Authored by David Stockman via David Stockton’s Contra Corner.
The case for getting out of NATO encompasses four fundamental propositions:
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First, the Federal budget has become a self-fueling fiscal doomsday machine, even as the Fed has run out of capacity to monetize the skyrocketing public debt.
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Second, the only viable starting point for fiscal salvation is slashing the nation’s elephantine Warfare State by at least $500 billion per year.
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Third, the route to that end is a return to the “no entangling alliance” wisdom of the Founders, which means bringing the Empire Home, closing the 750 US bases abroad, scuttling much of the US Navy and Army and withdrawing from NATO and similar lesser commitments elsewhere.
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Fourthly, jettisoning NATO requires debunking its Origins Story and the false claim that it brought peace and security to post-war America when what it actually did was transform Washington into the War Capital of the World, dominated by a panoptic complex of arms merchants, neocon warmongers and a vast Warfare State nomenklatura.
Part 1
As to the impending fiscal calamity, just recall this sequence. When Ronald Reagan attacked the soaring Federal deficits in 1980 the public debt was less than $1 trillion and about 30% of GDP. But it had erupted to $20 trillion by Donald Trump’s first election, now stands at $36 trillion and will be hitting $62 trillion and 163% of GDP by the mid-2030s.
Yet even that figure embodies CBO’s most recent Rosy Scenario fairy tale under which—-
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Congress never again adopts a single new spending increase or tax cut.
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The $5 trillion of Trump’s 2017 tax cuts are allowed to expire next year.
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There are no recessions or other economic crises for the remainder of this decade and forever thereafter, world without end.
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And despite 7% of GDP deficits and annual interest expense of $1.7 trillion by 2034 the average yield on the public debt clocks in at a minuscule 3.4%.
Yes, and if dogs could whistle the world would be a chorus! Boost the average debt yield by a minimally realistic 250 basis points, however, and now you have $3 trillion of annual interest expense and a $4.5 trillion deficit by 2034.
In short, there is a doom-loop building inside the fiscal equation under which soaring interest expense will ignite a veritable budgetary wildfire, powering the public debt upward to $150 trillion by mid-century, even under CBO’s cheerful baseline.
Of course, long before the debt actually hits this staggering figure, the whole system would implode. Every remnant of America as we now know it would go down the tubes.
So slashing the national security budget by $500 billion per year is especially urgent since there is no chance whatsoever of getting similar giant slices out of the other two fiscal biggies— Social Security and Medicare, which are surrounded by a veritable wall of political terrorists on the left.
Fortunately, slashing the Pentagon by 50% is fully warranted. Today’s bloated Empire-serving Warfare State is not remotely necessary for homeland security or the foreign policy of a peaceful Republic.
When you add-up the current year $927 billion for the national defense function, $66 billion for international operations and aid and $370 billion for veterans disability and health care—you get a comprehensive national security budget of nearly $1.4 trillion.
Moreover, three things stand out when this stupendous total is looked at in historic perspective. First, the disappearance of the heavily armed Soviet Empire into the dustbin of history in 1991 left no visible trace on national security spending.
In fact, at the peak of the Cold War in 1962 when JFK faced down Khrushchev in Cuba the comprehensive national security budget in today’s dollars stood at just $640 billion. That was barely 46% of the current level, and it was still only $810 billion by 1990 on the eve of the Soviet collapse.
So what transpired thereafter is astounding. An adversary armed to the teeth with upwards of 37,000 nukes and a 4 million man conventional armed force vanished from the face of the earth. And yet the national security budget kept rising skyward to the present $1.4 trillion without missing a beat.
The second point is that the largest military increases occurred not in the Cold War heat circa 1960, but during the Reagan era of the 1980s when the Soviet Union was already on its last leg economically and militarily. Still, the constant dollar US national security budget actually soared by +42%, from $570 billion to the aforementioned $810 billion.
There’s no mystery as to why. During the Reagan Era the neocons hijacked the Republican party and cast its historic fiscal prudence to the winds, claiming that massive defense increases were needed because the Soviets were on the verge of a nuclear first strike capacity.
That latter was an abject lie as proven by the fact that less than 10% of the Reagan defense build-up actually went to the strategic nuclear arsenal. Most of it was for conventional forces including the 600-ship Navy, massive air power increases, new tanks, expanded air and sealift and extensive new cruise missiles and electronics warfare capabilities.
All of these latter forces had but one purpose: Namely, overseas power projection and the conduct of wars of invasion and occupation in a world in which the US was not threatened in the slightest by any industrial power with expansive conventional warfare capabilities.
The real effect of the Reagan defense build-up, therefore, was to supply future administrations with the military wherewithal to launch serial adventures in Regime Change. That is, real defense spending should have been cut in half or by $400 billion (FY 2025 $) upon the Soviet demise but was actually increased by $600 billion, thereby enabling military interventions from the First Gulf War onward.
Thirdly, the Forever Wars have been a physical, medical and fiscal disaster. Currently 5 million wounded veterans receive disability compensation and 9 million receive health care benefits. That is, one out of every 30 adult Americans is a VA client.
Accordingly, the “deferred cost” of Empire has literally shot the moon. In today’s dollars, veterans benefits have risen from $57 billion in 1962, mainly representing WWII veterans, to $370 billion. This 6.5X rise represents the frightful human and fiscal tab for the Empire.
