Trump’s Hegseth Caper and the Delusion of ‘Peace Through Strength’

by David Stockman Posted onNovember  15, 2024

Well, you can say this much about the Donald’s off-the-wall pick of Fox’s weekend news commentator, Pete Hegseth, for Secretary of Defense: At least it wasn’t a hard-core neocon like House Armed Services Chair Mike Rogers (R-Ala), Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) or the horrid Senator Tom Cotten of Arkansas. Better a cheerleader for patriotism and valorization of the military than war-mongering interventionists like those three blemishes on the Republican brand.

Well, maybe. Yet what this insensible pick also shows, if any more proof is needed, is that Donald Trump is a clueless, lightweight political demagogue who has no intention of bringing the Empire Home. Nor does he have the remotest chance of making the American economy great again. That’s because if you don’t dismantle the war machine and slash the hideously bloated national security budget by upwards of $500 billion per year, the already debt-saturated US economy is going to be KO’d by an exploding public debt.

For want of doubt, however, here is the Donald’s rationale for selecting a guy to run the $1 trillion/2.9 million employee Pentagon who has never managed anything bigger than a household of three successive wives and the accumulation of seven kids:

“Nobody fights harder for the Troops, and Pete will be a courageous and patriotic champion of our ‘Peace through Strength’ policy… Pete has spent his entire life as a Warrior for the Troops, and for the Country… With Pete at the helm, America’s enemies are on notice – Our Military will be Great Again, and America will Never Back Down.

What unmitigated breast-beating rubbish!

For crying out loud, the last thing America needs is another Warrior for the Troops. Instead, what it really needs is a Fearless Slayer of the sacred cows and obese pigs of the military/industrial complex who gorge themselves at the Pentagon’s trough.

Likewise, the pointless, costly Forever Wars stem from too much of the false “strength” of a globe-spanning War Machine that thrives upon inventing enemies, exaggerating threats to national security and provoking conflicts. We are referring, for instance, to the Washington-funded and orchestrated coup in Ukraine during February 2014 that deposed a duly-elected, Russia-friendly President and fostered the hellacious civil war now raging in Ukraine.

The fact is, the very slogan “peace through strength” is a vestigial relic of the Cold War. In today’s world it is utterly irrelevant because subsequent to the Soviet Union’s disappearance into the dustbin of history there remains no rival military superpower which poses a remote threat to the liberty and security of the American homeland. In the year 2024 America doesn’t need “strength” to deter hostile like-sized enemies because, well, there are none.

So today’s $1.4 trillion national security budget – including $70 billion for foreign aid and operations and $380 billion for the deferred cost of the Forever Wars in the form of veterans benefits – is a colossal, unaffordable waste. And it is the preponderant source of the very thing which Washington should be backing down from – namely, the America’s existentially threatening runaway public debt.

That figure was $1 trillion when Ronald Reagan took office; $19 trillion by the time the Donald stumbled into the White House; stands at $36 trillion today; will top $60 trillion by the end of the next decade based on current built-in spending and borrowing; would exceed $70 trillion by the same point (2034) under the sweeping tax cuts and spending increases already proposed by the Donald; and will hit $150 trillion by mid-century under the CBO’s latest Rosy Scenario outlook.

Yet the Donald chooses to appoint to the single most crucial fiscal job in the entire Federal government a flag-waving champion of military glory. And one who is also an ill-informed hawk who foolishly thinks America is imperiled by enemies on every side and that we can bomb our way to safety, even in the case of a third-rate power like Iran that poses no military threat to the American homeland whatsoever.

Nevertheless, Hegseth sounded like Curtis LeMay in an interview during the Donald’s last stint in the Oval:

After the Soleimani assassination, Pete Hegseth called on Trump to bomb Iran’s energy production facilities, ports, and nuclear facilities. He said Trump should even bomb mosques, hospitals, and schools if deemed necessary.

More importantly, his top priority seems to be rooting-out DEI and wokish nonsense from the armed forces:

“First of all, you’ve got to fire the chairman of the Joint Chiefs,” Hegseth said, referring to Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr. “Any general, any admiral, whatever,” who was involved in diversity, equity and inclusion programs or “woke shit” has “got to go,” Hegseth said.

Well, yes, the current Joint Chiefs of Staff to the last man ought to be fired all right, but for not telling the President and Congress that the demolition derby in Ukraine is pointless, unwinnable and risks the threat of nuclear war, DEI or no.

