A new missile defence base was opened in November in northern Poland by the US, as part of Nato’s Aegis Ashore missile shield built to shoot down short- and intermediate-range ballistic missiles, and the shield’s Turkey-based radar will now be redirected from Middle Eastern to Russian threats.
The base at Redzikowo near the Baltic Coast had already been flagged as a threat by Moscow in 2007 during the Republican presidency of George W Bush when it was still being planned, Reuters reported, yet nothing appeared to impede its development under Democrats Barack Obama or Joe Biden, and it looks set to operate under Republican president-elect Donald Trump.
“Warsaw says it shows Poland’s military alliance with Washington remains solid, whoever is in the White House,” Reuters wrote, demonstrating the uninterrupted longevity of Pentagon and defence industry objectives, regardless of who occupies that pale pondok at the end of the lawn across the Potomac.
This is instructive as we prepare for yet another likely chaotic and inchoate Trump presidency, for though he will return to office armed with an unprecedented protection from indictment for wayward acts he may commit in office, issued by a loyalist-stacked US Supreme Court, Trump is fully aware he cannot simply rule by fiat.
In his first days in the Oval Office in January 2017, he naively attempted to do just that, but was swiftly brought up short, not so much by the checks-and-balances of the system, as by the Byzantine realpolitik of Washington DC. Now he knows better, and will be more assiduous this coming January in what South Africans call “cadre deployment” of loyalists to key posts. After all, it served him well in the Supreme Court, and Republicans will control both legislative houses.
Yet beyond control of the three arms of government, and beyond the Oval Office incumbent’s considerable presidential powers, including those as commander-in-chief of all six US armed forces, there exist three immense, yet less visible and mostly unaccountable and unelected centres of power in the US.
First, there is the military-industrial complex, the huge, moneyed combine of the armed forces and the defence industry that supplies it that properly coalesced during World War 2. We would do well to remind ourselves that the term was popularised by Republican president Dwight D Eisenhower, who warned of its power in his farewell address in 1961: “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists, and will persist.” And persist it has.
Second, the state bureaucracy itself, one of the world’s largest and most powerful, which, like the military-industrial complex, has its own strategic foreign interests separate to those of the incumbent president and which, being unelected, has longer tenure in office and thus longer-range objectives than incumbent parties. Only crude Marxists and the ignorant fail to see the state as a major force with its own distinct aims.
And lastly, there is the plutocracy, the wealthy old-boys’ club of funders, lobbyists and special-interest groups from Washington DC and elsewhere who, since the rise of the rail, steel, oil and chemicals “Robber Barons” in the 1860s, have shaped presidencies according to their own private agenda, such as the now-defunct US-supremacist “Project for the New American Century”.
It is a club that today would include SA-born new boy Elon Musk, and which has been critiqued by business ethics specialist Marjorie Kelly in her book, The Divine Right of Capital, for fostering pre-democratic, even aristocratic principles in the US economy that would be jarringly out of place in the rest of its society.
The view from the Pentagon
But let me focus on the remarkable way in which the Pentagon views itself. Around the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks a decade and a bit ago, I managed to secure access to this enormous complex of 23,500 workers (top-heavy with brass: 70% of the military staff are officers) with its Humvee-wide corridors and its centre courtyard Ground Zero Café, named as it is the spot over which any future enemy ICBMs would detonate, having recognised the building’s unique geometry incoming from space.
Hear me out, for though this tale is dated, and its personalities have moved on in their careers, my point is the endurance of long-term, even Chinese-like multigenerational forward thinking at the Pentagon. The men I spoke to were all civilians, though ranked on the ladder of power as the equivalent of four-star generals, the highest current US Army rank.
Bryan Whitman, the principal assistant secretary of defence for public affairs, expounded on how the US military operated globally, across all time zones, underscoring the unusual degree of personal latitude allowed by the Pentagon to its regional commanders, whose six regional combatant commands divide the Earth like segments of a giant orange.
