Tom Cotton invokes Adolf Hitler in maiden US Senate speech

US Senator Tom Cotton has slammed Washington for not significantly increasing the US military spending to confront an increasingly “dangerous” world that is being threatened by a new Adolf Hitler.

Cotton reportedly received one million dollars from the Emergency Committee for Israel, an American neoconservative group associated with the Israel lobby, just before the last US election.  

The freshman Republican from Arkansas began his maiden Senate speech on Monday evening, drawing parallels between the current world and Hitler’s Nazi Germany.

"The world is growing ever more dangerous, and our defense spending is wholly inadequate to confront the danger," Cotton said. "To be exact, during the last four or five years, the world has grown gravely darker.”

“We have steadily disarmed, partly with a sincere desire to give a lead to other countries and partly due to the severe financial pressure of the time. But a change must now be made. We must not continue longer on a course in which we alone are growing weaker while every other nation is growing stronger," he added.

"I wish I could take credit for those eloquent but ominous words, but I cannot. Winston Churchill sounded that warning in 1933 as Adolf Hitler had taken power in Germany. Tragically, Great Britain and the West didn't heed this warning, when they might have strangled that monster in his crib. Rather they let the locust continue to eat away at the common defense,” the 37-year-old lawmaker continued.

In February, President Barack Obama unveiled his fiscal 2016 budget proposal, reversing many of the cuts instituted in 2013 and requesting the largest base military budget in US history.

The Obama administration proposed an increased $534 billion Pentagon base budget for fiscal year 2016, plus $51 billion for funding wars. The proposed budget for the US Department of Defense exceeds the $499 billion federal spending cap set for next year.

Cotton said the United States needs a military budget of $611 billion to manage a world that had “grown gravely darker” since Obama became president.

Tom Cotton also accused the Obama administration of being "harsh and unyielding to our friends" and "soothing and suffocating to our enemies."

In a bizarre move last week, a group of 47 Republican senators sent an open letter to Iran’s leaders, warning that whatever agreement reached with President Barack Obama would be a “mere executive agreement” and that Congress could ultimately walk away from any deal with Tehran upon review.

Secretary of State John Kerry has denounced the GOP letter as an “unprecedented” and “calculated” attempt to interfere with nuclear talks underway between Tehran and the P5+1 countries - the US, Britain, France, China, Russia, and Germany, which have entered a sensitive final stage ahead of the July 1 deadline for a comprehensive agreement.

Tom Cotton claimed that he had drafted the letter. However, independent analysts say the letter was actually written by William [Bill] Kristol, a US neoconservative political analyst and the founder of the Emergency Committee for Israel.

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