Cui Bono

Who Benefits?

There’s an old Latin phrase, cui bono — who benefits? Roman prosecutors used it to establish motive. It’s held up well for about 2,000 years.

I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately.

We are currently engaged in military conflict in the Middle East. I won’t pretend to fully understand the geopolitics. What I do understand is the human cost — the soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines who are right now sleeping in places they don’t want to be, eating food they don’t recognize, calling home on scratchy connections to families who are scared. Some of them will come back changed. Some won’t come back at all. And some will come back apparently fine, which sometimes turns out to be the hardest version of all.

Nobody seems to be talking about that part.

I also keep coming back to the other question. The Roman one. Who benefits?

I’m not a historian, but I’ve read enough to know that American military adventures have frequently had a commercial dimension that didn’t make it into the official explanation. The Banana Wars — US military interventions across Central America in the early twentieth century — were nakedly about protecting the interests of American fruit and railroad companies. General Smedley Butler commanded some of those operations. He won two Medals of Honor doing it. He was, by any measure, one of the most decorated soldiers in American history.

And then he sat down and wrote about how he actually felt about it.

Butler described himself as a gangster for capitalism — a high-class muscle man for Wall Street and the bankers. He went down the list of his own distinguished service record with cold, precise anger: he had helped make Mexico safe for American oil interests, helped make Haiti and Cuba profitable for American banks, helped rape half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. His words, not mine. He wasn’t anguished or self-pitying about it. He was furious in the way a man gets furious when he finally names something he should have named twenty years earlier. That was 1935. Nobody seriously disputed his account.

The pattern didn’t end with bananas.

There are credible reports — and I’d encourage you to search them out yourself — suggesting that companies connected to the current president’s sons have received significant defense contracts since this conflict began. Eric Trump has apparently been publicly celebrating a $24 million Pentagon contract awarded to a robotics company where he serves as chief strategy adviser. A company backed by Donald Trump Jr.’s venture capital firm reportedly secured a contract in the range of $620 million from the Department of Defense. I believe I’ve also read that the Trump family’s total financial gains across this presidency may be approaching $4 billion, though I’d encourage you to verify that figure independently. If even a fraction of that is accurate, the Roman question becomes unavoidable.

Now, American presidents profiting from war is not new. There are those who argue LBJ had financial ties to companies that benefited enormously from Vietnam construction contracts. The difference, as best I can tell, is one of visibility and apparent shame. Whatever LBJ’s entanglements were, they weren’t celebrated on Fox Business at 8 in the morning. Eric Trump apparently was.

I spent two years in the Army. I didn’t see combat — which is its own complicated thing I’ve written about elsewhere, something I call Non-Combat Service Shame. But my nation called, so I wore the uniform and served. And because of that I pay more than casual attention to the plight of other veterans and their families. I personally know three veterans suffering serious medical problems related to Agent Orange exposure. Dow Chemical — one of the primary manufacturers of that herbicide — made substantial profits from government contracts during Vietnam, then spent decades fighting accountability in court. In 1984, Dow and six other chemical companies settled a class-action lawsuit brought by 2.4 million exposed veterans for $180 million — a figure widely criticized as inadequate. Dow’s defense, essentially, was that they were just following government orders. The men I know didn’t get that defense. They just got sick. And the men and women currently serving are being told, as soldiers are always told, that what they’re doing matters — that there’s a reason worthy of the cost.

So I’ll ask the question Butler asked ninety years ago, and that Roman prosecutors asked two thousand years before that:

Is this current conflict simply a money-grabbing racket, conducted with total disregard for the American military person and the average American citizen? And if the answer is yes — even partially yes — what does that say about the country those soldiers are serving, and the people sending them?

I don’t have a clean answer. But I think the question deserves to be asked plainly, and often, by anyone willing to ask it.

Cui bono.