Another lamentable reason is that America's monstrous military-industrial complex is the cause of so much global insecurity and conflict. Paradoxically, US politicians justify military spending with the need to make America secure with robust defense. The reality is the opposite.
Logically, as the US stockpiles more and more weapons, other nations are obliged to increase their defenses. This dynamic leads to further tensions, mistrust and misapprehensions. As the world's top military spender, the onus is on the US to scale back. If it did so, that would serve to deescalate the military spending by other nations.
America's war economy -- for that's what it is -- has other far-reaching deleterious impacts. The US weapons industry accounts for half of the world's arms trade. The planet is awash with America-made weapons, which fuels regional conflicts and non-state terror groups.
Furthermore, with such an engorged military, the ineluctable logic is for US governments to seek wars in order to maintain its war economy. America's "scramble for Africa" is a topical case in point.
The historical record shows that no other nation has been involved in as many wars as the US since the Second World War. There's no comparison. Historian William Blum has documented dozens of US wars around the world. The major ones include Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and a host of clandestine ones in Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America. The death toll from US military conduct over the past seven decades is reckoned to be about 25 million.
Why is the US addicted to war? A major reason is to do with the failure of American capitalism. The US economy is propped up by its military-industrial complex, comprising giant weapons manufacturers like Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Raytheon. These companies have enormous lobbying influence on government, think tanks and corporate media, which perpetuates in the "warfare state."
However, this war economy is unsustainable, as David Stockman and others remark. It is leading to cataclysmic American fiscal debt and social decay. It is also fomenting a highly unstable world of international tensions and conflict. Washington's belligerence towards China, Russia, Iran and North Korea is a corollary of its irrationally disproportionate military forces.
The dangerous state of affairs was warned about some 55 years ago in 1961 by President Ike Eisenhower during his farewell address to the nation. Eisenhower foretold the grim emergence of an all-dominant military-industrial complex that would pose a danger to the US nation and the world.
His successor, John F Kennedy, was determined to rein in the military. He was opposed to a nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union and was moving to withdraw American troops from Vietnam.
It's not just the rest of the world that suffers from America's addiction to war. American society and democracy are also casualties. Just imagine how much healthier, better educated, more prosperous, more cultured American citizens would be if they did not have to feed their war-addicted economy with an annual fix of $700 billion.
The final irony is that America's other pathological addictions are intertwined with its war habit. Its Big Oil addiction, the opiate crisis fueled by illicit drug business behind the war in Afghanistan, and the proliferation of military weapons in society, are all, in one way or another, rooted in America's addiction to war.
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