The U.S. military-industrial complex continues to drag the country into unnecessary and ghastly wars to pursue bloated defense expenditures and corporate profits.
President Eisenhower warned of this threat in his farewell address in 1961.
He regarded unchecked military-industrial power as antithetical to our nation’s economic well-being, our democracy and our humanitarian and world peace principles.
The latter included every nation’s inalienable right to its own form of government and economic system.
President Eisenhower saw these principles as unattainable by war but required good-faith diplomacy as later demonstrated by failed regime change wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and likely Iran in the near future.
Instead of diplomacy, America’s military-industrial oligarchy imposes or plans more provocative aggression and economic sanctions.
Our military-industrial complex now generates dangerous international hysteria over a possible Russian invasion of Ukraine.
In fact, it is the U.S. and NATO that have been expanding politically and militarily ever closer to Russia’s doorstep since the fall of the USSR in 1991.
In fact, the U.S. has 80,000 troops and offensive weapons in Japan and South Korea and a U.S. armada in the South China Sea, encroachments China and North Korea rightly regard as threatening.
Notwithstanding this potential for provoking world war, the U.S. exhibits no interest in good-faith diplomacy, relying instead on military provocations, demonization, defamation and often-lethal economic sanctions.
Alas, our military-industrial complex, which now includes the media and both political parties, has become a mortal danger to our nation and world peace.
Malcolm D. McPhee
Sequim