Ben Cohen of Ben & Jerry’s argues U.S. military expansion—like NATO’s 2014 push eastward—provoked Russia’s 2022 Ukraine invasion, ignoring earlier assurances and Russian warnings, while $800B Pentagon budgets prioritize corporate profits over domestic needs like healthcare. Citing Smedley Butler’s 1935 expose War is a Racket, he links U.S. interventions to Wall Street-driven instability, from Latin America to Ukraine, where weapons manufacturers lobby for endless conflict. Rejected by The New York Times for questioning U.S. narratives, Cohen calls for ceasefires and critiques media suppression of dissent, framing Iran as a $7B threat while the U.S. spends nearly $1T on war. His activism—through Common Sense Defense—targets systemic corruption, where retired generals profit from militarism, and urges shifting from arms exports to humanitarian values, warning America risks losing its moral compass to perpetual war. [Automatically generated summary]
And I think about it a lot in terms of, you know, all these refugees, immigrants that are trying to get to the U.S. Why are they trying to get to the U.S.?
A lot of times it's because the U.S. at some point in history overthrew or invaded their government or...
I think that those actions that the U.S. has done over the years back in his time and pretty much continues to do to essentially run the world in a way that benefits the elites in the United States ends up causing a lot of resentment, ends up being the cause of a lot of wars, ends up being the cause of a lot of...
Immigration and people trying to flee countries that are economically or politically unlivable.
And if you go back to the root causes, you find out that there were some great liberation struggles in these countries and the U.S. was on the other side.
The way a lot of people see it is this little country, Ukraine, got invaded by this big giant Russia.
But I think what you need to understand is what provoked You know, at the end of the Cold War, the U.S. made promises to Russia that they're not going to expand NATO eastward.
And then we proceeded to expand NATO eastward.
As a matter of fact, you know, the government was not going to do that.
Until the weapons manufacturers set up this committee to expand NATO, which was essentially the CEOs of the weapons manufacturers lobbying Congress to expand NATO.
So, I mean, geez, if you're a weapons manufacturer and you expand NATO, they're going to buy a lot of your stuff.
No, I think it's incredibly harmful to the United States.
First of all, We're making a lot of enemies.
People don't like us being the big bully on the hill, telling all these other countries what to do.
And it sucks a huge amount of money out of our country.
It's stuff that can be used for things that people really want and need.
We could have more affordable housing.
We could make it so that the American dream could actually still happen, that people could afford a house, that you can get a decent education, and that you can get childcare, that it doesn't have to cost you so much money to go to college.
I mean, these things can all be done, and most other developed countries are providing that for their citizens.
But the U.S. chooses to spend—I mean, look at this.
This is a chart of the federal discretionary budget.
That's the amount of money that Congress has each year to allocate to the various departments.
So the big red one on top, that gets over half.
That's the Pentagon.
And these little slivers are like, you know, USAID, the Education Department, the Health Department.
Community development, whatever else the country does.
But in terms of stuff that would actually be helpful to people living in their daily lives, it's all sucked out by the Pentagon.
You know, Martin Luther King gave this speech, and he talked about the Pentagon being this huge, demonic sucking tube.
That sucks out the lifeblood of things like housing, schools.
You know, everybody's school budget is always in the red or can't raise enough money, got to get rid of teachers or whomever.
So that, the pie, if I were to look at, if you didn't tell me what country that was, and you said, here's a country that spends more than half of its entire discretionary budget on weapons and troops.
I would imagine a small country surrounded by enemies.
I would not imagine a continental-sized country with independent resources, enough energy, enough food, doesn't really need anything, that's separated from the rest of the world by the two biggest oceans.
Yeah, it's interesting because Russia collapses, the Soviet system collapses after seven years in 1991, the summer of 91, and I kind of assumed, I think everyone assumed, that we would take the win.
Like, we were having this Cold War all these years, and they collapsed, we won, and then we could be friends and move forward because there are no more Soviet communists left.
