Tag: perpetual war

Patriotic Dissent: How A Working-Class Soldier Turned Against “Forever Wars”

When it comes to debate about US military policy, the 2020 presidential election campaign is so far looking very similar to that of 2016. Joe Biden has pledged to ensure that “we have the strongest military in the world,” promising to “make the investments necessary to equip our troops for the challenges of the next century, not the last one.”

In the White House, President Trump is repeating the kind of anti-interventionist head feints that won him votes four years ago against a hawkish Hillary Clinton. In his recent graduation address at West Point, Trump re-cycled applause lines from 2016 about “ending an era of endless wars” as well as America’s role as “policeman of the world.”

In reality, since Trump took office, there’s been no reduction in the US military presence  abroad, which last year required a Pentagon budget of nearly $740 billion. As military historian and retired career officer Andrew Bacevich notes, “endless wars persist (and in some cases have even intensified); the nation’s various alliances and its empire of overseas bases remain intact; US troops are still present in something like 140 countries; Pentagon and national security state spending continues to increase astronomically.”

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A Headline That Perfectly Encapsulates Mainstream Liberalism:

“JUST IN: Senate Passes $740 Billion Defense Bill With Provision To Remove Confederate Names Off Military Bases” reads a headline from the digital news site Mediaite, which could also serve as a perfect diagnosis for everything that is sick about mainstream liberal orthodoxy.

The Democrat-led House and Republican-led Senate have now both passed versions of this bill authorizing three-quarters of a trillion dollars for a single year of military spending, both by overwhelming bipartisan majorities, on the condition that the names of Confederate Civil War leaders be removed from military bases.

Unsurprisingly, Security Policy Reform Institute’s Stephen Semler found a direct relationship between how much a House Democrat has been paid by the war industry and how likely they were to have voted for the bloated military budget which also obstructs any attempts to scale down troop presence in Afghanistan.

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