David Stockman

This is the second part of a three-part article.   Read part one here. The war-weary Washington policy makers were absolutely correct when they brought America’s 12 million-man expeditionary force home from Asia, Europe and the Seven Seas after August 1945. So doing, of course, they also abruptly closed the sluice-gates to what was America’s Brobdingnagian … Continue reading “The Entire Cold War Was an Avoidable Mistake”

There is not a snowball’s chance in the hot place of containing America’s public debt disaster unless the Empire is brought home and the national security budget is slashed by $500 billion per year. The merits aside, all the other big slices of the budget led by Social Security and Medicare are surrounded by nearly … Continue reading “Fiscal Redemption Requires a Republic, Not an Empire”

Another Christmas has passed and there is still no peace on earth. And the proximate cause of that vexing reality is the $1.3 trillion Warfare State planted on the banks of the Potomac – along with its web of war-making capabilities, bases, alliances and vassals stretching to the four corners of the planet. So positioned, … Continue reading “Wilson’s Folly, The Washington Hegemon and Why There Is Still No Peace On Earth”

If there was ever a moment that laid bare the utter stupidity and futility of Washington’s Empire First policy it surely is the smoking ruins of Syria that emerged last week. The latter was the desultory culmination of Washington’s 13-years-long effort to destroy the legitimate government of Syria on the grounds that Assad was a … Continue reading “A Case of the ‘Empire First’ Folly In Spades”

About 17 years ago the insufferable former general, Wesley Clark, reported on a talk he once had in the Pentagon: “This is a memo that describes how we’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.” Well, it took several … Continue reading “The Syrian Fiasco”

Well, you can say this much about the Donald’s off-the-wall pick of Fox’s weekend news commentator, Pete Hegseth, for Secretary of Defense: At least it wasn’t a hard-core neocon like House Armed Services Chair Mike Rogers (R-Ala), Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) or the horrid Senator Tom Cott0n of Arkansas. Better a cheerleader for patriotism and … Continue reading “Trump’s Hegseth Caper and the Delusion of ‘Peace Through Strength’”

This is part 2 in a series.    Read part 1 here. The Indispensable Nation meme originates not in the universal condition of mankind and the nation-states into which it has been partitioned. Instead, it stems from an erroneous take on the one-time, flukish and historically aberrant circumstances of the 20th century that gave raise to giant totalitarian states in Hitler’s … Continue reading “Living With Wilson’s Folly Over 100 Years Later”

Like the case of Rome before it, Empire is bankrupting America. The true fiscal cost of the national security budget is now upwards of $1.3 trillion per year (counting veterans expense and international operations and aid), but there is no way to pay for it. That’s because the 78-million strong Baby Boomers are in the … Continue reading “The Folly of Empire and the Albatross of Debt”

Someone should tell the European ruling elites to take a long jump off a short pier. Their endless whining about the Ruuskies and Putin is just plain pathetic because – It’s not justified – Russia bears no hallmarks of an expansionist imperial power. The Russia-Ukraine conflict is none of western Europe’s business – since its … Continue reading “The Ukrainian Border War Folly”

This is part 3 of Washington DC: The Unaffordable and Unnecessary War Capital of the World.  Read part 1 and part 2. The pivot from Republic to Empire circa 1949 remains evident even today – fully one-third of a century after the Cold War ended and the Soviet Empire was swept into the dustbin of … Continue reading “The American Empire Is Crumbling Under Its Debt”