Hallelujah! President Trump Actually Wants To Give Peace a Chance
Wow! These are the most powerful and consequential 36 words spoken by any US President. Ever.
“One of the first meetings I want to have is with President Xi of China, President Putin of Russia, and I want to say, ‘let’s cut our military budget in half.’ And we can do that.”
Yes, from the Donald’s lips to god’s ear and all that. The practicalities and obstacle-strewn path from here to there may well be insuperable.
But what our twice-baked President has actually done is to blow the Overton Window of permissible national security discussion wide open. Indeed, once you say that you intend to table this fear-obliterating idea at a joint summit with the two endlessly demonized leaders of America’s purported leading foes, everything—and we do mean everything— heretofore prohibited is on the table for fresh, open discussion.
After all, you don’t need to be a student of the intricacies of the $850 billion defense budget to recognize that when you cut the Pentagon’s rations by half the whole globalist national security framework left over from the Cold War’s demise 34 years ago collapses.
That’s because you would have to bring the Empire home—and all the national security apparatus that goes with it. To wit, 750 foreign bases and 173,000 US troops posted in 159 countries; globe spanning Navy and Air Force 0perations; and alliances large and small, from NATO to the Taiwan Straits, to so-called peacekeeping missions throughout the Middle East and north Africa.
Stated differently, what you can fund on just 50% of today’s defense budget, as we amplify below, is an invincible strategic nuclear deterrent and an impenetrable defense of America’s coastlines, airspace and sovereign territory.
And yet, and yet. That’s all we actually need! It would fully accomplish the fundamental national security goal of keeping America’s 347 million citizens free and safe from Bangor Maine to San Diego California.
Indeed, whether he recognizes it or not, President Trump’s bold entreaty would amount to eschewing every notion of Empire. It would pave the way for returning to the nation’s pre-1914 policy as a peaceful Republic, safely minding its own business behind the wondrous gifts of Providence—the great Atlantic and Pacific Ocean moats which separate the American homeland from any serious potential military foe anywhere on the planet.
At the present time and for the foreseeable future, there are only two nations even remotely capable of posing a military threat to the American homeland—Russia and the People’ Republic of China. Yet the bottom line strategic reality is that Russia doesn’t have anywhere near the requisite economic heft to threaten America, and China doesn’t have a even a semblance of the economic running room to go on a global military aggression campaign.
With respect to Russia and despite all the demonetization of Putin, no one has even attempted to make the case that he’s so stupid as to believe his $2 trillion of commodity-based GDP is any match for the world-leading technology-based $30 trillion GDP of the United States.
Indeed, the whole Russian ogre thing is based on a purely fanciful derivative case. Namely, the vague arm-waving claim that Putin will take the Baltics next, then Poland and thereafter march on thru the Brandenburg Gate into Berlin on the way to France, the Low Countries and across the English Channel to London—assuming Putin is also stupid enough to want to occupy the economic basket case of a Starmerized Little England.
In other words, implicit in Washington’s current consensus foreign policy posture is the notion that Russia is actually a big threat only after it attacks, occupies, pacifies and militarizes the entire continent of Europe!
That’s the only route by which Moscow can possibly get the economic heft, manpower and military means to materially threaten the US. In the end, therefore, the threat is not the Ruuskies per se, but, apparently, Russified Germans, Poles and Frogs.
Of course, there is not a shred of evidence that this is Putin’s plan or that he would remotely have the economic and military wherewithal to accomplish such a sinister purpose were he so inclined, which most evidently he is not. To the contrary, Putin’s aim by all the evidence seems to be far, far more modest: Namely, to keep NATO out of his backyard in an ancient piece of the Russian Empire that was called Novorossiya or New Russia during most of its history.
That was the name of the Donbas and Black Sea rim region before Lenin and Stalin created the artificial country of “Ukraine” for the purely administrative convenience of operating their brutal tyranny. Yet in even attempting to retake the Russian half of Ukraine, Putin is having a hard time mustering the requisite military power—to say nothing of conquering the rest of Europe.
Fortunately, VP Vance has already let the cat out of the bag, and it shows exactly why Russia is not on the warpath toward the conquest of Europe. To wit, after the impending Trump-Putin deal there will be no NATO in Ukraine and the country will be partitioned between the Russian-speaking regions of the Donbas, Crimea and the Black Sea rim, on the one hand, and the Ukrainian and Polish speaking regions of the west and on the left bank of the Dnieper River, on the other.
