Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said this week he would cut military spending in half by the end of his term as president and that the United States should play a reduced role in world affairs.
“Military spending is a constant drain on the vitality of our nation,” Kennedy said in an hour-long speech Wednesday night at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library in California. “We are so obsessed with the idea of national strength that we ignore the growing weakness of our base.”
While Kennedy had long criticized U.S. military spending and defense contractors, his speech at the Nixon Library also focused in part on foreign policy, painting a grim picture of American decline over the past 60 years and laying out a radically different vision for America's place on the world stage.
He said the United States should accept a reduced role in international affairs, redirect more of its national security spending to domestic programs and prepare for a multipolar world in which other powers such as China and Russia gain influence and the United States is no longer the sole global superpower.
“We still seem to believe we live in the same world we did in 1991,” Kennedy said, referring to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. “We are stuck in the past. Any nation, any individual, really, must pay an ever-higher price for maintaining that illusion.”
Kennedy's pledge to aggressively cut national security spending stands in stark contrast to the trajectory of global military spending, which has reached its highest level in 35 years, in part due to Russia's all-out invasion of Ukraine. As an independent, Kennedy will likely have few allies in Congress to help him deliver on his pledge, and support for military spending is typically strong there. The 2025 defense budget is currently capped at about $895 billion, but Democrats and Republicans are considering further increases.
Kennedy, who made opposition to military aid to Ukraine a central part of his campaign platform, said the United States was bankrupt in its “forever wars” with foreign nations and cited dark stories from recent American history to explain his position.
Condemning “Bush-Cheney patriotism,” Kennedy said the U.S. had “poured its wealth into one military campaign after another in the pursuit of global empire” as a result of which “the nation began to wither from within,” describing “epidemics of chronic disease, epidemics of addiction and historic economic inequality.”
Kennedy sometimes praised President Richard Nixon's diplomatic dealings with China and said he understood the need to not bully America's rivals “into submission.” But he denounced Nixon's actions as president to end the gold standard, a move that converted the U.S. dollar into so-called fiat currency. Kennedy argued that printing “unlimited amounts of money” with fiat currency “is the only way to make war.”
“Fiat money was invented to finance wars,” Kennedy said, referring to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. “If politicians hadn't come to us and said, 'We want to spend $3.6 trillion to get rid of Saddam Hussein,' there would have been no war.”
