U.S. military-industrial complex sees war as shortcut to profits

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People's Daily Online

Editor

Wang Xinjuan

Time

2021-12-22 

By Zhong Sheng

Over the years, U.S. military expenditure has continuously hit record highs while the country's fiscal deficit worsened, behind which lies the strong influence of the country's military-industrial complex.

Throughout the U.S. history, its military-industrial complex, a mighty interest group, has repeatedly manipulated the country's political decision-making and seen wars as a shortcut to profits, prompting the U.S. government to cause one catastrophe after another in the world.

War is big business for the U.S., as Peter Kuznick, a history professor at the American University in the U.S., put it sharply.

To create inelastic demand for arms trade, the U.S. military-industrial complex has been bent on pushing U.S. foreign policy toward wars and conflicts.

“The U.S., driven by political-corporate greed, robbed Afghanistan of stability and tranquility for two decades,” said an article published on the website of Pakistan Observer.

In the Afghan war where loss is reckoned in lives, the only winner is the U.S. military-industrial complex, the article pointed out.

“The decisions to start and sustain wars are thus shaped by people with vested interests in extending the war as long as possible,” the article continued.

The five biggest U.S. defense contractors—Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Boeing, and Northrop Grumman—acquired as much as $2.02 trillion from the U.S. government’s funding for the war in Afghanistan, according to the Security Policy Reform Institute, an independent think tank in the U.S.

The fact that U.S. top weapon companies grabbed huge profits from the war in Afghanistan mirrors the age-old special existence of the military-industrial complex in the U.S.

During World War II, a structural connection between the giant war machine of the U.S. and the country’s economic system was forged and a huge interest group composed of the U.S. military, military industrial enterprises, politicians, and scientific research institutions took shape.

“This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence—economic, political, even spiritual—is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the Federal government,” warned former U.S. President Dwight David Eisenhower in his farewell speech delivered in 1961.

“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex,” Eisenhower added.

However, in the following decades, the influence of the military-industrial complex hasn’t been curbed, but penetrated deeply into the decision-making process of the U.S.

General Dynamics got off to a good start this year; although the world becomes more and more dangerous for mankind, the company has seen a good sign of stable demands, said Phebe Novakovic, chairman of General Dynamics, in April. Her remarks revealed that the U.S. military-industrial complex is actually composed of a bunch of vultures.

It is no secret that U.S. military industry companies spend large sums of money on lobbying U.S. politicians, donating money to their election campaigns and funding the so-called policy experts to ensure policies are in their favor.

Representatives from military industry companies have also frequently taken advantage of the “revolving door” to hold a position in key decision-making departments.

Statistics suggest that more than 4,000 military-industrial complex lobbies are active in today’s U.S. political arena.

The military-industrial complex can not only make sure that its own interests are not affected by changes of government, but can often prevent government from making decisions that may shrink its slice of the cake, even if these decisions are in line with the public interest.

The U.S. government has unrestrainedly provided resources for arms dealers, sacrificing investment in its public goods and increasing the risks of wars, which has done itself and others no good, commented Erica Fein, the Senior Washington Director of American anti-war coalition Win Without War.

To ensure strong demands for arms trade, the U.S. military-industrial complex has continuously incited the government to create imaginary enemies, never hesitating to arouse people’s fear and stirring up trouble.

The U.S. is searching for enemies around the world under the guise of safeguarding national security and promoting democracy and freedom, of which one of the drivers is the interests of the military-industrial complex, as American observers noted.

If it had not been the Russians, the U.S. would have devised some other rivals to replace them as a justification for its military aggression, George Kennan, who formulated the U.S. containment policy toward the Soviet Union, said in a speech in his later years.

Since the end of the Cold War, the U.S. has successively launched the Kosovo War, the War in Afghanistan, the Iraq War, and many other wars, in which American arms dealers have made a great fortune.

For a long time, the U.S. military-industrial complex has repeatedly packaged wars as a proper option for U.S. foreign policy in a bid to pursue its own benefit, which has caused endless pain for people in other countries and led to turmoil and unrest in the world.

Such consequences make people around the world couldn’t help but wonder: What the U.S. has done to shoulder the international responsibilities it has kept talking about? How has it safeguarded the human rights it always spouts off about? Where is the so-called democracy that it couldn’t stop boasting about?

(Zhong Sheng is a pen name often used by People’s Daily to express its views on foreign policy and international affairs.)

Liberals Military Heritage

Fleet plagued by problems

Crash of a Canadian Forces helicopter, which killed 3 and injured 4 off Nova Scotia, occurred while aircraft was under restrictions because of past mechanical troubles

EDITORIAL: Keep our Snowbirds airworthy

Under the Trudeau government the Canadian state focused less on external military operational capacity and more on the use of the military for domestic problems.

One was the Trudeau fear of insurrection in Quebec post the FLQ crisis, the other was the idea that the military should also be used for domestic emergencies, like clearling snow from Toronto streets or clean up after storms.

The Trudeau government also looked at the military as an opportunity to offer jobs to Maritimers whose local fishing industry was in decline. Along with the policy of promoting the depopulation of the Maritimes by promoting fishers to take up work elsewhere in Canada, the military offered trades training to the unemployed.

Combined with the Liberals ideology that the military was for peace keeping, and their disdane for NATO (though unlike the NDP they never admitted to wanting to leave NATO, they merely provided the absolute minimum required to maintain membership) military equipment purchased was for domestic use.

After WWII the dismantling of the merchant marine directly impacted on Canada's ability to maintain its ship building ability.

Under the Mulroney government the final destruction of Canada's indigenous ship and aircraft building industry was sealed with the Free Trade Agreement and NAFTA. What the Liberals had wrecked with indifference, the Conservatives now finally killed with its sucking up to the U.S.

Under the Chretien Liberals, a new policy was introduced, one that bespoke the Liberals frugality with taxpayers money, post-Mulroney's spending spree, the government would only buy used military equipment at bargain basement prices, and would continue to maintain old outdated equipment past their expiry date.

There are no such thing as accidents. The failure of the Submarine fleet, the aging helicopter fleets, the dangerous outdated fleet of Tudor aircraft for Canada's Snowbirds, all this is the direct result not only of the Canadian Governments failure to fund the military but the result of the death of Canada's own homegrown ship and aircraft industries. The Liberals had no use for an indigenous Military Industrial complex, satisfied being a branch plant supplier to the US for its war operations.

