How To Bring The Empire Home: A Nobel for the Donald in Three Parts

Part 1

Donald Trump doesn’t really deserve the Nobel Peace Prize. Not after his unprovoked bombing of a country (Iran) that is no military threat whatsoever to the American Homeland. Not after continuing to green-light and arm Israel’s genocidal madness on Gaza and elsewhere. And not, most especially, after fronting for an even bigger defense budget than the bloated $1.0 trillion per year monstrosity that the UniParty already had in place.

Indeed, Washington’s $1 trillion war machine is a dangerous historical aberration on the world stage. It thrives in a tax-adverse democracy only by virtue of funding a vast ecosystem of arms merchants, think tanks, NGOs, PACs, lobbies and war-mongering politicians, which perpetuate a false narrative of foreign perils, threats and enemies that are largely its own self-justifying fabrications.

Still, Trump should get his Nobel prize anyway for breaking out of the Warfare State’s utterly false narrative on Ukraine and blundering his way into an end to the hideous proxy war on Russia being conducted there.

Indeed, you don’t have to read too much between the lines of the Alaska summit to see that a peace fix is in—perhaps to be inked a few weeks hence in Moscow; and that the Donald’s guests at the White House last week—-the un-useful idiot, Zelensky, and the clown car of European leaders—Macron, Merz, Starmer, Rutte and van der Leyen, especially—will be afforded an opportunity to like it or lump it, as they appeared to be doing during this Oval Office stunt staged by the Donald:

The tragedy and outrage, of course, is that the main points of the peace deal coming out of the summit could have been achieved years ago. And sans the sheer waste of $150 billion of US weapons and economic aid, the loss of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian and Russian lives, and the utter destruction of a country that was essentially taken hostage by the neocon hegemonists and military-industrial complex arms merchants that ruled the roost on the banks of the Potomac until the Donald stumbled into the Oval Office the second time.

After all, anyone with even a modicum of common sense, historical knowledge and minimum regard for human decency should find nothing objectionable in the following apparent “Elmendorf Meeting” formula, And that’s notwithstanding all the Munich-betrayal howling by neocon politicians and MIC bag carriers in the establishment media on both sides of the Atlantic.

Key Elements Of The Elmendorf Formulation:

1. A comprehensive peace deal and sustainable settlement of “root causes” of the current conflict will be agreed upon first to be followed by a cease fire later, not vice versa as had been demanded by Zelensky and his European supporters.
2. Ukraine won’t join NATO or function as a stalking horse to bring NATO’s military capacities to Russia’s back yard.
3. The four Russian-speaking provinces plus Crimea that voted to secede from Ukraine will be permitted to do so after some minor and symbolic “swapping” of territories around the current line of contact. That is, Russia would get all of Donetsk and Lugansk oblasts (i. e. the Donbass) in return for not attempting to capture the small areas of Zaporizhia and Kherson that are still on the Ukraine side of the contact line.
4. A fig-leaf of security guarantees will be afforded to the rump of Ukraine via an ad hoc squad of European, US and other guarantors. This will provide an “article five” type security “commitment” on paper, albeit without any real mechanism to activate and execute it–including no American “peacekeeping” boots on the ground.
5. The rump state of Ukraine will by quasi-demilitarized via a sharp limit on the size of its armed forces and the nature and lethality of its armaments.
6. The Trump-threatened secondary sanctions against India and China for buying Russian oil will be withheld to enable the execution phases of the deal to go forward.
7. No further arms or intelligence support to Ukraine will be provided by the US or NATO during the peace process implementation.
8. A milestone-based lifting of US/NATO primary sanctions on Russia will be phased in—so long as Russia adheres to the deal and stays in the territorial/political lane specified in the upcoming agreement.
9. Various aspirational future economic opportunities for both sides will be appended to the deal as an expression of Trump-style deal-making.
10. Free elections will be held in the rump state of Ukraine upon the implementation of the peace treaty and the exile of current corrupt Ukrainian leaders including Zelensky.

The heart of the deal, of course, is the territorial partition. As is evident from the map below, 95% of Luhansk (dark red area) and 75% of the Donetsk oblast are already under Russian military control and that will go to 100%. On the other hand, the 20% to 25% of Kherson and Zaporizhia claimed by Russia will remain under Ukrainian control (light red area) as is presently the case on the battlefield. This is a far better deal for Ukraine than is likely to occur upon further combat, where its forces have been in relentless retreat for months.

After the proposed “swap”, therefore, roughly half of historic Novorossiya (New Russia) will be ceded back to Russia– from whence it came after being settled and developed during the time of Catherine the Great (late 18th century) by Russians. Indeed, the whole of Novorossiya had been an integral part of the late Czarist Empire during the 19th century. It ended-up inside the borders of what had been a tiny kingdom along the Dnieper River of Cossack warriors and brigands in 1922 for reasons of convenience to the bloody Bolshevik rulers who had sized power during the war-induced collapse of Czarist Russia in October 1917.

Likewise, Crimea lasted as an integral Russian territory even longer. After being purchased by Catherine the Great from the Ottoman’s in 1783, Crimea was solidly Russian—even through the time of the Crimean War of the 1850s when Russian nationalists turned back the imperial advances of England and France; and remained so until 1954, when the Ukrainian-born Soviet tyrant, Nikolai Khrushchev, emerged atop the post-Stalin power struggle and rewarded his Ukrainian comrades on the Politburo with Crimea as a door prize.