But you can’t send the equivalent of a Pom-Pom Boy who valorizes destructive military combat like that carried out by Washington in Iraq, Afghanistan and at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base (sic!) to do a man’s job of draining the vast Swamp on the Pentagon side of the Potomac. You need someone who knows why the whole idea of Washington’s global hegemony is wrong, obsolete and not remotely necessary for securing the safety and liberty of the American homeland.

Stated differently, America First amounts to nothing more than flag-waving and nationalist boasting unless it is predicated on bringing the Empire Home, dismantling the War Machine and drastically slashing the national security budget as part of a comprehensive plan to stem the tsunami of red ink flooding from the banks of the Potomac.

The starting point for that task, of course, is that in the present world order there are no technologically-advanced industrial powers who have either the capability or intention to attack the American homeland. To do that you need a massive land armada, huge air and sealift capacities, a Navy and Air Force many times the size of current US forces and humongous supply lines and logistics capacities that have never been even dreamed of by any other nation on the planet.

You also need an initial GDP of say $50 trillion to sustain what would be the most colossal mobilization of weaponry and materiale in human history. And that’s to say nothing of being ruled by suicidal leaders willing to risk the nuclear destruction of their own countries, allies and economic commerce in order to accomplish, what? Occupy Denver?

The entire idea that there is a post-cold war existential threat to America’s security is just nuts. For one thing, nobody has the GDP or military heft. Russia’s GDP is a scant $2 trillion, not the $50 trillion that would needed for it to put invasionary forces on the New Jersey shores. And its defense budget is $75 billion, which amounts to about four weeks of waste in Washington’s $900 billion monster.

As for China, let us not forget that even its communist rulers sill believe it is the “Middle Kingdom” and therefore already occupies the most important territory on the entire planet. Why would they want to patrol the streets of Cleveland OH or Birmingham AL for dissenters from Chairman Xi’s thought?

More importantly, they ain’t got the GDP heft to even think about landing on the California shores, notwithstanding Wall Street’s endless kowtowing to the China Boom. The fact is, China has accumulated in excess of $50 trillion of debt in barely two decades!

Therefore, it didn’t grow organically in the historic capitalist mode; it printed, borrowed, spent and built like there was no tomorrow. The resulting simulacrum of prosperity would not last a year if its $3.6 trillion global export market – the source of the hard cash that keeps its Ponzi upright – were to crash, which is exactly what would happen if it tried to invade America.

To be sure, its totalitarian leaders are immensely misguided and downright evil from the perspective of their oppressed population. But they are not stupid. They stay in power by keeping the people relatively fat and happy and would never risk bringing down what amounts to an economic house of cards that has not even a vague approximation in human history.

Moreover, the nuclear blackmail card can’t be played by China or Russia, either. Neither has anything close to the First Strike force that would be needed to totally overwhelm America’s triad nuclear deterrent, and thereby avoid a retaliatory annihilation of its own country and people if it attempted to strike first.

After all, the US has 3,700 active nuclear warheads, of which about 1,770 are operational at any point in time. In turn, these are spread under the sea, in hardened silos and among a bomber fleet of 66 B-2 and B-52s – all beyond the detection or reach of any other nuclear power.

For instance, the Ohio class nuclear submarines each have 20 missile tubes, with each missile carrying an average of four-to-five warheads. That’s 90 independently targetable warheads per boat. At any given time 12 of the 14 Ohio class nuclear subs are actively deployed, and spread around the oceans of the planet within a firing range of 4,000 miles.

So at the point of attack that’s 1,080 deep-sea nuclear warheads to identify, locate and neutralize before any would be blackmailer even gets started. Indeed, with respect to the “Where’s Waldo?” aspect of it, the sea-based nuclear force alone is a powerful guarantor of America’s homeland security.

And then there are the roughly 300 nukes aboard the 66 strategic bombers, which also are not sitting on a single airfield Pearl Harbor style waiting to be obliterated, but are constantly rotating in the air and on the move. Likewise, the 400 Minutemen III missiles are spread out in extremely hardened silos deep underground across a broad swath of the upper mid-west, which would also need to be taken out by would be blackmailers.

Needless to say, there is no way, shape or form that America’s nuclear deterrent can be neutralized by a blackmailer. And the best thing is that according to the most recent CBO estimates the nuclear triad will cost only about $75 billion per year to maintain over the next decade, including allowances for periodic weapons upgrades.

The heart of America’s military security thus requires only 7% of today’s massive military budget. Indeed, the key component of the nuclear deterrent – sea-based ballistic missiles – is estimated to cost just $188 billion over the next decade, or 1.9% of the $10 trillion national defense baseline.