The Liberals focused their policies on domestic peace keeping, increasing the capabilities of the military and police to monitor the Left, Labour, the Anti-War movement and Quebec nationalists.

Under the Conservatives, both Mulroney and now the Harpocrites, the military industrial complex that did exist in Canada was further reduced to hewers of wood and drawers of water for the benefit of the Americans.

Today the military is being funded to buy new equipment, from the U.S. And that includes secondary manufacturing and maintance, something Canada once was famous for, is now being contracted out.

The failure to subsidizde the Canadian Military Industrial complex was a political choice of the Liberals, they had little use for the Military, except to quell another Quebec crisis. For the Conservatives its a political choice as well, to integrate the Canadian Military Industrial complex into the American one. Meaning that our military will be supplied by the American Military Industrial complex.

Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum.




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University Investments: Divesting from the Military-Industrial Complex

by Binoy Kampmark / April 30th, 2024

The rage and protest against Israel’s campaign in Gaza, ongoing since the October 7 attacks by Hamas, has stirred student activity across a number of US university campuses and beyond.  Echoes of the Vietnam anti-war protests are being cited.  The docile consumers of education are being prodded and found interested.  University administrators and managers are, as they always tend to, doing the bidding of their donors and funders in trying to restore order, punish the protesting students where necessary and restrict various forms of protest.  Finally, those in the classrooms have something to talk about.

A key aspect of the protest centres on university divestment from US military companies linked and supplying the Israeli industrial war machine.  (The pattern is also repeating itself in other countries, including Canada and Australia.)  The response from university officialdom has been to formulate a more vigorous antisemitism policy – whatever that means – buttressed, as was the case in Columbia University, by the muscular use of police to remove protesting students for trespassing and disruption.  On April 18, in what she described as a necessary if “extraordinary step”, Columbia President Minouche Shafik summoned officers from the New York Police Department, outfitted in riot gear, to remove 108 demonstrators occupying Columbia’s South Lawn.  Charges have been issued; suspensions levelled.

Students from other institutions are also falling in, with similar results.  An encampment was made at New York University, with the now predictable police response.  At Yale, 45 protestors were arrested and charged with misdemeanour trespassing.  Much was made of the fact that tents had been set up on Beinecke Plaza.  A tent encampment was also set up at MIT’s Cambridge campus.

The US House Committee on Education and the Workforce has also been pressuring university heads to put the boot in, well illustrating the fact that freedom of speech is a mighty fine thing till it aggrieves, offends and upsets various factional groups who wish to reserve it for themselves.  Paradoxically enough, one can burn the US flag one owns as a form of protest, exercise free speech rights as a Nazi, yet not occupy the president’s office of a US university if not unequivocal in condemning protest slogans that might be seen as antisemitic.  It would have been a far more honest proposition to simply make the legislators show their credentials as card carrying members of the MIC.

The focus by students on the Israeli-US military corporate nexus and its role in the destruction of Gaza has been sharp and vocal.  Given the instinctive support of the US political and military establishment for Israel, this is far from surprising. But it should not be singular or peculiar to one state’s warring machine, or one relationship.  The military-industrial complex is protean, spectacular in spread, with those in its service promiscuous to patrons.  Fidelity is subordinated to the profit motive.

The salient warning that universities were at risk of being snared by government interests and, it followed, government objectives, was well noted by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in his heralded 1961 farewell address, one which publicly outed the “military-industrial complex” as a sinister threat.  Just as such a complex exercised “unwarranted influence” more broadly, “the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research.  Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity.”  The nation’s academics risked “domination … by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money”.

This has yielded what can only be seen as a ghastly result: the military-industrial-academic complex, heavy with what has been described as “social autism” and protected by almost impenetrable walls of secrecy.

The nature of this complex stretches into the extremities of the education process, including the grooming and encouragement of Stem (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) students.  Focusing on Lockheed Martin’s recruitment process on US college campuses in his 2022 study for In These Times, Indigo Olivier found a vast, aggressive effort involving “TED-style talks, flight simulations, technology demos and on-the-spot interviews.”  Much is on offer: scholarships, well-paid internships and a generous student repayment loan program.  A dozen or so universities, at the very least, “participate in Lockheed Martin Day, part of a sweeping national effort to establish defense industry recruitment pipelines in college STEM”.

Before the Israel-Gaza War, some movements were already showing signs of alertness to the need to disentangle US learning institutions from the warring establishment they so readily fund.  Dissenters, for instance, is a national movement of student organisers focused on “reclaiming our resources from the war industry, reinvest in life-giving services, and repair collaborative relationships with the earth and people around the world.”

Such aspirations seem pollyannaish in scope and vague in operation, but they can hardly be faulted for their intent.  The Dissenters, for instance, took to the activist road, being part of a  weeklong effort in October 2021 comprising students at 16 campuses promoting three central objects: that universities divest all holdings and sever ties with “the top five US war profiteers: Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and General Dynamics”; banish the police from campuses; and remove all recruiters from all campuses.

Demanding divestment from specific industries is a task complicated by the opacity of the university sector’s funding and investment arrangements.  Money, far from talking, operates soundlessly, making its way into nominated accounts through the designated channels of research funding.

The university should, as part of its humane intellectual mission, divest from the military-industrial complex in totality.  But it will help to see the books and investment returns, the unveiling, as it were, of the endowments of some of the richest universities on the planet.  Follow the money; the picture is bound to be an ugly one.Facebook

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Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com. Read other articles by Binoy.

Philosophical Soup: The glorification of the U.S. military-industrial complex in film

April 14, 2021  by Max Ferrandino


The following article contains spoilers for “Outside the Wire.”

Action movies are undeniably entertaining and captivating, and the genre is typically defined by big, strong military heroes. Take “Outside the Wire,” all of the “Captain America” movies or basically any Marvel Cinematic Universe superhero film for example.

In reality, however, superheroes such as Captain America and Captain Marvel are just figures who are glorifying the United States’ military-industrial complex. And Marvel movies aren’t the only films that do this.

In the recent Netflix movie “Outside the Wire,” Anthony Mackie plays a U.S. robot soldier fighting against Russia in a civil war in Ukraine. Captain Leo, Mackie’s character, is the latest in the line of supersoldiers in films. At the end of the movie, he goes rogue and tries to prevent future wars and the super-soldier program by launching nuclear missiles against the United States.