“We plan centrally and operate decentrally, so the field commanders have a lot of autonomy,” Whitman said. “The ambassadors [under the state department] focus on their own country [of posting] but the commanders [under the Pentagon] look at regional security.”
I responded that as the US military had this enormous 24-hour global presence, with its own state-like infrastructure (housing, engineering, social services, and so on), massive staff and facilities (some ZIP codes are those floating cities called aircraft carriers), and heavily armed semi-autonomous regional forces, and given that the military officer caste was largely unaffected by changes in whichever political party rotated through the White House and therefore could devise longer-term strategies than the state department, whose foreign policy was bound to the incumbent presidency – given all that, was the US military not in fact a parallel world government?
Whitman gave me a long, penetrating stare and said: “I think you have answered your own question” – which to me was a remarkably frank admission from the senior ranks about how the military-industrial complex viewed itself superior to the elected, yet ephemeral presidency.
Evolving US military might
This sabre-rattling supremacy was not always so. The Founding Fathers were extremely wary of creating a nation-wide standing army in the first place, most preferring levies that would raise short-term local militia or temporary state-wide provincial troops in times of defensive necessity.
After the outbreak of war against Britain at Lexington and Concord in Massachussetts on April 19 1775, it was only the impassioned oratorial skills of Masachusetts lawyer John Adams combined with the solemn stature of Virginian colonel George Washington that swung the vote at the 2nd Continental Congress on June 14 to establish a Continental Army under Washington’s command as a general.
Success in the Revolutionary War did not, however, secure permanence for the military, and most of the Continental Army was disbanded after the peace was signed on September 3 1783, only two regiments remaining as residual forces, one guarding settlers on the western frontier and the other the West Point arsenal, though a tiny department of war was formed in 1789.
It was only the disastrous routing by the Native American warriors of the Western Confederacy of a 1,000-strong US force of six-month levies, with 665 killed or captured at the Battle of the Wabash on November 4 1791 — still one of the US’s worst military defeats — that caused Congress to authorise the creation of a small standing army, the Legion of the United States, the following year, a force that became the US Army in 1796.
And it was only the wars of a century later, particularly the Spanish-American war of 1898 that turned the US into a truly globe-spanning empire, with its acquisition of Cuba (temporarily, except for Guantanamo and the Isle of Pines), Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines — while it also annexed Hawaii the same year, and three centuries of genocidal war against the Native Americans ended three years later, and it maintained ground forces in China in the first decade of the 1900s.
The US military another century and a quarter on is a different beast entirely to its antecedents. Ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union, and of the bipolar Cold War balance between the two superpowers, the US has become the sole global “hyperpower”, with about 750 military bases in 80 countries, and 2.86-million active-service personnel, spending more on its military each year — $916bn last year — than the next 10 countries, including “New Cold War” opponents Russia and China, combined.
Together with the $309bn defence industry, this creates a centre of gravity that is more like the event horizon of a black hole — impossible for any US president to draw away from its orbit, and of such gravitas that it surely must distort any impinging presidential policy decisions.
America in Africa
For instance, the US military’s Africa Command (Africom), the aegis for the Africa-dedicated components of the US military, was hived off European Command (Eucom), which had covered Europe and North Africa, in 2007, because Sub-Saharan Africa is geopolitically detached from North Africa and Europe. Africom is still headquartered in Stuttgart, Germany, and has yet to find a home in Africa, though Ghana and SA are contenders.
Trump’s first term was characterised by a general dismissal of Africa, but from next year this appears set to change, with his camp reportedly planning the leveraging of the Sub-Saharan continent’s considerable conservative evangelical bloc to drive US business interests, while probably slashing foreign aid programmes like the President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief (Pepfar), and rolling back support for climate change-mitigating initiatives.
