The Realignment: What's Marshall's Beef with Gen. Smedley Butler?
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Welcome Back to The Realignment
Today’s edition of the newsletter kicks off our effort to offer more original content. From now on, each newsletter will feature expanded thoughts on something discussed that week. This draft version’s pulled from the YouTube comments, where Marshall got into a really productive conversation/debate about the role of the military-industrial-complex during the inception of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
We’d love to hear your thoughts, especially if you disagree. The whole point of this show is that we’re trying to be a resource for helping us all understand the world. Given the size and diversity of our audience, good faith disagreement only means we’re succeeding at our job.
Marshall’s Beef with Gen. Smedley Butler and War is a Racket
Anyone who reads the YouTube comments on your episodes and listened to our episode with Elbridge Colby knows that Marshall has serious beef with audience members invoking General Smedley Butler’s thoughts on the role of the military-industrial-complex (MIC) and banks when it comes to war. During the 1930s, Smedley Butler wrote War is a Racket, a short pamphlet that sought to catalog the supposed role financial interests played in bringing America into World War One.
In the wake of America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, many people have reasonably looked at the trillions of dollars spent over the last 20 years and invoked Butler’s framework in explaining the war. Marshall disagrees, and said so during the episode with Bridge, which solicited this response on YouTube from a user named Austin:
Can you give a cogent, steel-manned argument as to why Smedler Butler's and Dwight Eisenhower's concerns over the MIC ought to be ignored / glossed over? If you're seriously entertaining the issues those two are raising, I don't know how the issue can be ignored in any conversation about military intervention. It doesn't have to be the controlling factor, but ignoring it is ignorant imo.
Marshall responded with (lightly edited for clarity):
I overstated when I said concerns about contractors/industry should be dismissed. It’s perfectly legitimate for people to pursue corruption concerns. That being said, I don’t particularly believe Smedly Butler/MIC frameworks are particularly useful for examining military intervention, and actually prevent people from thinking clearly. I’m not accusing Butler of anything, but his framework fueled dangerous isolationist thinking during the 1930s that directly aided the disastrous appeasement of Hitler. Yes, industries made money off of WWI, but that wasn’t why the war occurred, and the fact that industries make profits isn’t a case for or against military action. The question facing policy makers in the 1930s was what should the former allies do in the face of a rising Nazi Germany that was aggressively throwing off the shackles of Versailles. The question was, how far is too far? Was it the Sudetenland? Reunification with Austria? The creation of the Luftwaffe? The limit ended up being the invasion of Poland, but what I’m getting at is that very little of what War is a Racket was discussing was particularly useful to solving these questions. In fact, they just allowed appeasers and mistaken isolationists to smear critics of Hitler as profit seeking warmongers.
So to today, I completely understand why many members of the audience turn to War is a Racket after looking at 20 years in Afghanistan and Iraq. However, once again, I don’t think the question of industry profits is particularly useful for examining the origins of these wars, or for looking at future conflicts. For example, despite what people will say, the U.S. did not intervene in Afghanistan in 2001 to make industry profits. The intervention was light footprint, and in fact, the main supporter of the light footprint approach, Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, was notorious for cutting major weapons systems. The industry didn’t like him. Building on that, Rumsfeld himself was very opposed to the national building project in Iraq, and wanted to get out far, far sooner than more neoconservative members of the administration. What I’m getting at is that looking at what happened from 2001-2005 through an industry profits lens isn’t particularly useful, versus analyzing the actual beliefs and actions of the specific players. To sum up, this episode focused on China and Taiwan. There’s a whole bunch of Qs regarding how we should handle our relationship with Taiwan, a rearming Japan, and the broader region. I likely disagree with most folks here about how we should do that. My point’s that we should focus on ideas, interests, and specific questions with unclear answers, rather than just focusing on the fact that people will make money as an explainer for why events happen.
Note: There’s an interesting-looking book coming out about Smedley Butler by Jonathan M. Katz: Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America’s Empire. We’ll be sure to invite the author on the show.
Episodes of the Week
Episode 159: Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying: How the 21st Century Drove Us All Crazy
(Audio) (Video)
Episode 158: Elbridge Colby: Welcome to the Era of Great Power Conflict
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