While America spends $50m to kill a single Taliban and boosts Afganistan’s GDP by 1000% in the process, it is falling from economic primacy.
The “Debt ceiling” is $16.7 trillion.
Cost of the war so far, $6 trillion.
Those two numbers speak for themselves.
Divide the cost into the American population into that and you get roughly $19,000 a head.
Imagine that in your checking account.
Meanwhile, while you spend $19,000, Chinese GDP has gone up 500% and US GDP 50%.
What could the US have done with that $6,000 billion? That is 12 Apple Inc’s of capital or a dozen or more Exxons. 150% of the whole market cap of the Nasdaq.
So here we are again, the US and probably the UK, two massively indebted countries, running vast deficits, which are cutting social programs to their citizens because of budget constraints, girding themselves up for more war.
Untold millions, likely billions are set to be poured away while the Pandora’s box of escalation and all out regional war will be vigorously shaken.
All the extremist will get a giant shot in the arm of resources.
What are the governments of the west thinking?
They decided to “gave war a chance” and it didn’t pan out.
Its time the leadership read a few basic text books.
Alexis de Tourquville wrote in 1840 in “Democracy in America.” “No protracted war can fail to endanger freedom of a democratic country.”
He also wrote.
“All those who seek to destroy the liberties of a democratic nation ought to know that war is the surest and shortest means to accomplish it.”
Anyone following the Snowden scandal will instantly see that at work.
But you don’t have to be a peacenik to understand how this never-end military adventurism is dragging down the west.
War monger Sun Tzu of Art of War fame said:
“There is no instance of a country benefiting from prolonged warfare.”
He also said:
“No state has the resources to sustain protracted warfare.”
So it is not as if the outcome of Perpetual war has not been understood for hundreds or even thousands of years..
Major General Smedley Butler, in his time, the most decorated marine in History, (2 Medals of Honour,) that War is a Racket, but it really isn’t really about profit.
War is a terrible business model, one that has put 50% on to the national debt of America in the last decade alone.
Instead the cause of this perpetual war is the USA living in the past.
America was ascendant because a war addicted Europe dissipated itself and its capital through an insatiable desire for military conflict. Crudely, all Europe’s gold ended up in America. Through European perpetual war America ended up owning the world.
But now the same vice is dissipating America. Where is the wealth of America going?
So America will lose it economic and political primacy to the country focusing on trade.
America, once the workshop of the world to the waring countries, will cede as they did to the new workshop of the world: China.
Unless America conquerors its addiction to war the cycle will turn so it becomes the hollowed out husk that Europe became.
Unless the US plans to dominate the world economy through force of arms, it be left like Russian when the UUSR collapsed, with stock piles of weapons it cannot afford to maintain or dare to use, squatting in the shadow of a country with triple the population and an industry it cannot match.
If you doubt the possibility, find out if they still make light bulbs in the USA.
Who knew?