The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government by Mike Lofgren (Audiobook)
From chapter 06:
The Crony Capitalist Warfare State When it was not unleashing the restless spirit of capitalism, the Reagan revolution called for an unprecedented peacetime military buildup. The genius of the architects of Reagan’s policies was to recognize that the superficially disparate interests of Wall Street and the Pentagon could in fact be harmonized. For public relations purposes, the Reagan team claimed that the expensive military buildup and tax-cutting deregulation were both natural, patriotic impulses desired by the real America. The evident contradiction between a budget-busting military policy and the small- government, balanced-budget sloganeering of business conservatism could be smoothed over by constantly pounding on the theme that both were expressions of old-fashioned American freedom.
For the next thirty years, tax law, trade treaties, and national security policies were to be coordinated in such a way as to prioritize the varied needs of Wall Street and the military-industrial complex. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States most likely did not need to maintain its military spending at a level greater than the next ten countries combined; but this hypertrophied military machine, together with a forward-deployment strategy that stationed U.S. troops in some 150 countries, became the ultimate backstop for what the Pentagon described as “maintaining global stability” and “shaping” the international environment. Ever since the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, a series of Pentagon strategic reviews has emphasized the military’s global role in a nebulous and coded fashion. During the days of U.S.- Soviet rivalry, the rationale for America’s then-unprecedented global buildup was straightforward: to resist the advance of a purportedly monolithic and expansionist global communism. However much this was an oversimplification of the geopolitical situation, it was at least plausible in view of the Soviet Union’s rough nuclear parity with the United States, its huge conventional military forces, and the existence of several Soviet client states.
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