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America’s National-Security State

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The following is a nonverbatim transcript of a talk that I delivered on September 1, 2023, at the young scholar’s segment of the annual conference on foreign policy sponsored by the Ron Paul Institute and held at the Dulles Hilton in Virginia. The biggest mistake America has ever made was the conversion of the federal government to a national-security state. That conversion has served as the greatest destroyer of our rights and liberties, our democratic processes, and our economic and financial well-being. What is a national-security state? It is a type of governmental structure in which the government wields totalitarian-like, dark-side powers. To employ the title of one of Ludwig von Mises’s books, it is omnipotent government. America’s national-security state is composed of separate but interrelated entities — the Pentagon, the vast military-industrial complex, including an enormous empire of domestic and foreign military bases, the CIA, the NSA, and, to a certain extent, the FBI. But it’s important to recognize that this ...

Xi Jinping is Right About the U.S. Empire

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On the eve of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s current visit to the United States, the New York Times published an article detailing some of Xi's thoughts about the United States. The article states:  In Mr. Xi’s telling, China sought to rise peacefully, but Western powers would not accept the idea that a Communist-led China was catching up and could someday overtake them in global primacy. The West would never stop trying to derail China’s ascent and topple its Communist Party, he said in speeches to the military that are largely unreported by the media. In 2015, Xi told military commanders: “Some Western countries absolutely never want to see a socialist China grow strong under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party.” The Times writes that Xi’s speeches “voiced an almost fatalistic conviction … that China’s rise would prompt a backlash from Western rivals seeking to maintain their dominance.” Xi told Chinese Air Force officers in 2014, “The ...

America’s Forever Wars Are Not the Problem

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Ever since it became clear that the U.S. invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq were turning into disasters, a common refrain has been to end America’s “forever wars.” Politicians of all political stripes, commentators in the mainstream press, and various conservative and libertarian think tanks and educational foundations have embraced the refrain, thinking that if only America can bring an end to its “forever wars,” everything will be fine. But these people are mistaken. Ending America’s forever wars is akin to reducing the size of a cancerous tumor. In order to cure the longstanding ailment that afflicts the American body politic, it is necessary to eradicate, not reduce, the entire cancerous tumor that is taking our country down from within. As a new book entitled The Last Honest Man by James Risen demonstrates, U.S. Senator Frank Church gradually came to this realization. Church was a fierce opponent of the war in Vietnam. Not surprisingly, rightwing proponents of the war called ...

The Dangerous Pursuit of Empire: Russia, China, and the United States

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Giving up the reality, the nostalgia, or the dream of empire is very difficult for those in political power, and even for those citizens who have bought into their government’s indoctrination and propaganda. Historically, empire-builders and political leaders often seem to hold certain attitudes and ideas in common. First, they believe that they and their group or nation are on ...