American Militarism Is Riding High — W. J. Astore

What we’re not encouraged to do is to criticize or even to question America’s vast military establishment and its enormous power, even though President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned us about that establishment in his famous farewell speech in 1961.
It’s high time we Americans listened to Ike as well as to J.W. Fulbright. Let’s give the latter a close listen, shall we?…

I stumbled across Senator J. William Fulbright’s 1970 book The Pentagon Propaganda Machine and, out of curiosity, bought it for the princely sum of five dollars. Now, talk about creepy. Fulbright, who left the Senate in 1974 and died in 1995, noted a phenomenon then that should ring a distinct bell today. Americans, he wrote, “have grown distressingly used to war.” He then added a line that still couldn’t be more up to date: 

“Violence is our most important product.” Congress, he complained (and this, too, should ring a distinct bell in 2019), was shoveling money at the Pentagon “with virtually no questions asked,” while costly weapons systems were seen mainly “as a means of prosperity,” especially for the weapons makers of the military-industrial complex.

“Militarism has been creeping up on us,” he warned, and the American public, conditioned by endless crises and warnings of war, had grown numb, leaving “few, other than the young, [to] protest against what is happening.”

This process has a name — "normaliztion." War and state-violence are becoming normalized in American society.

Bracing Views
American Militarism Is Riding High

W. J. Astore

Andrew J. Bacevich — What Happens When a Few Volunteer and the Rest Just Watch — The American Military System Dissected

How to explain this paradox of a superb military that never gets the job done? Let me suggest that the problem lies with the present-day US military system, the principles to which the nation adheres in raising, organizing, supporting, and employing its armed forces. By its very existence, a military system expresses an implicit contract among the state, the people, and the military itself.

Here, as I see it, are the principles — seven in all — that define the prevailing military system of the United States....

TomDispatch 

What Happens When a Few Volunteer and the Rest Just Watch — The American Military System Dissected

Andrew J. Bacevich, Col. (ret.) US Army, and Professor Emeritus of International Relations and History at the Boston University, Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies

Gregory Clark — Former Japanese Diplomat Hitoshi Tanaka Fears War on Horizon

Another backgrounder on Korea.

Strategic Culture Foundation
Former Diplomat Fears War on Horizon
Gregory Clark

See also

The US successfully dealt with rising nuclear powers China and Russia using diplomacy under the umbrella of deterrence. No reason that this would not work with Korea, too. The US media pictures Kim Jong Un as a madman on one hand and as evil personified on the other. This makes it difficult for the US leadership to use diplomacy. 

The reality is that like all other states, North Korea has interests and it has signaled that it want to make a deal. 

A major problem is that the US imposes unacceptable conditions that are non-negotiable as a precondition for negotiations, which is a non-starter. It's time to take a different tack. One that could be be successful. This would involve giving North Korea security guarantees. That remains unacceptable to the US leadership, however, and US public opinion has been whipped up against it.

Insider Sources
Time to Deal With North Korea

John Feffer

Gordon Adams and Lawrence Wilkerson on Clinton and Trump on foreign policy

Adams and Wilkerson assess Clinton and Trump on temperament and judgment. The find Trump unqualified on temperament and judgment, and Clinton qualified in temperament but not on judgment.

I think that they may be giving HRC too much credit on temperament, based on her public performance and manufactured image. She is reported to be extremely temperamental in private to the point of being unstable, as well as extremely vindictive and domineering.

Since foreign policy is the unique prerogative of the president in an age in which declaration of war, which is the prerogative of Congress, has fallen into disuse and the power effectively delegated to the president's discretion.

Experts seem to agree that war with Russia, which could easily go nuclear, is closer than anytime since the Cuban missile crisis was defused without incident through diplomacy and compromise.

The National Interest

No, Hillary Clinton's Foreign Policy Judgement Isn't As Good As Everyone Says
Gordon Adams, distinguished fellow at the Stimson Center, professor emeritus at American University, and former senior White House budget official for national security in the Clinton administration, and Lawrence Wilkerson, visiting professor of government and public policy at the College of William and Mary. and former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell

Foreign affairs neorealist John Mearsheimer analyzes Us-Russian relations and the effect of Trump.

Russia & India Report
US professor: Trump can’t fix Russia-U.S. ties

Nikolay Shevchenko

Liu Haiyang — Whose “International Law” Are We Talking About?

A Chinese view of what happens when the US makes the rules.

On its face, the US FON [freedom of navigation] program is an effort to assert US desires upon the world oceans for the sole purpose of affording its naval and air forces the maximum degree of mobility and flexibility. In essence, through enforcing American perspective of international law in defiance of shared international perspectives of international law, the apparent provocative nature of such assertions exposes the FON operations as exercises of hegemonic power projection so as to establish a US-dominated maritime legal order beyond a world ocean legal order guaranteed under the convention. As for the FON operations conducted in the South China Sea, they are no more than a tool to carry out the US “Pivot to Asia” strategy.

CHINA US Focus
Whose “International Law” Are We Talking About?
Liu Haiyang is a research fellow at the Collaborative Innovation Center of South China Sea Studies, Nanjing University