Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the impartial presidential candidate, mentioned this week that he would reduce navy spending by half by the top of his first time period as president, and mentioned the USA ought to have a lowered function in international affairs.
“Navy spending is a continuing drain on our nation’s vitality,” Mr. Kennedy mentioned in an hourlong speech on Wednesday night on the Richard Nixon Presidential Library in California, including that “obsessive about the concept of our nation’s energy, we ignore the rising infirmity at our core.”
Mr. Kennedy has lengthy assailed American navy spending and protection contractors, however his speech on the Nixon Library, which partly targeted on overseas coverage, painted a grim image of American decline over the past 60 years and laid out a radically completely different imaginative and prescient of America’s place on the world stage.
He mentioned the USA ought to settle for a diminished function in international affairs, divert a lot of the nation’s safety spending to home packages, and put together for a multipolar world — the place different highly effective international locations like China and Russia would have elevated affect and America wouldn’t be the only international superpower.
“We appear to assume that we’re nonetheless the place we have been — in the identical world as in 1991,” Mr. Kennedy mentioned, referring to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the top of the Chilly Battle. He added: “We’re caught in that previous. Any nation, or for that matter any particular person, can preserve an phantasm like that solely at an ever rising value.”
Mr. Kennedy’s vow to aggressively cut back nationwide safety spending stands in stark distinction to the trajectory of world navy spending, which has reached a 35-year excessive, pushed partly by Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Mr. Kennedy, as an impartial, would even have few allies in Congress to assist him fulfill that promise, and there has sometimes been sturdy assist for navy spending in Congress. The protection finances for 2025 is at present capped at about $895 billion, although Democrats and Republicans are mulling an extra enhance.
Mr. Kennedy, who has made his opposition to offering navy assist to Ukraine a central a part of his marketing campaign platform, supplied a darkish narrative of latest American historical past to elucidate his place, saying that the USA had bankrupted itself in overseas “ceaselessly wars.”
Denouncing “Bush-Cheney jingoism,” Mr. Kennedy mentioned that the USA had “poured our wealth into one navy operation after one other within the pursuit of world empire,” and because of this, “our nation started to decay from inside,” describing “an epidemic of persistent illness, a plague of dependancy and historic financial inequality.”
Mr. Kennedy at occasions praised President Richard Nixon for his diplomatic negotiations with China, saying that he understood that you just “don’t must intimidate” America’s rivals “into submission.” However he additionally denounced the ending of the gold normal, an motion that Nixon took as president that transformed the U.S. greenback into what is named a fiat forex. Mr. Kennedy asserted that printing “limitless portions of cash” by fiat “is the one means we go to conflict.”
“Fiat forex was invented to finance wars,” Mr. Kennedy mentioned, including “the wars wouldn’t have occurred if the politicians needed to come to us and say, ‘we need to spend $3.6 trillion to eliminate Saddam Hussein,’ ” referring to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.