To properly respond to David Brooks’ latest column, I would have to do research, which means I would have to greatly delay responding to his column. So, consider this an improper response. As long as America maintains its investment in its Navy and its nuclear arsenal, it can maintain most of its global presence and influence. What’s needed in addition to that is the ability to respond to both global calamities like the Sumatran tsunami and the Haitian earthquake, and global hotspots like Kosovo and Libya. Unless Russia and China develop comparable capabilities, America will still be indispensable in many respects, and thus will have an outsized influence. I presume this is desirable, although some will differ.
If we want to maintain the ability to occupy multiple Asian countries for years on end, we will have to either raise taxes dramatically, find a way to dramatically control health care costs, or give up our welfare state. I don’t think we want to make that tradeoff, so it is probably true that we will have to rethink how we go about policing the world.
But even here, we have an opportunity (already begun) to create massive cost savings in our defense budget. Obama famously pointed out that we have fewer muskets and bayonets than we used to have, and we can get by with fewer armored divisions, too.
We are shouldering a tremendous burden when it comes to policing the world, and we aren’t great at it. We would like some countries to share our burden, but we don’t want to just hand over responsibilities to the Chinese. That is why Obama is attempting to refocus our priorities to the Pacific. But that’s only one part of it. The other part is having parts of the British Commonwealth, parts of Europe, and perhaps Japan, South Korea, India and Brazil start to pick up some of the slack. We’re all democracies now, with emerged or emerging economies, and we all share enough interests to make it seemingly safe for us to delegate some power.
In conclusion, we launched this effort in 1945 in an effort to beat back totalitarianism and create real barriers to World War Three. Those were the goals, and they remain the main goals, although things like climate change have joined the list. We didn’t set out to attain total global hegemony, and we certainly don’t want to pay for it.
So, we can do quite well by slashing the defense budget to pay for the welfare state if we are smart, humble, and effective in getting others to step up where we step back.
If we don’t pay for the police force, we don’t get to delegate. We have to share responsibility, which assumes a different international politics than delegation. Delegation still presumes subordination. That changed role for American power under shared responsibility is the basic issue for the hawks, who see it as degradation of national standing. To realize a different order to the world will take quite a different mindset for the whole of American politics. I hope we have it in us to change. We remain in a very dangerous period in our politics.
The Libya operation is a good example of what shared responsibility, including shared authority and consensus decision-making, looks like in the military sphere.
And the Republicans howled about “leading from behind.” Never mind that “leading from behind” actually…you know…WORKED. This is the difference between those who think the military is there to actually accomplish things, and those who think it’s there to make us feel like tough guys.
I found it encouraging that the “leading from behind” attack flopped during the 2012 campaign.
At the very least we can still project power and be responsive to threats without being in every country on the planet.
I would argue to close most of the foreign bases but leave 1 in each region. Reopen the bases here in the US, we can basically have the same size army and stimulate local economies instead of foreign ones. Also, since they’re here and not dispersed it takes longer to start a land war, giving our leaders more time to hopefully avoid it.
If you watch your Football playoffs this weekend (admittedly a weakness of mine) you’ll hear Joe “Good German” Buck or some other announcer tell you that the US has troops in 175 countries world wide.
175. With US troops. In the open. This doesn’t count countries, like Iran, with thousands of US-taxpayer-paid-for covert operatives.
Depending on how you count there are anywhere from 190 to 206 countries in the world. This includes such states as the Cook Islands, the Vatican, and the Maldives.
Americans have long ceased to comprehend what their country has become, or what their taxes are paying for. We have – with very few exceptions, completely bought into the propoganda of the military “serving” the country and “protecting our freedom”.
We, the United States of America, are the greatest military machine that has ever existed. And we have no enemy left. Therefore we must find one to justify our existence.
God I cannot stand this lavish praise. They no more protect America than most public workers or servants, especially teachers and academics. My family is dominated by the military, so the last time I opened up my mouth there was a huge fight.
The thing is: we actually do have fewer armored divisions than we used to. The army currently has 10 divisions, down from 18 at the height of the Reagan buildup. The Navy is significantly smaller than it was 20 years ago too. And yet, we are paying even more for defense than we did then.
Something doesn’t seem right. I suspect there’s huge amounts of waste and graft in there, e.g. billions of dollars for black budget “research” that will never go anywhere.
