How do you fundamentally change the military posture of the United States without losing your job as president? You can increase military spending and expand the Pentagon’s mandate. If anyone questions you, you can accuse them of recklessly endangering national security. But what if you want to shrink the military?
In such a case, there is no avoiding the charge that you are recklessly endangering national security, so the safest bet is to wait until your second term in office when you won’t be facing the electorate again.
But what if you don’t want to wait until a second term, considering that you may not be reelected?
In that case, you’d probably want to make the changes as early in your first term as possible, while you still have a mandate and you have plenty of time for the debate to fade before you have to face the voters.
But, there’s another way. What Obama chose was to announce the change in an election year. He made sure that his foreign policy credentials, for both toughness and competence, were extremely well-established. He’s banking that he can’t be convincingly accused of weakening national security after he signed the START treaty, ordered the risky mission to kill Usama bin-Laden, ended the war in Iraq, and oversaw a, so far, successful mission in Libya. And he’s probably right.
It would be nice if a president could come into office and slash military spending and roll back the Pentagon’s mandate without weakening his or her administration and party. But it isn’t that easy. It takes careful preparation. It helps if some left-wingers are convinced they’re a warmonger and no different from the hawks they replaced. That provides cover, too.
Mr. Obama, who spoke surrounded by a tableau of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in dress uniforms and with chests full of medals, underscored the national security successes of his administration — the ending of the Iraq war, the killing of Osama bin Laden and the ouster of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya — before declaring that the United States would downsize to a smaller ground force, get rid of “outdated cold war-era systems” and step up investments in intelligence-gathering and cyberwarfare…
…The new strategy document finally defines away the Defense Department’s historic requirement to have the ability to fight and win two wars at once — a measure that one official said “has been on life-support for years.”
The strategy released under Mr. Obama in 2010 said the military was responsible for “maintaining the ability to prevail against two capable nation-state aggressors.”
In contrast, the strategy released Thursday said the military must be able to fight one war, but is responsible only for “denying the objectives of — or imposing unacceptable costs on — an opportunistic aggressor in a second region.”
The bottom line?
The change is also driven by a new age of austerity hitting the nation. As $350 billion in scheduled cuts are made over the next decade, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said the military “will be smaller and leaner.” (The Pentagon says those cuts will result in a $480 billion cut to planned spending.)
It’s still not as much as I would like, but if you are going to be fair, Obama is delivering in a major way on reducing defense spending, and he’s doing it at a time that maximizes the risks to him politically.
I believe this shows both courage and leadership. I also think he did the groundwork to get away with it.
As I think I’ve repeated again and again, I’m on what most people would consider the far left, of the Marxist variety (and I won’t even qualify it). I suppose the thing I’d say is that we should not compare Obama to Presidents who have never existed when determining if he deserves our however-qualified support. The fact of the matter is that this is making as you point out a real and potentially radical–i.e., to the root of the issue–change in how we deal with military matters.
The real issue as I’ve seen it for a long time is how much we spend on the military, euphemized “defense.” I saw David McReynolds, Socialist Party candidate, speak in the 1996 election, and his platform was to halve the defense budget. It would have allowed for national health among other things, with money to spare. The US still would have outspent the rest of the world in military matters. Hardly radical for a socialist, but that’s the extent of the problem.
So, we’re going into an election and we have a lot of people who flatter themselves they’re on the left going on about Obama like he’s Hitler. Race is front and center, in a paradoxically oblique way, but there’s also the problem I would raise from the Marxist angle: we need to deal in actual realities. The reality is that Obama has done more for the country from a left perspective certainly than anyone since Johnson, and that’s excluding Johnson’s warmongering. Obama has pursued a very different foreign policy than any president since, likely, Carter, or maybe Hoover–though successfully unlike those two. He ended wars and demonstrated that major foreign policy goals–Bin Laden, e.g.–are best pursued by means other than conventional warfare.
