National Security is Stealing from You To Fund A War Against You
Militarism benefits reactionaries. Doesn’t matter whether you code it as primacy, imperialism, Monroe Doctrine 2.0, or great-power competition. It’s why most people under 40 will never own a home.
There was a popular saying when I worked as a strategist in the Pentagon: “Show me your budget and I’ll show you your strategy.” It was reductive, simplistic. But the idea was that no matter what you say, your actual priorities will be evident in what you choose to fund and not fund. Budget documents are moral documents are strategic documents.
This is a point my co-author Mike Brenes and I make in The Rivalry Peril. We have a chapter explaining how great-power competition worsens economic inequality, and part of that argument comes in the form of the political tradeoffs between military spending and economic security for the average Joe/Jane.1
Most people understand intuitively that spending on guns comes at the expense of spending on butter. But not enough people appreciate the anti-democratic political project implied by choosing guns at the expense of butter. As I wrote a couple years ago:
as our individual and societal choices narrow (or become more awful), it’s not because the world is just mysteriously getting worse. It’s because state power allows it (or directly causes it) to be that way, sometimes in spite of elites’ best intentions; we can and should be holding them accountable.
Spending public resources on militarism, and making the US economy dependent on national security Keynesianism, weakens the working class. If you’re a worker, that sucks for you. But some people aren’t workers. Some people are landlords, owners of capital, or servants of financial capital. People like this, who think they benefit from a weak working class, have an interest in promoting uses of state power that enrich those with privilege, allowing them to hoard wealth and opportunity at the expense of others.
Right now, Bernie Sanders is barnstorming across the United States with a wildly popular message about oligarchy; he is naming the root problem facing democracy.
As Bernie repeatedly described during his 2020 presidential bid, oligarchs are the chief beneficiaries of a militarist foreign policy. The language of that foreign policy might be great-power competition and geopolitics and balance of power and the like, but we know who’s benefiting from it all. So as we watch a Trump administration that is literally a marriage of tech oligarchs, finance oligarchs, and ethnonationalists, we should not be surprised that its spending on national security would surge as extreme austerity is being imposed on the nation’s workers.
The guns-butter tradeoff—a project for reactionaries by reactionaries (and the national security state)—is reaching absurdist levels.
The Pentagon budget, we know, is approaching a trillion dollars—a dystopian milestone it will probably eclipse either this year or next. But that’s only a fraction of national security spending. Putting aside hidden spending and supplemental budgets, the Republican senate just passed a bill that provides $340 billion—billion—to fund Trump’s regime of ICE raids, immigration detention, deportation, and border security. The US state spends 1/3 of that amount on food stamps, and 1/5 of that amount on public housing support.
And since national security spending is financed not through taxation but debt accumulation, the actual amount being spent is not ~$1 trillion for the Pentagon plus $340 billion for border wars—you must also include the interest payments on the debt we accrue for military spending, which is never factored in but is mind-bogglingly large. As we note in The Rivalry Peril:
The interest alone on U.S. financing for the first 18 years of the War on Terror amount to $925 billion. Assuming interest rates do not radically rise, interest payments on military spending are projected to be $2 trillion by 2030 and $6.5 trillion by 2050.
This shit is bananas, B-A-N-A-N-A-S.
Niall Ferguson, the Pete Hegseth of historians, claims that a great power ceases to be a great power when its debt servicing overtakes its military spending. That is simply not true. Spending vast amounts of public treasure on interest payments can be a huge problem, especially if it’s on something that has meager fiscal payoffs like defense spending. But what Ferguson means by this heuristic is that the US cannot afford to keep spending on a welfare state while maintaining military primacy and warmongering. He’s trying to argue indirectly that more of the money used for healthcare and anti-poverty measures should be used to pay down US debt. Classic ruling-class aristocracy shit.
Anyway, all of this national security spending—fortress America plus the Pentagon plus the ballooning interest payments—is happening while DOGE is laying off hundreds of thousands of federal workers and the Republican senate simultaneously passed $4.5 trillion in tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations while trying to reduce healthcare spending by as much as $2 trillion. If the federal budget is a moral and strategic document, it’s on behalf of the few who benefit from it, not the majority who pay for it.
Class war from above is our reality. It’s ruthless. And it’s not exempting the middle class. It is, in fact, destroying the middle class, because that is the section of society that MAGA intellectuals believe is the center of gravity for the “woke” ideology they find so threatening.
It’s not enough that Trump’s security state is profoundly bad policy. It’s also impossibly expensive and you and me are the ones paying for it.
Further Reading:
Your point about reducing welfare to offset increases in military spending and debt repayments is valid but I think reduced expenditure in infrastructure that requires engineers and tradesmen in quantity is a bigger problem. Big pharma can get less of a cut of the budget to reduce health costs. Infrastructure employment and resulting improved productivity and livability for society are great rewards too. Guns to rebar or rail perhaps.