It is to be taken for granted that the Donald knows nothing of this history. Then again, perhaps an alert publicist at the White House might note that the Donald’s deal at least unwinds half of the Soviet tyrants’ border drawing with respect to Novorossiya.

Even more to the point, the ethno-linquistic map below fits like a hand-in-glove to the Elmendorf Settlement. That is, when the anti-Russian and neo-nazi nationalists took-over the Kiev government during the CIA-NED-State Department sponsored coup in February 2014, the Russian speaking areas in the yellow portions of the map moved to secede in a manner echoing America’s own Declaration of Independence against a tyrannical ruler.

It was only the subsequent US/NATO funded attack by Kiev on these seceding provinces that started the Ukrainian civil war and ultimately brought about the Russian intervention in 2022.

The fact is, when it comes to sovereignty the present borders of the fake state of Ukraine are what actually materialized under the point of Bolshevik machine guns a century ago. What the Trumpian settlement will actually do is restore the more natural ethno-linquisitic borders that encompassed Novorossiya for a century and one-half prior to the Soviet tyranny.

In any event, the map below tells you all you need to know about why much of the Donbass revolted and sought separation after the ne0-Nazi Maidan coup. To wit, one of the first acts of the new government was to outlaw Russian as an official language for tens of millions of inhabitants in these yellow-marked areas whose mother-tongue was Russian!

For want of doubt, here is a map of the last free presidential election in Ukraine in 2010. The pro-Russian candidate who won, Janukovych, received upwards of 80-90% of the vote in the darker blue areas of the Donbass east and southern rim of the Black Sea. These are the very same territories which are heavily Russian-speaking per the ethno-linguistic map above, and which will be permitted to secede from Ukraine on the settlement implicit in the Elmendorf Deal per the second map above.

Would it actually be too much trouble for the hyperventilating neocons in Washington and the mainstream press to just eyeball these three maps? What is happening is actually a clean-up of 100 years of misbegotten history, not a betrayal of the Ukrainian nation, whatever that actually is; or, most certainly, not a repudiation of Imperial Washington’s phony “rules-based order”.

The truth is, hundreds of thousands of Russians and Ukrainians have died because a viper’s nest of Washington neocons overthrew the winner of the 2010 election as shown below, thereby igniting the bloodbaths and demolition derby’s that have now led to the imminent partition of a communist-built nation that was never meant to last.

Moreover, as we will amplify in Part 2, the claim that this history is irrelevant and that the so-called Budapest Memorandum of 1994 guaranteed the current Ukrainian borders—-drawn by communist tyrants or not—is risible beyond belief. After all, the Budapest Memorandum was inked at the very moment that President Bush, Secretary of State Baker, the German Chancellor and numerous others had also guaranteed Moscow that NATO would not move “one inch to the east”.

As shown below, so much for the utter hypocrisy of the Washington neocons! Since 1997 14 former Warsaw Pact satellite have joined NATO. So bravo to the Donald for having been too lazy to have absorbed their mendacious narrative.

Meanwhile, the European clown car is lined-up in the Oval Office trying to save their own political hides after years of leading their countries down the destructive primrose path of proxy war on Russia. In the case of Germany especially, they have badly wounded their own economies and living standards in subservience to the sanctions and economic warfare leveled against Russia by the War Capital of the World on the Potomac.

No wonder the Donald has rendered them desperate. The upcoming Elmendorf Settlement will reveal them (save for Giorgia Meloni) to be knaves and incompetents who deserve to be driven from office at the earliest possible date.

Part 2

Last Monday was a good day for world peace. Zelensky put on a suit (of sorts) and kept his mouth shut—even as the Clown Car of his European sponsors dutifully sat on the floor of the Oval Office cross-legged and feigning rapt attention to the random stream of consciousness emanating from behind the Resolute Desk.

So, yes, at last the peace fix is in with respect to ending the madness of Washington’s proxy war on Russia. Within weeks there will hopefully be a crowning summit in Moscow where the Donald will earn his Nobel Peace Prize, owing to the inking of some version of the potential 10-point agreement outlined in Part 1.

Alas, the tricky part will be to gussy-up a completely hollow “security guarantee” (item # 4) that will tiptoe around Putin’s understandable red line that there be no NATO boots on the ground in the rump of Ukraine. Still, some version of peacekeepers and trip-wires for the “article-5 like” guarantee will be needed in the deal.

But we think threading that needle won’t be so difficult, either. The Donald has already taken the possibility of American boots on the ground off the table and nobody wants Russian-hating Brits in Ukraine or a return to the Russian borders of German-speakers in uniform for the third time in 110 years.

Then again, it is likely that French soldiers bearing muskets that have never been fired and dropped only once could form the nucleus of an “observers” force. The latter might include a pick-up squad of UN draftees from Algeria, Azerbaijan and Argentina, if they start with the “A”s.

In any event, just about any fig leaf of rag-taggers will do. That’s because the giant lie upon which the whole Ukraine insanity has been predicated is about to be eviscerated. To wit, this has always been about Washington’s aggression against Russia in the form of the pointless and duplicitous expansion of NATO to Russia’s doorstep after 1997; the US-instigated Maidan coup in February 2014 that overthrew the legitimately elected president and ruptured the delicate balance of Ukrainian politics; and the subsequent NATO supplied and funded attack by the neo-Nazi putschists in Kiev on the breakaway Russian speaking provinces of the Donbass and the south, who were fleeing for their lives.

