I won’t keep you in suspense. IT’S TRUMP! The bad news—or, I guess, the worse news—is, it’s a close contest. And the worst news—for now—is that it’s not just funny dumb but, all too likely, disastrous dumb. Because the real objective for both sides—though they’re choosing different routes—is a new Cold War, with ever-tightening tensions, ever-emerging “crises”, and ever-mounting defense budgets as far as the eye can see. That $700 billion defense budget, for example. Don’t you find that a little bit embarrassing? How about $1,000,000,000,000? You know, a solid trillion! Isn’t that more American? Isn’t that how we roll?
Well, oy vey, oy vey, is all I can say. A week ago or so, our “intelligence chiefs”, aka the “Military Intellectual Complex”, a gag that has taken me a full decade to come up with, reported to Congress that, as the New York Times explained it “North Korea is unlikely to dismantle its nuclear arsenal, that the Islamic State group remains a threat and that the Iran nuclear deal is working. The chiefs made no mention of a crisis at the U.S.-Mexican border for which Trump has considered declaring a national emergency.”
If you’ve keeping up with the news, you know that Trump didn’t take kindly to the “chiefs”— FBI Director Christopher Wray, CIA Director Gina Haspel and Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats—dissing his priorities and inserting their own, calling their comments “extremely passive and naïve”, which is what they could have said about him.
As Scott Ritter, writing for the American Conservative, points out, the American intelligence community has a long history of getting it wrong:
In this case, Trump is right and his detractors are wrong.
The current crop of national intelligence chiefs are cut from the same cloth as their predecessors. They are careerists who have risen to the top not through their analytical or operational talents, but through their willingness to conform to a system that is designed not to challenge conventional thinking—especially when such thinking sustains policies that have been given the imprimatur of the entrenched establishment.
That’s definitely true, and Ritter goes on to detail the number of times the CIA et al. have gotten it all wrong at the behest of their political masters. But Trump’s major beef with the Military Intellectual Complex is that it isn’t obedient enough to his every claim—because, of course, Trump believes that it’s the job of every government employee to give him unlimited and unstinted personal loyalty. If Trump had his way, the MIC would be praising him for averting a major war with North Korea, thanks to his warm personal relationship with best bud (one of them, at least) Kim Jong Un, not to mention how withdrawing from the agreement with Iran guarantees that that nation will never acquire nuclear weapons and indeed all but guarantees the complete collapse of the evil mullahs in the very near future.
What’s worse—much worse, in fact—beyond this affront to Trump’s massive, and massively unstable, l’amour-propre—is that—given the way of the world—the world of DC, at least—the future of American foreign policy is likely to be a malign, split the difference mish-mash of the worst of both Trump’s and the MIC’s competing “visions”. The myth of the Trump-Kim Jong Un bludbruterschaft will fade, but the myth that North Korea’s nuclear weapons constitute an “existential threat” to the U.S. will be dusted off and brandished whenever peace is in danger of breaking out. While Trump may actually succeed in getting U.S. troops out of Syria and Afghanistan, that victory may be more than cancelled out by his compulsive determination to kick some as of yet unspecified ass in Iran as Trump, both led on and enabled by National Security Advisor and war whisperer in chief Tom Bolton, keeps ratcheting up the tension, sure that something cool and electorally advantageous will happen if he just keeps on poking and prodding long enough and hard enough.
In the meantime, of course, Trump keeps antagonizing China, while Congress keeps antagonizing Russia. There is much not to like about both nations. One has a de facto authoritarian president for life and the other a fuehrer de jure. One seeks to expand a “philosophy” of reactionary chauvinism in Europe, while the other seeks to recover—really, to invent—its “natural role” as the dominant economic and cultural force throughout Asia. Both nations are harassing the U.S. in a variety of unattractive ways, but both are, literally, at the opposite ends of the earth from the U.S.2
Russia, whose economic sophistication is still decades behind the West, Germany in particular, is an annoyance far more than a danger, though Putin, lustily waving his nuclear weapons, which he would never dare use—for what could he gain that would be worth the nuclear holocaust that the U.S., Britain, and France could and would all inflict upon him?—is less of a danger. Back in the day, President Eisenhower used to say “There won’t be a war. Khrushchev knows that, no matter what, I can always destroy Moscow, and there’s nothing he wants so much that he’ll give up Moscow to get it,” words that are a thousand times more true today than back in the fifties.
The real danger of nuclear weapons is the triggering of their use by accident, confusion, or misinterpretation of the other side’s actions. During the Cuban missile crisis, Soviet anti-aircraft installations in Cuba had strict orders not to shoot at U.S. planes flying overhead, but one Soviet officer fired anyway, when he saw the Cubans doing so. “We were here to protect our Cuban brothers,” he explained. On several occasions, U.S. surface ships dropped “warning” depth charges near nuclear-armed Soviet submarines. See, because it didn’t hit you, it was a warning shot. So you shouldn’t feel threatened. If we wanted to kill you, you’d already be dead. That’s the difference.