Ultimately, Thomas Harp, the hero of the movie, stops Leo from launching the missile. Framing Leo as the well-meaning villain only serves to glorify the United States’ endless wars. Netflix tries to make a complex point, yet it falls short once again by letting the U.S. hero win.

“Captain America: The Winter Soldier” is another example. While the action sequences in this film are excellent, it, too, glorifies the military-industrial complex.

“Avengers: Endgame,” another action movie, was the second highest-grossing film ever, raking in only around $46 million less than “Avatar.”

It raises the question: What does the United States love so much about action movies that are steeped in military themes?

I watch action movies simply because I enjoy watching them, not out of any sense of patriotism. However, I think this may be too simple of an explanation. If you think about it more, action movies — perhaps similar to all forms of media — help us escape the mundane nature of our lives.

I do not seek to take my mundane life for granted. I am incredibly lucky to be able to go to college and have a set routine. Places that are currently being destroyed by the U.S. military are not so lucky.

Just last week for my Introduction to International Relations class, I watched a video in which a Syrian mother described how a berry tree was able to protect her and her children from the shrapnel of a Russian bomb that dropped on their village.

The United States, and other countries, has been pulled into a humanitarian crisis in Syria. The lives of those who live in Syria have been affected by near-constant war for the last 10 years. This in turn has become a sort of proxy war between the United States and other countries.

I know the damage our military-industrial complex causes, yet I still unintentionally support it through watching action movies. Can I reconcile my enjoyment for movies such as “Lady Bird” with my enjoyment of “Captain America” and the violence it helps to normalize?

The depiction of U.S. exceptionalism in films have influenced cultural perceptions of enemies in these movies and real-life U.S. adversaries. In most films, these enemies are the Russians or Soviet Union — a remnant of the Cold War — North Koreans or Islamic extremists.

The United States has fought so many different countries around the globe that there is no shortage of enemies for action filmmakers to use. By using a biased narrative and blurring the line between real and fictional wars, the United States gains control of who is perceived as the enemy of the people. This can be dangerous if used to misguide or miseducate the public to garner support for wars.

To sum up, our perception of the United States cannot be separated from how action movies depict the country. One feeds the other.

The military thrives upon the media industry portraying the institution in a positive light. To understand the United States, all you need to do is watch an action movie to get a sense of what the country thinks of itself as: the shining beacon of light in a sea of chaos.

Yet the United States image as a world power has been tainted, which is why it is so necessary for action movies to show a U.S. perception of reality and why it is doubly more crucial for us to recognize and be aware of this propaganda the next time we indulge in the MCU and other films.

America’s Disastrous 60-Year War: Three Generations of Conspicuous Destruction by the Military-Industrial Complex

WILLIAM J. ASTORE

( Tomdispatch.com ) – In my lifetime of nearly 60 years, America has waged five major wars, winning one decisively, then throwing that victory away, while losing the other four disastrously. Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, as well as the Global War on Terror, were the losses, of course; the Cold War being the solitary win that must now be counted as a loss because its promise was so quickly discarded.

America’s war in Vietnam was waged during the Cold War in the context of what was then known as the domino theory and the idea of “containing” communism. Iraq and Afghanistan were part of the Global War on Terror, a post-Cold War event in which “radical Islamic terrorism” became the substitute for communism. Even so, those wars should be treated as a single strand of history, a 60-year war, if you will, for one reason alone: the explanatory power of such a concept.

For me, because of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s farewell address to the nation in January 1961, that year is the obvious starting point for what retired Army colonel and historian Andrew Bacevich recently termed America’s Very Long War (VLW). In that televised speech, Ike warned of the emergence of a military-industrial complex of immense strength that could someday threaten American democracy itself. I’ve chosen 2021 as the VLW’s terminus point because of the disastrous end of this country’s Afghan War, which even in its last years cost $45 billion annually to prosecute, and because of one curious reality that goes with it. In the wake of the crashing and burning of that 20-year war effort, the Pentagon budget leaped even higher with the support of almost every congressional representative of both parties as Washington’s armed attention turned to China and Russia.

At the end of two decades of globally disastrous war-making, that funding increase should tell us just how right Eisenhower was about the perils of the military-industrial complex. By failing to heed him all these years, democracy may indeed be in the process of meeting its demise.

The Prosperity of Losing Wars

Several things define America’s disastrous 60-year war. These would include profligacy and ferocity in the use of weaponry against peoples who could not respond in kind; enormous profiteering by the military-industrial complex; incessant lying by the U.S. government (the evidence in the Pentagon Papers for Vietnam, the missing WMD for the invasion of Iraq, and the recent Afghan War papers); accountability-free defeats, with prominent government or military officials essentially never held responsible; and the consistent practice of a militarized Keynesianism that provided jobs and wealth to a relative few at the expense of a great many. In sum, America’s 60-year war has featured conspicuous destruction globally, even as wartime production in the U.S. failed to better the lives of the working and middle classes as a whole.

Let’s take a closer look. Militarily speaking, throwing almost everything the U.S. military had (nuclear arms excepted) at opponents who had next to nothing should be considered the defining feature of the VLW. During those six decades of war-making, the U.S. military raged with white hot anger against enemies who refused to submit to its ever more powerful, technologically advanced, and destructive toys.


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I’ve studied and written about the Vietnam War and yet I continue to be astounded by the sheer range of weaponry dropped on the peoples of Southeast Asia in those years — from conventional bombs and napalm to defoliants like Agent Orange that still cause deaths almost half a century after our troops finally bugged out of there. Along with all that ordnance left behind, Vietnam was a testing ground for technologies of every sort, including the infamous electronic barrier that Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara sought to establish to interdict the Ho Chi Minh trail.

When it came to my old service, the Air Force, Vietnam became a proving ground for the notion that airpower, using megatons of bombs, could win a war. Just about every aircraft in the inventory then was thrown at America’s alleged enemies, including bombers built for strategic nuclear attacks like the B-52 Stratofortress. The result, of course, was staggeringly widespread devastation and loss of life at considerable cost to economic fairness and social equity in this country (not to mention our humanity). Still, the companies producing all the bombs, napalm, defoliants, sensors, airplanes, and other killer products did well indeed in those years.