Accordingly, we are about to witness the geopolitical equivalent of the tree falling noiselessly in the empty forest. That is, there will be no Russian forces on the move westward at all.

The truth is, Putin is way too smart, realistic and civilized to attempt to recreate the Soviet Empire as per the false narrative of the Washington/NATO neocons. He never wanted to even rule the Ukrainian, Polish, Belorussian, Hungarian, Romanian and others nationalities who inhabit the left bank of the Dnieper River and in the west and north of Ukraine.

And that’s to say nothing of shooting his own country in the economic and political kneecaps by attempting to occupy and subdue Russian-hating Lithuanians, Estonians, Latvians, Poles, Germans, Danes, and the inhabitants of the hapless bankrupt socialist states further west. And heaven forfend, who in their right mind would think that the degenerate, wokified socialist precincts of the British Isles are any kind of prize whatsoever?

Indeed, the chutzpah of the British pols like Starmer and the UK nomenklatura is a wonder to behold. There is not a would be conqueror on the planet today (or in the known past) who would see anything from the cliffs of Dover to the Scottish Out Stack that is worth the candle of invasion.

In short, the very idea of an expansionist Russia and Putin-with-a-mustache is an utterly bogus lie. There is no there there. Whatsoever.

And the fact that nothing untoward is going to happen when the Donald partitions and cuts loose the fake state of Ukraine is the real reason that he should get the Nobel Peace Prize. The impending “Elmendorf Deal” will knock the props out from under the whole case for Empire and the very business of the War Capital of the World on the Potomac.

At length it will actually make pursuit of the dream that Trump ventured to utter out loud early in his second term about world disarmament and a 50% cut in defense budgets a realistic possibility. That’s because once it becomes clear that there was nothing to the Russian Menace, the case against Red China will become all the more dubious, as well.

After all, the red rulers of Beijing have staked their very tenure in power and likely their lives on the prosperity emanating from becoming the Factory Floor of the planet. And no one, especially the wily comrades of Beijing, are foolish and stupid enough to make war on $3.5 trillion per year of global export customers.

So it just may be that these words the Donald spoke upon being sworn to office for the second time will turn out to be the most powerful and consequential 36 words spoken by any US President. Ever.

“One of the first meetings I want to have is with President Xi of China, President Putin of Russia, and I want to say, ‘let’s cut our military budget in half.’ And we can do that.”

At the time we said, yes, from the Donald’s lips to god’s ear and all that. The practicalities and obstacle-strewn path from here to there seemed will nigh insuperable.

But with the Ukraine Peace Settlement now in tow what our twice-baked President has actually done is to blow the Overton Window of permissible national security discussion wide open. Indeed, once you reach the point were tabling this fear-obliterating idea at a joint summit with the two endlessly demonized heads of America’s purported enemies becomes feasible, everything—and we do mean everything—heretofore prohibited is on the table for fresh, open discussion.

After all, you don’t need to be a student of the intricacies of the $1.0 defense budget to recognize that when you cut the Pentagon’s rations by half the whole globalist national security framework left over from the Cold War’s demise 34 years ago collapses.

That’s because once you ixnay the Russian (and Chinese) Menace and essentially euthanize NATO, as will now happen in the wake of the Elmendorf Settlement, you can bring the Empire home—and all the national security apparatus that goes with it. To wit, 750 foreign bases and 173,000 US troops posted in 159 countries; globe spanning Navy and Air Force 0perations; and alliances large and small, from NATO to the Taiwan Straits, to so-called peacekeeping missions throughout the Middle East and north Africa.

Stated differently, what you can fund on just 50% of today’s defense budget, as we amplify in Part 3, is an invincible strategic nuclear deterrent and an impenetrable defense of America’s coastlines, airspace and sovereign territory.

And yet, and yet. That’s all we actually need!

It would fully accomplish the fundamental national security goal of keeping America’s 347 million citizens free and safe from Bangor Maine to San Diego California.

Indeed, whether he recognizes it or not, President Trump’s bold entreaty would amount to invalidating every notion of Empire. It would pave the way for returning to America’s pre-1914 policy as a peaceful Republic, safely minding its own business behind the wondrous gifts of Providence—the great Atlantic and Pacific Ocean moats which separate the homeland from any serious potential military foe anywhere on the planet.

At the present time and for the foreseeable future, it goes without saying that there are only two nations even remotely capable of posing a military threat to the American homeland—Russia and the People’s Republic of China. Yet the bottom line strategic reality is that Russia doesn’t have anywhere near the requisite economic heft to threaten America, and China doesn’t have a even a semblance of the economic running room to go on a global military aggression campaign.

With respect to Russia and despite all utter demonetization of Putin, which hopefully well now be undone, no one has even attempted to make the case that he’s so stupid as to believe his $2 trillionof commodity-based GDP is any match for the world-leading technology-based $30 trillion GDP of the United States.

Indeed, the whole Russian ogre thing is based on a purely fanciful derivative case. Namely, the aforementioned arm-waving claim that Putin will take the Baltics next, then Poland and thereafter march on thru the Brandenburg Gate into Berlin on the way to France, the Low Countries and across the English Channel to London—again, assuming Putin is also stupid enough to want to occupy the economic basket case of a Starmerized Little England.

In other words, implicit in Washington’s current consensus foreign policy posture is the notion that Russia is actually a big threat to America because it will eventually attack, occupy, pacify and militarize the entire continent of Europe! Well, unless stoutly resisted by the War Capital of the World on the Potomac.

