{"id":46693,"date":"2024-03-19T15:44:36","date_gmt":"2024-03-19T23:44:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/?p=46693"},"modified":"2024-03-19T15:44:36","modified_gmt":"2024-03-19T23:44:36","slug":"more-militarism-puts-america-on-the-road-to-ruin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2024\/03\/19\/more-militarism-puts-america-on-the-road-to-ruin\/","title":{"rendered":"More Militarism Puts America on the Road to Ruin"},"content":{"rendered":"

Walter Russell Mead ends his latest column<\/a> with some random assertions, mindless talking points, and a call for violence:<\/p>\n

Crows cluster where scarecrows fail. If Team Biden wants a world with fewer challenges to the American order, it must restore respect for American power, competence and will. Step one would be to submit a serious defense budget to the Congress, one that demonstrates American resolve to support our friends and deter our adversaries in key global theaters.<\/i><\/p>\n

Step two is to kill some crows.<\/i><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Mead still subscribes to a discredited worldview according to which the U.S. overawes other states through sheer might and resolve, and if there are ever any problems in the world it is because the U.S. has not thrown enough money at the military and killed enough people. This is the sort of deranged analysis that would have been quite popular around 2003-04, but it is wrong and it has nothing to offer us today. It is nothing more than crude militarism. Whatever is wrong with U.S. foreign policy, it isn\u2019t going to be fixed by giving more funds to the Pentagon and killing \u201ccrows.\u201d<\/p>\n

The U.S. has spent more than twenty years killing people all over the world ostensibly in the name of security and counterterrorism, but obviously it hasn\u2019t made the world more stable or secure. It definitely hasn\u2019t reduced the number of terrorist groups in the world. The military budget is higher in real terms now than it has been at almost any point in American history and it is equal to the next seven top military budgets combined (most of which belong to allies), but somehow we still need a \u201cserious\u201d budget that will fill adversaries\u2019 hearts with fear. No matter how big the budget gets, it will never satisfy the militarists and they will always spot some new threat that \u201crequires\u201d it to grow by another half trillion dollars.<\/p>\n

An $850 billion<\/a> military budget request is not \u201cshockingly inadequate\u201d by any reasonable measure. It is obscene and excessive. We can only guess how many trillions Mead\u2019s militaristic agenda would involve since he never bothers to specify how much he thinks is needed. Portraying one of the largest military budgets on record as a signal of \u201cretreat\u201d is ridiculous even for Mead.<\/p>\n

Read the rest of the article at Eunomia<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n

Daniel Larison is a contributing editor for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia<\/a>. He is former senior editor at<\/i> The American Conservative. He has been published in the<\/i> New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and<\/i> Culture11, and was a columnist for<\/i> The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter<\/a>.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Walter Russell Mead ends his latest column with some random assertions, mindless talking points, and a call for violence: Crows cluster where scarecrows fail. If Team Biden wants a world with fewer challenges to the American order, it must restore respect for American power, competence and will. Step one would be to submit a serious […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":56,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"none","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-46693","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46693","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/56"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46693"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46693\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":46697,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46693\/revisions\/46697"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46693"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=46693"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=46693"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=46693"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}