“US Foreign Policy Is a Scam Built on Corruption”

Posted by M. C. on January 8, 2024

Professor Jeffrey D. Sachs reminds us that war is a racket.

https://petermcculloughmd.substack.com/p/us-foreign-policy-is-a-scam-built?publication_id=1119676&post_id=140420718&isFreemail=false&r=1a9m4

Major General Smedley Darlington Butler was, at the time of his death in 1940, the most decorated Marine in U.S. history. During his 34-year career, he fought in the Philippine–American War, the Boxer Rebellion, the Mexican Revolution, and World War I.

However, at some point after World War I, he began to have grave doubts about his profession. Over time, with study and reflection, he concluded that he had NOT spent his life fighting and killing for the American people, but for special interests in New York City and Washington.

As he memorably stated it in his 1935 book, War is a Racket:

I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.

Though war is indeed profitable for the financiers and industrialists who champion it, it is invariably a disaster for a free citizenry. As James Madison remarked in a 1795 pamphlet:

Of all the evils to public liberty, war is perhaps the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops every other. War is the patent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes. And armies, and debts, and taxes, are the known instruments for bringing the many under the dominion of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of the executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds are added to those of subduing the force of the people! No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.

I thought of Butler and Madison this morning when a friend in Boston sent me an essay by Columbia University Professor Jeffrey Sachs that begins as follows: