Obama’s Neocon Moment
In his State of the Union address, President Obama emphatically declared, “Anyone who tells you that America is in decline or that our influence has waned, doesn’t know what they’re talking about.” Obama sought to put to rest the notion that he is embracing American decline, as GOP candidates Romney, Gingrich and Santorum have accused him of doing. He likewise affirmed his belief in the country’s exceptional place in history.
In particular, this president believes, as his predecessor did, in the necessity of the U.S. military to act beyond its constitutionally mandated function, put out any fires that flare across the globe, and underwrite world security. I examine this in an op-ed published today on CNN.com:
The president sounded like a neoconservative when he declared during his recent State of the Union address that the United States was, and would remain, the world’s “indispensable nation.” Obama’s proposed Pentagon budget, released last week, affirmed his intention to retain most of the U.S. military’s current missions, even when they aren’t needed to safeguard the United States’ vital security interests.
Meanwhile, the Pentagon’s latest strategy document was carefully designed to convince allies and adversaries alike that the United States can continue to prosecute multiple armed conflicts in far-flung corners of the globe. Taken together, Obama’s strategy document, budget and State of the Union remarks articulate a coherent philosophy on military spending and global engagement that ought to hold a lot of appeal for the neoconservatives in the GOP.
But … our foreign policy leaders have consistently ignored … an argument that should have strong sway at a time of economic uncertainty: this country’s tax dollars can be better spent than on defending wealthy allies who are more than capable of protecting themselves.
This talk of the United States as the “indispensable nation” is straight out of the neoconservative playbook. They should have no quarrel with President Obama’s policies. And it is interesting that while Mitt Romney criticizes the president in this arena, Romney foreign-policy advisor, neoconservative stalwart Robert Kagan, has gotten the president’s attention.
Like Kagan and Romney, President Obama believes the world is better off with the United States doing for wealthy allies what they should be doing for themselves: securing their interests. President Obama talked of “fairness” in his State of the Union and a “shared sacrifice” among citizens in these trying economic times. But this sacrifice apparently does not extend beyond the borders of the United States. Under President Obama, as under a Romney presidency, the American taxpayer will continue to pay for the security of Europe and East Asia, and our troops will be saddled with a nearly endless list of missions. That isn’t fair, nor is it wise.
Logan vs. Kagan on Military Spending
In January, Robert Kagan of the Brookings Institution wrote an epic-length cover story for the Weekly Standard urging that not only should military spending not be cut, but that it should be increased.
I disagreed, and responded with an article in the April 2011 issue of the American Conservative that is now available online. Here’s the basic gist:
[Kagan's] argument centers on three claims. First, [he] alleges that America faces a dire threat environment in which a more restrained strategy would only amplify the dangers. Second, he argues that cutting military spending can’t solve our fiscal dilemma. And finally, he asserts that America simply cannot change its grand strategy, for we have always been interventionists.
Each claim is wrong: America could make substantial changes to its grand strategy that would save hundreds of billions of dollars per year without endangering our national security.
Read for yourself and see if you think I moved the ball forward at all. We debate, you decide.
P.S.: I have a polemical side, but the “Beltway brigadier” trope in the subhead was not mine — in case anyone at the, uhh, “National Institute for Civil Discourse” is concerned.
Robert Kagan for the Defense
The calls for cutting the federal budget continue to build in Congress as the new GOP members try to make good on their promise to rein in the deficit. And, right on time, the latest issue of the Weekly Standard features an article by Robert Kagan critiquing the chorus of calls for cuts to military spending.
I think Kagan’s critique is reasonably fair, certainly more so than others of the recent past. But his basic premise, that national security spending is unrelated to the national debt, simply is not true. At the The Skeptics, I address this:
It is of course true that entitlements and mandatory spending pose the greatest threat to the nation’s fiscal health, but $700+ billion [in defense spending] isn’t chump change. The question of what we should spend on the military ought to take into account the trade-offs, an argument that Dwight Eisenhower advanced in his farewell address just over 50 years ago, and that Charles Zakaib and I highlighted last week. (See also James Ledbetter’s discussion on this point.)
