Bursting the Pentagon Spending Bubble (New at Reason)

If you find yourself convinced that a presidential vote for a candidate not named either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton is simply a waste, you had better also be convinced that more massive military spending is the “smart power” needed to “Make America Great Again.” 

The standard-bearers of the Republican and Democratic parties are on record saying they would oppose any cuts in defense spending. Worse, the (at least in theory, and on only occassion) supposedly less-interventionist Trump has pledged to make the military commit war crimes, while Clinton has never met a military misadventure she didn’t endorse.

In a new column by appearing in the August/Septmeber 2016 issue of Reason, Veronique de Rugy takes on both fear-mongering and recklessly wasteful expenditures:

There’s also an exaggerated sense that the security of individual Americans is existentially threatened. Both Democrats and Republicans on the campaign trail contribute to this collective anxiety. “We live in a complex and dangerous world!” Clinton told a March rally in Seattle. Speaking before the Chicago Council on Global Affairs in February 2015, former Republican candidate Jeb Bush insisted that America needs “a military equal to any threat,” while Marco Rubio’s campaign website informed us that the “world has never been more dangerous than it is today” and that “Nothing matters if we aren’t safe.”

This is crazy. The United States has wide oceans to the east and west and friendly neighbors to the north and south, and is decidedly not at risk of being invaded by its enemies any time soon. And as Micah Zenko and Michael A. Cohen pointed out in Foreign Affairs last November, Americans are more likely to be crushed to death by their televisions and furniture than to be killed in a terrorist attack.

View this article.