Growing danger of Pentagon's insatiable greed

This is an editorial from China Daily.

There is more than enough reason for the entire world to feel uneasy about the prospects of world peace when the defense budget of the United States for 2024 will be $842 billion, up 3.2 percent from the enacted level in 2023. The figure was released by the White House late last week.

That the US accounts for about 40 percent of the world's total defense expenditure begs the question why the US needs to spend so much on its military, when it already has the world's largest and strongest military force.

The US has been involved in most of the military conflicts around the world in recent decades. The invasion of Iraq, Afghanistan and its military involvement in the civil war in Syria as well as the important role it has played in the current military conflict between Russia and Ukraine, are recent instances, but the list is much longer when other military clashes or conflicts in the past several decades are included.

The threat to world peace will persist simply because the expansion of the US' military presence worldwide has become a source of interest for its military-industrial complex.

Hyping up competition and confrontation between major countries and overstating threats to its national security from various countries have been the reasons it has fabricated for the necessity of rapidly expanding its military in recent years.

Of the new budget, a lot of money will be spent in further modernizing its weapons such as ballistic missiles and strategic bombers, which will very likely stimulate a new global arms race, a factor that will pose a threat to world stability.

Despite the failures it has suffered in its invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, Washington has not learned the lesson that military interventions will not help it impose its values on other nations. Neither will they persuade the world to accept its own perception of democracy and freedom.

The rapid increase of its national debt, which has risen to more than $31 trillion, has become a heavy burden on the finances of the country. Such heavy national debt should prompt the US to shrink its military spending. Yet, the Pentagon still demands such a large budget, which will undoubtedly squeeze the share of what Washington should spend on the well-being of the US people. Meanwhile, it is the American people that will have to dig deep to foot the bill for the expansion of the US military.

It is the world that suffers from the increased tensions in various regions because of the US military-industrial complex's insatiable greed. The entire world needs to be vigilant as the continued expansion of the US military will only make the situation even worse as far as world peace and development are concerned.