In his farewell address, Dwight Eisenhower delivered a warning that became far more appreciated after his death: beware the military-industrial complex.
Beware the symbiosis of government and private interests that generate mountains of wealth for defense contractors at the expense of the American taxpayer, and the feedback loop that this relationship creates in the media, the public intellectual and thinktank classes, and the political mainstream.
Beware the opportunity cost of foreign intervention; every bomb dropped on a classroom of children in Iraq is a new classroom for the South Side, every naval destroyer is a new hospital in an underserved community, every F-35 boondoggle is a trillion dollars that could have saved tens of thousands from opioid addiction.
As Americans, we have completely failed to heed his warning.
Recently, President Trump vetoed a second bipartisan bill to stop arming Saudi Arabia’s army in their quest to slaughter the Houthi rebels. Given the mainstream media’s focus on the political horserace and general neglect of issues of war and peace, this act unsurprisingly fell under the radar in the wake of the release of the Mueller report.
The current norm in American politics has been to fund militaristic allies and to generally maintain a policy of empire across the globe. This status quo has been so entrenched into the American political identity that we don’t even stop to consider the following: why does the American president appear to have unchecked military authority when Congress holds the Constitutional power to make war? Why is it essential to spend American tax dollars on subsidizing oil autocrats who slaughter women and children 3,000 miles away?
In the post 9/11 period, these normative questions have rarely been discussed in the public sphere, despite the moral and fiscal responsibility to at least consider them. Many public figures idealize America as a shining city on a hill, yet that ideal is coldly disconnected from the extreme costs of American expansionism, both around the world and at home. Let’s stop to consider how foreign interventionism weakens the American economic position.
No honest conversation about the national debt and spending in this country can avoid mentioning that the Pentagon spends nearly $700 billion dollars a year. This sum of money can never be deeply cut or adjusted, and when it is reduced in any way—see President Obama’s cuts to the military during sequestration—it is denounced as a military dismantlement that will weaken the United States and its allies while emboldening its enemies.
The inability to reduce the defense budget—especially in times of peace—creates incredible opportunity costs for the United States. There is great irony in the calls by so-called “deficit hawks” to reduce social programs for the poor as a means of reducing the debt while turning a blind eye to massive increases in military spending and large, regressive tax cuts that do little to generate sustainable economic growth.
America’s commitment to global empire ensures that there is a permanent freeze of American tax dollars that can never really be cut or reallocated, creating significant ramifications in public policy debates.
There are significant opportunity costs to the huge sums of money spent on proxy interventions in Yemen, the billions of dollars in weapons sent to theocratic dictators, the thousands of lives and trillions of dollars spent on invasions in Afghanistan in Iraq, or the estimated $100 billion spent on military bases around the world. For conservatives, they could serve as funding for domestic law enforcement or reductions in taxes. For libertarians, these funds can instead be used to shrink the deficit. For progressives, they represent money towards expanding vital programs to help underserved citizens.
Even for those who would never call themselves libertarian, it is hard to disagree with the argument made by people like Ron Paul that the United States’ huge sums of money spent on foreign proxy wars and militarism could be used instead to pay off the ever-expanding deficit. It is certainly preferable that the national debt be paid off than to see the “defense” industry continue to suckle at the government teat.
Indeed, the longer we leave the military-industrial complex in bed with the government, the more entrenched their propaganda machine will become. Minimizing the ability for the military-industrial complex to justify yet another foreign intervention as a pretext to pad their bottom line, the better. Shrinking the size of the government is certainly preferable to metaphorically strangling citizens at home to literally strangle citizens abroad in the name of profit.
Perhaps most infuriating is how any mention of reducing the “defense” budget is met with calls of treason, abandoning the troops, and selling out America to its enemies. The Pentagon has so many surplus tanks, APC’s, and the like that they created a program in the late 1990’s that allowed local police departments to gain access to surplus military equipment—this is how the Ferguson police department had Humvees and APC’s with mounted sentry guns. In some instances, the Pentagon has even abandoned surplus military equipment in the deserts of the Middle East, and then wonder how terrorist cells get their weapons.
This debate becomes even more cynical when Republicans who voted for the sequestration—resulting in cuts to federal spending across the board including defense spending—later claimed that Obama was betraying American troops by cutting defense spending by 10% over seven years.
The time has come to stop pretending that the interests of American citizens—and the interests of American troops, for that matter— are less important than those of private military contractors, their allies in Congress, the media, and the thinktank complex. When the Trump administration will soon be running a deficit in excess of a trillion dollars, it is wholly reasonable to suggest that perhaps the hundreds of billions spent on offensive wars, foreign military bases, and defense industry boondoggles should be examined and reallocated.
It is evil that American tax dollars are used to slaughter children in Yemen at the expense of decent healthcare and schools for children in our backyard. In the 20 years since 9/11, it seems we have learned nothing: we still prop up evil regimes across the world at the expense of fiscal sanity in Washington. At the very least, can someone finally audit the Pentagon? Where’s Rand Paul and his selective fiscal outrage when you need him?
