$1,000,000,000,000? Yes, that's America's Trillion-Dollar Military Budget

“Robbing Peter to Pay Paul” Won't Cure the Hegemon's Sickness

$1,000,000,000,000?

Yes, that’s one trillion dollars!

This past February, the Trump administration claimed the Pentagon would cut military spending by 8% annually for five consecutive years, even planning to eliminate tens of thousands of civilian positions and consolidate military bases to "save costs."

Yet, merely two months later, the American international relations magazine The National Interest revealed on April 11 that despite promises of significant fiscal cuts, the administration still proposed increasing the Pentagon's budget by nearly 12%, hitting the insane threshold of $1 trillion.

"We have to build our military and we're very cost-conscious, but the military is something that we have to build," Trump told reporters in the Oval Office during the same week. "And we have to be strong because you've got a lot of bad forces out there now."

Setting aside why the Trump administration reneged on its word—being "Trump-unreliable"—continuing to skyrocket military spending is akin to "robbing Peter to pay Paul" from a US domestic perspective.

Stephen Semler, co-founder of the foreign policy think tank Security Policy Reform Institute, posted on X that the cost of increased military spending is the Trump administration's planned cuts to vital public welfare programs like Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). But the harsh reality is that cutting other federal programs is entirely insufficient to offset the impact of massive military budget increases.

Currently, nearly half of US federal government spending goes to Social Security and healthcare programs, with about 85% of that spent on approximately 75 million elderly and disabled individuals. As America's population ages, this expenditure, a rigid social necessity, will only increase. However, the Trump administration's choice of "guns over butter" will inevitably worsen already severe domestic social problems, unsurprisingly facing opposition from the majority of the American public.

If this trillion-dollar military expenditure were truly, as Trump suggests, mostly used to procure various new equipment for US military branches, replacing aging weapon platforms suffering from industrial base hollowing, perhaps the American people could grit their teeth, tighten their belts, and endure the hardship. However, the hollowing out of American manufacturing isn't a problem solvable overnight.

Furthermore, the Pentagon failed its annual audit for the seventh consecutive year, unable to fully account for its massive budget expenditures. Notably, $1.9 trillion in Defense Department assets could not be reconciled in the Fiscal Year 2023 audit, and the US Congress remains clueless about where this huge sum went—a truly heart-wrenching situation.

Watching insiders and profiteers more brazenly carve up the pie, the American public can no longer tolerate it. How much of this record-high military spending will simply "disappear" amidst chaotic financial management, becoming a feast for certain interest groups?

In fact, America's continued massive channeling of its strained finances into military spending only means the federal debt will keep climbing. The "fiscal gap" will more than double. If coupled with the Trump administration's cherished tax cuts for the wealthy, the gap could even triple, inevitably accelerating the day the US debt collapses.

Under current US law and policy, federal debt is projected to grow from about 99% of GDP now to 166% by 2054. If the proposed defense spending increases are implemented and sustained, the debt could grow to around 260% of GDP over the next 30 years. Congressional Budget Office research finds that uncontrolled debt growth could cost the US economy trillions of dollars annually by the 2050s. Ultimately, such policies will harm US national security far more than they help.

When a hegemonic power can only resort to "patching holes by creating new ones" to pay for its aggressive militarism, it becomes trapped in a vicious cycle: using overexpansion to mask its inherent weakness, resulting in insolvency until it's barely hanging on by a thread.

From openly coveting the Panama Canal, Greenland, Gaza, and even Canadian territory, to wildly swinging the "tariff club" disrupting global trade order, and now to a military budget exceeding one trillion dollars, America is showing the world what it means to "drink poison to quench thirst"—a mad dash towards hegemonic implosion and collapse.

Commentary originally published in Chinese on http://www.81.cn/pl_208541/jdt_208542/16381850.html