Republican Rep. Dan Crenshaw is not holding back with his love of endless wars.
On the latest episode of his Hold These Truths with Dan Crenshaw podcast, the hawkish congressman said that anyone who opposes endless war is a “friggin’ idiot.”
“We’re the United States of America, so we always have to be prepared for everything,” Crenshaw said, according to a report from Mediaite.
“China just has to prepare for subjugating their own people, that’s one of their big focuses, and then they have to focus on screwing with us,” Crenshaw continued. “Russia is primarily focused on its periphery. They want the Ukraine, that’s usually what they care about.”
Crenshaw claimed that, essentially, it is the job of the American military to be the world’s police.
“We have to care about everything, and it should be that way,” he said. “I think too many on our side get hung up on this issue. They pretend we can be an Ostrich and hide and that just makes you an easy target. It’s unbelievably naive reasoning and dangerous reasoning and stupid.”
The Texas representative then said what every neoconservative is thinking but never directly says out loud.
“Everyone who has ever screamed, ‘No more endless wars’ as their foreign policy is a friggin’ idiot,” Crenshaw stated.
Do you not want our country to send another generation of troops to defend random places across the world with no strategic interest to America?@RepDanCrenshaw says you’re a “friggin idiot” pic.twitter.com/96LcmRdgrB
— X Strategies LLC (@XStrategiesLLC) December 29, 2021
The term “endless wars” has been used regularly by President Donald Trump and his supporters.
“We are ending the era of endless wars,” Trump said in speech at West Point in 2020. “It is not the job of American forces “to solve ancient conflicts in faraway lands that many people have not even heard of.”
The term is not exclusive to the right and is also commonly invoked by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and his supporters.
In 2019, Sanders penned an op-ed for Foreign Affairs titled “Ending America’s Endless War.”
“The American people don’t want endless war. Neither do we want a foreign policy that is based on the logic that led to those wars and corroded our democracy: a logic that privileges military tools over diplomatic ones, aggressive unilateralism over multilateral engagement, and acquiescence to our undemocratic partners over the pursuit of core interests alongside democratic allies who truly share our values,” Sanders wrote. “The time has come to envision a new form of American engagement: one in which the United States leads not in war-making but in bringing people together to find shared solutions to our shared concerns. American power should be measured not by our ability to blow things up, but by our ability to build on our common humanity, harnessing our technology and enormous wealth to create a better life for all people.”
According to a poll released in August by Concerned Veterans of America, most Americans (51 percent) believe the United States should be less militarily engaged in conflicts around the world. Only seven percent think we should be more engaged.
The pollsters also found that 67 percent of Americans think we should prioritize domestic policy issues over foreign policy issues.
