Donald Trump’s proposed $1.5 trillion Pentagon budget would not make the United States safer, but would divert resources from the education, infrastructure, research and resilience needed to rebuild national strength.

The US empire is in decline. Compare it today to where it was only 30 years ago, following the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was a ‘hyperpower’ then, almost inconceivably dominant with no challengers on Earth.

Since then, China has surpassed the US economically. Russia is rated No.1 militarily. The US has to borrow close to $2 trillion per year (the annual federal budget deficit) just to keep the lights on. Its government based on checks and balances is under assault by a sleazy felon who wants to be king. It is wracked by social divisions that presage civil war.

President Donald Trump’s proposed solution to these problems is to shoot our way out. He wants a 50 per cent increase over last year’s Pentagon budget, to $1.5 trillion. It is stupid in the measure to which it is excessive. It is suicidal to the extent it will degrade our security and our chances of improving national prosperity.

A wiser policy would be to rethink how the US is to co-exist with other nations in what is emerging as a multipolar world. That’s a big rethink. There’s another rethink coming as well: how we run the economy and what it is that actually accounts for national well-being.

Neither of these ‘rethinkings’ – security nor the economy – will be easy. Both will go against existing failed doctrines and the powerful interests that back them. But, without doing this, we face the certainty of continuing national decline.

The highest-level rationale for rejecting a 50 per cent increase in the Pentagon’s budget is that the military simply doesn’t win wars. Sure, it can knock off defenceless, pipsqueak principalities like Grenada, or Serbia, or Libya. But whenever it goes up against a committed adversary, especially one that fights back, it loses.

It lost in Vietnam to a nation of rice farmers that hadn’t even entered the industrial age. It killed more than three million Vietnamese, four million Southeast Asians when you count Laos and Cambodia. Yet, it lost.

It lost in Iraq, despite Iraq having been bombed for the prior decade, since the first Gulf War in 1991. Even in losing, the US killed more than a million Iraqis and spawned ISIS, one of the most virulent terrorist organisations ever let loose on the world.

It lost in Afghanistan, despite 20 years of trying to win. Afghanistan was a fourth-world country, with the Taliban literally living in caves. The Taliban had only hand-held firearms. No air force. No artillery. No satellite intelligence. The US still managed to........

© Pearls and Irritations