Trip the Beltway Fantastic With Kelley Vlahos and Friends

It is now less than three months until the November presidential election and we are in one of the odd cycles in which neither candidate is an incumbent — the last time being when Donald Trump won his seat over Democrat Hillary Clinton in 2016. 

One of the biggest question marks in these races is how the winner will staff his or her administration, and in my case, I’m interested in foreign policy and national security. Where Biden was a known quantity, his decision to step out of the race and endorse his Vice President Kamala Harris has opened up the guessing game on the Democratic side. We will talk about that in a future episode, but first we are going to talk about what might happen in a new Trump administration.

One of the biggest complaints about Trump’s first term is that he had a sloppy appointment process, he didn’t bring in the right people to help with the transition, and ended up putting hawks and neocons into positions of power, like Mike Pompeo as CIA director, then Secretary of State, and John Bolton as National Security Advisor. He kowtowed to the four stars – John Kelly, who he made his Chief of Staff, and Jim Mattis as his Secretary of Defense. None seemed to particularly like him very much, and when it came to serious matters of war and foreign policy, they counseled aggressive postures, particularly when it came to Iran, Syria, and especially staying in Afghanistan.

Now, some three years later, we are starting to hear from Trump supporters from all over the spectrum who appear to be jockeying for a new role if Trump were to win in November. And their messages should make any realist and restrainer wary. 

You have Robert O'Brien, former National Security Advisor after Bolton, writing a 2000- word piece for Foreign Affairs sub-titled “Making the Case for Trump’s Foreign Policy” seeking to double down on anti-Iran policy and to start testing live fire nukes, not to mention decoupling our entire U.S. economy from China.

Mike Pompeo has also published a piece called “A Trump Peace Plan for Ukraine” which is just a long-winded way of promoting a continuation of the war. There’s Fred Fleitz, former deep stater and Trump’s National Security Council Chief of Staff and retired General Keith Kellogg, who have been peddling their own “America First Foreign Policy” and showing up in news articles here and abroad, speaking for Trump without officially speaking for him.

Bottom line, it is not clear what direction Trump could go this time around. To help me tease this out a bit, is John Gay, Executive Director of the John Quincy Adams Society, a national network of student groups centered on a vision of foreign policy restraint. He is a former managing editor of the National Interest, where his writing focused on U.S. foreign policy and the Middle East. He is also co-author, with Geoffrey Kemp, of War with Iran: Political, Military, and Economic Consequences.

More from John Gay:

The Abraham Accords Are Not Dead

The Iraq War’s Worst Legacy: Endless Confrontation With Iran

According to analysts, if the Military Industrial Congressional Intelligence Media and Think Tank Complex gets its way, the total defense budget will reach $1 trillion by 2027. That’s not hard to imagine given that the budget request for 2025, which all includes our nuclear weapons programs and other defense related activities not under the DoD appropriations, is close to $900 billion already. 

Considering that we gave Ukraine some $175 billion over the last two and a half years, it’s not a stretch to think we may get to that trillion mark even sooner. 

So what are we spending it on? Aside from the pay and pensions and healthcare for active duty, retirees, and veterans, big ticket items that may or may not be efficient or even strategic are on the menu, year after year. The Navy’s Columbia-class ballistic missile submarine and Constellation-class frigate, the Air Force’s B-21 Raider, the Navy’s F-35, and the Sentinel Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM), are just a few of the big programs sucking away at your tax dollars today. There are big promises here, but the jury is out whether these programs, once complete, will rise to the hype or even meet the current moment.

Then there is the strategy and policy. In its newly released report, the Commission on the National Defense Strategy, a congressionally formed boondoggle that counts as its members the same Washington creatures who stand to make money hand over fist from their recommendations, say:

 “The U.S. public are largely unaware of the dangers the United States faces or the costs (financial and otherwise) required to adequately prepare. They do not appreciate the strength of China and its partnerships or the ramifications to daily life if a conflict were to erupt. They are not anticipating disruptions to their power, water, or access to all the goods on which they rely. They have not internalized the costs of the United States losing its position as a world superpower. A bipartisan “call to arms” is urgently needed so that the United States can make the major changes and significant investments now rather than wait for the next Pearl Harbor or 9/11. The support and resolve of the American public are indispensable.” 

The report complains that the 2022 National Defense Strategy’s “force construct does not sufficiently account for global competition or the very real threat of simultaneous conflict in more than one theater.” Instead they are proposing a “Multiple Theater Force Construct. This “reflects the likelihood of simultaneous conflicts in multiple theaters because of the partnership of U.S. peer or near-peer adversaries and incorporates the U.S. system of alliances and partnerships. The United States must engage globally with a presence — military, diplomatic, and economic — to maintain stability and preserve influence worldwide, including across the Global South, where China and Russia are extending their reach.”

