War Is a Racket (1935) | Hacker News Reader

War Is a Racket (1935)

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383 pointspasquinelli534 comments

Butler's experience was from the period when the United Fruit Company more or less ruled Central America.[1] At times U.S Marines were used to enforce US authority, and Butler was a leader in some of those operations. That's why he says war is a racket.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Fruit_Company

That's certainly not the only reason he says war is a racket. He provides many examples (WWI notably).

> [War's] bill renders a horrible accounting. Newly placed gravestones. Mangled bodies. Shattered minds. Broken hearts and homes. Economic instability. Depression and all its attendant miseries. Back-breaking taxation for generations and generations.

Still as relevant to today's veterans as in 1935.

Not really. Wars are mostly money-losers today. They're more likely to be a power trip for some leader.

I'm not understanding your comment.

Wars have generally been money losers for the nations involved and money-makers for businesses and individuals connected to power (Krupps to United Fruit to Wagner Group to etc). Wars have generally involved the egos of leaders but these leaders nearly always consider their friends who'll get rich through it.

Looking at the P&L of Lockheed, Raytheon, Boeing and the entire military-industrial complex, I'll politely disagree that it's a "money-loser".

Government loses (we'll, distributes conjured dollars from it's balance sheet), taxpayers lose, and war fighters lose. But profiteers win -- hence: War is a Racket.

What do you think has been happening for the past couple centuries in the Congo (and various other countries of the global south)? US imperialism is alive and well and The Jakarta Method [1] by Vincent Bevins is a damning account of it from the cold war to present day.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jakarta_Method

One need only look at the map of military bases. Its a really modern way to rule and avoids the issues of old imperialism while reaping the benefits. You have people thinking they are self governing themselves, but they are actually on a pretty tight leash, and should a regime change occur guess what side the US and all her allies will back with money and arms: the side that favors letting the US keep their military bases and preferential trading relationship. Its basically imperialism through the transitive property. A country like the Phillipines is still basically a US colony, Japan is still basically occupied by the US, the northern border of south Korea is still defended by the US military. There's only been a few times the US was ever rooted out from a country, like during the fall of Saigon, or recently when the US abandoned Bagram airbase.

Good thing corporations are no longer deeply involved in and profiting from war, right? Right?

Here's what Assange had to say about the Afghan war in 2011:

"The goal is to use Afghanistan to wash money out of the tax bases of the US and Europe through Afghanistan and back into the hands of a transnational security elite. The goal is an endless war, not a successful war"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IGU_7alJ80

How likely is it that he was completely wrong about that, and this wasn't a motivation for any of the key decision makers?

I have mixed feelings about this. The problem is that if you are being attacked, you will gladly allow people to make big profit if they save lives. You can try to fight the war without profit but you might not like the results. Ultimately, wars are started by governments. They cajole the resources of the nation to fight the enemy. Each country has the things they are good at it and they will use those things to their advantage. In the US we are a free market society and happily give out big rewards (aka profits) to those that can make a difference and build things that the nation wants.

So the reason I say I have mixed feelings is because I can imagine a world where the entities that make profit off of war can use their influence to prod the nation into war. And this should be prevented. I suspect this has happened in the past.

I'm often very conflicted about USA's history of military use in the last 100+ years. Imperialistic? I don't know. But what I do know is that I would rather be a South Korean than a North Korean. And post-defeat Japan has been one of the preeminent countries in the entire world.

South Korea was a brutal dictatorship for quite some time, just because they aren't now doesn't mean the US's military intervention is to thank for that.

> just because they aren't now doesn't mean the US's military intervention is to thank for that.

The alternative was that the entire peninsula would be "North Korea". And then there would never be any chance of formulating a functional democratic society.

You don't know what the alternative would be. US intervention and the massive amounts of civilian deaths caused in Korea are a major reason why North Korea is so anti-West.

There is no good north korea timeline. The entire revolution that created it was for the express purpose of putting an idiot dictator in charge, one who immediately went to work on forcing the population to consider him a god king and putting his equally selfish, stupid, paranoid, and vile progeny in charge.

Unless you believe a unified korea without US intervention but still with USSR support would suddenly overthrow that repressive regime, that was never going to produce a free society.

Why would they be less authoritarian if they weren’t anti West? This sounds a lot like the argument that the only reason communist countries terrorize, murder and starve their own people is because of the evil capitalist in other countries who aren’t doing that to their people. If only we could execute all of the kulaks together there’d be no need for the NKVD, comrade!

Lest we forget, the North was propped up by the Soviets under Stalin. Do you think it is likely that they would have allowed a non-Stalinist, non-totalitarian faction to remain in charge there even if there was one with strong positions? Just look at Soviet-run purges of "improper" leftists during the Spanish Civil War.

Multiple brutal dictatorships, which were a direct continuation of Japanese colonial control, and which massacred their own people with US support and approval.

> In the fall of 1946, the US military authorized elections to an interim legislature for southern Korea, but the results were clearly fraudulent. Even General Hodge privately wrote that right-wing "strong-arm" methods had been used to control the vote. The winners were almost all rightists, including [Syngman] Rhee supporters, even though a survey by the American military government that summer had found that 70 percent of 8,453 southern Koreans polled said they supported socialism, 7 percent communism, and only 14 percent capitalism. [...]

> Chung Koo-Hun, the observant young student of the late 1940s, said of the villagers' attitude: "The Americans simply re-employed the pro-Japanese Koreans whom the people hated." [...]

> Seventy of the 115 top Korean officials in the Seoul administration in 1947 had held office during the Japanese occupation.

> In the southern city of Taegu, people verged on starvation. When 10,000 demonstrators rallied on October 1, 1946, police opened fire, killing many. Vengeful crowds then seized and killed policeman, and the US military declared martial law. The violence spread across the provinces, peasants murdering government officials, landlords, and especially police, detested as holdovers from Japanese days. American troops joined the police in suppressing the uprisings. Together they killed uncounted hundreds of Koreans.

> American anthropologist Cornelius Osgood, spending much of 1947 in a village west of Seoul, watched as police carried young men off to jail by the truckload. A "mantle of fear" had fallen over once peaceful valleys, he wrote. The word "communist," he said, "seemed to mean 'just any young man of a village.'" On August 7, 1947, the US military government outlawed the southern communists, the Korean Worker's Party. Denied a peaceful political route, more and more leftist militants chose an armed struggle for power.

quotes from The Bridge at No Gun Ri

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gwangju_Uprising

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_imperialism

Without USA there would be no division of Korea. Also, before US sanctions, North Korea was more successful than South Korea.

How people seriously can blame North Korea for poverty if it is deliberately being suffocated by USA for decades?

Without reservation, I can.

North Korea could simply abandon their nuclear weapons program, stop antagonising their neighbours and then the sanctions would be lifted.

Also having actually been to the country the issue isn't sanctions. It's the lack of foreign investment and restrictions on business. Many China businesses for example would love to have broader access to the North Korean market not just for exports but as a source of cheap labour. But this is not happening because North Korea is fearful of their population being 'indoctrinated'.

> North Korea could simply abandon their nuclear weapons program, stop antagonising their neighbours and then the sanctions would be lifted.

Stop resisting and I'll stop choking you.

More like stop trying to attack your neighbours and I'll stop choking you.

And nobody in this world including the US wants North Korea to continue to be a relic from the 1970s. Prosperity lifts us all.

Then lift the sanctions. How are sanctions going to protect anyone from nuclear attacks anyway, if NK already has an arsenal?

Flood them with Yankee dollars. Fidel Castro would have been ousted immediately. Kim Jong Il would have been murdered.

North Korea actually already makes millions (at least) of passable US currency. North Korea isn't impoverished because of lack of resources, but rather because the Kim regime would rather spend those resources on themselves.

They did it for a 3 year period from 2002-2005.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Korea%E2%80%93United_S....

Yes, that is how subduing a belligerent person works.

A person that wouldn't be belligerent in the first place if you didn't make it so?

Kim Jong Un isn't belligerent. The north koreans have a different playbook for foreign policy than you might be used to but its a playbook nonetheless. For their people the program is akin to something like the Apollo program in terms of national pride. Its also a dead man's switch effectively. The ruling family obviously wants to maintain their life of idyllic luxury and nuclear weapons and belligerent public addresses are a good way to make people second guess just steamrolling you over. In effect they are just playing a hand thats already dealt to continue their positioning.

Or you know they could become democratic and embrace market reforms so their people don't suffer so much oppression and poverty, but then the ruling class would have to give up its power. Then they could unite with SK. Nobody in the West is team rolling a democratic country.

That would require losing the reigns of power. Plus who is to say if the populace doesn't turn on them and make a Mussolini out of him?

Also look at what is happening in Europe and the Ukraine war.

After the weak and inept leadership shown by France and Germany in their response to Russia's aggression the hopes for a EU defense capability is all but finished. Eastern European countries would rather have the US to defend them [1].

And I think more appreciation needs to be given to the US for supporting Ukraine in those early days because if Russia over-ran Kyiv it's quite possible that Belarus, Moldova, Estonia etc could have been next. US military leadership can credibly be argued to have saved Europe.

[1] https://twitter.com/ulrichspeck/status/1661710156944535554

> Belarus

Why on earth would Russia invade its closest ally? It is alarming that we see such confident justifications of US foreign policy from people who don't know the basic facts of IR and world history.

"War is God's way of teaching Americans geography"

Because Lukashenko is dying.

And countries like Poland are seeing a unique opportunity to fill the power vacuum in order to change the government to one that isn't interested in being part of Russia's sphere of influence.

If Putin was successful in Ukraine it's not inconceivable he would have rather have invaded rather than risk it becoming pro-EU, joining NATO etc.

https://news.yahoo.com/russia-belarus-strategy-document-2300...

A leaked internal strategy document from Vladimir Putin’s executive office and obtained by Yahoo News lays out a detailed plan on how Russia plans to take full control over neighboring Belarus in the next decade under the pretext of a merger between the two countries. The document outlines in granular detail a creeping annexation by political, economic and military means of an independent but illiberal European nation by Russia, which is an active state of war in its bid to conquer Ukraine through overwhelming force.

“Russia’s goals with regards to Belarus are the same as with Ukraine,” Michael Carpenter, the U.S. ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, told Yahoo News. “Only in Belarus, it relies on coercion rather than war. Its end goal is still wholesale incorporation.”

According to the document, issued in fall 2021, the end goal is the formation of a so-called Union State of Russia and Belarus by no later than 2030. Everything involved in the merger of the two countries has been considered, including the “harmonization” of Belarusian laws with those of the Russian Federation; a “coordinated foreign and defense policy” and “trade and economic cooperation … on the basis of the priority” of Russian interests; and “ensuring the predominant influence of the Russian Federation in the socio-political, trade-economic, scientific-educational and cultural-information spheres.”

What a buried lede!

> the strategy confirms what has long been obvious and, at times, openly acknowledged, by both Moscow and Minsk.

The Union State is not a secret conspiracy, it is openly recognized by both countries.

How is this any different than a country, say Ukraine, joining European Union & NATO under substantial political pressure?

> US military leadership can credibly be argued to have saved Europe.

more than once

> And post-defeat Japan has been one of the preeminent countries in the entire world.

Imagine if they weren't defeated. Because they where one of the most preeminent countries in the world before defeat as well.

And brutal. As empires go, the Japanese had no regard for the lives of humans who weren't ethnically Japanese. This old-world way of doing war saw some 250,000 [0] Chinese killed for aiding American pilots after their bombings of targets in Japan. [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhejiang-Jiangxi_campaign

[1] https://www.historynet.com/jimmy-doolittle-and-the-tokyo-rai...

Post-defeat Japan is an interesting beast.

Before attacking the US, they had Korea and Manchury invaded, and Russia in check. The extent of their dominance relative to their country size was really impressive, and they went for the US because they needed to feel unstoppable.

Then of coure, they were stopped. But none of the base roots of the war were removed, the emperor was allowed to stay, they made token trial of random generals who committed atrocities.

But no one was allowed to officialy question:

- the US carpet bombing entire Tokyo (for comparison we questionned Germany carpet bombing EU towns) and dropping the bombs on civilians

- the Japan's spiritual leader and basic phyolosophy. Really, imagine Hitler being excused as a mere puppet and staying as a philosophical leader after the war.

In that respect, The compromise the US took looks to me like the critical difference from Germany, where they could move on and jointly create the EU. Instead, Japan and Korea are still barking at each other over the war almost a century later.

Most roots of the war cause were removed. Entire military was destroyed so some bad systems are also destroyed: Old constitution that defines emperor as top of mils formally (rather than prime minister) so mils did some thing without cabinet's order. Gunbu Daijin Geneki Bukan sei system so mil had control for cabinet.

People think the existence of emperor (thousand years long) itself wasn't the root cause (or at least think it's better than changing everything), unlike Hitler.

You are right, in that most of the international community saw the deal as a decent one, and see Japan as a fundamentally different entity pot-war.

I'd argue it's a different story looking from inside Japan. A sizeable part of the population aren't questioning going to war in the first place, and only put the blame on the military for having attacked the US. Basically they blame the country for having been too greedy, and see the current jp/usa relationship in that light ("why do we need to import so much US beef ?" "Because we lost" is something you'd hear with only half sarcasm)

That is to me a fundamental problem that was one of the root cause of the war, and stil causes issues to this day. The lasting conclusion should have been "don't invade your neighboors", not "don't attack the US".

To be clear, I don't think Japan will ever invade Korea or China again, but their diplomatic relations are still somewhere stuck in that age on both side. And if Japan had a venue where the international community wouldn't beat the shit out of them, they'd still go for full domination.

Ah yeah totally agree for national people perspective. Sino-Japan war is underrated. But also people think: we did bad things like western countries did, why don't every westerns be blamed equally for this? (this story misses some Japan specific bad things, like 731.) Still, it was terribly bad obviously.

I think there is some loss of understanding of how conquest and colonialism were the norms of the day. This is represented in who Japan was fighting with for control of countries.

Japan took Korea from China, hence it being a Sino-Japanese war. Japan took control of Manchuria form Russia. They took Indochina from the French.

>That is to me a fundamental problem that was one of the root cause of the war, and still causes issues to this day. The lasting conclusion should have been "don't invade your neighboors", not "don't attack the US".

I think it is fair to say that Japan was following the dominant playbook of the era. They were literally taking colonies held by other western powers, as the western powers often did.

I think that is a pretty high expectation to hold for any former or current empire. Outside of Germany, I can't think of one who drew that lasting conclusion. I don't the English, French, Dutch, or Spanish spend a lot of time regretting empire. The US only makes small noise about the conquest of the native Americans. Literally nobody cares about the USA taking Florida, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines from Spain, or Texas and California from Mexico.

Given this context, it it pretty easy to take "don't attack the USA and loose" as the lesson. The success of the USA is global example of what happens when you don't lose existential wars.

Hawaii, where the Japanese would ultimately attack, was itself annexed by the US in 1904, roughly the same time Japan was expanding in Korea.

As Winston Churchill said, history is written by the victors

It's called the military industrial complex and it happens all the time.

Wars are fought by governments, but often started by individuals with massive leverage over the war-fighting apparatus of governments. Industry veterans hired to patronage positions in high office, who then push the government into a war that will benefit the industry or company. Or media companies, headed by executives seeking to push their own political will on nations, that harangue the public with fear and anger to instill a desire for war.

Governments have basically no agency or will of their own. They're like a mecha suit from an anime. Lots of infrastructure, but where they go and what they do is up to whomever's at the controls at the time.

Probably more appropriate to compare it to the type of mecha Power Rangers use, except unlikely to be piloted by a group of people that both A) want to work together and B) want to work towards the common good.

"who then push the government into a war that will benefit the industry or company."

Where is the evidence for this ?

Wars are generally not started by the arms makers, rather, the profiteer off of the situation.

Obviously there might be influence but I don't think that industrial complex is in charge of anything really.

“Industry veterans hired to patronage positions in high office, who then push the government into a war that will benefit the industry or company.”

Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney seem to fit this mold squarely

To take some artistic license with a well-known aphorism:

If all you've ever used is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.

It's a common practice on capitol hill, ask anyone who works there.

Goldman Sachs has basically kept an office in the White House since FDR (https://archive.is/WJnkD), though BlackRock is becoming the new Goldman (https://archive.is/kPJOY). Once they're there they can influence policy to benefit the company they came from (and all their tight-knit peers).

After they're done in office they move on to another executive position where they can use their government contacts. Private companies regularly hire government officials, both to help make sales, and to work around any pesky regulators.

"Since 2018, Amazon Web Services has hired at least 66 former government officials with acquisition, procurement or technology adoption experience, most hired directly away from government posts and more than half of them from the Defense Department. That’s a small portion of AWS’ tens of thousands of employees, but a particularly key group to its federal business. Other AWS hires have come from departments including Homeland Security, Justice, Treasury and Veterans Affairs." (https://www.politico.com/news/2021/06/04/amazon-hiring-forme...)

Without context, this is verging a little bit into conspiracy territory.

Literally in the first reference, the first reference given of the 'Goldman Man' ... is Steve Bannon (!) as if he's part of that crew.

Goldman is the top financial firm in the world, and yes, they're going to use their status to move people in and out and leverage relationships.

That does not mean they are working for Raytheon trying to start wars.

The AWS statement doesn't add anything to the position - Amazon is one of the biggest employers in the US, and a huge DoD contractor, it's entirely rational for them to be hiring out of the DoD, and they do it from the rest of government as well. CGI (contractors in Canada) hire a ton of ex-gov people from Ottawa and the Military. It doesn't mean they are leaning on policy makers to start wars.

The fact of the matter is there isn't a lot of direct influence to start wars 'because future projects'. Obviously that is a constituency, and sometimes there is a big conflict of interest (as mentioned below Dick Cheney) but even aside from Halliburton relationships I actually don't doubt Cheney would have the same position otherwise.

So if you mean to say certain alpha corporations have undue influence via networked relationships within governance - yes - but that doesn't map at very well to 'they are pushing to start wars for Raytheon'. Aside from the Bushes, you'd have to go back to maybe 1 or 2 presidents during the intervening war periods to say that's even kind of true, or you might be able to throw Reagan in there as a 'Cold War Mega Buildup' guy but he wasn't swashbuckling around trying to start wars either, rather, he 'built out gear faster than the Soviets'.