In any event, that 7% piece of the Warfare State is actually what dissuades both Moscow and Beijing from attempting nuclear blackmail and therefore invasion by nuclear checkmate. That is to say, America’s security lies in nuclear deterrence – the linch-pin called MAD (mutual assured destruction) that has worked for 70 years. And it worked even at the peak of the cold war when the Soviet Union had 40,000 nuclear warheads and leaders far more unstable than either Cool-Hand Vlad or Xi Jinping.

At the end of the day, it is the triad nuclear deterrent and the relative economic diminutiveness of Russia and China that keep the American homeland secure and safe from hostile foreign encroachment. Indeed, when it comes to the threat of a conventional military invasion the vast Atlantic and Pacific moats are even greater barriers to foreign military assault in the 21st century than they so successfully proved to be in the 19th century.

That’s because today’s advanced surveillance technology and anti-ship missiles would consign an enemy armada to Davy Jones’ Locker nearly as soon as it steamed out of its own territorial waters.

The fact is, in an age when the sky is flush with high tech surveillance assets a massive conventional force armada couldn’t possibly be secretly built, tested and mustered for surprise attack without being noticed in Washington. There can be no repeat of the Japanese strike force steaming across the Pacific toward Pearl Harbor sight unseen.

Indeed, America’s ostensible “enemies” actually have no offensive or invasionary capacity at all. Russia has only one aircraft carrier – a 1980s era vessel which has been in dry-dock for repairs since 2017 and is equipped with neither a phalanx of escort ships nor a suite of attack and fighter aircraft – and at the moment not even an active crew.

Likewise, China has just three aircraft carriers – two of which are refurbished rust buckets purchased from the remnants of the old Soviet Union, and which carriers do not even have modern catapults for launching their strike aircraft.

In short, none of the non-NATO countries will be steaming their tiny 3, 2 and 1 carrier battle groups toward the shores of either California or New Jersey any time soon. An invasionary force that had any chance at all of surviving a US fortress defense of cruise missiles, drones, jet fighters, attack submarines and electronics warfare would need to be 100X larger.

Again, there is no GDP in the world – $2 trillion for Russia, $3.5 trillion for India or $18 trillion for China – that is even remotely close in size to the $50 to $100 trillion GDP that would be needed to support such an invasionary force without capsizing the home economy.

At the same time, the 11 US carrier battle groups, which will cost upwards of $1.2 trillion over the next decade, would have no role in a continental Fortress America defense at all. They would be sitting ducks in the blue waters, and far less effective than aircraft and missile defenses based in the North American interior.

In short, these massively expensive forces have no purpose other than global power projection and the conduct of wars of invasion and occupation abroad. That is, they are military accoutrements of the Global Hegemon not even remotely relevant to a proper Fortress America defense.

Most of the rest of the massive $900 billion defense budget is based on false predicates, fabricated threats and the budget-grabbing prowess of its own marketing (i.e. think tanks) and advocacy (i.e. defense contractors) arms.

For instance, why in the world do we still have NATO 32 years after the Soviet Union perished?

The only real answer is that it is a mechanism to sell arms to its 30-member states. Indeed, Europe had long ago proved it did not really fear that Putin would be marching his armies through the Brandenburg Gates in Berlin. That’s why Germany spent only 1.4% of GDP on defense, and was more than happy to buy cheap-energy via Russian delivered pipeline gas.

Germany’s current quasi-warlike posture vis-a-vis Russia is actually not what it is cracked-up to be by the US pro-war media, either. The truth is, the German Green Party – which is what kept the Scholz social democrat government in power until last week – has gone full retard war-mongering for the most hideous of reasons: To wit, the Greens live to end the era of fossil fuel, and what better way to do it than cut off the cheap oil and gas supplies from Russia on which German’s fossil-fueled economy is based.

Likewise, one thing anyone who has read a smattering of European history knows is that Russians and Poles hate each other and have for a good long stretch of wars and bloody altercations. So Vlad Putin may not be a Russian Gandhi, but he is sure as hell way too smart to attempt to occupy Poland. Ditto France, Germany, the Low Countries, Iberia and the rest.

In short, Washington doesn’t need NATO to protect our allies in Europe because they are not facing any threat that can’t be handled by their own ways and means, preferably of the diplomatic variety. In fact, the whole disaster in Ukraine today is rooted in the War Party’s mindless expansion of NATO in violation of all of Washington’s promises to Gorbachev to not expand an inch to the east in return for the unification of Germany. Yet NATO now includes all of the old Warsaw Pact nations and even attempted to extend its reach to two of the former Soviet Republics (i.e. Georgia and Ukraine).

