TomDispatch.com

You may have noticed those U.S. aircraft carrier task forces repeatedly entering the South China Sea to challenge Beijing or the increased arms sales to Taiwan and the special visits high Trump administration officials have paid to that island (another way to challenge the Chinese leadership). I’ll bet, though, that you didn’t notice when the USS John S. McCain slipped into Peter the Great Bay in the Sea of Japan. That “freedom of navigation” float-a-thon that purposely crossed Russia’s claimed maritime border there was ended only when a Russian warship, the Admiral Vinogradov, challenged the Navy destroyer. Or, for that matter, did you notice that American special ops guys, usually associated with the never-ending U.S. war on terror, were firing M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (transported to Romania from a U.S. air base in Germany) 25 miles into the Black Sea as another kind of challenge to the Russians?

I know, I know, you must think that previous paragraph is ancient, that the young Tom Engelhardt wrote it 40 or 50 years ago in the midst of the Cold War with the Soviet Union. Unfortunately, no such luck. I wrote it this very week and all of the above happened in 2020, not the 1970s. Indeed, as TomDispatch regular Michael Klare, author most recently of All Hell Breaking Loose: The Pentagon’s Perspective on Climate Change, points out today, with the Trump era drawing to a particularly chaotic close, the Pentagon seems deeply committed to one thing above all else: entering a twenty-first-century version of the Cold War. As it turns out, America’s forever wars (still ongoing, though perhaps finally winding down) may be succeeded by wars that none of us will ever forget. Tom

Trump’s Pernicious Military Legacy
From the Forever Wars to the Cataclysmic Wars
By Michael T. Klare

In the military realm, Donald Trump will most likely be remembered for his insistence on ending America’s involvement in its twenty-first-century “forever wars” -- the fruitless, relentless, mind-crushing military campaigns undertaken by Presidents Bush and Obama in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Somalia. After all, as a candidate, Trump pledged to bring U.S. troops home from those dreaded war zones and, in his last days in office, he’s been promising to get at least most of the way to that objective. The president’s fixation on this issue (and the opposition of his own generals and other officials on the subject) has generated a fair amount of media coverage and endeared him to his isolationist supporters. Yet, however newsworthy it may be, this focus on Trump’s belated troop withdrawals obscures a far more significant aspect of his military legacy: the conversion of the U.S. military from a global counterterror force into one designed to fight an all-out, cataclysmic, potentially nuclear war with China and/or Russia.

People seldom notice that Trump’s approach to military policy has always been two-faced. Even as he repeatedly denounced the failure of his predecessors to abandon those endless counterinsurgency wars, he bemoaned their alleged neglect of America’s regular armed forces and promised to spend whatever it took to “restore” their fighting strength. “In a Trump administration,” he declared in a September 2016 campaign speech on national security, America’s military priorities would be reversed, with a withdrawal from the “endless wars we are caught in now” and the restoration of “our unquestioned military strength.”

Read more »

Nineteen years ago, the administration of George W. Bush responded to the 9/11 attacks by invading Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. And, yes, you won’t be shocked to learn that the Taliban is stronger now than at any time since that moment. Though U.S. troop strength in Afghanistan has been shrinking, thanks to the president who swore he would end America’s forever wars but didn’t, it still remains a factor there as does American air power (and Joe Biden has favored keeping U.S. counterterrorism forces in that country).

Of course, it’s now more than 17 years since the Bush administration invaded Iraq, something its top officials were intent on doing from the early moments after 9/11, even though their nemesis Saddam Hussein had nothing whatsoever to do with al-Qaeda. As Donald Trump prepares to depart the White House in a storm of accusations of election fraud, he’ll leave several thousand U.S. soldiers in Iraq, too. And there are 700 more in Somalia, where the U.S. has been fighting on and off for 27 years, many of whom may be withdrawn before the new administration takes over (though not the local CIA contingent, one of whom died there recently). And the list just keeps on going, including those 900 American soldiers left in Syria, even though the president’s generals falsely promised to withdraw 700 of them (a move criticized by Joe Biden).

Never in history, it might be said, has a great power at the height of its military strength been quite so unable to impress its will on the countries and peoples it targeted.

And yet, sooner or later, withdrawn or not, American troops do come home, often in the deepest sort of trouble. Once here, they are eternally “thanked” and then generally forgotten, though not by TomDispatch regular, co-founder of Brown University’s Costs of War Project, and military spouse Andrea Mazzarino who reminds us today that, while U.S. taxpayer dollars flow in a profligate fashion into the Pentagon and the major arms makers in this country, America’s soldiers are essentially left in the lurch. Our forever wars, in other words, are a matter of forever funding when it comes to those at the top and underfunding when it comes to those who “volunteer” to fight them. Tom

Ready or Not, Here They Come
A Military Spouse’s Perspective on Bringing the Troops Home from Afghanistan and Iraq
By Andrea Mazzarino

By the end of this year, the White House will reportedly have finally brought home a third of the 7,500 troops still stationed in Afghanistan and Iraq (against the advice of President Trump’s own military leaders). While there have been stories galore about the global security implications of this plan, there has been almost no discussion at all about where those 2,700 or so troops who have served in this country’s endless wars will settle once their feet touch U.S. soil (assuming, that is, that they aren’t just moved to less controversial garrisons elsewhere in the Greater Middle East), no less who’s likely to provide them with badly needed financial, logistical, and emotional support as they age.