After all, that’s the only scenario by which Moscow could possibly get the economic heft, manpower and military means to materially threaten the US. In the end, therefore, the threat is not posed by Ruuskies per se, but, apparently, by Russified Germans, Poles, Danes, Spaniards and Frogs.

To repeat: There is not a shred of evidence that this is Putin’s plan or that he would remotely have the economic and military wherewithal to accomplish such a sinister purpose were he so inclined, which most evidently he is not. To the contrary, Putin’s aim by the very evidence of the Elmendorf deal he is about to agree to is far more limited and reasonable: Namely, to keep NATO out of his backyard in an ancient piece of the Russian Empire that was called Novorossiya or New Russia during most of its history.

Again, that was the name of the Donbas and Black Sea rim region before Lenin and Stalin created the artificial country of “Ukraine” for the purely administrative convenience of operating their brutal tyranny. Yet in even attempting to retake the Russian half of Ukraine, Putin had a hard time mustering the requisite military power—to say nothing of conquering the rest of Europe.

Fortunately, the cat is now out of the bag. The Elmendorf Deal shows exactly why Russia is not on the warpath toward the conquest of Europe. To wit, after the impending Trump-Putin deal there will be no NATO in Ukraine and the country will be partitioned between the Russian-speaking regions of the Donbas, Crimea and the Black Sea rim, on the one hand, and the Ukrainian and Polish speaking regions of the west and on the left bank of the Dnieper River, on the other.

That’s all Putin every wanted anyway, and it will be the proof in the pudding that discredits the hideous notion that Washington must fight Russia by proxy over there in order to not have to fight it in Luxembourg or on the cliffs of Dover.

That is to say, once the war is settled and Ukraine partitioned, Putin’s special military operation will come to an abrupt halt at whatever turns out to be the exact frontier as between the breakaway republics and the rump of Ukraine. In turn, that will prove in spades that there exists not even the remotest prospect of a Russifed Europe, and therefore any real Russian threat to the security of the American homeland.

So, yes, the defense budget can be cut by 50% in part because. among other things, the 62,000 US troops shown above that are now stationed in Europe could be brought home forthwith. Even more importantly, US NATO membership and commitments could also be abandoned, meaning that the ridiculous idea of being committed under Article 5 to the mutual defense of such nationlets as North Macedonia, whose 10,000 man active duty military is smaller than 12,000 man police force of Chicago, would also expire.

Part 3

To repeat: the geopolitical equivalent of a tree is about ready to fall unheard in the global forest. Once the Trump/Putin peace deal is inked, not a single element of the neocons’ scary bedtime stories about Russian aggression will be heard anywhere on the planet.

To wit, Putin has no interest in what will be the nationalist anti-Russian rump of a neutralized Ukraine. There will be no Russian flag flying over Kiev or Lviv.

Likewise, nothing untoward will happen in the three Baltic states, either. That’s in part because once they see that poking the Bear next door doesn’t pay and isn’t safe, the often noisy anti-Russian fulminations of politicians in these countries looking for some cheap campaign demagoguery will go radio silent forthwith.

The same goes for Poland. And why in the world would Putin invade eastern European countries like Slovakia or Hungary, which have stoutly opposed the NATO aggression in Ukraine . And that’s to say nothing of Romania, which actually elected a Russian-favoring president until it was ixnayed by Brussels and the CIA.

Moreover, after having even failed to conquer all of Russian speaking Donetsk, what kind of idiot actually thinks that Germany, Italy, France and England are next in Putin’s alleged expansion plans?.

With respect to China, the single most important thing to recognize is that it is the very opposite of the old Soviet Empire, which was based on economic autarky and scant trading relationships with the world outside of the Warsaw Pact. Accordingly, had it been both inclined and capable of offensive military aggression toward the rest of Europe and or even the US—for which the now open archives of the old Soviet Union reveal scant evidence—there would have been no collateral disruption of its basic economic function. The latter was purely an internally-focused regime of centralized state socialism, which, needless to say, didn’t work but didn’t depend upon commerce with the so-called “free world”, either.

By contrast, after Mao was sent off his rewards in Red Heaven, China pivoted sharply to the outside world under the leadership of Mr.Deng and his successors; and they did so under the banner of so-called Red Capitalism, which amounted to an extreme version of export mercantilism.

Consequently, China’s exports soared by 14X during the two decades between 2000 and 2022, rising from $250 billion to $3.5 trillion per year. So doing, the Chicoms essentially took themselves hostage, meaning that every province, city, village, factory, rail line, trucking operations, warehouse and port operation along the length and breadth of China got deeply entangled with just-in-time economic production for customers across the planet, as depicted in the graphic below. Accordingly, China’s economy would collapse on the spot were Beijing to disrupt the daily flow of $10 billion of merchandise goods to Europe, the Americas and the balance of Asia.

Indeed, had its post-Mao leadership been hell bent on foreign conquest, which most clearly it was not, the Beijing regime’s very survival would have been compromised by the resulting disruption to the greatest factory-economy the world has ever seen.

That’s surely why Washington’s idiotic “domino theory” during the Vietnam era was repudiated in spades by subsequent history. That is, Washington wasted 59,000 American lives and upwards of 3 million Vietnamese lives before eventually fleeing from Vietnam. Yet afterwards the Chinese didn’t even try to capture Hanoi because Beijing was busy building-up a massive manufacturing and export economy.

