Ending Wars to Build Communities at Home: An interview with U.S. Representative Ro Khanna.

• Author: Nichols, John

Ro Khanna first ran for Congress in California in 2004 as a bold, if unsuccessful, anti-Iraq War challenger to a pro-war Democratic incumbent. After serving in President Barack Obama's Department of Commerce and teaching at Stanford, Khanna beat another Democratic incumbent in the 2016 general election and has served in the House since then. A co-chair of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders's 2020 presidential campaign and a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, he's emerged as a steady challenger of the military-industrial complex and U.S. military interventions abroad. Khanna recently spoke with The Progressive about the need for a new approach to international relations.

Q: There are fifty-nine members of the House Armed Services Committee. This year, you cast the sole "no" vote on the proposed $886 billion defense bill. Why?

Ro Khanna: [The CBS News program] 60 Minutes is doing better oversight than the Congressional committees at this point. The reality is that you have price gouging and price inflation for at least $400 billion of the defense budget that's in acquisition. That money's going into the pockets of defense contractors. We also don't even know how much of the production is happening in America. You have these defense contractors profiting. They've "offshored" some of the production. There is no oversight. What I'm saying is that you can have a precise, strategic national security budget that meets the challenges with China and Russia without having a budget approach $1 trillion and line the pockets of defense [industry] executives.

Q: You have referred to the network of more than 800 U.S. military bases around the world as vestiges of the Cold War that are ill-suited to modern challenges. You argue that the United States should rethink its commitment to having all these bases. This would reshape defense policy, but how would closing bases reshape foreign policy?

Khanna: There is an emerging consensus in America that we have been engaged in endless wars overseas at the expense of building the strength of communities here at home; that we have been spending trillions of dollars on overseas conflicts [and] bases while seeing towns like Lordstown, Ohio, and Johnstown, Pennsylvania, devastated, with no [economic] security for families living in those communities. So there is an opportunity, post-Cold War, to look again at where all these bases are to make sure that the ones we need strategically are retained, but the ones...