America’s rationale for defending others is all wrong
It’s time to prioritize the future – fertility – in deciding where to spend our young men and tax dollars.
A large part of the resistance to Trump, whose inevitability now is almost guaranteed, is because of his view of defensive alliances. Europeans - and the American arms manufacturers demanding the continued expansion of NATO against the promises made by essentially all NATO heads of state not to do so - are scared that Trump will prioritize NATO nations living-up to their word in defense spending, or they’ll be SOL.
Declassified documents show security assurances against NATO expansion to Soviet leaders from Baker, Bush, Genscher, Kohl, Gates, Mitterrand, Thatcher, Hurd, Major, and Woerner
While from a contractual and treaty standpoint, this makes complete sense – if their word is no good, why defend them? - Trump needs to take a step back and review the entire purpose for defending a nation, any nation.
That nation’s ability to help offset costs is important, but fiscal choices are not and cannot be the defining purpose to send American youth out to kill and die for others. Regardless of Biden’s demand to fund his war on Ukraine because it creates employment and profits in states Democrats need politically, killing for domestic prosperity has never been in America’s DNA. When we’ve done it (“Remember the Maine!”), our elites were smart enough to hide their greed behind nationalism.
Now? Not so much. Below is a slide from Biden’s presentation to senators on why they should support his continued killing of Ukrainians.
There is one - and only one - relevant issue with regard to America defending overseas allies. That issue is the Total Fertility Rate of the ally in question.
No logical reason exists for America to spend its youth and the tax dollars they and their parents pay to support America’s free and prosperous future, in the defense of nations that don’t believe in their future enough, even, to populate it.
Sacrificing our youth and future to protect and defend the futures of other youths is reasonable; they have a future. That’s what WW2 was about. Sacrificing our youth to protect a nation’s childless elderly serves no purpose whatsoever. What, and whom, are we defending, and why? For what purpose? The elderly have no future; the childless elderly chose that path.
Who are we to unilaterally overturn their choice? Wouldn’t that be paternalistic and colonial?
And the idea of defending countries all-in on globalism, an evil anti-human ideology whose proponents demand a global population of 500,000,000 – a reduction of 7.5 billion human souls – is antithetical to their stated beliefs and to humanity, itself. Defending them is both pointless and stupid.
If a NATO Article-5 situation arose tomorrow in Germany, American young men and women would be sent to die in place of the young men and women Germany has, for decades, failed to bear and raise. Instead, we’d be defending an aging population that chose not to raise its own warriors, and millions of illegal immigrants invited-in by those same childless elderly to rape and murder European citizens in their streets.
Why?
This makes sense to no sentient person.
Taiwan lacks the failed leadership of Europe with regard to the illegal and illiterate third world Neolithic invaders but has the lowest TFR on the planet. Others not believing in any significant way in their future: S Korea, Italy, Japan, Ukraine…
The CIA Factbook lists 227 countries. The bottom four in Total Fertility Rate are: Ukraine (224), Singapore (225), S Korea (226), and Taiwan (227). Defending any of these is a purposeless waste of men, materiel and tax dollars.
Iceland (113) possesses the highest TFR of any NATO country, yet,
Iceland’s total fertility rate (TFR) has been fairly stable, hovering around replacement level (2.1 children per woman), for decades – a rate higher even than its Nordic neighbors.
Barely replacement is the highest TFR of any NATO country that America spends nearly a trillion dollars annually to defend; over a trillion once S Korea is thrown into the mix.
The next NATO country, Turkey (119) has a TFR of 1.9; below replacement, followed by France (121/1.9) and the United States (133/1.84). Denmark is next (144/1.77), and on down they go.
Why do the countries of Europe now find themselves and their children attacked, raped and murdered in their own streets, their culture attacked and their security and future a thing of the past?
Because they chose not to have children. And so they invited other peoples' children to sweep their streets, serve their lattes, wait their tables, empty their garbage, and man their rifles & tanks.
If there is anything lower than being a parasite on other peoples’ children, I am unaware of it. These choices are not America’s problems.
Given that our own TFR is below replacement, our sending our kids to die defending the childless is pure existential stupidity.
A purpose must exist to spend lives to defend. If a nation has no purpose to exist, which is what a below-replacement TFR shouts out-loud, it has no purpose to defend. This is axiomatic. At that point, that “nation” is nothing more than a quickly-depopulating geography empty of any human future… by choice.
A foreign policy must be based on reality. And the reality is that countries whose denizens have chosen not to have a future have no call on the sons of other nations to protect a future they have made the conscious choice not to have, no matter how much they may pay Americans to do so.
America’s alliances today are, at-root, nothing but expressions of market dominance for weapons, the anticipated cost in human lives be damned.
Our alliances are about profits today, not freedom tomorrow. This is obscene.
NATO became obsolete in 1992, but its obsolescence began when the member nations quit having children decades earlier. The latter is true, also, of Taiwan, S Korea, Japan, Australia.
The ignorant will accuse me of “isolationism.” Those aware of the costs and reasons for war will recognize the pointlessness of defending the indefensible: those members of our species refusing to continue our species. These people are not worthy of the sacrifices they demand of the youth who must make up our future.
How many future artists, writers, scientists, doctors, composers, … parents … never will exist because their never-to-be-parents lie dead on some worthless piece of jungle, mountain or sand dune, having had their lives taken from them in “defense” of people not in the least interested in their own future?
To ask a 20-year old man who planned to have a wife and family, children and grandchildren, to go die defending an aging population that is voluntarily childless and so unable – generationally unwilling - to defend themselves, and for him to never have that family or create those new lives is way past merely stupid. It’s insane.
We - all - are and will remain the poorer for it.
Trump should not ration defense dollars to other nations based on their financial contribution, but on their contribution to their own future, their Total Fertility Rate.
Anything less is unimportant and unworthy of the sacrifice of the flower of our youth.