We all know that the U.S. spends obscene sums of money on defense. But the actual amount tends to be a moving target, one that is described by official Washington and its enablers in the media in the smallest terms possible.
Thus in unveiling the Pentagon’s 2024 budget request on March 6, DoD Comptroller Mike McCord demurely highlighted $842 billion as the “top line” a figure dutifully cited in relevant news reports. In his remarks, McCord took pains to remind us that, actually, we’re spending much less than we used to: “When I was born [1959] we, the United States, were at nine percent of GDP on defense. Ronald Reagan was considered high at six percent. We're now at three. So it's a big number, but in other contexts, you know, you could look at it another way.”
So what do we actually spend on the defense of the United States? Unearthing the true figure demands tireless application combined with a sure grasp of the subterranean pathways along which our dollars travel to fuel the national security machine.
Fortunately, we can spare ourselves the effort, thanks to the work of defense analyst Winslow Wheeler. Wheeler learned his budget-navigator’s skills over many years in the congressional branch of the military industrial complex in assorted U.S. Senate offices, including the budget committee and the staffs of both Democratic and Republican senators, before transitioning to the GAO and then the watchdog Center for Defense Information. He had now applied his hard-won knowledge to our current and imminent outlays. As he tells us:
“The big spenders, especially, like to distort the size of our spending — and to mis-measure it -— with gimmicks and yardsticks that have almost nothing to do with dollars spent. As it did in the past, this has prompted me to put together a table showing all the spending that goes into US national security for the current and next fiscal years.
Some can’t even get Pentagon spending right (usually intentionally, I believe) by undercounting it. Others ignore enormous and entirely relevant amounts outside the budget of the Department of Defense — such as for nuclear weapons, protecting the homeland from terrorists and other criminals, or international security. One should also include a fair share of the costs that this spending adds to the annual deficit.”
His findings are laid out in the table below, sourced mainly from OMB's presentation materials for the 2024 budget request.
Spoiler alert: The number is much, much, bigger than they want you to know.
The column labeled "Comments" offers descriptions of just what monies are included, or not, in each category, plus some discussion of past and present gimmicks used to manipulate the public's perception of the "defense" (or "national security") budget.
Andrew Cockburn is the Washington editor of Harper’s Magazine and the author of several nonfiction books, including his latest, The Spoils of War: Power, Profit and the American War Machine (2021). He also published Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins (2016). He has written for The New York Times, The New Yorker, Playboy, Vanity Fair, and National Geographic, among other publications.
The U.S. foreign policy community is offered a generational opportunity, necessitated by crises abroad and shifting attitudes at home, to fundamentally reappraise American interests on Europe’s eastern periphery.
Georgia, a eurasian crossroads in the Caucasus, has become an unlikely focal point in the push and pull between dueling visions of U.S. priorities in the region.
The MEGOBARI Act (short for Mobilizing and Enhancing Georgia's Options for Building Accountability, Resilience, and Independence), recently passed by the U.S. House of Representatives, is a series of ultimatums on Georgia that reads as a litany of post-Cold War Atlanticism's greatest hits. The full bill is here, but its stated aim is "examining the penetration of Russian intelligence elements and their assets in Georgia, that includes an annex examining Chinese influence and the potential intersection of Russian-Chinese cooperation in Georgia." A thorough 90-day examination by USAID and relevant Congressional committees will determine who will be punished with sanctions and whether Georgia is worthy of proper U.S ties moving forward.
In other words, to remain in — or, as it were — find its way back into the West’s good graces, the ruling Georgian Dream government must not just cut any ties with Russia but adopt an overtly confrontational stance, including through its enforcement of Western sanctions on Moscow and other measures intended to counter Russian influence (also in the bill).
The legislation, in its insistence that this prescribed stance of maximum hostility to Russia is the only one consistent with the Euro-Atlantic aspirations of the Georgian people, imposes a steep conditionality not just on Georgia’s path to EU accession or NATO membership, but on its ability to support any kind of constructive relationship with the U.S. and EU.
The act additionally calls on Georgian Dream to commit to a gamut of ad hoc concessions stemming from Western criticisms over the conduct of Georgia’s 2024 parliamentary elections, up to and including the rather striking suggestion that Georgian Dream should determine “whether the elections should be judged as illegitimate.”