Part 2
So, how did a peaceful Republic secure behind the great Atlantic and Pacific Ocean moats, which until 1949 eschewed permanent “entangling alliances” abroad, end up with an global Empire that it doesn’t need and can’t even remotely afford?
The answer, we believe, lies in three strategic mistakes made on the banks of the Potomac in 1917, 1949 and 1991, respectively, that have enabled the rise of a self-fueling Warfare State. This fiscal monster, to repeat, can only be eliminated by returning to Jefferson’s admonition that America should pursue—-
Peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none.
For most of its history, of course, America had adhered to this advice yet had been invasion-free owing to the great Atlantic and Pacific ocean moats. These blessings of Providence, in turn, enabled America to remain a peaceful Republic because its favorable geography precluded the need for a large standing military, heavy taxes, a powerful central government and, most especially, the need for entangling alliances with foreign nations.
In fact, an early treaty with France was canceled by Congress in 1797, meaning that the nation was free of permanent alliances for the next 152 years. Even as late as 1919 Congress prudently rejected the entanglements of the League of Nations Treaty after Wilson’s foolish crusade blatantly failed to make the world safe for democracy.
The inexorable slide toward Empire thus incepted only in 1949 when the Senate ratified the NATO Treaty. But, as we will argue, that was based on utterly false lessons from the world wars and a misguided theory of collective international security.
To be sure, Jefferson’s admonition had preiviously been the default position of American governance. This was demonstrated by the radical demobilization of military forces even after America had uncharacteristically elected to go to war on the world stage in both 1917 and 1941.
Thus, the US military budget on the eve of World War I was just $11 billion when expressed in present day dollars and amounted to a slim 0.9% of GDP. But after Wilson plunged American forces into the stalemated trenches on the Western Front, constant dollar military spending soared 18-fold to $194 billion by war’s end.
That amounted to nearly 15% of GDP at the wartime peak but immediately upon the armistice a sweeping demobilization began. By 1924, 100% of the troops were home and military spending bottomed out at just $12 billion. That amounted to a 93% reduction from the wartime peak and just 0.8% of GDP.
The pre-war status quo ante had thus been fully restored, implying that the lurch into a foreign war had amounted to a one-off venture, and a bad one at that.
Indeed, US intervention in the Great War had been a calamitous mistake. On the date Congress declared war (April 6, 1917) there was not even the slightest chance of a German attack on America. By then the German Fleet was quarantined in its Jutland home-port by the Royal Navy and all sides to the conflict were running out of draftable men, materiale, morale and fiscal resources.
Yet that Woodrow Wilson had plunged the US into the stalemated carnage of the old world for the vainglorious purpose of acquiring a powerful seat at the post–war peace conference is indisputable based on the testimony of his intimate alter ego, Colonel House. So doing, Wilson tipped the balance on the Western Front to a victory by the Entente powers led by England and France.
That is to say, the natural end to this pointless “world war” would have left all the sides exhausted, bankrupt and demoralized, and their respective domestic “war parties” subject to massive repudiation at the post-war polls. But the arrival of two million fresh American doughboys and massive armaments from Washington literally rechanneled history, enabling a vindictive peace of the victors at Versailles—a travesty that sowed the seeds for the even more calamitous second world war.
Yet it can’t be gainsaid that Wilson’s foolish intervention encouraged a last futile offensive by Russia in the summer of 1917, the failure of which soon gave birth to the bloody revolution of Lenin and Stalin. Likewise, the parceling out of the parts and pieces of Germany to France, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Belgium and others by the victors at Versailles fostered the stab-in-the-back myth and revanchist campaigns on which Hitler rode to power.
More importantly still, the alleged “lessons” of the interwar period and WWII were falsely played and replayed in the years after 1945. To wit, the Wilson–enabled rise of Hitler and Stalin did not happen, as claimed, because the good people of England and America slept through the 1920s and 1930s. These monsters of the 20th century were not resident in the DNA of nations nor do they continuously lurk among the lesser tinpots who rise from time to time to authoritarian tyranny among the far flung nations of the earth.
To the contrary, they were aberrations—freaks of historical happenstance. That means that even after the two catastrophic world wars there was no baseline case for Empire as a requisite of America’s homeland security. Washington and Jefferson were still correct even in 1946 and beyond.
For a brief moment after WWII ended, in fact, Jefferson’s admonition had prevailed yet again when another massive post-war demobilization occurred, laying the ground for a return to the pre–1914 status quo ante.
Accordingly, the war-weary Washington policy makers were absolutely correct when they brought America’s 12 million-man expeditionary force home, reducing it to 1.3 million by 1948, and also abruptly closed the fiscal sluice-gates to what had become America’s Brobdingnagian war budget.
When translated into present day dollars there’s no room for doubt: Military spending in FY 2025 dollars dropped form $1.7 trillion in 1945 to just $125 billion by 1948, marking another stunning 93% reduction in the post-war military budget.
And well it should have. At that point there was absolutely no military threat anywhere on the planet to the homeland security and liberty of America.
Japan’s leading cities had been fried alive by horrendous nuclear and conventional bombing assaults and Germany’s industry had been laid waste by nightly bomber storms for months on end
That’s to say nothing, of course, of the prostate corpus of Stalinist Russia, which had suffered 27 million military and civilian deaths due to bombs, bullets, starvation, disease, pestilence, atrocities and other barely imaginable inhuman afflictions. And that was atop the destruction of 32,000 industrial enterprises and upwards of 70,000 towns and villages—all leaving tens of millions of Soviet citizens destitute.
