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  • From: Don Bowen <don.bowen AT earthlink.net>
  • To: homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Homestead] Somewhat sobering
  • Date: Fri, 21 Jan 2005 17:13:41 -0800

http://www.motherjones.com/news/dailymojo/2005/01/what_could_go_wrong.html

This line has real relevance:

In addition, a national economy that cannot itself produce the things it needs and invests instead in military "security" will eventually find itself in a position in which it has to use its military constantly to take, or threaten to take, from others what it cannot provide for itself, which in turn leads to what Yale historian Paul Kennedy has described as "imperial overstretch":

"[T]hat is to say, decision-makers in Washington must face the awkward and enduring fact that the sum total of the United States' global interests and obligations is nowadays far larger than the country's power to defend them all simultaneously."

That descent into imperial overstretch explains how in the early 1940s an America much weaker in absolute terms, fighting more evenly matched opponents, could nonetheless prevail against its enemies more quickly than a state with an $11-trillion Gross Domestic Product and a defense budget approaching $500 billion (without even adding in the $80 billion budgetary supplement for Iraq and Afghanistan that the Bush Administration is reputedly preparing for the current fiscal year) fighting perhaps 10,000-20,000 ill-armed insurgents in a state with a pre-war GDP that represents less than the turnover of a large corporation. The U.S. today is a nation with a hollowed-out industrial base and an increasing incapacity to finance a military adventurism propelled by the very forces responsible for that hollowing out.



Don Bowen
Awl Knotted Up Woodworking
Valley Center, CA http://www.braingarage.com






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