America First: The Good And Bad Of It, Part 1

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America First: The Good And Bad Of It, Part 1
By David Stockman. Posted On Monday, January 23rd, 2017
On his first day in office Donald Trump got two former generals confirmed to his cabinet, restored Winston Churchill's bust to the Oval Office, declared the lodestone of his policy would be "America First" and put the Imperial City on notice that it is now the designated enemy. Said the nation's newly-sworn 45th President:

"For too long, a small group in our nation's capital has reaped the rewards of government while the people have born the cost. Washington flourished, but the people did not share in its wealth. Politicians prospered but the jobs left and the factories closed".

Nothing could be more conducive to Donald Trump's admirable aspiration to return power to the people, in fact, than a foreign policy built around the genuine meaning of "America First" in its original anti-interventionist incarnation.

After all, the swamp of Big Government first came to America in 1917, not 1933. It was Woodrow Wilson's folly---America's plunge into a feckless crusade to make the world safe for democracy----that brought boom-time prosperity to the sleepy backwaters of Washington DC. And with it came an alphabet soup of Warfare State bureaus and agencies, onerous levels of Federal income taxes and the enlistment of the nation's newly created central bank in the business of monetizing the tsunami of war bonds that took the national debt from $3 billion to $26 billion in less than 50 months.

At the same time, Trump's two generals and the bust of Winston Churchill signify the very opposite of America First and the restoration of populist democracy. If the truth be told, Churchill was a blood-thirsty imperialist who spent the better part of 40 years attempting to inveigle Washington into bailing-out the serial failures of British foreign policy and especially Churchill's delusions of faded imperial grandeur.

Likewise, generals Mattis and Kelly have spent their 40-year marine careers in the service of today's Imperial City, commanding Washington's expeditionary legions in the senseless killing fields of Afghanistan and Iraq. So doing, they contributed no more to the defense of their homeland than did Churchill to Great Britain's during his vainglorious stint as a battalion commander in the mud and blood of the Flanders trenches during the Great War.

Also like Churchill, during their careers advancing the front lines of the American Empire abroad they didn't learn anything at all about Draining the Swamp at home. In fact, as post-war prime minister between 1951 and 1955 Churchill heartily promoted Britain's bloated welfare state-----just as Mattis and Kelly are certain to deliver a double whammy against Trump's promises to tame the monster on the Potomac.

To wit, it is an iron rule of Washington politics----etched in stone during Reagan's time----that the Welfare State does not shrink because its advocates and supplicants swap their votes in return for mutual support from the vast lobbies of the Warfare State.

As it happens, your editor learned that lesson first hand exactly thirty-six years ago when he supervised Ronald Reagan's first day order to freeze Federal hiring in the exact manner that the Trump White House is promulgating today. The hiring freeze worked----for about 12 months!

Then the swamp creatures regrouped. As Ronald Reagan's misguided campaign to "rebuild" America's perfectly adequate defenses-----against an internally decaying Soviet Union----gathered momentum and spending soared year-after-year, as tracked by the red line in the chart below, the Federal "hiring freeze" melted away and then disappeared without a trace.

The blue line in the graph rose steadily for the last six years of Reagan's administration. By December 1988, there were 2.301 million Federal employees----17,000 more than the Gipper had inherited from the "big government" White House of Jimmy Carter.



At the end of the day, Ronald Reagan's eight years in the White House proved the truth of Randolph Bourne's immortal 1918 essay. Indeed, "war is the health of the state", and Donald Trump is well on the way, unfortunately, to proving it all over again.

This time the case for "rebuilding" the nation's bloated military is far more tenuous than it was in 1981. At least back then Washington's national security apparatchiks-----who didn't understand that the Soviet Union's days were numbered because they had no affinity for the essential principles of free markets and individual liberty-----could marshal a plausible argument.

That is, even if it was economically hollow inside, the Soviet state was armed with 50,000 tanks and 9,000 nuclear warheads, making it appear to be a formidable threat.

Yet most of the Soviet tanks were not battle-capable and had only a few hours of fuel. Even its nuclear threat was fully deterred by America's existing nuclear triad of land, sea and air based retaliatory forces.

Keeping the peace, therefore, did not require any US defense build-up at all---let alone the $1.46 trillion explosion of defense spending that upended Reagan's campaign against big government. The defense build-up, in fact, left the Federal spending share of GDP at the highest in peacetime history---- at 21.7% during Reagan's second term compared to Jimmy Carter's 21.1%.

