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.