This commentary is by Michael Caldwell of North Wolcott, who writes the Radical Center column and is a member of the international ecumenical Iona Community.
Where are the Hebrew prophets when we need them? They’re in the Bible that evangelicals call holy. They’re in the unconscious guilty conscience of Larry Liberal.
Woe to those who decree iniquitous decrees,
writers who keep writing oppression,
who turn aside the needy from justice,
rob the poor of their right,
that widows may be their spoil,
orphans their prey. (Isaiah 10.1-2)
There’s hope and grace in the Bible following indictment of corruption and judgment of perpetrators. Today’s debt crisis is a crisis of ethics. No politician, left or right, not even the faint pen of a well-employed journalist, whispers a word about military spending as a source of settling the stalemate. The silence is spellbinding.
Is it the terror of being called naive? Is it registering to anyone that U.S. Defense Department spending per year outpaces the next 10 nations combined? Compare America’s $877 billion with China’s $292 billion and Russia’s $86 billion (the second- and third-largest spenders). (“The Week,” May 5, 2023.)
The questions of recluse cultural commentators will be roundly dismissed. Politicians with a conscience might offer answers.
We believe, at least in Vermont, that we are blessed with Washington pols of baseline integrity. That integrity will be tested this month to the extent that they propose cuts in the egregiously obese defense department budget.
The irony is that the U.S. and the world would be safer if we spent less on the military. Leadership takes risks, even the risk of losing campaign donors, even the risk of losing a seat. It comes down to what’s essential and urgent: cutting back our global bullying instead of cutting social programs, medicine and education. We should repent of our addiction to empire.
Some will point to Russia’s barbaric assault on Ukraine and China’s saber-rattling about Taiwan. But isn’t there an argument — even with appropriate defense against aggression — that these nations feel hemmed in by the long arm of Western cultural and economic influence? Are we at all interested in the source of their belligerence? Do we have the courage to look at our own disguised empire-building in the disguise of cries of freedom and democracy?
The world needs strong leadership that has a credible component of humble sanity. The U.S. is in a position to provide humble pie for Isaiah’s poor widows, orphans and, in another place in the prophet, foreign refugees.
There’s a clear path: Cut the hundred billion a year (for the next 10 years) that’s being invested by the DoD to upgrade our arsenal of nuclear weapons. Join the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons; sign the Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. That would bring sanity to the debt crisis, begin to move the doomsday clock back from approaching midnight, push the button of ethical integrity, not to speak of sparking a glimmer of global respect for a recovering bully.
Maybe an old nuke could still detonate all right, even if we invest in a faster rocket to take it to Moscow or Beijing, as we mistake an errant attack, start World War III, and wreck a planet already hurtling toward climate disaster.
Only a miracle has saved us from nuclear disaster during the 78 years since Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It’ll happen again unless we cut back.
Could the Pentagon get by with only about a quarter-trillion dollars next year? Too much to ask? Save the world from hell as we save America’s soul?
