How The Bipartisan War Party Fostered Fiscal Ruin, Part 3

When big spending Barrack Obama left the White House the national security budget properly measured totaled a staggering $822 billion. That included $600 billion for defense, $46 billion for security assistance and international operations and $177 billion for veterans compensation and services, which reflect the deferred cost of prior wars.

So much for the “peace candidate” of 2008 and the anti-war democratic party of the Vietnam era and its aftermath. To the contrary, that $822 billion national security budget embodied the cost of global hegemony and the Forever Wars to which it gave rise—notwithstanding that the only real threat to homeland security in the post-war period, the former Soviet Union, had been consigned to the dustbin of history 25 years earlier.

Donald Trump came bounding into the Oval Office talking what sounded like a different game—America First. But as his last Attorney General, Bill Barr, recently noted, if you believe in his policies don’t expect him to execute them. He can’t organize or lead his way out of a wet paper bag, and the budgetary fiasco in the national security space provides striking confirmation of Barr’s observation.

To be sure, the Donald did manage to see through the uniparty’s demonization of Putin and the feckless neocon claim that he intends to recreate the former Soviet Empire. After all, in the theater of Washington politics Vlad Putin was simply the Donald’s doppelganger when it came to demonization. So Trump got that part of the equation.

But the Donald actually had no idea what he meant by “America First” except that the line elicited boisterous cheers from the patriotic throngs at his campaign rallies. The fact is, he was historically ignorant beyond measure, lazy as they come when it involves studying your brief and a total sucker for military pomp and circumstance and the medal-bedecked uniforms of the generals.

So while Trump talked about bringing the Empire home, he actually fueled its budget like never before. The vastly bloated, broadly measured national security budget left behind by Obama took on $215 billion more girth on the Donald’s watch. His outgoing national security budget (FY 2021) actually broke the trillion dollar barrier, weighing in at $1.035 trillion or 26% more than what Obama and the Congressional uniparty had spent in FY 2017.

It might be supposed, of course, that with control of the veto pen and strong GOP positions in both the House and Senate during these four years that the near quarter-trillion dollars of extra largesse for the national security state would have been off-set by some hefty curtailments on the domestic side. The party in power being the fiscally conservative GOP and all.