“War,” Randolph Bourne wrote, is “the health of the state.” But war is also, it has recently and quietly become clear, the cheapest and quickest antidote when the state gets sick. This antidote, in fact, represents the most significant part of President Donald Trump’s agenda since he assumed office on January 20, after running what many supporters believed was an antiwar campaign. Instead he has presided over an infusion of war spending to stabilize America with trickle-down job creation at home and resource extraction abroad.

This strategy represents the ratcheting up of what American patriots from the Founders to Dwight D. Eisenhower feared most: the twisting of life at home and abroad by the “merchants of death” who run Washington’s military corporate complex, what Trump until recently called “the deep state.” It is not the return to normalcy or solidity or America First that a majority of voters clearly hoped for in November. Instead it is a willful ignoring of systemic problems in Washington and a doubling down on American empire, this time in the name of America First.

The key to Trump’s approach is his treatment of the U.S. Armed Forces which, according to investigations in January and February including several of my own, has in recent years suffered a sharp decline in technical competence, equipment, and morale. These investigations have shown that the root of this crisis, which Trump attributes to DEI (Diverity, Equity, Inclusion initiatives), is instead corporate and legal concentration in Washington DC. This means the dominance, beginning in the 1990s, of five weapons manufacturers which captured contracts with the Pentagon and concentrated their operations by buying out smaller companies. They then installed their ex-employees, mostly lawyers, inside the Pentagon to negotiate more contracts and expand bureaucracy to shield themselves from liability. And they funded fifty or so Washington think tanks to issue reports justifying the need for the contracts in the first place. This created an expanded administrative-corporate apparatus focused on mitigating risk at the expense of training soldiers, and on purchasing defective weaponry from the “right” vendors rather than effective weaponry from the best ones. …

But what is most significant about the essential Trump Administration policy, the use of defense spending to bolster the economy and placate domestic discontent, is that it is the strategy our ruling class has used to keep power for eighty years. A recent, authoritative dissertation by Harvard PhD Tim Barker has shown that, in periods of recession since 1945, defense spending has boomed. This is the case for a straightforward reason. Defense spending is the only agreed-upon way by Democrats fearful of direct corporate giveaways and Republicans fearful of direct government programs to inject money into the economy, and it is hard to mount opposition against because it’s done in the name of “national security.” This is why those Democrats in the ascendency to oppose Trump’s Republican Party—U.S. Senator from Michigan Elissa Slotkin, gubernatorial candidate in Virginia Abigail Spanberger, U.S. Representative from New York Ritchie Torres—mimic Trump’s approach to defense.

In the end, there’s not much good news from this spending. Most jobs created in the defense sector are unstable, unless they’re unionized; and, if they’re unionized, they’re difficult to get rid of, making for inefficient production of vital equipment and harms to soldiers, which is already the case anyway thanks to contractor concentration. About the only people who really benefit from any of this are the corporate shareholders and the white collar weapons contractors who work for them. And the harms of these plays don’t end with wasted spending, faulty weaponry, at-risk soldiers, stunted reforms domestically, and alienated nations abroad. As I will show in a coming report, militarist policies meant to “heal the state” create wars at home that, in the Trump administration, are fast finding new detritus among Americans.