In other words, China is inherently not a military threat to the US, nor is there any evidence that it is expansionist—even in its own region. There is undoubtedly a reason why after thousands of years, the Chinese, Koreans, Japanese, Indonesians, Malayans and Filipinos stick to themselves; and also why a reunification of the Han Chinese on the mainland with their kin on Formosa would have virtually zero implications for the rest of the region.

The state of Taiwan exits only because Washington stood it up in 1949 when Chiang Kai-shek lost the civil war fair and square to Mao and the reds. Were Washington to step aside, it is likely that in a short time Taiwan would be hardly distinguishable from Shanghai across the Yellow Sea.

That is to say, the US does not need the massively expensive 7th Fleet and US Marines and large parts of the Air Force to contain China. The latter’s giant Ponzi economy perched as it is on $50 trillion of debt and upwards of $3.5 trillion per year of exports does all the containing that America’s military security actually requires.

At the end of he day, if Donald Trump’ impending “America First” foreign policy triumph in Ukraine means anything at all, it’s that the current $1.4 trillion national security budget including foreign operations and veterans is double the size that an adequate homeland defense shield actually requires. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that in relentless pursuit of its own self-serving aggrandizement, the military/industrial/intelligence complex has massively inflated America’s Warfare State into an “extra-large” when what is really needed in the world of 2025 is a snug-fitting “small.”

And now, the Donald has dramatically opened the door to downsizing America’s crushing national security budget to exactly that, thereby paving the way for a return to Thomas Jefferson’s wise admonition urging,

“…peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none.”

Indeed, the way for the Trump Administration to shoe-horn roughly $1 trillion of DOD spending into a $500 billion budget was laid out a long time ago by the great Senator Robert Taft at the very dawn of the Cold War. He argued that the modest threat to homeland security presented by the war-ravaged corpus of the Soviet Union and the collectivist disaster imposed on China by Mao could have been readily handled with–

• An overwhelming strategic nuclear retaliatory capacity that would have deterred any possibility of nuclear attack or blackmail.
• An invincible Fortress America conventional defense of the continental shorelines and air space that would have been exceedingly easy to stand up, given that the Soviet Union had no Navy worth speaking of and China had devolved into industrial and agricultural anarchy owing to Mao’s catastrophic experiments with collectivization.

That eminently correct Taftian framework has never changed since then—even as the technology of nuclear and conventional warfare has evolved apace. For modest military spending Washington can keep its nuclear deterrent fully effective and maintain a formidable Fortress America defense of the homeland without any of the apparatus of Empire and no American boots on foreign soil, at all.

In fact, the case for a true America First policy––that is, returning to the 1914 status quo ante and a proper Fortress America military posture––has powerfully strengthened during the last three decades. That’s because in today’s world, the only theoretical military threat to America’s homeland security is the possibility of nuclear attack or blackmail. That is to say, the threat that one of its two nuclear adversaries could develop a First Strike capacity so overwhelming, lethal, and effective that it could simply call out checkmate and demand Washington’s surrender.

Fortunately, neither Russia nor China has anything close to the Nuclear First Strike force that would be needed to totally overwhelm America’s triad nuclear deterrent and thereby avoid a retaliatory annihilation of their own country and people if they attempted to strike first. After all, the US has 3,700 active nuclear warheads, of which about 1,800 are operational at any point in time. In turn, these are spread under the seven seas, in hardened silos and among a bomber fleet of 66 B-2 and B-52s–all beyond the detection or reach of any other nuclear power.

For instance, the Ohio class nuclear submarines each have 20 missile tubes, with each missile carrying an average of 4-5 warheads. That’s 90 independently targetable warheads per boat. At any given time 12 of the 14 Ohio class nuclear subs are actively deployed, and spread around the oceans of the planet within a firing range of 4,000 miles.

So at the point of attack that’s 1,080 deep-sea nuclear warheads cruising along the ocean bottoms that would need to be identified, located, and neutralized before any would-be nuclear attacker or blackmailer even gets started. Indeed, with respect to the “Where’s Waldo?” aspect of it, the sea-based nuclear force alone is a powerful guarantor of America’s homeland security. Even Russia’s vaunted hypersonic missiles couldn’t find or take out by surprise the US sea-based deterrent.

And then there are the roughly 300 nukes aboard the 66 strategic bombers, which also are not sitting on a single airfield Pearl Harbor style waiting to be obliterated either, but are constantly rotating in the air and on the move. Likewise, the 400 Minuteman III missiles are spread out in extremely hardened silos deep underground across a broad swath of the upper Midwest. Each missile currently carries one nuclear warhead in compliance with the Start Treaty but could be MIRV’d in response to a severe threat, thereby further compounding and complicating an adversary’s First Strike calculus.

Needless to say, there is no way, shape, or form that America’s nuclear deterrent can be neutralized by a blackmailer. And that gets us to the heart of the case as to how the Trump Administration could actually cut the defense budget by 50%. To wit, according to the most recent CBO estimates the nuclear triad will cost only about $75 billion per year to maintain over the next decade, including allowances for periodic weapons upgrades.

That’s right. The core component of America’s military security requires only 7% of today’s massive military budget as detailed on a system-by-system basis in the table below. Thus, in 2023 the nuclear triad itself cost just $28 billion plus another $24 billion for related stockpiles and command, control, and warning infrastructure.

Moreover, this key component of this nuclear deterrent–the sea-based ballistic missile force–is estimated to cost just $188 billion over the entire next decade. That’s only 1.9% of the $10 trillion CBO defense baseline for that period.

