{"id":24645,"date":"2017-08-12T20:24:42","date_gmt":"2017-08-13T01:24:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=24645"},"modified":"2017-08-12T20:26:25","modified_gmt":"2017-08-13T01:26:25","slug":"if-war-comes-dont-blame-the-military-industrial-complex-things-are-even-worse-than-you-think","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=24645","title":{"rendered":"If War Comes, Don\u2019t Blame the \u2018Military-Industrial Complex\u2019 \u2013 Things Are Even Worse Than You Think"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"If<\/p>\n

If War Comes, Don\u2019t Blame the \u2018Military-Industrial Complex\u2019 \u2013 Things Are Even Worse<\/i> Than You Think<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/header>\n

As the drumbeat intensifies for what might turn out to be anything but a \u00absplendid little war<\/a>\u00bb against North Korea, it is appropriate to take stock of the ongoing, seemingly successful effort to strip President Donald Trump of his authority to make any foreign and national security policies that fly against the wishes of the so-called Military-Industrial Complex, or MIC. A Google search for \u00abMilitary-Industrial Complex\u00bb (in quotation marks) with \u00abTrump\u00bb yields almost 450,000 hits from all sources and almost 26,000 from just news sources.<\/p>\n

During the 2016 campaign and into the initial weeks of his administration, Trump was sometimes described as a\u00a0threat to the MIC<\/a>. But over time, with the appointment to his administration of more generals and establishment figures (including\u00a0some allegedly tied to George Soros<\/a>)\u00a0while purging Trump loyalists<\/a>, it\u2019s no surprise that his policies increasingly seem less a departure from those of previous administrations than a continuation of them (for example, welcoming Montenegro into NATO). Some now say that\u00a0Trump is the MIC\u2019s best friend<\/a>\u00a0and maybe always was.<\/p>\n

There are those who deny that the MIC exists at all. One self-described conservative blogger writing in the pro-war, pro-intervention, and mostly neoconservative\u00a0National Review\u00a0refers to the very existence of the MIC as a \u00abmyth\u00bb peddled by the \u00abconspiracy-minded<\/a>\u00bb. Sure, it is conceded, it was appropriate to refer to such a concept back when\u00a0President Dwight Eisenhower warned against it in 1961<\/a>\u00a0upon his impending departure from the White House, because back then the military consumed some 10 percent of the American GDP. But now, when the percentage is nominally just 3.2 percent, less than $600 billion per year, the term supposedly is inapplicable.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If War Comes, Don\u2019t Blame the \u2018Military-Industrial Complex\u2019 \u2013 Things Are Even Worse Than You Think As the drumbeat intensifies for what might turn out to be anything but a \u00absplendid little war\u00bb against North Korea, it is appropriate to take stock of the ongoing, seemingly successful effort to strip President Donald Trump of his […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,6],"tags":[7844,15619,15620,528,2006,8203,862],"class_list":["post-24645","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geopolitics","category-liberty","tag-donald-trump","tag-james-george-jatras","tag-mic","tag-military-industrial-complex","tag-north-korea","tag-strategic-culture-foundation","tag-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24645","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=24645"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24645\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24648,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24645\/revisions\/24648"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=24645"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=24645"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=24645"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}