At The Atlantic, Peter Beinart points to the recent budget bill to remind us that the Democratic Party as a whole appears to have given up on any critique or meaningful challenge to the ever-bloating Pentagon budget — and by extension, the ever-increasing militarization of U.S. foreign policy. Beinart refutes President Trump’s claims that the defense budget atrophied under President Obama, and reminds us that despite the Pentagon’s failure to audit its own spending — in contravention of laws passed to this effect — experts agree that there are literally tens of billions of dollars that the Pentagon could save by rationalizing various functions. Other reports have suggested that many more billions of dollars are simply wasted every year — which hasn’t stopped military leaders from claiming that any failure to give the Pentagon as much money as it wants constitutes a threat to national security.
I can understand why the Democratic leadership would not want to pick a fight with the president and Republicans over the defense budget. What politician wants to seem weak on defense, which is just another way of looking weak in general? Conversely, what better way to appear “strong” by larding the Pentagon budget with more dollars than anyone can count? But by tacitly embracing Trump’s lies that the U.S. military is in a beleaguered state and that the armed forces are the nonpareil symbol of American greatness, the Democrats have ended up bolstering Donald Trump’s claims that he’s the president who’s going to make America great again.
The military budget is no secondary issue. By dominating discretionary spending, increased dollars to the armed forces squeeze out funds for civilian use — you know, things like actually investing in our country. Beyond this, treating the defense budget, and by extension, the U.S. military as something sacred and beyond criticism bolsters the tendencies towards militarism and war as a first resort that have done as much as anything to degrade our democracy and our actual security in the world. From an imperial presidency whose dangers so many are now waking up to, to U.S. wars that have helped destabilize the Middle East, the escalating primacy of violence as how America makes its way in the world has left a dangerous legacy that a true movement for democratic renewal will need to confront and reverse. There is a deep, subterranean link between Trump and the rise of authoritarian politics on the one hand, and the U.S.’s intervention across vast swathes of the planet on the other — due both to the destabilization this has led to, and due to the links between the impulse to violence and the willingness to embrace authoritarian solutions to public problems.
Part of the irony and agony of this moment is that much of the American public is clearly exhausted by the wars of the last couple decades. People know in their gut that the people doing the fighting and dying have primarily been from the lower rungs of our society. They know billions of dollars have been spent for no good reason. They know that in the case of Iraq, we literally invaded the wrong goddamned country. Trump understood this public mood better than Hillary Clinton, and so he criticized the Iraq invasion, even though he’d previously supported it.
But Trump also knows that many Americans are irrationally scared of the world’s perceived dangers, and seems to share their belief that simply throwing money at the military, even as he’d promised not to get us into new wars, would not be perceived as any sort of contradiction. (Indeed, in light of the lack of actual strategy by either party, the shoveling of money into the military is the whole point. It is not rational in any way — if anything, it’s more akin to magical thinking, as if we were casting a spell to ward off unspecified demons). Of course, Trump soon enough revealed himself to be a president actually more likely to get us into war than his average predecessor — not simply on account of his own personal maladies and ignorance, but because he surrounded himself with supposed experts who’ve apparently managed to convince him that a war with North Korea might constitute a rational and defensible act, despite the potential loss of millions of lives and the likely irreversible destruction of U.S. leadership in the world.
But this only renews the urgency of the question — when we are faced with the possibility of wars that would come at unsupportable costs, and when we see the chaos that our recent wars have unleashed, why are we still acting as if the military is the one thing that can reliably keep us safe? We need look no further than the true existential crisis of our times, climate change, to see the folly of this monomania. It’s a challenge with no military solution (even though the Pentagon is already looking ahead to the political chaos that will surely result, and seeing still more roles for itself). The Democrats seem to be committing the same mistakes they made on gun control, embracing a tired fatalism at the exact moment it’s time to question all the rotten assumptions about where we are.