In terms of sheer bomb tonnage and the like, America’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were more restrained, mainly thanks to the post-Vietnam development of so-called smart weapons. Nonetheless, the sort of destruction that rained down on Southeast Asia was largely repeated in the war on terror, similarly targeting lightly armed guerrilla groups and helpless civilian populations. And once again, expensive strategic bombers like the B-1, developed at a staggering cost to penetrate sophisticated Soviet air defenses in a nuclear war, were dispatched against bands of guerrillas operating in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. Depleted uranium shells, white phosphorus, cluster munitions, as well as other toxic munitions, were used repeatedly. Again, short of nuclear weapons, just about every weapon that could be thrown at Iraqi soldiers, al-Qaeda or ISIS insurgents, or Taliban fighters in Afghanistan, would be used, including those venerable B-52s and, in one case, what was known as the MOAB, or mother of all bombs. And again, despite all the death and destruction, the U.S. military would lose both wars (one functionally in Iraq and the other all too publicly in Afghanistan), even as so many in and out of that military would profit and prosper from the effort.

What kind of prosperity are we talking about? The Vietnam War cycled through an estimated $1 trillion in American wealth, the Afghan and Iraq Wars possibly more than $8 trillion (when all the bills come due from the War on Terror). Yet, despite such costly defeats, or perhaps because of them, Pentagon spending is expected to exceed $7.3 trillion over the next decade. Never in the field of human conflict has so much money been gobbled up by so few at the expense of so many.

Throughout those 60 years of the VLW, the military-industrial complex has conspicuously consumed trillions of taxpayer dollars, while the U.S. military has rained destruction around the globe. Worse yet, those wars were generally waged with strong bipartisan support in Congress and at least not actively resisted by a significant “silent majority” of Americans. In the process, they have given rise to new forms of authoritarianism and militarism, the very opposite of representative democracy.

Paradoxically, even as “the world’s greatest military” lost those wars, its influence continued to grow in this country, except for a brief dip in the aftermath of Vietnam. It’s as if a gambler had gone on a 60-year losing binge, only to find himself applauded as a winner.

Constant war-making and a militarized Keynesianism created certain kinds of high-paying jobs (though not faintly as many as peaceful economic endeavors would have). Wars and constant preparations for the same also drove deficit spending since few in Congress wanted to pay for them via tax hikes. As a result, in all those years, as bombs and missiles rained down, wealth continued to flow up to ever more gigantic corporations like Boeing, Raytheon, and Lockheed Martin, places all too ready to hire retired generals to fill their boards.

And here’s another reality: very little of that wealth ever actually trickled down to workers unless they happened to be employed by those weapons makers, which — to steal the names of two of this country’s Hellfire missile-armed drones — have become this society’s predators and reapers. If a pithy slogan were needed here, you might call these the Build Back Better by Bombing years, which, of course, moves us squarely into Orwellian territory.

Learning from Orwell and Ike

Speaking of George Orwell, America’s 60-Year War, a losing proposition for the many, proved a distinctly winning one for the few and that wasn’t an accident either. In his book within a book in Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell wrote all-too-accurately of permanent war as a calculated way of consuming the products of modern capitalism without generating a higher standard of living for its workers. That, of course, is the definition of a win-win situation for the owners. In his words:


“The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent. Even when weapons of war are not actually destroyed, their manufacture is still a convenient way of expending labor power without producing anything that can be consumed [by the workers].”

War, as Orwell saw it, was a way of making huge sums of money for a few at the expense of the many, who would be left in a state where they simply couldn’t fight back or take power. Ever. Think of such war production and war-making as a legalized form of theft, as Ike recognized in 1953 in his “cross of iron” speech against militarism. The production of weaponry, he declared eight years before he named “the military-industrial complex,” constituted theft from those seeking a better education, affordable health care, safer roads, or indeed any of the fruits of a healthy democracy attuned to the needs of its workers. The problem, as Orwell recognized, was that smarter, healthier workers with greater freedom of choice would be less likely to endure such oppression and exploitation.

And war, as he knew, was also a way to stimulate the economy without stimulating hopes and dreams, a way to create wealth for the few while destroying it for the many. Domestically, the Vietnam War crippled Lyndon Johnson’s plans for the Great Society. The high cost of the failed war on terror and of Pentagon budgets that continue to rise today regardless of results are now cited as arguments against Joe Biden’s “Build Back Better” plan. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal arguably would have never been funded if today’s vast military-industrial complex, or even the one in Ike’s day, had existed in the 1930s.

As political theorist Crane Brinton noted in The Anatomy of Revolution, a healthy and growing middle class, equal parts optimistic and opportunistic, is likely to be open to progressive, even revolutionary ideas. But a stagnant, shrinking, or slipping middle class is likely to prove politically reactionary as pessimism replaces optimism and protectionism replaces opportunity. In this sense, the arrival of Donald Trump in the White House was anything but a mystery and the possibility of an autocratic future no less so.

All those trillions of dollars consumed in wasteful wars have helped foster a creeping pessimism in Americans. A sign of it is the near-total absence of the very idea of peace as a shared possibility for our country. Most Americans simply take it for granted that war or threats of war, having defined our immediate past, will define our future as well. As a result, soaring military budgets are seen not as aberrations, nor even as burdensome, but as unavoidable, even desirable — a sign of national seriousness and global martial superiority.

You’re Going to Have It Tough at the End

It should be mind-blowing that, despite the wealth being created (and often destroyed) by the United States and impressive gains in worker productivity, the standard of living for workers hasn’t increased significantly since the early 1970s. One thing is certain: it hasn’t happened by accident.

For those who profit most from it, America’s 60-Year War has indeed been a resounding success, even if also a colossal failure when it comes to worker prosperity or democracy. This really shouldn’t surprise us. As former President James Madison warned Americans so long ago, no nation can protect its freedoms amid constant warfare. Democracies don’t die in darkness; they die in and from war. In case you hadn’t noticed (and I know you have), evidence of the approaching death of American democracy is all around us. It’s why so many of us are profoundly uneasy. We are, after all, living in a strange new world, worse than that of our parents and grandparents, one whose horizons continue to contract while hope contracts with them.

I’m amazed when I realize that, before his death in 2003, my father predicted this. He was born in 1917, survived the Great Depression by joining Franklin Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps, and worked in factories at night for low pay before being drafted into the Army in World War II. After the war, he would live a modest middle-class life as a firefighter, a union job with decent pay and benefits. Here was the way my dad put it to me: he’d had it tough at the beginning of his life, but easy at the end, while I’d had it easy at the beginning, but I’d have it tough at the end.