The MEGOBARI law, as Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) observed in a March 27 Foreign Relations Committee proceeding, cannot be seen in any other light than as a direct intervention into domestic Georgian politics. It seeks, under the flimsy facade of advancing the interests of the “Georgian people,” to punish a duly elected Georgian government for pursuing a geopolitical course of which a faction within the U.S. foreign policy community disapproves.
This is ipso facto problematic insofar as it intrudes, in the name of defending democracy, on the democratic process inside Georgia to manipulate outcomes in ways that benefits perceived U.S. interests.
The second and more serious problem, from a technical perspective, is that these kinds of pressure tactics are counterproductive to any genuine sense of U.S. priorities in the region. Eleven percent of Georgia's overall trade volume comes from Russia, and the country's economy has been further entangled with Russia's after 2022 in ways that would impoverish the country if severed. Georgia, under President Mikheil Saakashvili, fought and lost a war with Russia in 2008 to establish control over two northern breakaway provinces. A reheating of that conflict at the behest of Western powers would be similarly ruinous for Tbilisi.
Demanding that the Georgians commit economic suicide and risk another war with Russia or face a flood of Western sanctions and restrictions is, as it were, not an attractive invitation. The West cannot offer anything remotely commensurate to the degree of hardship and insecurity that it is demanding from the Georgian people as the price of their Euro-Atlantic path. The 2008 crisis demonstrated that the West not only should not but will not fight Russia over Georgia.
There is a recklessness and more than a whiff of cynicism, not lost on Georgian Dream officials, to the West’s appetite for relitigating this question.
Meanwhile, Russia has signaled, in ways that have only grown more credible since 2008, that it will employ all tools at its disposal to balance against the integration of post-Soviet states into the Western security sphere. Far from an affront to democracy, it is Georgian Dream’s highest duty to the Georgian people to recognize these realities on the ground and steer Georgian foreign policy accordingly.
Furthermore, and for many of these reasons, the MEGOBARI Act will force a set of outcomes in Georgia and the region that are opposite of its intended effect. Attempting to strongarm Georgian officials into running roughshod over their own economic and security interests only incentivizes them to further insulate themselves against Western pressure by cultivating relationships with other powers, including its Russian neighbor.
American overreaction to Georgian Dream's well-founded pragmatism toward Moscow will ironically force Tbilisi into a more conciliatory posture with Russia by depriving it of an American partner with which to pursue a multivector foreign policy between East and West. Georgia will aim to soften the blow from Western punitive measures by doubling down on its trade and commercial ties not just with Russia but China, further distancing it from the U.S. and Europe in the long term.
Full diplomatic normalization between Georgia and Russia, previously inconceivable due to the outstanding territorial conflict from 2008, is now squarely within the realm of political possibility. This would clear the path for additional and deeper forms of Russo-Georgian cooperation, potentially even on security issues, with the effect of further peeling Georgia away from the West.
It is tempting to conclude from this sobering diagnosis that the MEGOBARI law's central conceit lies in its wrong-headed tactics, but that would be mistaking the symptom for the underlying disease. The deeper problem is that this law and initiatives like it proceed from a purist vision of Euro-Atlantic integration that forces not just Georgia but all post-Soviet states to pick sides between the West and Russia in ways that are harmful to these countries and do not advance any tangible American interests.
U.S. policy toward Georgia should instead proceed from the reality that America is not made more prosperous or secure by fashioning Georgia into a forward operating base against Russia whilst punishing Georgians who do not share this vision. The U.S., simply put, has no core interests that would justify the costly, dangerous, and counterproductive agenda of setting up a possible military confrontation with Russia over the right to maintain a web of de jure alliances and de facto dependencies in that part of Eurasia.
Georgia and many other post-Soviet states seek, for readily understandable reasons, robust ties with the West without being dragged into an overtly hostile footing with Russia, the dominant regional player. Washington has every reason to approach relations with countries like Georgia on exactly those terms, as they provide a low-cost, low-risk way of remaining engaged in the region while avoiding security spirals with Russia and thereby supporting regional stability.
