Last Friday, daydreaming while driving home, I lost control of my car, which careened through a 6-foot snow bank and down an embankment before stopping (literally) one inch from a large tree.
My mishap drove home to me how uncertain life is, a realization magnified exponentially after discovering that my mad king had, for no good reason, unleashed the dogs of war in the Middle East.
Both events were traumatic.
My accident triggered flashbacks to three serious car accidents from my wild and crazy youth. Flashbacks of my life careening out of control in slow-motion, frame by frame, bracing for the sickening thud of impact.
Then my president, along with his sociopathic buddy Netanyahu, started this war with Iran, triggering flashbacks from my time in Vietnam: of being jarred awake by the order, “General Quarters. General Quarters. Man your battle stations! This is not a drill!”
“Apocalypse Now” was perhaps the most famous movie about the Vietnam War. Trump’s Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, could double for the movie’s character Lt. Col. Kilgore, who in one scene declared, “I love the smell of napalm in the morning” as he surveys the smoldering ruins of a village.
Hegseth did his best Kilgore impersonation on Day 3 of Trump’s new war, bragging that Operation Epic Fury was being fought “on our terms, with maximum authorities,” and without our “traditional allies who wring their hands and clutch their pearls hemming and hawing about the use of force.”
This disastrous and unnecessary war, declared unlawful by a consensus of legal experts, is what happens when saber-rattling and strutting bravado replace diplomacy. Yuval Noah Harari, the prominent Israeli historian and philosopher, points out how nations throughout history have spent an extravagant amount of their wealth, 50% or more, on the military and on defending themselves.
That only changed after the horrific destruction and loss of life caused by WWI, followed closely by WWII. It became clear that the old way of governing: dividing the world into spheres of influence, based on “might makes right,” was destroying civilized society.
The United States was the prime mover in making a monumental change: spearheading the drive to establish international diplomacy based on the rule of law rather than brute force. Because of the U.S.’s leading role, often imperfect, in sponsoring international agencies like the United Nations, global military spending has drastically reduced over time.
Of course, right-wing hardliners mock this development, calling the advocates pansies. Here is Harari’s answer to all those who say this is just a leftist dream:
“People sometimes say that the long peace we’ve been living through has been a fantasy of poets and artists and leftist intellectuals. But that’s not the case. It has been driven by the numbers in budgets. If you look at governments around the world, in 2020, the average defense budget was about 6%. In Europe, it was about 3%. Historically, this is absolutely amazing … Lower defense spending is the basis for having good health care systems and education systems.”
Tragically, Trump, Putin and their fellow autocrats are now reversing this trend, lusting after bloody wars that inevitably result from dividing the world into spheres of influence, ruled by the strongest and most ruthless, willing to bomb hospitals and even a girl’s elementary school, even on the first day of this latest combat.