…
Actually, it is a question of fairness, but not the one that [Kagan] proposed. Because security is a core function of government (I think one of the only core functions of government), it would be a mistake to treat military spending as synonymous with spending on, say, farm subsidies. But Kagan’s writings presume that other countries’ governments do not — and should not — see their responsibilities in the same way. Kagan contends that American taxpayers should be responsible for the security of people living in Europe or East Asia or the Middle East. Or anywhere in the world, really… It simply isn’t fair to ask Americans to pay for something that other people should pay for themselves. For reference, the average American—every man, woman and child—spends two and a half times more on national security than the French or the British, five times more than citizens living in other NATO countries, and seven and a half times as much as the average Japanese.
Justin Logan is in the process of authoring a lengthier response for publication, but in the mean time click here to read the full post at The National Interest.
Actually We Aren’t Running the World
Bloggers have already noted the most glaring problems with Arthur Brooks, Edwin Feulner and Bill Kristol’s Monday Wall Street Journal op-ed, “Peace Doesn’t Keep Itself,” which worries that conservatives are figuring out that trying to run the world is not conservative.
The op-ed pretends that the fact that defense spending isn’t the largest cause of the deficit means it isn’t a cause of the deficit. It obscures the fact that we spend more on defense than we did in the Cold War by counting the defense budget as a portion of the economy without noting the latter has grown faster than the former.
So I can limit myself to less obvious angles. The first is that neoconservatives like Kristol are for increasing the defense budget no matter what. For them the military is basically an expression of national awesomeness (to use an academic term). Enemies and other details, like what we spend already, come up mainly in the justification phase.
In 2000, when U.S. defense spending was nearly $180 billion lower than today—excluding the wars and adjusting for inflation—Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan wanted to increase defense spending by $60 to $100 billion a year. After September 11, they called for a “large” and “substantial” increase. Having got that and then some, Kristol, at least, wants even more. The neoconservative appetite for military spending is insatiable because their militarism is.
Second, I want to pick on one point the op-ed makes because it is both wrong and widely believed: “Global prosperity requires commerce and trade, and this requires peace. But the peace does not keep itself.”
Obama, American Nationalism, and the Weird Anti-Materialism of the Foreign Policy Elite
Matt Yglesias puts down the bloody shirt long enough to make the modest-on-its-face claim that “actions, not words, will clarify Obama’s foreign policy.” I don’t think that’s quite right.
In one sense, of course, it is. For the bean counters among us, the outcomes are the real metric: whether the United States remains the sole superpower on the planet; whether a diplomatic resolution can be reached with Iran; whether Obama can (assuming he has has any intention to) get our military out of Iraq; whether his spun-like-cotton-candy Afghanistan policy can stabilize that sorry land — these are the things we’ll be looking at.
But the more important thing in the short term for Obama is probably to slake the nearly-unquenchable thirst of the David Brookses of the world — and probably the American people — to have their identities stroked. To take the most recent example, Brooks, William Kristol, Robert Kagan, and the Foreign Policy Elite of whom they are avatars were in desperate need of a cold shower and a trip to the nearest confessional after Obama indulged them by unsheathing the Mighty and Awesome Totem of American nationalism — before a crowd of peacey Norwegians no less. To take another example, witness the veritable panic, the hysterical and fluttering response to the imaginary Obama “apology tour” that didn’t exist and had no affect on anything in any event.
Indeed the Foreign Policy Elite is so captivated by the rhetoric, imagery, and perhaps most importantly the identity surrounding U.S. foreign policy it hardly has time to think seriously about the material realities. There are of course examples where analysts simply misrepresent material reality — witness this ridiculous characterization of Obama’s boost in defense spending as an “assault” on the defense budget — but in general the foreign policy commentariat seems more interested in how American power makes them feel than it is on the outcomes it produces. And witness the frenzy over the Oslo speech, the “apology tour” claptrap, or the whining about Obama’s restraint from calling on the Iranian people to start a revolution.
Charles Krauthammer, in a recent essay, went so far in the anti-materialist direction to claim that “decline is a choice.” “Decline — or continued ascendancy — is in our hands.” Of course, it isn’t always a choice, says Krauthammer. The British had it coming, for example, but the crucial factors in Krauthammer’s telling weren’t imperial overextension and the relative waning of its latent power but rather “the civilizational suicide that was the two world wars, and the consequent physical and psychological exhaustion.” Thus, nations decline in large part because of sapped will — perhaps this would be the foreign policy equivalent of the “mental recession” we heard about a year ago. If this is right, keeping a careful eye on will-sapping things is more than a parlor game.
