War spending is a bi-partisan sport in the Beltway, while the corporate media justifies it with euphemisms such as “the war on terror”, “human rights”, “defending freedom”, “promoting democracy”, etc. We spend $1.5 trillion on what we humorously describe as “defense”, when offense would be more accurate.

Meanwhile, China demonstrates the advantage of directing war spending elsewhere.

The elephant in the room is the military/industrial/complex (MIC), which makes massive profits on endless war. Again a useful comparison is China, where the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) employs market competition as a tool to achieve goals, in this case high-tech weapons that provide defense from US imperialism. This is “real” capitalism, something the US no longer practices. What this means for the MIC is the decay of American military ability, entirely a product of a now lost industrial and tech lead because of financialization.

American weapons may be overpriced and ineffective but they are extremely profitable for the MIC shareholders, who use portions of their ill-gotten loot to lobby for more war. Presidents come and go but the bi-partisan war party reigns supreme in Washington. And if presidents attempt to wage peace, the foreign-policy establishment will work tirelessly to sabotage any and all attempts as Trump is again discovering with his new 28-point peace plan to end the Russia/Ukraine war.

United in outrage, war hawks moved quickly to gut Trump’s initiative, and bray for more carnage.  There was much talk of appeasement and treason in response to the Trump Administrations peace efforts, with the neocons plotting how to reverse what they claimed was “appeasement” of “Russian aggression.” According to the Washington consensus, the only way to support Ukraine is to continue feeding their soldiers into the maw.

The neocon’s aggressive posture toward anyone seeking peace in Ukraine is nothing new. Since the Maidan coup of 2014, any attempt by Trump or his predecessor Barack Obama to move towards a compromise with Russia, particularly in Ukraine, has met fierce resistance from the national security state and Congress. The corporate media has obscured the coup side of the story, insisting that there was no coup and studiously ignoring the presence of neo-Nazi militias leading the fight against the ethnic Russian east in the Donbas.

Obama attempted to broker peace by supporting the Minsk II peace plan to allow for Donbas autonomy but the deep state had other plans. Just as Minsk II was being finalized, Obama’s own senior State Department official, Victoria Nuland, met with some of his staunchest political rivals, including veteran Republican Senator John McCain, on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference and discussed how to undermine the peace pact. Leaked details of the Nuland meeting caused a stir in Germany, but were widely ignored in the United States. NATO Commander Air Force Gen. Philip Breedlove was quoted as saying that sending more weapons would “raise the battlefield cost for Putin.” Nuland interjected to the U.S. politicians present that “I’d strongly urge you to use the phrase ‘defensive systems’ that we would deliver to oppose Putin’s ‘offensive systems.’”

From the start, Trump recognized that hostility to diplomacy with Russia would cost lives. Russia-gate, he complained in November 2017, “gets in the way” of improving US-Russia ties, “and that’s a shame because people will die because of it.” Of course, Trump isn’t any more peaceful than the rest of our presidents. He sometimes likes to pose as an opponent of interventionist foreign policy, but when it matters he is every bit as much of a militarist as any of the neocons. The real story is that Trump’s diplomacy is transactional based on the fact that he would like to make some money off the Ukraine/Russia conflict.

Unfortunately, Russia is poised to settle the conflict militarily and that’s why there is such panic amongst Washington elite who had long dreamed of looting Russia. They truly believed they could cripple Russia’s economy with the blizzard of sanctions while using Ukraine as a proxy battering ram to defeat the Russian military.

It’s too bad that we can’t send the neocons off to the front lines. I think Lindsey Graham would look fetching in camouflage

Update: I’ve written about this before but the only way to break the power of the war party is for them to suffer a massive, obvious defeat. And, don’t look now but the US is poised to be defeated in Ukraine with their proxy war against Russia, and potentially in Venezuela if they are stupid enough to invade the oil-rich country.

Update 2: Wish I’d written this–“An enshittified military costs more, delivers less, and deploys for ever-more dubious purposes. Military contractors’ performance is unfalsifiable, judged on metrics that have nothing to do with outcomes that matter in the real world. It’s a sick joke that how quickly contractors get paid is a metric of anything but corruption. 

More can be said about this, but US oligarchs have been facing a crisis of capital accumulation. The permanent war economy—national security Keynesianism—has been a way to manage that crisis without inadvertently strengthening the working class. And that means you have to have profiteering agents like Anduril to sop up surpluses of capital that oligarchs have no wish to redistribute to workers but that also have few profitable places to go in a world of low/negative growth.”