At LewRockwell.com, Karen Kwiatkowski calls the Iran war a “fiasco” but thinks it’s so bad it might spur a change in American foreign policy, ending “US wars of choice” and bringing the troops home. She writes:
From this fiasco, paradigmatic and strategic changes to America’s parasitic national security state are coming. These changes are buoyed by a deep negative societal reaction to this latest war for Israel, and propelled by $40 trillion federal debt growing at 6% annually, with more and more Americans dependent on federal checks, and fewer and fewer global buyers of US debt. A truly defensive military and intelligence apparatus, at a fifth or even a tenth of what we spend today, as well as a structural jettisoning of special alliances that animate the current defense budget and focus, including but not limited to Israel, are now within reach for the US, in part because of what happened over the past 100 days. The empire will oppose any changes in this direction, but our dry shell of an empire has few choices.
In a strange way Trump will bring the troops home, and end US wars of choice, and like the captain of the Titanic, he will ride the ship, damaged by arrogance and overreach, into the deep.
But before the empire fades, it retrenches, and global war-mongering becomes totalitarianism at home, national intelligence becomes domestic surveillance, AI looks inward to identify potential enemies of the state, and maps their communities for decimation or economic lockdown. Critics of government policies, as we saw in Lincoln’s time, in Wilson’s time, and in our time, are labeled traitors. Natural rights are openly ignored by the state, any Constitution shredded and past assumptions of citizen roles and state duties cast aside.
Most disturbing is Kwiatkowski’s conclusion, in which she writes:
US imperial retrenchment has been happening under our very noses, slowly at first with our devalued currency and never-ending wars, but the pace is quickening. Notably in this 250th year after the Declaration of Independence, every American needs to be prepared for war at home.
Read more here.