In some kind of ghoulish absolution, therefore, the slate had been wiped clean. There wasn’t even a scant reason for American expeditionary forces to remain outside the homeland after 1945—nor for bases, alliances and commitments to intervene anywhere abroad that would put American servicemen in harms’ way.
Part 3
And yet Washington’s incipient “War Party” of military contractors and globe-trotting officialdom gestated in the heat of World War II was not about to go quietly into the good night. Instead, the Cold War was midwifed on the banks of the Potomac when President Truman fell under the spell of war-hawks like Secretary James Byrnes, Dean Acheson, James Forrestal and the Dulles brothers, who were loath to go back to their mundane lives as civilian bankers, politicians or peacetime diplomats.
So exactly 11 months after Hitlers’ demise at his own hand in his bunker and a mere eight months after Armageddon had been visited upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the out-of-power but inveterate war-mongering Winston Churchill delivered his “Iron Curtain” speech in Fulton Missouri.
That opening call to the Cold War was powerfully seconded barely 10 months latter when the US president delivered his “Truman Doctrine” speech to the Congress. That latter was a belligerent oration which laid the planking for the post-1947 web of entangling alliances and the budget-crushing American Empire it fostered.
It can be well and truly said, however, that the ruckus in Greece and Turkey caused by local communist parties, which was the basis for Truman’s declaration, didn’t amount to a hill-of-beans with respect to the homeland security of America.
Yes, Stalin wanted a port on the Turkish Dardanelles, as had all the Russian Czars for generations before him. But so what?
Likewise, after a decade of brutal political and economic oppression by both a homegrown dictatorship and the Nazi occupiers, the Greek people were seeking more relief than could be delivered by the sickly King George II. So they were understandably lured by the false promises of the communist left.
But, again, so what?
The population of Greece at the time was a mere 7.3 million and even in today’s dollars its GDP was just $50 billion and $7,000 per capita, meaning that Greece was a museum piece of western history that had dwindled to an economic cipher. Had the local communist party come to power that misfortune for the Greek people would have had no bearing on America’s homeland security 5,000 miles away on the far side of the Atlantic moat.
As it happened, the author of the Truman Doctrine was Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson, who was a pompous Yale-trained international lawyer from Washington’s elite Covington & Burling. He’d had been a New Dealer during the early 1930s. but then came back to the State Department in 1941, where he had designed the American/British/Dutch embargo against Japan.
In thereby paving the way to Pearl Harbor he actually became the “trigger man” for America’s entry into World War II by unilaterally shutting-off 100% of Japan’s oil while FDR was away meeting with Churchill at the famous “Atlantic Charter” confab in Newfoundland in August 1941.
Acheson was also an inveterate anglophile who apparently suffered from “empire-envy”. He thus imagined that America should step into Great Britain’s imperial shoes when it emerged economically crippled from WWII and could no longer provide aid to Greece and Turkey.
So upon such advice from the Brits in February 1947, Acheson had sprung into action. In a pivotal meeting shortly thereafter with Congressional leaders, Acheson articulated what would later become known as the “domino theory.”
He stated that more was at stake than Greece and Turkey, for if they should fall communism would likely spread south to Iran and as far east as India. Acheson reportedly concluded that “not since the days of Rome and Carthage” had such a polarization of power existed.
That was utter poppycock. Should the people of Iran and India have made the stupid mistake of voting in their small but noisy communist parties, it would have posed no material threat whatsoever to the military security of Americans.
The Greek-Turkey aid gambit of March 1947, of course, was just the opening salvo. Soon the baleful idea that communist political gains anywhere in democratic Europe were to be viewed as cause for national security alarums gathered momentum on the banks of the Potomac.
Consequently, the modest aid to Greece and Turkey quickly ballooned into the Marshall plan announced in June 1947. Again, in today’s dollars the Marshall plan provided upwards of $175 billion to Western European countries between 1948 and 1951.
Needless to say, by virtue of doling out such tremendous sums of money Washington was soon knee-deep in the domestic politics, economics and inter-country intrigues of post-war Europe.
But why? There was not a snowballs’ chance in the hot place that a communist France or red Luxembourg would have been a military threat to the US. Or even that in league with Soviet Russia they would have posed a conventional military challenge on the New Jersey shores 4,000 miles to the further side of the Atlantic moat.
Indeed, the US had left WWII with the greatest assemblage of naval power in human history—including 28 aircraft carriers, 23 battleships, 72 cruisers, 377 destroyers, and hundreds of auxiliary vessels. Altogether this amounted to 10 million tons of naval vessel capacity or more than six times the 1.5 million tons of the Soviet Navy, whose fleets consisted of far fewer and far less lethal warships.
Needless to say, therefore, neither the Truman Doctrine nor the Marshall plan advanced America’s military security in any material manner. The requisite muscle to defend the American shorelines and airspace had already been bought and paid for during WWII.
But these politico-economic programs did grease the slippery slope to NATO and entangling alliances and interventions stretching to all four corners of the planet. And they did most definitely set off alarm bells in the Kremlin, where the hyper-paranoid Joseph Stalin everywhere and always expected treachery from friend and foe alike.
