Since last November’s election, the Democrats have been desperately trying to explain why they lost the presidential election to Donald Trump, possibly the most unsuited candidate to ever be elected to the nation’s highest office. One of the handiest scapegoats seems to be Russia and, with more than a century of propaganda against the Great Bear, especially when it was the Soviet Union, it was an easy move to blame everything on them and on Vladimir Putin.

Americans would do well to recall the admonition of President Dwight D. Eisenhower from more than a half-century ago, to the effect that every dollar spent on armaments and the military and defense is a dollar that cannot be used to provide for the people and, especially, those in direst need.

Let’s look at the two countries’ defense budgets and what is happening to them. Jane’s Defence Weekly, a British research entity that has studied and reported on such things globally since the end of the 19th Century, earlier this month noted that the Russian Federal Treasury confirmed that the country’s defense budget has been cut by 25.5 percent, falling from RUB 3.8 trillion (this amount of rubles is the equivalent of $65.4 billion), to RUB 2.8 trillion.

The U.S. defense budget stands at about $600 billion and President Trump is going to increase that amount by some $54 billion. The increase that Trump seeks is the equivalent of 80 percent of Russia’s entire defense budget, which means that Russia’s defense budget is somewhere around 10 percent of the U.S. budget. Does that sound like a country that is a danger to the U.S, or even to Europe? Of course, the possible threat of a nuclear exchange is what hangs in the balance, but so far, the U.S. is the only country to have actually used the bomb to kill people outright (the testing of nuclear weapons kills life on the planet slowly). Essentially, the peoples’ resistance to the use of nuclear weaponry has been what has kept the nuclear nations from using such death-dealing weaponry.

War-making in the U.S. has drained the federal budget of the possibility of embarking on programs that will benefit the people: universal health care, housing, education for all, a healthy diet for all, roads and bridges that won’t disintegrate or collapse, clean air and water, and let’s not forget reparations for the crime of slavery. That’ll do for a start. All of these things that should have been in the works for decades will not have a chance of seeing the light of day, as Trump and his lieutenants destroy the programs that might provide them and cram more money into the military and defense, sucking the money out of our communities. The money is there, but it is not going to be spent the way a nation that values its people would spend it.

Russia’s economy is in tough shape and it has been for years. Let’s not forget that one of the main reasons for the collapse of the Soviet Union a quarter century ago was that its wealth was going into military hardware and not to sustain the people. It was an arms race that did them in and the U.S. still has not learned that lesson. The U.S. is approaching the same condition and it has happened because of the hubris of its leaders, Democrat and Republican alike, who brazenly thought the country could realize the long-held pipe dream of hegemony over the rest of the world. As for Russia’s wanting to threaten Europe and the U.S., Putin said in an interview with a mainstream U.S. publication last year that, on the face of it, how would it be possible for a nation, Russia, with 144 million people, to threaten the European Union that has a population of some 510 million and the U.S., which has a population of 323 million? That is, of course again, excluding the possibility of a nuclear exchange.

While the U.S. has about 800 foreign bases, large and small, Russia has a dozen, or so, and the small number could be attributed in part to the reduction to its defense budget. But that’s where their money goes. And, most of Russia’s bases are in places that were a part of the Soviet Union, whereas the U.S. bases are spread all over the globe. Again, to those 800 bases is where the taxpayers’ money goes and, once it goes there, it is lost to the federal treasury. So, goodbye domestic spending and all that it could produce for the people and the planet. Under Trump, what little is being spent on social programs and the environment is being slashed or the programs killed outright, presumably to increase the defense and military budget.

Wisely, the Russians are cutting defense spending, presumably to put more into their domestic economy, while Trump is headed in the opposite direction, even though it may not be more nuclear weapons or tanks or airplanes or more military forces that would “win” a war in the near future or in years to come. Rather, it will be the modern kinds of warfare, such as “cyberwarfare.” Mark Galeotti, a Russian security expert at the Institute of International Relations in Prague, recently told Quartz news that the reported Russian decrease in defense spending could be considerably less than 25.5 percent, but that still leaves a very wide gap in defense spending between the two countries.

The Pentagon, Galeotti said, bases its annual spending proposals on being able to conduct wars in two regions at the same time. But, Quartz reported, “Galeotti says arguments that more spending is direly needed are ‘tremendously overblown’ when potential foes like Russia are so far behind. ‘It’s very hard to sustain any kind of notion that Russia actually plans any kind of direct military challenge to the West.’” Why, then, the hysteria over Russia’s threat to the West? It could be the excuse that Democrats use for their ignominious loss to Trump in the general election and, for the Republicans, it provides cover for their ineptness in governing, from the White House to the Congress. They are the majority everywhere and they still can’t show that they can or will govern for the benefit of the people.

Always, however, there is the threat of Russian interference with American elections, as well as other countries’ elections. Leaving aside the interference of the U.S. over generations in dozens of other countries, including arranging and supporting coups, what does the purported Russian interference say about the inability of the richest, best educated, most technically advanced, most powerful nation on earth to thwart such interference? In the words of Donald Trump that makes the U.S. the “loser.” He doesn’t like to be considered a loser, but that’s the direction he’s going with his administration of billionaires and millionaires. Their inexperience is leading them down the proverbial slippery slope to “loserdom.” Unfortunately, they will take the country with them.

So, why further bloat the military-defense budget? Because it makes the president feel like a big shot and, as has been shown over time, it is the easiest way to transfer wealth from the people to the plutocrats in the budding oligarchy that the U.S. has become. Trump is always looking out for himself and, by default, the people in his class, so the giant corporations that benefit from war and the preparation for war are the beneficiaries of Trump’s vision and budgets. In that, he is similar to officials from both parties over generations, but this time, the U.S. needs to be talking to the other nuclear powers, including China, to curb even the speculation that such weapons could ever be used. He won’t do it, nor will future U.S. presidents do it, if the people are not in the streets to demand elimination of nuclear weapons and demanding the use of diplomacy to avoid war.

Eisenhower made a speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors in the spring of 1953, in which he noted that an arms race would be devastating to both the Soviet Union and the U.S. It is well to revisit his admonition: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people…This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”

It would appear that preparation to defend against cyber threats, such as interference with elections, would be much cheaper than preparation for an end-of-the-world conventional war or worse. Cyber conflicts do not cause the carnage that conventional or drone warfare cause. It’s not pleasant, but it can be done without a body count. The U.S. and other technically advanced nations can do it and it would leave billions for domestic spending. It will take skilled diplomacy, so Trump might have to rehire some diplomats he recently fired in number. Only the massing of people in the streets will be able to change Trump’s policies or those of any of the other oligarchs who might be put into positions of power.