Will Japan Nuke Pearl Harbor? by Justin Raimondo

Donald Trump has raised an important issue: the costs of defending allies who have the wherewithal to defend themselves. From Justin Raimondo at antiwar.com:

I was struck by something Donald Trump said on CNN this [Sunday] morning:

“Until I got involved in this most people didn’t know we were defending Japan and Germany.”

Of course they didn’t, and don’t – they’re too busy paying their mortgages, raising their children, and living their lives. They don’t have the time or inclination to educate themselves in the many ways their government is ripping them off, meddling in concerns that are none of America’s business, and otherwise projecting the monumental conceit of the political class overseas.

Direct payments to NATO in fiscal year 2010 were $711.8 million, but this underestimates the real costs by several orders of magnitude. The US deployment of troops to Europe, the continuing expense of basing them in Germany, Spain, Italy, and elsewhere, easily equals that amount – and if we add up all the years we’ve been NATO’s mainstay, the total represents an enormous drain on the American economy. Of course, not everybody pays: some profit from this, notably the big military contractors, who rake in billions. So when Trump says our allies are “ripping us off,” he’s only half right: the real thieves are the American war profiteers and their political Praetorian Guard in Congress, who make this grand larceny possible.

And the costs aren’t just calculated in terms of dollars and cents. The NATO alliance, and the web of treaties that has us entangled in Asia, has created a mesh of tripwires that could put us on a war footing the moment some disputed border somewhere in Outer Slobbovia is crossed.

Do Americans want their young people to die so that the boundary between Moldova and Romania remains forever sacrosanct? Of course they don’t. But our political class disagrees, and they are ready, willing, and able to sacrifice any number of American lives, not to mention what’s left of our financial heft, to ensure it.

Aside from the entertainment value of Trump’s candidacy – and even his worst enemies have to admit it is considerable – the educational value of his rise is something I can appreciate. For the past twenty years, I’ve been writing about the costs of our interventionist foreign policy, the dangers of entangling alliances, and the utter cluelessness of our bipartisan foreign policy Establishment, which has led us from disaster to catastrophe. And now, suddenly, everybody is talking about these issues – because Trump is raising them.

For once foreign policy is an issue in a presidential election. I can’t remember the last time that was the case. And it’s a wonderful opportunity to expose the utter bankruptcy of the “conventional wisdom.”

For example, here’s Clinton shill Jake Tapper interviewing Trump on his idea that we have to make the Japanese, the Koreans and the Saudis start paying for their own defense: Trump insists that they have to pay 100 percent of the costs. When Tapper comes back at him by saying “We have bases there” – as if this is some benefit to us – Trump points out that we’re actually paying rent on those bases. We’re paying them so they don’t have to defend themselves against threats real and imagined. So we have to be ready to “walk away,” says Trump, if our “allies” won’t fork up the cash. Tapper then borrows from the Clinton arsenal and plays the nuclear card: “That’s where the nukes come out. If they don’t pay –“

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