By contrast, today America does not have a significant industrial state enemy on the planet. Neither Russia nor China present even a remote capacity or intention to threaten the security and safety of any American citizen. Russia's $1.3 trillion GDP is smaller than that of New York metro ($1.6 trillion) and just 7% of the US as a whole.

Likewise, without access to America's 4,000 Wal-Mart's stores, China's GDP would collapse in six months---a fact understood fully by Xi Jinping and his politburo colleagues. Besides, the US spends upwards of $650 billion each year on national security or nearly 5X the combined military budget of China and Russia.

What passes for a state enemy, in fact, is the sliver of god-forsaken territory marked in gray in the map of Syria below. That is, the Islamic State has now been reduced to a few dozen dusty, demolished towns that remain nominally under control of the medieval butchers who proclaimed the caliphate in June 2014.

Yet even this disappearing "threat" could be extinguished in a matter of months based on a single Presidential action. That is, a decision to terminate US aid to the so-called "moderate" rebels in Syria and join Russia in a grand coalition with its Shiite crescent allies-----Iran, Iraq, Assad's Syria and Hezbollah.

Termination of aid to the rebels would cause the green and orange areas of the map to be vacated almost instantly and the Washington/Saudi/Qatar funded carnage to stop, as it now has in Aleppo.

At the same time, the Shiite nations and communities are the natural 1300-year old enemies of the Sunni/Wahhabi fanatics who formed the caliphate and conquered territory in western Iraq and the upper Euphrates Valley. Yet without Washington's destruction of the secular Baathist regimes in Iraq and Syria, and the $25 billion worth of American tanks, Humvees, artillery and other advanced weapons left behind by Washington for the non-existent Iraq national army in Mosul and elsewhere, the scourge of the Islamic State would not even exist.

So now is the time to unwind Imperial Washington's hideous mistakes. The truth is, the only way to liquidate the rump of the Islamic State is to unleash the Shiite crescent. It is the latter which has the motivated and capable boots on the ground that are needed for the clean-up operations in Raqqa, Mosul, Palmyra and the smaller towns and villages.

Indeed, if at the same time the Trump White House were to tell the incipient tyrant in Ankara, President Erdogan, that any further war-making against the self-governing Kurdish border towns shown in the yellow areas of the map would result in the cut-off of spare parts to his air force, the map would become pink and yellow almost over night. That's because without spare parts from the US defense contractors, the Turkish military would be driven to launch a coup, and this time they wouldn't miss.

So our newly elected President does have the power to bring the devastating civil war in Syria, and the flood of millions of refugees it has sent catapulting into Europe, to a quick and merciful end.

But that would also require a bold resolve by Donald Trump to reject the Imperial City's false claim that Iran is a dangerous sponsor of terror and middle east instability. There is no more truth to that proposition than the CIA's fatuous claim that Russia hacked the American election and put Trump in the White House.

As we demonstrated in chapter and verse in Trumped!, the Iranians never had nuclear weapons nor did they conspire to obtain them. Their alliance with Assad is based on confessional politics of the Shiite world of which his Alawite tribe is a long-standing branch. The same is true of Tehran's alliance with Hezbollah, the largest political party in Lebanon, and also the Houthi tribes of northern Yemen who have been at war with the Sunni faction of the south for decades.

In its imperial arrogance Washington simply designated Iran in early 1991 to become the surrogate enemy that justifies the massive waste of the Warfare State once the Soviet Union had disappeared from the face of history; and it further deigned to label the diplomatic alliances of Iran----a nation which had invaded no one in modern history----to be evidence of state sponsored terrorism.

The term might better be applied to Washington funded "terrorism". That is, the kind that has killed thousands of civilians in drone attacks throughout the greater middle east and which provides billions per year in aid and weapons sales to "allies" like Egypt and Saudi Arabia. The latter two----which have liquidated thousands of their own inhabitants for such offenses as political dissent and religious blasphemy----make Iran look like a model of liberal rule.



 

In Part 2 we will treat with the fanatical anti-Iran phobia possessed by Trump's generals and national security picks---especially Mad Dog Mattis and national security advisor, General Flynn. Clearly what President Trump needs to do in order to quickly defeat ISIS and turn to his economic recovery promises on the home front will be thwarted at every turn by the "Empire First" team he is now putting in place---including the rabid Islamophobe, Congressman Pompeo, who is slated to head the CIA.