The Military Industrial Complex is a real thing with real influence, it was no less than former Supreme NATO Allied Commander that gave us the starkest warning about that system, but it's also something that is misrepresented due to a lack of context about how that power really works.

> Where is the evidence for this ?

Really ? Military lobbyists for the "big 5" are as common as parking slots in Capitol hill - it is established standard operating practice that no one talks about it much any more. Its like asking for evidence at the sun rising in the East.

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2021/09/02/top-defense-fir... https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2022/11/defense-sector-spen...

>The problem is that if you are being attacked, you will gladly allow people to make big profit if they save lives.

Reminds me of the covid pandemic. Pfizer made $100 billion last year

The agreement was $20 a vaccine, which IMO is perfectly fine. Making a profit from doing a necessary thing is very capitalism. Remember that shareholders were very upset they didn't make MORE profit.

Canada paid $175 per dose.

https://www.oxfam.ca/news/vaccine-monopolies-make-cost-of-va...

That's likely the price executives and shareholders would have wanted for the US. I wonder what leverage Trump held over Pfizer to get the $20 price. It's a genuine negotiating win from someone who considers just not paying your contractors to be good business and negotiating.

Pfizer also got billions of dollars in free and taxpayer-funded advertising

Taxpayers got billions in life-saving government information, too. It wasn't for the benefit of Pfizer that the government ran those campaigns.

They also saved millions of lives.

And caused many unnecessary deaths by witholding the vaccine from less rich countries that couldn't outcompete richer ones, since the supply was very limited in the moments of most need.

If they really wanted to save lives they should have liberalized the vaccine's production, but all they cared for was profit, the life saving just a coincidence.

Eh, it's not like you people would share SinoVac, even if it worked properly.

> it's not like you people would share SinoVac

Patently false[0]. Then yes, Chinese vaccines might have been less effective but it was still an obvious choice when the alternative was nothing.

By the way, what do you mean by "you people"?? I'm European and your statement makes me think you have a fragile ego and a typical USamerican superiority complex.

.0: https://archive.is/Ir6qt

Your other comments mention living in China, and you also deny Uighur genocide, so thinking you're pro-CCP is not exactly a stretch, is it?

CCP could buy Western vaccines, but they instead chose their own, even when they knew it is less effective, because their people's lives were less important to them than their ego.

> you also deny Uighur genocide

It's *Uyghur. At least learn their name if you pretend to know everything about their alleged genocide. Do some unbiased research and you will come to the same conclusion.

> thinking you're pro-CCP is not exactly a stretch

It's CPC but yes.

> CCP could buy Western vaccines

Sure, the supply wasn't enough for Europe alone and you think China could have vaccinated 1 billion quickly using western vaccines?

Pfizer was making on average $50b revenue [1] before COVID.

And the profits they generated by COVID could well save countless more lives given that their MRNA technology is successfully being applied to other use cases.

[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/PFE/pfizer/revenue

COVID vaccines are estimated to have saved 20 M lives world wide. In the US, the statistical value of a human life is $9 M, so (extending that to the global population, which is perhaps problematic) the value is $180 T. Making a measly $50 B is chump change in comparison.

Are the people who were saved by COVID vaccines never going to die from any other cause? I believe the $9M figure is actually just a reference to what the FAA considers a reasonable threshold for imposing a new expense on aircraft manufacturers and airlines in order to make flying safer?

So, saving a life has no value unless the person was already otherwise immortal?

Ridiculous.

No that isn't what I said, and yes it would be just as ridiculous as attributing the same value to preventing a 90 year old nursing home patient from dying of an endemic respiratory virus as we do to preventing deaths in plane crashes.

That's going to alter the number by less than an order of magnitude. The benefit still is massively larger than the cost.

Can you link me to a study which does a reasonable job of attempting to come up with a "Covid deaths prevented by vaccines number" while taking into account the effects of increased seroprevalence, decreased virulence of the virus itself, and the "no more dry tinder" effect?

The 20M figure was from an estimate in Lancet Infectious Diseases. It was for the first year, not the entire pandemic.

https://archive.ph/R5K3r

Typically the way it is done is by calculating how many years of healthy life you saved

Which would, of course, bring the “money saved by vaccines” number down a bit.

On the other hand, if we were able to factor in the benefit of milder cases and less long COVID/other side effects, I guess the number would go up a bit.

I suspect it is just too complicated for us to work out here.

Where did that 9 million come from? Pls

The value is something the US Transportation Admin. has calculated [0]. It's rather cold-blooded, but it makes sense.

[0] https://www.transportation.gov/office-policy/transportation-...

It seems a bit excessive, but if you assume someone working from 25 to 65, that is 40 years, at $50k per year then they're "worth" >= $2M to the economy. Really more than that because they will do some things for free to other people, such as family members. So it is probably at the right order of magnitude.

By your logic there would be nothing wrong in charging $100 or more for an insulin injection.

Instead https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/cost-of-i...

The problem with insulin, at least in the US, has been elaborations (still under patent protection) on it that are slightly better than the old versions. But doctors have to prescribe the best treatment. There's no quality/cost tradeoff.

Thats a massive difference in absolute and relative terms. $50B and 100%

In Marine Corps bootcamp, this man is lionized for his accomplishments during service. After my service ended I read war is a racket and it profoundly changed a lot of my viewpoints.

> I read war is a racket ... After my service ended

If only we could get US marines to read this before their service started. :-(

That would likely require a return to mandatory service.

Return to mandatory service is a possible action of the US (federal) government, I was talking about an oppositionary initiative.

I understand where you are coming from, it's just naive to think that a nation state won't form a counter action to preserve it's ability to wage war.

It's not going to happen. You couldn't get enough able-bodied people to show up or communities to enforce it. The ideals that made this possible for Vietnam will die with the boomers.

After 20 years of blowing things up in a far away desert, the US military is struggling to find enough volunteers to meet it's requirements. Nobody wants to go die in the desert. Maybe if we had spent the past 20 years not doing that, the US would have a bit more gusto from the youngins.

If we go to war with China, and it's not just some minor skirmish, I expect there to be a draft.

War between the West and China would be naval and air affair (with the exception of Korea I guess), so the traditional draft doesn't make much sense I think. The war would be mostly about whether US can blockade China into a collapse, because China is not self-sufficient in energy (by a huge margin) and food (by a smaller margin).

You might see people drafted into factories, given how much stuff is made in China and the impact on global trade, though.

>After 20 years of blowing things up in a far away desert, the US military is struggling to find enough volunteers to meet it's requirements. Nobody wants to go die in the desert.

The desert stuff was not so bad by comparison. These were asymmetrical conflicts. The emerging threats are near-peer forces. Even fewer will want to sign up for that!

>I expect there to be a draft.

And if there is a draft there will be mass noncompliance. It won't work. If they're smart they won't try it because that would look weak.

You mean the Boomers' parents. Because those were the ones that were fine with the draft. The Boomers were the ones being drafted.

Oh, they would draft the zoomers if they could. The fact that it happened to the boomers previously will only deepen their conviction that others should have to deal with it too.

I don't disagree with that point at all. It's always seemed like a large contingent of Boomers are unhappy unless younger generations suffer more than them.

Switzerland has a mandatory service requirement for men, and the people there experience fewer gun deaths per capita despite having a relatively high gun ownership rate.

This thread is not about gun control or lack thereof.

Even ignoring that part - it's weird bringing up War and Switzerland.

All those wars Switzerland has fought...

That's actually an important point though. The kind of isolationist neutrality that Switzerland has is only possible if you can make it seem like conquering you is impossible to justify. Switzerland will protect its neutrality by force if necessary. They also have a military industrial complex, so is that one a racket?

> so is that one a racket?

Probably somewhat, but if you read the essay, you wouldn't come away with the impression that the author's disillusionment is targeted in any way at a country like Switzerland.

His thesis seems to be that elites profit off casualties, and are happy to foment more wars as a result.

Isn't that exactly the point, that it's possible to be neutral and isolationist?

Hey, when I was young Swiss mercenaries were considered truly elite troops. Remember the battle of Nancy.

I'd love to see it. Probably the quickest way to end imperialism would be to force Americans to do the dirty work themselves.

This has been in my head for awhile. It would give a "common ground" or "common understanding" that Americans seem to lack at this point. I would hope something like this would provide a framework to communicate for wildly differing political ideas.

Also, Eisenhower's farewell address...

"In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eisenhower%27s_farewell_addres...

One of the most disappointing things in American politics in the last ten to fifteen years has been watching the left abandon their antiwar fervor.

The Korean War began and was fought under a Democrat. It was ended by a Republican.

The Vietnam War began under one Democrat, escalated and spread beyond Vietnam under his Democratic successor, and then under a Republican. It was ended by another Republican.

The Persian Gulf War was entirely a Republican affair.

The Bosnian war and the bombing of Serbia were overseen by a Democrat.

The "war on terror" was started by a Republican who invaded Afghanistan and Iraq and continued for nearly 8 more years under a Democrat.

you're confusion "the left" with "democrats".

democrats are centrist relative to the left.

Indeed "Leftists" mostly vote Democratic for lack of a more viable alternative, but many do not consider themselves Democrats.

Even really smart and educated people I know are surprised to discover most voters in the US do not have a party affiliation.

There aren't really political parties in the US. In other countries, people pay membership dues to their political parties and get membership cards. Here, we just declare our allegiance to these private organizations on twitter.

That's not true.

We poll the hell out of our populace and ask, "What do you identify as?" That's how we know how people identify.

> In other countries, people pay membership dues to their political parties and get membership cards. Here, we just declare our allegiance to these private organizations on twitter.

Some states in the US have state-level party organizations which you join and receive a card. Not all.

How does these polls work? What’s the selection process? I’ve never been asked what I politically identify as, and I imagine anyone who asks would be disappointed that I would refuse place myself as something fitting whatever binary/trinary categories they have in mind.

Many states allow you to pick a party affiliation when you register to vote, and some require a declared affiliation before you can take part in primaries.

Generally polling organizations poll a random sample of Americans via phone calls or online polls. There is a lot of process to try to guarantee a representative sample.

I don't think a pollster would be disappointed that you don't have a party affiliation. In fact some of biggest emphasis in election season is on independents or undecided voters.

> In fact some of biggest emphasis in election season is on independents or undecided voters.

Exactly. You can look it up on 538 or wherever you like, but all the polls say roughly the same thing: There's more unaffiliated voters than there is voters for either party. Something like 40-45% unaffiliated, with ~25% identifying as Republican and ~30% identifying as Democrat.

You can pay dues and get a membership card for political parties in US, as well. The difference is that it's not necessary to have access to the primaries in most places.

The left in america votes blue no matter because idpol and maybe climate, the only nationally palitable Left ideas since Marxism any class are anathema to USA, particularly since fall of USSR.

Nah; the 2016 election saw many "leftists" that were dedicated to Sanders go on to vote for Trump.

I know establishment Dems liked to whine about that, but is there any evidence that this actually happened in meaningful numbers?

I and many other people I know did. I saw Sanders get snubbed and schemed against by the DNC, to the point where Hillary got the questions ahead of time. So many gaffes in this campaign between two "equal" Democratic candidates that we just don't talk about anymore.

No, I refuse to play that game and I'd rather burn the place to the ground and suffer together than walk willingly to my own execution.

“I think I should have more of my richer neighbors’ money and if I don’t get it I’ll vote for trump ahaha” isn’t the own that you probably think it is, but this is very illustrative nevertheless.

Thanks. I've never met a single person who flopped from Sanders to Trump. I can't for the life of me figure out how you'd make that leap. I thought that the stories about people doing that were mostly BS, but I guess there are a few of you out there, assuming you didn't make this account to LARP as a Bernie turned Trump voter.

"Drain the swamp" leftists are separate category to DSA members and almost nonexistent post-COVID (RFK JR. maybe). Is this beyond explanation why someone would do that?

Sanders is Marxist?

I think there's a good amount of debate in leftist circles whether Sanders is actually a global leftist or if he's just an American progressive. The two are categorically unalike, which would agree with other comments that any form of Democrat and Republican are just symbiotes attached to the same thing.

That's the "insider/outsider" thing. Trump is a rightist outsider, Bernie a leftist outsider. Both are favoured by "anti-establishment" types.

Trump merely coopted the fig leaf of outsider to sway voters, since he did get full support of the GOP establishment unlike Sanders.

How is he? Literally campaigned on turning US into EU/Scandinavia? Anti-establishment is the going currency, you could say the same for Biden's rhetoric.

Will this "true" left you're talking about criticize democratic party leaders for their wars with the same fervor that they criticize republican party leaders?

When Trump was campaigning for his first presidency everybody was saying he would start a bunch of wars and nuke the whole world. When none of that happened he had to be a traitor since he didn't start any beautiful patriotic wars. Reality is of no consideration to the uneducated and educated masses. War is peace, peace is war.

I will not be mutilated by mortar in a ditch or send my children to die in a trench, no matter who is president. War is a racket, I feel truly sorry for those who suffer and will suffer for following their "leaders".

>When none of that happened he had to be a traitor since he didn't start any beautiful patriotic wars

Find me a quote of someone on the left saying Trump was bad for not starting a war

I bet you if Trump somehow served an extra 1.5 years, you'd have plenty of such people - the ones that today love to use the term "acquiesce" to criticize careful handling of a conflict that could easily spiral into end of the world with one press of a button.

You are misunderstanding. When Trump turned out to not be a crazed war monger, the narrative changed to that he was a traitor taking orders from Russia. If you can't find quotes for that, you are offline.

I am fully aware that most leftist (which means most of HN) think that Trump is an insane war monger, even though he served four years as president without starting any wars. Like I wrote, reality does not matter at all anymore to anyone.

Well, there was an exchange of Missiles with Iran. That almost went full war, until Iran shot back and they were like 'Wuuuut, they can do that?'.

And missiles shot at Syrian air base, where Russian/Syrian planes were luckily moved just in time, very conveniently, almost like it was a good PR stunt.

Yes, the United States will always be at war. Trump waged much less war than what is convenient for a US president and way less than everybody said he would. Compared to other US presidents he was a man of peace. I know the power of denial is much stronger than that fact.

There is a strange paradox with Trump in that he seems like he would start a war just to score ratings or settle a grudge but it is precisely for this reason that I think it would be difficult for him to really effectively lead the nation into the war because unlike, say, a GWB, there would be far too much skepticism over his motives. So perhaps perversely it is his unfitness as commander in chief that kept us out of more significant military excursions.

He had press conferences where he openly 'colluded' with Russia, I can't believe that isn't brought up more. It was live, recorded video. I saw it on the news, in a live press conference. Its just that nobody believes what he is saying, so he gets away with saying anything he wants.

Diplomacy is collusion now? That's a pretty hawkish stance.

"If any Russians are listening please hack my political opponent"

How is that diplomacy?

> most leftist (which means most of HN)

lmao

…which is particularly egregious in the context of wars like Vietnam - or even the war in Iraq - which the left was famously outspoken against compared to most Democrats.

JFK would be considered a right-wing extremist by todays democrat party (the political powerful left wing, not the average voter)

Well he did try to invade Cuba

He also put nuclear missles in turkey which were then used as part of the negotiation to get USSR to dismantle their Cuban bases so we wouldn't invade.

Other way around. He put missiles in Turkey and Italy, USSR responded by putting missiles in Cuba, then both parties agreed to deescalate and withdraw. Then of course a few years later none of this matters because ICBMs become a thing and the soviets and americans can just launch over the north pole.

(for the record, I did not mean to imply the temporal ordering you suggest I did)

And he was critical of the CIA and FBI.

I think everyone is confused of what is the left / right.

Traditionally the left has been associated with social policies (stemming from socialism/communism vs capitalism)

And there always was a part of the left which was anti-war, and always was a more "totalitarian" version of the left that felt it was morally justified.

But in every society the meaning of left and right has been fluid.

You're missing the point that left/right/democrat/republican religions are a divide and conquer strategy to distract from the realization that there is no democracy.

Uh, no? Left and right are generalized terms used to describe political philosophies. Democrat and republican are terms used to describe political parties- those parties don't fully overlap with left and right, and in fact the parties have completely changed their overlap over time.

We (Americans) live in a representative democracy (for choosing public officials) and that democracy gives a great deal of influence and power to capitalists/industrialists (the "racket"), which has been absolutely successful in establishing and maintaining the existence and wealth of the country.

If you want to argue there is no democracy, find another person to argue with; my premise begins with the US being a representative democracy.

It is a representative Democracy. I vote directly for all of my representatives. Anyone arguing it's not is moving goalposts or arguing No True Scotsman.

For semantic clarity: are you saying that it ticks the boxes for being a "representative democracy", but not extending the meaning of the word representative to encompass representative of the will of the constituents?

> Anyone arguing it's not is moving goalposts or arguing No True Scotsman.

With this be considered rhetoric?

I have a government that I choose through voting. It's not complicated.

Do you choose the candidates? Do you influence what they actually work on once in office with your votes? Do our elected officials generally prioritize the needs of those who cast votes for them or those who bankrolled their campaigns? Who btw bankrolled the campaigns? Is your vote nearly as powerful as their dollars?

If you avoid answering questions about your theories it can certainly appear to be not complicated, but whether it actually is is another matter.

Looking from outside as a non-American, I feel that Democrats and Republicans are really first and foremost sports clubs. Any actual political leanings are mostly based on what is most likely to keep support of their existing fans, and secondarily a matter of inertia.

And nowhere in these splits - neither in Democrat/Republican, nor in left/right - is there any notion of actually looking at the problem and trying to find an actual, effective, efficient solution, that maximizes the desired impact and minimizes undesired second-order effects.

That is exactly how it works, just none of the constituents think that's how it works on their team, so we're in this sort of stasis. The unsolved and repeatedly retrodden problems are called wedge issues and they're key to these teams staying in power collectively.

I recall the mid-Obama years where I had a lot of acquaintances (now almost equally split between "left" and "right") who didn't see a lot of difference between Bush and Obama on a great many issues. They were sick of foreign wars, the military-security state, unfettered corporate abuses, and the elision of many issues that impacted Americans from any public discussion on either side of the aisle.

The prospect of a (Jeb) Bush vs. (Hillary) Clinton race seemed emblematic of a government that was a democracy in form, but not in practice. And then along came Trump who nicely put everyone I know (myself included) in either pro-Trump or anti-Trump camps.