Any attempt to secure the notional “Arc of Instability”, which the US determines sweeps across the Sahel and Sahara into the Middle East, against insurgent forces will at the very outset be bedevilled by challenges at both ends: in the west, the fragmentation of the Economic Community of West African States (Ecowas) following the withdrawal of the military juntas of Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger under distinctly anti-occidental influence stoked by Russian mercenary proxy the Africa Corps (formerly the Wagner Group); and in the east, the increasing frustration of US ally Saudi Arabia with Israeli intransigence on Palestine makes their pre-war toenadering towards Israel’s Abraham Accords seem more remote.
In 2011, Pentagon spokesperson and legal expert David Oten told me that direct military-to-military co-operation was often one of the best ways for the US to engage diplomatically “because often the [African] military is the only centre of national power – there is no strong legislature, etc.” But though it is now clear that US military diplomacy has failed in the Sahel, after a rash of seven anti-western coups since 2021, the generals are likely to continue to find other ways to push their own agenda.
This is achievable via Africom’s archipelago of 27 military bases across the continent, with the largest boots-on-the-ground element being the Combined Joint Task Force at Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti, while the Africa Contingency Operations Training Assistance (Acota) peacekeeper and offensive training programme is aimed at integrating African armed forces into Nato doctrine and US strategic objectives.
Electing inferior men
That great 19th century commentator on the US, Alexis de Tocqueville, wrote in his landmark Democracy in America, the first volume of which was published in 1835 and the second in 1840, during the presidency of Andrew Jackson who ordered the forced removals and ethnic cleansing of Native Americans: “I do not know if the people of the United States would vote for superior men if they ran for office, but there can be no doubt that such men do not run.”
The presidency and the legislature were already seen by such an astute observer as marked by pork-barrel politics, in which patronage by wealthy plutocratic donors, derived from both the landed planter class and the newly emerging industrial class, played a great role in driving the party-political machinery that secured votes.
And that was at a time when the map of the US did not yet run “from sea to shining sea”, the southwest still being part of Mexico and the Republic of Texas, the northwest as yet unconquered, and the legislature divided between Democrats, derived from primary Declaration of Independence author Thomas Jefferson’s founding party, and Whigs, the latter being the ancestor of today’s Republican Party.
While as president, Washington had been unaffiliated to any party, the roughly two-party system (there have been significant third-party challengers from time to time) that emerged from about 1792, with conservatives contesting liberals, has marked the US political system ever since.
Yet the nature of the two primary parties rotated 180º in the mid-20th century, when Franklin D Roosevelt’s New Deal dramatically expanded the unelected bureaucracy of federal agencies, and traditionally Republican-voting blacks switched to the Democrats who started emphasising civil rights, while in response, conservative, white and southern Democrats shifted to the Republicans.
The political differences are not that clear cut, however: liberal Democrat John F Kennedy brought the world to the brink of nuclear war in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, while the usually belligerent Republican Ronald Reagan stopped supporting Pinochet’s Chilean junta from 1985.
Trump is often viewed by progressives as the worst US president ever, but in 2021, as Biden started his term, 142 presidential historians and professional observers of the presidency named James Buchanan, in office 1857 to 1861, as the worst president of the 44 who by then had served. His pushing of the infamous Dred Scott v Sandford case through the Supreme Court resulted in a ruling that enslaved people were not US citizens, which so stoked tension between the north and south that the Civil War broke out shortly after he left office.
Trump was rated the fourth-worst, however, because he challenged a multitude of long-established ethical laws, appointed cabinet secretaries with no political experience, and a national security adviser who was working as a foreign agent. And that was before he pushed insidious lies about the integrity of the 2020 election, which sparked the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol. Trump’s scowling face will hopefully never make it onto Mount Rushmore.
Retired on his Monticello slave plantation, Jefferson once stated: “The tyranny of the legislature is really the danger most to be feared, and will continue to be so for many years to come. The tyranny of the executive power will come in its turn, but at a more distant period.” That distant period may now have come, but the US presidency is the most powerful, yet the most beholden, executive office in the world.
• Schmidt is an investigative journalist and author of books including Death Flight (2020).
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