Obama has presided over an imperialist power, and so the policies are imperialist. The US is not at a point where, unlike England when it voted Clement Attlee in, it will recognize how its empire bleeds itself dry, let alone that it is imperialist. He is putting changes in place, however that are real and create a context where that discussion might take place. This, from an actually-existing President.
Very well said.
Tank you.
Agreed. And FWIW, Dave McReynolds is a long-time personal friend. He’s still going strong. I’m sure he’d appreciate the props.
I’d call D. McReynolds an ass-kicker if asses didn’t flee in advance from him in terror at what would be coming their way. A real light in the world, McReynolds.
My first instinct is to dismiss the opinions of self-avowed unqualified Marxists. And it hardly surprises me that a Marxist would no be overly supportive of U.S. post-war foreign policy. We were, after all, primarily concerned with discrediting your political philosophy by any means possible.
But let’s set that aside.
In the tatters of Europe and the wastelands of Japan, what other country was prepared and willing to set up, promote, and protect a system of collective security? Who else would put a check on the kind of totalitarian brutality of Josef Stalin or Mao? Who else could stand in to assure Western Powers did not revert to warlike ways?
Who could blame us for making relationships in the Middle East that would assure us a steady reliable source of energy, and deny the Soviets ability to disrupt those supplies?
When you talk about American imperialism, hopefully you aren’t talking about things like the development of Japan, South Korea, and Western Europe. Hopefully, you are understanding of why we got embroiled in the Middle East. Hopefully, you are limiting your criticism to our excesses and to our errors and to our moral failings and inconsistencies and lack of consistent commitment to democracy in places like Latin America. Hopefully, you are angry that we would rather have business-friendly dictators to work with than less reliable prime ministers and presidents, who might give us less generous and stable terms.
But America had to be a major power in the aftermath of World War Two. We had to throw our weight around. And, on balance, the world is much better off for the fact that we did. It seems to me that the world learned to respect human rights and collective security so well, that they now can validly point out our shortcomings and hypocrisy. That’s a hell of a lot of moral progress, and America deserves tremendous credit for its efforts, no matter how flawed and uneven those efforts have been.
Boo, I have a feeling that you haven’t read Capital, nor the Economic and Philosophic Manuscript of 1844. I don’t expect you to, but I imagine you’d have a more nuanced first instinct if you did. I’m glad that you checked that first instinct if only for a brief moment. I am very sure that you have no idea what I mean by labeling myself a Marxist nor why I do so at the start of a comment.
So, why: I think that there’s a big problem on the radical left, one which I think you yourself point to often, which is to pursue some ideal purity at the expense of getting anything done. We can and should have ideas and even ideals, but we shouldn’t make them then ends of our efforts. We’re not in this for an idea.
I don’t know if you remember that Marx was very impressed with capitalism, and–a little more obscure–that he had a lot of confidence in England’s government to secure a large measure of improvement for working people, if less confidence that it would produce systemic, i.e., revolutionary change. His model of historical change, which I find a lot of value in and which is one reason I call myself a Marxist (aside from a hope it might not always be the dirty word it now is in this country), is closer to Burke’s than most people admit, the big difference being that Marx looked forward to change when personal taste got into it, while Burke did not. So, little bits here and there, new, small precedents changing assumptions, changes in conditions which produce new possibilities on the microscopic level. This is more or less the view the President shares, not because it’s Marx’s but because it’s how things actually work.
Those of us on the left would do very well to actually participate in public discourse. Maybe people who might otherwise dismiss us might grant that we make plausible points from time to time. This is how people work with each other to make things better.
I guess that you must be unaware that I have a degree in philosophy.
Unfortunately, I have read Marx’s works, including the dreadfully boring Das Capital.
Of course, anything deriving in any way from Hegelian philosophy is going to be a wank-fest and have nothing to do with how the world actually works.
As for capital, it isn’t American. It seeks a return, but the money can come from anywhere. You’re as likely to find Swiss, German, British, Chinese, or Australian investors as Americans. For global corporations, nationality hardly has anything to do with it.
