Friends,
Why do the legislators who get mucho donations from the
military contractors think they can get us to believe they are protecting this
country from attack? Actually, the weapons contractors make us less safe
as tax dollars going to them is money diverted from healthcare, social services
and infrastructure. In other words, weapons contractors are not part of
the national defense. National defense means all of us have Improved
Medicare for All, clean air and water, income equality, good schools and more.
This is an excellent article. However, Goodman is
stuck in the muck as he consistently uses the term defense. The U.S.
military is not a defense force. It is a war machine. Ask people in
Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere. Remember It used to be the Department of
War, back in the day when the truth was important.
Kagiso, Max
The Coronavirus and the Urgent Need to Redefine
National Security
Posted By Melvin Goodman On March
25, 2020
Photograph
Source: CDC/Dr. Fred Murphy – Public Domain
For
far too long, the United States has been wastefully spending its precious
budgetary resources on a nineteenth-century military strategy and a strategic
arms policy that has brought no advantages to the American people. For
the past three decades, our national security policies have been ineffectual
and irrelevant to the genuine threats we face today. These threats do not
emanate from Russia or China. Rather, they stem from an underfunded and highly
vulnerable public health system, a cyber world that is out of control, and a
crumbling infrastructure. In 2017, the American Society of Civil
Engineers gave a grade of D-plus to the nation’s infrastructure, with the
lowest grades going to roads, bridges, mass transit, and water management systems.
President
Dwight D. Eisenhower warned us 60 years ago that military demands on U.S.
spending would become a “cross of iron” that would limit spending on domestic
needs. The United States has been profligate, ignoring real enemies,
particularly the climate catastrophe that awaits the global community as well
as the domestic evidence of economic deterioration.
Despite
its standing as one of the richest nations on earth, the United States has
enormous poverty and the world’s highest level of economic inequality; an
archaic system for health care that has been exposed by the novel coronavirus
pandemic; and the highest level of child mortality in the industrial
world. We worship a gun culture and find no inconsistency in endorsing
capital punishment while endorsing right-to-life. Unlike most of the
industrial world, we lack universal health care and no guaranteed sick leave.
Meanwhile,
as the only superpower since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, we have
misused our military power because there was an absence of the restraint that
Soviet power had ensured. We were careful in some scenarios because we could
not be sure how the Kremlin would react. More recently, resources have
been wasted in pursuing fool’s errands in the Middle East and Southwest Asia,
where the United States wages war without clear objectives. Increasing
bipartisan majorities see defense [sic] spending as a jobs bill and, as a
result, support record-level defense [sic] spending that finds the United
States in an arms race with itself.
The
bloated military and intelligence budget has the United States spending more on
defense [sic] than during the worst years of the Cold War, outspending the
entire global community. Defense [sic] spending and procurement must be
linked to actual threats to the United States, acknowledging there are no
challengers to the United States in the key areas of power projection; naval
power, and overall air power. No other country has huge military bases
the world over or access to countless ports and anchorages. No other
country has used lethal military power so often and so far from its borders in
pursuit of dubious security interests.
The
Trump administration has abandoned the world of arms control and disarmament,
which every presidential administration since the Eisenhower administration has
endorsed. In December 2019, the United States tested a ballistic missile
that would have been forbidden by the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF)
Treaty that was signed in 1987 and abrogated by Donald Trump three decades
later. Secretary of Defense [sic] Mark Esper wants to put new missiles in
Asia “sooner rather than later;” fortunately, U.S. allies in the region are
uninterested. Meanwhile, the treaty to reduce strategic nuclear weapons
that was negotiated in the Obama administration expires in less than a year,
and there is no indication of U.S. interest in resuming negotiations.
Russian President Vladimir Putin called for a moratorium on new missile
deployments, which French President Emmanuel Macron considers a “basis for
discussion.”
What is
Needed to be Done?
Interestingly
and ironically, we have a statement from the former Soviet Union for the
substantive speech an American president should issue. On the eve of the
inauguration of President Jimmy Carter in January 1977, General Secretary
Leonid I. Brezhnev, a persistent advocate for detente, presented a new military
policy that renounced the pursuit of military superiority and endorsed
strategic arms limitations and reductions. Brezhnev’s Politburo was
committed to reducing Soviet defense [sic] programs and the high level of
defense [sic] spending. It was a signal to the Soviet military that it
had been receiving more than its fair share of Soviet resources and investment,
and that it was time for the military to share this largesse with a civilian
economy that was falling behind. This is exactly what the United States
must do, particularly in the wake of the current pandemic that has exposed U.S.
domestic weakness.
Brezhnev’s
speech was a seminal statement of Soviet policy that offers ideas to American
national security policy more than four decades later. First of all, the
Kremlin understood that there was a rough parity between the strategic forces
of the two sides. Moscow led in the area of the overall number of ICBM
and SLBM missile launchers as well as strategic missile throw weight. The
United States led in the numbers of missile warheads, forward submarine bases,
and strategic bombers. The existence of strategic parity, which continues
to this day, allows for significant reductions in strategic capability.
Moscow was objecting to Washington’s preoccupation with military power and the
military balance, which continues to this day and has worsened in the Trump
era.
Donald
Trump’s first secretary of defense [sic], James Mattis, wanted to transform the
U.S. military into a more effective fighting force that would waste less money
and pursue greater cooperation within allied arrangements. Trump stood in
the way of this with his pursuit of a Space Force; a wall and National Guard
deployment on the southern border; strategic modernization; and national and
regional missile defense [sic]. The Pentagon was initially spared the
politicization that Trump inflicted on the Department of State, the Department
of Justice, and the intelligence community, but his appointment of Secretary of
Defense [sic] Esper points to politicization of the military as well. U.S.
hostility toward Russia and China have driven Beijing and Moscow to forge their
best state-to-state relations in the past 60 years. Pulling out of the
Iran nuclear accord and manufacturing a crisis with Iran have worsened U.S.
interests in the Middle East, the Persian Gulf, and Southwest Asia.
Now,
at a time when there are no serious challenges from abroad to U.S. security or
military supremacy, more than 60 percent of U.S. discretionary spending goes to
support defense [sic], including the budgets of the Pentagon, Veteran’s
Affairs, Intelligence, Energy, and Homeland Security. No other agency in
the U.S. government gets as much as 10% of U.S. discretionary spending, and
Trump’s current budget calls for cutting the budgets of domestic agencies such
as Health and Human Services, Education, and Housing and Urban Development even
further. The pandemic crisis should remind us that these non-defense
agencies must be bolstered.
In
order to address serious domestic concerns, the United States must seek
significant savings by reducing the Pentagon budget, ending endless wars, and
returning to the arms control and disarmament arena. Security assistance
programs must be more transparent and accountable, and alliances with corrupt
dictators and monarchies must be ended. As defense analyst William
Hartung notes, the question is not “whether military spending creates jobs—it
is whether more jobs could be created by the same amount of money invested in
other ways.”
Article printed from CounterPunch.org: https://www.counterpunch.org
URL to article: https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/03/25/the-coronavirus-and-the-urgent-need-to-redefine-national-security/
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"The
master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought
the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while
the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially
their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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