobility.
Serious military austerity would not merely reshape American foreign policy, it would also disrupt labor markets, educational pathways and regional economies that have become deeply intertwined with the defense state itself. The political durability of defense spending therefore cannot be explained solely via lobbying or corruption within the so-called military-industrial complex. Defense contractors undoubtedly wield enormous influence in Washington, but the deeper mechanism resembles something closer to economic codependency.
Universities receive Pentagon research grants; manufacturers rely on military procurement; municipal governments rely on defense-related economic activity; and millions of Americans depend, directly or indirectly, on employment tied to the defense sector.
The result is a coalition in which politicians, labor interests, local governments and contractors all possess strong incentives to preserve high levels of military spending. The US may no longer sustain enormous defense budgets solely because it expects large-scale war, but because the defense economy has become one of the few politically acceptable means through which the federal government can pursue industrial policy.
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This clown can theorize what he likes but we need a strong military. Strong energy policy of drilling and production at home. Strong AI because we are up against Chinese AI research.
Our strong military that can project forces, also keeps our Dollar strong.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Farewell Address (1961)
A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment.
Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action,
so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction.
American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required,
make swords as well.
But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation
of national defense; we have been compelled to create
a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions.
This conjunction of an immense military establishment
and a large arms industry is new in the American experience.
Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications.
In the councils of government, we must guard against
the acquisition of unwarranted influence,
whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.
The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power
exists and will persist.
China, Russia, North Korea and Islamic regimes don't endure the yo-yo musical chairs we do every few years, and they adhere to their political philosophies far more faithfully.
So while the average shill for Raytheon or Lockheed-Martin schmoozes some politician primarily for profit they're helping keep the U.S. on par with those countries dedicated to seeing our destruction.
Funny how stuff tends to ultimately balance out.
⚠️🌍
But then we were dragged into yet another Mideast conflict, the Gulf War. Which only occurred because U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, signaled to Saddam Hussein that the U.S. had no objection to Iraq invading Kuwait.
The Neocon Deep State tricked Saddam into attacking Kuwait, thus providing a pretext to remain militarily in the Mideast, and continue our military spending and foreign aid.
Implying AOC and Massie are diverse is like claiming that the GOP members of the Jan6 committee made it bipartisan.
Gimme a F@#$in break. Both are clowns.
1. We can have a strong military for far less than $1.5T annually.
2. George Washington would be rolling over in his grave over this statement.
🤔 After we replace the tens of thousands of munitions fired off recently at the Iranian Mullahs. ?
2. You don’t maintain a strong military by firing tens of thousands of munitions in dystopian Islamic dumps.
I hope Prez Trump has a good strategy re: Iran. So far it is mostly incomprehensible - to me. 🤔
Read Washington’s own words on that subject.
“Our strong military that can project forces, also keeps our Dollar strong.”
Do you agree with the above? Seems that you are merely quibbling over the price of this.
You and libertarians believe we should only defend our borders and shorelines, armed with pop guns.
I don’t even know where you get the idea that our dollar is “strong,” to begin with. Our domestic fiscal policy pretty much guarantees that the U.S. dollar will not be strong anytime soon.
Lolz you are clueless on this. Have an amazing day.
“ The Neocon Deep State tricked Saddam into attacking Kuwait..”
That’s quite the accomplishment. How exactly did they do that?
L
April Glaspie our dumbass ambassador to Iraq led Saddam to believe that US would not intervene if he invaded Kuwait.
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April Glaspie our ambassador to Iraq led Saddam to believe that US would not intervene if he invaded Kuwait.
That is a widely discussed claim, but historians and scholars remain divided on how much responsibility can be attributed to April Glaspie.
The argument stems largely from a meeting between Glaspie and Saddam Hussein on July 25, 1990, just days before Iraq invaded Kuwait. According to an Iraqi transcript of the meeting, Glaspie reportedly said that the United States had “no opinion on Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait.”
Those who support the claim argue that Saddam interpreted this as a signal that the U.S. would not oppose military action against Kuwait.
Having “no opinion” on a “border dispute” is hardly permission for a full scale invasion.
L
Looks like permission to me. Saddam had a long standing beef with the Kuwait smart asses. They were slant drilling under the border into a major Iraqi oil reservoir.
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