Because our Cold Warriors, who for their whole life, you know, fighting the Soviet Union, that's what they were about, they wanted to continue the Cold War.
They wanted to continue having Russia as this enemy.
You know, starting with the end of the Cold War, there was a promise made to Russia that, kind of in exchange for, I think it was taking down the wall in Germany, that we're not going to extend NATO eastward.
You know, that's what Smedley Butler came up with.
I mean, you read the whole rest of his book and he says at the end...
You know, these anti-war protesters, they're really good people, but you're never going to stop the military-industrial-congressional complex until you take the profit out of it.
That's what's driving all this shit, is the profit that these corporations are making on making weapons.
I mean, we're coming from different points of view, but I agree strongly with everything you've said.
But you're the one who's been saying the same thing for a long time, like ever since for the 40 years I've been eating your ice cream, which is fattening.
So you're saying, right, so some of that group is, you know, behind Ukraine, let's defend Ukraine, and some of that group is saying, no, we shouldn't be involved in this war.
You know, I think the people who are saying, let's defend Ukraine, I can certainly understand it from their point of view.
And their point of view is that Russia made an unprovoked invasion and Russia therefore started this war and they're trying to take over this country and we should defend that country.
But people don't understand what led up to it.
I mean, as a matter of fact, with...
With the Eisenhower Media Network, this group of retired admirals, generals, and colonels, we took out a full-page ad in the New York Times at the very beginning of that war, calling for a ceasefire.
And the headline of the ad was supposed to be, the U.S. provoked the war on Ukraine.
And the New York Times would not allow us to run it as an ad.
Wait, Cass, wait, so this is another, like, I don't think North Korea has a propaganda initiative as comprehensive and aggressive as the one I saw after the Ukraine war started.
Like, it was just like...
New York Open was taking Russian names off the scoreboard.
New York Times was editorializing in other people's advertisements.
I mean, they don't let us hear what the people in China are saying.
I mean, you know, so I dug around.
A friend of mine sent me, you know, a speech by the defense minister of China, and he's saying...
We're not looking to be enemies with the US.
We're looking to develop our country and grow, and we can peacefully coexist together.
The world is big enough for both of the US, but the...
Explicit policy of the United States, if you read these, I mean, I don't know, what the hell is this ice cream guy doing reading these national security documents?
Well, originally, during the Cold War and after, there was the Center for Defense Information, which was a home for retired, high-level military officers that were critical of the Pentagon.
That organization kind of fell on hard times and kind of twittered away.
So myself and a veteran, Danny Serson, decided to start up the Eisenhower Media Network as a home for higher-level former military people to use their credibility.
On the issue of critiquing the Pentagon, because what usually happens when you critique the Pentagon is that you don't have the credentials.
You say that, well, the Pentagon is doing this weird thing or that screwed up thing.
And then the Pentagon general gets up there in uniform with all his medals and stuff and says, you know, those guys have no idea what they're talking about.
I'm the military expert, so the idea of Eisenhower Media Network is to have those military experts that can support a different point of view than what the Pentagon is putting in.
How hard is it for them to join a group like that?
It seems like one of the structural problems is that, you know, if you're a one-star and you fail to make two-star, you just like seamlessly move over to the defense industry, to a weapons manufacturer.
Yeah, I'm asking these dumb questions because I feel like I may be missing something.
So the guys who have signed up, the retired officers who signed up for the Eisenhower Media Project are turning down a lot of money in order to do that.
And the only way we judge whether a politician is weak on defense or not is how much money they are willing to give to the Pentagon.
So you have two politicians that are running for election, and usually they're trying to out-compete the other guy in terms of who's willing to raise the Pentagon budget, because I'm strong on defense.
So this is like the one area of bipartisan agreement.
Let's give more and more money to the Pentagon.
And there's this other aspect of so-called political engineering that earlier, I don't know, back in the 90s, I guess, military contractors, these weapons manufacturers, would deliberately...