Some people don't understand it, but when you actually talk to people, you find that at least a pretty substantial portion are very aware of it but don't feel empowered to do anything that can change it.

All forms of change that aren't voting are either de jure or de facto illegal. Sure, you can march... on a route cleared with the authorities... with a permit 90 days in advance... as long as absolutely nothing untoward happens within two blocks.

When you ignore domestic politics entirely I can see how it would look that way.

But there is a very real difference in policy between rural Alabama and Chicago. In no small part because of different parties exercising control in those localities.

> But there is a very real difference in policy between rural Alabama and Chicago.

I believe this difference exist. But I attribute it mostly to "rural" vs. "urban" part - and for far enough places, also to difference in cultures between the two locations. Rural Alabama has a different lifestyle, different market, different pressing problems than urban Chicago, different individual needs - which may result in people in those two locations overall promoting opposite policies.

How well these differences overlap with with Dem/Rep or left/right belief clusters is, I think, mostly incidental.

I think that what you said about the causes of difference is true, but that doesn't mean the party affiliation of urban vs rural voters is incidental.

The parties, to the degree they do differ, do position themselves on opposite sides of the urban vs rural divide.

https://engaging-data.com/election-population-density/

The missing artifact from the comment is that Republicans and Democrat Left/Rightism as we understand it is a modern thing established (edit: I should say 'consolidated' - because the shift started earlier) under Reagan.

The 'Democrats' were very popular in the South in the 1950's among people who would now refer to themselves as 'conservative'. (Edit: look at the electoral maps for mid century US - Democrats/Republicans were not Left/Right)

Not that Left/Dem are different things today, they are effectively the same, it's just that policy is constrained by the other side, which has a dampening effect on legislation.

This isn't true under the current terminology, where Democrats have assigned themselves the title of "the left" with the enthusiastic agreement of Republicans. And while that's a new situation, we're also currently experiencing a vast majority of people who identify as "left" falling under two categories: Obama socialists, who were enthusiastic supporters of candidate Obama and were disappointed in the absolutely traditional run of his presidency, esp. its second term; and Clinton socialists, who went along with the catastrophe of the 2016 Democratic primary because they let themselves be convinced that while they mostly agreed with Sanders, H. Clinton was the only one who could defeat Trump (and they resent the party for this.)

These aren't intellectual positions at all, they're just soap opera stuff. If they've picked up anything about political economy, it was because they were in left-wing spaces during the rise of the Sanders campaign. As far as I can tell, all they took away from it is the slur "tankie," which they think has something to do with Tienanmen Square and should be screamed at anyone anyone to the left of Bill Kristol.

Tankies are the people who I'd loosely call neostalinists, they're seemingly for a Soviet style violent revolution of the proletariat - they're also the people who are often reflexively anti-american, and pro-russia, because america is the force of imperialism. There are many socialists who are fine with achieving socialism via electoral means those people are not tankies - tankies are generally not okay with waiting for that.

I don't think so. Yes, Democrats (and American progressives in general) don't emphasize socialism as much as the traditional left or some European parties. However, they're generally still sympathetic. Moreover, while American progressives don't worry so much about economic egalitarianism, they very strongly believe that minorities earning less than whites, female earning less than male, etc. is wrong, and are willing to enact things like reparations, affirmative action,and the like to counterbalance that. In the ideal progressive utopia, CEOs would still be paid hundreds of times more than the average worker, but representation of minority race, female, non-straight and trans people among CEOs and other prestigious positions would occur at least as much as their representation in the population, regardless of their ability, and if cis straight white males are represented less than their proportion of the population, that's just gravy, and maybe justified revenge for their dominant position in the past. In fact, wokism is even more egalitarian than Marxism - the latter says from each according to ability, to each according to need, but it was generally expected that the jobs requiring higher ability would be staffed by people of higher ability.

In general, it's obvious that identity politics forms the core of the political class of today's Democratic Party (especially the young), and equally obvious that America is the innovator that other progressive parties follow in this respect. America also has thrown itself into gender politics with particular enthusiasm - gender transitions, even of minors, are a cornerstone of American progressivism today, even as progressive European countries have rolled that back to an extent.

I will concede that Europe leads in the other main aspect of current-day progressivism, the Green movement, although American progressives are avid followers.

I think it’s fair to say American politics are violent, and it’s not really a partisan thing

Sometimes Democrats get backed into a corner. Like with Korea, Vietnam. No matter what they do, Republicans call the Democrats communists/evil/Satan. So when there is a communist country in the mix, then they better damn well go to war, or it proves they are stooges of those same communist countries. Because Democrats can't appear weak on communists, they might fight them harder than a Republican would, (see recent history where Republicans are backing Russia, which is like bizzaro world).

So they don’t actually have any principles?

Why the down votes? Republicans love war, sometimes Democrats go along with it. It's called compromise. You mean, why do Democrats sometimes bend their principles in the face of gun toting Republican's calling for a coup? I don't know, to thread the needle to keep the peace. When half the country is ready to re-enact the Civil War, what is to be done? It isn't like Lincoln didn't compromise when needed.

What real-world circumstance does this theory explain?

Korea, Vietnam. If Communist China wasn't involved, we probably wouldn't be either. It was a policy of containment. And yes, Democrats went along with it. What could they do, say "no we're siding with China"? They would be voted out.

That's really more of a post 60s-ish thing. You can't really extend it back to Korea or before.

From ~FDR-LBJ, the democratic party was pretty pro-war (so was the average american, really, so I guess that's fair for a party called democratic), but that really starts to flip in the late 60s/early 70s.

> The "war on terror" was started by a Republican who invaded Afghanistan and Iraq and continued for nearly 8 more years under a Democrat.

And ended by a Republican

The Republicans keep saying that Biden improperly withdrew from Afghanistan.

One committed the country to the withdrawal the other executed the withdrawal.

And Democrats keep pinning it on Trump.

Regardless, who is there when they withdrew is not the same as who made the plan and started the withdrawal. The Doha Agreement was drafted and signed under Trump. Biden didnt renege on the agreement and executed it.

We have no idea if he would have drafted such an agreement but his track record in that regard isnt good. Obama and Biden increased troops as another commenter noted.

The reality is that there was no path to a good exit from Afganistan, and we should condemn Bush for starting it, condemn Obama for doubling down, condemn Trump for not pulling out earlier, and same for Biden.

Afghanistan is a wash, nobody gets to take credit for ending that. Trump entered into the surrender agreement, but delayed the execution of the agreement past the end of his term, so if he doesn't take the blame for the fallout he doesn't get credit for ending it either. Meanwhile Obama surged troops while he was in office, sure, but then tried to steeply draw down and was blocked by republicans[1]. They also blocked his effort to close the human rights embarrassment at Guantanamo[2]. This is basically an 'everyone sucks here' situation, at best.

[1] https://thehill.com/homenews/286787-gop-questions-obamas-afg...

[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-defense-guantanamo/ho...

Trump, denying they lost the election, refused to support any transfer of power or awareness to the incoming administration as traditionally happens. This combined with the agreement taking effect very shortly after the new term enhanced the scale of the damage, particularly with the new administration's cabinet bootstrapping during the same period.

Trump drafted and signed the agreement and Biden executed it. That’s about as fair as you can put it.

As you noted, Obama and Biden increased troop count before Trump signed the Doha agreement to end the war.

Is Biden a Republican? What president ended the war for you?

Trump started the legal process of ending that war, like him or not.

I gotta nitpick :)

Ignoring the whole background of Korea, it's occupation by Japan, and split at the end of WW2, the Korean War began when the North invaded the South.

For Vietnam, the war ended when the North Vietnam 'won' and the South collapsed.

Hard agree. Democrats pay lip service to anti-war voices when they are out of power, then often rule as hawks.

It's not necessarily meaningful to call one party more or less hawkish than the other. It often comes down to the leader, era, and coalition behind them. Bush/Cheney were definitely more aggressive than Gore would have been, but HRC was positioning herself to be much more hawkish than Trump ended up ruling as. That's why in the post-2016 era many infamous hawks like Bill Kristol and David Frum have been Democrat-aligned.

US involvement in the Vietnam war started with Eisenhower, who last I checked was a Republican...

Pedantic: depending on what "involvement" means.

Eisenhower continued and increased support for the French till 1954. Then backed Diem, blocked the 1956 elections, and sent in more "advisers", however .. :)

An OSS Dear Team provided training, medical and logistical assistance to Hồ Chí Minh and the Việt Minh in 1945. An OSS doctor is reported to have treated Ho Chi Minh for malaria and dysentery. [0] Then Truman provided troop transport, money and materiel for France to re-conqueror Indochina (Democrat).

Archimedes Patti, from the OSS wrote a book [1] about the experience.

War is multi-party, forget tech stocks, I gotta invest in Lockheed Martin.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSS_Deer_Team [1] "Why Vietnam?: Prelude to America's Albatross

Also WW's Sr. and Junior, if you care to extend the pattern back, though those both began and ended under Democratic administrations. In the case of the latter, the Republican general leading the war effort became the next US President --- which suggests that there's some haziness to the attributions being made. That same administration participated in violent campaigns in Iran (overthrowing democratically-elected Mossedegh) and Guatemala, as well as planning the Bay of Pigs operation (which occurred as Kennedy's administration opened).

Antiwar sentiments existed for many of these, though it's notable that considerable anti-war sentiment in the US against entry into WWII had a distinctly hard-right flavour to it. Not all anti-war sentiment, as there can be many possible motiviations, but in this specific case, domestic groups sympathetic with (and often orchestrated by) rightest European belligerents had an outsized role.

The anti-war movement of the 1960s and 1970s became associated with Democrats as that party swung leftward and shed its own long-standing Southern affiliations, and grew our of anti-nuclear and civil rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s, all of which saw Vietnam specifically as an unjustified and unjust war, with considerable merits to that viewpoint.

Painting pro- or anti-war sentiments as distinctly left or right, or aligned with either of the two present major parties is not historically accurate and misses considerable nuance.

> One of the most disappointing things in American politics in the last ten to fifteen years has been watching the left abandon their antiwar fervor

You might be mixing up anti-imperialism with antiwar sentiment. In the past, the 2 were typically hand-in-hand due to the geopolitics of the day, but it is not a given - depending on the circumstances[0].

It's interesting how the American right is also taking up an anti-war stance, while maintaining pro-imperialist attitudes[1]

0. Cf. The left's attitude towards the Vietnam war vs. the Apartheid government in South Africa.

1. With Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and the "peace with North Korea at all costs" under Trump

Its about not wanting to fight other people’s wars.

Republicans are a lot more interested in the militarization of the pacific and southern border.

Like a lot of things, it went off like a light switch when Obama was elected. It was crushing. I thought it was genuine anti-Iraq-war sentiment, not merely well-deserved hate for Bush. But a lot of it turned out to be a cudgel to beat the other guys.

COVID is similar; Trump fucked it up because everything he touches turns to shit, not a surprise. Biden continues to fuck it up to this day and... crickets from Democrats.

Thankfully, Biden is doing the right thing, very skillfully, with Ukraine. I wish he could get it together on domestic policy. Making his bumblefuck COVID czar his chief of staff was a incredibly bad decision, though.

> Biden continues to fuck it up to this day

what is there left to do on COVID? The healthcare system is not collapsing and lockdowns have ended. Remember, the lockdowns where there only to prevent the healthcare system from collapsing. We even have vaccines and a host of other treatments widely available. If you're expecting total eradication of an airborne respiratory virus I don't think you're being realistic.

Obama doubled down on Afghanistan from the get-go -- I consider that fiasco as much his as his predecessors.

As an "anti-war leftist", I find myself cheering on the assistance to Ukraine, as that is the first war in my memory that seemed worth fighting.

Still no love for the Military Industrial Complex though...

I would say, they are both complicated.

Afghanistan shows that trying "nation building" on a place where they don't actually want any nation doesn't really work. But it did work for Japan and Germany after WW2, so maybe it was worth trying. I'm sure the women who are now forbidden to learn to read liked the Americans more than they like Taliban, but does that mean extending the war was worth it?

As for Iraq, the WMDs were a complete lie and Bush and Cheney just wanted more war - some say Cheney was the mind behind and Bush was just idiot, some say Bush wanted to finish what his father started - but average Iraqi is now better off than with Saddam. That doesn't help those who died in the war, of the people who could have has better lives for the money the war had cost though.

It was actually Ukraine that changed my opinion on Iraq, because the arguments "Iraq under Saddam's brutal dictatorship wasn't that bad, there was no reason to war" started resonate with "don't help Ukraine, their lives aren't going that bad under Putin's brutal dictatorship, tell the to surrender" little too much. Was Iraq different from Ukraine only because in one the dictator was status quo and in the other it wasn't?

Yeah, complicated.

But they emphatically said they weren't nation-building, and armies are only good for fighting and destroying things, not building things (with an exception to the Corp of Engineers).

There was never a plan, more so, never a formal declaration of what the hell victory was supposed to look like.

Neither Japan nor Germany needed "nation building", because the corresponding nations were already formed long before then.

As far as Ukraine and Iraq, one big difference is that there Iraq under Saddam was not fighting a war on its territory when US invaded in 2003. So you have to consider the number of people who would have likely died due to political repressions vs the number of people who died from the war and the resulting instability - and I don't think that arithmetic is in favor of the war even today.

OTOH in Ukraine it was Russia that invaded and forced the war on them, so from the perspective of outside assistance you have to compare the number of Ukrainians that would die resisting by themselves vs the number that will die resisting with Western aid. I don't think this comparison is a given either way - there's a lot of rhetoric in the West along the lines of, "if we didn't support them they'd fold quickly and then the war would be over", but given the determined resistance that we have seen and the sheer number of people who joined the volunteer territorial defense units and their willingness to engage early in the conflict (e.g. under Kyiv), I think it's more likely that even if Russia managed to occupy the entire country, it would still be dealing with large-scale guerilla warfare, with all the massive civilian casualties that entails.

The other key difference is that Iraqis under Saddam weren't really given a choice whether they preferred to suffer Saddam or an invasion to remove him. Ukrainians, OTOH, are pretty open about their preferences.

I'm a huge Obama fan but Afghanistan was his biggest mistake. In fairness, he got sold a bill of goods by the Pentagon and with the economy in a shambles, he was somewhat distracted. The Republicans greeted anything he did with stubborn resistance with McConnell pledging to make him a one term President. McCain prevented him from closing Guantanamo.

But he was still Commander in Chief.

Yes, he was sold a bill of goods, but in his 8 years never re-evaluated the situation.

I'm going to guess that he was wary of the political attacks over doing so -- if all it took was french mustard or a tan suit, imagine the outrage of "cutting and running"

> Biden continues to fuck it up to this day

In what way? Don't get me wrong, I think Biden sucks. But when wearing a mask became an issue of deepest political ideology before Biden was elected, it's a tough task to change public opinion when you're a politician.

There's something to be said that we literally lost the war on covid and just kinda pretended that it ended, but I'm not sure what other option there was. If democrats pushed to keep fighting covid with gusto, it would not have been popular and would easily lead to Republicans running everything in the next decade.

History books will hopefully acknowledge just how terribly the entire world handled it.

Yeah I agree but, like I say, we were defeated by COVID before Biden was elected, just like we were defeated in Afghanistan before he was elected. He could have pulled off something excellent in either case, but that would have been very difficult and I don't know how he would have done it.

How was this country defeated by covid? What could he have done otherwise? Hospitals aren't overwhelmed today, that was the entire concern of the pandemic.

People forgot about the whole "flattening the curve" thing, and a bunch of narratives cropped up about what the end goal was.

The goals, which were never real, started to have political consequences and it became a whole thing.

People forgot about flattening the curve because we literally did flatten the curve. It was about hospital capacity:

https://www.michiganmedicine.org/health-lab/flattening-curve...

We were defeated in the sense that the very idea of fighting covid became a political hot button and a huge percentage of the US population decided not to fight.

Yes, it could have been worse, maybe we could have had utter collapse. But hospitals did get overrun multiple times and many people died completely unnecessarily because we stopped fighting. I really wouldn't call this a win; covid is now endemic and continuing to evolve inside us. At best this is a bloody stalemate.

Covid is over. It might still be around but we are done melting down over it.

We won the war on covid though, it was always about hospital capacity.

The outcome of the conflict will be the only metric that matters for assessing Biden's performance. If we end up spending hundreds of billions of dollars and have nothing to show for it except Russia controlling the territory they originally intended to seize, it will be difficult to consider anything we are doing as 'skillful'. Dumping money and weapons into the proxy war du jour is the default policy of D.C.

Biden shouldnt be judged on the outcome of Ukraine. And im no fan of Biden. But its just not in his power nor all of NATO, unless we got in a direct conflict with Russia.

And sadly, this is more normal than peace when it comes to Russian border states.

American leadership deserves to be judged if they commit hundreds of billions of dollars to cause with no benefit to the American public. A Russian victory that we are spending huge sums to prevent doesn’t bring any benefit to the American public.

A Russian victory in Ukraine being would be Pyrrhic. No matter what the PR on the war's eventual end is, Putin hollowed out Russia to fight this war. The negative impacts on Russia will last until the end of this century, and beyond.

Im not sure I agree that the US shouldn’t fund Ukraine. Very sympathetic to that but not sure I agree. And yes Biden deserves blame for it to the extent that anyone deserves blame for it.

But that’s entirely different than blaming him for not solving the crisis.

How do you mean? Seems like the left is still pretty antiwar. Also, not all war is equal. Otherwise you're in the paradox of tolerance. It should be a last resort but it necessarily must remain an option. Unprovoked wars of aggression (US Iraq) are different from provoked wars (e.g. Germany in WWII). The other problem is when there's provoked aggression but the response is disproportionate (9/11 Afghanistan considering Afghanistan offered to remand Bin Laden into US custody). There's a lot more nuance in the real world too (e.g. how should Israel respond to inbound rocket attacks which are provoked but failure to respond with outsized force tends to cause attackers to get more emboldened).

No one is antiwar. Its a non-sensical position. There are just people who want de-escalation in a subset of cases.

Antiwar doesn’t really make any sense because you can’t end wars without fighting in wars. Or surrendering but that proves the “doesnt really make sense” point. It also just encourages more wars in the future. There can be diplomatic solutions but you still have to embrace the war until then.