So the question recurs with respect to the DOD’s current spending level. After setting aside $75 billion for the strategic nuclear triad, how much of the remaining $1.0 trillion+ would actually be needed for a conventional Fortress America defense of the continental shorelines and airspace?

The starting point is that neither Russia nor China have the military capability, economic throw-weight or intention to attack the American homeland with conventional forces. To do that they would need a massive military armada including a Navy and Air Force many times the size of current US forces, huge air and sealift resources, and humongous supply lines and logistics capacities that have never been even dreamed of by any other nation on the planet.

They would also need an initial GDP of say $50 trillion to $100 trillion per year to sustain what would be the most colossal mobilization of weaponry and materiel in human history. And that’s to say nothing of needing to be ruled by suicidal leaders—which characterizes neither Putin nor Xi— willing to risk the nuclear destruction of their own countries, allies, and economic commerce in order to accomplish, what? Occupy Denver?

The entire idea that there is currently an existential threat to America’s security is just nuts. After all, when it comes to the requisite economic heft, Russia’s GDP is a scant $2 trillion, not the $50 trillion that would be needed for it to put invasionary forces on the New Jersey shores. And its ordinary defense budget (excluding the SMO) is $75 billion, which amounts to less than four weeks of waste in Washington’s $1.0 trillion monster.

Likewise, China doesn’t have the sustainable GDP heft to even think about landing on the California shores, notwithstanding Wall Street’s endless kowtowing to the China Boom. The fact is, China has accumulated in excess of $50 trillion of debt in barely two decades!

Therefore, it didn’t grow organically in the historic capitalist mode; it printed, borrowed, spent, and built like there was no tomorrow. As we indicated above, therefore, the resulting simulacrum of prosperity would not last a year if its $3.5 trillion global export market–-the source of the hard cash that keeps its Ponzi upright–were to crash, which is exactly what would happen if it tried to invade America.

To be sure, China’s totalitarian leaders are immensely misguided and downright evil from the perspective of their oppressed population. But they are not stupid. They stay in power by keeping the people relatively fat and happy and would never risk bringing down what amounts to an economic house of cards that has not even a vague approximation in human history.

Indeed, when it comes to the threat of a conventional military invasion, the vast Atlantic and Pacific moats are even greater barriers to foreign military assault in the 21st century than they so successfully proved to be in the 19th century. That’s because today’s advanced surveillance technology and anti-ship missiles and flocks of drones would consign an enemy naval armada to Davy Jones’ Locker nearly as soon as it steamed out of its own territorial waters.

The fact is, in an age when the sky is flush with high-tech surveillance assets neither China nor Russia could possibly secretly build, test and muster for surprise attack a massive conventional force armada without being noticed in Washington. There can be no repeat of the Japanese strike force–the Akagi, Kaga, Soryu, Hiryu, Shokaku, and Zuikaku–steaming across the Pacific toward Pearl Harbor sight unseen.

Indeed, America’s two ostensible “enemies” actually have no offensive or invasionary capacity at all. Russia has only one aircraft carrier–a 1980s-era relic which has been in dry dock for repairs since 2017 and is equipped with neither a phalanx of escort ships nor a suite of attack and fighter aircraft–and at the moment not even an active crew.

Likewise, China has just three aircraft carriers–two of which are refurbished rust buckets purchased from the remnants of the old Soviet Union (actually Ukraine!), and which carriers do not even have modern catapults for launching their strike aircraft.

In short, neither China nor Russia will be steaming their tiny 3 and 1 carrier battle groups toward the shores of either California or New Jersey any time soon. An invasionary force that had any chance at all of surviving a US fortress defense of cruise missiles, drones, jet fighters, attack submarines, and electronics warfare would need to be 100X larger.

So let us repeat: There is simply no GDP in the world––$2 trillion for Russia or $18 trillion for China––that is even remotely close in size to the $50 trillion or even $100 trillion that would be needed to support such an invasionary force without capsizing the home economy.

Donald Trump is therefore on to something huge, whether he realizes it or not. To wit, Washington’s globe-spanning conventional war-fighting capability is completely obsolete!

Fully one-third of a century after the Soviet Empire collapsed and China went the Red Capitalist route of deep global economic integration, it amounts to utterly extraneous and unneeded muscle.

For want of doubt, consider that Washington equips, trains, and deploys an armed force of 2.86 million. But rather than being devoted to homeland defense, the overwhelmingly purpose is to support missions of offense, invasion, and occupation all over the planet.

As depicted in the graphic above, this obsolete Empire First military posture still includes among others–

• 119 facilities and nearly 34,000 troops in Germany.
• 44 facilities and 12,250 troops in Italy.
• 25 facilities and 9,275 troops in the UK.
• 120 facilities and 53,700 troops in Japan.
• 73 facilities and 26,400 troops in South Korea

All of this unnecessary military muscle stands as a costly monument to the hoary theory of collective security, which led to the establishment of NATO in 1949 and its regional clones thereafter. Yet the case for Empire and its global alliances was dubious even back then. In fact, the now open archives of the old Soviet Union prove conclusively that Stalin had neither the wherewithal nor intention to invade Western Europe.

What military capacity the Soviet Union did resurrect after the bloodletting with Hitler’s armies was heavily defensive in character and lumbering in capabilities. So the alleged communist political threat in Europe could have been wrangled out by these nations at the polls, not on the battlefield. They did not need NATO to stop an imminent Soviet invasion.

