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Remember How We Got Out of Vietnam

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Do you remember what U.S. national-security state officials were saying when millions of Americans were demanding that the U.S. government withdraw its troops from Vietnam and bring them home? They were saying that “national security” was at stake — i.e., the very survival of the United States. If the U.S. government withdrew from Vietnam, they said, the dominoes would start falling to the communists, first in Southeast Asia and ultimately all over the world, with the United States being the final big domino. Vietnam was our line of defense against the entire world going red. It was all false. As I point in my new ebook The CIA, Terrorism, and the Cold War: The Evil of the National Security State (which just hit #5 in Amazon’s top 100 bestselling ebooks in Political Freedom), in actuality it didn’t make a whit of difference whether Vietnam and other countries in the world went red, at least not insofar as the United States ...

The Empire versus Little America

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Former Arkansas Sen. William Fulbright said in 1967, “The price of empire is America’s soul, and that price is too high.” War, expansion, the maintenance of a large standing army: these corrupt a country, as poets from James Russell Lowell to Wendell Berry have tried to tell us. The Vietnam or Iraq War may level villages across the sea but back home, in our villages, they unleash an insidious poison, too. They make our places less liveable. From the pit of the Cold War Edmund Wilson, the Sage of Boonville, New York, lamented that “our country has become today a huge blundering power unit controlled more and more by bureaucracies whose rule is making it more and more difficult to carry on the tradition of American individualism.” In Boonville as in Emporia as in Sauk Centre, the little places that give America soul were ravaged and denuded by the machine of perpetual war. War effaces and perverts the very bases of healthy ...

Trump and America First

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Whatever else might be said of Donald Trump, no one can deny that he has the most remarkable ability to make the GOP and mainstream establishment go ballistic. The most recent example is his use of the term “America First” in a foreign policy speech that he delivered right in the center of U.S. Empire, Washington, D.C. Once again, he has caused the Washington establishment and mainstream pundits and commentaries to scream like banshees. Why? Because Trump’s use of “America First” focuses people’s attention on what known as the America First Committee, a nationwide organization that opposed U.S. intervention into World War II. Given the horrific consequences of U.S. interventionism, it’s not surprising that the interventionists would get upset if any indirectly questions their interventionist shibboleth, World War II. It’s that war that interventionists inevitably revert to when anyone points out the massive death and destruction that the U.S. interventionist death machine has produced in the Middle East and Afghanistan, including the rise ...

A Few Thoughts on Machiavelli

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The Italian Renaissance politician and writer Nicolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) remains controversial. His defenders see him as a tough-minded “realist” and the founder of proper political science. Some writers find two Machiavellis: an advisor to aspiring despots, or (alternatively) a sincere republican theorist bent on freeing Italy from foreign rule. Either way, Machiavelli’s analysis of such categories as fortune, necessity, ...