Is Pat Buchanan Right? (America's Problems Due to American Empire)

Great Debates
1

Buchanan has a unique worldview…one which I think is correct. Basically, the USA is in trouble because we :

  1. Maintain military forces around the world. This drain on the treasury is winning us few friends and many enemies
  2. constantly get involved with conflicts that have no relevance to the USA or its citizens
  3. interfere in the muslim world, making enemies (“they are here because we are there”)
    Buchanan points out that the USA was better off when we were not a world power- Washington’s famous injunction against “foreign intanglements” is something that Buchanan constantly invokes.
    I belive that he is right-our military commitments are destroying us. Plus, we are now economically exhausted-we have reached our borrowing limits, and our dying industrial structure cannot pay the taxes to support our world empire.
    Do you accept this? If not, why not?:confused:
2

While I don’t agree with him on everything, on these points he is spot on… America’s problems are directly related to a aggressive, over-extended military and heavy involvement in the Middle East… supporting dictators and inspiring hatred.

A big part of this is blind, unyielding support for Israel no matter what they do.

3

ralph124c - With such a broad OP, you are likely going to get a thousand"The US is in trouble because they [INSERT IDEOLOGICAL STATEMENT HERE]."

For example:

or

The US is in trouble because there are too many/too few illegal immigrants.
The US is in trouble because our businesses are regulated too much/not enough.
The US is in trouble because of gay marriage / marriage isn’t gay enough.

etc, etc

What sort of “trouble” is the United States currently in, exactly? Does our current economic troubles have anything to do with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan or our ongoing military presence elsewhere in the world? What about the oil spill in the Gulf? What does a perfect, not in trouble America look like?

Personally, I believe the problem with America is that we are a country full of entitled, stupid people. No one sits down to look at problems to try and figure out how to solve them. We encourage our best and brightest to become lawyers and investment bankers and hedge fund managers because it’s easier to push numbers around a spreadsheet than it is to actually invent stuff.

It’s a country full of people who are all living above their means or their contribution because they all think they deserve it.

4

Pat Buchanan discovers the pitfalls of imperialism, about one hundred years too late.

5

Whatever shall we do with all these useless people?

6

I think one flaw with this line of thinking is that it assumes things would automatically be BETTER if we did mind our own business so to speak.

For example, how would our economy (and the worlds for that matter) fair if the Middle East region had suffered or continued to suffer a REAL balls to walls kinda war. One where significant fractions of oil producing capacity was not available. The WORLD runs on CHEAP, DEPENDABLE oil.

7

Well, it is not a theory that is original with Pat Buchanan, an Anti-Semite, but it is okay when you are a Republican.

Yes, the US is over-extended.

8

Actually, about fifty years too late as I think he has been quite consistent in his private beliefs for decades. In public of course he worked for Nixon, who was as screwed up as a soup sandwich.

9

Yes, he’s quite right. By contrast, Rachel Maddow is left.

I hope that clears it up.

10

Considering that they are horribly expensive, and how our militarism distorts our economy I’d say yes, they do have something to do with our economic problems. We could use an extra trillion-plus dollars about now.

11

Remarkable how many basic political questions were decided by the 1847 War. Then America went for empire and never really turned back.

12

The problem is that somebody is going to be a world power. It was fine when the United States was isolationist back around 1900 - we could live in a world dominated by the British Empire. But did we want to live in a world dominated by Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, or the People’s Republic of China?

13

The military budget is about 650 billion or so. That really isn’t ‘that much’. Social security is roughly the same while the combination of medicare, medicaid, VA & SCHIP is also close to 650 billion.

So the military isn’t bankrupting us, it is barely 3-4% of GDP. I don’t agree with that part. The military makes up maybe 1/5 of the federal budget.

Our military does (from my understanding) win us some friends though. South Korea, Israel, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, etc. seem like they appreciate our military aid and assistance. Or at least did at one point.

Like it or not, we are involved in the muslim world because of energy. Until the world kicks oil we pretty much are going to be involved in politics in the region.

Does Buchanan talk about the cold war? Does he feel US interventions during the cold war were good or bad? I don’t know his views on that subject.

14

I’ve heard Buchanan described as a paleoconservative, which in context I would take to mean that he decries America becoming a defacto empire, while the neoconservative movement actively seeks to embrace such a position.

After World War Two, isolationism just wasn’t an option anymore. It was either let the Soviet Union dominate Europe and much of the post-colonial world, or resist by the Cold War. After four decades of such policy, it would have taken a deliberate winding down of the US international role after 1990 to go back to the old ideal of the republic that minds its own business, stays at home and lives in peace unless overtly attacked. But empires almost never contract gracefully.

