Unhinged, Part 2: The War Party’s Desperate Assault On “America First” by David Stockman

Robert Taft for President! From David Stockman at davidstockmanscontracorner.com:

Part 1

The major—perhaps only—redeeming virtue of Donald’s ersatz campaign platform was his clear intent to seek a rapprochement with Russia, revamp America’s commitments to NATO and other cold war relics and to discard “Regime Change” as the core tenant of foreign policy in favor of an “America First” approach to domestic security and safety.

Those eminently sensible notions struck the Deep State’s raison d’etre to the quick. The fact is, there would be no justification for the $800 billion defense, intelligence and foreign aid apparatus on which the very prosperity of the Imperial City depends in the absence of a large state-based enemy; or, better still, without an imperial foreign policy that is implicitly designed to either bully or remove recalcitrant governments anywhere on the planet—-whether or not they have the intent or capacity to harm the US homeland.

And that’s not the half of it. Lurking not far below the surface of the “America First” slogan was the ghost of Senator Robert Taft’s profoundly correct understanding that free enterprise prosperity, minimal government and maximum personal liberty were incompatible with a permanent, fiscally debilitating Warfare State leviathan designed to function as the world’s boots-&-suits-on-the-ground hegemon.

Consequently, Taft strongly opposed a big peacetime navy, a large standing army with forward stationing and rapid global deployment capacities and the proliferation of foreign treaties and aid commitments. To the contrary, he reasoned that in the nuclear age a US-based bomber and missile force of unquestioned striking capacity would more than adequately protect the homeland from foreign military aggression, and at a fraction of the cost of what amounted to permanent imperial legions assigned to patrolling the better part of the planet.

Today Taft’s vision of a homeland defense would be more apt than ever. It would constitute an even cheaper and more efficacious guarantor of the safety and security of the American people than in his time because there are now no rival super-powers with the military and economic might of the Soviet Union. Moreover, missile technology has become so advanced that a relative handful of submarines and hardened domestic launch sites can deter any conceivable foreign threat, which is inherently a nuclear one.

To continue reading: Unhinged, Part 2: The War Party’s Desperate Assault On “America First”