A few months after the horrendous slaughter of World War I had been unleashed by the “guns of August 1914,” soldiers along the Western Front famously broke into spontaneous truces of Christmas celebration, song, and even exchange of gifts.

For a brief moment they wondered why they were juxtaposed in lethal combat along the jaws of hell. As Will Griggs once described it,

A sudden cold snap had left the battlefield frozen, which was actually a relief for troops wallowing in sodden mire. Along the Front, troops extracted themselves from their trenches and dugouts, approaching each other warily, and then eagerly, across No Man’s Land. Greetings and handshakes were exchanged, as were gifts scavenged from care packages sent from home. German souvenirs that ordinarily would have been obtained only through bloodshed – such as spiked pickelhaube helmets, or Gott mit uns belt buckles – were bartered for similar British trinkets. Carols were sung in German, English, and French. A few photographs were taken of British and German officers standing alongside each other, unarmed, in No Man’s Land.

The truth is, there was no good reason for the Great War. The world had stumbled into war based on false narratives and the institutional imperatives of military mobilization plans, alliances, and treaties arrayed into a doomsday machine and petty short-term diplomatic maneuvers and political calculus. Yet it took more than three-quarters of a century until the end of the Cold War in 1991 and disappearance of the Soviet Empire into the dustbin of history for all the consequential impacts and evils to be purged from the life of the planet.

The peace that was lost last time has not been regained this time, however. And for the same reasons.

So those reasons and culprits need to be named once again—just as historians can readily name the culprits from 111 years ago.

The latter include the German general staff’s plan for a lightning mobilization and strike on the Western Front called the Schlieffen Plan; the incompetence and intrigue in the court at St. Petersburg; the lifelong obsession of Austrian chief of staff Franz Conrad von Hotzendorf with the conquest of Serbia; French President Raymond Poincare’s anti-German irredentism owing to the 1871 loss of his home province, Alsace-Lorraine; and the bloodthirsty cabal around Winston Churchill, who forced England into an unnecessary war, among countless others.

Since these casus belli of 1914 were criminally trivial in light of all that metastasized thereafter, it might do well to name the institutions and false narratives that block the return of peace today. The fact is, these impediments are even more contemptible than the forces that crushed the Christmas truces one century ago.

There is no peace on earth today for reasons mainly rooted in Imperial Washington—not Moscow, Beijing, Tehran, Damascus, Beirut, or the rubble of what remains of the Donbas. Imperial Washington has become a global menace owing to what didn’t happen in 1991.

At that crucial inflection point, Bush the Elder should have declared “mission accomplished” and parachuted into the great Ramstein air base in Germany to begin the demobilization of America’s vast war machine.

So doing, he could have slashed the Pentagon budget from $600 billion to $300 billion (2015 $); demobilized the military-industrial complex by putting a moratorium on all new weapons development, procurement, and export sales; dissolved NATO and dismantled the far-flung network of US military bases; reduced the United States’ standing armed forces from 1.5 million to a few hundred thousand; and organized and led a world-disarmament and peace campaign, as did his Republican predecessors during the 1920s.

Unfortunately, George H. W. Bush was not a man of peace, vision, or even middling intelligence.

To the contrary, he was the malleable tool of the War Party, and it was he who single-handedly blew the peace when, in the very year the 77-Years War ended with the demise of the Soviet Union, he plunged America into a petty argument between the impetuous dictator of Iraq and the gluttonous emir of Kuwait. But that argument was none of George Bush’s or America’s business.

By contrast, even though liberal historians have reviled Warren G. Harding as some kind of dummkopf politician from the hinterland of Ohio, he well understood that the Great War had been for naught, and that to ensure it never happened again the nations of the world needed to rid themselves of their huge navies and standing armies.

To that end, he achieved the largest global-disarmament agreement ever during the Washington Naval Conference of 1921, which halted the construction of new battleships for more than a decade (which incidentally the true dummkopf in the Oval Office now wants to revive). And even then, the moratorium ended only because the vengeful victors at Versailles never ceased exacting their revenge on Germany.

And while he was at it, President Harding also pardoned Eugene Debs. In so doing, he gave witness to the truth that the intrepid socialist candidate for president and vehement antiwar protestor, who Woodrow Wilson had thrown in prison for exercising his First Amendment right to speak against US entry into a pointless European war, had been right all along.

In short, Warren G. Harding knew the war was over and the folly of Wilson’s 1917 plunge into Europe’s bloodbath should not be repeated. At all hazards.

But not George H. W. Bush. The man should never be forgiven for enabling the likes of Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Robert Gates, and their neocon pack of jackals to come to power—even if he eventually denounced them in his doddering old age.

Alas, upon his death, Bush the Elder was deified, not vilified as he deserved, by the mainstream press and the bipartisan Uniparty. And that tells you all you need to know about why Washington is ensnared in its Forever Wars and is the very reason why there is still no peace on earth.

Even more to the point, by opting not for peace but for war and oil in the Persian Gulf in 1991 Washington opened the gates to an unnecessary confrontation with Islam and nurtured the rise of jihadist terrorism that would not haunt the world today save for forces unleashed by George H. W. Bush’s petulant quarrel with Saddam Hussein.

We will momentarily get to the 52-year-old error that holds that the Persian Gulf is an American Lake and that the answer to high oil prices and energy security is the Fifth Fleet.

