Power & Glory

Warfare, welfare and the cost of getting hooked on the empire drug...

(Statue of Pericles, general of Athens during its golden age. Source: Getty Images)

Bill Bonner, reckoning today from Poitou, France...

Another war!  

Another flare up in a long-bubbling cauldron…Arabs vs. Jews in the Levant. Since 2008, the conflict has cost the lives of more than 3,500 people – almost all of them civilians.

Not to worry, a US carrier “strike group” is now steaming across the Mediterranean. Not to protect innocent civilians…but to back up Israeli soldiers with even more firepower.      

Who’s right? Who’s wrong? Who cares! That is what we learn from the spoofy “Report from Iron Mountain.” Like dogs and fleas, drunk drivers and lampposts, sinners and Hell – war and government go together.

And now, the US is on course for a terrific smash-up. Its foreign policy spending is way out of line…at $1.5 trillion per year – an amount that is roughly the same as the deficit.  

The Empire Drug

Unlike the welfare states of Europe, the US is more of a traditional warfare state.  Most out-of-control in a whole out-of-control budget is its military spending. And since the US is cursed with a currency it can create at will, this inevitably means that it will try to ‘print’ its way out of its financial troubles, adding inflation, economic depression…and political turmoil (perhaps a revolution or a secession movement) into the mix of chaos and decline. The disaster, in other words, is likely to stretch across the whole nine yards of modern public policy catastrophes – finance, economics, and politics.

This is, of course, just a guess. And it will take many years to find out how good or bad a guess it was. But we just wanted to start out the week on a cheery note.

Also on a cheery note, at least one presidential candidate has placed himself clearly at odds with the War & Empire agenda – Robert F. Kennedy Jr. He is hoping to pick up where his uncle, John F. Kennedy, left things when he was assassinated in Dallas in 1963. Our sources tell us that RFK, Jr. is going to break away from the Democratic Party in a speech, live streamed today from Philadelphia at noon.

We wish him luck. But we give him low odds of success. People don’t usually give up the Power&Glory Empire drug until after they’ve hit bottom. We have a ways to go.  

And today, let’s ask ourselves: no one would want the scenario we outline above. So, why don’t ‘we’ make sure it doesn’t happen?

A Stiff Resolve

We could begin by noting that if leaders could prevent public policy disasters, they would never happen. Nobody wanted the Great Depression or the 16 million deaths in WWI. They happened anyway. Our hypothesis is that leaders (or more broadly, elites) don’t stop major disasters; they cause them.  

War is catnip to politicians. It stirs them to speechifying – ‘we will stop them on the beaches’….’four score and seven years ago’ – and provides them an opportunity not only to grab more fame and power, but also to exhibit their extraordinary strategic genius.

Probably the most notable of the genre was Pericles’ Funeral Oration, which Lincoln seemed to use as a model for his Gettysburg Address. Pericles began by telling the crowd how great the Athenians were – their government…their customs and so forth. Then he got down to business. The dead men (Athenians who died in their war with Sparta) died so that his great nation should not perish. And to that end:

"So died these men as becomes Athenians. You, their survivors, must determine to have as unfaltering a resolution in the field, though you may pray that it may have a happier outcome." 

The effect of Pericles’ speech was to stiffen Athens’ resolve to keep fighting. At the time, 431 BC, Spartan hoplites were outside the walls of the city. Crowded within the walls were the farmers from the surrounding territory, becoming increasingly weary of the war. They wanted peace so they could get back to their crops.

Pericles was a general as well as a politician. He exhorted the people to keep the faith…and to continue the war. But a plague soon ran through the packed city; approximately half the population of Athens died, including Pericles.

The Athenians didn’t give up. The war went on until a Spartan general, Lysander, destroyed the Athenian fleet in 405 BC…and then Athens itself, facing siege and starvation, surrendered the following year.

Laughable Nonsense

And here, we pause to laugh. The ‘causes’ for war are always spelled out by the politicians and the press in the loftiest terms – to ‘free the Holy Land’…to ‘prevent foreign aggression’…to ‘make the world safe for democracy’…to “provide ‘living room’ for the German people.’  

It is always laughable nonsense. In the current proxy war in the Ukraine, for example, the US claims to be defending a ‘rules based order’ – that is, a world of laws, not of brute force.

Invading another country is outlawed by the UN Charter, and the Nuremberg Tribunal. And in the US, the War Clause of the US Constitution also forbids an invasion not specifically backed by Congress with a Declaration of War.

But in the real world of megapolitics, when you are powerful enough, you make the rules yourself. So it was that the US invaded Iraq in violation of all the rules – even its own constitution – and with much more firepower, death and destruction than Russia has used in the Ukraine.

The purpose of rules is to settle disputes without war. War though, has a purpose of its own. It doesn’t need a real dispute. And when it is ready, no rules will stop it.

Tomorrow…hate crimes! Stay tuned.     

Regards,

Bill Bonner