{"id":54397,"date":"2025-08-01T07:16:26","date_gmt":"2025-08-01T15:16:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/?p=54397"},"modified":"2025-08-01T07:16:26","modified_gmt":"2025-08-01T15:16:26","slug":"persistent-pernicious-perpetual-and-permanent-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2025\/08\/01\/persistent-pernicious-perpetual-and-permanent-war\/","title":{"rendered":"Persistent, Pernicious, Perpetual, and Permanent War"},"content":{"rendered":"

Reprinted from\u00a0Bracing Views<\/a>\u00a0with the author\u2019s permission.<\/i><\/p>\n

The real enemy of America isn\u2019t Russia or China or Iran or any other country. It\u2019s America\u2019s own pursuit of persistent, pernicious, perpetual, and more or less permanent war or preparations for the same.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s undeniable. America\u2019s war and weapons budget is a trillion dollars a year. And rising. There are no plans in the foreseeable future to reduce spending on wars and weapons. Predictably, Americans are told this colossal spending on wars and weapons is for \u201cdefense\u201d and \u201cnational security.\u201d This is a lie. This spending enriches the few at the expense of the many. It sustains imperialism at the expense of democracy. It serves the desires of Wall Street while ignoring the real needs of Main Street USA. And it is supported by a bipartisan majority in Congress as well as the Trump administration (and the Biden administration before it).<\/p>\n

War and weapons are making the American people poorer and less free. Sure, some people are getting rich selling murderous weaponry around the globe, yet America itself is being hollowed out. The warmongers in charge tell us that we can\u2019t have nice things because America, or Israel, or Ukraine, or all three need more weapons (never mind the price tag). Yet it\u2019s our money\u2014it\u2019s our taxpayer dollars.<\/p>\n

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We can\u2019t say we weren\u2019t warned about this. President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1953 told us that pursuing war and weapons would lead to our crucifixion on a \u201ccross of iron.\u201d Eight years later, Ike warned that a military-industrial complex already existed that was undermining American democracy and that we urgently needed to act to curb its power.<\/p>\n

Sadly, what gives the military-industrial complex its unity is, among other things, greed and power. Congress is more than happy to serve it. So are America\u2019s presidents. The last U.S. president to speak sincerely and powerfully about peace, John F. Kennedy, was assassinated just over six decades ago. There hasn\u2019t been a peace president since then.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, since 9\/11\/2001, if not before then, the U.S. military has enthusiastically embraced a warrior ethos, abandoning its own citizen-soldier tradition. America, of course, is supposed to be a constitutional republic, not Sparta or Prussia. But instead of a nation of justice and the rule of law, we have an empire and culture in which wars and warriors rule.<\/p>\n

War is not peace. Warriors don\u2019t seek peace. War is war, and perpetual war will destroy both the U.S. empire and the kernel of democracy that remains (however weak or shrinking) at its core.<\/p>\n

The choice is clear. We must seek peace. We must cut war and weapons spending dramatically\u2014I\u2019d suggest by 50%\u2014and reinvest that money in Main Street USA. We can have nice things again, if we\u2019re willing to stop empowering the warmongers among us.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reprinted from\u00a0Bracing Views\u00a0with the author\u2019s permission. The real enemy of America isn\u2019t Russia or China or Iran or any other country. It\u2019s America\u2019s own pursuit of persistent, pernicious, perpetual, and more or less permanent war or preparations for the same. It\u2019s undeniable. America\u2019s war and weapons budget is a trillion dollars a year. And rising. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":290,"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":[758],"class_list":["post-54397","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":"The Real Enemy of America"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54397","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\/290"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=54397"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54397\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":54402,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54397\/revisions\/54402"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=54397"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=54397"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=54397"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=54397"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}