AEI would print money for the Pentagon if it could
The DC think tank will find any reason to boost the DOD's already out of control budget, this time it's Russia

The American Enterprise Institute has officially entered the competition for which establishment DC think tank can come up with the most tortured argument for increasing America’s already enormous Pentagon budget.

Its angle — presented in a new report written by Elaine McCusker and Fred "Iraq Surge" Kagan — is that a Russian victory in Ukraine will require over $800 billion in additional dollars for the Defense Department, whose budget is already poised to push past $1 trillion per year.

Before addressing the Ukraine conflict directly, it’s worth looking at the security outcomes of high Pentagon spending during this century. As the Costs of War Project at Brown University has found, the full costs of America’s post-9/11 wars exceed $8 trillion. In addition, hundreds of thousands of people have died, millions have been driven from their homes, thousands of U.S. personnel have died in combat, and hundreds of thousands of vets have suffered physical or psychological injuries. And this huge cost in blood and treasure came in conflicts that not only failed to achieve their original objectives but actually left the target nations less stable and helped create conditions that made it easier for terrorist groups like ISIS to form.

Any call for ratcheting up Pentagon spending needs to reckon with this record of abject failure for a military first, “peace through strength” foreign policy. The new AEI report fails to do so.

As for its central thesis — that a Russian victory in Ukraine will require a sharp upsurge in Pentagon spending — neither part of the argument holds up to scrutiny. (...)

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 R_P wrote:

trump wants to take a place with a population greater than California and a land area greater than the entire US and give them the senate clout of N. Dakota

he wants tariffs to keep manufacturing jobs out of Canada but also wants Canada to be part of the US so tariffs won't apply and the jobs could stay there 

"Would you or would you not like Canada to become the 51st state of the United States?"

No: 82%
Yes: 13%

—-
No Among:

NDP: 94%
LPC: 89%
BQ: 88%
GPC: 87%
CPC: 73%
PPC: 57%

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Leger / Dec 9, 2024 / n=1520 / Online

The 13% should be deported to Florida.

Nekkid!

'America First' meets Greenland, Taiwan, and the Panama Canal
With an eye on China’s expanding footprint, Trump aims to recalibrate US strategy across three crucial global choke points

As the incoming Trump administration prepares to take office on January 20, 2025, a recalibration of U.S. foreign policy priorities and broader national strategy goals is already underway. Advocates of realism and restraint welcome Trump’s emphasis on a foreign policy that prioritizes pragmatism and “peace through strength” over ideological moralism, even while liberal internationalists fear the effects of “America First” policy on multilateral alliances.

Both sides recognize, however, a need for a prudent shift from crippling foreign policy misadventures and ideational stagnation to a bold U.S. foreign policy vision in all theaters of potential competition.

Among the constellation of apparent global security hotspots, three seemingly disparate locations — Taiwan, Greenland, and the Panama Canal — have emerged as serious contenders in the geopolitical realignment of interstate competition over resources, trade and shipping routes, and political-military dominance, becoming the recent focus of President-elect Trump’s typically boisterous social media posts over the holidays.

All three, whilst geographically distant, do share a common denominator — China — a so-called “pacing challenge” deemed most intent on dislodging America’s hegemony, supplanting its economic clout, and challenging its military primacy in an increasingly multipolar world. All represent tests for the kind of foreign policy Trump says he wants to pursue, while denying Chinese encroachments in key strategic areas. (...)

First of its kind tracker cracks open DC's think tank funding
New fun database filters the foreign interests, arms contractors, and US govt funding DC's top 50 orgs

Part of the so-called Washington swamp is the opacity of the funding going to powerful think tanks that provide policymaking expertise to Capitol Hill, to White House staff, and to agencies, including the Pentagon and State Department. It is no secret that the think tanks that have an outsized influence on foreign policy and national security affairs receive grants from the government to conduct studies and research to the tune of millions of dollars a year. Meanwhile, these organizations get tons of funding from the military contractors who stand to benefit from those reports and research in support of American war policy.

Foreign governments, too, are plowing millions into think tanks in hopes to influence the direction of policy their way.

Not only do think tanks generate a lot of paper but their experts write op-eds, they testify before Congress, they are called upon by reporters and producers to give their take on policy and world events — like the wars Washington is currently funding with American money and weapons — all over the information landscape. In short, they help shape perception and manufacture consent. (...)

Top defense stock traders in Congress in 2024
Data shows these lawmakers traded between $24M and $113M million worth, some while serving on committees making war policy

Pardoned?

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The US wants credit for Assad's ouster
Biden officials are trying to firm up his foreign policy legacy but is anyone buying it?

50 Oppressive Governments Supported by the U.S. Government (2020)

 islander wrote:

The "Protestant work ethic" is toxic.

Oliver Stone: on being 19 in war, and for a county addicted to it

 Red_Dragon wrote:
I think I've told this story, but it fits, so...

I asked a Mexican friend why I didn't see a lot of homeless people around like we have in the states. He gave me a puzzled look and said, why would we have homeless people? If you are hungry a Mexican will give you a burrito.  

The rest of the world looks at us and just puzzles. It really doesn't have to be this way.