"Anti-war" is a sensible coherent position relative to a country making war. It only seems ambiguous these days because Russia is trying to tap into existing anti-war sentiment against the US (caused by elective wars the US created), to undermine western support for Ukraine in a war that Russia created. The straightforward anti-war position on Ukraine is "Russia, stop making war in Ukraine" - which is clearest when expressed by Russian citizens, but can be expressed by anyone. Russia however is not stopping (just as the US didn't stop in Iraq), and so war continues.

The paradox of tolerance can not be used here.

It requires fiat control of the situation.

That control of sovereign entities can only be attained by threat or actualised violence.

Putting it another way.

That you even consider yourself entitled to tolerate a sovereign nation requires that you believe you are entitled a degree of control it.

Anti-war thinking requires not just that you consider war a last resort. But you consider that you have no option at all. War is not another just lever.

If it is then you do not have anti-war beliefs you just are more adverse to it than some hawks.

> That control of sovereign entities can only be attained by threat or actualised violence.

Treaties are signed regularly having nothing to do with any kind of threat of violence. Breaking of treaties often even has legal redress mechanisms within international courts of law, all without military threats. Instead economic sanctions are often the recourse.

Re "paradox of tolerance" it's a pretty close analogy so I'm really not sure what you're going on about. An absolute anti-war position puts you in the position of tolerating wars. Thus any group that wants can engage in violence to acquire more resources. At the limit it can even overpower you although that's not so important because your tolerance of the war has a net result in having caused more war and violence. In military circles it would be called appeasement* but it's the same basic philosophy.

* Interesting side note is that there are some historians that suggest that Chamberlain's appeasement strategy wasn't because he thought it would work to pacify Hitler but because he was desperately trying hard to avoid Britain getting sucked into a conflict until they were properly staffed up (Stalin did the same btw). Additionally the appeasement strategy arguably was helpful in also pulling America into the European theater because domestic supporters of Germany couldn't claim that Hitler's expansion was somehow legitimate given that every grievance raised by Germany had a legitimate attempt to redress.

What are you blathering on about? Intolerance, treaties, Hitler?

Your comment is the best example of Godwin's law I've seen in a while.

I'll take your sprinting away from the point at hand to mean you're not interested in the original discussion?

To tolerate suggests you could not tolerate it. That requires control.

> To tolerate suggests you could not tolerate it. That requires control.

Actually it does not and I’m not sprinting away from anything. I am concerned about the refusal to engage with analogies though. I thought my analogies were passable but you seem to have gotten quite triggered. What’s going on there?

Let me try again. If someone is robbing you without you doing anything, you tolerate getting robbed because otherwise you might risk bodily harm. So if anything, tolerance is the opposite and implies a lack of control because otherwise if you could not tolerate it and had control, you probably wouldn’t. Indeed, if we look at examples of intolerance, it’s actually the intolerant that have the control which is where the paradox comes from (governments self-limiting their ability to control situations and thus letting intolerant people take that control, Britain appeasing Germany because they’d otherwise lose the war before it started if they didn’t buy themselves time etc).

As for Godwin’s law:

> the probability of a comparison to Nazis or Adolf Hitler approaches 100%.

I’m not comparing anyone or anything to Nazi’s nor Hitler but instead I’m showing the similarity between appeasement and the paradox of intolerance through the lens of the most famous appeasements of the 20th century. Just saying “Hitler” doesn’t automatically make it an example of Godwin’s law. Ironically:

> Godwin's law itself can be applied mistakenly or abused as a distraction, diversion or even as censorship, when fallaciously miscasting an opponent's argument as hyperbole when the comparison made by the argument is appropriate

And this is just talking about the link between authoritarians and Hitler / genocides and Nazis.

One of the most disappointing things in American politics in the last ten to fifteen years has been watching the right cozy up to Putin.

Im familiar with the argument in favor of this within the past couple years. But what case is there that they started 15 years ago?

“I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy,” Bush said. “I was able to get a sense of his soul.”

I dunno about 15 years, but it was already a thing in 2015. My local gun store owner - the kind of guy who watches Fox religiously, has "thin blue line" stickers on his truck etc - straight up told me that he'd prefer Putin to Obama because the former is a "true leader", a "real Christian", and "protects family values".

What about when the entire left voted for going to Iraq twenty years ago? (Except Bernie Sanders I believe)

> The dramatic, much-debated vote on Joint Resolution 114 was taken on Oct. 11, 2002. It passed the Senate by a vote of 77 to 23, and the House of Representatives by a vote of 296 to 133. In the end, 156 members of Congress from 36 states had enough information and personal insight and wisdom to make the correct decision for our nation and the world community.

> Six House Republicans and one Independent joined 126 Democratic members of the House of Representatives in voting NAY. In the Senate, 21 Democrats, one Republic, and one Independent courageously voted their consciences in 2002 against the War in Iraq.

https://www.thoughtco.com/2002-iraq-war-vote-3325446

Worth mentioning among the NAY votes is Barbara Lee representative of California’s 12th congressional district (9th during the vote) who has announced she’ll be running to take Dianne Feinstein’s (who voted YAY) seat in the 2024 senate race, and is a favorite among many progressives (i.e. left wing Democrats).

I still don’t understand why people think it was the wrong decision.

I’m sorry for the snark, but Major General Smedley Butler offers a generic explanation for wars in general in his 1935 essay War is a Racket.

But for the Iraq war specifically (a part from the racketeering) why many people think it was the wrong decision is in large part based on the lies and deceptions that were used to justify the invasion.

At the time many people believed those lies and thought they were justifiable reasons for the invasion. When it later turned out there were no weapons of mass destruction, that ties of the Ba'ath party to terrorist organizations were none, that the USA imposed government was corrupt and offered little benefits to regular people over Saddam’s dictatorship, etc. etc. When this all became common knowledge, on top of all the war crimes, the torture scandals, the massacres, after Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange went to prison for revealing some of those war crimes, many of these people who previously believed the war was justified, changed their opinion of it.

Where is the 'war fervor' of the Left?

What does helping Ukraine defend themselves have to do with 'war fervor'?

Putin invaded Ukraine in 2014 and Obama/Trump reaction was to ignore it - which directly resulted in a much bigger war.

The US Military Industrial Complex is why there are no wars against rich allied states. If Ukraine were part of the system and had a well managed, functional military - Putin could not have invaded, in fact he never would have tried.

This is incomplete. Ukraine was supposed to be a buffer between NATO and Russia. As soon as Western folks started talking about getting cozy with Ukraine, Putin saw the eventuality where US/joint bases would be on his border and he didn't want that. He would rather start a war with Ukraine than go toe-to-toe with the US and NATO.

Other people making friends is not really a good reason to start killing them, either way.

I know it’s not what you’re saying exactly, but it’s what Putin’s actions boil down to.

Russia has borders with NATO and had them for years. The buffer theory makes zero sense, considering Ukraine was not even trying to get to NATO and there is pretty long border between Russia and NATO anyway.

NATO basis were next to Russia for decades.

Plus, one does not need to commit genocide to achieve safety. Anand Putin just happen to be committing genocide.

NATO was already on his border.

The route that Russia has been invaded through during WWII and Napoleon runs right through the plains of Ukraine. Putin's older brother died during the siege of Stalingrad as an infant. These memories are not that long ago. They obviously care much less about Finland on their borders.

But really, it's more about the money, the people and the control over trade routes and resources in my estimation and less about security.

It's basic raw Imperialism. The Soviets were just the Russian Empire under another name, absolutely all of Putin's actions aka saying Ukrainians don't exist, calling them 'little Russians', the tactic of treating them as vassals, of viewing this as a conflict with the US and not Ukraine, his ultra nationalist rhetoric, his posturing as the saviour of the Slavs - it's actually kind of straight forward in those terms.

It's astonishing that in the West, so many people see short term things like money or resources, that is often the reality of it, and Crimea does have offshore Oil, but in 50 years he won't be remembered for that - he will be 'Putin the Great' for re-conquoring lost territories and uniting the Russian people and their Empire. Even if there is a stalemate now - it means over a 10 year period he took Crimea and a huge swath of land - that is a big win. It won't feel like a win for a few years, but in the long run of history it'll be viewed as a victory - an expansion of the empire.

For the same reason Westerners talk about China wanting to invade Taiwan for TSMC? Gosh no - they view Taiwan as 'China' - and all the states around them as 'natural vassals to their greater power' - and that's that, they are the 'Middle Kingdom Centre of the World' and Xi is on that mission.

Those guys are using 19th century geopolitics and ethnography, taking very long term view of things.

A victory for Ukraine is important to maintain some very basic and essential things we have come to expect in the world - not fancy ideals - just basic freedoms, democracy, rule of law etc..

The military industrial complex will take a pound of flesh unless we manage them effectively, but they are not driving this war, not even from the Russian side where most of the money is pilfered anyhow.

Any ideology that doesn't allow Ukraine to make their own destiny is unacceptable. Ukraine told Russia it wouldn't join NATO, tried to set itself up to join the EU instead, and got invaded anyway, back in 2014.

> Any ideology that doesn't allow Ukraine to make their own destiny is unacceptable.

Thank you for stating that. I hate when smaller countries are just talked about as pawns in a chess game between larger powers with no self determination, or should just take one for the team to prevent rocking the boat.

If Russia doesn't like its smaller neighbours wanting to join NATO, it should've treated them a lot better.

I remember all the whining about "NATO bases on our borders!!!" on Russian news back in 1999 when Poland joined. And then again in 2004 when the Baltics joined. It was all the same stuff then as it is now - about how they were just prepping the beachhead for those tank columns that would eventually drive towards Moscow, how NATO nukes would be stationed there allowing for a surprise decapitation strike etc. None of which came to pass in the years since, unsurprisingly.

In any case, what does "supposed to be a buffer" even mean? Supposed by whom? Ukraine certainly didn't sign up for that.

> What does helping Ukraine defend themselves have to do with 'war fervor'?

For me: the manner in which it is done (the rhetoric in media, etc).

Politicians in the American Left have never been antiwar.

Truman, Johnson, Clinton, Obama, etc.

The only difference between now and the 70s is that the politicians have more control over the left.

The progressives (bernie, AOC, etc.) had very very disappointing responses to Ukraine that showed they are not ready to rule. I was particularly devastated by AOC's response.

>> Truman, Johnson, Clinton, Obama, etc.

The Carter presidency is in the running for the most peaceful modern presidency. He did start arming the rebels in Afghanistan, and ordered what I guess amounts to a brief invasion of Iran, but overall, pretty peaceful. It's either him or Trump.

Agreed.

More like the left abandoned American politics. At least compared to the rest of the world the US have 2 right-wing parties.

American politics abandoned the left, not the other way around. We decided to make McCarthyism a national sport. Being against Vietnam was unpatriotic and wrong. Being against Afghanistan was unpatriotic and wrong. Being against unregulated capitalism was unamerican and wrong.

Predictably, this comment started a partisan political argument that took over the thread like kudzu.

> watching the left abandon their antiwar fervor.

As left people gain political maturity, they understand that those in power will not give up their power willingly, so force is required.

As a liberal person I am suspicious of any liberal who does not believe in gun rights, and I am even more suspicious of a liberal person who does not believe in unions, which is the 2nd amendment of labor rights. Neither the 2nd amendment nor unions can be used for their purpose within the bounds of the law.

Believing in human rights means believing in defending human rights with force, otherwise what is to stop someone from violating human rights?

If a powerful person uses their power against you, your choices are submit or fight. Leftists are slowly understanding:

  1. There are powerful people
  2. They will arbitrarily use your power against you
  3. Those people use their power to influence law so the law will not protect you
  4. You can't solve this problem within the bounds of the law

It's not hard to look at Ukraine and see that justice cannot be achieved without war and that you don't get to decide when you are at war.

The problem with this whole thought process is it's hilariously abstract. The people in power have F-35s. What is your collection of (admittedly, unnecessarily powerful) guns going to do against that?

It also assumes that such disagreements require force to be resolved, and that's just demonstrably not always true. Even if it sometimes is.

> The people in power have F-35s. What is your collection of (admittedly, unnecessarily powerful) guns going to do against that?

Military inventory, while powerful, isn't the end-all. Just ask Afghans about their experiences with two superpowers' machinery.

F-35s aren't particularly useful for collecting taxes, for maintaining a state. You can't use them to intimidate an individual, it's a huge waste of resources for the owner of the F-35. What's more dangerous than an F-35 is a group of guys with guns driving around in a pickup truck. Guns and trucks are just so much cheaper than fighter jets, so much more deployable... not to mention the entire logistical and manpower apparatus that goes into getting an F-35 in the air. If you want to win a war of attrition you use cheap, effective tools, not the flashy stuff. Flashy weapons are great for blowing up some other country's infrastructure, it's not very useful if the enemy is your own people. If you blow up all your own people and infrastructure, what do you have power over?

If you and everyone in a 10-mile radius of where you're sitting right now decided to ignore some federal law, like maybe the one against cannabis, what the heck is an F-35 going to do about it? Blow up a building, is that supposed to help? No, you get some guys with guns and trucks and then you can start going door to door, threatening people, looking around, collecting stuff, whatever. You can set up checkpoints and block off bridges, the whole shebang, because you're trying to establish control, not just blow things up.

Blowing things up has its uses but if you want to intimidate someone to the point where you have power over them, you need to be a little more intimate. You can't just be a fleck in the sky and you can't just show up do to the big stuff. You need to be in their face as a persistent, immediate threat. That's what influences human behavior and that's how power is established. That's exactly why small guns are such a sticking point in the USA, they're a very effective counter to this intimate threat.

Conversely the over abundance of guns also is fraying the social fabric and makes normal policing impossible.

FWIW, despite having a strong favorable opinion about gun rights, given Americas clear lack of responsibility in using their gun rights for good, I think it's hard to argue against gun regulation.

I am pro gun rights but not anti regulation.

I think liberals fail to acknowledge that sometimes you can't get out of "might makes right" resolution for disputes, which results in situations of denial around gun rights.

So regulation is seen as a weakening of gun rights because the people most in favor of regulating guns fail to also make arguments in favor of guns or discount the pro-gun argument entirely.

I wonder what the Vietnamese would think of your argument or the Ukrainians. I wonder if the people in Tiananmen wish they had had guns. I wonder if people in Hong Kong wish they had had guns. I wonder about the people in Myanmar or the educated class in Cambodia, or Afghani, or Iranians wish they had more guns.

"Who are the 2nd amendment protected guns theoretically meant to be used against? When are they supposed to be used? Can the 2nd amendment ever be used to protect a free state within the bounds of the law?" are pretty major critical thinking questions that it are probably worth meditating on, especially for liberal people.

What would have happened if Trump won is a question every liberal person needs to contemplate.

When the rule of law (the idea that powerful people cannot arbitrarily exercise their power) fails, it becomes might makes right. Would you rather be in a might makes right society where you have a gun or where you don't? I think that answer is obvious.

> Even if it sometimes is.

If you want peace prepare for war.

It's hard to get a military to invade its own country, harder to get them to keep doing it, and harder yet to keep the whole apparatus supplied in the process. And the waves of mass desertions tend to come with military hardware attached.

The most serious threat to an American insurgency isn't the US military, it's the police. And the police don't have F-35s... yet.

We on the left realized that John Brown got it right. Sometimes you have to march to the sea to get basic human rights.

My impression is that the left is more anti-imperialist-war than anti-war. Vietnam and Iraq were hard to justify morally.

I must confess...I detest the phrase military-industrial complex while acknowledging that it was likely defined and definitely used by people much smarter than I. It's too abstract and sounds like a phrase your tinfoil-hat wearing conspiracy-theorist uncle would rant about. Would much rather we spoke in terms of real-world organizations (start with the big players and go from there) that benefit from forever wars...

I've been thinking that we ought to stop using county names to refer to wars. Vietnam is a place, people live there, but when I hear its name I just think about how messed up my grandpa is because of his experiences in that war.

So I think that instead of "Afghanistan" we should call it "Lockheed's War" or something like that.

And Iraq would the be the Bush/Cheney/Haliburton War. I'm a fan of this naming convention.

War? Product placement campaign.

I'm not sure if you're being serious but I like this a lot

Totally serious.

If we must have wars, let them be remembered as a black mark on the names of the people who profited from them. A cautionary tale about how not to weild power.

On the flip side: I have no ill will towards the people of Iraq or Afghanistan or Vietnam, so I feel bad attaching a negative connotation to the name of their country. As if my tax dollars didn't do enough harm to their homes, now my speech is making it harder to let go of. Yuck.

I've been saying things like:

> The justification for Putin's war feels even flimsier than the justification for Cheney's war, but then again I'm not the target audience.

So far people just raise their eyebrows at me, but I like to imagine it'll catch on.

The specific players change, though. You wouldn't call it (for example) the "Reagan-Raytheon Complex", since that's just a specific, temporary instance produced by a more systemic pattern of behavior. Even though the more specific framing seems more actionable, getting rid of those particular players would not solve the problem if the next set just did the same thing. So, it's actually more useful to think of this as a warning about systems rather than entities.

Its a massive oversimplification driven by pessimism.

>> It's too abstract and sounds like a phrase your tinfoil-hat wearing conspiracy-theorist uncle would rant about

That's why it was so important that it come from someone like a 5 star general and Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe during World War II. No one was going to mistake Eisenhower for a tinfoil-hat wearer, a pacifist, or an appeaser.

While I completely agree I'm not sure how well known its origins are today, or will be in the future.

The dominance of the US military, for all its faults (and there are plenty), is the reason there's a mostly peaceful world. Deterrence has been an absurdly powerful force towards that goal, and we have the military-industrial companies in the US to thank for that. Yes, they're also profiting from it. That's a win-win, in my opinion.

In my 20+ years in software engineering, I've yet to meet a Chinese or Russian colleague who thinks it would be better if China or Russia had more military/political power. I've even argued in favor of that position in the past (that the world would be better off if there was more multipolarity), and they fervently opposed my position. They are keenly aware of the kind of crimes their ex-governments engage in.

US military dominance is hegemonic, yes, but it would be far worse to have it any other way currently.