He sensed, I think, that the American dream was being betrayed, not by workers like himself, but by corporate elites increasingly consumed by an ever more destructive form of greed. Events have proven him all too on target, as America has come to be defined by a greed-war for which no armistice, let alone an end, is promised. In twenty-first-century America, war and the endless preparations for it simply go on and on. Consider it beyond irony that, as this country’s corporate, political, and military champions claim they wage war to spread democracy, it withers at home.

And here’s what worries me most of all: America’s very long war of destruction against relatively weak countries and peoples may be over, or at least reduced to the odd moment of hostilities, but America’s leaders, no matter the party, now seem to favor a new cold war against China and now Russia. Incredibly, the old Cold War produced a win that was so sweet, yet so fleeting, that it seems to require a massive do-over.

Promoting war may have worked well for the military-industrial complex when the enemy was thousands of miles away with no capacity for hitting “the homeland,” but China and Russia do have that capacity. If a war with China or Russia (or both) comes to pass, it won’t be a long one. And count on one thing: America’s leaders, corporate, military, and political, won’t be able to shrug off the losses by looking at positive balance sheets and profit margins at weapons factories.


Copyright 2022 William J. Astore
Via Tomdispatch.com

About the Author

William J. Astore , a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF), has taught at the Air Force Academy, the Naval Postgraduate School, and the Pennsylvania College of Technology. His personal blog is BracingViews.com. He can be reached at wjastore@gmail.com.

US Foreign Policy Is a Scam Built on Corruption

The $1.5 trillion in military outlays each year is the scam that keeps on giving—to the military-industrial complex and the Washington insiders—even as it impoverishes and endangers America and the world.


US ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield abstains during a vote to approve a resolution that "demands" all sides in the Israel-Hamas conflict allow the "safe and unhindered delivery of humanitarian assistance at scale" at UN headquarters in New York on December 22, 2023.
(Photo by Charly Triballeau / AFP via Getty Images)

JEFFREY D. SACHS
Dec 26, 2023

Common Dreams

On the surface, US foreign policy seems to be utterly irrational. The US gets into one disastrous war after another -- Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Ukraine, and Gaza. In recent days, the US stands globally isolated in its support of Israel’s genocidal actions against the Palestinians, voting against a UN General Assembly resolution for a Gaza ceasefire backed by 153 countries with 89% of the world population, and opposed by just the US and 9 small countries with less than 1% of the world population.

In the past 20 years, every major US foreign policy objective has failed. The Taliban returned to power after 20 years of US occupation of Afghanistan. Post-Saddam Iraq became dependent on Iran. Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad stayed in power despite a CIA effort to overthrow him. Libya fell into a protracted civil war after a US-led NATO mission overthrew Muammar Gaddafi. Ukraine was bludgeoned on the battlefield by Russia in 2023 after the US secretly scuttled a peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine in 2022.

To understand the foreign-policy scam, think of today’s federal government as a multi-division racket controlled by the highest bidders.

Despite these remarkable and costly debacles, one following the other, the same cast of characters has remained at the helm of US foreign policy for decades, including Joe Biden, Victoria Nuland, Jake Sullivan, Chuck Schumer, Mitch McConnell, and Hillary Clinton.

What gives?

The puzzle is solved by recognizing that American foreign policy is not at all about the interests of the American people. It is about the interests of the Washington insiders, as they chase campaign contributions and lucrative jobs for themselves, staff, and family members. In short, US foreign policy has been hacked by big money.

As a result, the American people are losing big. The failed wars since 2000 have cost them around $5 trillion in direct outlays, or around $40,000 per household. Another $2 trillion or so will be spent in the coming decades on veterans’ care. Beyond the costs directly incurred by Americans, we should also recognize the horrendously high costs suffered abroad, in millions of lives lost and trillions of dollars of destruction to property and nature in the war zones.

The costs continue to mount. US Military-linked outlays in 2024 will come to around $1.5 trillion, or roughly $12,000 per household, if we add the direct Pentagon spending, the budgets of the CIA and other intelligence agencies, the budget of the Veteran’s Administration, the Department of Energy nuclear weapons program, the State Department’s military-linked “foreign aid” (such as to Israel), and other security-related budget lines. Hundreds of billions of dollars are money down the drain, squandered in useless wars, overseas military bases, and a wholly unnecessary arms build-up that brings the world closer to WWIII.

Yet to describe these gargantuan costs is also to explain the twisted “rationality” of US foreign policy. The $1.5 trillion in military outlays is the scam that keeps on giving—to the military-industrial complex and the Washington insiders—even as it impoverishes and endangers America and the world.

To understand the foreign-policy scam, think of today’s federal government as a multi-division racket controlled by the highest bidders. The Wall Street division is run out of the Treasury. The Health Industry division is run out of the Department of Health and Human Services. The Big Oil and Coal division is run out of the Departments of Energy and Interior. And the Foreign Policy division is run out of the White House, Pentagon and CIA.

Each division uses public power for private gain through insider dealing, greased by corporate campaign contributions and lobbying outlays. Interestingly, the Health Industry division rivals the Foreign Policy division as a remarkable financial scam. America’s health outlays totaled an astounding $4.5 trillion in 2022, or roughly $36,000 per household, by far the highest health costs in the world, while America ranked roughly 40th in the world among nations in life expectancy. A failed health policy translates into very big bucks for the health industry, just as a failed foreign policy translates into mega-revenues of the military-industrial complex.

The more wars, of course, the more business.

The Foreign Policy division is run by a small, secretive and tight-knit coterie, including the top brass of the White House, the CIA, the State Department, the Pentagon, the Armed Services Committees of the House and Senate, and the major military firms including Boeing, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon. There are perhaps a thousand key individuals involved in setting policy. The public interest plays little role.

The key foreign policy makers run the operations of 800 US overseas military bases, hundreds of billions of dollars of military contracts, and the war operations where the equipment is deployed. The more wars, of course, the more business. The privatization of foreign policy has been greatly amplified by the privatization of the war business itself, as more and more “core” military functions are handed out to the arms manufacturers and to contractors such as Haliburton, Booz Allen Hamilton, and CACI.