Read more »

[Note for TomDispatch Readers: My piece today shouldn't prove the ultimate in boredom -- anything but, I hope. When it comes to this note, however, I can’t deny it. Still, TomDispatch continues to exist only because of notes like these and because readers like you, even in truly tough times, keep supporting this site. If you have the urge to continue to do so (or to do so for the first time) as this dismal year edges toward its chaotic end, visit our donation page and think about what’s possible. This old man couldn’t be more appreciative! Tom]

The History of the Decline and Fall of the American Empire
Or What It Means to Fall on a Failing Planet
By Tom Engelhardt

We’re now living in an age of opacity, as Rudy Giuliani pointed out in a courtroom recently. Here was the exchange:

“‘In the plaintiffs’ counties, they were denied the opportunity to have an unobstructed observation and ensure opacity,’ Giuliani said. ‘I’m not quite sure I know what opacity means. It probably means you can see, right?’

“‘It means you can’t,’ said U.S. District Judge Matthew Brann.

“‘Big words, your honor,’ Giuliani said.”

Big words indeed! And he couldn’t have been more on the mark, whether he knew it or not. Thanks in part to him and to the president he’s represented so avidly, even as hair dye or mascara dripped down his face, we find ourselves in an era in which, to steal a biblical phrase from Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman, all of us see as if “through a glass darkly.”

As in Election Campaign 2016, Donald Trump isn't the cause but a symptom (though what a symptom!) of an American world going down. Then as now, he somehow gathered into his one-and-only self so many of the worst impulses of a country that, in this century, found itself eternally at war not just with Afghans and Iraqis and Syrians and Somalis but increasingly with itself, a true heavyweight of a superpower already heading down for the count.

Here’s a little of what I wrote back in June 2016 about The Donald, a reminder that what’s happening now, bizarre as it might seem, wasn’t beyond imagining even so many years ago:

“It’s been relatively easy... -- at least until Donald Trump arrived to the stunned fascination of the country (not to speak of the rest of the planet) -- to imagine that we live in a peaceable land with most of its familiar markers still reassuringly in place... In truth, however, the American world is coming to bear ever less resemblance to the one we still claim as ours, or rather that older America looks increasingly like a hollowed-out shell within which something new and quite different has been gestating.

“After all, can anyone really doubt that representative democracy as it once existed has been eviscerated and is now -- consider Congress Exhibit A -- in a state of advanced paralysis, or that just about every aspect of the country’s infrastructure is slowly fraying or crumbling and that little is being done about it? Can anyone doubt that the constitutional system -- take war powers as a prime example or, for that matter, American liberties -- has also been fraying? Can anyone doubt that the country’s classic tripartite form of government, from a Supreme Court missing a member by choice of Congress to a national security state that mocks the law, is ever less checked and balanced and increasingly more than ‘tri’?”

Even then, it should have been obvious that Donald Trump was, as I also wrote in that campaign year, a wildly self-absorbed symptom of American-style imperial decline on a planet increasingly from hell. And that, of course, was four years before the pandemic struck or there was a wildfire season in the West the likes of which no one had imagined possible and a record 30 storms that more or less used up two alphabets in a never-ending hurricane season.

In the most literal sense possible, The Donald was our first presidential candidate of imperial decline and so a genuine sign of the times. He swore he would make America great again, and in doing so, he alone, among American politicians of that moment, admitted that this country wasn’t great then, that it wasn’t, as the rest of the American political class claimed, the greatest, most exceptional, most indispensible country in history, the sole superpower left on Planet Earth.

Read more »

Consider the second paragraph of the lead story in the November 20th New York Times:

“The leaders of Western Europe have called Mr. Biden, as has the president of the world’s rising superpower, Xi Jinping of China. PayPal’s chief executive extended his ‘warmest congratulations to President-Elect Joe Biden, who will become the 46th president of the U.S.A.’ The Boeing Corporation, which benefited from Mr. Trump’s demands for big-ticket defense items, issued a statement on Friday saying, ‘We look forward to working with the Biden administration.’”

Not that I need to remind you, but we were then (as we are now) in the midst of the most bizarre post-election moment in American history. Donald Trump was doing every strange thing he could to hold onto power (or, at least, the fantasy of power) and defenestrate the American political system, while burying himself in a never-ending TV binge in the White House. Under the circumstances, it was hardly surprising that Joe Biden, the new president-elect, was being recognized by the governments of Western Europe (many of which The Donald had harried or spurned) and greeted by the president of China (a country he had gone after economically and even militarily). No surprise there. But you know you’re in a brand new American world when a major weapons-making corporation like Boeing acts as if it were a foreign government preparing to deal with a new president in a disputed election.

