Say you’ve done it. You finally elected a socialist president to the United States and tomorrow we’re going to have our fully automated gay space communism. Great! But!
What does this mean for the American military who has spent the better part of three centuries bombing the shit out of every country that gives us the side eye? This week, Francis and Alex McCoy attempt to figure out exactly what you do with a massive standing military when there’s no more war to be had.
Many people on the left will tell you the first thing we have to do is pull back all troops and dismantle the military. Most of those people probably haven’t seen much of various war torn countries across the world. Like it or not, America’s presence is a deterrence in some areas. But that doesn’t mean we have to go and take our bombs instead of bandages.
American might as an actual peacekeeping mission (the kind where we turn half our aircraft carriers into hospital ships) would probably heal a lot of the issues we face on the home front. Gotta win over the kids to really win over the world. And of course, spreading socialism with a helping hand rather than a gun is much more likely to make it stick. But like all entities for good, there will always be an enemy. And until all seven billion of us are on board with the same kind of communism, we’re gonna need a gun somewhere.
Adrian said it best in a previous episode, that talking is hard and bombing is easy. But more than that, bombing is what we know. It usually doesn’t work, but it’s what we do to solve the issues. So we build more bombs and we spend five minutes talking and five years bombing. Lives are lost, money is lost, and in the end nothing is made better. And American culture must break out of the feedback loop of Problem > bombing > ‘Freedom’ For all if we are ever going to be an effective world leader