Can the same thing be said of America’s so-called allies in East Asia?

Why, yes it can. Just as the definitely not sacrosanct borders of Ukraine were drawn by long dead Soviet tyrants (i.e. Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchev) that America’s homeland security has no reason to defend, the same is true of Taiwan.

Chiang Kia-Shek lost the Chinese civil war fair and square in 1949, and there was no reason to perpetuate his rag-tag regime when it retreated to the last square miles of Chinese territory – the island province of Taiwan. The latter had been under control of the Chinese Qing Dynasty for 200 years thru 1895, when it was occupied by the Imperial Japan for 50 years, only to be liberated by the Chinese at the end of WWII.

That is to say, once Imperial Japan was expelled the Chinese did not invade or occupy Taiwan–it had been Han for centuries. It is separated from the mainland today only because Washington arbitrarily made it a protectorate and ally when the loser of the civil war set up shop in a small remnant of modern China, thereby establishing an artificial nation that had no bearing whatsoever on America’s homeland security.

In any event, the nascent US War Party of the late 1940s decreed otherwise, generating 70 years of tension with the Beijing regime that accomplished nothing except bolster the case for a big Navy and for US policing of the Pacific region for no good reason of homeland defense.

That is to say, without Washington’s support for the nationalist regime in Taipei, the island would have been absorbed back into the Chinese polity where it had been for centuries. It would probably now resemble the booming prosperity of Shanghai – something Wall Street and mainstream US politicians celebrated for years.

And, no, a Red Taiwan will not stop selling semiconductor chips to the US. For crying out loud, the entire Red Ponzi of China is predicated upon being an industrial supply base to America.

Moreover, it still is not too late. Absent Washington’s arms and threats, the Taiwanese would surely prefer peaceful prosperity as the 24th province of China rather than a catastrophic war against Beijing that they would have no hope of surviving.

By the same token, the alternative – US military intervention – would mean WWIII. So what’s the point of Washington’s dangerous policy of “strategic ambiguity” when the long-term outcome is utterly inevitable? And yet and yet: Every one of the Donald’s national security appointees to date (save for Tulsi Gabbard) are foaming at the mouth China hawks, and Pete Hegseth is no exception.

But if you foolishly believe the self-serving military-industrial complex and Warfare State propaganda holding that the already tottering Red Ponzi is a military threat you are unlikely to be persuaded to slash anything from the defense budget. That’s because nearly the entire $250 billion annual cost of the Navy/Marines and much of the rationale for the two-and-one-half wars $185 billion Army is based on fighting a war with China in the Far East.

In short, the only sensible policy is for Washington to recant 70-years of folly brought on by the China Lobby and arms manufacturers and green-light a Taiwanese reconciliation with the mainland. Even a few years thereafter Wall Street bankers peddling M&A deals in Taipei wouldn’t know the difference from Shanghai.

Likewise, we think it is pretty evident that the Chinese do not like the Japanese and the South Koreans do not like the Japanese for the same reasons which go back to Imperial Japan and its invasions and occupations of both countries between 1895 and 1945. Yet 75 years have now passed and all three nations have become booming centers of economic prosperity and modern technologically-based civilization.

To be sure, the War Party on the Potomac can’t seem to understand that most of mankind would prefer peaceful commerce to bloody warfare or even permanent political and military mobilization. So the fact is, the only way these three great Asian nations would go to war today is if it were instigated and funded by Washington.

We’d bet, however, that this is the silver lining of the historic Ukraine fiasco now unfolding. No nation in its right mind – and these Asian folks are self-evidently in their right mind – would volunteer to become a Ukraine-style weapons testing range for the Washington War Machine.

In short, there is no need whatsoever for America’s massive conventional armada and its nearly $1.4 trillion annual expense. Easily $500 billion could be cut from that bloated military monster,

Yet what has the Donald proffered to save America from the impending fiscal calamity it fuels? Why, a flag-waver whose first priority is apparently getting the girls out of the trenches, when no American – he, she, them or they – needs to be in the battlefield trenches anywhere on the planet in the first place.

David Stockman was a two-term Congressman from Michigan. He was also the Director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Ronald Reagan. After leaving the White House, Stockman had a 20-year career on Wall Street. He’s the author of three books, The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed, The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America, TRUMPED! A Nation on the Brink of Ruin… And How to Bring It Back, and the recently released Great Money Bubble: Protect Yourself From The Coming Inflation Storm. He also is founder of David Stockman’s Contra Corner and David Stockman’s Bubble Finance Trader.

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