Think of Boeing, in fact, as the Boris Johnson of arms corporations. After all, Donald Trump, who may have put more money into the Pentagon than any president in memory, had been out on the hustings in Saudi Arabia (doing sword dances, no less) from the early moments of his presidency to sell the products of America’s largest arms makers (Boeing included). And that performance of his never ended. His administration, for instance, only recently approved major arms sales to Taiwan (another slap in the face to China), including 100 Boeing-made Harpoon Coastal Defense Systems and 135 Boeing-made air-to-ground cruise missiles.

And yet, like the British prime minister, Boeing, too, has now turned on its man in the White House and publicly recognized the new president-elect. What more do you need to know about the world of big money and the 1% that we’re now pandemically immersed in? Unfortunately, there turns out to be so much more to know, as you’ll soon discover in the latest piece from Pentagon experts and TomDispatch regulars William Hartung and Mandy Smithberger. Tom

Shrinking the Pentagon
Will the Biden Administration Dare Cut Military Spending?
By William D. Hartung and Mandy Smithberger

Now that Joe Biden is slated to take office as the 46th president of the United States, advice on how he should address a wide range of daunting problems is flooding in. Nowhere is there more at stake than when it comes to how he handles this country’s highly militarized foreign policy in general and Pentagon spending in particular.

Defense spending increased sharply in the Trump years and is now substantially higher than it was during the Korean or Vietnam War eras or during the massive military buildup President Ronald Reagan oversaw in the 1980s. Today, it consumes well over half of the nation’s discretionary budget, which just happens to also pay for a wide array of urgently needed priorities ranging from housing, job training, and alternative energy programs to public health and infrastructure building. At a time when pandemics, high unemployment, racial inequality, and climate change pose the greatest threats to our safety and security, this allocation of resources should be considered unsustainable. Unfortunately, the Pentagon and the arms industry have yet to get that memo. Defense company executives recently assured a Washington Post reporter that they are “unconcerned” about or consider unlikely the possibility that a Biden administration would significantly reduce Pentagon spending.

Read more »

[Note for TomDispatch Readers: The next TD piece will appear on the evening of Sunday, November 29th. Here's wishing you all as good a Thanksgiving as is possible under our present difficult circumstances. And don't forget, if you feel the urge to contribute something to this site, do check out our donation page.  Believe me, we always need help!  Tom]

There’s a history still to be written of how key officials in the Trump administration and the Pentagon stiffed the commander-in-chief when it came to America’s forever wars. How, for instance, did the generals with whom Donald Trump initially surrounded himself convince the man who had, in part, won the presidency by campaigning to end America’s post-9/11 “endless” wars to significantly increase the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan in 2017? We don’t know. All we really know is that he shouldn’t then have been calling Secretary of Defense Jim “Mad Dog” Mattis, National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster, and Secretary of Homeland Security and later White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, “my generals” (as he also then spoke of “my military”). They should instead have been referring to him as “our president.”

As the Trump presidency ends with the commander-in-chief finally cutting the number of troops in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Somalia (but not withdrawing them all), a story remains to be told. On his recent retirement, for instance, Jim Jeffrey, the State Department’s special representative for Syria engagement, offered a revelation. When the president finally began acting to “end” America’s forever wars in December 2018 by demanding that U.S. troops be withdrawn from Syria -- Secretary of Defense Mattis would resign over that order -- he was convinced to leave behind a relatively small number of them, 200, as the withdrawal proceeded. Or so the president came to believe at least (and so it was reported at the time). But Jeffrey now informs us that “there was never a Syria withdrawal” at all. The full contingent of perhaps 900 American troops evidently remains there to this day. The president’s top officials simply lied to him (and assumedly the media) on the subject. As Jeffrey put it, “We were always playing shell games to not make clear to our leadership how many troops we had there.”

Now, almost 19 years after the post-9/11 American invasion of Afghanistan, partial withdrawals are reportedly soon to be underway in that country, Iraq, and Somalia (even as the president has evidently been contemplating a military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities). TomDispatch regular Andrew Bacevich, author most recently of The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory, focuses on their significance today. But to anyone who watched retired Army Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster attack the president’s Afghan withdrawal plan on the PBS NewsHour the other night, claiming Trump had “partnered with the Taliban against the Afghan government,” you do have to wonder just how efficiently those partial withdrawals will be carried out by "his" military before Joe Biden assumedly enters the Oval Office on January 20th and then, of course, who knows what will happen? Tom

A Good Deed from the Wicked Witch?
Actually Ending the War in Afghanistan
By Andrew Bacevich

Let's open up and sing, and ring the bells out
Ding-dong! the merry-oh sing it high, sing it low
Let them know the wicked witch is dead!

Within establishment circles, Donald Trump’s failure to win re-election has prompted merry singing and bell-ringing galore. If you read the New York Times or watch MSNBC, the song featured in the 1939 movie The Wizard of Oz nicely captures the mood of the moment.

As a consequence, expectations for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris to put America back on the path to the Emerald City after a dispiriting four-year detour are sky high. The new administration will defeat Covid-19, restore prosperity, vanquish racism, reform education, expand healthcare coverage, tackle climate change, and provide an effective and humane solution to the problem of undocumented migrants. Oh, and Biden will also return the United States to its accustomed position of global leadership. And save America’s soul to boot.

So we are told.

Read more »