If you’re talking about capitalists in rich countries taking advantage of leaders in poorer countries, then that’s a worthy subject. But it isn’t anything specific to America.
In 1945, Saudi Arabia was a bedouin society based on a barter economy (except in the Holy places). U.S. investment turned it into a modern country with universities and hospitals and skyscrapers and highways. It’s not really our fault that the Saudi Royal Family chose to keep and squander the rest of the wealth instead of investing in its people. There are many more examples where he net effect of American “exploitation” has been positive even though the people never saw anything more than a small fraction of the benefit. What concerns me is where we have actively worked against people’s self-determination in the furtherance not of national security, but private corporate interests.
Definitely unaware and apologies for my assumption. What I was getting at was that Capital is not an analysis of states but of economy. It’s the economic question that I go to. That’s really it, and I made my point more dismissively of you than I should have.
You’re right, there’s nothing specifically American about capital, but the US has been and continues to be the chief–the most powerful–defender of capitalism as a system in the postwar world. As such, the US–that is, the state, not the people–does things in the world that are subject to critique.
Did you get though to my acutal, original points above? I am curious if there’s anything in the original post in my substantive argument that you have thoughts about. We both seem to think that the President has a lot to recommend him.
I agree that Obama has done a mostly exemplary job or running a flawed system. I feel that’s true in almost every area. In some areas, like gay rights, cocaine-sentencing, and consumer rights, he’s off the charts.
In others, like health care and foreign policy, he’s doing a good job despite debilitating constraints.
In others, like detainee policy, he’s in a straight-jacket, but still performing poorly.
About US imperialism: I mean it entirely in an economic sense, and I’m glad you prompt me to clarify. It has nothing to do with forming occupying governments in different countries and everything with how capital functions in the world.
So, the fundamental problem capitalism faces is the need for constant growth. Rates of return tend to diminish over time in mature economies, so capital seeks other outlets. In the 19th century this took the form of the “Scramble for Africa,” explicit taking of land. How can one guarantee that foreign direct investment will remain secure on its original, or better terms? Take the place over.
In the 20th century, it was clear that the expense of actually occupying places fairly quickly outweighed the aggregate benefits to capital. What we got, and not entirely by conscious design, was the system of debt, famously the IMF, the strings on which require the liberalization of capital markets in recipient countries, i.e., places to invest with some guarantee that the government won’t go all nationalist on capital, like Mossadegh did in Iran.
US foreign policy since Wilson has been about liberalization of capital markets. There are other threads, too. When I say “imperialism,” though, it’s about the first: using political, diplomatic, and occasionally military means to ensure the unhindered flow of capital on terms favorable to capital, particularly in this case finance capital.
Only a fool would say that the US has played an entirely good or bad role in world history. Certainly, there’s nothing Marxian about such an analysis.
Exactly.
I think you are missing another thing that makes this, although risky, somewhat more defensible to many. He has allowed the right to make the deficit a major talking point. He has shown a willingness to reduce spending (although not to a catstrophic level as many on the left would like to believe) on some of the left’s sacred cows.
This sets up the hypocrisy of the right if they complain too much.
It doesn’t hurt to have many of the leaders of the military (current, not retired Fox spokesmen) back the plan.
I think (and it may be wishful thinking) that Obama’s reelection strategy involves shedding his first-term persona, which involved a large amount of compromise and concilliation, in favor of being a lot more confrontational. “Man, the Republicans are a bunch of assholes,” may not be as inspiring a message as, “Hope and change,” but it has the advantage of being completely believable.
Governing and running for office are two different things.
Of course he going to transition into campaign mode. I, for one, am happy we have a president who isn’t permanently in campaign mode. It’s been quite some time.
you won’t see me complaining about Obama’s military cuts. That’s the most bloated part of our country’s budget, dwarfing everything else.
maybe eventually the pentagon can have that bake sale for a fighter jet, instead of teachers ponying up out of pocket for school supplies.