That’s all Putin every wanted anyway, and it will be the proof in the pudding that discredits the hideous notion that Washington must fight Russia by proxy over there in order to not have to fight it in Luxembourg or on the cliffs of Dover.
That is to say, once the war is settled and Ukraine partitioned, Putin’s special military operation will come to an abrupt halt at whatever turns out to be the line of contact between the breakaway republics and the rump of Ukraine. In turn, that will prove in spades that there exists not even the remotest prospect of a Russifed Europe, and therefore any real Russian threat to the security of the American homeland.
So, yes, the defense budget can be cut by 50% in part because the 62,000 US troops shown above that are now stationed in Europe could be brought home. Even more importantly, US NATO membership and commitments could also be abandoned, meaning that the ridiculous idea of being committed under Article 5 to the mutal defense of such nationlets as North Macedonia, whose 10,000 man active duty military is smaller than 12,000 man police force of Chicago, would also expire.
With respect to China, the single most important thing to recognize is that it is the very opposite of the old Soviet Empire, which was based on economic autarky and scant trading relationships with the world outside of the Warsaw Pact. Accordingly, had it been both inclined and capable of offensive military aggression toward the rest of Europe and or even the US—for which the now open archives of the old Soviet Union reveal scant evidence— there would have been no collateral disruption of its basic economic function. The latter was purely an internally-focused regime of centralized state socialism, which, needless to say, didn’t work but didn’t depend upon commerce with the so-called “free world”, either.
By contrast, after Mao was sent off his rewards in Red Heaven, China pivoted sharply to the outside world under the leadership of Mr.Deng and his successors; and they did so under the banner of so-called Red Capitalism, which amounted to an extreme version of export mercantilism.
Consequently, China’s exports soared by nearly 15X during the two decades between 2000 and 2022, rising from $250 billion to $3.6 trillion per year. So doing, the Chicoms essentially took themselves hostage, meaning that every province, city, village, factory, rail line, trucking operations, warehouse and port operation along the length and breadth of China got deeply entangled with just-in-time economic production for customers accross the planet, as depicted in the graphic below. Accordingly, China’s economy would collapse on the spot were Beijing to disrupt the daily flow of $10 billion of merchandise goods to Europe, the Americas and the balance of Asia.
Indeed, had its post-Mao leadership been hell bent on foreign conquest, which most clearly it was not, the Beijing regime’s very survival would have been compromised by the resulting disruption to the greatest factory-economy the world has ever seen. For crying out loud, Washington wasted 59,000 American lives and upwards of 3 million Vietnamese lives before eventually fleeing from Vietnam, yet afterwards the Chinese didn’t even try to capture Hanoi—the domino theory to the contrary notwithstanding.
In other words, China is inherently not a military threat to the US, nor is there any evidence that it is expansionist—even in its own region. There is undoubtedly a reason why after thousands of years, the Chinese, Koreans, Japanese, Indonesians, Malayans and Filipinos stick to themselves; and also why a reunification of the Han Chinese on the mainland with their kin on Formosa would have virtually zero implications for the rest of the region.
The state of Taiwan exits only because Washington stood it up in 1949 when Chiang Kai-shek lost the civil war fair and square to Mao and the reds. Were Washington to step aside, it is likely that in a short time the Korean peninsula would be hardly distinguishable from Shanghai across the Yellow Sea.
That is to say, the US does not need the massively expensive 7th Fleet and US Marines and large parts of the Air Force to contain China. The latter’s giant Ponzi economy perched as it is on $50 trillion of debt and upwards of $4 trillion per year of exports does all the containing that America’s military security actually requires.
At the end of he day, if Donald Trump’s “America First”-focused foreign policy means anything at all, it’s that the current $1 trillion national security budget is double the size that an a
Article from LewRockwell
LewRockwell.com is a libertarian website that publishes articles, essays, and blog posts advocating for minimal government, free markets, and individual liberty. The site was founded by Lew Rockwell, an American libertarian political commentator, activist, and former congressional staffer. The website often features content that is critical of mainstream politics, state intervention, and foreign policy, among other topics. It is a platform frequently used to disseminate Austrian economics, a school of economic thought that is popular among some libertarians.