It goes on from there. This means a lot of money, a lot of weapons, a lot of personnel, contractors, consultants, program people, you name it. Big, big big.

My guest this week is author Michael Vlahos, former professor of war & strategy at the Naval War College and Johns Hopkins University graduate program. He says all of this is part of an elaborate prepping for war and for big demonstrations of military superiority, but on the inside, this great spectacle of superpower is quite hollow. The elaborate theater of prepping for war keeps the ecosystem going. That includes political support for American primacy across the globe, keeping industry flush, the courtiers paid and fat, the pork flowing to the districts. But after years of show, what happens when it escalates into something more real, will the U.S. military be able to fight? Or will all of its overly-produced, techno fantasies of grandeur crumble under the weight of hubris, because none of it was really designed for battle but for the idea of battle — in other words, just a mirage?

More from Vlahos

The Ukrainian Army is Breaking 

America’s Perilous Choice in Ukraine: How Proxy War Accelerates Great Power Decline

From Savior to Divine Trickster: The Theological Drive in U.S. Foreign Policy

Fighting Identify: Sacred War and World Change

I’ve been reporting in Washington DC for over 20 years, which means I was here for the crazy 2000 election and 9/11, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a political news cycle quite like this one. If this episode isn’t published within the next 12-24 hours it may be at risk of expiring. The presidential election is in full swing right now and the wars abroad and the U.S. involvement in them, are on one hand being overshadowed by domestic events, but on the other, playing a role in how Americans view their parties and candidates and their fitness — or lack thereof — for leadership in Washington. 

I wanted to bring in the best analysts I know this week who can talk about the politics of the current moment against the backdrop of an extraordinary situation on the world front – two major wars in which the US is directly involved, not with boots on the ground, at least not yet, but with tens of billions of dollars and political and social capital that has put the reputation of the nation’s status as a superpower and moral leader to the ultimate test. 

Moreover this week, Vice President Kamala Harris is in the spotlight as she attempts to distance herself from the Biden administration’s policy on Israel-Gaza — at least enough to regain support from progressives and the Michigan vote — while not entirely alienating the pro-Israel members of her coalition. We’ll talk about how she is handling that balancing act against the backdrop of Benjamin Netanyahu’s trip to Washington and his remarks to Congress on Wednesday.

Matt Purple is a journalist and a writer, currently at Defense Priorities. We worked together at the American Conservative and he is a former editor for the Spectator. Dan Larison is a writer and also a former colleague at the American Conservative. He pens regular articles for me at Responsible Statecraft and writes daily for his own newsletter, Eunomia. This is a special episode in that all three of us launched the Empire has no Clothes podcast at the American Conservative back in 2019, and Dan and I hosted Crashing the War Party from April 2021 to late last year. 

More from Matt Purple: 

Why Conservatives Should Oppose Bombing Iran 

Turkey, Sweden, and NATO’s identity crisis

Don't like radical Houthis? Blame Bush's wars

More from Dan Larison:

Netanyahu’s dishonest propaganda speech

If there is a Harris foreign policy do we call it Biden-lite?

Houthis only emboldened by Israeli attacks

One of my favorite topics is the military industrial complex because it encapsulates the absolute corruption of centralized power as it grows and metastasizes beyond human scale — at which point it becomes not only painfully ineffective, but a threat to the very people it is supposed to be working for. 

Add weapons and war to the mix and you have a lethal, out-of-control institution that does everything in its nature to protect itself and at any cost, grows bigger, badder and more entrenched in society every day. Even Ike would be aghast at what it has become today.

This week we are talking about how Artificial Intelligence is becoming the ‘it’ technology of the U.S. military and how it is being helped along by Silicon Valley and venture capitalists. Both entities have rightly observed that there are billions of dollars to be made in the military industrial complex when you can convince the Pentagon of what it needs. Right now, by all measure, the Department of Defense believes it needs AI technology to take its capabilities to the next level — like the replicator drone program, an (envisioned) swarm of small AI-enabled killer drones that are supposed to be the latest in our military quiver against China. 

There seems to be no backstop or brakes when money finds its mark in Washington, and there are plenty of people who are scared, rightly so, that AI weapons systems and their ability to “shorten the kill chain” will transform the battlefield, and the homeland, into a dystopian nightmare.

Here to talk about this are two great reporters and writers on the subject. Bill Hartung is a colleague of mine at the Quincy Institute where he is a senior fellow in our Democratizing Foreign Policy program. Stavroula Pabst is a reporter and freelance writer who has contributed to a number of publications on the issue of technology in the military, including several pieces for Responsible Statecraft.

