During the recent Democratic Party debates, there was an elephant in the room and it wasn’t a Republican. It was America’s disastrous militaristic foreign policy.
Unsurprisingly, the moderators asked little about the subject and only Tulsi Gabbard, the first female combat veteran to run for president, faced the subject squarely. Though America’s aggressiveness abroad may serve certain corporate interests, as well as the agendas of the current regimes in Israel and Saudi Arabia, it does not enhance our national security.
It will ultimately bleed our economy dry and leave us defenseless in the face of the greatest real threat Americans face — climate change and alterations in our environment that could threaten the food supply while reshaping our coastlines.
Without a sustained national effort to adapt to our changing planet and limit to the endless expansion of population and resource extraction, all the fine words on social justice and economic equality will be rendered meaningless. Climate change, whether anthropogenic or not, has often altered the course of human history, sometimes suddenly, as during the Younger Dryas Period of the 13th millennium BC or during the Little Ice Age that followed the Medieval Warm Period.
Now, when our technical advances might protect us from some of these natural threats, we have instead made ourselves more vulnerable than ever. One solar flare like the Carrington Event of 1859 could knock out our whole scantily protected energy grid. Until our political elites recognize that national security cannot be defined by the same financial interests that have profited from militarism, our survival will depend largely on dumb luck.
John Coster
Amherst