It is clear in light of present circumstances that Tbilisi should be encouraged to pursue a multivector policy between East and West as the best course for all involved. Yet this will require part of the policymaking community to divest from the “with us or against us” mindset guiding the MEGOBARI bill in favor of a strategy that embraces, rather than dilutes, the sovereignty of local actors and their capacity to pursue strategies as nuanced as the challenges they face.
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Top photo: Presidential candidate Nicusor Dan speaks to the media after polls close for the second round of the country's presidential election redo in Bucharest, Romania, on May 18, 2025. (Photo by Alex Nicodim/NurPhoto)
Two EU countries on the front line of the war in Ukraine held presidential elections on May 18, a decisive second round runoff in Romania, and in Poland a tightly contested first round to be concluded in a June 1 vote.
In both campaigns, controversy swirled over the value of the EU, alleged Russian election interference, and whether to align with or oppose the Trump Administration’s attempts to negotiate an end to the conflict in Ukraine.
Poland: Uncertain prospects for June 1 second round
Warsaw mayor Rafał Trzaskowski, standard bearer for the centrist pro-EU, pro-Ukraine Civic Coalition (KO) of Prime Minister Donald Tusk will, as anticipated, face a runoff against Karol Nawrocki, the candidate of the main right-wing opposition Law and Justice Party (PiS) in the runoff set for June 1.
Trzaskowski’s margin of victory over Nawrocki (31.4% vs 29.4%) was much smaller than polls had forecast. Turnout was over 67%, a post 1989 high for a first round presidential race.
The difficulty for Trzaskowski’s second round prospects is that the third-place finisher in the race, Sławomir Mentzen, represents the Confederation Liberty and Independence party, which is further nationalist populist right than PiS. The prospect of Mentzen’s nearly 15% of voters rallying to Nawrocki on the second round could swing the election against Trzaskowski. Prime Minister Tusk’s government has been frustrated by vetoes from the incumbent PiS president Andrzej Duda who defeated Rafal Traszkowski to win reelection in 2020.
The Polish electorate since 1989 has shown a marked preference for electing presidents who tend to check the power of the governing majority in parliament, and this might tend to favor Nawrocki’s chances in the runoff.
While it is true that both PiS and Civic Coalition support Ukraine in its war with Russia, PiS and Mentzen’s Confederation party cultivate rural voters in Poland’s east who are unhappy with the alleged costs of supporting Ukrainian refugees in Poland, bear a grudge against Ukraine for the mass expulsions and killing of Poles by Ukrainian nationalists in western Ukraine in 1943, and oppose Ukraine’s EU accession because of its potential impact on Polish agriculture.
Cohabitation with Nawrocki as president would make it harder for Tusk to pursue his cooperation at Europe’s top table with Macron, Merz and Starmer in defense of a doubling down on the European effort to force back Russia’s ambitions for an advantageous settlement in Ukraine. The distinction between Tusk’s camp and his opponents in PiS and Confederation can be framed as a choice between pro-Americans and pro-Europeans, with Tusk and Trzaskowski seen as the latter.
Tusk’s tenure as president of the European Council and his strong acceptance in Europe allows him to be painted by opponents as pro-German and divorced from the concerns of ordinary Poles. It is not accidental that Nawrocki has made his career in the highly politicized and polarized historical debates in Poland where opposition to Russia is a constant, but where Germany and even Ukraine are also depicted as potential foes.
Romania: Calm restored?
Having won handily the first round of the Romanian presidential contest on May 5, nationalist populist George Simion lost to the liberal pro-EU mayor of Bucharest Nicosur Dan by a decisive 8 percentage point margin (54% to 46%). Turnout was much higher (65%) than the 53% garnered in the first round. Simion conceded defeat, after having at first indicated he would challenge the results.
The storm caused by the cancellation of last November’s first round won by the nationalist dark horse Calin Georgescu may now have ebbed. The rallying of Romanian voters to oppose Simion (who had pledged to appoint Georgescu as PM) was impressive but not total. Simion’s Alliance for the Union of Romanians is the second largest party in parliament and could be joined by the largest party, the Social Democrats, to become a formidable opposition.