Outsourcing. Blackwater cops and spooks and Halliburton chow costs a multiple of what is paid to military grunts.
Compare a picture of a fully-equipped infantryman in 1985 to one today. The equipment for a single soldier is at least 15x the cost, in constant dollars, of what it used to be.
That comparison extends to everything military – weapons, training equipment, and so on.
Drive by an army base where you can see lots of army housing – our local Ft Collins is a great example – the older housing units look like the sort of low-rent districts that you’d expect – the newer units look like upscale townhomes or even single family homes.
Oh, I’m sure there is massive graft, but on top of that when you have effectively an infinite budget you always buy the best. We have the greatest, most expensive and most comprehensive (per person) government-run housing, education, and health care system in the world – for the military.
Humble is not part of our national DNA. I have never heard other peoples refer to “The Humble American” – I’ve heard many other adjectives, but never humble. After all, as Toby Keith put it, “We’ll put a boot in your ass – it’s the American way!” For better or worse, there’s a few hundred years of evidence to that effect. Of course, there have been a few times when the boot was firmly applied to ours as well, but that doesn’t seem to stop us from lacing ’em up whenever it suits us.
You wrote,
As long as America maintains its investment in its Navy and its nuclear arsenal, it can maintain most of its global presence and influence.
What’s needed in addition to that is the ability to respond to both global calamities like the Sumatran tsunami and the Haitian earthquake, and global hotspots like Kosovo and Libya.
Unless Russia and China develop comparable capabilities, America will still be indispensable in many respects, and thus will have an outsized influence.
I presume this is desirable, although some will differ.
I differ.
We don’t actually need any of that.
Not any.
It’s all just looking for trouble and the price is we are still stuck with a half-assed social democracy.
Far too many liberals are tired of the fight and far too willing to declare victory and move on to something more fun, like worrying about women’s rights in Somalia and childhood inoculations in Central Africa.
I’ve always felt that one of Obama’s chess strategies has been to evolve not just our military machine into a leaner and smarter force that recognizes we have moved past the Cold War and its mentality; but to point out to our democratic partners and emerging partners that they need to begin to play more of an ongoing role in global defense.
The philosophy during Libya pointed to that pretty starkly and was widely misunderstood.
As climate change takes hold the militaries of the world will likely become tasked with more and more disaster & infrastructure responses. Watching the Australian wildfire reporting this morning with all its extremes (a new purple code for a heat index reaching 130 degrees!) It’s going to take everybodys’ military to pick up the pieces climate change leaves in its wake.
The philosophy during Libya pointed to that pretty starkly and was widely misunderstood.
We Eleanor Roosevelt liberals are a dying breed.
My son is career Army and has 8 years to go to get his pension. He is quite concerned about cuts to the defense budget in purely personal terms. If he gets released, he loses any pension benefits. He would be able to find employment in the private sector pretty easily, but that is still 12 years of lost retirement benefits.
Of coyurse, I have a feeling, based upon how his career path has gone, thaqt he would not be high on the cut list, if any cuts resulted in major personnel changes.
OTOH, and on the good side, he is currently working in contracting and has talked about changes that have been made and will be made in how the DoD sets up contracts which will result in savings for the government.
One solution might be to offer early outs to excess military people such as is done on the civilian side of the house.
My brother-in-law was cut from the Army at 18 years for “excess numbers in his MOS” and after four tours in VietNam with a Purple Heart. No pension because he didn’t do twenty.
I understand your concerns.
America does get other countries involved when the United Nations supports the wars it wants to start. Without UN sanction, not so much …
Though I don’t think there is any reporting at all in America about this, hundreds or thousands of military from many other nations have participated in Iraq One, Kosovo, Libya, Afghanistan, as well as the aftermath in Haiti, etc.
Yes, we are not a total failure. However, one look at our defense and intelligence and security budgets, and you’ll realize that we have cast ourselves in a role as a super-hegemon. We can’t afford to keep doing it and still provide for the needy.
Barack Obama reduced Medicare spending by over $700 billion when he eliminated the pointless Medicare Advantage subsidies. For Brooks to leave this, and the rest of the cost-savings measures of the ACA, out of his column makes it quite clear that he using the fiscal argument as a mere pretext for an ideological argument.
Brooks ignores a policy that reduces Medicare costs without reducing the benefits it provides because, to him, reducing benefits is the point.