Needless to say, once the Washington-based Empire of bases, alliances, collective security, and relentless CIA meddling in the internal affairs of foreign countries was established, it stuck like glue–even as the facts of international life proved over and over again that the Empire wasn’t needed.

That is to say, the alleged “lessons” of the interwar period and WWII were falsely played and replayed. The aberrational rise of Hitler and Stalin did not happen because the good people of England, France, and America slept through the 1920s and 1930s.

Instead, they arose from the ashes of Woodrow Wilson’s pointless intervention in a quarrel of the Old World that was none of America’s business. Yet the arrival in 1918 of two million American doughboys and massive flows of armaments and loans from Washington enabled a vindictive peace of the victors at Versailles rather than an end to a desultory world war that would have left all the sides exhausted, bankrupt, and demoralized, and their respective domestic war parties subject to massive repudiation at the polls.

As it happened, however, Wilson’s intervention on the stalemated battlefields of the Western Front gave birth to revolution in Russia and Lenin and Stalin, while his machinations with the victors at Versailles fostered the rise of Hitler in the rump of a dismembered and reparations-encumbered Germany.

To be sure, in the end the former did fortunately bring about the demise of the latter at Stalingrad. But that should have been the end of the matter in 1945, and, in fact, the world was almost there. After the victory parades, demobilization and normalization of civilian life had proceeded apace all around the world.

Alas, Washington’s incipient War Party of military contractors and globetrotting operatives and officialdom gestated in the heat of World War II was not about to go quietly into the good night. Instead, the Cold War was midwifed on the banks of the Potomac when President Truman fell under the spell of war hawks like Secretary James Byrnes, Dean Acheson, James Forrestal, and the Dulles brothers, who were loath to go back to their mundane lives as civilian bankers, politicians, or peacetime diplomats.

So, in the post-war period world communism was not really on the march and the nations of the world were not implicated in falling dominoes, nor were they gestating incipient Hitlers and Stalin’s. But the new proponents of Empire insisted they were just the same, and that national security required the far-flung empire that is still with us today.

So there is no mystery, therefore, as to why the Forever Wars go on endlessly. Or why at a time when Uncle Sam is hemorrhaging red ink like never before, a large bipartisan majority has seen fit to authorize $1.2 trillion per year for vastly excessive military muscle and wasteful foreign aid boondoggles that do absolutely nothing for America’s homeland security.

In effect, Washington has morphed into a freak of world history––a planetary War Capital dominated by a panoptic complex of arms merchants, paladins of foreign intervention and adventure, and Warfare State nomenklatura. Never before has there been assembled and concentrated under a single state authority a hegemonic force possessing such enormous fiscal resources and military wherewithal.

Not surprisingly, the War Capital on the Potomac is Orwellian to the core. War is always and everywhere described as the promotion of peace. Its jackboot of global hegemony is gussied up in the beneficent-appearing form of alliances and treaties. These are ostensibly designed to promote a “rules-based order” and collective security for the benefit of mankind, not simply the proper goals of peace, liberty, safety, and prosperity within America’s homeland.

As we have seen, however, the whole intellectual foundation of this enterprise is false. The planet is not crawling with all-powerful would-be aggressors and empire-builders who must be stopped cold at their own borders, lest they devour the freedom of all their neighbors near and far.

Nor is the DNA of nations perennially infected with incipient butchers and tyrants like Hitler and Stalin. They were one-time accidents in history and fully distinguishable from the standard run of everyday tinpots which actually do arise periodically. But the latter mainly disturb the equipoise of their immediate neighborhoods, not the peace of the planet.

So America’s homeland security does not depend upon a far-flung array of alliances, treaties, military bases, and foreign influence operations. In today’s world there are no Hitlers, actual or latent, to stop. The whole framework of Pax Americana and the Washington-based promotion and enforcement of a “rules-based” international order is an epic blunder.

In that regard, the Founding Fathers got it right more than 200 years ago during the infancy of the Republic. As John Quincy Adams approvingly held,

“[America] has abstained from interference in the concerns of others, even when conflict has been for principles to which she clings…She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.”

Needless to say, peaceful commerce is invariably far more beneficial to nations large and small than meddling, interventionism, and military engagement. In today’s world it would be the default state of play on the international chessboard, save for the Great Hegemon on the banks of the Potomac. That is to say, the main disturbance of the peace today is invariably fostered by the self-appointed peacemaker, who, ironically, is inherently the least threatened large nation on the entire planet.

The starting point for a Trumpian “America First” military posture and a 50% cut of the military budget, therefore, is the drastic downsizing of the nearly one-million man standing US Army.

The latter would have no uses abroad because there would be no cause for wars of foreign invasion and occupation, while the odds of any foreign battalions and divisions reaching America’s shores are virtually non-existent. With a proper coastline garrison of missiles, drones, attack submarines, and jet fighters any invading army would become shark bait long before it saw the shores of California or New Jersey.

Yet the 462,000 active-duty army soldiers at $112,000 each have an annual budget cost of $55 billion while the 506,000 army reserve forces at $32,000 each cost upwards of $16 billion. And on top of this force structure, of course, you have $77 billion for operations and maintenance, $27 billion for procurement, $22 billion for RDT&E, and $4 billion for everything else (based on the FY 2025 budget request).

In all, the current Army budget totals nearly $200 billion, and virtually all of that massive expenditure–nearly 3X the total defense budget of Russia–is deployed in the service of Empire,not homeland defense. It could readily be cut by 70% or $140 billion–meaning that the US Army component of a $450 billion Fortress America defense budget would absorb just $60 billion annually.