That was a given—considering the blood-soaked path by which he had climbed to absolute power in the Soviet Union itself and the treachery of Hitler’s double-cross after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939 and the subsequent devastating invasion of Russia by the Nazi.
So it is not surprising that Stalin soon suspected that his wartime allies—especially with FDR and Churchill gone—were laying the groundwork for the isolation and encirclement of Soviet Russia, exactly as the allied powers had attempted after WWI.
To be sure, Stalin was among the most wretched rulers ever to oppress a decent-sized chunk of mankind, and would have remained a blight on his own countrymen and ogre before the world during the remaining six years of his despicable life. But he was no threat to the American homeland as the now open archives of the old Soviet Union prove in spades.
These documents, in fact, amount to the national security dog which didn’t bark. Dig, scour, search and forage thru them as you might. Yet they will fail to reveal any Soviet plan or capability to militarily conquer western Europe.
They show, therefore, that Washington’s standing up of NATO was a giant historical mistake. It was not needed to contain Soviet military aggression, but it did foster a half-century of hegemonic folly in Washington and a fiscally crushing Warfare State.
It is in the nature of human history, it seems, that a wrong path taken like Wilson’s 1917 error frequently begets another baleful turn. The slippery slope here had further materialized when Britain and America had needed to ally with the vile red tyrants of Moscow to rid the world of the Hitlerian nightmare that rose up from the ashes of Versailles.
Indeed, this wartime alliance with the devil seemed so urgent to both Churchill and FDR that they more or less ceded the nations of eastern Europe to the then advancing Red Army at the Yalta Conference in February 1945.
In return for Stalin’s continued march toward Berlin, the Big Three principals reached an understanding that the Soviet Union would exert significant influence over Eastern Europe from Poland down to Yugoslavia.
Of course, free elections and democratic governments were to arise in areas occupied by the Red Army, but neither Churchill nor FDR provided any enforcement mechanism. It was a case of saying Eastern Europe is in your sphere of influence, Uncle Joe—by wink from the cynical Churchill and by nod from the doddering Roosevelt.
For his part, of course, Stalin was then in the business of rescuing his bloody regime from the near extinction event that had accompanied the Nazi invasion. His aim, therefore, was not about the ideological project of extending communism westward.
Instead, it was focused on driving the remnants of the Wehrmacht from his own country and establishing an invincible “cordon sanitaire” from the Baltic to the Adriatic, as Churchill himself later charged. Never again would marauding armies from Europe plunder the Russian motherland.
Needless to say, the arrival of the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan and NATO— within 25 months between March 1947 and April 1949–sent Stalin’s wartime understandings into a tailspin. Slowly at first and then aggressively he developed a paranoid certainty that his capitalist allies were once again in the business of attempting to encircle and destroy the Soviet Union.
This Soviet departure from the cooperative modus operandi of the wartime alliance thus arose from yet another unforced error in Washington. We are referring to the latter’s badly misplaced fears that deteriorating economic conditions in Western Europe could lead to the aforementioned communist parties coming to political power in France, Italy and elsewhere.
To be sure, communist governments in Western Europe would have been a misfortune for any electorate which stupidly put them in power. But that would have been a domestic governance problem over there, not a threat to the American homeland over here.
Nevertheless, Washington’s gratuitous antidote for what was essentially an internal political problem in western Europe was a sweeping course of economic and military interventions that were clinically described as “containment” measures designed only to keep the Soviet Union in its Yalta lane.
They were not meant to be the prelude to an attack on eastern Europe or Moscow itself, but if you examine a thousand random documents from the archives of the Soviet foreign ministry or even the correspondence of Stalin himself it is readily apparent that these initiatives were viewed in Moscow as anything but a polite message to stay in lane.
To the contrary, they were seen on the Soviet side as an incipient assault on the Soviet sphere of influence in eastern Europe that Stalin believed he had won on the blood-soaked battlefields against the Nazi.
To be sure, writing off this string of what came to be called “captive nations” would have amounted to an embrace of realpolitik that would have made moralists and anti-communist ideologues bristle. But abandonment of Eastern Europe per the Yalta zones of influence scheme was exactly what became Washington’s de facto policy until the very end of the Cold War in 1991, anyway.
That is to say, the uprisings against the Soviet hegemon in Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Poland in 1981 generated no response from the West beyond empty speeches and hortatory resolutions from western parliaments. The whole policy of “containment”, therefore, was actually just a large-scale effort by Washington to steer European politics away from the communist Left.
But why in the hell was thwarting the foolishness of communism in Europe America’s business at all?
That is, NATO was essentially an instrument of political control on the European side of the Atlantic, not a military shield that added any incremental security for the citizens domiciled on the North American side of the pond.
So the question recurs as to exactly why was America’s fully warranted post-war demobilization reversed after 1947 for no good reason of homeland military security?
Part of the answer is embedded in the popular Keynesian theorem which held that post-war demobilization would result in a devastating collapse of so-called “aggregate demand” and a resulting spiral into depression unless treated with aggressive counter-cyclical fiscal stabilization measures.
Since most of post-war Europe was fiscally incapacitated, economic aid proffered by Washington through the Marshall plan, therefore, amounted to a surrogate form of Keynesian stabilization against a depressionary relapse.
