My Take | When it comes to war, always follow the money
- Three great US military men help explain why ‘the China threat’ has a lot more to do with America’s defence spending than China itself
The late Polish journalist and author Ryszard Kapuscinski once observed that the West’s greatest asset was self-criticism; no, sorry, he didn’t mean the Maoist “Cultural Revolution” variety, but more along the lines of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. If so, then the greatest Americans are not necessarily those who go gung-ho about their country’s greatness but those who, despite their all-American backgrounds, become its harshest critics.
It shouldn’t be surprising, though it may be so to those not familiar with this topic, that some of these extraordinary people were military men with long and distinguished service. One who immediately comes to mind is Major General Smedley Darlington Butler, who for a long time was the most decorated marine in US history, being awarded a Marine Corps Brevet Medal and a Medal of Honour for two separate military actions. Before his retirement in the early 1930s, he fought in Honduras, Nicaragua, Mexico and Haiti; he earned his medals in the latter two countries. But what were he and his fellow marines doing in those exotic places? To understand America’s long-standing imperialism in the western hemisphere – which US historian Greg Grandin has called the “empire’s workshop” before it branched out to global dominance – you merely have to follow Butler’s adventures with the US marines.
Later in life, he came to the conclusion that was summarised in his famous booklet, War is a Racket. To appreciate its eternal truth, you can, for example, follow the money in the ongoing war in Ukraine, which has become, for those in the know, a financial black hole.
And so Butler famously wrote: “I served in all commissioned ranks from second lieutenant to major general. And during that period I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism. I suspected I was just part of the racket all the time. Now I am sure of it.”
The opening line of his booklet ought to be a classic in American literature, but for obvious reasons, it is not. “War is a racket. It always has been,” he wrote. “It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious … It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.”
Next time you want to argue that the Ukraine war must be fought until justice is delivered and the guilty punished, remember Butler’s words. There are many guilty parties in the current conflict. Most of them will probably never be punished and quite a few will become extremely rich.
Butler has two spiritual heirs: Chuck Spinney and Pierre Sprey. Sprey was one of the so-called whiz kids from the Office of the Secretary of Defence (OSD) in the 1960s who helped the air force’s concept design team to develop the legendary A-10 attack aircraft and then later the iconic F-16 fighter. While working as a staff member of OSD, Spinney produced a series of critical analyses of the Pentagon’s defective planning and budgeting that landed him on the March 1983 cover of Time magazine.
If you want to understand why in recent years, the entire Western news media and political machinery, especially those in the Anglo-American bloc, have gone 24/7 on China being the three-metre-tall monster bent on destroying the West and democracy itself, you may want to study the two friends Spinney and Sprey’s longitudinal studies of Pentagon budgeting since the Korean war. Again, always follow the money.