In a world where consumerism is our religion and Ikea catalogs are our bibles, the subject of psychological warfare in the military might seem far removed, if not wholly irrelevant.
Psychological warfare, it’s not just for soldiers on some distant battlefield, no. It’s playing out every day in boardrooms and on social media. Whether we realize it or not, we are in the constant crossfire of psychological warfare.
The Costs of Expanding the Alliance Outweigh the Benefits
As the war in Ukraine grinds on, policymakers and pundits, including Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and the former U.S. ambassador to NATO, Ivo Daalder, are pushing for NATO to offer Ukraine what French President Emmanuel Macron calls “a path toward membership” after the conflict concludes. This is not just show. Ukraine’s membership aspirations will now be a central topic of debate at NATO’s summit next week in Vilnius, with Ukraine arguing—as its former defense minister Andriy Zagorodnyuk wrote recently in Foreign Affairs—that it “should be welcomed and embraced” by the alliance. The way in which this issue is settled will have serious consequences for the United States, Europe, and beyond.
The alliance is bolstering its military deterrent in Europe amid Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and has expanded to include Finland.
Introduction
Founded in 1949 as a bulwark against Soviet aggression, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) remains the pillar of U.S.-Europe military cooperation. An expanding bloc of NATO allies has taken on a broad range of missions since the close of the Cold War, many well beyond the Euro-Atlantic region, in countries such as Afghanistan and Libya.
The fundamental dogma of all brands of socialism and communism is that the market economy or capitalism is a system that hurts the vital interests of the immense majority of people for the sole benefit of a small minority of rugged individualists. It condemns the masses to progressing impoverishment. It brings about misery, slavery, oppression, degradation and exploitation of the working men, while it enriches a class of idle and useless parasites.
My article “The Education of the Modern Socialist” deserves a follow-up. The first part showed that a change has occurred in the definition of “socialism”—a necessary change in view of the failures of this ideology during the last century. Socialism today is based on the ideology of “statism”—the conviction that the state must play a fundamental role in society. Ludwig von Mises’s wider definition of socialism as state intervention implies a modern social state that is involved in most if not all of the activities of society, whether commercial or not.
Libertarians often wonder why socialism continues to be so popular, even though it has proved to be such a failure as a political ideology and as an economic system. Though a public education system and a biased mainstream media are key reasons for this, the stubborn resiliency of socialism is also somewhat fictitious since socialism has evolved: the socialist of yesteryear is not the socialist of today. This distinction is important to remember when setting the themes for a libertarian education.
We now turn our attention to what happens with an increase in the money supply, rather than an increase in savings. This is critically important. The mercantilist idea that increasing the money supply increases prosperity was exposed as an error centuries ago by Richard Cantillon.1 However, modern mainstream economists, including the monetarists, Keynesians of various sorts, and the now-fashionable market monetarists, fully embrace the idea that printing money is necessary for prosperity.
In concluding part I of this study, we quoted then-Marine Corps Commandant Gen. David Berger, who observed that the setup of the US national security system made sense “when most conflicts were regional” in scope and nature.
L’hybris consiste à croire qu’un récit artificiel peut, en soi, apporter la victoire.
L’hybris consiste à croire qu’un récit artificiel peut, en soi, apporter la victoire. C’est un fantasme qui a balayé l’Occident – surtout depuis le XVIIe siècle.
The 31 countries of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) are taking their victory laps over the latest expansion of the political-military alliance. The boastful communique for last week’s NATO summit in Lithuania had more than 60 references to nuclear weapons, and promised modernization for NATO’s nuclear powers: the United States, Britain, and France. There is increased likelihood for the pre-positioning of advanced military weaponry, particularly artillery and air defense systems. The Baltic Sea will become Lake NATO.