A Word for Dick Cheney

So the Prince of Darkness endorses Kamala. What does it mean? Hamilton Nolan has a take that I mostly buy.

The main thrust of the article is that it's about U.S. national power. I agree. Harris, like Hillary, shows no sign of not being committed to it. Obama showed at least a crack of daylight in this regard with his references to “The Blob,” by which he meant the U.S. foreign policy consensus. A key decision on his part was declining to get the U.S. more stuck in Syria.

Contra Bernie and some others, I don't think Cheney’s endorsement is about democracy at all. That's just Bernie's reach for the best political common denominator. Now is no time to try and uproot the long-standing U.S. foreign policy axioms.

My quibble with Nolan is the over-emphasis on U.S. military spending. Bill Clinton curbed the growth of defense spending, and he was no peacenik. These days U.S. imperialism does not rest on gunboats; it's finance and politics. An exception is its surrogate, Israel. The intelligent imperialist understands the U.S. defense budget is full of waste. Recall that the British dominated India with a thin sliver of their own citizens.

Trump is a weird anomaly in all this — fundamentally unstable and undependable, and guilty of the cardinal sin of undermining NATO. If the Deep State was anything to worry about, it would have put a banana peel in front of him by now.