Health Warning: Some readers may find this blog politically disturbing.
On January 17, 1961, President Dwight Eisenhower gave his farewell address from the White House. He’d overseen one of the most successful presidencies in America’s history. The former Supreme Allied Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force during World War II, who commanded Operation Overlord on the war’s most decisive D-Day, Eisenhower surprised everyone by sharing his deep-seated concerns about a new threat, from within, to freedom and peace: the military-industrial complex. This was the vast defence manufacturing industry allied to the state’s Defence Force, what he described as a “conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry.”
In what I regard as the most prophetic speech ever given by a modern leader, he warned there would, from that time on, be the persistent threat of misplaced power: “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.” Coming from the former Supreme Allied Commander, these words still ring out with a shocking clarity. Over time, they’ve gained in significance, revealing just how foresightful Eisenhower was.
When we fast-forward 62 years on from that speech to 2023, we can only cry in despair, “Why didn’t we heed Eisenhower’s words of caution?” The price the world might end up paying for failing to listen to this warning will be too great to calculate. For, under this current US administration, at the head of which is a man in cognitive decline who is effectively a “zombie president”, no longer able to carry out the simplest of public duties, and, as a result, is incapable of providing authoritative leadership, the world is drifting inexorably into World War 3 sometime in the near-future, perhaps even as early as 2024. The fact that this would almost certainly involve the exchange of nuclear bombs fired at cities should add a sense of urgency to all who care about the issues I’m trying to highlight.
The delusional foreign policies of the current US administration show that it has fallen squarely under the control of the country’s military-industrial complex, given the growing noises about war with China (whaaat?), regime-change in Russia (whaaat?) and given the unprecedented expenditure of vast sums of tax-payers’ money to Ukraine, a country known to have been systemically corrupt for several decades and which has a government press-ganging men in their thousands to throw away their lives in a war against a military power which is self-evidently far superior in every single facet of warfare. Unless this war-profiteering, reckless flirtation with nuclear confrontation and wishful imperialistic thinking about being able to dominate China and Russia are reversed, and soon, we shouldn’t be surprised if President Eisenhower’s worst nightmare becomes a reality before Mr Biden ends his term of office. Eisenhower’s “disastrous rise of misplaced power” is playing out, once again, before our very eyes. Only this time, the stakes have never been higher, because the safety of large swathes of the world are at stake. I hope the biographers of Joe Biden don’t end up writing something resembling a dystopian science fiction novel.
Instead, we should all be fostering the peace of a new international security order in this inevitably evolving multi-polar world.
In addition to an imminent world war, I truly hate to say it, but all the conditions for a civil war in the US have, unfortunately, fallen into place. These include: extreme ideological polarisation on a nation-wide scale, huge numbers of arms and ammunition at the disposal of citizens, highly emotive and toxic public discourse, breakdowns in foundational democratic institutions, financial ensnaring of so many politicians by lobby groups and donors, breakdowns in the rule of law, radicalisation of groups on both sides of the political spectrum and growing social, economic and cost-of-living challenges.
Given the alignment of these conditions, combined with the fact that the military-industrial complex is seemingly in control of current US foreign policy and there’s an increasingly compromised leader at the helm, the build-up to a potentially messy 2024 US presidential election could, God forbid, trigger some sort of collapse into widespread domestic conflict.
A switch towards peace in the world is still possible, but I doubt that’ll happen in the long-term unless there’s a spiritual revival and a moral reformation at the highest levels of society, bringing about a return to the Rule of Law, a return to true public service and respect for democracy and the constitution, and bringing about an end to the twisted wishful thinking of neo-con imperialism. If you follow the full farewell speech by Eisenhower, you’ll notice the President prays for future peace and prosperity and refers to God’s guidance: “You and I – my fellow citizens – need to be strong in our faith that all nations, under God, will reach the goal of peace with justice.” (see https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/president-dwight-d-eisenhowers-farewell-address or watch on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHDgsh6WPyc “Dwight D. Eisenhower – Farewell Speech – Address to the Nation – Military Industrial Complex Warning”). Today, six decades on, it’s clear we need to return to God as the ultimate source of that peace, justice and prosperity, for our times have fallen, since Eisenhower spoke these words, into a terrible, shallow, self-serving Age of Narcissism, the very last thing we need in a time of global challenges we can only solve together, guided by a wisdom above and beyond our own prejudices and limited understanding.
More specifically, in the immediate future, preventing war and attaining peace would need a completely new US foreign policy, in which the shameless profiteering of the military-industrial complex is halted, allowing the government to focus fully on serving the needs of its people, rather than those of self-serving elites, many of them within the military-industrial complex, who don’t care about the colossal destruction that will occur if civil war or World War 3, or both, break out.