I think the moral of that story is the US needs to stop spending so much money on their military.
Um…how do you figure that? Because several Europeans aren’t spending enough to defend themselves we should do the same? At a time when China is increasing their spending and capabilities every year and Russia is pushing things everywhere, we should drop our spending? How does that logic make sense to you?
Goal is 2%. We spend well over that. We spend too much.
Because we have commitments besides NATO.
Putin’s worldview seems to have evolved from uneasy coexistence with Western democracy, to the belief today that it represents an existential threat to his survival. Unlike the Brezhnev, Putin isn’t aiming for detente; he’s aiming to completely undermine democracies, because the idea of democracy and the rule of law are perceived threats.
As author and Yale professor Timothy Snyder explains, people in Putin’s Russia don’t really have much of a future. People adapt and accept this because they are told that nobody else outside of Russia has much of a future either, and there are several themes that his propaganda machine uses to reinforce this message to his people.
The most prominent and effective theme is stoking racial strife and ethnic tensions. Russian propaganda characterizes Europe as a place of lawlessness whose once calm and tranquil communities have been overrun by violent and resource-sucking Muslim hordes. Russian media play up similar differences between the white conservative majority in the United States on one hand, and African Americans and Latinos on the other. They convince Russians that, yes, they might have it bad, but at least they no longer have problems with visible minorities now that Putin has laid down law and order. Russia is using propaganda on one hand, and on the other hand, it is using economic leverage as a supplier of energy to Eastern Europe. They can create economic chaos by choking off energy supplies, and then inflame ethnic tensions to justify political and military intervention. This is a reality throughout Eastern Europe, from Crimea to Bosnia.
Russia does not have to invade a democracy to defeat it; he just has to fuck it up beyond repair. Putin doesn’t necessarily want to occupy our house, he just wants to unleash his hungry termites and watch as they chew it to pieces. Putin and his oligarchs can identify political factions that might be receptive to his support - typically hard right wing conservatives with high susceptibility to corruption - and he offers them the equivalent of political heroin. These extremists use what Putin knows about destroying democratic institutions and public faith in democratic governments, and Putin uses them to carry out his dirty work of crippling an adversary from within.
Pay very careful attention to what’s happening right now in this country: take note of how Putin has befriended the alt-right, and how Russian oligarchs already have established financial ties with American plutocrats like the Mercers and other right wing benefactors. There are already established links between Russia and the NRA. The behavior of the right wing is not like that of Reagan’s Republican party; it’s behavior is more like Recep Erdogan’s AKP, or Victor Orban’s Fidesz party, blinding uniting behind an autocrat even when they probably realize the toll he’s taking on the country.
The real point, however, is that there’s a common thread: Putin is undermining all democracy because he views it as a threat, and the bigger and more powerful the threat, the more motivated he is to destabilize it and watch it destroy itself. Putin’s foreign policy may not be congruent to Hitler’s Lebensraum, but I think his ideal is to create a kind of political no-man’s land, where he clears Europe of Western style democracy and turns it into a geopolitical field of weeds, a space devoid of democracy as we know it and thus left alone, save for the occasional weeding that needs to be done from time to time. By accepting Putin’s aggression, by not pushing back and establishing boundaries, we’re allowing the end of global democracy, which includes ours.
It’s a possible argument. Maybe two percent is too high. Perhaps NATO is still secure with the members of it spending less.
It’s also hard to justify our current level of military spending as a response to Chinese and Russian spending. The Chinese military budget is $228,000,000,000. The Russian military budget is $66,000,000,000. The American military budget is $610,000,000,000. If anything, an objective observer might say that our military spending is driving theirs up.
I’m not sure Putin has got quite such an overarching longterm masterplan (he’s quite happy with democracies that can be manipulated into doing things that would favour Russia, rather than reinstalling monolithic dictatorial control, Soviet style, which would be rather expensive in all sorts of ways). It’s more that he wants to undermine the existing security structures with a view to disrupting western politics enough to minimise the threat to his way of running Russia, and to make it possible for him to portray himself to Russians as reasserting their special place in the world vis-a-vis wicked NATO and all the rest of it.