The two war strategy was a postwar fantasy of the pentagon that has been obsolete for at least 50 years. When another country can vaporize your major cities in a around an hour, there is no winnable global war. Of course, the two war thing was also a central plank of the imperial mindset under which military adventures becomes pre-paid sprees. We’ve got the hardware let’s see the light show. And securing the global supply of petrochemicals to run your war machine is another big deal.
The two war strategy was a postwar fantasy of the pentagon that has been obsolete for at least 50 years. When another country can vaporize your major cities in a around an hour, there is no winnable global war.
Actually, the two-war strategy was a creation of the 1990s, and hasn’t existed for 50 years.
BooMan, you’re a big man for volunteering that about Libya. You could have left it out of your list of successes, but you didn’t.
I think it’s brilliant the way Obama managed to leverage the Republicans’ austerity fever into major military cuts.
Indeed. But the cuts proposed do not include the second round of cuts based on the mandated action of the debt ceiling deal.
So we have these cuts, which are less than the $600 billion over 10 years and those mandated cuts as well. This builds a little bit of a legislative box for the military budget. And remember that the 10-year budget effectively means October, November, December of 2012, and however long it takes the next Congress to change the 10-year budget. Or not.
So the Republicans have two more opportunities to refuse to further cut the deficit – once in dealing with whatever post-SuperCommittee cuts get put back. And once in the FY2013 budget negotiations.
You can’t maximize zero, it’s still zero. It’s always zero. Nobody cares what Mitt Romney will say about defense spending.
I’ve learned to get used to the myopia of political discussion, but it still irritates me. Despite the leftist propaganda, there is no Empire. There’s very little in the way of “permanent war” thinking in the US compared to a great many other places in the world.
The defense spending in this country isn’t ever rising, it’s cyclical. Basically, throughout the twentieth (and now 21st) century, almost every other President ends up cutting the defense budget.
LBJ raised it during Vietnam, Nixon and Carter cut it. Reagan raised it in the 80s, Bush and Clinton cut it. Other Bush dramatically raised it, now Obama (and the next person after him) will cut it.
Wars end. The budget gets cut. The neocons and militarists never sustain themselves.
It is not THE BIGGEST SCREAMING DEAL IN THE HISTORY OF THE REPUBLIC!!11!1!
BJoe, I like many of your comments, but this floored me:
Do we live on the same planet? US military spending is cyclical, sure, but the up cycles are always far greater increases than the cuts are decreases. The US currently outpaces every other country in the world combined in such spending. There is not a single inch of the globe that the Pentagon does not consider strategic to American interests; we have nearly a thousand foreign bases, an average of five in every country in the world. The US does not go in for the permanent acquisition of land, but as an economic and culture empire, with the military as an implied last resort for enforcement, it has been hugely successful.
On the military side, we just wound down one eight-year long war of aggression, and we’ve been mired in another war, one that no longer has any clear purpose, for over a decade. Obama is currently using drone warfare in a half-dozen different countries. You can debate the morality or propriety (as Booman does, above) of the actions of the US, but to deny that those actions take place on a global scale and have almost nothing to do with “defense” and everything to do with advancing economic and geopolitical interests is to deny reality.
The list of the countries the US has taken overt or covert military action in/against since WWII is dozens long. Just in the last decade it’s over a dozen if you include the covert actions against Iran, Venezuela, etc. And the willingness to engage in such actions is ongoing. Hell, this is the first time in twenty years – a full generation – that we haven’t either been at war or using sanctions, covert actions, and periodic bombings against Iraq, and that’s only one country. That meets any reasonable definition of “permanent war.” Again, you can debate the wisdom of them, but to say such actions don’t meet that definition – and to imply that other countries’ actions meet it more squarely (Names? The only ones I can think of outside the Israeli occupation of Palestine, which we’ve helped enable every step of the way, are long-running domestic insurgencies like Colombia or the DRC) – leaves me surprised and shaking my head.
