On January 5, President Obama announced a new defense strategy. It’s titled ” Sustaining US Global Leadership: Priorities for 21st Century Defense.” It’s a plan that accommodates a leaner military. The plan is necessary in order to accomplish $487 billion in defense budget cuts over the next decade.
However, Obama stated that the defense budget would continue to grow “because we have global responsibilities that demand our leadership.”
What does Obama mean when he says we have responsibilities that demand America’s leadership?
What he essentially means is that although defense spending will be scaled-down, the United States will continue a policy of “peace through strength.” In effect, it means that unending wars are alive and well.
At one time, Obama gave us hope for an America absent of war. But, instead, he continued to conduct two of our nation’s longest wars. He has employed drone warfare and assassinations with Predators and Reapers. And, he has now set out new defense strategies with an emphasis on special operations, air and naval power, only to de-emphasize the need for large ground forces; not war.
Obama has approved a defense budget that, even with its reductions, remains larger “than roughly the next 10 countries combined.” And, it’s doing more than just keeping our military strong and our nation secure; it’s lining the pockets of arms dealers and other war profiteers at the expense of funding important domestic programs.
William Astore writes, in Weapons ‘R’ Us, America is the “world’s foremost ‘merchant of death.’” He writes, as an example of misplaced spending, that for the development and production of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, the sum is large enough to fund all federal government spending on education for the next five years.
In 1967, Martin Luther King called the United States “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” And so it is, in 2012 we continue to be the world’s number one arms-exporting nation.
The reality is that the world’s most powerful military and foremost arms merchant may make a powerful country, but it does not make a great country. If we lose that superiority, the United States will be a country with no moral standing in the world. It will be a country who has lost its most viable export: “making things that go boom in the night,” and with nothing as viable to replace it. And, at the end of the day, the United States will most probably be threatened by the very weaponry it exported.
Sources:
William Astore, Weapons ‘R’ Us, tomdispatch.com