By Vincent Cook

Trump’s latest National Security Strategy (NSS) document has predictably sent foreign policy pundits of all stripes into a tizzy, with globalists (both of the unilateralist-neoconservative variety and of the multilateralist “rules-based international order” variety) howling once again about Trump not being one of them, while “NatCons” celebrate the NSS’s assault on censorial Eurowokeness and the NSS’s dire warnings about a “stark prospect of civilizational erasure” in Europe.

In spite of the Euro-bashing orientation of the NSS, America’s militarist/imperialist lobby can take heart in the NSS’s endorsement of the Monroe Doctrine coupled to a “Trump Corollary” that sounds very much like the Roosevelt Corrollary and the Lodge Corrollary, as well as affirming a hodge-podge of other globalist doctrines (though not explicitly naming them) like the Carter Doctrine of keeping unfriendly powers out of the Persian Gulf (i.e., waging endless wars in the Middle East) and the Truman Doctrine of containing the spread of Communism, at least in Asia with respect to the Chinese and North Korean regimes. In terms of the overall spending commitment, the bottom line remains the “Hague Commitment” of increasing Pentagon spending to 5 percent of GDP.

Of course, massive increases in the demand for military goods and services will have to be matched by corresponding increases on the supply side if the Hague spending increases are to strengthen the Pentagon’s and its allies’ ability to enforce the witch’s brew of imperialistic doctrines with which the Pentagon has been tasked. This raises the thorny economic problem of how to increase the physical availability of cutting-edge weapons, munitions, and manpower at reasonable prices. A spending increase by itself doesn’t guarantee an increase in military might if an anemic, underperforming productive sector can’t respond well to the spending; instead, one merely drives up prices as higher spending confronts inelastic supply curves.

This supply problem is not a mere hypothetical concern—the Russo-Ukrainian War clearly demonstrates that modern missile and drone technologies have negated the kind of mechanized, mobile, combined-arms tactics that characterized the Second World........

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