Personally, while we are an empire, I think a lot of our military spending is driven not by the desire for empire per se, but the act of empire-level military spending – the lucrative welfare system in place for politically connected military contractors. There’s a lot of “if all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like nails” thinking in the US political and security establishment.
I give tremendous credit to Obama for both expanding the range of foreign policy tools the US embraces and, now, for challenging the spending side. He’s not about to challenge the basic imperial assumptions of US foreign policy, which is too bad, but even 23 years after the collapse of the USSR, I don’t expect that. Nobody electable to become commander-in-chief in the US (sorry, Mr. Paul) can presently do so.
http://www.cfr.org/content/publications/attachments/TrendsinUSMilitarySpending.pdf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:InflationAdjustedDefenseSpending.PNG
It’s flatly not the case that defense spending is some unstoppable behemoth. It’s basically been constrained between 3-7% of GDP for forty years now.
90% of the “permawar” basing structure stuff you can name (Germany, Japan, Korea, Saudi Arabia vs. Iran, etc.) was put into place in the ’40 or 50s. The narrative of unchecked expansionism and aggression in the late 20th century is wrong. The Bush administration was the anomaly, not the trend. We’re 10x better off now than we were in the era of domino theories and detente.
By 2017, Obama will have reduced defense spending by 25-40% off its 2010 highs, to like $450-500B/yr instead of $650-800B, and we’ll all be copacetic. It won’t even be as strong a cut as we saw post-1989. It’s just good business.
Obama is currently using drone warfare in a half-dozen different countries. You can debate the morality or propriety (as Booman does, above) of the actions of the US, but to deny that those actions take place on a global scale and have almost nothing to do with “defense” and everything to do with advancing economic and geopolitical interests is to deny reality.
Wait wait wait – you think we’re shooting at al Qaeda commanders in Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, and the gold-paved streets of uber-strategic Mauritania and Niger for reasons of economic and geopolitical interests? As opposed to anything having to do with defense?
Sometimes it’s possible to get a little too wrapped up in a narrative, even one that is often useful.
“The actions of the US” aren’t limited to drone strikes in this post. There’s lots of other stuff listed in there.
And my complaint was about including that one in the list.
Note that I did describe the narrative as “often useful.”
Assuming that every element of American foreign policy over a period of a century is indistinguishable from every other element is just sloppy thinking.
It’s like taking the libertarian approach to “government intervention” – it’s always the same, it’s always bad, it’s always done for the same reason, it always fails – and applying it to foreign policy.
Note that I did describe the narrative as “often useful.”
I guess I mistook your use of the word “narrative” to mean a larger narrative in the meta sense, as opposed to what Geov was saying in his one little post.
Assuming that every element of American foreign policy over a period of a century is indistinguishable from every other element is just sloppy thinking.
Granted. But assuming the inverse of that is to engage in Noonanism, if I may coin a term. Just because you know when to blame America doesn’t mean you do it reflexively at all times and in the face of all evidence.
It’s like taking the libertarian approach to “government intervention” – it’s always the same, it’s always bad, it’s always done for the same reason, it always fails – and applying it to foreign policy.
I suppose there will always be some out there arguing such a position, but the vast majority, even among the informed, are aware of nuance and grey areas and etc. Railing against this supposed purist minority is tilting at windmills.
I guess I mistook your use of the word “narrative” to mean a larger narrative in the meta sense, as opposed to what Geov was saying in his one little post.
I am talking about the larger narrative about American imperialism. I’m saying that citing the strikes against al Qaeda as an example of that narrative is mistaken.
But assuming the inverse of that is to engage in Noonanism…
I don’t think anyone has done that. I singled out, as you pointed out before, one entry in the blogger’s list of horribles.
Railing against this supposed purist minority is tilting at windmills.
I just wish that there weren’t so many of those ‘windmills’ on the blogs I read. I know they’re an itty-bitty-teeny-tiny minority among the general population, but they make up quite a large segment of, for instance, this blog’s regulars. Look up above about how the Gulf of Tonkin resolution is evidence that we’re the bad guy at Pearl Harbor, and that it’s American imperialism for a broad international coalition to sanction Iran.
