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Avoid the necessity of those overgrown military establishments which, under any form of government, are inauspicious to liberty, and which are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty.
George Washington
“Overgrown military establishments” now define the United States. For the U.S., war has little to do with defense and everything to do with feeding an always-hungry war-based economy.
Congressmen and senators from both parties are perpetually compelled to satisfy the insatiable lust for money from the public treasury by the military-industrial/surveillance-technocratic establishment in return for generous “contributions” to their re-election campaigns.
The annual taxpayer funding for the war profiteers is more than $1.5 trillion. That amounts to 750 military bases in over 80 countries all over the world. Plus, the State of Israel itself should be regarded as one giant U.S. military base, as we provide multiple billions of dollars annually to the Zionist war machine. To put it another way, Israel would not last two weeks as a functioning military force without U.S. taxpayer largess.
All the above spells one word: E-M-P-I-R-E.
Our first and greatest president, George Washington, warned us that “overgrown military establishments” are unfavorable and even hostile to liberty. And this is coming from the man that was the commanding general of our Continental Army, which won America’s War for Independence.
In his farewell address in 1961, President Dwight David Eisenhower warned: “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.” Like Washington, Eisenhower was America’s commanding general in a major war.
It is no coincidence that the two presidents who warned against the danger of an “overgrown” and overreaching military establishment were each America’s top generals. They saw up close and personal the hazard that an unrestrained military posed, not merely to innocents in foreign nations, but to personal liberty at home.
The war of aggression against Iran was “a bridge too far” for the U.S. empire. History will point to this most strategic defeat and the irrational reasons behind it as the beginning of the end of the American empire (which began shortly after World War II).
In the not-too-distant future, someone will write a book, The Rise and Fall of the American Empire. And the Iran war (and Donald Trump) will stand out prominently in that future best-seller. In fact, present pundits are already providing data for that future magnum opus.
For example, Jennifer Kavanaugh wrote a masterful missive for The American Conservative entitled: The Iran War and the Future of American Empire.
I want to quote segments of her superb analysis.
Wars often go wrong in unexpected ways. Even well-planned operations can be derailed by surprise events, equipment failures, bad weather, or bad luck. But the disaster that followed President Donald Trump’s decision to attack Iran on February 28 was not a surprise. War-gamed and red-teamed dozens of times over decades, the risks of the campaign were well-known and obvious.
Still, the war’s outcome has been worse than the most pessimistic predictions. Three months into what the Trump administration has called an “excursion,” the initial assessment that Operation Epic Fury was a “tactical success but strategic failure” appears too generous. After all, neither strategic nor tactical goals were achieved. The United States did not replace the Iranian regime with new, moderate leaders. It failed to seize Iran’s highly enriched uranium or eliminate Iran’s nuclear program. Worse, most reports suggest Iran has retained much of its military capacity, including access to large portions of its missile and drone stockpiles. Finally, the war has created a new, bedeviling problem. The Strait of Hormuz, once the passageway for 20 percent of the world’s oil and liquified natural gas, remains effectively closed.
No matter how the war ends, the costs of the latest U.S. military adventure in the Middle East will be steep and the geopolitical consequences irreversible. The next generation of U.S. leaders will face a stark reality. The United States, which for decades has made decisions based on what policymakers thought America should do, will be forced to consider what the United States can do. The change will have major implications for the United States, but also for U.S. allies who have come to depend on American security guarantees and for the international community that relies on the United States for provision of global security goods, like freedom of navigation.
It will take time for the American imperial project to disappear for good, but from this point, U.S. retrenchment is inevitable. In 20 years, the world will look back on this moment as a turning point: the beginning of the end of American empire.
Jennifer confirms what I have been saying since it became obvious that Iran defeated both the U.S. and Israeli militaries within the first two weeks of the illegal and unjust war against that country. Not only has Iran begun the dismantlement of the American empire, it has also begun the dismantlement of the Greater Israel Project and perhaps of the Zionist state itself.
A Theological Perspective
From a theological perspective, my next message pertaining to God’s covenant with Moses will prove from the words of Moses himself that God has already fully promised to destroy what we know as the Zionist State of Israel and its imperialistic ambitions to slaughter and enslave the entire Middle East. At least three times, God used the Persian Empire to rescue the Old Testament Israelites, so now He is using its national descendant, Iran, to dismantle the current counterfeit Jewish state.
And there’s nothing John Hagee, Robert Jeffress, Franklin Graham, Greg Laurie or Paula White (or Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham, Mike Huckabee or Mark Levin) can do to stop it.
Back to Jennifer:
President Trump has declared victory in the Middle East. But to anyone with eyes, his rosy prognosis does not match the reality. The most obvious evidence of the American failure is the continued closure of the Strait of Hormuz (which was open before the war), despite several attempts by the U.S. Navy to get traffic moving again through the narrow chokepoint. Although a small number of tanker and cargo ships have successfully transited the strait in recent weeks, most of the traffic remains stalled due to the security concerns of ship owners, captains, and their crews.
Away from Hormuz, the inability of the United States and Israel to suppress Iranian missile and drone attacks is perhaps the war’s biggest disappointment. Ambitious U.S. goals like regime change and eliminating Iran’s nuclear program were never achievable using military force alone, but destroying Iran’s ability to produce and launch missiles and drones that could be fired at regional neighbors seemed attainable. Recent reporting, however, suggests that even this objective has slipped through the U.S. military’s fingers; Iran appears to retain as much as 70 percent of its pre-war missiles and launchers and access to 30 of its 33 missile sites. Iran’s ability to manufacture drones also seems robust. That Iran was able to sustain a consistent rate of fire after the war’s opening days is further evidence that the damage inflicted by the U.S. military was somewhat less devastating than suggested by the Pentagon and the White House.
