As at the end of the Roman Empire politics becomes reduced to its basic power elements: the executive, the oligarchy and the army or, in this case, the presidency, Wall Street and the Pentagon. As this article shows, it’s the Pentagon which is currently making the running with a sort of incremental or creeping coup d’etat.
Tom Engelhart
9th September, 2010
The autumn issue of Foreign Policy magazine features Fred Kaplan’s “The Transformer,” an article-cum-interview with Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. It received a flurry of attention because Gates indicated he might leave his post “sometime in 2011”. The most significant two lines in the piece, however, were so ordinary that the usual pundits thought them not worth pondering. Part of a Kaplan summary of Gates’ views, they read: “He favors substantial increases in the military budget … He opposes any slacking off in America’s global military presence.”