Absolutely this. This comment [1] hit me hard when I read it:

>I never understood the good effects of American hegemony until they started breaking down.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine is a harbinger of what a world without American hegemony looks like. In that world, you're going to have a very bad time.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27565836

Did you heard about americans in humvees running around ukraine-russian border and provoking russians, few years before the conflict ?

How would your government react to russians trying to establish military bases in mexico, on your border? Oh, we know ... we can look what you did to Cubans. Are they still in blockade?

I don't endorse what Russians are doing. But somebody was helping them to decide to attack. If it was successfull or not, we'll never know.

To make your argument symmetric, we need to imagine Mexico inviting Russia after we 1) poison their President with polonium, 2) seize the Baja peninsula and 3) arm and support border incursions from Texas separatists and 4) have those separatists shoot down a civilian airliner.

So kinda not the same.

Your country does immoral things, Russians do immoral things, Chinese too, every big "power" does. That's not the point. Point is, how would you react to the foreign powers on your border ?

Would you go south or not?

Please, stop repeating russian propaganda. They wanted to control and reconquer their former imperial colonies. Their claimed Casus Belli were just lame excuses, not actual reasons.

I don't have it from russians, I'm not pro-russia, far from it. But those concerns that US (maybe) wants war on european continent were pretty often repeated in all EU media then.

God forbid we use a little empathy, nuance and historical perspective in our opinions.

And I know I'm a bit out there, but perhaps the people in the disputed territories should get a vote?

Russia would be happy to put it to a vote, now that they've relocated over a million Ukrainians from the Donbas to "filtration camps".

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_filtration_camps_for...

God forbid we react to the utterly inhumane invasion of Ukraine with the disgust it deserves. Stop trying to make cover for Putin behind a veil of insincere civility.

but… What if they vote russia?

Perhaps the time to discuss this was before the 2014 invasion. I doubt Ukraine would acquiesce to it now.

> And I know I'm a bit out there, but perhaps the people in the disputed territories should get a vote?

You mean just like the vote in Crimea in 2014 right? With a gun pointed at their backs under the supervision of the military?.

There’s no way that, any vote like that is in anyway shape or form fair and will result in any outcome other than what the people pointing the guns want.

It's unfortunate that Nations can't agree to respect the borders they agreed upon.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia%E2%80%93Ukraine_border#...

US will react the same way they did to cuba ..

the bigger problem is that Russia is a backwards country with caveman ideology modeled on the strong Mongolian empire who wants to oppress everybody around them because they have narcissistic tendencies

Are you implying that the US would react to that situation by annexing parts of Mexico and eventually declaring war on it?

The US would never declare war on Mexico! Nor annex any part of it!

Not in 100 years

Russia's power also came from American hegemony and its military was built in direct reaction to it. Or how the middle east is a mess in huge part because of the US. Or Latin America after all the meddling.

I really don't see an argument for US influence being better than the status quo, except for the US. It didn't stop wars or ethnic cleansings either when it was at its peak.

I'm not so sure about that. From my Finnish perspective, the invasion of Ukraine is much like a repetition of the 90s. The cold war was a very stable period for Europe. When the old order collapsed, wars started in the former Yugoslavia and Caucasus and raged on for years.

The 90s was also the decade of American hegemony. The hegemony started breaking down in the aftermath of 9/11, when the US decided that they care more about revenge than soft power.

> The hegemony started breaking down in the aftermath of 9/11, when the US decided that they care more about revenge than soft power.

I would diagnose it differently. If all the US looked for was revenge, we could have been in and out of Afghanistan much more quickly and accomplished the mission. The mistake in Afghanistan was to engage in a poorly conceived twenty year experiment in nation building.

If anything the problem is that Americans are too isolationist to take the duties of hegemony seriously. There’s really no reason we couldn’t occupy Afghanistan in perpetuity if we actually cared to bother, but it became politically unpopular for some reason. Maybe because we were never honest with ourselves about what we were doing.

From my point of view, the US wasted its hegemony on poorly planned unilateral actions in the early 2000s.

The invasion of Afghanistan was clearly motivated by revenge, as the US invaded quickly without a proper plan or debate. It wasn't that catastrophic in itself, as the world generally considered the invasion justified. But it made it easier to invade Iraq without a proper plan or debate, which was catastrophic.

Among other things, the invasion of Iraq taught the world that invading other countries with false justifications was perfectly fine. Putin certainly learned that. Then the US went on to alienate its traditional European allies that refused to participate in the charade. To many European politicians at that time, Putin didn't look much worse than Bush. When the US tried to warn Europe against tighter economic integration with Russia, those politicians refused to listen. When Putin turned out to be much worse, there were too many vested interests to reverse the course.

Iraq is a hard case to break down for me. In one sense, Iraq was ultimately successful: the goal of the war was to replace the Saddam regime with a democracy. 20 years later, Iraq is a democracy. I do have a problem with the WMD thing being used as a pretext though.

Also, I don’t necessarily think it’s fair to blame the Iraq War for some European countries being all squishy towards Russia; they’d been doing that off and on since the Cold War.

European countries were not squishy towards Russia. They acted according to their own interests in a world where no major power could be trusted.

The norms that govern international politics are similar to the ones that young kids develop when left to their own devices. Without shared values and without an authority that can impose theirs, you can't evaluate justifications. The norms that emerge deal with the actions themselves. You can do X for your reasons if I can do X for mine, and so on. The ways the US used their global hegemony taught Putin what he can do for his own reasons.

It's easy to forget how immensely unpopular the Bush administration was among the West European elite. Obama got a Nobel Peace Prize for not being Bush, while Biden didn't get one for not being Trump. When the Bush administration tried to tell Europe not to deal with Russia, they had barely more credibility than the Iraqi propaganda guy.

That loss of soft power was the beginning of the end for the American hegemony.

Revenge is great for war business

This comment reminds me of people warning about the perils of communism by posting photos of empty store shelves during the pandemic. In other words they used a failure of capitalism to exemplify communism.

If American hegemony brings peace, why are you using an example where there this supposed peace effect obviously failed?

American hegemony did not prevent the Russian invasion into Ukraine as we all know. It is not an example of a world without American hegemony, it is clearly and example of the world with American hegemony.

Russia invaded Ukraine because the US wasn’t being hegemonic enough. The first invasion in 2014 happened under a dovish, non-interventionist president elected due to public dissatisfaction with his interventionist predecessor. That administration refused to send aid to Ukraine at all, a policy that has been gradually reversed by the two successive administrations, then reversed more dramatically after the second invasion in 2022. Had the US taken the crisis more seriously, it could have likely deterred the 2022 invasion entirely.

If you want an example of the world with American hegemony, consider that the longest sustained period of peace in Western European history began when Western Europe was first occupied by American troops in 1945.

Surely you must realize the fallacy of your argument. I can apply this logic to literally everything.

- X means we don’t have Y.

- But a Y just happened.

- It’s because we didn’t have enough X.

But also you are wrong on you historic counts here. Western Europe hasn’t been entirely peaceful since 1945. First of all, Europe had colonies and colonial warfare well into the 1980s, colonial wars include Angola, Algeria, Kenya, the Falkland Islands and many more. Second many countries were dictatorship in Western Europe, including Spain, Portugal and Italy. There was a war in Cyprus, civil war in Northern Ireland, as well as terrorist insurgencies in Germany and Spain well into the 90s and 2000s.

Neither did USA have hegemony in Western Europe during this period. USSRs influence spread across the continent. There were actually two Germanies until the late 1980s, there still are two Cypruses (despite both Turkey and Greece being NATO members), Communist and Socialist parties remained popular and quite often as part of coalition governments e.g. in Scandinavia, France, Belgium, etc.

> Surely you must realize the fallacy of your argument. I can apply this logic to literally everything.

Well, you would need to analyze the specific facts of the situation to see if it backed up the argument first, which I did.

> Western Europe hasn’t been entirely peaceful since 1945. First of all, Europe had colonies and colonial warfare well into the 1980s, in places like Angola and Algeria.

Angola and Algeria aren’t in Europe.

> Second many countries were dictatorship in Western Europe, including Spain, Portugal and Italy.

They still didn’t go to war with each other.

> There were civil wars in Northern Ireland as well as terrorist insurgencies in Germany and Spain well into the 90s and 2000s.

I never claimed the US was able to eradicate domestic terrorism, only wars between countries. Western Europe hadn’t had a war between countries since 1945, which is the longest stretch since probably the fall of Rome.

> There were actually two Germanies until the late 1980s

Yes, that’s why I specified “Western Europe”; Eastern Europe was under Soviet hegemony.

What do you call the War in Cyprus and the Civil War in Northern Ireland? Turkey and Greece are two separate countries involved in territorial war of Cyprus (sometimes considered Western Europe). UK and Ireland are also two separate countries definitely inside Western Europe. Algeria and Angola were an integral part of France and Portugal respectively, just like Lyon and Lisbon. To the European powers, these were wars inside western European countries.

I find your specification of "War" and "Western Europe" awfully convenient. For example USA had hegemony over both the UK and Argentina, yet the latter invaded a territory of the former, but you are still correct because the Falkland Island aren’t in Europe.

If history doesn’t fit your narrative, you can simply narrow the scope until it fits. This is the problem with grand historic theories, they always just fit, but only after being hammered to the "correct" shape.

> Turkey and Greece are two separate countries involved in territorial war of Cyprus (sometimes considered Western Europe).

If you want to consider Turkey part of Western Europe that’s up to you.

> UK and Ireland are also two separate countries

The UK was not at war with the Republic of Ireland; it was at war with domestic terrorists inside Northern Ireland.

> I find your specification of "War" and "Western Europe" awfully convenient.

If that’s true, I’m sure it’ll be just as easy for you to find another 78 year period of history in which no two sovereign Western European polities went to war with one another. In fact, the whole reason I pointed it out is because the western half of Europe had been interminably war-torn for centuries. You’re talking about colonial wars in Angola and IRA terrorists; I’m talking about breaking the centuries-long cycle of Anglo-German-French wars that stretches into medieval times.

> For example USA had hegemony over both the UK and Argentina

We did? That’s news to me.

You were the one that stated that USA had hegemony in Western Europe post 1945, so that should include the UK. The Argentinian dictatorship had strong USA backing, the dictator who initiated the invasion Leopoldo Galtieri was a graduate from the US Army School of the Americas, in fact Argentina was working with the CIA in their backing of the Contras militia in Nicaragua. USAs influence over the Argentinian dictatorship just before the invasion is no secret.

As we see, USA hegemony is not sufficient for peace (even your very convenient definition of peace). However it is still not established that USA hegemony is even a necessary conditions.

First, you can mark any large cross-national territory over any arbitrary decade and find peace. Even territories with a history of war. For example, there hasn’t been large South American countries going to war with each other since 1947 either (see I can conveniently omit the Falklands War too if it fits my narrative). Heck, even the African great lakes has seen peace according to your definition since Tanzania invaded Uganda and disposed of Idi Amin in 1979. I guess Tanzanian hegemony is a thing for good.

Second there are multiple alternative hypothesis you haven’t explored. Don’t you think the UN deceleration of human rights helped with minimizing conflicts, the rise of democracy, the end of imperialism, decolonization, demilitarization, buildup of infrastructure, the European Union, etc. I find these together way more plausible then your supposed USA hegemony.

> USAs influence over the Argentinian dictatorship just before the invasion is no secret.

That doesn't imply that the US had any hegemony or control over Argentina.

> Don’t you think the UN deceleration of human rights helped with minimizing conflicts, the rise of democracy, the end of imperialism, decolonization, demilitarization, buildup of infrastructure, the European Union, etc.

Why did all of these things happen in the first place? American hegemony. You can tell because Europe tried half of the things on that list after WWI but they didn't work.

> Why did all of these things happen in the first place? American hegemony.

This is a theory, not a really good one, but lets take it at face value, starting with the end of imperialism. Given that USA continued it’s imperialism after WWII while WWI is the beginning of the end of imperialism for Europe. The British empire stopped existing in 1998, but I’d say the end of British rule over India in 1947 was the peak for the end of European imperialism. This had nothing to do with USA.

Decolonization: This didn’t happen until the 60s and only after fierce resistance from indigenous people withing the colonies. While the USA held a powerful seat the UN that called for decolonization, the fact that USA held its colonies (e.g. Guam and American Samoa), and that it took fierce colonial wars before liberation, I say indigenous resistance had way more weight than any USA influence of the matter. Portugal didn’t actually relinquish their colonies until their dictatorship fell in a socialist revolution in 1974.

Rise of democracies: Again did not follow USA occupations. Staying within Portugal, The Carnation Revolution would certainly be the first time the USA backed left leaning armed forces against a right wing dictator. And we know they didn’t, USA stayed out of that one. Greece on the other hand didn’t became a dictatorship until after it had joined NATO. Now this dictatorship was no friend of the USA, but that only further proves how little USA hegemony had in preventing these dictatorships and in the rise of democracy. I would actually give the EU more credit here. Speaking of which,

the EU: I honestly don’t know how you can give USA hegemony credit for this. It started as a free trade agreement, USA didn’t start doing anything similar until 1994 with NAFTA. Stating USA hegemony here is frankly a little insulting, insinuating that Europeans cannot take autonomous decisions regarding their own affairs.

The only think we can definitely thank the Americans for is demilitarization and the initial buildup of infrastructure.

But I think you get the point here. Attributing all of these to USA hegemony is a very simplistic—and frankly wrong—view of history. Honestly at this point I can’t tell what you consider hegemony, if USA had hegemony over Europe since 1945, how did it not have hegemony over Argentina during the dictatorship?

> The British empire stopped existing in 1998, but I’d say the end of British rule over India in 1947 was the peak for the end of European imperialism. This had nothing to do with USA.

Decolonization, including the dismantlement of the British Empire, was an explicit policy goals of the US dating all the way back to at least WWII. One of the signature examples of this orientation—and the first clear assertion of American hegemony even over Britain—was the Suez crisis.

> Rise of democracies: Again did not follow USA occupations.

The democratic governments of West Germany, Italy, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, and Austria were effectively installed by the US and UK at the end of the Second World War. Without American involvement, none of these countries would have become democratic; they would have either remained fascist or become communist.

(This was not the case for e.g. Argentina, Turkey, or Portugal.)

> the EU: I honestly don’t know how you can give USA hegemony credit for this.

The core concept of the EU is the goal of establishing a “United States of Europe”. In other words, it is an attempt to emulate Europe’s hegemon, and it arose almost immediately after Western European democracy was installed by the Allies at the end of WWII.

The invasion of Ukraine was about the breakdown of multipolarity and loss of Russian strength, not the growth of Russian strength.

This is obvious if you answer the following questions:

1) Was Russian influence and power in Ukraine increasing or decreasing prior to the invasion?

2) Was Russian economic and military power increasing or decreasing in Europe prior to the war?

3) Is Russia stronger or weaker relative to NATO than the USSR was?

I dont see how you can claim US and NATO power is in decline and was challenged more by Russia in 2022 than it was in the 20th century.

To the contrary, the war in Ukraine is the result of growing hegemony in Europe, as hegemony expands outward and more Nations fall into the orbit of the US. Russia is fighting to preserve it's sphere of influence and prevent further collapse of its influence.

I'm not saying that makes Russia a 'good guy", but I don't think there is any other way to interpret the shifting power balance leading up to the war.

Question is though did Russia have to choose to be anti-west?

Putin has been but Russia could have gone a different route rather than keep Putin in power all these years.

Russia really doesn't win keeping itself xenophobic of the West.

Japanese, Korean, & German culture are all very popular here in American entertainment today.

Russia could have continued to preserve, celebrate, and expand her culture around the world through Western entertainment and alliances.

Instead out of fear to preserve it Russia has become isolated from people that otherwise would have happily bought her stuff.

So that is a completely different question than if Russian global power and influence was rising prior to the war, which I was arguing against.

It is possible that Russia could have gone a different way.

Japan, Korea, and Germany all gave up significant autonomy by falling into the US alliance, but also reaped significant rewards.

I think it is debatable if the west would want Russia in alliance.

I think the really interesting question is what a country like Russia or China would have to give up to be on good terms with the US.

For one, I think they would have to give up any ability to militarily defend themselves against the US. They would also probably have to give up any allies that the US doesn't approve of. Last, they would probably have to share control over any countries are territories currently in their sphere of influence with the West.

Do you think hegemonic mono-culture mono-ideal is preferable to a multi-polar world of competing ideas and systems? If so, how do you prevent the hegemon from transmutating to the very thing we feared in the first place?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pax_Romana

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pax_Americana

That doesn’t excuse the crimes committed, nor does it negate the need to control the MIC. The Vietnam and Iraq wars should never have happened, among many other things. We shouldn’t have PMCs running about committing crimes, either.

Edit: nor does any of what you’ve said negate the sentiment Eisenhower was advocating, which relates directly back to the Vietnam and Iraq wars. Having power and wielding it responsibly are not the same.

What makes the justification for the Korean War different from Vietnam?

I think the Vietnam War was more obviously neocolonial.

How? Korea was a Japanese colony from 1901-1945.

Why would we not argue that the Korean War was an attempt by Koreans aligned with Japan to maintain their colony?

Because that would be false on its face. I'm sorry that you have no idea what you're talking about? The Korean war began when the communists invaded from the north, equipped and trained by the Soviets. It continued until the communists by then actually from China not North Korea, stopped trying.

At no point during the entire Korean War was there a Japanese colony anywhere on the Korean peninsula. Or, for that matter, anywhere on earth.

If you're arguing the South Korean government whose sovereignty the UN went to war to defend, was somehow "aligned" with their former occupier Japan which was itself then occupied by the US after its unconditional surrender to end WW2... sorry, you're just woefully ill informed.

There are dozens of good books on this topic.

Interesting, so what you're saying is after the Japanese lost their Korean colony, the country was split into two, then communist aggression from the North invaded the South which resulted in foreign powers stepping into defend the Southern half of the country.

Sounds pretty similar to France losing their Vietnamese colony, and the country being split into two, and then a foreign power coming in to defend the southern half of the country.

So it looks like we agree?

As far as I know the US backed the French and took over immediately as soon as they were kicked out. Though Korea and Japan were analogous, even though the US didn't actually support the Japanese occupation, it continued it.

I imagine the Koreans welcomed the US, that would be an important factor.