It's time to retire the Munich analogy
Neoconservatives keep trotting it out to justify costly and dangerous interventions

Contemporary neoconservatism is, in its guiding precepts and policy manifestations, a profoundly ahistorical ideology. It is a millenarian project that not just eschews but explicitly rejects much of the inheritance of pre-1991 American statecraft and many generations of accumulated civilizational wisdom from Thucydides to Kissinger in its bid to remake the world.

It stands as one of the enduring ironies of the post-Cold War era that this revolutionary and decidedly presentist creed has to shore up its legitimacy by continually resorting to that venerable fixture of World War II historicism, the 1938 Munich analogy. The premise is simple, and, for that reason, widely resonant: British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, in his “lust for peace,” made war inevitable by enabling Adolf Hitler’s irredentist ambitions until they could no longer be contained by any means short of direct confrontation between the great powers.

Professor Andrew Bacevich brilliantly distilled the Munich analogy’s two constituent parts: “The first truth is that evil is real. The second is that for evil to prevail requires only one thing: for those confronted by it to flinch from duty,” he wrote. “In the 1930s, with the callow governments of Great Britain and France bent on appeasing Hitler and with an isolationist America studiously refusing to exert itself, evil had its way.” This is the school playground theory of international relations: failure to stand up to a bully at the earliest possible opportunity only serves to embolden their malignant behavior, setting the stage for a larger and more painful fight down the line.

The Cold War years saw a feverish universalization of the Munich analogy whereby every foreign adversary is Adolf Hitler, every peace deal is Munich 1938, and every territorial dispute is the Sudetenland being torn away from Czechoslovakia as the free world looks on with shoulders shrugged. This was the anxiety animating the spurious domino theory that precipitated U.S. involvement in Korea and Vietnam, but appeasement fever was kept in check by the realities of a bipolar Cold War competition that imposed significant constraints on what the U.S. could do to counteract its powerful, nuclear-armed Soviet rival.

These constraints were lifted virtually overnight with the fall of the Berlin Wall and dissolution of the Soviet bloc. President George H.W. Bush proclaimed the end of the “Vietnam syndrome,” or Americans’ healthy skepticism of war stemming from the disastrous decades-long intervention in Vietnam, following U.S. forces’ crushing victory in the Gulf War. The George W. Bush administration gave itself infinite license to intervene anywhere against anyone, including preemptively against “imminent threats,” on the grounds that anything less is tantamount to appeasement. “In the 20th century, some chose to appease murderous dictators, whose threats were allowed to grow into genocide and global war,” Bush said in 2003. “In this century, when evil men plot chemical, biological and nuclear terror, a policy of appeasement could bring destruction of a kind never before seen on this earth.”

Even as the threat landscape has shifted since 2003, neoconservatism’s epigoni have trotted out the Munich analogy to justify every subsequent military intervention in the Middle East. Where direct confrontation is too costly and risky, as with Russia and China, the historicists insist that anything short of a policy of total, unrelenting maximum pressure and isolation amounts to appeasement. (...)

Meet Trump's new National Security Council
The president-elect is stacking this critical policy deck with hawks bent on sticking it to China and intervening in war over Taiwan

None of these appointments bode well for advocates of U.S. foreign policy restraint, let alone for those who voted for Trump hoping he would prioritize domestic problems over endless foreign wars. At best, Trump’s picks will seek to simply replace one dangerous, nuclear-tinged Great Power conflict with another. At worst, they will not do the former, and embroil the United States into two of the latter.

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Industry: War with China may be imminent, but we're not ready
Want to push controversial and expensive military tech on the congressional purse string holders? Scare them.

Xmas stocking stuffing
Noam Chomsky Has Been Proved Right (Stephen Walt)
The writer’s new argument for left-wing foreign policy has earned a mainstream hearing.

For more than half a century, Noam Chomsky has been arguably the world’s most persistent, uncompromising, and intellectually respected critic of contemporary U.S. foreign policy. In a steady stream of books, articles, interviews, and speeches, he has repeatedly sought to expose Washington’s costly and inhumane approach to the rest of the world, an approach he believes has harmed millions and is contrary to the United States’ professed values. As co-author Nathan J. Robinson writes in the preface,The Myth of American Idealism was written to “draw insights from across (Chomsky’s) body of work into a single volume that could introduce people to his central critiques of U.S. foreign policy.” It accomplishes that task admirably. (...)

As the title suggests, the central target of the book is the claim that U.S. foreign policy is guided by the lofty ideals of democracy, freedom, the rule of law, human rights, etc. For those who subscribe to this view, the damage the United States has sometimes inflicted on other countries was the unintended and much regretted result of actions taken for noble purposes and with the best of intentions. Americans are constantly reminded by their leaders that they are an “indispensable nation” and “the greatest force for freedom the world has ever known,” and assured that moral principles will be at the “center of U.S. foreign policy.” Such self-congratulatory justifications are then endlessly echoed by a chorus of politicians and establishment intellectuals. (...)

New Rulez

Tulsi smears are an American tradition. They shouldn't be.
Calling Trump's DNI pick an 'asset or a dupe' has its roots in a long history of chilling anti-war speech