Needless to say, the hive mind on the Potomac had it all wrong, and the evidence was right in its own backyard.
During the very first year of demobilization the US private sector economy came bounding out of the starting gates after being freed from wartime controls. Real private GDP grew by nearly 27% in 1946 over prior year and never looked back, expanding by 50% through 1950.
And it did so with no fiscal stabilization help from Washington, which was blocked by a Republican Congress, even as the American economy never came close to tumbling into the feared Keynesian abyss.
That the prevailing Keynesian theorem was just plain wrong was also well illustrated by the contemporaneous economic rebound in the western zone of Germany. The latter’s economy took off well before the Marshall Plan aid made any substantial impact owing to Ludwig Erhard’s famous turn to currency reform and free market policies.
In short, Washington’s Soviet “containment” policies were unnecessary as a matter of America’s homeland military security. Yet based on fuzzy thinking about economics and the taste for international power politics that had been acquired by Washington’s ruling class during WWII the US stumbled into the very entangling alliances that Washington and Jefferson had forsworn.
Part 4
The Soviet Union’s acquisition of the A-bomb in 1949 did not change the equation or gainsay the case that the entanglements of the Marshall Plan and NATO were a mistake. Crucially, neither did it create a military requirement for US air bases in Europe or alliances with European countries.
Instead, home territories and the open oceans and skies turned out to be more than adequate for basing the nuclear arsenals of both sides.
Indeed, once both sides had the A-bomb the age of nuclear deterrence or MAD (mutual assured destruction) commenced. Notwithstanding the fringe views of the likes of Herman Khan, nuclear war was soon deemed to be unwinnable and the focus shifted to the ability to reliably deliver a devastating second strike in response to a potential nuclear provocation.
This “assured” destruction was itself the defense against nuclear attack. But to be an effective deterrent the opposing side had to believe that its opponent’s ability to deliver was operationally full-proof and highly certain to happen.
In this respect, during the strategic bomber age of the 1950s the US established such deterrence early on—with the introduction of the Boeing B-52 in 1955 removing any doubt.
The B-52 had a range of nearly 9,000 miles without aerial refueling, even as it carried a payload of A-bombs far heavier than any previous aircraft, was powered by far more reliable engines and could attain altitudes beyond the reach of Soviet interdiction.
As it happened, the Soviets were late to the strategic bomber game, even after they detonated a serviceable nuke in August 1949. At the time and for several years to follow the Soviets relied upon a reverse-engineered copy of America’s earlier, far less capable B-29 to deliver their A-bombs. Soviet bombers thus faced significant range and payload capacity challenges, which made it difficult to deliver a meaningful number of nukes to the U.S. without risking detection and interception.
The Soviets soon learned the deterrence game, however, when they were the first to demonstrate a successful ICBM in mid-1957. Yet not withstanding the vaunted “missile gap” charge by JFK during the 1960 campaign, the Soviet Union had only deployed four ICBMs by 196o.
The United States’ own first successful ICBM tests didn’t occur until October 1959. But by the end of the following year it had deployed approximately 20 Atlas ICBMs, which figure grew to 129 ICBMs by the peak of the liquid fueled rocket era in 1962. The missile gap, alas, was massively in the US’ favor.
As the 1960s unfolded, both sides developed far larger numbers of more powerful, reliable and securely-protected, solid-fuel ICBMs, but neither the logic nor logistics of nuclear deterrence ever changed. To wit, the core national security policy of both sides remained based on the certainty of a devastating second strike retaliation against the cities and industries of a foe, delivered by ICBMs securely based in hardened underground silos in their home territories.
As technology evolved the same logic was extended to submarine based missiles, which were not only hidden even more securely in the deep ocean bottoms, but also required no allied partners to operate.
In short, by the time the Cold War reached it peak in the mid-1960s, two thing had been established. First, strategic nuclear deterrence was the heart of national security for both sides and was operated unilaterally from bases in the home country of each. In America’s case, therefore, the technological advances of the 20th century in no way negated the wisdom of the Founders’ 18th century admonition to eschew entangling alliances.
Secondly, throughout the entirety of the Cold War the Soviet Union never presented a meaningful threat of conventional military attack on the USA.
In fact, even at its military peak in the 1980s the Soviet Navy had but a single Nimitz class aircraft carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov, and only a handful of amphibious ships and troop transports capable of reaching America. This rudimentary sealift capacity would have faced, in any event, insuperable challenges landing troops on the New Jersey coast owing to lack of air cover, antisubmarine protection and sufficient refueling logistics.
Thus, even in the second half of the 20th century, NATO was not any kind of militarily necessary defense asset for the US.
To the contrary, from the very get-go NATO was a make-work project for the State Department and foreign affairs officialdom including wartime spooks who were out of business after August 1945; and, at length, it became a taxpayer-funded marketing organization for the US military-industrial complex and its congressional pork barrel champions.
NATO was thus not about homeland military security but was actually a globalist project of international politics that eventually transformed Washington into a menace and the War Capital of the World. Accordingly, NATO and the whole string of entangling alliances it begat elsewhere on the planet, functioned to actually diminish America’s homeland security, even as it added mightily to its fiscal cost.
That’s because the nearly 300,000 US servicemen remaining in Europe during the Cold War and the scores of bases and facilities which supported them were stationed there as “trip wires”.