One important difference is that the Korean war was a resolution of the United Nations Security Council, conducted under the flag of the United Nations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Security_Counci...

well that's convenient

Killing people with drones based on metadata, in foreign countries, without fair trial, is extremely immoral. With every killed father you'll make several more enemies.

"In 2016, America dropped at least 26,171 bombs authorized by President Barack Obama. This means that every day in 2016, the US military blasted combatants or civilians overseas with 72 bombs; that’s three bombs every hour, 24 hours a day" https://old.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/x332z...

Black sites, extraordinary renditions, torturing people in third countries ... that's deterrence?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_United_States_mili... (Read it all, I dare you)

Imagine foreign power's drones over your own country, over your city. Imagine hearing exploding homes in your town, maybe few homes away. Imagine unmarked millitary men going through your street and home with their rifles scaring your children. Imagine that your children would refuse to play outside when it isn't cloudy, because they're afraid of blue skies. You cannot, can you? Would you feel safe and glad?

Imagine foreign powers overturning your democraticaly elected leaders and instead putting in their puppets, all for profit again, of course.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_CIA_controversies

I'll now let Carl Sagan talk on the topic:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/BYdxFKTYJIQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWPFmdAWRZ0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6KcoPODwvW4

And Charlie Chaplin:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8HdOHrc3OQ

With 5+millions of millitary contractors and many more employees, many of them here, maybe this quote will fit.

"It Is Difficult to Get a Man to Understand Something When His Salary Depends Upon His Not Understanding It"

One thing to consider about your anecdotal encounters with people of those countries is that they were probably in your country. They were probably emigres. If you spoke to people within those countries who are happy with their country, the sentiment would probably be quite different.

Immigration, especially to us, is the best thing a typical person in these countries could do from quality of life perspective, and what most talented usually do. So selection bias here is based mostly on ability and intelligence, not political opinion.

What an embarrassingly privileged comment. The US funds terror around the world for their own benefit. Millions die because of the actions of the US or are effectively enslaved for the benefit of US capitalists to sell overpriced products to wealthy consumers such as yourself. The CIA regularly destabilizes 3rd world countries for the benefit of US corporations (see United fruit company and Guatemala). To suggest the world is a “peaceful” place simply because you live in a country that has never seen war in its homeland during your lifetime is ludicrous especially given the wars the US has started and participated in. Frankly this comment reeks of propaganda, I wouldn’t be surprised if you worked for the fed or a company profiting from the military industrial complex.

Please provide sources for the millions of deaths. Your post sounds like an anti-capitalist screed more than an argument against US military hegemony. Consider that alternative of world war and Russian or Chinese imperialism.

It's weird to set Chinese imperialism as the worst alternative, when the US is China's most prominent provider of technology, and first consumer of manufacturing and services. In exchange China is of course also the biggest holder of US dollar.

> China is of course also the biggest holder of US dollar.

Not any more, Japan is. China has been reducing it's dollar holdings at breakneck speed once it saw the US freeze dollars held by Russia.

https://www.ceicdata.com/en/china/holdings-of-us-treasury-se...

https://ticdata.treasury.gov/Publish/mfh.txt

https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/

> Over 937,000 people have died in the post-9/11 wars due to direct war violence, and several times as many due to the reverberating effects of war

> An estimated 3.6-3.7 million people have died indirectly in post-9/11 war zones, bringing the total death toll to at least 4.5-4.6 million and counting.

>mostly peaceful world

Except it hasn't been. Pinker's "long peace" theory with respect to global conflict is bad statistics - 20th-21st century under US military hegemony had a comparable if not higher number of conflicts, see Max Roser’s work documenting global conflicts over the past 600 years. What has changed is that war now is generally shorter and less deadly especially towards combatants, but that's more reflective of the pace of modern war enabled by modern weapons. High intensity wars don't last for 20+ years anymore because you can pretty much destroy nations in 1-5, and belligerents are quicker to exhaust and forced to settle. In aggregate war fatalities is down, but not # of conflicts. US hegemony didn't stop USSR and RU from warring in their periphery, nor PRC border skirmishes pre 90s when US had vast more naval power asymmetry. When countries want to fight for their interests, especially regional, they still do. His conjectures on QoL indicators around the world are improving, and we can credit some of that to US/western innovation, but it’s also a byproduct of technology disseminating as societies develop.

As for the opinion of your colleagues, consider some sort of self-selection bias happening - I've not met many from PRC that don't think China needs better military and regional hegemony to forward her interests the same way US does hers, especially post Belgrade embassy bombing in 99 by US/NATO. And frankly even among PRC diasporas, most people I know except very liberal types are increasingly unabashedly pro PRC military power - they’re just too polite to say so. See how PRC students in the west generally become more pro China the more they’re exposed to western society. Many are smart enough to not voice "objectionable" opinions.I can't speak for RUs.

Ultimately, US military dominance is good for US+LIO interests, but hard to extrapolate anything more. IMO multipolarity will increase the chance of "smaller" conflicts as poles assert their own interests for sure, but it's going to be around the baseline of conflicts that's consistently been simmering throughout history. The fear is increasing large-scale conflict between poles/blocks - ending the cyclic gap between major wars among major powers - but that's what happens when declining hegemon pushes their interests to the exclusion of others too intensely for too long.

> I've yet to meet a Chinese or Russian colleague who thinks it would be better if China or Russia

lmao the ones who live in america? yeah, of course. they don't want to get deported.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Initiative

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wen_Ho_Lee <-- taiwanese lolol

Wen Ho Lee was a PRC spy and was caught exfiltrating secrets. Hardly a reasonable example of unjust persecution.

Are you serious? No US person seriously believes we will deport a Chinese national on a legitimate visa for their political views. Can you point to a single example of this happening?

Isn’t that exactly what happened to Emma Goldman and Charles Chaplin?

Were they Chinese nationals?

you know, it's funny, the only person caught up by the china initiative was a white guy too.

There are famous cases of USA deporting a Polish-Lithuanian Jew and a British Actor because of their political views. Is there a reason to believe they wouldn’t deport a Chinese national for the same reason? Particularly since “having been a member of the Communist party” (a requirement for any Chinese citizen seeking a job in the public sector) is a question they ask before issuing a green card.

> Wen Ho Lee was a PRC spy and was caught exfiltrating secrets.

then why wasn't he convicted of it? LOL why is he walking around free, and with a bunch of money he won from a civil suit filed against the government?

who's incompetent here, the FBI, the DOJ, or the courts? how can we assure that every east asian accused of espionage is convicted?

it's a shame you aren't a federal judge, then no spy would ever get away.

A unipolar world order is a local optimum by its very nature. Regardless of who's in charge, conflict arises from parties thinking they have a chance to secure leverage against another power via violence. If there's a sole power with an overwhelming military advantage against their next-largest competitor, people aren't going to go off and die in hopeless wars. Russia and China's actions can't be separated from the fact that their existence in anything like their present form is a challenge to the US and its sphere of influence.

Even then, the US government and economy is organized in ways that make it disturb the trivial-to-maintain peace its position as hegemon affords it(see Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and various covert operations that succeeded before escalating to direct intervention) to secure itself minor advantages or even for entirely domestic reasons.

If you account at all for the inherent advantages of a unipolar world, the US's record is shockingly poor. I'm fine with rolling the dice on multipolarity in hopes of a less irrational hegemon emerging.

A multi-polarity framed discussion is fundamentally a might makes right framed discussion rather than a justice framed discussion.

The problem is that multipolarity is often meant to mean spheres of influence (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphere_of_influence). Which is just imperialism by another name.

I agree that the power the US can exercise should be checked by other powers (the desired "benefit" of multi polarity), but I also think the idea of promoting "rule of law" needs to be the frame of conversation.

"What pole of power do you belong to" is a very different question than "what is justice?"

> If you account at all for the inherent advantages of a unipolar world, the US's record is shockingly poor.

I think this statement isn't very well thought out or at least not well founded or self evident.

It's also important to understand that peace is not the absence of physical violence, but the presence of justice. Justice sometimes cannot be achieved without a fight.

> disturb the trivial-to-maintain peace

The "peace" between African slaves and American plantation owners was probably fairly easy to maintain. That doesn't make it a good "peace".

China is exercising coercive power over Taiwan. Are they at peace?

> If you account at all for the inherent advantages of a unipolar world, the US's record is shockingly poor. I'm fine with rolling the dice on multipolarity in hopes of a less irrational hegemon emerging.

Who?

If you look at past hegemons—Rome, the Mongols, Britain—the US has the best record of them all. And, incidentally, if you look at past periods of multipolarity, you get a series of progressively more deadly and destructive wars.

At no point in history was Rome, the Mongols, or Britain a global hegemon or even extant in a unipolar world.

The entire existence of the Roman republic and empire was bookended by China, for example, and Rome was almost continuously at war with almost all of its neighbors. Some of whom repeatedly beat them and eventually definitely outlasted Rome.

The Mongols defeated the vast majority of entities they went to war with, but not all. This is the closest you'll come to your thesis, as it is probably true that no army or civilization existed from the Pacific to Atlantic oceans capable of defeating the Mongol empire at peak. It is alt history to debate what might have happened had they pushed to Paris etc. They didn't bother. They easily could have, in my opinion, but had other priorities in Asia.

However, the Mongols were definitively repulsed in the Middle East and generally speaking were not going to conquer Egypt or Africa. They didn't even try to hold Jerusalem (though interesting quirk of history they took it, once). The Mongols were also arguably repulsed by India, though that's complicated by their own factionalism (they arguably defeated themselves in a civil war at the border of India).

It is probably true that the Mongols occupied any territory they chose to, at the peak of their power. However, they often chose not to, either because they acknowledged the impossibility of doing so, or the complex multipolar reality within and surrounding their empire required their presence elsewhere to maintain power. So that is also not a hegemon, but is probably the most terrifying and powerful empire in history. Certainly the only one to execute all civilians in conquered cities, with knives, in one day. Repeatedly. For sure the Mongols out-murdered anybody ever until Stalin and Mao. But this is not so much unipolar as systemic genocide. The Mongols literally used genocide not as an end but a means, and killed millions to cause their next enemy to surrender without fighting. They called this "division" where all surrending civilian populations were divided by the number of Mongol executioners present that one day. And they did this routinely. Nothing like this ever happened before in recorded history, or ever since. Not at that scale and for that duration (centuries). For perspective, the Mongols leased Russia to the conquered Russians for longer than the US has existed.

Britain, at no point in its entire history from Roman withdrawal to today, has ever been a global hegemon. They were never even dominant or unipolar. Rather continuously struggling with France, Germany, Spain, and at times the Dutch; nevermind England struggling to first conquer and then rule their own immediate neighbors in the British Isles (Ireland, Wales, Scotland etc). Looking globally, it is true that at times Britain had economic superiority but these eras are measured in decades or at best generations and never approach hegemony or unipolarity on any one continent nevermind all. At or near the zenith of their power, they lose repeatedly. Sometimes to mere colonial farmers. If you pick any random decade for the last 500 years, we can find a significant military struggle for Britain ongoing. Many victories yes. But many loses too, and constant struggle. That is not hegemony.

The fact is the species has been at war with itself continuously for millennia. That was surely happening before we had kingdoms and nation states, too, when the violence had other names. But it was still war.

There is no oversimplifiable theory of war. It persists.

Even the USA and other nuclear powers are obviously still today in a persistent state of mutual deterrence. While the many wars since 1945 have been horrible by any definition, the fact is they pale in comparison to the mass lethality of WW1 and WW2 and we should all be thankful for the relative peace dividend created by nuclear deterrence.

We experienced COVID as ghastly and it was, killing perhaps 1% of all humans infected? WW2 killed 6%. That could have kept happening every generation since. The reason it didn't is #1 the US prevented that from happening, globally, at considerable expenses; and #2 restrained itself, generally speaking, from occupying other countries. Fighting, yes. Conquering and keeping, no.

In this regard, agree with you the US has the best record. For all its struggles and imperfections and systemic issues, nobody has ever done better.

But for the US, we would all be slaves of somebody right now. Either the "Third Reich" or Imperial Japan, or Russian and/or Chinese autocracy pretending to be communism. Even the patriots born there were, slaves to obviously wrong ideas and obviously evil governments. This is easily proven by trying to count the tens of millions of corpses they created. Try. The numbers get over 100M just in the last century, and the unknowable "rounding" errors and margin of error of the estimates is itself horrific and evil. When we're not sure whether Russia or China killed 45 million or 62 million of its own citizens by policy, this is when you should just stop and rethink saying nonsense like the "US's record is shockingly poor." Compared to what?

> At no point in history was Rome, the Mongols, or Britain a global hegemon or even extant in a unipolar world.

I think I actually agree with you. Of course, according to the standards you’re setting, neither is the US. The British were fighting some sort of war every decade of the height of their empire, but so has the US. The Mongols never managed to dominate Africa; neither did we (not even to the point of preventing the bloody Congo Wars of the 1990’s).

The reason I brought up the other hegemons is that they managed to significantly reduce the amount of war inside their own empires. That’s the closest analogy to what the US has done.

> The reason it didn't is #1 the US prevented that from happening, globally, at considerable expenses; and #2 restrained itself, generally speaking, from occupying other countries. Fighting, yes. Conquering and keeping, no.

We do still have troops in Germany, Italy, Japan, and South Korea, of course. And we have promised to help defend these countries from attack. If you wanted to be melodramatic about it, you could call it a sort of empire. But I think we might agree that it’s not quite fair to say that.

> For sure the Mongols out-murdered anybody ever until Stalin and Mao

> When we're not sure whether Russia or China killed 45 million or 62 million of its own citizens by policy

It is funny how these numbers keep inflating, and also how these historical counts always omit King Leopold’s II massacre in Congo (as well as the dozens of millions killed in other horrors of European colonialism). In fact stating that “But for the US, we would all be slaves of somebody right now” is a gross omittance of the millions of humans born as slaves to European colonialism well into the 1960s (and arguably persisting today if you count neo-liberalism and neo-colonies).

> There is no oversimplifiable theory of war. It persists.

> We should all be thankful for the relative peace dividend created by nuclear deterrence.

If there is no oversimplifiable theory of war, why is there an oversimplifiable theory of peace? There is no historical consensus around nuclear deterrence, and there are plenty of alternative theories. Those include rise in democracy, global trade, proliferation of human rights, the United Nations and other global institutes and agreements, and yes, decolonization.

We even have examples of nuclear deterrence failing to prevent conflict. Both India and Pakistan are nuclear powers, yet constantly at conflict with each other. Israel’s nuclear armament hasn’t prevented Palestinian resistance, and many former colonies of Britain and France fought wars for their liberation despite them being nuclear powers. Argentina even invaded Britain’s territory at one point. In fact looking at history, it seems having nuclear weapons only empowers countries to start conflicts outside of their own territory. Case in point, South Africa became a lot more peaceful country after their nuclear disarmament (although there are probably many more reasons for this).

Ironically, China has probably benefited from US hegemony more than any other major country. They are highly dependent on imports of food, fertilizer, energy, and raw materials. The US Navy has kept their sea lines of communication open for free since the end of WW2. Imagine a scenario where the US pulls back and another country like, let's say, India decided to close down China's trade routes. China would be in an economic crisis within months. China is now working to build up a blue water navy and they have other ways to retaliate against threats, but still they are in a very precarious strategic position.

Not that I’d ever like to see it, but I’m really curious what would happen in a conflict with China.

I’m half inclined to believe the US populace would revolt before any meaningful military confrontation because all their stuff is made in China.

No more toilet paper, no more TV, no more phone. No more… everything! Kind of wonder how much military components are sourced/built in China.

These are two nations with H bombs and ICBMs. Lack of new iPhones would never even cross our minds. By the time the populace had formed an opinion it would likely be too late.

Any war would be conventional for that exact reason.

That’s the exact opposite of what every military in the world has thought for the last 70 years. If you were China, you would not wait for the American military to dominate yours. If you were the US, you would know this, and not wait for them to launch their nukes at your silos.

Thank you for bringing a voice of reason to this discussion. Far too many pilloried the US over the decades for unjust wars. Perhaps there are some, like Vietnam, Iraq, etc, but a far worse outcome would be to have the global security situation be controlled by China and Russia. We know what happens when non-democratically elected leaders rise to global power and decide to exert their will, and it is not pretty (world wars, basically).

The US military industrial complex is incredibly complex and somewhat corrupt - it is a revolving door between industry and government, but the alternative is far worse and leads to genocide on a scale unimaginable since WW2.

I don't think the only alternative is "replace the US with a different (evil) power". An alternative is that the UN plays more of a policing role and we move away from power and justice being applied unilaterally and capriciously. In no way am I suggesting that this is an easy thing to do, or even neccessarily to be desired, but the idea that the world being run by China-Russia is the only alternative to US hegemony is a false dichotomy.

Is your sample of Chinese and Russians limited to those who have had reason to leave their homes and move to the US? Because if it is, I suspect there's an element of selection bias there.

For sake of argument let's say the US military is a fine institution & let's say corporations making a profit supporting it is fine.

But my god, the inefficiency & fleecing being done by corporations is ghastly. It's an absurd detriment that the system is robustly categorically fucked, incapable of getting effective help to aid/drive/support the cause. The US taxpayer pays out the nose, when we could be bettering ourselves greatly, because of this systematic incompetence that we suffer.

I don't see your comment as replying to anything whatsoever topical here. You've paved over concerns with jingoism. We can debate that jingoism, but - at a minimum - I don't feel like America should suffer itself to keep getting fleeced by an ineffective & ghastly expensive defense industry. We could do this without it being such a racket.

As an Indian, I can tell you this is how everyone thinks about their country. Everybody thinks they stand for for good, others stand for evil. And by that definition their order must be spread in the world. And for that they are ok with them having overwhelming military power, and they are vehemently against others having it.

Its just how it is.

It's a bit sad to see the comment section here fighting about left/right, Democrat/Republican, and whose fault this mess is instead of focusing on the military-industrial complex.

"I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend." Faramir, "The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers"

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron." Eisenhower

Totally fair, and yet, the incidental fruits of WW2 such as radar, powerful long-range aircraft, all kinds of advances in electronics, radio communications, atomic energy etc. led to 60 years of incredible subsequent technological progress and economic development that without any question raised enormous numbers of people out of starvation, abject poverty and misery.