But that does involve all the techniques and processes that Asahi outlines. The risk is that inadvertently, rather like Kaiser Wilhelm, he will miscalculate once he really manages to disrupt the international system we have, and it’ll all turn out to be a Pandora’s Box. For one thing, I’d be nervous about Orban, who apart from everything else occasionally makes noises about being responsible for the remaining Hungarian communities in Romania, and once that sort of thing starts up again, who knows where it might end?
I can’t dismiss this point entirely, but the vast difference between those numbers is reflected in the fact that they are measured in nominal dollars, not PPP.
Here is an article that shows that if you measure in purchasing power, China’s true budget is more like $430 billion, and Russia more like $160 billion. One aspect of this I find fascinating is how they can make their investments go so much further than ours… damned contractors.
Yeah, to defense contractors with lobbyists and PACs.
Besides the excellent point Ravenman brings up there is another factor. Neither Russia nor China has the global commitments or posture that the US does. That is why it’s necessary for the US to spend more. As I noted earlier, we have commitments beyond NATO…it’s merely one of the defensive alliances we are in, and it’s only a small part of the world from our perspective. We also have to protect our interests in the various oceans of the world, Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Central and South America as well as North America. China is trying to become a regional hegemon and be able to project power in the East and South China seas region, Indian Ocean and now to the coast of East Africa…and this is reflected in their widening defense budget.
Another point, besides the PPP one Ravenman is making is…we don’t actually know what, exactly, it’s spending really is. Just like we can’t trust their economics data we can’t really trust what they make available wrt their budget. We know that they spend more than what they say on defense because they have a large black budget for internal military security aside from what they show…and the same is almost certainly true for their defense budget as a whole.
Russia certainly doesn’t have the economy to keep up. They are a threat mostly because they are aggressive and also because they have all that old legacy Soviet equipment. And, of course, they have a well established and capable military and industrial complex that is highly sophisticated. Also, as noted, they are simply one of many regions/threats that the US is dealing with.
Well, maybe it’s time to ask yourself why the United States is the outlier.
Well, it’s not a question I really need to ask since it’s been policy for decades and is just a continuation of that policy. I guess the real question to ask is…does the US still need to have global commitments? Which is part of the overarching question of ‘Is NATO obsolete?’ from the US perspective.
Now, I freely admit that there’s an element of circular reasoning here, but the U.S. has significant security commitments to Europe, Northeast Asia, and the Mid-East/Southwest Asia. No other country, friendly or adversary, has such interests. Further, for our adversaries, they are basically playing the home game in a war, while we are playing the away game. It makes perfect sense that it is most costly to maintain a military that is designed to project force 7,000 miles away, as compared to the cost of a military that for the most part must only defend a country’s borders.
Now, if you want to make the argument that having such a large military is an inducement to being involved in all these corners of the world, I can’t quibble with that. If you want to make the case that if we backed out of NATO, we could save a lot of money, I agree that is true as far as that statement goes. If you argue that our extraordinary military capabilities spur our adversaries to spend more, I’d say, of course!
But it seems pretty clear, that if you want the U.S. to maintain its level of commitments around the world, you’re going to spend a lot on our military. And if you want to cut our military in half, we are probably going to have to give up all commitments in the Mid-East/Southwest Asia, and all but token forces in Europe and Asia. I don’t think that’s a very good trade-off.
I’m not claiming I have a definitive answer. But I’m saying that it’s not clear that the correct response to “America is spending a higher percentage on defense than European countries are” is “European countries should be spending more.” You can’t dismiss out of hand the alternative that the correct response might be “America is spending too much.”
But the alternative explanation ignores the fact that the U.S. has military commitments that no other European nation has.
It’s sort of like saying, “The average Tesla costs $80,000. The average Toyota costs $35,000. Do Teslas cost too much, or Toyotas cost too little?” The most likely answer is that both cars are priced appropriately for what they are.
