Editor's Note:
Amid the Russia-Ukraine conflict, arms dealers have made a big fortune in the ongoing war, and financial predators have also missed no opportunity to take full advantage of the situation. Moreover, in the U.S., there is a group of "politicians, experts, or think tanks" who live by creating imaginary enemies and attacking Russia or China. These warmongers are "vampires" feeding on the bloody turbulence in other countries.
Observers predict that the post-war reconstruction of war-torn Ukraine may involve huge amounts of money, and U.S. companies, along with transnational corporations, will be the main beneficiaries of Ukraine's reconstruction.
The Global Times is publishing a series of stories and cartoons to unveil how the U.S., in its status as a superpower, has been creating one crisis after another in the world. This is the third installment.
Monstrous military-industrial complex
The Democratic and Republican parties in the U.S. are generally divided on many topics, from climate change to same-sex marriage, but there is one exception - the defense expenditure. In 2020, the U.S. spent nearly $780 billion on its military. The figure was more than the total expenditure of the other nine countries following the U.S. that spent the most on the military in the same year combined.
To justify such a large military expenditure, the U.S. had tried to incite wars around the world, with the Russia-Ukraine conflict their latest target.
John Mearsheimer, a prominent American international relations scholar, reiterated in a recent opinion piece published in The Economist on March 19 that "the West, and especially America, is principally responsible" for the Ukraine crisis. Since 2008, the U.S. has been encouraging Ukraine to join the EU and NATO, leading to the Russia-Ukraine conflict escalating into a war, he said.
After the Russia-Ukraine war broke out, students at the University of Chicago, where Mearsheimer works, circulated a letter calling for the cancellation of John Mearsheimer over "Putinism."
However, what the students do not know is that the U.S. military-industrial complex (MIC) is moving full steam ahead regarding the Russia-Ukraine war, which some media outlets have called the biggest land conflict in Europe since the World War II.
The MIC is a unique phenomenon in the U.S.. During World War II, the five top U.S. defense contractors - Lockheed Martin Corporation, Raytheon Company, Northrop Grumman Corporation, the Boeing Company, and the General Dynamics Corporation - made a large profit from the war and got a large number of federal government contracts during that period. Since then, their interests have been bound together.
During the Cold War era, the U.S. military, defense contractors, the federal government, the Congress, and local universities cooperated closely and extended their forces to new industries like aerospace, energy, the electronics industry, information technology, and bioengineering, creating an enormous MIC. Think tanks and the media have all been dragged into it and they became part of the complex of shared interest.
The MIC has hogged most of the U.S.' wealth and become a monster that the country cannot get rid of.
On January 17, 1961, in his farewell address, then-president Dwight Eisenhower warned against the establishment of a "military-industrial complex," noting that the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power along with the MIC existed and would persist.
The MIC also has a great influence on U.S. presidential elections, as about 30 percent of the U.S. companies and one-quarter of the country's employment opportunities are related to the MIC. In addition, some of the U.S. states where these military contractors have established their bases of operation like Michigan, Ohio, and Florida are also swing states that no presidential candidate would want to lose.
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