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The problem of simultaneity.

Under Donald Trump, the United States is, as policy analyst Karim Sadjapour suggested, the “attention deficit superpower.” On the campaign trail, Trump railed against the failed wars of the establishment. Once in office, he campaigned for the Nobel Peace Prize, while bombing seven countries plus fishing boats in the Caribbean, decapitating Venezuela, embracing Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, lacerating our allies, threatening to send troops into Greenland, Canada, Mexico, Ecuador, and Columbia, and launching an aggressive war on Iran, with Cuba soon to follow.

Is there any coherent explanation—or even plausible excuse –for the past months, other than reasonable doubts about the mad king’s sanity? In the Financial Times, contributing editor Patrick Foulis suggests there is. Trump and his strategists, he argues, are addressing the “problem of simultaneity,” the threat that haunts global empires: a possibility of concurrent attacks by multiple adversaries across the world that could overwhelm the empire’s capacities.

The Pentagon once aspired to be ready to fight two major wars simultaneously, but that nightmare was abandoned with the end of the Cold War when, as Bush’s secretary of state, Colin Powell, put it, “We are running out of enemies. We are down to Fidel Castro and Kim Il Sung.”

Now, with the rise of China and Russia’s recovery, concern about simultaneous threats has revived. The hawks surrounding Joe Biden sought to respond by rousing the allies to help bear the burden from the Baltics to the South China Sea.

Trump, of course, scorns all things Biden and so launched a different course. Flagellate the allies into action, placate China and Russia for the time being, while “sequencing” preemptive wars to degrade our enemies, and buy time to build up America’s military. Take out the “rogue” leadership in Venezuela. Then attack Iran. Cuba soon to come. The conflicts, according to Trump’s defense strategist Elbridge Colby, are “designed precisely” to avoid concurrent wars—not counting the bombing of several countries in the War on Terror.

And demand a staggering $1.5 trillion annual military budget—a $500 billion, a nearly 50 percent increase in one year that standing alone is more than any other country spends on its military. And that, of course, doesn’t include the cost of the Iran War or the rebuilding that will take place if it ever ends. The US will soon consume about 45 percent of the world’s military budget.

Put aside concerns about international law—dismissed as “international niceties” by the Stephen Miller, Trump’s rabid White House deputy—it sounds like a plan.

But a ruinous one. The flaws are clear and already obvious. One is that wars don’t go as planned—particularly imperial ventures in distant lands. In case we forgot........

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