In addition to the hundreds of billions of dollars of military contracts, there are important business spillovers from the military and CIA operations. With military bases in 80 countries around the world, and CIA operations in many more, the US plays a large, though mostly covert role, in determining who rules in those countries, and thereby on policies that shape lucrative deals involving minerals, hydrocarbons, pipelines, and farm and forest land. The US has aimed to overthrow at least 80 governments since 1947, typically led by the CIA through the instigation of coups, assassinations, insurrections, civil unrest, election tampering, economic sanctions, and overt wars. (For a superb study of US regime-change operations from 1947 to 1989, see Lindsey O’Rourke’s Covert Regime Change, 2018).

In addition to business interests, there are of course ideologues who truly believe in America’s right to rule the world. The ever-warmongering Kagan family is the most famous case, though their financial interests are also deeply intertwined with the war industry. The point about ideology is this. The ideologists have been wrong on nearly every occasion and long ago would have lost their bully pulpits in Washington but for their usefulness as warmongers. Wittingly or not, they serve as paid performers for the military-industrial complex.

There is one persistent inconvenience for this ongoing business scam. In theory, foreign policy is carried out in the interest of the American people, though the opposite is the truth. (A similar contradiction of course applies to overpriced healthcare, government bailouts of Wall Street, oil-industry perks, and other scams). The American people rarely support the machinations of US foreign policy when they occasionally hear the truth. America’s wars are not waged by popular demand but by decisions from on high. Special measures are needed to keep the people away from decision making.

In theory, foreign policy is carried out in the interest of the American people, though the opposite is the truth.

The first such measure is unrelenting propaganda. George Orwell nailed it in 1984 when “the Party” suddenly switched the foreign enemy from Eurasia to Eastasia without a word of explanation. The US essentially does the same. Who is the US gravest enemy? Take your pick, according to the season. Saddam Hussein, the Taliban, Hugo Chavez, Bashar al-Assad, ISIS, al-Qaeda, Gaddafi, Vladimir Putin, Hamas, have all played the role of “Hitler” in US propaganda. White House spokesman John Kirby delivers the propaganda with a smirk on his face, signaling that he too knows that what he is saying is ludicrous, albeit mildly entertaining.

The propaganda is amplified by the Washington think tanks that live off of donations by military contractors and occasionally foreign governments that are part of the US scam operations. Think of the Atlantic Council, CSIS, and of course the ever-popular Institute for the Study of War, brought to you by the major military contractors.

The second is to hide the costs of the foreign policy operations. In the 1960s, the US Government made the mistake of forcing the American people to bear the costs of the military-industrial complex by drafting young people to fight in Vietnam and by raising taxes to pay for the war. The public erupted in opposition.

From the 1970s onward the government has been far more clever. The government ended the draft, and made military service a job for hire rather than a public service, backed by Pentagon outlays to recruit soldiers from lower economic strata. It also abandoned the quaint idea that government outlays should be funded by taxes, and instead shifted the military budget to deficit spending which protects it from popular opposition that would be triggered if it were tax-funded.

It has also suckered client states such as Ukraine to fight America’s wars on the ground, so that no American body bags would spoil the US propaganda machine. Needless to say, US masters of war such as Sullivan, Blinken, Nuland, Schumer, and McConnell remain thousands of miles away from the frontlines. The dying is reserved for Ukrainians. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) defended American military aid to Ukraine as money well spent because it is “without a single American service woman or man injured or lost,” somehow not dawning on the good Senator to spare the lives of Ukrainians, who have died by the hundreds of thousands in a US-provoked war over NATO enlargement.

This system is underpinned by the complete subordination of the U.S. Congress to the war business, to avoid any questioning of the over-the-top Pentagon budgets and the wars instigated by the Executive Branch. The subordination of Congress works as follows. First, the Congressional oversight of war and peace is largely assigned to the House and Senate Armed Services Committees, which largely frame the overall Congressional policy (and the Pentagon budget). Second, the military industry (Boeing, Raytheon, and the rest) funds the campaigns of the Armed Services Committee members of both parties. The military industries also spend vast sums on lobbying in order to provide lucrative salaries to retiring members of Congress, their staffs, and families, either directly in military businesses or in Washington lobbying firms.

It is the urgent task of the American people to overhaul a foreign policy that is so broken, corrupted, and deceitful that it is burying the government in debt while pushing the world closer to nuclear Armageddon.

The hacking of Congressional foreign policy is not only by the US military-industrial complex. The Israel lobby long ago mastered the art of buying the Congress. America’s complicity in Israel’s apartheid state and war crimes in Gaza makes no sense for US national security and diplomacy, not to speak of human decency. They are the fruits of Israel lobby investments that reached $30 million in campaign contributions in 2022, and that will vastly top that in 2024.

When Congress reassembles in January, Biden, Kirby, Sullivan, Blinken, Nuland, Schumer, McConnell, Blumenthal and their ilk will tell us that we absolutely must fund the losing, cruel, and deceitful war in Ukraine and the ongoing massacre and ethnic cleansing in Gaza, lest we and Europe and the free world, and perhaps the solar system itself, succumb to the Russian bear, the Iranian mullahs, and the Chinese Communist Party. The purveyors of foreign policy disasters are not being irrational in this fear-mongering. They are being deceitful and extraordinarily greedy, pursuing narrow interests over those of the American people.

It is the urgent task of the American people to overhaul a foreign policy that is so broken, corrupted, and deceitful that it is burying the government in debt while pushing the world closer to nuclear Armageddon. This overhaul should start in 2024 by rejecting any more funding for the disastrous Ukraine War and Israel’s war crimes in Gaza. Peacemaking, and diplomacy, not military spending, is the path to a US foreign policy in the public interest.

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.


JEFFREY D. SACHS is a University Professor and Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, where he directed The Earth Institute from 2002 until 2016. He is also President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network and a commissioner of the UN Broadband Commission for Development. He has been advisor to three United Nations Secretaries-General, and currently serves as an SDG Advocate under Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. Sachs is the author, most recently, of "A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism" (2020). Other books include: "Building the New American Economy: Smart, Fair, and Sustainable" (2017) and "The Age of Sustainable Development," (2015) with Ban Ki-moon.

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for PERMANENT ARMS ECONOMY 

PERMANENT ARMS ECONOMY #MIC

BITCOIN EMITS LESS THAN 2% OF THE WORLD’S MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX CARBON EMISSIONS

Published research shows Bitcoin mining produces a mere fraction of the carbon emissions coming from the world’s military-industrial complex.