Spread out the jobs for a particular weapon system in as many congressional districts as possible.
And so, you know, that creates jobs.
And, you know, the politician from that area, that's what they, you know, that gives them a lot of credit.
Of course.
I brought jobs to my district.
And so...
You know, for say the F-35, you know, it's probably made in over 400, you know, congressional districts.
And, you know, if you say something, you know, if you try to say this is a shitty airplane, which, you know, John McCain said it was the worst thing he ever saw, you can't stop it because they've politically engineered it.
So when you tried to put this ad in the New York Times, or did put the ad, but with a different headline, by the way, what did they change the headline to?
Including ones you knew personally and had supported in the past.
They weren't saying that.
So that raises the question.
And some of those politicians, because you've always been against war, for the 40 years I've paid attention, you were supporting anti-war politicians, but they made an exception for Ukraine.
And they didn't hear what happened before, what led up to it, and they didn't think about, you know, which this ad that we ran did, what would the U.S. do if there were Russian missiles lined up along the Mexican border aimed at the U.S. I mean,
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Because you said that most people had this view because they didn't know better, because they didn't have access to other perspectives, to the truth, to the history of this.
You know, with the internet, I mean, you could say that there is free access, but you really need to kind of dig.
And, you know, you get a very different perspective if you read the news in the U.S. versus if you read the news in some other country in the world, you know, talking about the same situation.
You know, you would think most people would be in favor of a ceasefire.
I mean, we don't want to keep on killing people.
I'm not a Putin supporter.
I'm not a Zelensky supporter.
I'm a supporter of not killing each other and not using our resources to have actual wars, to supply weapons for wars, or to settle our problems through that means.
Why can't we cut to the chase and assume the war is over and have a negotiated settlement?
Why do we have to kill a few hundred thousand mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, sons and daughters in the process?
There's also a sense in which there's like a suicidal impulse at work here because for most of three years we were closer than we've ever been to a nuclear conflict.
Like an exchange of nuclear warheads where most of the Earth's population dies.
That's factually true, I think.
And I think planners of the Pentagon understood that, and they pressed forward anyway.
Do you think that the average American understands how close we have been to nuclear war?
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You saw people, you know, just as recently as a few months ago say, we actually benefit from sending billions to Ukraine because that money goes first through American companies.
Well, part of what got me interested in this issue is that, you know, you talk about these large numbers like 300 million, 500 million, a billion, 100 billion.
$800 billion.
Nobody has any idea what the size of that is.
It's just like more money than you could ever imagine.
In Pentagon speak, well, I don't know, it's a few aircraft carriers, it's another fighter jet, generation of fighter jets, whatever, whatever.
But in regular speak, here's a good example.
I wrote it down, because I thought you might be asking.
There was recently a fighter jet that...
That fell off an aircraft carrier.
So it was a $70 million fighter jet.
So, you know, that sounds kind of dramatic that, you know, a $70 million fighter jet fell off an aircraft carrier.
But if you think about the Pentagon budget as a box of Cheerios, That $70 billion would be one-tenth of one Cheerio, which is enough money, if you take it out of the Pentagon, to build two new hospitals in West Virginia.
So, what's crumbs to the Pentagon can really provide some real stuff that we need.
And it is a campaign that's aimed just directly at the public.
We're not trying to...
Lobby Congress.
We're not trying to influence that.
We're trying to change public opinion in terms of what we want our government to be spending its money on, or at least not spending its money on excessive weapons.
Yeah, I believe that the thing that can change it, and this is from my experience of my time going around lobbying on Capitol Hill about this issue, I think that's hopeless.
I went to Washington and I talked to those politicians.
They smile and they say nice things and they take a picture and then they just vote and rubber stamp whatever Pentagon bill comes in because they don't want their opponent to call them weak on defense.
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It's immoral.
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Well, we could whine about it.
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