The US Spends $700 Billion More For the Military While China Spends Its Money For Peace
by John Lawrence
House Republicans and Democrats joined forces Tuesday to decisively approve a defense policy bill that authorizes $700 billion to restock what lawmakers have described as a depleted U.S. military and counter North Korea’s advancing nuclear weapons program. This is even more than President Trump asked for! The bill would exceed the president's $603 billion defense budget request. But it also would blow past the $549 billion cap on defense spending set under the 2011 Budget Control Act by about $72 billion. For the funding scheme to work, lawmakers would need to strike a deal to increase or repeal the budget caps.
Meanwhile China under President Xi is spending money on its Belt and Road initiative to build infrastructure throughout the Asian-African-European land mass creating a new Silk Road. The difference in approach of the world's two largest economies is striking. While the US spends on war, China spends on peaceful development. Which approach do you think will win more friends and influence more people in the long run?
The US busts its budget for war while China's initiative will increase trade and mutual cooperation among Asia, Europe and Africa. The die has been cast. A new axis is forming consisting of China, Russia and Iran. The US, Saudi Arabia - which publicly beheads homosexuals and other non-violent offenders, thereby making a mockery out of US human rights preaching - and Europe are on the other side. Europe which is part of the Euroasian land mass is on the US side for now. Its economic interests may shift as they already have with regard to Russian natural gas. It is a market that Gazprom considers its own backyard as the dominant supplier of European gas and with its monopoly on pipeline exports from Moscow.
The US advantage of physical separation from Europe, which may have kept it out of some European land wars in the past, is an economic disadvantage when it comes to trade with much closer partners. Also its partnership with Saudi Arabia because of oil puts it on the wrong side of history as the world converts to renewable energy and abandons fossil fuels. The Saudi state religion, Wahhabism, preaches death and destruction to infidels and has spawned the major terrorist groups like ISIL, Al Qaeda and Boko Haram. 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers were Saudis. Then George W Bush decided to invade the wrong country because he didn't want to disassociate himself or the US from his Saudi oil friends.