Dan himself lies outside the mainstream parties which in coalition have disappointed many Romanians and fed the rise of Georgescu and Simion. His anti-corruption stance had at least something in common with Simion’s arguments. In the interim between the two rounds, the exchange rate wobbled and there were indications that Romania might face tougher borrowing terms for its public finances. Romania is one of the largest net recipients from the EU budget, a position that a Simion victory could have jeopardized.
Polls show that a large majority of Romanians favor the EU and NATO membership. Simion reassured the public that he did not favor leaving the EU; he only sought to restore a greater role of member state governments relative to the Commission. As for NATO, Simion approved of this as the embodiment of U.S. engagement in Romania and depicted this as challenged by figures such as Macron and Merz who sought greater independence from the U.S.
Conclusion: West vs. West?
The nationalist right sees the EU as setting itself against the U.S. and tends to elevate relations with the U.S. over the preservation of EU cohesion. They obviously and ostentatiously imitate the American president’s MAGA approach to nationalist self-assertion over the advantages of EU collective approaches to matters such as the war in Ukraine, migration, the green transition.
The pan-European scope of these elections was noteworthy. Poland’s election shadowed Romania, with Nawrocki campaigning with Simion. Former PiS PM Mateusz Morawiecki, a close associate of Simion, joined him in castigating Macron for allegedly interfering in Romania’s election. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban actually endorsed Simion, despite an abiding historical grievance about the rights of ethnic Hungarians in Romania’s Transylvania region.
Brussels, meanwhile, has shown great forbearance toward Tusk’s perceived political imperative to oppose EU positions on immigration, the Green transition, and other issues because of his stalwart pro EU and pro Ukraine policy.
The novelty of these races is the pitting of the U.S. against the EU mainstream on Ukraine, Russia, trade, climate change — “sovereigntism” versus EU solidarity. The results indicate that emulation of Trump’s appeal to voters may not be a winning tactic.
On the other hand, there is clear evidence of a reorganization of political competition across Europe setting the nationalist challenge against a mainstream consensus. This process tends to lock the parties encompassing the traditional social democratic left and the pro-business right into a single pro-establishment bloc.
This development could produce a fundamental realignment of party competition in Europe and force fundamental redesign of the European Union.
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Top photo credit: Marjorie Taylor Greene (Shutterstock/Aaron of L.A. Photography) and Tucker Carlson (Maxim Elramsisy/Shutterstock) and Steve Bannon (Shutterstock/lev radin)
Neocons and their allies in Washington, Israel, and beyond are making unrealistic demands about the outcome of U.S. talks with Iran on limiting its nuclear program. But President Trump has absolutely no reason to listen to them and should not take them seriously.
The anti-Iran deal campaign kicked into overdrive last week when Republicans on Capitol Hill sent a letter to the White House calling on Trump to refuse any agreement that doesn’t include the complete dismantlement of Iran’s nuclear program.
“Every Republican senator except Rand Paul signed a letter to President Trump urging the administration to push for an end to Iran’s enrichment capacity,” Andrew Day, senior editor of the American Conservative, told RS. “They know that this demand is unacceptable to the Iranian regime and are clearly hoping to sabotage Trump’s diplomatic efforts.”
Center for International Policy senior non-resident fellow Sina Toossi called the letter’s demand “a poison pill.”
“Demanding zero enrichment, permanent restrictions, and total dismantlement of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure — after the U.S. already broke the 2015 deal — is not a negotiating position,” he told RS.
Meanwhile, others deal opponents say that Iran can be allowed to keep its program for civilian energy production purposes with the caveat that it cannot enrich its own uranium.
The good news for Trump though — and those who see an opportunity to box in Iran’s nuclear program and avoid war — is that this anti-Iran deal coalition has no constituency outside Washington and Israel, and Trump will pay very little to no political price if he just ignores them.
Take for instance a recent poll conducted by the SSRS Opinion Panel Omnibus in conjunction with the University of Maryland Critical Issues Poll program. That survey found that a large majority of Americans — 69% — favor “a negotiated agreement limiting Iran’s nuclear program to peaceful ends, with stringent monitoring” as opposed to military action. But perhaps more importantly for Trump’s political fortunes, 64% of Republicans surveyed — i.e. his base — agreed.