He’s not about to challenge the basic imperial assumptions of US foreign policy, which is too bad, but even 23 years after the collapse of the USSR, I don’t expect that. Nobody electable to become commander-in-chief in the US (sorry, Mr. Paul) can presently do so.
I submit that the administration’s response to the popular uprisings against Mubarak and Ben-Ali represent a dramatic, historically-significant deviation from the imperialist patters of behavior that have long characterized our relationship with Central America; that characterized our relations with client states throughout the world during the Cold War; and that characterized our relations with strategically-important MENA allies right up until Arab Spring.
The administration didn’t have a “response” to Ben Ali’s evacuation. Anymore than they had a response to tidal conditions in the south Pacific, or the weekly activities of the Strasbourg city council (or whatever they have in Europe).
Talk about Burma or some shit instead.
The administration didn’t have a “response” to Ben Ali’s evacuation.
Which is, indeed, quite a dramatic departure from our treatment of imperial client states by the dozen or two presidents preceding this one.
I dare you to tell me that Lyndon Johnson, Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nicxon, or either George Bush would have limited themselves to expressing sympathy with the strikers and calling on the regime to show restraint.
If your definition of “imperial client state” includes lowly Tunisia, then apparently every state on earth is one of our “imperial client states.”
At which point, I decline to take your definitions seriously.
There’s a difference between the Tunisias of the world and the Egypts.
You’re welcome to compare the different responses between the Clinton administration to Suharto and the Obama administration and Mubarak. They are radically different.
But Tunisia was France’s bugaboo. The US (and UK) responded the way it did to other places where we had limited conflicts of interests (like in Central Asia or the former Soviet republics), by calling for restraint from violence on both sides and a path to free and fair elections. The success of which could then be used as leverage to get actual client states to clean their shit up and stabilize their futures with a little more urgency. I doubt there was even a millionth the intensity and conflict inside the administration and the pentagon and the state department over the Tunisian response as there was to events in Egypt and war in Libya.
If your definition of “imperial client state” includes lowly Tunisia, then apparently every state on earth is one of our “imperial client states.”
That’s nuts. Italy isn’t an imperialist client state. Nor China. Nor Japan. Nor North Korea. Nor Iran. Nor Canada. Nor most other states on earth.
In fact, it is specifically because Tunisia is “lowly,” in your formulation, that it fits the bill. Client states are almost always a great deal less powerful than their sponsor.
But Tunisia was France’s bugaboo.
Tunisia has been a U.S. client state since Ben-Ali came to power in 1987:
http://www.warisbusiness.com/2488/news/tunisia-before-the-riots-631-million-in-us-military-aid/
So, no.
Wow, $350 million in over twenty years. Whoa, easy big spender.
You’re completely wrong. Read some of those wikileaks embassy memos on Tunisia or Egypt.
The kleptocracy was a noted problem in each. Watching Ben Ali go wasn’t just the right move from some idealistic freedom and human rights agenda, but from stone cold realpolitik.
The US and other “friends of Egypt” (gak) needed them to get their act together and work out a plan of succession that would disempower the Mubarak family and its crony capitalists, while still protecting Israel, and marginalizing radical islamist elements.
Nobody was going to bat an eye at watching Ben Ali go, except for French people who liked the beaches there, they just didn’t expect the rest of the region to catch fire in a day.
There’s a 180 degree difference in the response and follow-up to Tunisia and a real client state like Bahrain. Give the administration all the credit in the world for what they did in Egypt and Libya, but don’t lump Tunisia in like it’s on that level.
Wow, $350 million in over twenty years. Whoa, easy big spender.
We’re talking about Tunisia, a country of 10.5 million people (about 8 million 20 years ago).
Read some of those wikileaks embassy memos on Tunisia or Egypt.
I’ve read plenty. Since when is the kleptocratic nature of a client state regime a deal-breaker? What do you think all of those suspiciously rich generalissimos in Latin America were, skilled at picking college football?