HASS MCCOOK

JUN 15, 2021

INTRODUCTION

Firstly, thank you kindly for clicking on my click-bait title — it’s trench warfare out here on the environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) front at the moment, and comparisons are being thrown around left, right and center.

Nobody hates comparisons more than I do, but as long as long bows are being drawn, I reserve the right to pull the “muh military!” card. But first, we must understand how the military-industrial complex (MIC) is inextricably related to the legacy financial system, via the mothers of all legacy industries, oil and the petrodollar.

The MIC is more essential to the financial system than you may think. Obviously, I had my suspicions and the basic facts, but this piece for Bitcoin Magazine by Alex Gladstein, chief strategy officer of the Human Rights Foundation, really drove things home for me. Gladstein’s piece is a brief read, 6,500 words or so, and should be considered a mandatory minimum prerequisite reading for basically all Bitcoiners, certainly ones who are serious about getting into the ESG or human rights discussion.

If reading isn’t your thing, be sure to listen to the one hour deep-dive podcast. Even though I can’t summarize it for you, here’s the basic gestalt: The world financial system cannot exist without the petrodollar, which cannot exist without the backing of the United States government, and by extension, The United States Armed Forces, and by further extension, the rest of the world’s governments and armies. Therefore, if we wish to compare Bitcoin’s emissions to the “legacy financial system,” the military must be accounted for too, as well as its primary supporting industries. You could also argue that almost the entirety of public service (with the possible exception of healthcare) is also a mandatory cog in the financial machine, but that will be an article for another time.

This piece will aggregate the current literature on military emissions, as well as a summary of methodology and assumptions behind these numbers. I will then compare these numbers to Bitcoin. It is heavily reliant on the following four sources (I would recommend reading all of them if you’re interested in this topic):

Crawford, N. (November 2019), “Pentagon Fuel Use, Climate Change, And The Costs Of War,” Watson Institute Of International And Public Affairs, Brown University.

Parkinson, S. (March 2020), “The Carbon Boot-Print Of The Military,” Responsible Science Journal, No. Two.

Parkinson, S. (May 2020), “The Environmental Impacts Of The U.K. Military Sector,” Scientists For Global Responsibility.

Parkinson, S. and Cottrell, L. (February 2021), “Under The Radar: The Carbon Footprint Of Europe’s Military Sectors,” Scientists For Global Responsibility.

While solid data only exists for the U.S., Europe and the U.K., they make up a dominant enough share of the world’s military industry and expenditure that global conclusions can be drawn. Dr Stuart Parkinson of The Scientists For Global Responsibility, an author of three of the abovementioned reports, concludes in one of them:


“I estimate that the carbon emissions of the world’s armed forces and the industries that provide their equipment are in the region of 5% of the global total. But this does not include the carbon emissions of the impacts of war — this could be as high as 1%. So the total military carbon boot-print could be 6%.”

As at time of writing, The Cambridge University Centre For Alternative Finance estimates Bitcoin’s energy use to be 97.9 terawatt-hours (TWh), with total emissions of 44.1 million tons of carbon dioxide and carbon dioxide equivalents (MtCO2e), a measly approximate 0.09% of world’s 50,000 MtCO2e emissions, and over 55- to 65-times less than the MIC.

SCOPE DEFINITION

While I was both positively surprised and alarmed by the level of detail that the U.S., U.K. and some EU governments voluntarily disclose to the UN Framework Convention On Climate Change, the data divulged is a little light on scope. The below table shows the different levels of scope to consider when it comes to assessing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and is used as the basis of scope definition in the reference texts listed above.

Although great disaggregated data exists on scopes one and two items, this article will also consider the scope three items, which tend to account for the lion’s share of total emissions. For example, while scopes one and two account for the general operation of an aircraft carrier, they do not account for the design, construction and eventual disposal of said aircraft carrier that scope three calls for.


The only explicit items excluded from the numbers are the knock-on social and environmental impacts of war itself, but some qualitative comments will be made on these in the conclusion of the piece.

WHAT DO WE KNOW ABOUT THE WORLD’S LARGEST ARMIES?

U.S.

“Pentagon Fuel Use, Climate Change, And The Costs Of War” by Professor Neta Crawford presents available public data on the U.S. military’s emissions, and goes further by calculating the carbon footprint of the U.S. MIC. Although these are older, 2017 financial year figures, the latest 2019 figures only show some slight improvements.


In terms of the scopes one and two items transparently reported by The U.S. Department of Energy, the carbon footprint of the U.S. military was about 56.9 MtCO2e, down from 59 MtCO2e in 2017. 20.7 MtCO2e stem from the “standard” emissions of all of the military’s 560,000 buildings across 500 sites nationally and internationally. Another 35.7 MtCO2e come from the fuel use of it’s 50,000-plus land vehicles and tanks, 13,000-plus aircraft and almost 500 naval vessels. Another half megaton of biogenic emissions were also produced.





To quote Professor Crawford:


“[A] complete accounting of the total emissions related to war and preparation for it, would include the GHG emissions of military industry. Military industry directly employs about 14.7% of all people in the U.S. manufacturing sector. Assuming that the relative size of direct employment in the domestic U.S. military industry is an indicator for the portion of the military industry in the U.S. industrial economy, the share of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions from U.S.-based military industry is estimated to be about 15% of total U.S. industrial greenhouse gas emissions.”

She notes that the 15% number does not even allow for “indirect military jobs, and therefore indirect military related emissions.”

I’ll go easy on The TroopsTM and we’ll just call it 15%. This results in an additional 280 MtCO2e, of which more than half is directly attributed to an active war effort, on top of the 56.9 MtCO2e covered under scopes one and two. This brings total U.S. military emissions to 336.9 MtCO2e, almost seven times Bitcoin’s impact.

Dr. Stuart Parkinson is the author of all of the research papers looked at in the following three sections on the U.K., EU and rest-of-the-world armies, respectively. His methodology is very similar to that of Professor Crawford, but goes into more granular detail on the military industrial complex of several nations. The highlights are as follows.
U.K.

Similarly to Crawford’s work, “The Environmental Impacts Of The U.K. Military Sector” takes publicly reported U.K. Ministry of Defence (MOD) data from its report “Sustainable MOD,” and includes an estimate of scope three impacts, namely, MOD U.K.-based suppliers, U.K.-based arms exporters and indirect employment due to MOD spending or arms exports.

