The United States Is a Force for Chaos Across the Planet

An F-16 Fighting Falcon prepares for takeoff from Joint Base Balad, Iraq, June 8, 2010. Including future costs to care for this country's war vets, a staggering $5.6 trillion has gone to the US war on terror.An F-16 Fighting Falcon prepares for takeoff from Joint Base Balad, Iraq, June 8, 2010. Including future costs to care for this country’s war vets, a staggering $5.6 trillion has gone to the US “war on terror.” (Photo: Tech. Sgt. Caycee Cook / US Air Force)

The military might and endless wars around the globe have “a staggeringly well-funded blowback machine,” according to Tom Engelhardt. Get his new book, A Nation Unmade by War, from Truthout. Click here to receive it now.

The United States is “incapable of producing any results other than destruction and further fragmentation across staggeringly large parts of the planet,” argues Tom Engelhardt, author of A Nation Unmade by War. Since 1991, the US has been engaged in a misguided and destructive exercise of triumphalism. In this interview, Engelhardt discusses why the US is an empire of chaos.

Mark Karlin: How much money has gone to the US “war on terror” and what has been the impact of this expenditure?

Tom Engelhardt: The best figure I’ve seen on this comes from the Watson Institute’s Costs of War Project at Brown University, and it’s a staggering $5.6 trillion, including certain future costs to care for this country’s war vets. President Trump himself, with his usual sense of accuracy, has inflated that number even more, regularly speaking of $7 trillion being lost somewhere in our never-ending wars in the Greater Middle East. One of these days, he’s going to turn out to be right.

Tom Engelhardt. (Photo: Haymarket Press)Tom Engelhardt. (Photo: Haymarket Press)As for the impact of such an expenditure in the regions where these wars continue to be fought, largely nonstop, since they were launched just after September 11, 2001, it would certainly include: the spread of terror outfits across the Middle East, parts of Asia and Africa; the creation — in a region previously autocratic but relatively calm — of a striking range of failed or failing states; major cities that have been turned into absolute rubble (with no money in sight for serious…

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