There’s a 180 degree difference in the response and follow-up to Tunisia and a real client state like Bahrain.
Egypt was a real client state. Egypt was the core of our security establishment in the region.
Give the administration all the credit in the world for what they did in Egypt and Libya, but don’t lump Tunisia in like it’s on that level.
The administration was certainly more ready and more nimble in dealing with the latter, yes. They were mostly spectators in events in Tunisia, no argument here. But that, in itself, is pretty significant. We didn’t lift a finger for an allied client as it was being overthrown by popular forces. That’s quite a departure for us, no?
I’m all for covering his blood-caked, war-mongering, drone-assassinating ass against accusations of peacefulness. The more we accuse him of merciless murder, torture, and baby -killing, the more money he can cut from the Pentagon. That’s wut I’m talking ’bout. Git to it!
fascist butthole, as well. What a civil rights jerk-off. And wall street meat puppet. Tell people his entire DOJ needs to be fired, now. We need to work the whole field.
Okay, I’m done.
But ya know, it’s pretty true that if you keep supporting the man for his atrocious behavior, you’ll keep getting atrocious behavior.
he is not supposed to “provide his own cover!” and have us call him a genius for it.
checks and balances, folks. Got it?
This is a ballsy decision in the context of the current Congress. It has the potential for setting the context for an adult conversation about national security, something that’s been lacking for almost 100 years. And to do it when we are coming out of a period of warfare instead of going into one.
But to have an adult conversation about national security, you have to have an adult conversation about the risks to the continental United States and not get caught up in the risk to the overseas transnational corporations that just happen to have their CEOs in the US (their tax address might be elsewhere). It is these economic interests of the few that has driven the grandiose idea of US global power projection into every last corner of the world (including Central Asia) that has cost us lives and treasure since World War II. And it is this power projection that has local in many other countries looking on the US as imperial. Many feel the war in Iraq ripped the benign mask of liberartion off US policy.
But there is a problem with history and tradition. The US cast itself from the beginning as the Empire of Liberty. And New York billed itself as the Empire State because of its pride in shipping and finance industries that were the core of its economy at the time it adopted the name. This self-perception of the US as “the most powerful nation on earth” and entitled to have its way in all things has to change in order to have an adult conversation about national security.
The two wars strategy was a product of the post-Cold War period when there was briefly the lack of a coherent mission that would justify the gargantuan military that we had amassed to fight the Soviet Union. The strategy was motivated by those who wanted to preserve the military industrial complex and its power to suck up tax money.
This change in strategy seems to move from some of the same thinking with the increased emphasis on high technology and further troop reductions (or as some cynics have predicted, further shifts to a mercenary army possibly hidden in the State Department budget).
But instead of cheering or booing, as citizen we need to start thinking in some detail about what the global security architecture looks like. Because the fearmongers and the snake oil salesmen of the the defense industries are going to be working over the American public in order to continue their gravy train. And we need to be able to spot the bullshit quickly and respond loudly.
I swear to god, it’s like you guys forgot the 90s ever took place.
I do not remember that during the 1990s there was an adult conversation nationally about what the US’s real security interests are.
I remember a Gulf War to toss Iraq out of Kuwait, a freakout over Somalia, a war in the former Yugoslavia because Europe couldn’t act quickly enough in their own back yard, and the notion that we had to be prepared to fight two regional wars simultaneously – and then there were the bombings of Baghdad and the cruise missile retaliation against al Quaeda’s bombing of two US embassies. The first two were in reaction to events that in and of themselves did not threaten US territory. The third threatened the stability of Europe, but not us. And there was no adult discussion about the reasons for the two-war strategy and exactly who those awful folks were who were going to have a regional wars. And the response to the attacks on our embassy could have been handled with a much smaller military; the cruise missile development program btw was started by Jimmy Carter and was considered a controversial escalation of the Cold War at the time.