More from Hartung:

Silicon Valley USA: Are these 'patriots' mere harbingers of doom?

The Pentagon is flirting with the dark side of AI

March of the Four–Stars: The Role of Retired Generals and Admirals in the Arms Industry

More from Pabst: 

Former NSA chief revolves through OpenAI's door

The US gives Israel $1.2B for giant laser beam weapon

Do venture capitalists want forever war?

It’s been less than a week since that infamous presidential debate and it is shocking how little the wars in Ukraine and Gaza played in the discussion. Worse, when they did spend 11 minutes total talking about the two conflicts, both candidates were largely incoherent and evasive. If the American taxpayer is going to spend tens of billions of dollars on these wars – which we have already: $6.5 billion in the last eights months to Israel; $175 billion in the last two and a half years to Ukraine – then we should be giving it more than a passing glance in the presidential race.

But alas, no one really wants to talk about it in any meaningful way because it would mean addressing the massive failures happening in both conflicts. So joining me on the episode today to actually give these issues substance is my friend retired Col. Doug Macgregor, CEO of Our Country our Choice, a decorated combat veteran, an author of five books, a PhD, and a defense and foreign policy consultant. Doug has been providing straightforward, common sense, and much needed criticisms of the military and U.S. war policies since I met him during the early days of the Iraq War.

He walks us through the failing trajectory of the Ukraine War, the looming Israel-Hezbollah war in Lebanon, and the weakness of Biden to stop the carnage in Gaza and a regional conflagration — with Washington sucked right into it.

More from Macgregor:

Ideas for candidates beyond talking points 

Is it game, set, match to Moscow? 

Would Israel go nuclear against Iran?

Will Israel’s war expand?

As we’ve said many times, all is not what it seems when it comes to Washington headlines. Well, this story has to be the epitome of that warning. In March, President Biden announced that the U.S. military would be building two piers — one floating, the other attached to the Gaza coast — to surge aid into the embattled and beleaguered Palestinians living there. 

The project was supposed to have the blessing of the Israeli government and was to be open for business so to speak, in two months time. Well it did begin operations in May, but as for fulfilling the aid surge, well, the story takes quite a turn. Here to catch us up this week with what happened and how the Biden admin has been misleading the public on this project, is Stephen Semler, co-founder of the Security Policy Reform Institute, a think tank that develops policy ideas for the working class. 

Semler also writes the Polygraph newsletter on Substack, and published a great piece on this topic for Responsible Statecraft entitled “Washington is not telling the truth about the Gaza pier.” I wrote that headline, and was toggling back and forth between “Washington” not telling the truth and the “Biden administration” not telling the truth. I went with Washington because it’s not just the administration, but the military and the compliant media, too, that have massaged this debacle so that the enormity of the failure and inevitable questioning of motives here are hidden. Stephen brings us up to speed with the project, and points out that less aid is getting into Gaza than when the “surge” pier opened – how does that work?

More on the Pentagon Pier project:

Washington is not telling truth about the Gaza pier

Alarming lack of detail in military's Gaza aid project

Where is the US military's $320M pier project?

$320M US military pier to open for business, but storms ahead

Some 88 years ago, an economist and concerned citizen by the name of Bruce Knight published a book, How to Run a War, to warn essentially, about Washington’s ability to marshal all of the tools of the federal government to mobilize the nation for war. Written in a highly ironic tone, Knight was drawing on the history of the first World War in anticipation of the growing push for conflict in Europe, which as we know, happened, and probably beyond Knight’s wildest nightmares, in terms of costs and scope and existential crisis. 

Our guests today, professors Christopher Coyne and Abigail Hall, have co-authored two previous books on the issue of the national security state, including Manufacturing Militarism and Tyranny Comes Home. Their new one is a fresh take on Knight’s 1936 book, entitled How to Run Wars, which is being released this week. It is as pertinent as ever, as national security elites know they must control the narrative, the media, dissent, the purse strings and more to ensure the public’s support for Washington’s security policies — no matter how wrong they are.

I was able to get a preview copy and am very excited to talk about it here on the podcast. 

Chris is a Professor of Economics at George Mason University and the Associate Director of the F. A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at the Mercatus Center, and Abigail is an Assistant Professor in Economics at the University of Tampa in Florida and a Research Fellow with the Independent Institute.

We’ve promised you that each week we will be lifting up the rocks in D.C. to see what is crawling around underneath and this week we won’t disappoint, as we lift up a very big rock – the dome of the U.S. Capitol - and see Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu swaggering around underneath. 

