• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 490 0

failed. Josef Stalin is long gone, as is the Soviet Empire. Red China has become simply China, valued by Americans as a bountiful source of credit and consumer goods. Although Communists still call the shots in Beijing, promoting exports ranks well above promoting Mao’s teachings in the party’s list of priorities. In the Islamic Republic of Iran, once thought to be the incubator of powerful revolutionary forces, the mullahs find themselves hard-pressed just to maintain order in the streets. Washington’s quasi-official enemies list now consists mostly of pygmies: North Korea, a nation unable to feed its own population; Syria, an Israeli punching bag; Venezuela, governed by a clown; and, for old times’ sake, Cuba.

The world has by no means entered an era of peace and harmony. Far from it. Yet the threats demanding attention today—terrorism, climate change, drug cartels, Third World underdevelopment and instability, perhaps above all the proliferation of genocidal weapons invented and first employed by the West—bear scant resemblance to the threats that inspired Washington to devise its sacred trinity in the first place.

The problem set has changed, while the solutions proffered by Washington remain largely the same. The conviction that the obligations of leadership require the United States to maintain a global military presence, configure its armed forces for power projection, and employ them to impose change abroad persists, forms the enduring leitmotif of U.S. national security policy. Washington clings to its credo and trinity not out of necessity, but out of parochial self-interest laced with inertia.

Dwight D. Eisenhower for one would have been appalled. Early in his first term as president, Ike contemplated the awful predicament wrought by the Cold War during its first decade. “What can the world, or any nation in it, hope for,” he asked, “if no turning is found on this dread road?” The president proceeded to answer his own question. The worst to be feared would be a ruinous nuclear war.

The best would be this: a life of perpetual fear and tension; a burden of arms draining the wealth and the labor of all peoples; a wasting of strength that defies the American system or the Soviet system or any system to achieve true abundance and happiness for the peoples of this earth.

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

The president illustrated his point with specifics:

The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement.

We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.

This is, I repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking.

This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.1

Eisenhower urged Soviet leaders to join him in lifting humankind from its iron gibbet. His speech had little practical effect. Perhaps inevitably, the Cold War and its associated arms race continued. Worth recalling, however, is this soldier-statesman’s acute discomfort with the progressive militarization of U.S. policy.

Today, for most Americans, the Cold War has become a distant memory. Yet the “life of perpetual fear and tension” that Eisenhower described in 1953, the “burden of arms” that he decried, and “the wasting of strength” that undercuts the prospect of Americans achieving “true abundance and happiness” all persist. In Washington, the pattern of behavior that Eisenhower lamented has become deeply entrenched. Practices that Eisenhower viewed as temporary expedients are now etched in stone.

Contemplate these three examples: the size of the Pentagon