To my mind, Elizabeth Warren is basically a Hillary Clinton who doesn’t summer in the Hamptons. That is, a well-meaning know it all who wants to run your life for you. So when disillusioned conservative Max Boot took aim at her in the Washington Post—“Elizabeth Warren has lots of ideas. Bad ideas.”—I was (largely) content to nod along, until I came to this:
Warren’s foreign policy may be even worse. Like Trump, she favors tariffs and wants to reduce overseas commitments.1 Unlike Trump, she wants to cut the defense budget, even though the Rand Corp. warned that, already, “U.S. forces could, under plausible assumptions, lose the next war they are called upon to fight.”
Well, the words “cut the defense budget” would cause any card-carrying neocon, anti-Trumper or pro, to defecate heavily in his breeches, as Max so clearly did, so much so that his link to the Rand Corporation’s dire warnings is out of date and has been “superseded” by Rand Corp.’s current study, circa 2017, “U.S. Military Capabilities and Forces for a Dangerous World’, though it contains the same dramatic language. I could, and will, point out that Rand was set up to advise the Defense Department, and continues to get substantial funding from Defense, so that expecting Rand to suggest anything other than, in effect, “Danger, Will Robinson!” is pretty moot, and one can, after all, program a robot to do that.2
Furthermore, what’s really funny is that if Max had actually found the “correct” study, he would have learned that Rand’s high-end recommendation, allowing us to supposedly fight two major wars at once, was $628 billion. The 2019 U.S. defense budget is somewhere between $685 and $716 billion, depending on who’s counting the beans, thanks to massive increases larded on by the Trump Administration over the past two years, lard on top of lard, one might say. So, according to Rand, we can afford a cut in military spending of some $60-$90 billion! Sweet! Guess Lizzie won that one!
Afterwords
I have kvetched, most mightily, on the subject of military waste now 27 times. Idiots like Max, and Rand, never notice that, among other things, Europe alone vastly outspends Russia, that China’s less than friendly neighbors’ spending is substantial—perhaps 50% of China’s total—and, most of all, that a “major war” between major nations would involve nuclear weapons, and no one wants to fight a war with nuclear weapons!
Afterwords II
One could also point out, for the benefit of both Mr. Boot and Rand, that the U.S. has never lost a war because of lack of money, but frequently—all too frequently—loses wars because it insists on initiating wars that are irrelevant to its national security.
1. I agree that all tariffs are terrible. Overseas commitments? We could lose a few.
2. There was back in the day, a TV show, Lost In Space, which as I understand it (I never watched), featured a robot that would exclaim “Danger, Will Robinson!” at opportune times.