Their purpose was to bring the US to the fight immediately upon a Soviet incursion in western Europe. While the latter was an exceedingly low-probability contingency, it should have been addressed, in any case, by Europe’s own military capabilities from its own fiscal resources. After all these years, Donald Trump is absolutely correct on that matter.
As the great Senator Robert Taft held at the time, the modest threat to homeland security presented by the war-ravaged corpus of the Soviet Union and the collectivist disaster imposed on China by Mao could have been readily handled with a invincible nuclear deterrent and fortress defense of America’s airspace and shorelines. As he said in his speech against ratification of the NATO Treaty,
… If we undertake to arm all the nations around Russia from Norway on the north to Turkey on the south, and Russia sees itself ringed about gradually by so-called defensive arms from Norway and Denmark to Turkey and Greece, it may form a different opinion…. how would we feel if Russia undertook to arm a country on our border; Mexico, for instance?
For want of doubt, just consider that every single war fought after the 1949 NATO Treaty ratification was unecessary and a blatant waste of American treasure and blood—to say nothing of the millions of foreigners who have been killed and maimed by these military operations.
That is to say, how in the world was America’s homeland security enhanced by the pointless bloodbath on the Korean peninsula just one year after NATO’s birth? Had China and the regime in Pyongyang prevailed would Seoul today actually look that much different than Shanghai or would it matter?
Likewise, what was accomplished by the overthrow of Mossadegh in Iran in 1953? Since that paved the way for restoration of the brutal thievery of the Shah and the even more benighted rule of the mullahs who replaced him, exactly what was the point? Denying the Soviets a Persian Gulf port for a blue water Navy that it never actually had?
Soon came the 1954 partition of Vietnam, its own civil war and an utterly heinous Washington intervention that brought death to 58,000 American soldiers along with 300,000 wounded and 75,000 severely disabled for life. And that’s to say nothing of 3.4 million Vietnamese—60% of whom were civilians—whose lives were snuffed out and for what?
Well, apparently so that this “domino” would not fall into the laps of the Chicoms, which were allegedly doing the bidding of the Kremlin? Yet what in the world did this slaughter contribute to America’s homeland security then, and most especially now?
After all, three decades after the Soviets passed into the dustbin of history and 52 years after Nixon went to Beijing and was feted by Mao, Vietnam remains an “unfallen” domino. Rather than being under the thumb of Beijing, in fact, the red capitalists of Vietnam are now exporting even cheaper shoes and shirts to America, thereby taking away market share on Walmart shelves from the red capitalists of China.
Indeed, in the light of history all of the Forever Wars and interventions that flowed from the Empire which was built upon the false foundation of NATO were not just pointless; they were tantamount to criminal undertakings—given their historical pointlessness.
And yet and yet. The list of interventions goes on and on—almost always on the grounds that these disasters are necessary to support local “allies” or bolster regional stability—with the middle east iterations of this canard being especially loathsome.
The first Gulf War, for instance, amounted to a spat between Saddam Hussein and the Emir of Kuwait over directional drilling in the Rumaila oilfield that straddled their border. But so frickin’ what!
There is not the slightest case that this intervention on behalf of a purported “ally” in Kuwait that we didn’t need in the first place had any benefit to the homeland security of America. It simply provided occasion for a CNN reality TV show about tank battles in the desert.
The same can be said of the shock and awe campaign a decade later that finally suspended Saddam from the end of a rope—only to open Iraq to anti-American chaos led by the dominant vengeance-seeking Shiite population. Ditto for Libya, Syria, Somalia, Afghanistan, Yemen, Lebanon—all victims of Washington conducted or supplied military assaults that had absolutely nothing to do with the military defense of the North American continent.
Indeed, the interventions box-score since Washington abandoned the Founders’ wisdom regarding foreign entanglements is approximately 0 wins, 12 losses. Every single one of these significant interventions in behalf of entangling alliances and Washington’s global Empire have been a failure.
Part 5
That surely has profound implications. It must perforce mean that the predicate on which they were based was deeply flawed.
In fact, the case for a true America First policy—that is, returning to the pre-1948 status quo ante and a proper Fortress America military posture—has powerfully strengthened during the last three decades.
That’s because in the world of 2025 the only theoretical military threat to America’s homeland security is the possibility of nuclear attack or blackmail in the form of a First Strike capacity so overwhelming, lethal and effective that an adversary could simply call out checkmate and demand Washington’s surrender.
Fortunately, there is no nation on earth that has anything close to the Nuclear First Strike force that would be needed to totally overwhelm America’s triad nuclear deterrent and thereby avoid a retaliatory annihilation of its own country and people if it attempted to strike first.
After all, the US has 3,700 active nuclear warheads, of which about 1,800 are operational at any point in time. In turn, these are spread under the seven seas, in hardened silos and among a fleet of 66 strategic bombers—all beyond the detection or reach of any other nuclear power.
For instance, the Ohio class nuclear submarines each have 20 missile tubes, with each missile carrying an average of four-to-five warheads. That’s 90 independently targetable warheads per boat. At any given time 12 of the 14 Ohio class nuclear subs are actively deployed, and spread around the oceans of the planet within a firing range of 4,000 miles.
So at the point of attack that’s 1,080 deep-sea nuclear warheads cruising along the ocean bottoms that would need to be identified, located and neutralized before any would be nuclear attacker or blackmailer even gets started. Even Russia’s vaunted hypersonic missiles couldn’t find and take out by surprise the US sea-based deterrent.