Of course, all European NATO nations have agreed that they spend too little, so there’s that as well.
You spend what you need to spend based on your requirements. Many European countries spend too little because their military capabilities don’t meet their basic security requirements. Specifically, Germany’s military is not able to fulfill it’s basic requirements to meet it’s commitments to NATO. It’s not the only one, but it’s the largest economy. It’s the actual reason why in the last 2 years the Germans have increased their military budget. It had, at one time, fallen to less than 1%…now it’s something like 1.19% of GDP and they plan to expand it again over the next 10 years.
The US spends what it needs to meet it’s requirements, which are global, encompassing Europe but also many other regions. Should the US have global commitments? That’s the real question. If we assume that the current requirements, one of which is the sub-topic of this thread, then we are spending the appropriate amount…we might even have been spending too little, as we’ve stretched our military quite a bit. Change the requirements and you can lower the price. Thus…Is NATO obsolete? from a US perspective because we should be cutting our military budget? No? Ok, then should the US defend Japan as part of our treaty commitments? Should the US do freedom of navigation exercises to keep powers such as the Chinese in check? Defend South Korea? Taiwan? Assist allies in Australia? Provide military assistance in Africa? How about the Middle East? South East Asia? India and the IO? Central and South America? South and East China Seas. etc etc…
If you are going to discuss cutting the budget then you have to discuss which of those myriad commitments (and this was a non-exhaustive list) we can and should cut…and what you base that assessment that we can cut those commitments loose on. It’s what always drives me nuts in these discussions. It’s not an apples to apples comparison to compare the US military budget to even the next 7 or 9 or whatever countries, since all of those countries are part of the US commitment in one way or another, while each of those countries generally has very locally oriented or at most regionally based commitments. I’m fine with saying we pay too much, but then I want to see what the new requirements are. Because saying we shall pay less but maintain the same requirements is kind of what we’ve been doing, and it’s stretched up almost to the breaking point. I also don’t see how you can justify staying in NATO, say, while saying to Japan or South Korea or Taiwan or our myriad other allies that they are on their own and need to fend for themselves now. Same as I don’t see we can tell NATO to fend for themselves while defending select others.
The USSR used to be one of the two most important countries on the planet. After the fall of Communism, that is no longer true. If Putin convinces his people that he is making Russia Great Again, he doesn’t have to worry about democracy internally since he will have all the support he needs especially as he has control of the media.
Destabilizing democracies is a means of weakening the West so that it does not object to his expansionist goals. The Communists used useful idiots on the left, Putin uses useful idiots on the right just as you listed. He is very good at it, but he did used to run the KGB.
So Putin’s hatred of democracy is a means to an end, the end being expansion.
Our global commitments have maintained peace, relatively speaking, for over 60 years. That’s something we should retreat from only with great care. I don’t know what the right amount is, but defense is a lot cheaper than war.
Yeah, too bad we are spending an absolute shit-pot of money on never-ending wars right now (well, technically, one has “finished”).
*According to a Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report published in October 2007, the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan could cost taxpayers a total of $2.4 trillion by 2017 when counting the huge interest costs because combat is being financed with borrowed money. *
I’d hazard a guess that Voyager (and probably everyone else in this thread) could have written that Wiki article. The huge costs of the Iraqi war have been discussed to death around here. I guess the question for you is, does a fucked up military intervention justify having the US back out of all it’s military commitments and cut it’s budget to the bone? To the point being raised in what you quoted, does the cost of Iraq balance out the cost of preventing WWIII? Because it’s one of those good with the bad thingies…we have a powerful military. It obviously can be hijacked to do bad things, or at least those in charge can use it in bad ways. Does that bad over ride the good it’s done throughout the decades? Iraq wasn’t the only hijack of course…but then NATO isn’t the only good. What, IYOH is the balance point? Obviously you wanted to make a statement about how stupid and expensive Iraq was, and you are correct…but as with many things there are two sides to that coin.