Jeffrey Tucker on the military industrial complex and external enemies

In foreign relations, here we are today: the US is in a de facto but undeclared war with Russia.  No one calls it that, but that’s what it amounts to when the US is providing armaments through intermediaries to the forces that Russia is battling on its border.  This intensifies and escalates conflict, same as sanctions.  The dangers right now are intense, on all fronts.  It’s not clear that decision makers even understand what they are doing. 

Or maybe they do.  Since the end of the Cold War, the US military-industrial complex has been searching for a reliable enemy that the US population could hate, as a way to distract from the misdeeds of the political elite at home.  After decades of cycling through them, it appears that the old enemy was the best enemy.  And with a small turn of a dial, vast swaths of high-end opinion are exclusively focused on the terrible plight of Ukraine.

~ Jeffrey Tucker, "How Seventy Years of Progress Came to an End," Brownstone Institute, March 11, 2022