“One word, Benjamin: drones.” Hear that just as Mr. McGuire gave Dustin Hoffman’s character, Benjamin Braddock, the warning of “plastics” in the 1967 classic “The Graduate.”
For decades (just as the very real President Eisenhower had foretold) US defense contractors had convinced congressmen there could be never-ending American hegemony just as long as trillions of (printed) federal dollars armed America with their fabulously (overpriced) invincible (hopelessly complicated) weapons platforms.
Then, along came cheap plastic drones that their $5 million dollar missiles had to be wasted upon. A bit of an over-simplification, but not by much. To wit, the underlying culprit(s) behind an ever-quickening twilight of the Pax Americana were mathematics and hubris.
The “Progressives” of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries got the ball rolling. The “Square Deal” morphed into the “New Deal”; which softened into the “Fair Deal”; which metastasized into the “Great Society”; and then finally gave way to smug honesty: “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” Communism has never worked. It really doesn’t work when you invite the world in to further burden the productive classes pulling the wagon. More than $100 trillion in national treasure has been frittered away upon thinly veiled vote buying schemes. Math is simply unforgiving.
Back to Presidents Eisenhower, then Reagan. How on earth did men win with the electoral mandates like those two received; and leave the welfare state intact? And to the spectacular victory over the Soviet Union engineered by President Reagan; what did his successors do with that golden opportunity to redirect relations with a Christian Russia against our true (existential) threat of Red China?
The UniParty “expert” class pretended like nothing had changed between Russia and our nation. And does anyone still debate the folly of ceding our industrial base to China in the hopes the Chicoms would eventually morph into Jeffersonian democrats? All, pure hubris.
President Trump. I hope and pray for our children that the Communists don’t sweep into power early next month; but there’s a reason why we’re warned about the company we keep. Your counsel shouldn’t have come from the comically compromised Mitch McConnells or Lindsey Grahams, Mr. President. The genuine articles were the Thomas Massies, Tulsi Gabbards, and Joe Kents.
Finally, as I type this all US ground troops have been removed from Iraq; the first time that nation has had no US ground troop presence since 2003. We are undergoing a world-wide realignment. The future is obviously multipolar. A United States refocused upon its own backyard could yield positive dividends (if not squandered away like our Cold War victory). We could also be at the same point now as the world was in the late 1930s; slipping beneath the waves of a world war already ignited. Chains of events are also unforgiving.
Next Week: Nation
Shane Morris is a retired soldier and teacher. Contact at sigm11@yahoo.com (Subject: “NtC”)
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