Somewhere, I don’t remember where, I came across a humorous variant of Newton’s three laws of motion, proposing a fourth law, as follows:
“Newton’s Fourth Law: Don’t start no shit, won’t be no shit.”
Imagine if the U.S. government/military had followed this “4th law.” No Vietnam war. No Afghan war. No Iraq war. No Libya. No Syria. And so forth. Trillions of dollars saved, along with millions of lives.
There’s an unbounded and restless quality to US ambitions that reminds me of Germany’s Second Reich under the Kaiser. Before World War I, Germany was known as the “restless Reich,” contesting for its imperial place in the sun. A relative latecomer to European imperialism, Germany wanted to enlarge its global span of control – it wanted to be a “world power” like Great Britain and France. Those global ambitions got Germany two world wars and utter devastation.
Continue reading “For the US Military, the World Is Not Enough”