The Fairy Tales We’re Told of American Military Preparations

I’m reading a full-bore, panic-attack article from an organization that calls itself the Atlantic Council’s Forward Defense Program.

So, I looked them up.

I like to keep abreast of what my military-industrial complex is up to, when I’m occupied elsewhere. ‘The Scowcroft Center is part of the Atlantic Council, a Washington-based policy institute founded in 1961 to promote cooperation between North America and Europe and strengthen the transatlantic alliance.’

Well, no wonder the Snowcroft Center’s knickers are in a twist.

That was 65 years ago. America is a far different place these days, from then.

Eisenhower had just retired from the presidency, and the military-industrial dog he was to warn us about had barely sunk its teeth into the American leg. Kennedy had three years to go before he was assassinated. Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were still alive, and the Vietnam War was not even a wet dream.

I was newly married, living in Evanston.

America was galloping astride the fastest industrial horse in the world. Who could even conceive of the military disasters yet to come? Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan (at 20 years, America’s longest war). A pitiful string of losses by the most powerful military on the planet, its nose bloodied by ragged insurgents and sent home, hanging off helicopters, to lick its wounds.

Economically, we were destined to exchange our lender-to-the-world status for debtor in chief.

Charging ahead, we answered the bugle-call of tax reductions, offshored industries, wealth over health, and the demise of international respect.

Since 1961, Great Britain has lost its empire and America, if it ever dreamed of empire, cashed in its chips and slunk out of Las Vegas in the middle of the night, leaving an unpaid hotel bill behind.

Who would ever have thought it could happen?

Certainly not the Snowcroft Center, which now squeaks its complaint like a loose floorboard, and flails at self-inflicted wounds of the past. Is anyone still there, dusting the shelves and refreshing the coffeepot?

“The Iran War Is Eroding America’s China Deterrent,” it screams from a headline in the Washington Post.

We have a China deterrent policy?

Really?

Are these people still shaking out the morning paper over coffee in a digital world? China is the nation to which we eagerly shipped off our industries and technical knowhow, so our millionaires could become billionaires and mollify the public with cheap goods and trickle-down promises. Has the Snowcroft Center checked in with Jeff Bezos, to see if Amazon is on board with all this?

“U.S. tactical gains are consuming the ships, munitions and readiness needed for the Indo-Pacific” is the article’s subtitle.

Tactical gains? You call this under-planned Iranian quagmire a tactical gain?

Sailing the world’s largest navy, supporting a military-industrial complex that out produces twice the total of the next six largest militaries in the world, combined, America is not yet prepared. Prepared for what? To lose again?

Certainly not this time against China, our largest trading partner. At least I would hope not.

Forgiving China Tibet, its mistreatment of seven million Uyghurs and a skirmish here and there, it has provoked no wars since WWII that I am aware of. China is no threat to America, we’re its biggest customer, growing their middle class at barnstorming rates. Premier Zi understands far better than we do that wars between major powers can no longer be won, much less occupied.

As our military flails around, like a blindfolded bully in the schoolyard, all the little kids have knocked us down.

Bully or not, embarrassed by our failure to strengthen the transatlantic alliance, we simply change the subject, complain about not being prepared for another war we cannot win, and plunge into that Iranian abyss, Israel at our side.

Since the glory (and gory) years of the 1960s, it has become an American habit to change the subject, rather than carving the meat to the bone. Once a nation of political, military and intellectual giants, we are now led by a leader run amok, a congress bribed into silence, and a feckless Supreme Court.

Our president overwhelms the world’s largest military by firing his way through the ranks until he arrives at compliance.

There is hope at home that America is repairable, but I sense it will happen only by memory, rather than history.

Written history leaves out all those tender little mouthfuls with which it is made. How can a mere date in history possibly transpose the feeling on your face of its daylight or rain, the heartbreak of fortune or misfortune?

But memory remains.

I can still smell (and almost taste) the exact character of sun-softened tar in the street in front of my childhood home, or the wet-cold of an ice sliver snatched from the ice man’s passing wagon. Yes, the iceman came by horse-drawn wagon in the 1940s. You can’t retrieve a sense of that to carry through a lifetime from a book of history.

I wasn’t there, but someone knew the smell of Napolean, returning from the battlefield.

Those who did know are long dead and gone, and my generation is quietly leaving as well.

And yet, in my older years, the aroma of our decline since 1961 is strong in my nostrils. Soon that will drift away, and only the dry bones of history will be left to tell the tale. Forward Defense at Scowcroft hasn’t been a factor for more than half a century.

Snowcroft didn’t even smell good at its inception.

But was a harbinger of things to come.