Opponents of diplomacy with Iran try to obfuscate this reality and muddy the waters. For example, Foundation for the Defense of Democracies CEO Mark Dubowitz — who’s been pushing for regime change in Iran for nearly two decades — promoted a poll last week finding that “76% of Americans say Iran’s nuclear-weapons facilities should be destroyed.”
Of course there is one problem: Iran doesn’t have nuclear weapons or a nuclear weapons program, and thus no nuclear weapons facilities, a fact that the U.S. intelligence community routinely concludes.
But it’s not just the American people or the GOP base that support Trump making a deal with Iran. Some of the more high profile figures in the MAGA-America First world back him too.
“It’s called sanity,” Steve Bannon said last week, referring to the SSRS/UMaryland poll. Bannon, of course, served as a senior adviser to Trump during his first term and remains influential within his orbit and among his supporters.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), who also has clout with Trump’s base, has been very vocal recently against going to war with Iran. "There is no wedge between the base and President Trump,” she said earlier this month. “The wedge is between Congress and the establishment Republicans that are undermining the president's agenda."
And conservative media star Tucker Carlson, who like Bannon, has close ties to Trump world and is influential with the president’s base, has been similarly calling out neocons and others who are trying to kill Trump’s diplomacy with Iran and push for war.
"Thousands of Americans would die. We’d lose the war that follows. Nothing would be more destructive to our country," he said last month. "Anyone advocating for conflict with Iran is not an ally of the United States, but an enemy.”
Popular right-wing podcaster Charlie Kirk has piled on as well. “[T]here are people in Washington inside the Pentagon and inside the administration who want to launch military strikes on Iran. Often, they say it'd be easy. Just one strike in and out,” he said recently. “Now pause. How often have they actually been correct about the one in and out thing? Has that ever actually been the case?”
“President Trump has consolidated his power over the Republican Party to a remarkable degree and could certainly sign a good deal with Iran without suffering politically,” Day said. “The base still loves him, and lawmakers and conservative media are afraid of him. The elites would fall in line for fear of MAGA turning on them.”
Ryan Costello, policy director at NIAC, agrees. “Trump wouldn't have been elected president twice if his foreign policy echoed the discredited views of the Bush-Cheney wing of the Republican party,” he said. “Trump can have a deal with Iran or he can be pushed into war by adopting rigid and inflexible demands — the vast majority of Americans want him to lead with diplomacy.”
Meanwhile, it appears increasingly unlikely that Democrats — most of whom supported President Obama’s Iran nuclear deal back in 2015 — will try to make much political hay with any agreement Trump makes with Tehran.
“This is not a time for politics on Iran,” Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), a leading Democratic foreign policy voice in the House, said last week. “I support [Trump] trying to get a deal with Iran. I supported the Obama nuclear deal. How about we put the interest of our nation and peace above scoring political points at every moment?”
And what’s perhaps overlooked but maybe equally important: major regional powers like Saudi Arabia, who campaigned hard against Obama’s Iran deal, have changed their tune with Trump.
"Gulf leaders have been broadly supportive of the talks between the Trump administration and Iran because they don't want to be caught in the crossfire of a regional escalation if they fail,” Ali Vaez of the International Crisis Group toldMiddle East Eye last week. “That support doesn't necessarily translate into success at the negotiating table but it's a shift from the 2015 talks.”
Perhaps most importantly, Trump can get a deal with Iran that places strict limits on its nuclear program with incredibly intrusive verification mechanisms that will satisfy his stated goal of preventing Iran from building a nuclear weapon, all without zero enrichment provisions or requiring Iran to dismantle its entire program.
“Not only will adopting a hardline ‘no enrichment’ position push Iran from the negotiating table entirely, it is not necessary for an effective agreement and would not fully address Iran’s proliferation risk,” the Arms Control Association’s Kelsey Davenport wrote recently, adding that “dismantling the infrastructure does not erase the knowledge Iran has gained about uranium enrichment.”
In short, she concluded, the U.S. “can find the right combination of limits and monitoring to block Iran’s pathways to nuclear weapons while allowing Iran to retain a less risky level of uranium enrichment.”
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