"War Is Making Us Poor"

“The easiest way to inject a propaganda idea into most people’s minds is to let it go through the medium of an entertainment picture when they do not realize that they are being propagandized,” explained Elmer Davis, a renowned CBS broadcaster, who had just been named director of the Office of War Information (OWI), a Pentagon program created on June 13, 1942, six months after Pearl Harbor.

Later in 1953, as the Cold War was in full swing, President Dwight D. Eisenhower commented on the burgeoning partnership between Hollywood and the Pentagon by stating that, "the hand of government must be carefully concealed and (…) wholly eliminated," adding that the engagement should "be done through arrangements with all sorts of privately operated enterprises in the field of entertainment, dramatics, music and so on."

Thus, the president who coined the term “military industrial complex,” was, in fact, one of the first major proponents of what would later be called the military entertainment complex or the militainment industry.

Today, this militainment industry is thriving. From Top Gun to the Marvel franchise and even shows like Extreme Makeover, the Pentagon has been able to shape the narratives of more than 2,500 movies and TV shows. No one knows this better than Roger Stahl, the University of Georgia’s Communications Studies Department Head, and author of Militainment Inc. With University of Bath lecturer and Workers Party Candidate Matthew Alford, investigative journalist Tom Secker, and others, Stahl created “Theaters of War,” a concise 87-minute documentary in which he methodically dissects our modern militainment industry, showing the behemoth it has become.

Responsible Statecraft talked to Stahl, Alford, and Secker about the ways our TV screens are weaponized through the Military Entertainment Complex’s oversight over and control of Hollywood scripts and production agreements. (...)

In reality, what Petraeus and his co-authors penned was an example of why a lessons-based approach to history is wrongheaded at best and dangerous at worst. It also highlights how, nearly 15 years after U.S. troops departed Iraq, the retired general still aspires to both control and revise the narrative over America’s disastrous intervention in Middle Eastern affairs. (...)

So how can Netanyahu learn from American “successes” in Iraq? Of course, by examining the 2007 “surge” under Petraeus’s command. What follows in the Foreign Affairs article are three broad “lessons” that, not surprisingly, form the central pillars of the surge myth that the general and his acolytes have advanced for more than a decade now.

Former Trump national security adviser Robert C. O’Brien’s monumental and much discussed new essay in Foreign Affairs may be the closest thing we are likely to get to an intellectual foreign policy blueprint for a second Trump term.

Over the coming years, it may well serve as the foreign policy template for future Republican administrations. In the same way George F. Kennan’s ‘X’ article (published in Foreign Affairsin 1947) and Paul Wolfowitz’s Defense Planning Guidance of 1992, otherwise known as the Wolfowitz Doctrine, served (for better, or, in the latter’s case, most certainly worse) as templates in past eras, O’Brien’s essay will likely define the terms of the foreign policy debate for at least the reminder of the decade — if not beyond. (...)

Nevertheless, if Washington truly wanted to halt Beijing’s commercial relationship with Russia, do we really think our sanctimony, including scolding Chinese officials in their own capital, is going to prompt them to alter their behavior in any manner favorable to U.S. interests? Effective diplomacy requires give and take, yet the Biden administration simply demands China comply with our directives and threatens to impose sanctions and tariffs if they don’t. (...)

Just look to his reversal on the issue of tariffs. In June 2019, then-presidential candidate Joe Biden tweeted, “Trump doesn’t get the basics. He thinks his tariffs are being paid by China. Any freshman econ student could tell you that the American people are paying his tariffs.”

This statement was true in 2019, and it remains true in 2024. Tariffs are simply a tax on the American consumer, and their imposition is estimated to increase costs for the average American household by over $830 per year.

President Biden not only kept Trump’s tariffs in place, but recently raised tariffs on an additional $18 billion worth of Chinese imports. So much for not knowing the basics.

On the issue of Taiwan, the most sensitive matter in the U.S.-China relationship, President Biden falsely stated on four separate occasions that the United States is obligated to defend the island. For over four decades, the official policy of the United States, codified into law by the Taiwan Relations Act, has been one of “strategic ambiguity” in which the United States is not committed to the defense of Taiwan but maintains the capacity to do so. (...)

For seven and a half years, I served as director of the State Department office that leads Leahy vetting of foreign security units. I have seen how even and fair application of the Leahy law is key to U.S. foreign policy and credibility abroad. But when it comes to Israel — the story so far is about a lack of application.

U.S. State Department spokespersons assert that the department complies with the Leahy law via “ongoing processes,” and that treatment of Israel under the Leahy law is the same as for any other country.

Both assertions are incorrect.

To implement the anti-vax campaign, the Defense Department overrode strong objections from top U.S. diplomats in Southeast Asia at the time, Reuters found. Sources involved in its planning and execution say the Pentagon, which ran the program through the military’s psychological operations center in Tampa, Florida, disregarded the collateral impact that such propaganda may have on innocent Filipinos.

“We weren’t looking at this from a public health perspective,” said a senior military officer involved in the program. “We were looking at how we could drag China through the mud.”