Yes, the majority and minority leaders of both the House and Senate, meaning both parties, including Mitch McConnel, Chuck Shumer, Mike Johnson and Hakeem Jeffries, formally invited the Israeli PM to deliver a speech to joint chambers of Congress, an invitation typically bestowed as an honor, and usually to make some sort of unifying statement as a body. Ukrainian President Zelensky has made two such addresses in the last year. 

It was announced late Thursday that Netanyahu will speak to Congress on July 24. 

The invitation has drawn a swift rebuke considering that Israel has been accused in the ICC of genocide for the killing of thousands of Gazans, of withholding food and medicine, and for engaging in systematic attacks on civilian infrastructure like hospitals and places of sanctuary. Just two weeks ago, the Israelis struck civilian tent encampments in southern Gaza and then called it a “tragic mistake” when their missiles set off a fatal inferno. Senator Bernie Sanders, Democrat Rep. Jim McGovern, and supposedly other progressives have vowed to boycott the visit, the second by Netanyahu since 2015. Others like Democrat Rep. Mark Pocan argue that by boycotting, only staunch Bibi supporters will be left filling the seats. 

Here with us to talk about the political motivations — and implications — of this and more are two of my favorite reporters, Matt Petti, who writes for Reason, and Connor Echols, who writes for Responsible Statecraft. 

More from Matt and Connor:

House votes to sanction ICC for case against Israeli leaders (Echols)

Palestinian Students at Columbia Are Still Protesting. Is Anyone Listening? (Petti)

Drafter of Leahy law says it was never applied to Israel (Echols)

Democrats Surprised To Learn Bombs Are Used To Bomb People (Petti)

Israel using secret AI tech to target Palestinians (Echols)

Is America's Blank Check for Israel Ending? (Petti)

Today I have two special guests to talk about a real unfolding foreign policy failure happening right before our eyes. According to the most recent reports, the Biden Administration is closer than ever to signing a deal with Saudi Arabia that the White House thinks will eventually lead to Saudi-Israeli normalization a la the Abraham Accords that were first set into motion by the Trump Administration. 

The deal reportedly on the table today would give the Saudis a security agreement, in which the U.S. would be obligated to defend Riyadh militarily if it were attacked.The U.S. would also agree to help the Saudi’s get a nuclear power program off the ground, ostensibly for civilian use. In exchange, the Saudis will think about normalization with Israel down the road and then maybe, just maybe, this will lead to a two-state solution for Israel Palestine. 

But those are a lot of maybes. The Israelis, however, don’t seem so interested so it may just be that Washington’s gives all these things anyway to Saudi Arabia, a dictatorship that we know now had ties to the 9/11 hijackers and the killing and dismembership of Saudi-American journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018, with little in exchange.

Here to talk about all this and more is Sarah Leah Whitson, an American lawyer and the executive director of Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN). Danny Davis is a retired Army officer who served in the first Persian Gulf War as well as the Afghanistan War. He is  a senior fellow at Defense priorities and the host of the podcast Deep Dive.

More from Sarah and Danny

America is investing in Ukrainian Failure (Davis)

The two-state solution has failed. A true democracy is the Middle East’s only hope (Whitson)

Why are 600 Americans Still Languishing in Gaza?  (Davis)

America Should Help Israel Defend Itself and Avoid Escalation (Davis)

It’s Time to Scrap the Abraham Accords (Whitson)

Today, we talk to Brandan Buck — Buck is not only a veteran of the Afghanistan War, but a writer and academic who studies war propaganda through the 20th and 21st Centuries, and wow, does he have a tale to tell. 

We discuss, among other things, an article he did for Responsible Statecraft, “Feeling manipulated? How Uncle Sam perfected the information state,” to launch into a conversation about how the U.S. government marshaled all of its powers to frame the narrative, the messaging, and ensure support from the American people for World War I. This not only included propaganda, but manipulation (surprise!) of major news channels, overt censorship, and the surveillance of Americans organizing in dissent. 

This, despite the fact that most Americans had no idea why they should be sending their men to fight this war in the first place. Sound familiar?

He then talks about the backlash to that war effort, the softer propaganda machinery during World War II, and how Uncle Sam has taken it to the next level, deploying the disinformation Death Star for the post 9/11, Russiagate age. 

More from Brandan Buck:

The F-Word and its consequences

History Last, Polemics First: A Critical Review of Jacob Heilbrunn’s ‘America Last’

Beyond the Noise: NATO Debates, Past and Present

No 'Putin apologia' and certainly not new: the Old American Right on war

Deja vu: Republicans fracturing over Ukraine, just like Korea