Threats of Our Own Making
The Pentagon has long had a conflict of interest. The Department of Defense builds the weapons of war (albeit in a grossly inefficient manner using a captive defense industry that is a ward of the state). Yet the department also supervises and funds 85 percent of the intelligence effort to identify threats that those weapons, at least theoretically, are designed to counter. Thus, political pressure for more business from states and congressional districts containing defense industries leads the U.S. government to inflate external threats to justify ever-greater defense spending. The Pentagon helps generate such political pressure by distributing defense contracts and subcontracts, not on the basis of the best or most efficient defense companies, but to companies in as many states and congressional districts as possible. Such is the way the military-industrial complex—identified by President and former General Dwight Eisenhower—works.
Of course, it is much easier to find new threats to highlight if you help create them yourself. A classic case of threat generation occurred with NATO expansion. NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, was originally created after World War II as a defensive alliance against possible Soviet expansionism in Europe. After the Cold War, despite the eclipse of its reason for being, NATO started expanding its territory and mission. The alliance admitted former Soviet allies in Eastern Europe and republics of the defunct USSR, which implanted a hostile alliance on a weakened Russia’s doorstep. NATO became even more threatening to Russia because, at the same time, the alliance shifted its mission from defending the soil of member countries to offensive missions outside the treaty area—for example, bombing Bosnia, Kosovo, and Serbia.