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America’s longest war ever is finally coming to an end. President Biden announced last month that all U.S. troops will be out of Afghanistan by the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Revolver is happy to see any leader, regardless of party, complete President Trump’s goal to end America’s longest and most fruitless forever war.

But don’t celebrate yet. Once the war is actually over, the Deep State will be happy to reignite it in an instant, or else hunt for a new one to begin in some other unfortunate country. And that’s assuming the war ends at all. Until the last U.S. boot is out of Afghanistan, the American deep state may find a way to prolong the war. They’re fighting hard to do it right now, using the recent bombing of a girls’ school in Kabul to agitate for a longer war. The Taliban has condemned the bombing and strenuously denied involvement. No matter, the Deep State is happy to use whatever bodies it can find, so long as it means more war.

This pattern will continue until there is a fundamental overhaul of America’s entire defense and foreign policy establishment. To save America from one ruinous war after another, we must stop falling for the Pentagon and State Department’s tricks. Instead, it’s time for a new strategy: Defund the military-intelligence complex that has led the country to ruin.

That’s the central takeaway from The Stupidity of War, a highly readable new book from Ohio State professor John Mueller that chronicles the sad history and calamitous future of American military adventurism.

Throughout his long career, Mueller has been a skilled critic of the panic and tunnel vision that define the overcredentialed, unimpressive blob of hacks and academics who set America’s defense policy, justify its defense budget, and agitate for its wars.

In 2006’s Overblown, he argued that the threat of terrorism was dramatically inflated. Events over the past 15 years have proven him correct; terrorist attacks are not nearly as common as leaders feared they would be, extremists have never come close to acquiring weapons of mass destruction, and the greatest long-term impact of terrorism is the systemic loss of freedom in the name of “fighting” it. In 2010’s Atomic Obsession, Mueller argued that the nuclear arsenals of the great powers are exaggerated in their destructive capacities, limited in their impact on foreign policy, and for the most part a waste of money for their owners. Now, instead of poking at individual parts of America’s defense/intelligence/security apparatus, Mueller is taking aim at the whole thing.

After reading Mueller’s book, one easily sees that the Afghan forever war is not a one-off blunder by the U.S. foreign policy establishment. It is part of a toxic recurring pattern that has not merely wasted money and lives, but brought America to the brink of losing its superpower status entirely.

Consider this March article from the Deep State’s favorite newspaper, The New York Times, which tries to lay the groundwork for propping up the Afghan government literally forever:

Some military commanders and administration officials have argued that any set date for withdrawing the approximately 3,500 American troops who remain, whether it is May 1 or at the end of the year, will doom the mission. The only way to preserve hard-fought gains in Afghanistan, they said, is to keep the small American presence there long enough to force a lasting deal between the Taliban and Afghan government.

These officials have used the intelligence assessment to make the point that a withdrawal this year will lead to a fall of the current government, a sharp erosion of women’s rights and the return of international terrorist groups. A rush to the exit, some officials said, will only drag the United States back into Afghanistan soon after leaving — much as was the case in Iraq in 2014, three years after the Obama administration pulled troops out of that conflict. [NYT]

The same pattern is poised to repeat, as it has over and over again: America must remain in Afghanistan, indefinitely, or some vague threat will manifest itself and America will be profoundly endangered. In reality, it is the war in Afghanistan itself that has been a calamity for America, costing thousands of lives and more than a trillion dollars.

But that’s how almost all of America’s wars have been, for decades: Unnecessary conflicts that solve no problems but create entirely new ones, while costing American lives and, critically, justifying the perpetual maintenance of a bloated, self-important defense apparatus that never faces any consequences for its incompetence or hideously poor judgment.

American globalists and interventionists, while routinely deriding America’s own history, institutions, and historic population as racist and irredeemable, simultaneously view the U.S. as completely indispensable on the world stage. Every minor conflict requires an American role. The U.S. military and diplomatic corps must remain gigantic and liberally funded, as a guarantor of world security.

In reality, America’s military itself has become the chief threat to America’s wellbeing. War is deeply stupid, Mueller says, and for half a century nobody has fought as many wars as the United States.

“In the new century, American military policy has [both] created disorder and then … preserved it,” Mueller writes. “Throughout, foreign and domestic policy has been a quixotic quest to extinguish threats to U.S. security that, as with the Cold War, substantially do not exist.” The reason the world has remained largely at peace since 1945 is not because of some special peacemaking power of the United States. Instead, a more obvious reason suggests itself: Most developed countries now realize that interstate war is deeply stupid, and not worth fighting. So far, in fact, America seems to be one of the only countries that hasn’t internalized this lesson.

