In physics, I learned about Newton’s three laws. But his (fictional and humorous) fourth law may be the most important of all
Somewhere, I don’t remember where, I came across a humorous variant of Newton’s three laws of motion, proposing a fourth law, as follows:
“Newton’s Fourth Law: Don’t start no shit, won’t be no shit.”
Imagine if the U.S. government/military had followed this “4th law.” No Vietnam war. No Afghan war. No Iraq war. No Libya. No Syria. And so forth. Trillions of dollars saved, along with millions of lives.
There’s an unbounded and restless quality to US ambitions that reminds me of Germany’s Second Reich under the Kaiser. Before World War I, Germany was known as the “restless Reich,” contesting for its imperial place in the sun. A relative latecomer to European imperialism, Germany wanted to enlarge its global span of control – it wanted to be a “world power” like Great Britain and France. Those global ambitions got Germany two world wars and utter devastation.
Meet the new “restless Reich”: the United States. Indeed, for the Pentagon and America’s national security state, being a world power isn’t enough. Not only must the land, sea, and air be dominated, but space and cyberspace as well. America’s leaders act as if any backsliding in any region of the world is a sign of weakness, tantamount to appeasement vis-à-vis Russia, China, terrorists, and so on.
The result is that it’s very easy for rivals to pluck the US eagle and make it screech. Russia and China can spend relatively little on missiles or jets or ships, and America’s military-industrial complex is guaranteed to scream in response. China has two aircraft carriers! Russia has new missiles! American supremacy is not compromised by such weapons, but that has never stopped threat inflation in America (recall the fictional “bomber” and “missile” gaps during the Cold War).
Threat inflation is now global, meaning scaremongering is global. Even at America’s border with Mexico, a caravan of a few thousand impoverished and desperate people requires the deployment of more than 5800 combat-ready troops to stop this “invasion,” or so the Trump administration argues.
The United States is bankrupting itself in the name of global strength and full-spectrum dominance. Dwight D. Eisenhower was right when he said that only Americans can truly hurt America. That’s what our leaders are doing with this global scaremongering.
As Army Major Danny Sjursen noted recently at TomDispatch.com, the United States has transformed the entire planet into a militarized zone, slicing and dicing it into various military commands overseen by generals planning for the next war(s). Sjursen notes a sobering reality:
With Pentagon budgets reaching record levels – some $717 billion for 2019 – Washington has stayed the course, while beginning to plan for more expansive future conflicts across the globe. Today, not a single square inch of this ever-warming planet of ours escapes the reach of US militarization.
Think of these developments as establishing a potential formula for perpetual conflict that just might lead the United States into a truly cataclysmic war it neither needs nor can meaningfully win.
To avert such a cataclysmic war, we’d do well to channel Newton’s (fictitious) Fourth Law: Don’t start no shit, won’t be no shit.
William J. Astore is a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF). He taught history for fifteen years at military and civilian schools and blogs at Bracing Views. He can be reached at wastore@pct.edu. Reprinted from Bracing Views with the author’s permission.
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