The media reports that some 14,000 people are marching from Honduras through Guatemala through Mexico to the US. They are supposed to arrive just in time for the US election in early November. Is this a political stunt? A genuine mass migration? What are the factors that may have led to such an event and what should we do about it? Troops on the border? Tune in to today’s Ron Paul Liberty Report:
Reprinted from The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity.
Scientists tell us a perpetual motion machine is impossible (that pesky 2nd law of thermodynamics about entropy), but America’s leaders are proving a perpetual war machine is quite possible, as events in Afghanistan prove. The USA is now entering the 18th year of its Afghan war, with regress rather than progress being the reality of nearly a trillion dollars committed to this war. At TomDispatch.com, Tom Engelhardt notes that “Though few realized it at the time [in 2001], the American people married war. Permanent, generational, infinite war is now embedded in the American way of life, while just about the only part of the government guaranteed ever more soaring dollars, no matter what it does with them, is the U.S. military.” At Slate.com, Fred Kaplan notes that the Afghan War:
has been going on for 17 years now… making it the longest war in American history. Yet we are no closer than we have ever been to accomplishing our objectives, in part because those objectives have been so sketchily, inconsistently, and unrealistically defined.
In fact, the Taliban is gaining strength; other jihadist groups, including ISIS and a revivified al-Qaida, are joining the fight (against the Afghan government, Western forces, and the Taliban); the Afghan Army is suffering casualties at an alarming rate; the chaos is spiraling to unsustainable levels.
Nevertheless, the USA persists in its folly. There are many reasons for this, but I’d like to focus on one: the warrior ethos in the US military. “Warriors wanted,” say new US Army TV ads and web campaigns. The warrior ethos, according to the Army, compels us to never accept defeat. Check out goarmy.com/warriors to get your lesson on America’s warrior ethos. The site says the Army must be “unbeatable.” The site says “We never accept defeat.”
Continue reading “William J. Astore on A Perpetual War Machine”
President Trump signaled over the weekend that he would withdraw from the 1987 INF nuclear treaty which prohibited missiles and missile launchers with a range from 500KM to 5,000KM. Is leaving the treaty in the US interest, as Trump claims? Who’s cheating? What are the real reasons Trump’s getting out? China? On today’s Ron Paul Liberty Report:
Reprinted from The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity.
Originally appeared on The American Conservative.
The Trump administration is preparing to quit the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty thanks to the arms control-hating John Bolton:
The Trump administration has told U.S. allies that it wants to withdraw from the landmark Reagan-era Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty, or INF, and plans to inform Russian leaders of its position in the coming days, said foreign diplomats and other people familiar with the deliberations.
The planning is the brainchild of Trump’s hawkish national security adviser, John Bolton, who has told US allies he believes the INF puts Washington in an “excessively weak position” against Russia “and more importantly China,” said a diplomat who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive issue.
The president confirmed the intention to withdraw from the treaty this weekend:
President Donald Trump said Washington will exit the Cold-War era treaty that eliminated a class of nuclear weapons due to Russian violations, triggering a warning of retaliatory measures from Moscow.
The treaty has served US and European security well for three decades. Casting aside a landmark arms control agreement risks starting a new destabilizing arms race with Russia at a time when relations with Moscow are already extremely poor. Withdrawing from the treaty amounts to letting Russia off the hook for its recent violations, and it gains the US nothing except the ability to waste more resources on nuclear weapons that we don’t need. Killing the treaty isn’t going to remedy any of the things that critics complain about. China isn’t a party to the treaty and hasn’t been bound by its limitations, but it is difficult to see why the US needs to be able to have land-based intermediate-range ballistic missiles in East Asia in any case. Giving up on an arms control treaty that has been largely successful for European security because it does not address new developments in another part of the world just creates a new problem without fixing any of the others.
Quitting the INF Treaty is just one example of Bolton’s reflexive hostility to any and all nonproliferation and arms control agreements. In addition to supporting withdrawal from the INF Treaty, Bolton is also resisting an extension of New START:
Former US officials say Bolton is blocking talks on extending the 2010 New Start treaty with Russia limiting deployed strategic nuclear warheads and their delivery systems. The treaty is due to expire in 2021 and Moscow has signaled its interest in an extension, but Bolton is opposing the resumption of a strategic stability dialogue to discuss the future of arms control between the two countries.
Extending New START should be an easy national security win for the Trump administration. There is no good reason to oppose the extension, just as there was no good reason to oppose its ratification. Bolton is ideologically opposed to the treaty, which he has previously declared to be “execrable,” and as long as he is National Security Advisor it seems very unlikely that the treaty will be extended. Quitting the INF Treaty and allowing New START to expire would represent the willful destruction of the most important arms control agreements that the US has, and together they will have a very dangerous destabilizing effect on the security of Europe and the US
Daniel Larison is a senior editor at The American Conservative, where he also keeps a solo blog. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and is a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Dallas. Follow him on Twitter. This article is reprinted from The American Conservative with permission.
While Washington is in a frenzy over the apparent Saudi government murder of a Saudi Washington Post journalist, little attention is being paid to news that the United Arab Emirates hired an “guns for hire” company founded by an Israeli-American to assassinate members of a political party in Yemen. Pentagon and CIA trained special operations troops were used to carry out the assassinations, including a plan to blow up the party’s headquarters building. While Russian involvement in our elections has yet to be proven, certainly blowing up a foreign political party headquarters and assassinating its leaders qualifies as election meddling. But it’s Ok if we do it? Tune in to today’s Ron Paul Liberty Report:
Reprinted from The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity.
What do we call it when the government outsources censorship to the private sector? And what about when those “private” companies are in bed with government? The latest social media purge of hundreds of alternative news sites guarantees that we will be less informed. Guarantees that our only inputs will be from the government-approved mainstream media outlets. They want to turn us into a nation of sheep. Will we allow them? Tune in to today’s Ron Paul Liberty Report:
Reprinted from The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity.
