Which brings us back to the absurd levels of military spending the United States has been indulging in latter years, like an insatiable crack addict. I hate to break up the acid test party with a mild dose of reality, but it’s pure lunacy to spend considerably more than all of nearly 200 other countries in the world on your national defense. I mean, isn’t it? Is there really no limit to the depths of America’s national paranoia? Well, as a matter of fact, it gets far stranger yet when you contemplate that none of those countries – not even North Korea, Cuba or Iran – have expressed anything approaching a genuine hostility toward your country which could plausibly lead to an attack on their part. Then it becomes the very definition of insane when you have a nuclear deterrent force that prevents any of those countries from attacking you even if they wanted to. And it makes the insane look downright wholesome when you spend these obscene sums to fight a non-existent enemy, but cannot afford a children’s healthcare program at home. If you needed to write a definition of a society gone mad, surely this would be the textbook case.
Let’s face it, probably three-fourths of the Pentagon budget is spent to enrich contractors at home and bust down doors for corporate predators abroad. China spends about $60 or $70 billion a year on protecting the same geographical area as the US and more than four times the number of people. Who is going to mess with that country? Not even the United States, with tens times the military budget, would dare. Surely America could easily procure the same degree of security as the Chinese do for – let’s be generous – say, double their expenditure, if its true interests were purely defensive.
Nor would such a formula be a prescription for disarmament or a wimpy defense posture. This is still double the amount of any other country in the world. Certainly many would argue that far less than even that much should be spent. I’m one of them, but right now I’d gladly settle for a 75 percent reduction in military spending.
Of course, there are those who would claim that the United States is the ‘indispensable nation’, the one that provides the glue for keeping peace in the international system, and the only one capable of mounting an operation like the Iraq war. Let’s leave aside for the moment the poor performance of keeping peace during the ‘American century’, which often seemed rather more like the American adventure series, and let’s leave aside also the disasters of Afghanistan, Vietnam and Iraq. What a critique such as this actually reveals is three things. First, that other developed countries have been able to buy butter like national healthcare and such, while we have stupidly forsaken it for guns. Second, that the result of our spending the last decades undermining the creation of a legitimate and functional international force to clean up international messes is – surprise, surprise – that no such forces now exist to carry this burden. And third, that we’re too arrogant and narcissistic to pay attention to the wake-up call that non-interest in our wars among potential allies represents.
This is where multilateralism comes into play in a crucial and cognitive fashion. If we can’t attract serious allied support for a war, it’s certainly worth asking whether we should be engaged in such a conflict at all. Neocon blowhards love to argue that Europeans have gone soft and are all from Venus, while tough-guy Americans are from Mars. The truth is that Europeans were fighting wars long before America was even in diapers, and they’ve learned more from the experience than have we. They’re not soft. Rather, it’s that they’re not indiscriminate. They went to Afghanistan. They didn’t go to Iraq. Or at least a lot of them didn’t. The others only went because they wanted to keep the hyperpower happy. The next stop was regret, followed by withdrawal of what were mostly token forces anyhow. In any case, for a legitimate threat or a legitimate emergency (the antithesis of Iraq), the Europeans and many others would stand shoulder to shoulder with America, as has happened many times previously, including those wimpy cheese-eating French who were there at America’s birth, and without whom, indeed, the country would likely not have been born at all.
But wouldn’t cutting American military spending dramatically make the country weaker? To the contrary, our current approach makes us weaker. We have lost the capacity to exert soft power by over-reliance on hard power. Nobody follows us anymore unless they have to because we have twisted their arm nearly out of its socket, or unless they’re into committing career suicide, like Tony Blair did. And, increasingly, that simply means that nobody follows us anymore at all. The tauntings of Hugo Chávez or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would have been inconceivable not so long ago. Now they represent leadership to a resentful world where the arrogant and impotent superpower has hobbled itself, and can do nothing to respond. Meanwhile, China and Russia quietly build power and influence, wondering what they ever did to get so lucky as to have a rival apparently quite devoted to destroying itself.
In addition to being so diplomatically, we are also weakened economically. Dollars spent on bombs instead of education mean a dummer ‘Muricah, bro. Dollars spent on napalm instead of education mean a sicker America. And ask the Soviets what happens to a national economy when it is dominated by military spending. If you can find the Soviets, that is, which you can’t (hint, hint). National security in the modern era depends on economic power as well as on legions and hardware. In a very real sense, therefore, we are diminishing our capacity to provide sustained military security should we need it tomorrow, by bloating it out of all recognition today.
Finally, it is pretty impossible to argue that recent choices have made the America militarily stronger in even the most narrow sense. When all your land forces are bogged down in a worse than useless war, you’ve got a problem should a real crisis come ‘round the corner. When even a sycophant like Colin Powell can say that your Army is "broken", surely it is and worse. When your own intelligence agencies affirm that your actions in Mesopotamia are actually creating terrorists with a vengeance (and with a vengeance), you screwed up bad, pal. When nobody believes you anymore including your own public, and you have to pay exorbitant sums to get people otherwise headed to jail to join your ‘volunteer’ military, it’s no longer clear which is scarier – your army or theirs. Hey everybody, raise your hand right now if you feel safer today than before Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld got hold of US national security policy. Yeah, that’s what I thought.
All this obscenely exorbitant military spending represents one helluva lot of bad news, but the good news is that the entire scenario is unsustainable. One day, not long from now, Americans will have to make tough choices that they are avoiding (and therefore exacerbating) today. But in all probability, such choices may not actually wind up being so tough, after all.
We want our MTV, and we want our Social Security.
And if we have to sacrifice protecting Chiquita Brands’ exorbitant profits in Guatemala or Colombia to get them, we will.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
