On Friday, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. endorsed former President Donald Trump, calling the Democrats the “party of war, censorship, corruption, big Pharma, big tech and big money.”
How did the party of former President John F. Kennedy, RFK, beatniks, peace, and love, turn into the party of war?
Since the sixties, the dominance of America’s military has lulled most politicians on the left and right into a false sense of security. No serious person thinks that China might seize Honolulu or worries Canada has designs on Detroit. The sovereignty of the United States is as secure as any nation in history.
This is security bred complacency.
“What’s the point of having this superb military that you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?” Bill Clinton’s secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, famously asked Colin Powell. How easy it has become for our government officials to frivolously commit American power to far-away nations with few, if any, American interests at stake.
Democrats compound military adventurism by using our uniformed service members to drive social reform within the borders of the United States. Social justice evangelists seek to hijack the nation’s largest bureaucracy and turn it into Yale in camouflage, Harvard with tanks. From green energy military vehicles to abortion on demand (paid for by the taxpayer), they see the Pentagon as a five-sided Petri dish for social tinkering. They argue the military — with its socialized medicine, socialized grocery stores, socialized rules and limited freedoms — is the perfect example for the rest of us.
Almost every politician trades votes for dollars. Each spring the scramble for Department of Defense dollars is a sight to behold, like the blooming of Washington’s cherry blossoms. Few give a damn if those dollars translate into something productive for the department.
When I first went to work on the Hill, I was shocked at how rarely anyone asked: “Is this in the best interest of national security?” Or: “How will this benefit the American taxpayer?” After asking those questions myself — at every meeting I took — I often received blank, bewildered stares in return.
Like a drunk passing a saloon, most swamp creatures just can’t seem to wait to sidle in and order up American ground forces, a naval flotilla or air power. And since only 1% of Americans serve in the U.S. military, relatively few constituents seem to object. Richard Nixon figured that by ending the draft, he would end the Vietnam War protests. He was right: When someone else’s sons or daughters did the fighting, Americans stopped protesting the war.
America’s military adventurism has other costs. When I was first in Afghanistan, in 2010 and 2011, the United States spent $2 billion per week trying to create civilized order in the chaos of that backward bit of middle-Asian squalor. The American taxpayer paved roads, built schools and fired up power plants from Kabul to Kandahar. Simultaneously, the U.S. remained bogged down in Iraq, and between the two wars, the direct U.S. outlays totaled $1.6 trillion dollars, which doesn’t reflect the interest on the money we borrowed, the long-term care of the wounded and many other indirect expenses. In short, the U.S. squandered a budget surplus on 20 years of fruitless warfare.
On the campaign trail, former President Donald Trump vows major reform to the United States military. He’s pledged to hold top generals and policymakers accountable for the collapse of Afghanistan. He wants to boot those seeking to use military service as a pathway to taxpayer-funded sex changes. Trump promises to eradicate DEI in the Pentagon, and refocus the American service members to the rougher, meaner business of deterring war.
Friends and foes alike take him at his word; after all, Trump has done it before. In his first term, he boosted defense spending, drew down American forces abroad, avoided new foreign entanglements, and encouraged our allies to spend more for their own defense. Each of these policies made the average American more secure. They are also common sense, a trait in short supply in Washington, D.C.
In Afghanistan I followed the directives of Washington, D.C. national security advisors who had PhDs in “I.R.” (international relations) but who wouldn’t know the working-end of a M4. The Georgetown geniuses tasked my compatriots and me with the naive mission to root out the Taliban, which was about as probable as eradicating all the Baptists in Mississippi.
Today, those same advisors lament the looming return of Trump’s foreign policy, warning of the “perils of isolationism.” Their binary argument seems to be either you are for the unrestrained use of American power or you’re an “isolationist.”
As RFK Jr. knows, Trump was no isolationist while in the White House. He engaged North Korea, calmed the Middle East, took a tough line with Iran and deterred Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
Trump was not a war hawk. Trump wasn’t a peaceful dove. The ancient Greeks would describe a man or woman who has learned from a lifetime of experience, as a “wise owl.”
We need a flock of them in Washington.
Morgan Murphy is a former DoD press secretary, national security adviser in the U.S. Senate, and veteran of Afghanistan.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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