Trump, by abrogating our treaty with Russia regarding intermediate-range missiles, has given the Pentagon an exceedingly early Christmas present. It’s clear that Trump likes breaking treaties—it feels so manly. I suspect that Trump wants another arms race. It’s fun spending money, and maybe, just maybe, he could build the world’s biggest bomb, or the world’s biggest, well, the world’s biggest penis shaped object, a goal that seems to exert a fascination over many billionaires, both real and imaginary.
It is bad enough to get into a nuclear pissing match with a pissant1 country like Russia, which is spacious in the possession of dirt but has a defense budget less than a tenth the size of ours, about $61 billion in 2017—buying, of course, that wonderful Russian technology, which is light years in advance of our own, if you believe Comrade Putin, not to mention those professional liars in the Pentagon and elsewhere, and even else-elsewhere. But getting into a shoving match with China is a whole ’nother level of stupidity, and danger.
China, unlike Russia, is a true “rival” to the United States, something that we have never really experienced before. The Soviet Union certainly sought world leadership, and had the advantage of millions of true believers in the great 20th century myth of “the Revolution”, when those who had nothing would at once have everything, while China “only” has its massive size and steadily growing economy as a fit vehicle for dominating the Asian landmass in a manner somewhat similar to the dominance of the United States in the Western Hemisphere. Such strange presumption!
Sadly, it’s not only Trump and the MIC that want to get into a pissing match with China. Elizabeth Warren wants in on the action as well, claiming that we must not lose our technological lead over China. Here’s a news flash, Lizzie: no country keeps its technological advantage forever. Something that can be done once can be done again. Great Britain was the world’s workshop from about 1770 to 1870, but after that both the U. S. and Germany caught up swiftly. The U.S. was easily the world’s leading industrial nation by 1914, a lead that widened enormously when Europe all but blew itself up in first World War I and World War II. Yet by 1975, both Japan and Germany were challenging the U.S. for supremacy in the world market for passenger automobiles, an industry that the U.S. had of course invented. One decade later, the U.S. had clearly lost the “race” for dominance in the market for home entertainment electronics, something else we had invented.
Still, the U.S. had a huge, educated, homogeneous population and an unmatched system of higher education, which helped us first create and then dominate the whole field of digital electronics. But China, in a matter of decades, has emerged from a state of self ruin imposed by blind ideological obsessions to the modern age, with a population four times the size of the U.S. There is no reason why China should not emerge as a “giant” Germany, or a “giant” Japan, or, indeed, a “giant” U.S. There is no trick the U.S. can play to turn back the clock. It’s quite possible that China’s swerve to authoritarianism may ultimately lead to a stultified, self-destructive society (which, of course, would present significant dangers in its own right), but it’s also possible that, in fifty years, China’s economy could be twice the size of our own. Trying to apply the “lessons of the past”, when the U.S., in league with Great Britain and the Soviet Union, defeated Nazi Germany, with the odds seven to one in our favor (in terms of uniformed troops), and when the U.S., in league with western Europe and Japan, defeated the Soviet Union, with an economy less than half the size of the U.S. economy alone, could be literally self-defeating.
As I’ve complained before, the “left” promotes almost no reasoned opposition to the MIC, when indeed it isn’t simply repeating its talking points in less hysterical tones. Even though right-wing hawks constantly accused President Obama of being “soft” on North Korea—because if he were “firm” the commies would have surrendered immediately—the Obama Administration pushed the myth of the Korean menace as much as the Bush Administration, whose “toughness” resulted in the development of the Korean bomb in the first place. Obama, whose opposition to nuclear weapons was “sincere”—at least he thought so—apparently thought it was disastrous for any nation without nuclear weapons to acquire them, even while signing off on a trillion-dollar, entirely unnecessary, renovation of our nuclear inventory, thanks to the massive inertia of the MIC, the almost complete lack of interest on the part of liberal voters on any subject related to foreign and military policy, and the almost complete obeisance of Congress to military contractors.
Liberals are happy to ridicule the split between Trump and the MIC, but they almost always accept the MIC talking points as a convenient stick to beat Trump, without noticing or caring that they’re also promoting a new Cold War as well. It’s just that Trump’s Cold War is all about feeding Trump’s ego, while the MIC’s Cold War is all about maintaining the careers of thousands of hard-nosed, hard-working bureaucrats, both in and out of uniform, who don’t want to admit that they’re a solution in search of a problem.
Afterwords
If I’ve skimped on the whole Middle East aspect of this thing, and I certainly have, well, there’s a limit to the amount of angst that I can ventilate in one sitting.
1. Word “recognizes” “pissant”. I did not see that coming.
2. Russia is marginally closer via the over the Pole route, but they still have to go through Canada first. And that’s a lot of skiing.
