It's not "Defense" Spending

Observing your country from here in the north, it is hard to understand much of your behavior without positing fear as a key factor in explaining it. Somehow from at least the end of WW2 the nation that manifestly has less to fear than any other has routinely reacted from terror. Examples: McCarthyism, the exaggerated Cold War, Vietnam and bleeding maps, 911, which was so manifestly a police, not a military, matter, your extreme over-expenditure on your military. I will be intentionally provocative: Why does your nation appear to have such a broad yellow streak up its back?

I can easily understand your feeling, my Canadian friend. I used to feel this way too. But now I think the real truth is that the establishment simply doesn't care what the public thinks. It gives us some bread and circuses, but in exchange we are supposed to shut up about foreign policy. Poll after poll shows that most of the country wants out of Iraq, doesn't want to bomb Iran, wants a two-state solution for Palestine, etc. It just doesn't matter.

I wish it was entirely the fault of the leadership. However, even the most totalitarian regime needs a modicum of public support to remain in office — witness the collapse of communism, or the loss of the Mandate of Heaven by Chinese dynasties over the millennia. Your leadership plays the fear card very successfully as a means of bending the populace to its will. Why is it so successful? Other countries, like ours, share much of your history, yet we don't seem to share your huge underlying anxiety.

Thanks for another fascinating conversation, Bruce and George. The concept of the super-weapon as cultural artifact is intriguing. As a naïve observer from afar of the US, I am wondering if there is some parallel to be drawn between the US hierarchy's fascination with development of overwhelming "Vergeltungswaffen", and a domestic US obsession with the individual's 2nd amendment right to bear arms...

Although late in listening and posting, I would just like to add that this concept of warfair ;) was not necessarily first used, but certainly in practice during our very own war between the states with Sherman's march through Georgia (scorch the earth).