In The Art of War the Chinese General Sun Tzu asserted that “There is no instance of a nation benefitting from prolonged warfare” and many of us had hoped that President Trump would bear in mind this and other instructive maxims after taking power in the country with the world’s largest and most active warfare machine.
We had also hoped he might behave sensibly concerning US relations with countries which over the years have incurred the aggressive wrath of Washington’s drum-beating clique which is backed by a Congress of lamentable xenophobia, concerning which the great President Eisenhower had warned Americans that “In the councils of government we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”
Wise words, indeed; but little did the world imagine that his forecast of likely dangers would be so acutely prophetic.
In the years since the catastrophic election of George W Bush there has been a disastrous rise of misplaced power. The US war on Iraq, the US-NATO war on Libya and the campaign in Afghanistan by that inept military alliance have been calamities resulting in hundreds of thousands of deaths, a massive refugee crisis, and expansion of the barbaric Islamic State terrorist organization. (The incompetence of US and British efforts in the Iraq and Afghan wars is compellingly described in…