Tell Congress to stop the Biden administration from funding wars in Ukraine and Israel

Note from LifeSiteNews co-founder Steve Jalsevac: This article is significant. The United States has been on a path of constant, mostly avoidable, and failed wars from 1960 onwards. It has gone from the war in Vietnam, the Bay of Pigs CIA fiasco, invasion of Grenada, the Persian Gulf War, intervention in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia and northeastern Kenya, Libya, Syria, the Yemini Civil War, and to now imminently facing being pulled further into possibly the most dangerous wars of all – in Ukraine and the Middle East – because of the influence of the powerful Zionist and other lobbies in Washington.

These wars have been extremely costly in lives and finances – millions of innocent people killed and trillions of dollars spent. The giant military-industrial-complex has played a large role in advocating for what has seemed to be never-ending wars by the U.S., ensuring there is always a demonized enemy to sway the public to support giant defense industry contractors making trillions of dollars of sales from each war. War has become a massive business and human life has had to be greatly degraded to justify such massive machine-killing.

The war industry is falsely promoted as a defender and promoter of democracy and a patriotic duty. However, numerous U.S. soldiers have been looking back at all the suffering they endured and caused, and innocent civilian lives snuffed out, towns and cities destroyed, and seen that it was rarely justified. The United States does not really need 800 military bases around the world. They could legitimately be seen as branch offices of defense corporations.

President Dwight Eisenhower, who was the leading U.S. general during WWII, on the date of his retirement, gave a brief, somber warning about the power and dangers of the military-industrial-complex. Sadly, he has proven to be prophetic and the U.S. has fallen into the trap that has been laid for it by the multinational, globalist corporations such as Blackrock, Vanguard, and State Street and their army of bribing lobbyists who have made the U.S. into now one of the most despised nations in the world. Few of the wars could be considered to have been necessary or a success other than many elected leaders and defense contractors have become obscenely wealthy from the killing.

In my view, being pro-life is also to be pro-peace, placing the highest priority on diplomatic efforts, rather than military actions, to save sacred human lives and resolve conflicts. At certain times, WWII being the most prominent, war becomes unavoidable in order to defend the defenseless from deadly aggressors, but it should always be the last resort. A truly Christian nation must be a peace advocating nation.

(AIER) — In 1953 Dwight Eisenhower gave his now famous “Chance for Peace” speech. It is worth repeating one key section of this speech in full:

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. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. 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 50 miles of concrete highway. 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, I repeat, is 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.

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Eisenhower is making two key points here. First, he is describing a world – one that came to pass – in which Americans would be poised for war at all times. This war, should it ever happen, had the potential to be an existential one because it would likely involve the use of nuclear weapons by both sides. That was the worst-case scenario. The best-case scenario, Eisenhower said, was:

… 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.

That “best-case scenario” still sounds pretty dark.

Eisenhower’s second key point here is about opportunity costs, the opportunity costs inherent to constructing and maintaining a military that consumes a significant amount of the country’s GDP each year. Here, we are really talking about the trade-offs required in a world of vast but finite resources available to the United States. Clearly the United States has key interests – preserving itself as a nation, securing its territorial integrity, deterring attacks against the U.S. homeland, preserving the lines of communication upon which its overseas trade (and national prosperity) relies – that must be protected by military capabilities. It will thus always have to have some kind of military, and given the size of the United States and its interests, it will want to have a pre-eminently powerful military.

But we must never allow ourselves to be persuaded that purchasing and maintaining such a pre-eminent military comes at no cost to ourselves or that spending our resources in this way does not squeeze out alternative things that we could purchase with those same resources.

Eisenhower reminds us that military spending squeezes out other domestic concerns: social welfare programs, education, power and transportation infrastructure, and so forth. Creating such a military requires the efforts of some of the finest American minds (and bodies), who, rather than applying their talents to creating greater prosperity for themselves and other Americans, are consumed with building weapons of war.

Sadly, the relevance of Eisenhower’s points did not end with the Cold War but remain every bit as important today. To be fair, there was a small peace dividend during the Clinton administration, when annual defense budgets fell from the FY1992 peak of $295 billion to a low of $263 billion in FY1994, and remained below the FY1992 level until FY2000, when the defense budget climbed to $304 billion.

The defense budget climbed every year until FY2010, reaching a peak of $721 billion, then fell each year until FY2016, when it once more began to climb. As of March 2024, the U.S. Department of Defense FY2025 (FY2025) budget request was $850 billion. Whatever peace dividend existed following the collapse of the Soviet Union, it dried up within a few years before the September 11 responses and the “forever wars” in Afghanistan and Iraq, followed by current preparations for a new cold war with China, which has accelerated defense spending with no end in sight.

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The United States has become a nation that remains perpetually ready to go to war. This was not the case prior to World War II. National military preparedness was sold to Americans beginning in 1940 with the nation’s first peacetime draft and the beginning of significant defense spending increases as a temporary measure needed because of global events and the predations of the Axis. That wartime expediency continued for the 45 years of the Cold War. There was a brief respite in the 1990s and then September 11 ushered in a massive new wave of military expenditures.

As the forever wars have wound down, calls to prepare against a new cold war with China have begun. The United States has lurched from one geopolitical crisis to the next since 1940 with no end in sight. While we never ended up with the garrison state that Harold Lasswell feared in 1940, we have seen the rise of the military-industrial complex, the creation of the national security state, and a bloated military that is second to none, but with a price tag to match.

While a multitude of entrenched interests would oppose the notion of cutting military spending, cutting U.S. military expenditures by 40-50 percent, as former Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller has called for, would not be as devastating as it might sound. This would return the United States to its pre-9/11 level of military spending, which is appropriate now that the Global War on Terror has ended. If coupled with defense acquisition reform, it would produce a U.S. military that remains pre-eminent while also fostering innovation, investing wisely for the future, starving an insatiable military-industrial complex, and right-sizing the military so that it can secure core American interests. It would also provide room for federal tax reduction, deficit reduction, infrastructure investment, or any other use that would create value for American taxpayers. Perhaps most importantly, such a military spending decrease could provide a major bargaining chip – a kind of quid pro quo – for policymakers interested in concomitant domestic spending decreases.

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Embarking on this path requires us to return to Eisenhower’s emphasis on the opportunity costs of out-of-control government spending. In Eisenhower’s Farewell Address, he once again addressed the theme:

As we peer into society’s future, we – you and I, and our government – must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow.

For Eisenhower, fiscal prudence was a moral imperative.

Reprinted with permission from the American Institute for Economic Research.

Tell Congress to stop the Biden administration from funding wars in Ukraine and Israel