Mueller offers a grim assessment of America’s diplomatic and military record since the Second World War. For three-quarters of a century, America has launched one elective war after another while fielding the world’s most expensive military by far. What are its achievements as global policeman?

It can take credit for keeping South Korea independent – no other country at the time would have been able to do that. However … it went to war there in 1950 for other reasons, and it badly botched the effort and massively increased the costs by a futile quest to liberate North Korea as well. The American military also forcefully pushed thuggish rulers out of tiny Panama and even tinier Grenada – rather minor developments that would not have happened (as quickly at least) without the efforts of the United States. It also led a lengthy bombing campaign that resulted in the secession of Serbia’s Kosovo province, and it productively used airpower to contribute to the downfall of ISIS in the 2010s. …

Beyond this, its specific contributions to world security are difficult to find.

While the Korean War might be defended on purely moral grounds, Mueller argues that just about every other conflict involving America since 1945 wasn’t worth it. The war in Vietnam was driven by the dictates of so-called domino theory: If America did not prop up a corrupt, failing regime in Saigon, then the more important nation of Indonesia might fall to Communism. Lyndon Johnson even surmised that, if America did not project an image of absolute strength, Russia and China might collude to launch World War 3.

In reality, nothing of the sort happened. Contrary to the expectations of neurotic Pentagon planners, the USSR had no interest in a general war of aggression. By the end of 1965, Indonesia had wiped out its own Communists and China had turned inward with the Cultural Revolution, removing the grand strategic justifications for war in Vietnam. Yet the war ground on for nearly a decade anyway, costing tens of thousands of American lives and fueling unparalleled domestic trauma at home.

When America finally did withdraw, South Vietnam fell, and the warnings of domino theory appeared to come true: Laos, Cambodia, Angola, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Afghanistan, and Nicaragua all plunged into the Soviet orbit within a few years. And yet… that was all. There was no World War III, and America was never imperiled. In fact, it was the Soviet Union which suffered, drained economically by subsidies to its new satellites and militarily by an exhausting imperial war of its own in Afghanistan.

Eventually, the USSR collapsed, not because of a war with the United States, or even the fear of losing one, but from the sheer decay of its own rotten system. Yet without the USSR around, America’s diplomatic and military elites declared that this called for even more U.S. military power and foreign adventurism (adventurism which conveniently gave these elites status, wealth, and power). James Woolsey, Bill Clinton’s CIA chief, made the bewildering analogy that with the Soviets gone, “we have slain a large dragon, but we live now in a jungle filled with a bewildering variety of poisonous snakes.”

And so began the age of America’s unipolar hegemony, which helped nobody except lobbyists, consultants, and power brokers in Washington D.C.

Mueller says what is now obvious, but even today few are willing to say: That America’s global crusade against terrorism following 9/11 was a self-destructive, irrational overreaction almost unrivaled in history.

In the days after 9/11, America’s foremost “experts” predicted a terrifying new normal. Leaders expected that 9/11-level attacks might occur with shocking regularity. A nuclear attack by a terrorist group, supported by a rogue state, was possible, even likely.

In reality, nothing of the sort was ever at risk of happening. Far from being a clever group of elite operators, al-Qaeda was a slipshod collection of extremists who got lucky:

9/11 was characterized less by flawless execution than by steadfast, malleable militants practicing slipshod tradecraft. Two were completely unprepared for their assigned roles of piloting the suicide aircraft and couldn’t get training in the United States because they couldn’t speak adequate English. Another al-Qaeda trainee was so incompetent that two days into his aviation training his flight instructor reported him to the FBI as a potential hijacker. He called attention to himself by, among other things, insisting on receiving advanced training for flying large commercial aircraft, asking how much fuel a jumbo jet could carry and how much damage it would cause if it crashed into anything, and getting extremely agitated when asked about his religious background.

It’s no surprise at all that al-Qaeda has never come close to recreating its prior success. No state actor with the capacity to develop nuclear weapons is stupid or suicidal enough to hand them to an unstable terror group. Al-Qaeda and terror groups like it are small, poor, delusional, and grossly lacking in basic competence. 9/11, far from bringing about a new normal, was and remains an extreme outlier.

