Close the Pentagon

The Pentagon, famed as the world's largest office building, recently underwent a renovation process that took seventeen years and $4.5 billion -- ten times as long and four times the cost of constructing it in the first place. That makes it a potent symbol of a US foreign policy infrastructure built for another era, dominated by a massive, bureaucratic, hopelessly inefficient military machine. Close the Pentagon argues that traditional battlefield warfare is going extinct while the national security threats of the next fifty years -including climate change, pandemics, global financial meltdowns- don't need a military response. It is time to radically overhaul our foreign policy institutions -and budget-- to focus on diplomacy and global economic engagement.