In terms of the scopes one and two items, while far humbler than the U.S., the carbon footprint of the U.K. MIC was about 11 MtCO2e. 1.22 MtCO2e stems from the “standard” emissions of all of the MOD’s estate, which covers 1.5% of the U.K. landmass (excluding foreign installations). Another 1.81 MtCO2e come from the fuel use of it’s 5,000-plus land vehicles and tanks, 700-plus aircraft and almost 100 naval vessels. Based on the aggregated GHG reporting of the largest 25 military suppliers and exporters based in the U.K., which employ 85,000 of the 110,000 jobs resulting from MOD spending, 3.23 MtCO2e was produced. Indirect employment accounted for 1.67 MtCO2e, and non-U.K.-based operations account for the remainder. In all, it’s roughly 1.4% of the U.K.’s total emissions.



EU

In “Under The Radar: The Carbon Footprint Of Europe’s Military Sectors,” Parkinson uses the same methodology from his UK. .analysis, but using European data from sources such as NATO, individual nations and reported data from the largest military contractors in Europe. Summary data is below. A total of 24.83 MtCO2e was spewed by The EU27 militaries.


REST OF THE WORLD

In “The Carbon Boot-Print Of The Military,” Parkinson goes over his U.S., U.K. and EU data, but quickly concedes that precise figures for large military spenders like China, Russia, Saudi Arabia and India are much less transparent. As you can read in the introduction, he concluded that emissions as a result of global military spending results in 5% of global emissions in a “quiet” year, and 6% or more during a year with active conflict. With 50,000 MtCO2e being produced globally, this results in between 2,500 to 3,000 MtCO2e/yr, depending on what your definition of “quiet” is.
CONCLUSION

The numbers, as always, speak for themselves. Bitcoin, in the scheme of things, emits nothing compared with the positive value it provides, and compared to its legacy counterparts. While the legacy MIC runs around desperately changing all of its lightbulbs to LEDs to slightly offset the emissions of their bomber fleets, Bitcoin miners and sovereign nations are literally piping into volcanos for zero-emission mining. Many Bitcoin miners currently run on negative-emissions energy by mining using waste flared methane. For Satoshi’s sake! There are actual serious people alive today who believe it is possible to stop Bitcoin. I repeat, The El Salvadoran government is literally figuring out how to pipe into a volcano in order to produce 95 megawatts of lava-powered, clean and cheap energy to mine bitcoin — this would account for just under 1% of all energy currently consumed by the network.


The MIC will NEVER improve from an environmental point of view, let alone the social and economic disaster and ruin it brings in its wake. Bitcoin plugs into the wall (or a methane vent, or a volcano). That’s it. Nobody has to die. I have little doubt that by 2025, 25% of Bitcoin’s energy will come from stranded energy sources, and by the end of the decade, Bitcoin will have negative emissions, due to the amount of methane emissions it will offset. This will not be because Bitcoin miners are environmentalists, but because it’s the most profitable thing to do.



BY HASS MCCOOK

Biden is rooting for Russia to invade Ukraine, Tulsi Gabbard says

The former US congresswoman suggests US and NATO want Moscow to attack so they can impose “draconian” sanctions and enrich the military-industrial complex

Tulsi Gabbard (right) is shown sitting next to Joe Biden in January 2020, while both were campaigning in South Carolina for the Democrat presidential nomination. © Getty Images / Sean Rayford

President Joe Biden and his NATO allies could easily prevent war in Ukraine but would rather see Russia invade their ally to justify harsh sanctions against Moscow and spur a money-making cold war, former US congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard said on Friday in a Fox News interview with Tucker Carlson.  

Gabbard, an Iraq war veteran who ran unsuccessfully for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, made her comments as Biden’s administration and US media outlets continued to hype a possibly “imminent” Russian attack on Ukraine. “It cements this cold war in place,” she said in the interview.

The US and its allies could prevent an armed conflict by pledging that Ukraine won’t be allowed to join NATO, Gabbard said. It’s “highly, highly unlikely” that Kiev will ever be approved as a NATO member, so refusing to promise what’s already a reality shows that leaders of the alliance don’t want peace, the Hawaii Democrat added.

The military-industrial complex is the one that benefits from this. They clearly control the Biden administration. Warmongers on both sides of Washington have been drumming up these tensions.

Russia last December sent security proposals to Washington – among them, blocking Ukraine from NATO membership – but US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the alliance will maintain its open door policy.

“Why are we in this position then, if the answer to this and preventing this war from happening is very clear as day?” Gabbard asked. “And really, it just points to one conclusion that I can see, which is, they actually want Russia to invade Ukraine.”

An invasion of Ukraine would give Biden a “clear excuse to go and levy draconian sanctions, which are a modern-day siege against Russia and the Russian people,” Gabbard said. The result would be “locking in a new cold war.”

“The military-industrial complex starts to make a ton more money than they have been in fighting Al-Qaeda or making weapons for Al-Qaeda,” Gabbard said. “And who pays the price? The American people pay the price, the Ukrainian people pay the price, the Russian people pay the price. It undermines our own national security, but the military-industrial complex that controls so many of our politicians wins, and they run to the bank.”

The US has denied purposely arming radical Islamists, but researchers have reported cases of sophisticated American weaponry falling into the hands of fighters linked to Al-Qaeda and Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS).

bard has been a prominent voice against America’s wars and regime change interventions. US media outlets have been largely dismissive of her arguments; the Daily Beast called her latest comments “Tulsi’s twisted theory.”

The ex-lawmaker earlier this week said “warmongers” have argued that the US must protect Ukraine as a democracy – all while supporting such anti-democratic actions in Kiev as shutting down critical TV stations and imprisoning an opposition party leader. On Friday, she pointed out that US leaders haven’t even made a case as to why the American people should want Ukraine to join NATO.

“I have a hard time seeing how President Biden or anyone can say with an honest face, ‘We are defending democracy,’” Gabbard told Carlson. “And the reason is because our own government has publicly supported these authoritarian actions by the Ukrainian president in shutting down their own political opposition … This sounds familiar to some of the things that unfortunately, we're seeing play out right here at home.”

Russia has denied that it intends to attack Ukraine, while the White House said on Friday that an invasion could begin “at any time.” Western countries have been accusing Russia of amassing troops and military hardware dangerously close to Ukraine’s borders since last fall. Moscow has denied making threats to Kiev and blamed the West for the escalation in tensions.