I recommend checking out the fantastic, "The Rise and Fall of American Growth". The book provides very strong evidence that the era of American growth which produced our modern standard of living starts in 1870 and actually ends in 1940, though there was also an era of less important but still strong growth from 1940-1970.

Furthermore, this is a bit of a counterfactual as we don't actually know the trajectory of technology without the war. Some thing we know for certain though, mass electrification and public health were well underway before the war and continued through it. These being probably the two most important developments that improved productivity and the quality of life for most people.

Its crazy how little this country has really changed since 1970, when you remove the superficial fluff like iphones or flat screen tv. Take a neighborhood in socal. It might be full of dingbat apartments. 50 years ago in 1973 it probably looked exactly the same since thats when those apartments where built. Go back another 50 years though, and you have a former spanish ranchero with cattle, oil derricks, or fruit orchards depending on what block of southern californian suburbia you are considering. The world was growing and changing rapidly then basically stalled out. much more restrictive zoning separating degrees of use (e.g. apartment versus a home) versus type of use (residential vs industrial) came in to replace redlining in effort to limit movement of the working poor into certain neighborhoods so as not to affect real estate valuations, and now we have our world today, full of 50+ year old apartments and 70+ year old single story "starter" californian homes going for over $1000 a square foot thanks to our inability to add more housing to an in demand area.

Yeah. I think that a lot of these changes after 1940 are much more to do with socio/political factors than growth. By 1940 you have the GDP to support a middle class. It's the collective experience of the Great Depression, WWII and the rheotric of the New Deal that produce a populace that just wouldn't put up with significant imbalance in the riches of society.

People who fought in and justified WWII contrasted it with WWI. The claim being that WWI was a war fought on behalf of the old world system. And WWII was a true war for Democracy. I think it would've been very hard after that kind of mobilization, sacrifice and rhetoric to re-instute the Gilded Age ethos of a system which the rules of the game were sacred about the outcomes.

In this way American Democracy is born of the FDR era. I don't mean this in the narrow sense of the size of the electorate though that is important. At every level, America's systems Democratized. From the way the Supreme Court interpreted the law, to the choices of industry in what to produce, to how the rewards of production were distributed. There was a broad transition from the notion that institutions existed to maintain rules towards a notion that these institutions in their largest sense needed to serve the people.

I think a lot of what has happened since 1970 is a transition back to a way of looking at the world through the pre-democratic lense. The biggest difference being that now there is a plurality which is the upper half of the middle class who have some similar interests to the wealthy in protecting their wealth.

>I think a lot of what has happened since 1970 is a transition back to a way of looking at the world through the pre-democratic lense. The biggest difference being that now there is a plurality which is the upper half of the middle class who have some similar interests to the wealthy in protecting their wealth.

I agree although I believe that the upper middle class and the capital class still don't actually have similar interests if you think about things that are actually in the upper middle class's best interest. In the context of a propaganda model (1), most people just aren't exposed to opinions that even align with their true economic interests. They are often exposed to opinions that actually kowtow the economic status quo that benefits the existing elite establishment more than anything. Mass media has been able to stratify labor: it has divided the working poor among right and left on cultural considerations versus unifying it through economic arguments, and made the white collar class which still has to sell their labor for wages believe they are no longer of the working class, and have little need to organize themselves. Labor as a unified movement has been divided and effectively conquered. A sad state of affairs.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_model

The people who got into power in the 70s basically still haven't left. Plenty of our politicians were born before the civil rights act.

I think its even more insidious than that. The political party machine on both the GOP and Dem side control what candidates are even put in front of us. Populist antiestablishmentism doesn't get you far because both the media and the political party itself are working against you. So you will still see younger politicians who hold these opinions in positions of power, because these are the opinions of the elite more than anything generational, and these are the candidates who receive the most support and most air time in front of voters.

Yes. I got very involved in my local district party a few years back. Probably the most powerful and effective organ of this party was its endorsements committee. I found it staggeringly depressing that round after round of endorsements went to exactly the same kinds of people: small business owners, cops, nurses, teachers and prosecutors. Basically, if you were for the system, you got in. Almost always the endorsement went to small business owners. Those endorsed almost always won the primary because they were immediately supported by party affiliated groups. The endoresment committee passed up social workers, corrections officers and public defenders. I remember one lady who worked in the sheriffs office for like 10 years came to talk about how things actually worked and what needed to change. She spoke clearly about the issue in the office, not polemical at all. Committee was a hard NO on her.

A lot of that is from world governments adopting centrally planned economic and scientific goals. We could do this whenever. We don't need a war for it. Its just our leaders favor things like rugged individualism and privatizing what should be public works instead today, probably because that leads to outsized benefits to certain connected individuals.

Sure, we could adopt centrally planned goals and the will to carry them out (the goals are much easier than the carrying them out), but war, cold or hot seems to be just about the only means to generate that will.

In some sense that's okay. We shouldn't bypass democratic means easily. It's similar to how democratic societies have "state of emergency" powers and just as dangerous, and also why armed pacifism should be a good default for democratic society. You should not cause war, but if someone brings war to your door, you have a duty to your people to protect them and prevent occupation.

Important in this ideology is that flying a boeing into a building and killing 3000 people is not bringing war to your doorstep.

The thing that is bad about democracy as we experience it today, is that while in theory you get an equal choice at the ballot between different options, the sources of information you have to rely on to form an opinion to vote a certain way are not providing information on options at equivocal levels, or in an unbiased manner. It begs the question, is this really your vote, or did someone successfully convince you to vote in their interests thinking they are your own? Considering the massive incentives behind the ability to control voting in a democratic country, it should be expected various interests are working tirelessly to influence your voting behavior. It makes you wonder if the end product would be very different whether we bothered with the performance of elections or not. Certainly at least people believe they chose this government having cast the vote, so maybe that's the benefit of maintaining the system for elites: not to have the public shape government, but to have the public believe they have shaped government, and don't need to try and shape it through other means that might disrupt the order of things.

To add to the Eisenhower quote - I highly recommend watching his 1961 Farewell Address, where the term "military–industrial complex" was first used: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyBNmecVtdU

Schools, homes, power plants etc are pretty meaningless if they're stolen or destroyed by a foreign power. I understand there's a balance to be made but spending on national defense is necessary. The money spent on the deadbolt on my front door could have bought me lunch but I still bought the deadbolt.

No one will disagree with that. (Well, I guess there is Defund the Police...)

There are, however, plenty of people who say with a straight face wAr Is GoOd FoR tHe EcOnOmY

It's interesting to observe people repeat the "war is racket" line while also supporting wars because "their" side is allegedly the virtuous one (and anyone pointing this out is peddling "propaganda" of "the enemy" in the totally virtuous war).

Wars of defense are entirely different in my opinion.

Those are not up for debate, as the US has never been properly attacked, as far as I know. (The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor might be an exception, but that wasn't the US mainland, though the US attack on Japan did involve the Japanese mainland, so this probably doesn't count as a purely defensive war.)

Are you really going to suggest an attack that killed 2,403 Americans, sunk five U.S. battleships & damaged 4 others ships, and destroyed 188 aircraft, is not a proper attack? because it wasn't on the "mainland?"

An attack made with the explicit purpose to prevent the US from putting up a fight as Japan took internationally recognized US territory.

The point is that the US war against Japan wasn't a purely defensive war.

But it absolutely was, and the idea that an attack isn’t an attack and responding to it isn’t defense if it isn't on the “mainland” is ludicrous. (Also, Japan attacked the US mainland during WWII, and did so before any US attacks on Japan proper, so you’ll need to move the goalposts farther.)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombardment_of_Ellwood

Of course one can argue about the semantics of "defensive war", but as far as I understand, there was basically zero chance Japan would have conquered the US, or any American territory for an extended period of time, without the US invading Japan. So in this sense the war wasn't purely defensive. It was nothing remotely like the defensive war of France against Germany during WW2.

> > so you’ll need to move the goalposts farther.

> […] there was basically zero chance Japan would have conquered the US, or any American territory for an extended period of time, without the US invading Japan. So in this sense the war wasn’t purely defensive.

War is only defensive if the attacker is likely to conquer and hold territory for an extended period of time? Well, there go the goalposts as expected, though I could not have predicted that that was where they would go.

The OP talked about "defensive wars". If X tries to steal Y's pocket, and Y prevents X from stealing it, and additionally gives X a kick in the ass, then that might be justified, but it's not just an act of self-defense.

Japan stole quite a bit, from quite a few people, in the Pacific theater. The war doesn't end when the US gets back what was stolen - it ends when all of its allies get back, what was stolen.

That's hardly a universal truth. Nations, the US included, don't wait until War every time another country is wronged. They don't continue until every wrong has been righted. It is far from clear that the us would have entered the Pacific War simply to to defend other countries, even if us strategists wanted to.

We aren't arguing universal truths. This was a fought war with context. No claim of universal truth was made.

> They don't continue until every wrong has been righted. It is far from clear that the us would have entered the Pacific War simply to to defend other countries, even if us strategists wanted to.

Once the US entered the war and thus entered into deeper agreements with allies it was inevitable. The war was never ending once the US righted its own wrongs. It made promises to allies.

If that was your point, I agree. War can have multiple objectives. Depending on how things started and played out, they could have been different, which was my primary point.

If Japan had not attacked Peral harbor, it is possible that the US objectives could have been different.

That not really how it works when nations go to war.

Once hostilities start, you need either complete submission or a high degree of trust to stop them. This is because there is a large downside risk to stopping prematurely.

By way of analogy, if you are in a fist fight and stop before you know the opponent is down, you may be knocked out yourself

I think the greater point is people can have a reasonable debate over that, since Americans were actually attacked on American soil. There is no reasonable debate over the other 100+ wars and invasions we've been involved in over the last two centuries where all of the hostilities, from start to finish, took place outside of our own borders.

The U.S. was "properly attacked" in the War of 1812, Pearl Harbor, and 9/11.

---

There are conspiracy theories (which I don't believe) that the latter two were known, but deliberately permitted to happen.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearl_Harbor_advance-knowledge...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9/11_conspiracy_theories

I'm not an expert on American history, but the War of 1812 was first declared by the US against the UK. It doesn't sound like a purely defensive matter. 9/11 was a terrorist attack which is not something one could fight a defensive war against.

Yes, the US declared war first. (After Britain seized American ships.)

The US was "properly attacked" -- and capital burned -- though whether they were attacked first is a matter of debate.

Written by one of the very few (only?) people to have received two Medals of Honor. Dude knew a thing or two about war.

He claimed also to have been approached to be installed as dictator of the US. He immediately exposed the plot.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot

The real question is: if it's true, what do you think those who tried learned from it? Did they find a way to achieve their goal without any outright observable changes from the public's perspective?

It sure puts the 60s in a new light.

Yes, mostly through the ideas of Edward Bernays and Ivy Lee.

Nobody went to jail, the united states is primarily run by business interests since the 80s, and facism is alive and well in the states. It sounds to me like they got exactly what they wanted, just had to be patient.

> the united states is primarily run by business interests since the 80s

The 1880s.

Arguably the revolution was heavily motivated by business interests. Arguably.

The 1780s.

And earlier, but then it was Britain being run by business interests, and the main reason for the US becoming independent was conflict between local and remote business interests. (Particularly, North American interests and regulation serving the East India Company.)

Dictator of the US. That's one of the weirdest things I have ever heard. But I know once upon a time that word had no negative connotation. Just like fascism after all.

Not really Trump was planning the same thing a few years ago.

Hopefully the Republicans choose an adult this time who will not try that again but that is doubtful given the choices so far.

The two front runners are Trump again or wannabe Theocratic Dictator. There's no hope.

FDR was a borderline dictator, so this is ironic.

Even if he was, he clearly represented the national/public interest. These guys wanted an entirely different flavor of dictator.

yeah no doubt, he was popular, mostly because of great depression social programs and war ... but he also expanded executive power and ultimately led us on a path to the welfare state status we're at today.

Calling the modern USA a welfare state is laughable.

It is remarkable that the totally ahistorical narrative of "FDR ruined the US (economy), Reagan saved it" is still popular outside of the elite whom it benefits. Propaganda works.

"Welfare queen" stereotypes are still alive and well on the Right, despite there NEVER BEING A WELFARE QUEEN. It was a complete fabrication. Maybe they haven't had a great grip on reality for quite some time, or at least a willingness to ignore it.

> led us on a path to the welfare state

You may be interested in this pamphlet written by founding father Thomas Paine:

https://www.ssa.gov/history/tpaine3.html

I wasn't aware of this paper, thank you for sharing. Paine is an interesting character and mused on alot of subjects. Way more utopian in his ideas compared to his peers at the time. Obsessed with Revolution. Wouldn't say economics was his strength.

On the contrary, it seems to me that his reasoning about taxation - that it is unjust to coerce via force from the living and thus infinitely preferable to collect from the dead since they no longer need it, whereas the elderly and young do - to be unmatched in halls of power to this day.

And its not unjust for the state to seize inheritance in the name of equity? I think there are limits ... I'd like to give my children my wealth when I pass, but I am a modest person, not Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos. We pay tax on our income, things we buy, our property, our investments, etc - now we must fork over what is left to the state to divvy out? There's a reason only 6 people attended Paine's funeral - he was advocating for a Peoples Monarchy.

Mr. Paine answers all your concerns in his wonderfully well thought-out pamphlet. If more people read it, the world would be a better place. Here's the full text: http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/Paine1795.pdf

> ultimately led us on a path to the welfare state status we're at today

That's one way of looking at it. Another way would be: he made enough basic concessions to the working class to prevent an outright socialist revolution. We weren't very far from it at that point in history.

The welfare state is a safeguard. Every modern state has social supports, just like every modern road system has traffic control devices and other safety measures. The alternative, as we've seen repeatedly, is to allow unchecked profit motive to grind the masses down to the point that they start erecting guillotines.

This is a very important point.

You mean, Corporate Welfare. The right often bemoan the welfare state for people, but love welfare for corporations.

The movie AMSTERDAM which came out recently touches on the Business Plot, and themes of sub rosa fascists and Nazis in the American ruling class more generally. Fairly worth a watch if you're interested in history viewed through this sort of parapolitical lens.

"I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it. Like all the members of the military profession, I never had a thought of my own until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of higher-ups. This is typical with everyone in the military service." - Major General Smedley Butler, USMC, 1933 speech

Smedley Butler, the writer of this book, latter in life claimed he was sought in a facist conspiracy to lead and overthown Franklin Roosevelt and assume power.

He claimed to had stayed in the conspiracy long enough to find out the identity of the conspirators (owners of big america monopolies), and denounced their plans to the president.

Note that he was possibly also asked to lead a coup against FDR [1] which was never substantiated, but rhymes with other stuff going on at that time such as that covered by "Invisible Hands: A narrative history of the influential businessmen who fought to roll back the New Deal." [2]

These conservative groups were also heavily involved with extremist anti-communist and oft times pro-fascist efforts, even involving the CIA such as that covered by "The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government" [3] that shows how Dulles & Co. supported these same rightist American elites' business interests. One of these was Fred Koch - ie father of the infamous Koch Brothers, who expanded his campaign massively to this day.

Eisenhower's "Military Industrial Complex" final speech [4] actually was made because he was heavily pressured by these same groups to both profit from fighting the Cold War and as well as encourage its anti-communism to remove the threat to their wealth.

Anti-communism in the West can largely be viewed as wealthy businessmen being scared of getting their assets seized and making a long-term scare campaign to get the public onboard. I'm not saying I like communism at all, but their reaction was often very bad for the American people and the world in general, and it continues in forms to this day.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot

[2] https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/2751831

[3] https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/24723229

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eisenhower%27s_farewell_addres...

Also a reminder that after the 1932 German presidential election [1], won by Paul von Hindenburg, 84 years old, with 53%, he appointed as chancellor one Adolf Hitler in 1933 following the advice of Franz von Papen, the conservative chancellor who served in 1932 and who would have rather see the Nazi Party in power than the Communist Party (KPD) led by Ernst Thälmann. In 1934 Hitler dissolves the presidency and calls himself Führer und Reichskanzler. Ernst Thälmann will be executed under Hitler's orders in 1944, after 11 years of solitary confinement. That's how the Nazis torture (Hans Litten [2], the lawyer who stood against Hitler in the 1931 Eden Dance Palace trial, was also tortured for 5 years, 1932-38).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1932_German_presidential_elect...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Litten

Of course capitalists prefer fascists, they will preserve the private property AND provide a subservient workforce.

Communists on the other hand will seize their means of production.

Fascism and capitalism are complementary, communism excludes both.

I agree with Butler's point but think he's missing the forest for the trees by focusing on territory acquisition and profits from production of war materials. The real point of war is that it's a way to farm us (the masses) for rapid development of promising new technologies, e.g. —

— US Civil war: Rifles, telegraph, railroads

— World War 1: Optics, radio communication, aviation, tracked vehicles

— World War 2: Computers, cryptography, atomic energy, radar and microwave communication, global logistics (fuels, containerization, etc)

— Cold War: SPAAAAACE

Shout out to @floydnoel for citing this yesterday in the F-35 Malpractice submission. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36056584

Very apt then, & what a crazy topic! How the government has payed a ton of money to develop & purchase jets it basically doesnt/can't own operate or repair. Right to repair/upgrade at the highest level. A racket!

>A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.

Just because people make fortunes from war doesn't mean that this is the essential characteristic of war. People make fortunes out of everything regardless of its cause.

War is a historic universal, and in fact it was most intense in pre-modern societies. Aboriginal cultures went to war not just for material reasons, but also for cultural reasons, ritualistic, and religious reasons. Long before we had organized commercial activity or opportunity for rackets we had warrior cultures.

The conspiratorial idea that war is largely driven by shadowy elites doesn't really hold up to anthropology. Far from it elites often even have to reign the flames of war in as populations whip themselves into a frenzy. The fact that war generally benefits few people, or sometimes even nobody at all doesn't imply that the majority of people weren't genuinely enthusiastic about it, although they'll typically deny it later.

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> Aboriginal cultures went to war not just for material reasons, but also for cultural reasons, ritualistic, and religious reasons.

Those are always just emotional excuses for gaining more power over resources. If you ignore incentives and take everyone's word at face value, then we're all saints and nary a sin has ever been committed in the name of some righteous cause. Mutual misunderstandings, is all, I suppose.

> People make fortunes out of everything regardless of its cause.

