Russia's Ukrainian invasion last year - and really, it's part of an ongoing Russian invasion of Europe, only the latest chapter - as well as China's ongoing saber-rattling over Taiwan have made a convert of me in the military department. This is a different world than the one that existed when many of us first cut our political teeth in opposition to the Iraq War.
What we need in this era is high military spending, but focused on winning great-power conflicts against the likes of Russia and China, rather than on dropping multimillion-dollar bombs on terrorists in caves and spending trillions on trying to plant democracy in deeply Islamic fundamentalist countries that have never known it before.
This is actually now very mainstream thinking within the so-called military-industrial complex and foreign policy "blob." While griping about the deeply misguided 2000's-2010's era American interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq states a valid point, at the same time, it is very much fighting the last battle.
You want to Defund the World Police. Well, it turns out that having some kind of a rules-based order in the world is better than its absence. It's the underpinning of a global security and economic order that has enriched America more than most.
Now, when I say "enrich America," I recognize too many Americans have been left behind and too much of that wealth derived from globalization has gone into a few fat pockets. The solution is simple: Tax the Rich, fund infrastructure and social spending, and redistribute that wealth.
Despite the tremendous costs of Iraq and Afghanistan, the Bush tax cuts cost even more, and the Trump tax cuts compounded that, as this chart uses the year 2018 as an example show. Just these Bush/Trump policies alone (war, defense budget increases, unfunded tax cuts) account for more than the entire budget deficit. Now, post-2022, I don't necessarily have a problem with the defense budget increases, but the other policies are wasteful.