Likewise, the US Navy and Marine Corps spends $55 billion annually on 515,000 active-duty forces and another $3.7 billion on 88,000 reserves. Yet if you look at the core requirements of a Fortress America defense posture, these forces and expenses are way over the top, as well.

By core missions we refer to the Navy component of the strategic nuclear triad and the Navy’s large force of attack and cruise missile submarines. As it happens, here are the current manpower requirements for these key forces:

• 14 Ohio-class Strategic Nuclear Subs: There are two crews of 155 officers and enlisted men for each boat, resulting in a direct force requirement of 4,400 and an overall total of 10,000 military personnel when Admirals, overhead, support, and woke compliance is included (or not).
• @50 Attack/Cruise Missile Subs: There are two crews of 132 officers and enlisted men for each boat, for a direct requirement of 13,000 and an overall total of 20,000 including Admirals and overhead etc.

In short, the core Navy missions of a Fortress America defense involve about 30,000 officers and enlisted men or less than 6% of the current active-duty force of the Navy/Marine Corps. On the other hand, the totally unnecessary carrier battle groups, which operate exclusively in the service of Empire, have crews of 8,000 each when you count the escort ships and suites of aircraft.

So, the 11 carrier battle groups and their infrastructure require 88,000 direct military personnel and140,000 overall when you include the usual support and overhead. Likewise, the active-duty force of the Marine Corps is 175,000, and that’s entirely an instrument of invasion and occupation. It’s totally unnecessary for a homeland defense.

In short, fully 315,000 or 60% of the current active-duty force of the Navy/Marine Corps functions in the service of Empire. So, if you redefine the Navy’s missions to focus on strategic nuclear deterrence and coastal defense, it is evident that more than half of the Navy’s force structure is not necessary for homeland security. Instead, it functions in the service of global power projection, policing of the sea lanes from the Red Sea to the East China Sea and platforming for wars of invasion and occupation.

Overall, the current Navy/Marine Corps budget stands at about $236 billion when you include $59 billion for military personnel, $81 billion for O&M, $67 billion for procurement, $26 billion for RDT&E, and $4 billion for all others. A $96 billion or 40% cut, therefore, would still leave $140 billion for the core missions of a Fortress America defense.

Among the services, the $246 billion contained in the Air Force budget is considerably more heavily oriented to a Fortress America versus Empire-based national security posture than is the case with the Army and Navy. Both the Minuteman land-based leg of the strategic triad and the B-52 and B-2 bomber forces are funded in this section of the defense budget.

And while a significant fraction of the budget for the manning, operations, and procurement of conventional aircraft and missile forces is currently devoted to overseas missions, only the airlift and foreign base component of those outlays inherently function in the service of Empire.

Under a Fortress America defense, therefore, a substantial part of the conventional air power, which includes upwards of 4,000 fixed wing and rotary aircraft, would be repurposed to homeland defense missions. Accordingly, upwards of 75% or $180 billion of the current Air Force budget would remain in place, limiting the savings to just $65 billion.

Finally, an especially sharp knife would be brought down upon the $181 billion component of the defense budget which is for the Pentagon and DOD-wide overhead operations. Fully $110 billion or 61% of that huge sum–again more than 2X the total military budget of Russia–is actually for the army of DOD civilian employees and DC/Virginia based contractors which feast upon the Warfare State.

In terms of homeland security, much of these expenditures are not simply unnecessary––they are actually counter-productive. They constitute the taxpayer-funded lobby and influence-peddling force that keeps the Empire alive and fully funded on Capitol Hill via lavish appropriations for every manner of consultancy, NGO, think tank, research institute and countless more.

Even then, a 38% allowance or $70 billion for the Defense Department functions (which include the hidden by currently massive over-funding of the CIA and other intelligence agencies) would more than provide for the true needs of a Fortress America defense.

Overall, therefore, downsizing the DOD muscle would generate $410 billion of savings on a FY 2025 basis. Another $50 billion in savings could also be obtained from eliminating most funding for the UN, other international agencies, security assistance and economic aid. Adjusted for inflation through the next four years of Trump’s term, the total savings would eventually come to $500 billion year.

Fortress America Budget Savings:

• Army: $140 billion.
• Navy/Marine Corps: $96 billion.
• Air Force: $65 billion.
• DOD agency-wide: $111 billion.
• UN contributions and foreign economic and humanitarian aid: $35 billion.
• International Security Assistance: $15 billion.
• Total Savings, FY 2025 basis: $462 billion.
• 8% inflation adjustment to FY 2029: +$38 billion.
• Total FY 2029 Budget Savings: $500 billion.

At the end of the day, the time to bring the Empire home is long overdue. The $1.3 trillion annual cost of the Warfare State (including international operations and veterans) is no longer even remotely affordable–-and it has been wholly unnecessary for homeland security all along.

All of this should have been obvious long ago, but the Overton Window was so narrow that the sheer nakedness of the Empire could not be spoken about in polite company. But now Donald Trump has done exactly that, and it will make all the difference in the world.

So let President Trump’s tripartite summit happen soon and begin the great defunding of the world’s hideously bloated Warfare States. The latter is now 10o-years overdue, but, at last, Donald Trump may be the best hope for peace since August 1914. And for that he deserves a Nobel Peace Prize and then some.

Reprinted with permission from David Stockman’s Contra Corner.

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