Yet despite this, Mueller says, “trillions of dollars have been expended to deal with a problem that, insofar as it affects the United States, is limited, even trivial.” The United States remains in a state of perpetual low-intensity warfare in countries like Yemen or Niger where most of the country doesn’t even know the U.S. to be at war. To the extent America faces any danger at all from Islamic terrorism, it is likely these neverending interventions that causes it — just as America’s military presence in Saudi Arabia is what motivated 9/11 itself.

Over and over again, Mueller skewers the ridiculous modes of reasoning that pass for conventional wisdom in Washington, D.C.:

By far the most common justification for remaining in Afghanistan is that it is important to keep al-Qaeda from establishing itself there once again where it would be free to again plot attacks on the United States. That is, it is effectively contended that, although 9/11 was substantially plotted in Hamburg, Germany, just about the only reason further attacks haven’t taken place is that al-Qaeda needs a bigger base of operations and that base must be in Afghanistan.

The threat assessment for Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was similarly ridiculous. Leaders in both parties found it perfectly reasonable to fear that Saddam Hussein’s regime might obtain (or already possess) nuclear weapons, and suicidally use them against its neighbors. They also found it perfectly reasonable to fear that with nuclear weapons plus his large army Saddam “would be in a position to dominate the Middle East” (as George W. Bush said in the lead-up to the war) even though Saddam couldn’t even control the entirety of his own country. The threat from Saddam was marginal to nonexistent and easily could have been contained with minimal effort. Yet America’s leaders worked themselves into a frenzy, and launched an enormously costly war. That war not only left America much weaker than beforehand, but also claimed more lives than the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.

Now, after grossly exaggerating just about every threat America has faced for more than half a century, America’s leaders are hyping up a new wave of threats. Leaders from both parties are eager to label China, not merely as an economic rival, but an aggressive military foe. In fact, though, China has shown almost no territorial ambitions except for reunion with Taiwan, and its chief military concern is security in its own territorial waters. The chief reason to fear war with China, Mueller argues, is that America’s own hawks hysterically stoke tensions in response to the country’s inexorable economic rise, just as they shrieked about the danger of Japan 30 years ago.

Of course, many of these same hawks also shriek about Russia, an economically shaky petrostate that has struggled to digest its 2014 acquisition of Crimea. President Trump’s efforts to boost relations with Russia were treated as a criminal dereliction of duty that would invite Vladimir Putin to invade Poland and the Baltic States. In fact, as Mueller points out, Russia’s own leaders show not the slightest interest in such military adventures, which would be economically and diplomatically suicidal and which involve no major national interest.

Over and over, America’s expert class has simply been wrong about threats: Wrong about the Soviet Union, wrong about Vietnam, wrong about nuclear war, wrong about Iraq, wrong about Al Qaeda. So, the natural question is: Why on Earth should we trust them to be right now? And the equally natural response is: We shouldn’t.

The most harmful enemy of the United States has not been Iran, or China, or Russia, or North Korea, or any combination thereof. The most destructive enemy of the United States, the one that has caused the most damage to its peace and prosperity, is America’s own diplomatic and military leaders, who have thrown it into one unnecessary war after another, while endlessly hoarding more money and power to themselves without consequence.

Today, America is weaker and more vulnerable than it has been in a century, and that is almost entirely due to the perpetual panic and interventionism of our globally-minded elites. Multiple wars and a $700 billion/year defense apparatus have drained America’s economic vitality to the point where it is on the verge of an implosion. The cultural rot of America’s institutions, meanwhile, has depleted its human capital and made it so politically divided that the nation is increasingly incapable of decisive policy action of any kind, no matter how necessary.

To make America a prosperous and successful country again, it must destroy its parasitic class of security hysterics and war hawks who set policy in Washington. And the way to destroy them is simple: Defund them. America can be kept safe by its nuclear arsenal and a military a small fraction the size of the bloated one it fields today. With a smaller military, America would save hundreds of billions of dollars a year, and stay out of the wars that have drained the nation’s blood and treasure over and over again. That smaller military could also limit itself to the best of the best in terms of human capital, letting it more easily abandon bizarre follies like 110-lb women soldiers and transgender troops hopping from the operating room to the battlefield, dilators in hand.

But most important of all, defunding today’s Pentagon and State Department would rid us of an entire class of leaders who have done nothing but hurt the country to flatter their own egos, justify their salaries, and fulfill their middle school delusions of military grandeur.

Wars are stupid, Mueller writes. The best way to improve America is to fire the equally stupid people who keep starting them.

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