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William Astore, Cutting the Pentagon Down to Size

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It’s one of the stranger phenomena on this planet. By 2023, the U.S. was estimated to spend more money on its “defense budget” than the next 10 countries combined. Yes, the next 10! And yet, whether you’re talking about Korea and Vietnam in the last century, or Afghanistan, Iraq, and so many other places involved in what came to be known as the “war on terror” in this one, the U.S. hasn’t won a conflict of any significance (or even insignificance) in recent memory.

Take, for example, Somalia. As Nick Turse reports at the Intercept, the U.S. has been involved in a conflict with what became al-Shabab, a local branch of al-Qaeda, since its special operations forces were first dispatched there in 2002. In the years that followed, conventional troops and air power were added to the mix. In 2007, the U.S. military made its first air strike there and at least 280 air attacks and commando raids on al-Shabab have followed. The result, as Turse notes: “Last year, deaths in Somalia from Islamist violence hit a record high of 7,643 — triple the number in 2020… [including] a 22% rise in fatalities from terrorism in Somalia from 2022 to 2023,” while “violence has increasingly bled across the border into Kenya.”

And that’s about as close to success as the war on terror gets. Meanwhile, last year Congress responded (as always) by passing a record Pentagon budget of $886 billion on its way, it seems, to the trillion-dollar mark in the foreseeable future. Quite a record, all in all, when it comes to squandering your tax dollars on the military-industrial-congressional complex. But let retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel, historian, and TomDispatch regular William Astore fill you in on what it would now mean (and would have meant once upon a time) to cut that budget in a significant fashion — and then, of course, dream on. Tom

Daring to “Look a Sacred Cow in the Teeth”

Military Spending and National (In)Security

In an age when American presidents routinely boast of having the world’s finest military, where nearly trillion-dollar war budgets are now a new version of routine, let me bring up one vitally important but seldom mentioned fact: making major cuts to military spending would increase U.S. national security.

Why? Because real national security can neither be measured nor safeguarded solely by military power (especially the might of a military that hasn't won a major war since 1945). Economic vitality matters so much more, as does the availability and affordability of health care, education, housing, and other crucial aspects of life unrelated to weaponry and war. Add to that the importance of a Congress responsive to the needs of the working poor, the hungry and the homeless among us. And don't forget that the moral fabric of our nation should be based not on a military eternally ready to make war but on a determination to uphold international law and defend human rights. It’s high time for America to put aside its conveniently generic “rules-based order” anchored in imperial imperatives and face its real problems. A frank look in the mirror is what’s most needed here.

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Rebecca Gordon, My “Children” Say They Won’t Vote for Biden

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Let me start with my own news. At almost 80, I’ve decided not to run for president. I know it’s a shock and, if the presidency were largely a morning or even an afternoon job, I might actually consider it. But 24 hours a day, with crises endlessly multiplying in a world truly on edge (and seemingly at the edge as well)? No, I don’t think so. At this age, I find that I already tire out more quickly than I once did. And assuming I won (which I suspect I might), I would be 84 in my final year in office, which I find worrisome. Yes, an 84-year-old or even an 86-year-old could prove to be a perfectly competent, even exceptional president, but is it really something you want to bet your bottom dollar on?

I have a strange feeling that this country deserves someone younger in the White House than Joe Biden, Donald Trump, or me. I mean, comedian Bill Maher even suggested that Joe Biden could prove to be the “Ruth Bader Ginsberg of the presidency.” How true! After all, when Dwight D. Eisenhower left the White House in 1961 at age 70, having had a stroke in office that affected his speech, he was the oldest president in our history. When Ronald Reagan left at 77 in 1989, setting a new age record, he might even have had dementia.

Now, we face two men, both of whom would set remarkable age records for that office and both of whom are already often fumbling with words when they speak extemporaneously (though admittedly each always did some of that, even in his better years). Still, only one of them represents a danger beyond compare should he enter the White House a second time and that, of course, is The Donald. In that context, let TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon explore the strange and potentially all too ominous presidential race of 2024. Tom

Trump Showed Us Who He Is the First Time Around

Trump 2.0 Would Be Even Worse

Recently my partner and I had brunch with some old comrades, folks I first met in the 1996 fight to stop the state of California from outlawing affirmative action. Sadly, we lost that one and, almost three decades later, we continue to lose affirmative action programs thanks to a Supreme Court rearranged or, more accurately, deranged by one Donald J. Trump.

It was pure joy to hang out with them and remember that political struggle during which, as my partner and I like to say, we taught a generation of young people to ask, “Can you kick in a dollar to help with the campaign?” For a couple of old white lesbians who, in the words of a beloved Catherine Koetter poster, "forgot to have children," those still-committed organizers and activists are the closest thing to offspring we’ve got. And their kids, including one now in college, who were willing to hang out with their parents’ old buddies, are the closest we’ll ever have to grandchildren. 

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Alfred McCoy, Living in a Quagmire World

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[Note for TomDispatch Readers: Just a small reminder that, if you find today’s Alfred McCoy piece as fascinating as I did, a signed, personalized copy of his remarkable book on empire, To Govern the Globe: World Orders and Catastrophic Change, is still available to anyone who visits the TD contribution page and donates $125 or more. Think of this as but another reminder that this site needs your donations in a big-time fashion. Tom]

Americans have never liked to think of themselves as part of the West’s imperial history that began with the Roman empire and may now quite literally be ending, as historian and TomDispatch regular Alfred McCoy suggests, in a distinctly un-American moment. The author of a classic history of empire, To Govern the Globe: World Orders and Catastrophic Change, McCoy has previously suggested that, in symbolic terms, if Donald Trump were to win the 2024 presidential election (or even lose it and once again contest it, possibly, thanks to his most fervent followers, in an ominously well-armed fashion), he could prove to be the end of empire personified.

Certainly, as McCoy explains today, it’s hard not to imagine that, from Ukraine to Gaza to Asia, this country is on a dramatic imperial downward slide. His own findings only serve to reinforce a view taking root among America’s European and Asian allies that the United States, globally dominant since 1945 and triumphantly the lone superpower on Planet Earth in 1991 after the collapse of the Soviet Union, is now experiencing an epoch-ending terminal failure. The global Pax Americana (that proved to have all too much war in it) is, it seems, crumbling amid two grim conflicts, one in Europe and the other in the Middle East, and a political and military stand-off with China that could, at any moment, take a turn for the worse.

And let me add: it’s strange to see the American Moment (and yes, historically speaking, I do think that should be capitalized!) potentially ending here at home with two elderly men locked in an electoral knife fight that could blow the American imperium sky-high from the inside out. Tom

The American Empire in (Ultimate?) Crisis

The Decline and Fall of It All?

Empires don’t just fall like toppled trees. Instead, they weaken slowly as a succession of crises drain their strength and confidence until they suddenly begin to disintegrate. So it was with the British, French, and Soviet empires; so it now is with imperial America.

Great Britain confronted serious colonial crises in India, Iran, and Palestine before plunging headlong into the Suez Canal and imperial collapse in 1956. In the later years of the Cold War, the Soviet Union faced its own challenges in Czechoslovakia, Egypt, and Ethiopia before crashing into a brick wall in its war in Afghanistan.

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