One data point here: The U.S. military alone guzzles more fossil fuel than the entire country of Sweden. When it comes to energy consumption, our armed forces are truly second to none.
With its massive oil reserves, the Middle East remains a hotbed in the world's ongoing resource wars, as well as its religious and ethnic conflicts, exacerbated by terrorism and the destabilizing attacks of the U.S. military. Under the circumstances, when it comes to future global disaster, it's not that hard to imagine that today's Middle East could serve as the equivalent of the Balkans of World War I infamy.
If Gavrilo Princip, a Serbian "Black Hand" terrorist operating in a war-torn and much-disputed region, could set the world aflame in 1914, why not an ISIS terrorist just over a century later? Consider the many fault lines today in that region and the forces involved, including Russia, Turkey, Iran, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the United States, all ostensibly working together to combat terrorism even as they position themselves to maximize their own advantage and take down one another. Under such circumstances, a political temblor followed by a geo-political earthquake seems unbearably possible. And if not an ISIS temblor followed by major quake in the Middle East, there's no shortage of other possible global fault lines in an increasingly edgy world -- from saber-rattling contests with North Korea to jousting over Chinese-built artificial islands in the South China Sea.
As an historian, I've spent much time studying the twentieth-century German military. In the years leading up to World War I, Germany was emerging as the superpower of its day, yet paradoxically it imagined itself as increasingly hemmed in by enemies, a nation surrounded and oppressed. Its leaders especially feared a surging Russia. This fear drove them to launch a preemptive war against that country. (Admittedly, they attacked France first in 1914, but that's another story.) That incredibly risky and costly war, sparked in the Balkans, failed disastrously and yet it would only be repeated on an even more horrific level 25 years later. The result: tens of millions of dead across the planet and a total defeat that finally put an end to German designs for global dominance. The German military, praised as the "world's best" by its leaders and sold to its people as a deterrent force, morphed during those two world wars into a doomsday machine that bled the country white, while ensuring the destruction of significant swaths of the planet.
Today, the U.S. military similarly praises itself as the "world's best," even as it imagines itself surrounded by powerful threats (China, Russia, a nuclear North Korea, and global terrorism, to start a list). Sold to the American people during the Cold War as a deterrent force, a pillar of stability against communist domino-tippers, that military has by now morphed into a potential tipping force all its own.
Recall here that the Trump administration has reaffirmed America's quest for overwhelming nuclear supremacy. It has called for a "new approach" to North Korea and its nuclear weapons program. (Whatever that may mean, it's not a reference to diplomacy.) Even as nuclear buildups and brinksmanship loom, Washington continues to spread weaponry -- it's the greatest arms merchant of the twenty-first century by a wide mark -- and chaos around the planet, spinning its efforts as a "war on terror" and selling them as the only way to "win."
In May 1945, when the curtain fell on Germany's last gasp for global dominance, the world was fortunately still innocent of nuclear weapons. It's different now. Today's planet is, if anything, over-endowed with potential doomsday machines -- from those nukes to the greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming.
That's why it's vitally important to recognize that President Trump's "America-first" policies are anything but isolationist in the old twentieth century meaning of the term; that his talk of finally winning again is a recipe for prolonging wars guaranteed to create more chaos and more failed states in the Greater Middle East and possibly beyond; and that an already dangerous Cold War policy of "deterrence," whether against conventional or nuclear attacks, may now have become a machine for perpetual war that could, given Trump's bellicosity, explode into some version of doomsday.
Or, to put the matter another way, consider this question: Is North Korea's Kim Jong-un the only unstable leader with unhinged nuclear ambitions currently at work on the world stage?
A retired lieutenant colonel (USAF) and history professor, Astore is a TomDispatch regular. He blogs at Bracing Views.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, John Dower's The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II, as well as John Feffer's dystopian novel Splinterlands, Nick Turse's Next Time They'll Come to Count the Dead, and Tom Engelhardt's Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.
Copyright 2017 William J. Astore
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