And then there are the roughly 300 nukes aboard the 66 strategic bombers, which also are not sitting on a single airfield Pearl Harbor style waiting to be obliterated either, but are constantly rotating in the air and on the move.
Likewise, the 400 Minutemen III missiles are spread out in extremely hardened silos deep underground across a broad swath of the upper Midwest. Each missile currently carries one nuclear warhead in compliance with the Start Treaty but could be MIRV’d in response to a severe threat, creating upwards of a thousand more retaliatory warheads.
Needless to say, there is no way that America’s nuclear deterrent can be neutralized by a blackmailer. And that gets us to the heart of the case for drastically downsizing America’s military muscle. To wit, according to the most recent CBO estimates the nuclear triad will cost only about $75 billion per year to maintain over the next decade, including allowances for periodic weapons upgrades.
That’s right. The core component of America’s military security requires only 7% of today’s massive military budget. Moreover, the sea-based ballistic missile force is estimated to cost just $188 billion over the entire next decade or only 1.9% of the $10 trillion CBO defense baseline.
So after setting aside $75 billion per year for the strategic nuclear triad, how much of the remaining $900 billion+ DOD budget would needed in a post-NATO world shorn of America’s entangling alliances, foreign bases and foolish overseas commitments—such as the utter folly of decreeing which Chinese political faction is permitted to rule Taiwan.
And please don’t say because semiconductors. Beijing actually practices the reverse of Lenin’s aphorism. That is to say, to keep their subjects fat and happy Beijing’s rulers will sell us shirts, shoes, solar panels, semiconductors and even the rope to hang them with if they should ever foolishly attack the American homeland.
So the question recurs: In addition to an invincible nuclear deterrent what would be the cost of a conventional Fortress America defense of the continental shorelines and airspace?
The starting point is that a conventional invasion by an adversary would require a massive military armada many times the size of current US forces, huge air and sealift resources and humongous supply lines and logistics capacities.
You also need an initial GDP of say $50 trillion to sustain what would be the most colossal mobilization of weaponry and materiale in human history. And that’s to say nothing of needing to be ruled by suicidal leaders willing to risk the nuclear destruction of their own countries in order to accomplish, what? Occupy Denver?
Obviously, no nation has the GDP or military heft to successful execute an invasion of the American homeland. Russia’s GDP is a scant $2 trillion, not the $50 trillion that would needed for it to put invasionary forces on the New Jersey shores. And its ordinary defense budget apart from the SMO is $75 billion, which amounts to about four weeks of waste in the Pentagon’s $950 billion monster.
As for China, it doesn’t have the sustainable economic heft to even think about landing on the California shores because it has accumulated in excess of $50 trillion of debt in barely two decades!
Rather than growing organically in the historic capitalist mode, it printed, borrowed, spent and built like there was no tomorrow. The resulting simulacrum of prosperity would not last six months if China’s $3.6 trillion global export market—-the source of the hard cash that keeps its Ponzi upright—were to crash, which is exactly what would happen if it tried to invade America.
Indeed, when it comes to the threat of a conventional military invasion the vast Atlantic and Pacific moats are even greater barriers to foreign military assault in the 21st century than they so successfully proved to be in the 19th century. That’s because today’s advanced surveillance technology and anti-ship missiles would consign an enemy naval armada to Davy Jones’ Locker nearly as soon as it steamed out of its own territorial waters. With today’s military technologies there can be no Pearl Harbor redux.
Indeed, America’s ostensible “enemies” actually have no invasionary capacity at all. Russia has only one aircraft carrier—the aforementioned 1980s era relic which has been in dry-dock for repairs since 2017 and is equipped with neither a phalanx of escort ships and suite of attack and fighter aircraft nor even an active crew.
Likewise, China has just three aircraft carriers—two of which are refurbished rust buckets purchased from the remnants of the old Soviet Union (actually Ukraine!).
In short, neither China nor Russia will be steaming their tiny 3 and 1 carrier battle groups toward the US shores any time soon. An invasionary force that had any chance at all of surviving dense flocks of US cruise missiles, drones, jet fighters, attack submarines and electronics warfare, we’d dare say, need to be 100X larger.
Again, there is also no GDP in the world—$2 trillion for Russia or $18 trillion for China—that is even remotely close in size to the $50 trillion, or even $100 trillion, that would be needed to support such an invasionary force without capsizing the adversary’s home economy.
Still, Washington maintains a globe-spanning conventional war-fighting capability driven by NATO and other foreign entanglements fully one-third of a century after the Soviet Empire collapsed and China went the Red Capitalist route of deep global economic integration.
We are referring, of course, to the 173,000 US troops in 159 countries and the network of 750 bases in 80 countries. This includes —
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19 bases and nearly 34,000 troops in Germany.
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44 bases and 12,250 troops in Italy.
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120 bases and 53,700 troops in Japan.
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73 bases and 26,400 troops in South Korea
All told, Washington equips, trains and deploys an armed force of 2.86 million not for purposes of homeland defense but overwhelmingly for missions of overseas offense, invasion and occupation all over the planet. So if Washington withdrew from NATO and its clones, conventional military requirements would shrink drastically.