The results of the war, then, are dismal. The costs of the military failure, on the other hand, are significant—and not only in monetary terms.
Most up-to-date assessments suggest that at least 16 U.S. military installations across eight countries—most of the U.S. military positions in the region—suffered severe damage. For many of these sites, the damage incurred was so extensive as to render the facility effectively unusable for military operations. The cost of reconstituting these bases and hardening infrastructure across the region against renewed conflict will be high, but the total is difficult to estimate since the U.S. government is still limiting access to open-source satellite data in the region. Iranian missile and drone strikes also successfully targeted dozens of U.S. sensors and radars across the Middle East, including those underlying U.S. regional air defense and early warning networks. Forty-two military aircraft, including an E-3 AWACS, four F-15s, and seven air tankers, were also damaged or destroyed. Replacing these assets will require tens of billions in additional spending.
Costs to long-term military readiness are hard to measure and surely not counted in the Pentagon’s estimate, but they are worth considering anyway. In addition to wear and tear to equipment and personnel caused by the war, the loss of aircraft and air defense platforms and the depletion of U.S. missiles and air defense interceptor stockpiles will affect U.S. preparedness for future military operations. Some estimates suggest the United States has burned through 1,000 Tomahawk missiles, nearly 50 percent of its Patriot and THAAD stockpiles, and significant portions of advanced stand-off weapons like PRSM and JASSM missiles.
The constraints on U.S. military power created by these shortages will be consequential and enduring. In congressional testimony, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth admitted that it would take years to replenish the missiles expended in Iran. During this time, American strategic flexibility will be limited. For example, leading experts now assess that the U.S. military arsenal is not sufficient to support a defense of Taiwan, long considered the highest priority contingency for American military planners. To put this more bluntly, if China were to attack Taiwan tomorrow, the United States might be forced to watch on the sidelines. The same is probably true of a major conflict in Europe.
As seriously, the problems facing a diminished U.S. military will be contagious, affecting the rearmament efforts of U.S. allies across regions. As our stockpiles are rebuilt, the United States will have to divert most defense production to its own military, reducing what is available for sales to U.S. allies and partners who have based their rearmament plans on such weapons purchases. Already, European NATO members are hearing that shipments of much-needed missiles and other weapons are being delayed indefinitely. Allies in Asia have been similarly warned. Japan’s shipments of Tomahawk missiles, for instance, are likely to arrive late, as are most weapons in recent Taiwan arms packages.
For many of these allies, such delays are unsustainable. In Europe, for instance, there is talk of focusing more heavily on indigenous production or shifting orders to other suppliers such as Israel, Turkey, or South Korea. In some ways, allied assessments that the United States is an unreliable partner are a good thing, pushing countries that have long been dependent on the United States firmly and finally in the direction of independence and self-sufficiency. But, for the United States, it will be a dramatic change that contributes to a gradual erosion of its position of global military dominance.
The Economic Fallout
Beyond military costs, there is the economic damage caused by the conflict, which is outside the Pentagon’s purview but real and serious nonetheless. The economic losses caused by disrupted trade are likely to be massive, measured in slowed economic growth and lost corporate profits and national income. For the United States, the effects of higher oil prices and inflation for American consumers are the biggest concerns. And of course there are also the opportunity costs, that is, the U.S. government investment in domestic programs that will now be delayed and foregone to support higher military budgets.
The bottom line is this: The war has not made Americans safer, but they will be paying for it for decades anyway.
The Key Takeaway
The key takeaway is that U.S. military power simply doesn’t reach as far or have the staying power that it used to. Just as seriously, the war in Iran suggests that the insolvency of the current U.S. military position is systemic and strategic, not simply a question of lack of funds or insufficient magazine depth. A $1.5 trillion defense budget or investment in the defense industrial base cannot solve these problems. Instead, the United States will be forced to reevaluate and reduce its global commitments in a way that it has not in the past.
There is much more to Jennifer’s treatise. I suggest that you read it.
If you are taking her analysis (and mine) to mean that the American empire, now in full free fall, portends ill for the United States, you are reaching a very mistaken conclusion. Empires—ALL empires—are doomed to fall. The entirety of human history proves that fact. The Egyptian Empire fell, as did the Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, Seleucid, Grecian, Roman, Mongol, Ottoman, Spanish and British empires.
The truth is, the sooner the empire falls, the better off the nation itself will be. Divine Providence is extremely merciful to America to provide for the fall of its empire in a relatively brief period of time.
America was never founded to be an empire. We don’t need an empire; and we shouldn’t want one. All the empire does is suck and bleed our nation dry. Empires only enrich the oligarchs. Empires wipe out a prosperous middle class. Empires incite hatred and conflict abroad and at home. Empires are giant nets cast to catch large portions of the world’s population for the frying pan of perdition. The longer the empire lasts, the harder its fall will be.
We should all work and pray for the American empire to end AS SOON AS POSSIBLE.
Then, and only then, can the American government be controlled by We the People and not by billionaires and foreign powers. Then, and only then, can the American nation start defending constitutional liberty again. Then, and only then, can the American nation restore prosperity to the working class again. Then, and only then, can the American nation enjoy peace and tranquility again. Then, and only then, can America enact true justice again. Then, and only then, can America be America again.
© Chuck Baldwin
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