Suffice it to say here that the correct answer to high oil prices everywhere and always is high oil prices. This truth was driven home in spades by the oil busts of 2009, 2015, and 2020, and the fact the real price of oil today (2025 $) is no higher than it was in the mid-1970s.

But first it is well to remember that in 1991 there was no plausible threat anywhere on the planet to the safety and security of the citizens of Springfield, MA, Lincoln, NE, or Spokane, WA when the Cold War ended.

The Warsaw Pact had dissolved into more than a dozen woebegone sovereign statelets; the Soviet Union was now unscrambled into 15 independent and far-flung republics from Belarus to Tajikistan; and the Russian motherland would soon plunge into an economic depression that would temporarily leave it with a GDP about the size of the Philadelphia SMSA.

Likewise, China’s GDP in 1991 was even smaller and more primitive than Russia’s. Even as Mr. Deng was discovering the People’s Bank of China’s printing press, which would enable it to become a great mercantilist exporter, an incipient Chinese threat to national security was never in the cards.

After all, it was the 4,000 Walmarts in America upon which the prosperity of the new Red Capitalism inextricably depended and upon which the rule of the Communist oligarchs in Beijing was ultimately anchored. Even the hardliners among them could see that in swapping militarism for mercantilism and after invading America with tennis shoes, neckties, home textiles, and electronics—that the door had been closed to any other kind of invasion thereafter

So, yet another Christmas is here and there is still no peace on earth. And the proximate cause of that vexing reality remains the $1.3 trillion Warfare State planted on the banks of the Potomac—along with its web of warmaking capabilities, bases, alliances, and vassals stretching to the four corners of the planet.

So positioned, it stands in stark mockery of John Quincy Adams’s sage advice to his new nation 200 years ago:

Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be.

But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.

She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all.

She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.

She will commend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example.

She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom.

The last bolded sentence pretty much sums up the foolish, destructive, unnecessary, and fiscally calamitous Forever Wars hatched in Washington all the way back to 1950.

Nearly without exception they were waged against alleged foreign “monsters” of the very kind which John Quincy Adams urged his countrymen not to pursue: Kim Il-Sung, Mohammad Mosaddegh, Fidel Castro, Patrice Lumumba, Ho Chi Minh, Sukarno, Salvador Allende, Ayatollah Khomeini, Daniel Ortega, Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, Bashar al-Assad, Nicolas Maduro, Xi Jinping, and Vladimir Putin are but the most prominent among these targets of Washington’s relentless global-spanning search for “monsters to destroy.”

Yet without exception not one of these assorted authoritarians, dictators, tyrants, thugs, and revolutionists, along with the nations they ruled, posed a direct threat to the American homeland. Not even Putin or Xi could actually dream of mounting the massive armada of land, air and sea forces needed to transit the great ocean moats and lay waste to the security and liberty of 340 million Americans domiciled from “sea to shining sea.”

In the first place, this is the nuclear age but there is currently no nation on earth that has anything close to the First Strike force that would be needed to totally overwhelm America’s triad nuclear deterrent and thereby avoid a retaliatory annihilation of its own country and people if it attempted to strike first. After all, the US has 3,700 active nuclear warheads, of which about 1,800 are operational at any point in time. In turn, these are spread under the seven seas, in hardened silos and among a bomber fleet of 66 B-2 and B-52s—all beyond the detection or reach of any other nuclear power.

For instance, the Ohio class nuclear submarines each have 20 missile tubes, with each missile carrying an average of four-to-five warheads. That’s 90 independently targetable warheads per boat. At any given time 12 of the 14 Ohio class nuclear subs are actively deployed, and spread around the oceans of the planet within a firing range of 4,000 miles.

So at the point of attack that’s 1,080 deep-sea nuclear warheads stealthily cruising along the ocean bottoms that would need to be identified, located, and neutralized before any would-be nuclear attacker or blackmailer even gets started. Indeed, with respect to the “Where’s Waldo?” aspect of it, the sea-based nuclear force alone is a powerful guarantor of America’s homeland security. Even Russia’s vaunted hypersonic missiles couldn’t find or take out by surprise the US sea-based deterrent.

And then there are the roughly 300 nukes aboard the 66 strategic bombers, which also are not sitting on a single airfield Pearl Harbor-style waiting to be obliterated either, but are constantly rotating in the air and on the move. Likewise, the 400 Minutemen III missiles are spread out in extremely hardened silos deep underground across a broad swath of the upper Midwest. Each missile currently carries one nuclear warhead in compliance with the Start Treaty but could be MIRV’d in response to a severe threat, thereby further compounding and complicating an adversary’s First Strike calculus.

Needless to say, there is no way, shape or form that America’s nuclear deterrent can be neutralized by a blackmailer. And that gets us to the heart of the case for drastically downsizing the hegemonic Warfare State domiciled on the Potomac River. To wit, according to the most recent CBO estimates the nuclear triad will cost only about $75 billion per year to maintain over the next decade, including allowances for periodic weapons upgrades; and that’s just 7.5% of the current hideously bloated $1 trillion per year Pentagon budget.

At the same time, neither are there any technologically-advanced industrial powers who have either the capability or intention to attack the American homeland with conventional forces. To do that you need a massive military armada including a Navy and Air Force many times the size of current US forces, huge air and sealift resources, and humongous supply lines and logistics capacities that have never been........

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