CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Lesson from the Iran War: Making Enemies Makes Us Poorer

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Our Secretary of Defense (or War) Pete Hegseth seems to be having a really great time killing people in Iran, but his live action video games come at a big cost — not just in lives, but in budget dollars. To be clear, the main reason to oppose this pointless war is its impact on the people of Iran and elsewhere in the region. But it also has a huge economic cost that is seriously underappreciated.

The short-term cost is the shortage of oil, natural gas, fertilizers, and other items that would ordinarily travel through the Strait of Hormuz. This shortage has already sent prices of many items soaring. The impact is not just on the goods themselves; there is a large secondary impact due to higher shipping costs, and if fertilizer supplies are not resumed soon, higher food prices due to lower crop yields. This is a big hit to people in wealthy countries, but it is life-threatening to people living on the edge in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.

But in addition to the short-term cost, there is also a longer-term cost insofar as we are making new enemies and therefore will have higher bills for military spending long into the future. We already got the first taste of this as the Trump administration floated the idea of a $200 billion special appropriation to cover the cost of the war.

The Military is Really Big Bucks

There is remarkably little appreciation of how much money is at stake with wars and the military. This is because the media have a deliberate policy of uninformative budget reporting. They just write huge numbers in the millions or billions, knowing they are completely meaningless to almost everyone who sees them.

It would be virtually costless to provide some context for these numbers, for example, expressing them as a percentage of the budget. That would take any competent reporter ten seconds and add maybe ten words to a news article. This would tell you that the $200 billion (2.7 percent of the budget) Trump wants for his Iran war is a........

© CounterPunch