Don’t get me wrong. America has all kinds of dangerous enemies both foreign and domestic, both state actors and private criminals. But they apparently aren’t so dangerous that they lay in wait, watching for that perfect moment when our guard is down and we are weakened, to launch mass casualty attacks against us. If they were, we would be under such attack right now, and I’m not just talking about Russian election interference. At the moment, the greatest threats to America come from self inflicted wounds.
Just think about the nice mess into which Donald Trump and his enablers have led America. The Commander in Chief is quarantined with a debilitating and sometimes fatal disease while taking mind altering drugs. The Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon have gone into quarantine along with unknown numbers of their immediate subordinates sequestered. The Trump campaign is so rotten that the VP is drawing flies. Meanwhile, the Trump/Pence Administration has hollowed out the agencies comprising the federal government, placing almost the entire government under the thumbs of unqualified, incompetent and sometimes downright piratical political lackeys of the President.
Our nation has never been more leaderless, more vulnerable, more open to attack by our adversaries.
Yet, we aren’t under attack, at least not any kind of attack that we have ridiculously overfunded the Pentagon to fend off. Maybe it’s the deterrent effect of all that spending. But, maybe America’s absurd defense budget has failed to provide the kinds of tools really needed to defend our country from the external forces that actually threaten us. The idea needs to be explored, thoroughly and publicly.
This is terrible campaign issue, of course, and the early days of the Biden administration will be dominated by the efforts needed to get America out of the ditch into which Trump and the GOP have once again driven the nation. But later, maybe in year two or three of the Biden/Harris administration, people must begin to realize that a prosperous future may depend upon finding ways to wean our economy off of its unnecessarily expensive, military/industrial addiction.
America has lots of foreign enemies. But, in the modern age, weapons like aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines, squadrons of warplanes and massed boots of the ground, consistently prove utterly ineffectual in actually dealing with them. It’s crazy to do what doesn’t work over and over, endlessly.
A nice mess, indeed —