But of course Krauthammer’s charge that Obama is willfully precipitating American decline cannot be substantiated by reference to material factors, so it’s perhaps no coincidence that he takes aim primarily at Obama’s “demolition of the moral foundations of American dominance.” Krauthammer’s central piece of evidence is telling:
In Strasbourg, President Obama was asked about American exceptionalism. His answer? “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.” Interesting response. Because if everyone is exceptional, no one is.
Reading this, I was reminded of Conor Cruise O’Brien’s observation that
Ideally those responsible for international affairs ought to be able to understand and moderate the holy nationalism of their own country and to discern, even when disguised, the operations and limits of holy nationalism in rival countries as well as in third-party countries.
Unfortunately this may be too much to hope for. There are serious cognitive difficulties involved. Any nationalism inherently finds it hard to understand any other nationalism or even to want to understand it. This is particularly true of holy nationalism. Rejection of the other is part of the holiness.
All of this is enough to make you wonder then — if Obama wanted to, could he just keep the opinion columnists — and the American people — happy with a regular genuflection at the altar of American nationalism rather than by providing them with actual wars and actual crusading? Would he if he could?
Our ‘Reassured’ Allies
Justin Logan beat me to the punch, but Robert Kagan and Dan Blumenthal’s op-ed in the Washington Post warrants more than just one comment. Kagan and Blumenthal fret that the Obama administration’s policy of “strategic reassurance” is sure to fail. Aimed at encouraging Russia and China, especially, to cooperate with the United States in dealing with a number of common threats, the two predict that the policy will succeed only in making “American allies nervous.”
Maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad thing. Not that we should go around making our allies nervous just for the heck of it, but I worry that our allies have grown, well, too comfortable with the current state of affairs in which American taxpayers and American troops bear a disproportionate share of the costs of securing global peace and prosperity.
And who can blame them? From the perspective of our allies in East Asia (chiefly the Japanese and the South Koreans), and for the Europeans tucked safely within NATO, getting the Americans to pay the costs, and assume the risks, associated with policing the world is a pretty good gig.
The same Robert Kagan made this point explicitly, if somewhat crudely, in his book Of Paradise and Power, when he cast the United States in the heroic role as sheriff, while our wealthy allies were portrayed as cowardly, sniveling townspeople, or, worse, saloon keepers who benefited from the protection of the Americans while selling booze to the bad guys.
For at least two decades, we have adopted a strategy designed to comfort our allies. Our goal has been to discourage them from taking prudent steps to defend themselves. Many Americans are beginning to appreciate just how short-sighted this policy was, and is. Such military capabilities might have proved useful in Afghanistan, for example, and they might ultimately serve a purpose in checking Russian and Chinese ambitions, which would be particularly important if these two countries prove as aggressive as Kagan and Blumenthal claim.
Instead, we have a group of militarily weak and comfortable allies who spend a fraction of what Americans spend on defense, and who can muster political will with respect to foreign policy only when it entails criticizing the United States for not doing enough. In other words, we are reaping what we sowed.
Trying Harder in Afghanistan
President Obama today gave a statement about his strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan. The first thing to say here is that, according to those who attended a White House briefing, the strategy is not complete: the goals are not defined.
Second, there seems to be a gap between rhetoric and reality. On the one hand, the White House is rhetorically embracing the idea that, at least as far as Afghanistan is concerned, the problem is insufficient U.S. effort. That is consistent with what Obama has said all along: that we are failing in Afghanistan because U.S. efforts there are starved of resources that went to Iraq.
So we need more trainers for the Afghan army (a brigade from the 82nd Airborne gets that job), more combat troops (although only the 17,000 already committed), more U.S. government civilians to aid local development, and more drug eradication (on the folly of this, read Ted Carpenter and David Rittgers). As an enthusiastic Robert Kagan points out, this seems to be a stronger embrace of the nation-building strategy. The partial departure is the willingness to try to buy off elements of the Taliban.
On the other hand, the trainers being sent were requested long ago, and the troop increase is not new. The other shifts are minor. So, in terms of action, little has changed. There seems be a compromise here between the so-called minimalists and maximalists, which caused essentially a stalemate.
If you agree that the trouble in Afghanistan is that we weren’t trying hard enough, you should wonder why we aren’t trying even harder — doubling down on troops and effort, not just saying so. If you think, as I do, that we need a new strategy of radically reduced objectives, you have the opposite concern.
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