There is no cause for a hue and cry about US defense spending suffering as a result of some of the aspects of the deal brokered between House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and US President Joe Biden to raise the debt ceiling, David T. Pyne told Sputnik.
“It doesn’t matter as much how much we spend on defense. It matters how we spend it. Our defense budget should focus spending on strategic and nuclear defense, not offensive conventional power projection abroad. We should return to a more non-interventionist foreign policy like the one we had before World War Two,” said Pyne, who now serves as deputy director of national operations of the EMP Task Force on National and Homeland Security.
Furthermore, the US could manage to protect its national security on a smaller budget, Pyne emphasized, instead of spending $886 billion annually on defense, but only if Washington abandons its “failed policy of liberal hegemony, and signed a mutual security agreement with Moscow that included withdrawing our troops from Eastern Europe restoring the pre-2016 Warsaw Summit status quo.”
The Democratic POTUS and Republican speaker struck an agreement in principle to suspend the debt ceiling until 2025 to avert an imminent US default. The deal includes a 3% rise in defense spending next year, less than the current annual inflation rate of more than 4%. The bipartisan deal was denounced by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC). In his opinion, the spending incorporated into the deal is aimed to “gut our national security apparatus at a time of great peril.”
He vowed on Monday that he would “use all powers available to me in the Senate to have amendment votes to undo this catastrophe," adding on Twitter that he was concerned not only about "our own national defense," but that nothing in this bill "provides weapons or technology to help Ukraine defeat Putin."
The former US Department of Defense officer disagreed with criticism of the US defense budget being rendered inadequate due to the newly-reached deal, and decried tying the spending to the Ukraine conflagration. It is not in the Unites States' national security interest to funnel aid to Kiev to help it defeat Russia when Ukraine stands no chance of victory, no matter how many weapons the West sends, Pyne said.
“It is wrong for US policymakers to conflate Ukrainian security interests with our own. [Ukraine’s President Volodymyr] Zelensky’s stated objective to retake Crimea is in direct opposition to our own vital interests which is to do everything we can possibly do to avoid stumbling into an unnecessary world war with Russia. The Russian Federation is only an adversary because of the foolish policies of US leaders,” Pyne underscored.
"If all US aid to Ukraine was immediately cut off, authorities in Kiev would be forced to agree to fully implement a cease fire with Russia," he pointed out.
Russia’s President Vladimir Putin "indicated that he wanted peace with the US when he offered a mutual security agreement the terms of which were mostly favorable to the US," the editor of The Real War newsletter recalled.
In the months prior to the launch of the special military operation in Ukraine in February 2022, Russian Foreign Ministry officials presented two draft proposals on security guarantees between Russia, the US, and NATO. In part, the document called on Washington to pledge not to continue NATO's eastward expansion without any regard for Russia’s interests, and to refrain from cooperating militarily with post-Soviet states, like Ukraine. At the time, Russia drew a red line at Ukraine becoming a base for NATO weapons.
26 December 2021, 12:01 GMT
Going back to Senator Graham’s concerns about the Pentagon having insufficient funding, and that the annual inflation rate (4.9%) exceeds the increase in defense spending (3.3%), David T. Pyne said he would support increasing the defense budget to match inflation. However, he did not believe there was cause for concern about the defense spending.
The Republicans in the House are "much more supportive of defense spending than non-defense spending," Pyne pointed out, which explains why the agreed debt ceiling deal makes an exemption for defense, which accounts for nearly half of all discretionary spending.
Defense budget cuts are politically untenable in Washington, because it "feels like we are living in a dangerous world due to the fact that US leaders have been pursuing a militaristic policy versus Russia, China, and other countries," according to David T. Pyne. He added:
"If we were to return to pursuing a more defensive policy, then the peace dividend would be sizeable, and we could trim our defense budget down a bit."