But even on the purely fiscal dimension, the picture is bleak. Back in 1991 when the cold war ended, total spending for DOD and homeland security amounted to just $290 billion, and it had nowhere to go except down.

But actually, the current budgets of the two departments that Kelly and Mattis have been confirmed to head now total nearly $700 billon per year---or 2.4X cold war levels. The prospect that this insanely bloated number will shrink under their tenure is somewhere between zero and none---or even less.

Finally, there is another angle on "America First" that requires initial commentary. Contrary to the constant scolding and harrumphing of the mainstream press, the America First Committee of 1940-41 was not composed of secret Nazi sympathizers or intellectually challenged "isolationists".

Actually, they were just honest citizens who understood the arrogant stupidity of Woodrow Wilson's crusade to make the world safe for democracy and himself the kingpin of the post-armistice peace conference had been one of America's greatest historical follies.

We refer here to the reason why John F. Kennedy, Gerald Ford, Sargent Shriver, Norman Thomas (socialist candidate for President), Sinclair Lewis, E.E. Cummings, Alice Longworth Roosevelt, Walt Disney, Gore Vidal, Lillian Gish, Frank Lloyd Wright and Senators Burton Wheeler of Montana and David Walsh of Massachusetts (Democrats) and Gerald Nye of North Dakota (Republican), among nearly a million others, joined the committee.

They did not want to be stampeded into war again, and properly so. Even then, it took FDR's perfidious campaign via his crushing oil and scrap steel embargoes to lure Japan into attacking Pearl Harbor.

So now begins a commentary on the budding incoherence and basket of irreconcilables that is taking shape in Donald Trump's government. Many of the key players he has chosen are Swamp dwellers or fillers, not drainers. Like the spenders who populated Ronald Reagan's government, they will give lip service to smaller government in the abstract even as they maneuver ceaselessly to inflate their own corner of it.

In fact, Senate Democratic Leader, Chuckles Schumer, gave it away on the War Channel (CNN) Sunday morning with his pointed answer about the delay in approval of most of Trump's Cabinet. The Senate had swiftly confirmed the "two mainstream" nominees, he averred, referring to Generals Mattis and Kelly.

Yet beneath the populist rhetoric of the President's inaugural speech, he continued, there is lurking about eight "hard right" nominees who will need much deeper scrutiny.

As to the latter, he specifically named Trump's nominee for budget director, Mick Mulvaney, for advocating domestic spending cutbacks in such areas as health research, where the multi-trillion capitalization of the Pharma industry funds nearly limitless R&D already; Betsy DeVos, owing to her views in favor of school choice and ending the public schools/teacher's union monopoly; Andy Puzder for his stout opposition to jobs-destroying labor regulations; and implicitly, Scott Pruitt for his intrepid resistance to the Obama EPA's regulatory juggernaut.

In a word, the Donald and his unfolding team appear to be the closest thing to a whirling dervish the modern world has ever seen. They are more likely to produce chaos than governance; and rather than fulfill the admirable goal of returning power to the people that Trump promised in his inaugural address, there is every prospect of a replay of Ronald Reagan's profound failure to Drain the Swamp.

What happened, instead, is the Pentagon end got far deeper and the libertarian members of his domestic team were quickly marginalized and eventually run out of town on a rail. Your editor included.

The plain fact is, if you want to drain the swamp and wrest power from the permanent elites of the Imperial City, you need to do two things above all else. To wit, clean house at the Fed and take a fire-ax to the main entrance of the Pentagon.

But Trump has not said boo about the former since his election, and has actually populated his national security team with militarists and interventionists who will push to flood the deepest end of the Swamp, which is on the Pentagon side of the Potomac, with even more borrowed dollars.

Indeed, with the exception of Rex Tillerson the President has not yet chosen a single non-interventionist for his national security team.

Even Tillerson felt compelled to huff and puff about the ridiculous sand bars Beijing has erected in the South China Sea. Yet those are surely a giant  "so what!" if there ever was one.

In today's world the litmus test for actually defeating the Imperial City and restoring a prosperous domestic capitalism is rapprochement abroad with Russia, China and Iran. On that front, the Donald's first day was not a propitious start.