Author took care to mark the fortunes of companies at peacetime vs war time and noted that fortunes increased by an order of magnitude in some cases, as a result of war. If your net worth or social standing is due to jump one or two orders of magnitude as a result of a war or two, your subconscious mind will find more reasons than are rational to justify and support a war. You'll say it's to save your people. You'll say it's self-defense. You'll say it's necessary and just. You'll ignore any path to peace that might avert such a disaster, in particular if you never have to enter the fox holes yourself. That's the author's point.

Rackets aren't always some men conspiring to gain power or money or fame in smoke-filled parlor rooms. Often, they are emergent properties of incentivized systems.

> The conspiratorial idea that war is largely driven by shadowy elites doesn't really hold up to anthropology.

The only part that is wrong about that statement is the idea of the elites being 'shadowy'. No, they conduct their racket right out in the public eye. This isn't a particularly insightful phenomenon, by the way. Power always follows a power law of distribution. Of course the elites are primarily responsible for war. If the elites are ever against war, it just means that the incentives of the moment are temporarily more favorable for peace.

As a blatant example, let's take the American Civil War for example. Well over 90% of white southerners didn't own slaves. So why would they go to war and lay down their life, by the hundreds of thousands, if they stood to gain almost nothing? Most of these kids were raised on subsistence farms and didn't even know how to read. Of course, to those boys it was a cultural cause, defense of their homeland, states rights, yadi yadi. That's what they were sold. But the ones really pulling the strings in that war, were the rich Southern elites, who did in fact own many slaves and stood to lose a great deal over Lincoln's election.

Again, this is true of the vast majority of wars and battles in human history. Pick your time and place in history.

>cultural cause, defense of their homeland, states rights, yadi yadi.

It was explicitly to enforce the white mans superior position over the black man. That's what many confederate soldiers wrote about, that's what pastors gave sermons about, that's what the confederate government discussed in their legislative chambers. It wasn't even "states rights to own slaves", but explicitly that most of the southern population believed it was by god's will that the white man guide the black savage. They believed the north was morally wrong to elevate the black man as an equal. They were fighting to maintain their societal hierarchy.

Let's take a couple more recent examples then circle back to the Civil War. If I take your interpretation, which is a single side of a complex multi-dimensional conflict that involved millions of participants, and apply it to more recent conflicts: the American soldiers who fought in the War on Terror in Afghanistan and Iraq were totally just trying to dominate the middle eastern man. In fact, they owned cars and stood to gain from having access to cheap oil. Many people texted about it, saying we should keep the oil and bomb the whole lot. Sermons about the risks of Islam, etc were spoken, in Christian churches.

And if you choose to discard all the other sides of the die, that's all there is to the story. Those words were spoken at various times. People earnestly meant them on some level. But it's not the whole picture. It's a flat, 2D perspective. It's jingoistic in the opposite extreme.

But what we do know from the so-called "War on Terror" (itself a propagandistic title), is that elites went so far as to even make up stories about fake nuclear weapons in order to drum up support for that war. We actually caught them in this blatant lie, for once. None of those people, of course, have gone to jail for it, but I digress. If you think that every war in history isn't similarly manipulated to drum up popular support, you don't know the first thing about war or propaganda.

But we also know, from a certain perspective, that in the wake of 9/11, there was some popular sentiment to do something in retaliation for the innocent lives lost. Nevermind that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. It was pitched as an extension of the War on Terror. And having been swept up in that, I can tell you, I didn't disagree with it at first either. The war was supported on both sides of the political aisle.

As for the Civil War, can you find damning documents if you look for them? Of course. But that doesn't tell you the whole story. My own brother was drafted into the War on Terror, not because he wanted to, but because he was a member of the National Guard. Similarly, in the South and the North and most wars in history: young men don't get a choice, they get drafted. If they don't go to war, and are fully capable, they get arrested or executed. Desertion is also punishable by death. But there's also softer influences. Your own brother is going to war, your cousins, your neighbors and best friends. Why wouldn't you go with them, to have their back? They would have yours, wouldn't they? Reciprocation is another extremely important influence in human psychology.

We actually have recordings of Civil War veterans taken from the early 20th century, when they were still alive: https://youtu.be/swifvJEOF6s?t=160

"I didn't feel much interest in it, because I felt kindly towards the darkers, and they were kindly towards me, and towards my family."

"Now, attending school, in Spring of '61, when news came war was declared...there was a rally among 75-100 boys at school. Well right then, about half of our pupils, boys around 18, quit school...I wanted to go too! But my father said I was too young, but if the war lasted long enough, you may have an opportunity."

"Well, so I rested. War began. And I heard about it. And I heard about at Williamsburg, some of my classmates fell in the battle there, and I grieved about it because the boys I had been brought up with. They were a little older than I, and I felt sorry they were killed."

"Then in 1862, General Lee began to need more men, naturally. Although the biggest battles had not come yet...I a boy, of 16 1/2 years old, joined a cavalry company."

"It was a great curse on this country that we had slavery, and I thank God that I did not bring up my boys and girls under a system of slavery which I was brought up under."

You can see in Howell's own retrospective about it. He was convinced it was about state's rights. He saw Virginia as his homeland moreso than even the U.S.A. In the 1860s, most men around the world would have done the same for wherever they resided, whatever tribe they belonged to, whatever monarch was in power and whatever cause was presented.

But that instinct that men have to fight for their tribe, well that has been tapped successfully by elites for millenia.

>The conspiratorial idea that war is largely driven by shadowy elites doesn't really hold up to anthropology.

Of course not, Bush jr and his administration made up a war right in public. That we had no business in the middle east is not conspiracy. That Bush wanted to go to war in the middle east is also not conspiracy. Those WMDs never existed, and they knew that, yet off to war we went. How is that not elites driving war?

What do you figure he had to say after 1945?

For anyone curious, Smedley Butler died in 1940[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smedley_Butler

To anyone just passing through the comments, the Wiki article on Butler is a worthy read. He was an interesting person.

The YouTube series Knowing Better had a very good episode about Butler and this essay too: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=Lg-nUy2DalM

Which was probably good for his reputation. Some people die at the right time. Had he lived a bit longer he might have come out against entry into WWII, which would not have aged well.

He was an Anti-Fascist, but wanted to prevent a war with the Fascists. In fact, he was so Anti-Fascist, that the US Government apologized to Benito Mussolini on his behalf, and court-martialed him over his Anti-Fascist comments about Mussolini.

Source: New York Times.

https://www.nytimes.com/1931/01/30/archives/united-states-ap...

Also, record of the apology from the Department of State.

https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1931v02/d6...

Sounds like he won a moral victory over the US Government and the Fascists, and then the US Government (ever full of contradictions) later helped depose the actual Fascists through the war he wanted to avoid.

> He was an Anti-Fascist, but wanted to prevent a war with the Fascists

That's rich :) For all intents and purposes you're supporting it, you just like to support it while feeling morally superior.

What would you expect?

I appreciate the brevity but what exactly are you saying? That WW2 wasn't a racket? Is that your thesis here?

I'd interpret the question as: "given the copious evidence that the US did not enter WWII intentionally to make money for industrialists, is Smedley's thesis that all war is a racket reasonable? To what extent are humanitarian or democratic concerns as important as war profits in the decision to go to war?"

(with the unstated assumption that the US was just in its choice to fight the Axis)

I actually don't think Smedley would have changed his message at all; I think he started from a false premise that he was 100% convinced of, and would have pointed at the enormous profits made by war industrialists in the US during WWII. He might not also notice that post-war US was the most economically productive country of all time, that it opened up huge options of African Americans, or even really recognize quite what motivated Hitler and the Nazis.

Maybe the US didn't enter WWII with the idea of making a profit. I don't know.

But what is undeniable is the US exited WWII in a very good position and lots of profits were made.

What does that matter though? Should we have bombed ourselves because germany and japan couldn't do it?

So, yes. You are saying "nuh uh smedly, ww2 was a proper justified fight"

Actually, the only thing I said above was that I think he started from false premises.

> given the copious evidence that the US did not enter WWII intentionally to make money for industrialists

The USA started selling weapons to the allies long before it entered the war.

I'm referring to our entry into the war. That the US is an arms merchant is well understood- and didn't have the costs (to Americans) that Smedley describes.

The USA sold weapons to the allies largely because the president genuinely believe hitler would invade everything if not stopped. Congress wouldn't let him enter the war, because the US has a strong Isolationist vibe, but the President believed if we didn't go stop hitler in europe, hitler would eventually find his way to coming after the US and by that point we wouldn't have any allies left.

This is AFTER the allies attempted appeasement. If a foreign country wants to war, you can't not war. The only alternative is to roll over and accept new ownership, but usually new ownership disagrees with the people on how things should be done, so that "solution" largely isn't.

There was a period were Germany seemed unstoppable remember.

Just because it's a racket, doesn't mean its unjustified?

WW2 was a fight against evils of an absolute and appalling nature.

A lesser evil against a greater evil. And then the lesser evil became the greater evil.

The US has death camps? The US was prepared to have 70 million citizens commit glorious smashed-jewel suicide rather than surrender?

Your facile equivalence is rejected with prejudice.

>Your facile equivalence is rejected with prejudice.

It's your facile equivalence, that because these specific things don't apply to the US, American imperialism was morally justified.

You could just read the Wikipedia article on American war crimes, or learn about how much of the Nazi's ideology was based on American eugenics and racial segregation, or take even a glance at the last several decades of American militarism throughout the Middle East, but I guess you won't.

And how do European countries view America's role in defeating Nazis Germany, or supporting NATO against Russia?

How would I know? Opinions are bound to be all over the map over that large a population.

The US absolutely had a purposeful genocide of native americans, and directly implemented prison camps and some property confiscation of japanese immigrants and citizens.

This is explicitly not a support of the parent's comment. The US was not great, and even had explicit segregation, but was not trying to spread it's own abysmal ideals to all of europe. Hitler was clearly trying to spread facism through all of europe, and eventually the world. His desire to do so was broadly popular in Nazi Germany, so the country's people were never going to stop him. Going to war to grind Nazi Germany into the dust was the only option. It is justified. We also didn't preempt anything. We sacrificed two sovereign countries hoping to avoid that war, which should be clearly not acceptable.

General Rule: If a war is existential, then countries which want to keep existing usually find ways to turn down the "racket" aspects.

I suspect he may have had a preemptive opinion on that even though he wasn't around any more when it started.

“WAR is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.” - SB

We are told a version of things, and maybe that version is even mostly true, but I'm less sure about this now then I was when I was a kid in grade school.

We are often told that the conflict in WW2 was a conflict between a clearly good side and a clearly evil side. While it's true one of the sides was certainly the a much greater evil, it would be disingenuous to hide the short comings of the "good" side. The USA was a country that at the time still practiced segregation, and was the only country to use nuclear weapons. The British, French and Belgian empires and their conduct in India and their African colonies was not far off from what the Germans were accused of. It's not good to whitewash these facts.

So, resisting attack isn't allowed unless you're pure as the driven snow? This is nonsense.

The points I am trying to make is that it isn't black and white as "resisting attack", and that the history that is taught shouldn't be whitewashed. The Indians fought in the 2 world wars for the freedoms of others while their own freedoms were not guaranteed under British colonialism. 1/6th of all the "British" forces in ww2 were Indian, while India was suffering British induced famines due to redirection of supplies and scorched earth policy of the British in the south east Asian theatre. Do you think it's fair to them to not acknowledge this fact and teach it in history?

We were talking about WW2. It absolutely was black and white. Trying to deny that is itself a despicable act, in the same spirit as Holocaust denial. Pointing to other acts of evil alters that not one whit.

I explicitly said the Nazis were evil. But please do not underplay the suffering of the colonial subjects of the allied powers. That is a despicable act.

I think it's complicated. I don't think Butler believed that every single war was unjustified. When reading 'War is a Racket', you have to look at the context of war in which we lived. He was too young to fight in the American Civil War. So his consistent experiences of war were those fought in America's most blatantly Imperial phase. Even compared to Vietnam, Iraq, etc, the wars of the turn of the century were cravenly driven by capital and imperial ambitions.

And to that matter, some of what brought the U.S. into the orbit of WWII was a lower key version of the kind of foreign policies of that earlier era. Disrupting Japanese interests in Asia was very much about economic benefit and power balance in the mode of realpolitik.

And in the end, the Roosevelt administration remains unique in American history for how hard it pushed against colonialism. Truman was much more aligned with British interests in this way than FDR. So while the war is justified in the name of stopping two monstrous regimes, its precursors and its aftermath do carry a fair amount of the same taint that Butler thoroughly observed in his time.

There are always at least two parties involved in a war, an aggressor and a defendant. 'War is a Racket' is always true or war unjustified in case of the aggressor. Defendant usually doesn't have much choice in it.

Even the example you've taken for WWII, UK and US weren't the aggressor. The war already at their door for British, so they had a little choice in it. Similarly for US they knew, if they don't do something early enough, they could end up being a victim or suffer from it eventually. So they had to support Britain in the war.

> There are always at least two parties involved in a war, an aggressor and a defendant.

There are many wars where multiple sides are belligerent. There are wars where a side manages to profit or benefit from a conflict without appearing as a belligerent. And there are wars where it's not clear who the beligerent is.

In the French Revolutionary wars, France appears as the aggressor, as they declared war first. But they declared war as a pre-emptive to gain advantage in a conflict with Austria over Bourbon restoration that they felt sure would come. And judging by contemporary history (the partitions of Poland, the Hungarian rebellion, the Revolutions of 1848, etc), they were probably right.

There is the Franco-Prussian war, a war which was essentially desired by both sides.

Most civil wars rarely have a clear beligerent side with slow escalation of violence by multiple parties.

We are deep into the era of nationalistic propaganda so we are used to conceiving of wars as clear conflicts between two cohesive political units: one the aggressor and one the defender. But that is a concpetion mostly born out of our experiences in the 20th century and even then it is highly biased by the popular narrative of WWII.

"told you so" — WWII was one of the best things to happen to the US from an economic standpoint. Before joining the war effort the US was selling weapons to the allies and making piles of money doing so. Post WWII the US had the largest economic boom in history.

It was also one of the worst things to happen to Europe, the Soviet Union, and Japan.

All of them were completely devastated, while the US was largely unscathed.

I really wonder what the world would look like today if they'd managed to avoid this senseless war and/or the first World War.

This is one of the main reasons for our economic prosperity post WW II. You have room for a lot of excess in your economy when your global competition are all living in smoldering piles of rubble.

> WWII was one of the best things to happen to the US from an economic standpoint

Sadly, that is true.

> the US was selling weapons to the allies and making piles of money doing so

Indeed.

War Is a Racket.

Maybe "We may have been fighting the wrong enemy all along." - https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/36062/did-gen-p...

Predating that is Ludwell Denny's "We Fight For Oil" from 1928. I have a physical copy of this book. Its mere existence says a lot, and still does ...

https://www.yamaguchy.com/library/denny/denny_index.html

Smedley Butler, previously on HN

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

It's worth noting Smedley Butler and the Business Plot [1].

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot

I've only skimmed this essay, and plan to read it more carefully later, so please be charitable if I've overlooked an important passage.

Butler's argument appears to be conflating two questions:

1. Does anyone unfairly profit from war?

2. Is the unfair profit the result of a racket?

I think few people would argue that the answer to #1 is "yes", but I don't think he's made a convincing argument that the unfair spoils of war are either necessarily or overwhelmingly the result of a racket.

Here I would like to note that the Butler's definition of "racket" is rather loose. The strongest interpretation of his definition, I think, is that a racket is something that is orchestrated covertly by few, for their own benefit, and at the expense of the many.

There is another word for this: a conspiracy. The American Heritage Dictionary has what I consider to be a fair definition for conspiracy: "an agreement to perform together an illegal, wrongful, or subversive act."

So to show that war is indeed a racket, Butler would have to demonstrate that one of two things is true:

1. War can only emerge from conspiracy

2. The overwhelming majority of wars have historically emerged from conspiracy

Demonstrating a conspiracy in turn is a two-part enterprise: (1) showing the act was illegal, wrongful or subversive, and (2) showing that a group of people agreed to perform it together. As far as I can tell, we are only shown instances of profiteering, and perhaps individual corruption in the form of draft-dodging and whatnot. This is outrageous, to be sure, but falls short of demonstrating that a "racket" is at play. And while I can think of recent examples of wars that do qualify as a racket (at least, IMO), Butler's more general claim that "War is (effectively always) a racket" seems like hyperbole.

You probably meant to say that few people would argue that the answer to #1 is "no"

Whoops. That’s an unfortunate mistake.

He came from generations of influential Quaker's (pacifists) but defied his father in signing up for the Spanish-American war before he left school. He lied about his age to be commissioned as an officer.

It's no surprise the military didn't meet his idealistic expectations.

His awards were probably not legitimate. At the time, his father was the chair of the House Naval Affairs Committee, overseeing the budget of the Marines. E.g., one award was for a spy mission that consisted of taking a train incognito into Mexico.

His claims in "War is a racket" were designed to elevate his reputation as a truth-teller and good guy, an unwitting accomplice.

I don't think the world gives the US enough flak for the Spanish-American war. It was an invented war to steal territory. No wonder he became cynical.

There’s also The War Racket by Harry Browne (2004).

But when the bad guys are doing all kinds of bad stuff. When your good friends in the media are telling you all about all this bad stuff that the bad guys are doing. When all your friends are hot to go out and fight these bad guys. What can a right-thinking person do but join the fight?

Style note: I can't tell if you're echoing propaganda or parodying it.

Tie always goes to the echo side when dealing with propaganda

That's why satire tends to be exaggerated to an extreme degree.

Stripped of context, it certainly does look suspicious.

Parody

And societies never learn.

no, racket lang is a racket

Smedly Butler!

The people driving the wars generally don't profit from the wars, and it's generally not true that the war profiteers have that much influence over spending during war time, rather, they are a bit like doctors during a plague and have huge pricing leverage once a war starts.

There are almost zero wars which are profitable even for the antagonist.

'Making needed weapons during war is exceedingly profitable' - yes it is, and often nations are in ruin after the fact, which will lead to profiteering like 'a racket'. And the proceeds will indeed go to very few.

This has to be the most re-posted piece on HN

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=War+Is+a+Racket

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