Guest Post by David Stockman - December 14, 2024

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 a muscular homeland defense shield actually requires. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that in relentless pursuit of its own self-serving aggrandizement, the military/industrial/intelligence complex has massively inflated America’s Warfare State into an “extra-large” when what is really needed in the world of 2024 is a snug-fitting “small.”

The basis for that stunning disconnect goes back deep into cold war history and its aftermath. The post-WWII policy of collective security, extensive alliances through NATO and its regional clones and globe-spanning military power projection capabilities and a network of 750 foreign bases was an epic historical mistake. It fostered the opposite of America First and permanently broke faith with Thomas Jefferson’s wise admonition urging:

“…peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none.”

At length, Washington became the War Capital of the World and the seat of an Empire First policy regime embraced by both elected officialdom and the multitudinous nomenklatura of the Warfare State that took up permanent residence on the banks of the Potomac. In fact, the Empire First policy regime became so deeply-rooted that even 33 years after the Soviet Union disappeared into the dustbin of history, it refuses to go quietly into the good night.

The reason, of course, is that America’s elephantine Warfare State never was grounded in an objective external threat. Even during Soviet times, the exaggerated girth of America’s military machine was based on vast threat inflations emanating from a resource-heavy national security bureaucracy seeking to secure its own future funding and to relentlessly expand its missions and remit.

That Washington’s trillion-dollar Warfare State is rooted in internal self-perpetuation rather than external threats is evident from the post-cold war dog that didn’t bark. That is, the Soviet archives are now open, but there’s absolutely nothing there to validate the cold war axiom that the Soviet Union—along with the affiliated menace of Maoist China—was hell-bent on world military domination, starting with western Europe, Japan and then extending to the lesser lands all around them.

In fact, the Soviet archives make clear that Moscow never had a plan or even faint aspiration to fortify and offensively unleash the Red Army toward Bonn, Paris and London. The closest thing to a plan for military mobilization westward was the “Seven Days to the Rhine” blueprint, but that was a defensive action plan explicitly formulated as a contingency plan to respond to a theoretical NATO first strike.

According to the plan, if NATO were to launch a nuclear attack on Poland, the Warsaw Pact would respond with a massive counterattack aimed at quickly overwhelming NATO forces in Western Europe. The goal was to reach the Rhine River within seven days, effectively splitting Europe and preventing NATO reinforcements from reaching the front lines in Eastern Europe and potentially embarking upon yet a fourth post-1800 invasion of Mother Russia.

Indeed, what the Soviet archives actually show is not the deliberations of a menacing Colossus, but the record of a chronic struggle to hold together with economic bailing-wire and bubble-gum a lumbering communist state that didn’t function and couldn’t last.

Nevertheless, it was the false fear of a red tide descending over Europe and ultimately the Western Hemisphere, too, that enabled Empire First to trump the natural and proper tendency of Washington politicians and policy-makers to retreat behind America’s secure ocean moats after WWII. In fact, for a brief interlude a sweeping military demobilization did occur, when the peak $83 billion defense budget of 1945 plunged to just $9 billion by 1948.

But that sensible attempt for the second time in the 20th Century at post-war demobilization and a return to peacetime normalcy was . . .

[SNIP]