For instance, a post-NATO military posture would eliminate most of the nearly one-million man standing US Army. The latter would have no uses abroad because there would be no cause for wars of foreign invasion and occupation, while the odds of any foreign battalions and divisions reaching America for hand-to-hand combat with the US Army in, say North Carolina, are virtually non-existent.
With a proper coastline garrison of missiles, attack submarines and jet fighters any invading army would become shark bait long before it saw the shores of California or New Jersey.
Yet the 462,000 active-duty army soldiers at $112,000 per year each have an annual budget cost of $55 billion, while the 506,000 army reserve costs upwards of $16 billion. And on top of this force structure, of course, you have $77 billion for operations and maintenance and $53 billion for procurement, RDT&E and everything else (based on the FY 2025 budget request).
In all, the current Army budget totals nearly $200 billion, and virtually all of that massive expenditure–nearly 3X the total defense budget of Russia—is deployed in the service of NATO and Empire, not homeland defense. It could readily be cut by 70% or $140 billion.
Likewise, the US Navy and Marine Corps spends $59 billion annually on 515,000 active-duty forces and 88,000 reserves. Yet if you look at the core requirements of a Fortress America defense posture, these forces and expenses are way over the top, as well.
By core missions were refer to the Navy component of the strategic nuclear triad and the Navy’s large force of attack and cruise missile submarines. As it happens, the direct manpower requirements for the 14 Ohio-class Strategic Nuclear Subs is about is about 10,000 military personal when Admirals, overhead, support and woke compliance is included (or not).
Likewise, the 50 or so attack and cruise missile subs have two crews of 132 officers and enlisted men for each boat, for a direct requirement of 13,000 and an overall total of 20,000 including Admirals and overhead.
In short, the core Navy missions of a Fortress America defense involve about 30,000 servicemen or less than 6% of the current active-duty force of the Navy/Marine Corps.
On the other hand, the totally unnecessary carrier battle groups, which operate exclusively in the service of Empire, have crews of 8,000 each when you count the escort ships and suites of aircraft, meaning that the 11 carrier battle groups and their infrastructure require 88,000 direct military personnel and 140,000 overall when you include the usual support and overhead.
Finally, the active-duty force of the Marine Corps is 175,000, and that’s entirely an instrument of invasion and occupation. It’s totally unnecessary for a homeland defense because the latter encompasses neither the halls of Montezuma nor the shores of Tripoli.
In short, fully 315,000 or 60% of the current active-duty force of the Navy/Marine Corps functions in the service of Empire. So, if you redefine the Navy’s missions to focus on strategic nuclear deterrence and coastal defense, it is evident that more than half of the Navy’s force structure is unnecessary muscle.
Instead, it functions in the service of global power projection, policing of the sea-lanes from the Red Sea to the East China Sea and platforming for wars of invasion and occupation.
Overall, the current Navy/Marine Corps budget stands at about $236 billion when you include $59 billion for military personnel, $81 billion for O&M, and $97 billion for procurement, RDT&E and others. A $96 billion or 40% cut, therefore, would still leave $140 billion for the core missions of a Fortress America defense.
Among the services, the $246 billion contained in the Air Force budget is considerably more heavily oriented to a post-NATO Fortress America versus Empire-based national security posture. Both the Minuteman land-based leg of the strategic triad and the strategic bomber forces are funded in this section of the defense budget.
And while a significant fraction of the budget for the manning, operations and procurement of conventional aircraft and missile forces is currently devoted to overseas missions, only the airlift and foreign base component of those outlays inherently function in the service of Empire.
Under a post-NATO Fortress America defense, therefore, a substantial part of the conventional air power, which includes upwards of 4,000 fixed wing and rotary aircraft, would be re-purposed to homeland defense missions, which would insure North American airspace was defended in depth. Accordingly, upwards of 75% or $180 billion of the current Air Force budget would remain in place, limiting the savings to $65 billion.
Finally, an especially sharp knife could be brought down upon the $181 billion component of the current defense budget which is for the Pentagon and DOD-wide overhead operations. Fully $110 billion or 61% of that huge sum could be cut because it actually funds the hordes of DOD civilian employees and DC/Virginia based contractors which feast upon the Warfare State. Immerwahr, Daniel Best Price: $15.69 Buy New $17.24 (as of 11:50 UTC – Details)
Most of these overhead expenditures are counter-productive. They actually fund the beltway think tanks, consultants, lobbyists and influence-peddling racketeers that keep the Empire defended and fully funded on Capitol Hill.
Overall, therefore, re-sizing the DOD portion of the national security budget to a post-NATO world would generate $410 billion of savings on a FY 2025 basis. Another $50 billion in savings could also be obtained from eliminating most funding for the UN, other international agencies, security assistance and economic aid—all of which service alliances and the Empire, not homeland security.
Adjusted for inflation through the end of the second Trump term in FY 2029 the total savings would come to $500 billion per year.
At the end of the day, Bush the Elder should have parachuted into NATO’s Ramstein air base in Germany and declared “mission accomplished” 34 years ago when the Cold War officially ended—even after 42 years of an unnecessary and largely counter-productive existence.
But now the time to bring the Empire home is surely long, long overdue. The $1.4 trillion annual cost of the Warfare State is no longer even remotely affordable as it fuels a spiraling public debt that menaces the very future of constitutional liberty and capitalist prosperity in the American Republic.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 03/08/2025 – 07:00