So what 1990s did I miss? It seems to me that we screwed up our Cold War “victory” by being punitive and set up a decade of wars in the Middle East and Central Asia. Were those the two regions? When did we have the geopolitical conversation?
See, as I recall it, at the turn of the century, “adult conversation” or not, we had zero discernible military rivals. And thus, spending plummeted. You can’t fight what isn’t there. And had a dozen and a half Saudi fucks been arrested or deported instead of allowed to fly our own planes into our own skyscrapers, it would have remained that way.
The tail doesn’t actually wag the dog. And unlike you, I don’t have any expectation that we’re going to abolish cruise missiles (wtf?) or zero out the defense budget any time soon.
Where do you see TarheelDem suggesting that the defense budget either should or will be zero’ed out?
Also, how much of the Pentagon budget do you imagine goes to directly dealing with Al Qaeda and its ilk? I don’t have a number, so it’s a serious question. I imagine a tiny percentage. Most of it goes to maintaining a huge infrastructure around the world, and to a lot of weapons systems to deal with as-yet-to exist threats. The necessity of all that is the conversation we didn’t have in the 1990s. You could halve that budget–I mentioned this before–and still the US would outspend the rest of the world by a bunch.
So what 1990s did I miss?
A 20% real-dollar cut in military spending, base closures, and most relevantly, a top-to-bottom review of our military posture that resulted in the replacement of the East-West Conflict doctrine with the Two Regional War strategy.
The defense contractors will be crawling all over the members of congress to get the contracts. They won’t like this one bit.
It seems that Obama is winding down the despicable war on terror.
Isn’t that the point of having an adult conversation about national security. At the moment, it’s the only jobs program that the GOP likes–and it’s full of gold-plating, featherbedding, and fraud.
Strange thing to say. The reality is that the defense budget has substantially increased under Obama, and that, despite the claims of ‘reductions’ it will be bigger than ever when he leaves office. To claim that he is interested in ‘reducing military spending’ is an outright lie. A blatant and obvious lie. The reality is that under Obama the US has significantly expanded its military presence around the world, with its death squads (also called ‘special forces’) terrorizing people in more countries than ever, and significant efforts made to expand NATO outside of Europe, establish the military presence in Africa and Asia, and so on. Very frightening that people are seriously claiming that this ultra right-wing, dyed-in-the-wool warmonger cares about reducing the US military when it’s more than obvious his highest priority is to expand it, and that all other concerns will take second place to it.
This is the craziest damn post, and this is a thread in which marxism is apparently taken seriously by some, so that, mikep, is saying something.
Shine on, you crazy fucking diamond. Beyond kooky.
You know, I’d never suggest that I couldn’t take someone seriously because they were a liberal. I would demolish the argument on its own lack of merit or keep my trap shut.
I have to say that I’m a bit taken aback by the tone on this piece. It’s not what I come to expect here. This is supposed to be the left of center/center-left/progressive site where people deal in arguments.
It’s not just this piece. The Frogpond has been a little stagnant lately, imo, even among the more informed commentators. I don’t know how hard it is to say your peace without including a hefty dose of personal attacks and just outright bile, but apparently it’s harder than I thought.
Marxism: because 150 years of abject failure in the field just isn’t enough to discredit it forever, apparently.
I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but capitalism isn’t looking too good these days either. Even “Keynes” is under attack as the new “Carter.”
Indeed. Can we even find a way to have real growth that’s not sustained by bubbles? These same questions were being asked during/after the Great Depression as well, but who knows anymore…
Strange thing to say. The reality is that the defense budget has substantially increased under Obama
Only because Obama is now including much of the war spending within the defense budget, as opposed to off-budget. In apples-to-apples terms, the core defense budget has decreased a little, and the war spending has decreased by a good amount (and will decrease much further now that we’re out of Iraq).
The reality is that under Obama the US has significantly expanded its military presence around the world
You know, like Iraq. Oops.
It’s difficult to take seriously anything written by someone who claims to be concerned about war, but doesn’t care when wars are ended.