I’ve gone on record on this board several times comparing the United States’ path to the path Rome took from republic to empire, and I’m hardly unique in making that analogy.

15

http://www.alternet.org/world/141071/spending_%24102_billion_a_year_on_800_worldwide_military_bases_is_bankrupting_the_country/
We have over 800 bases around the world. We waste over 100 billion a year, year after year on maintaining them. Then we have the military /industrial complex looting the country like vampires. We have the CIA and many other agencies eating billions more. We are pouring money into Iraq, and Afghanistan while Bush cut taxes. it would be silly to pretend that the military isn’t sucking us dry.

16

No, he’s not right. America’s military amounts to a few percentage points of GDP. Foreign policy isn’t about making friends, it’s about gaining allies. That requires concrete commitments, which involves ‘foreign entanglements’, and sometimes it involves making some people mad.

As a Canadian, let me tell you that being liked is all well and good - but it doesn’t translate into influence. And it doesn’t keep enemies from wanting to kill you. Canada is a very well respected country, and our people are generally well liked around the world. But the only time were have been relevant and actually been able to influence world events to our liking was when he was the military clout to back up our ideals, and the military clout to offer allies something of real value in exchange for their support.

America’s ‘problem’, if it has one other than the creeping entitlement mentality common to all western nations these days, is that it’s now facing competition. America was the big winner in the 20th century because America was militarily isolated, avoided the ravages of war, and discovered free markets and capitalism and absorbed it into its culture long before most other countries did. So while the Soviet Union and China and India and the rest of Asia and much of Europe frittered away the century with economically destructive forays into Communism, Socialism, and Fascism, America kept becoming more and more productive.

Then the world changed. The crises of the 1970’s caused reform movements to spring up around the world. Country after country started liberalizing and freeing markets, and world economic growth began to explode. South Korea, Singapore, India, and eventually China turned to market economies to deliver what central planning couldn’t. The Soviet Union fell.

It’s not that America fell back - it’s that everyone else caught up. So now there’s competition. Americans have to compete in a global economy. They aren’t sheltered by their own superiority any more. In some areas, America has continued to lead the world. In others, America has lost its competitive advantage.

But so long as the American government keeps propping up companies that should be allowed to die, keeps turning to protectionism as an answer to lack of competitiveness, and maintains and expands laws that make it hard for capital for form and for businesses to flourish and grow, America will have an increasingly hard time competing. Other countries are learning that low regulations and low taxes ultimately results in stronger economies, but America seems headed in the wrong direction.

If that trend continues, America will decline. But if it doesn’t, America still has all the advantages it had in the 20th century - lots of space, isolation from enemies, plenty of resources, and a large, educated population. There’s no reason it can’t continue to lead the world in prosperity and influence. The book on the 21st century hasn’t been written yet.

17

The “bases” in that article were expanded embassy complexes, not military bases, which means that the author is contradicting himself. The DoD doesn’t pay for State Department projects.

18

4% of GDP over 50 years is a lot of cash, compound interest and all that.

The cumulative effects would be pretty large. The question is whether that expenditure has been offset by the benefits, rather than that cost being ‘minor’.

Otara

19

Other than the fact that Congress is unwilling, what exactly is stopping us from borrowing more? If interest rates were high, you could make the case that we had reached some sort of limit. But the US government borrowing money right now is incredibly cheap, and inflation is near zero. These things indicate that we are no where near our limits for borrowing at the moment. People are still quite willing to lend the US money.

20

But America’s competitors have traditionally spent 2-4% of GDP on the military as well, so if you’re trying to look at competitiveness, you have to look at the difference.

And Keynesians who believe in stimulus are sure quick to forget that military spending is ‘stimulus’ spending as well. The salaries go to Americans, the equipment is built by American companies. Only a small percentage of that spending winds up in the hands of foreigners.

In fact, if you believe in stimulus spending and multipliers and all that, it’s pretty hard to argue that American military spending has cost America any competitiveness at all, because as spending goes, it’s just about as good as it gets in terms of stimulus. The pay goes to young people who don’t make much and generally spend it all and don’t save. A lot of the money goes into R&D, much of which reflects back on civilian industry. GPS, anyone? DARPA, which was the incubator for the internet, was a military budgeted program. Foreign competitors have complained that Boeing and Lockheed and Rockwell and a bunch of other companies with domestic products get to subsidize their products by having the military pay for R&D.

Now, I don’t believe that Keynesian spending is a good thing, and I think the ‘multiplier’ is less than one in all likelihood. But even if it’s only .8 (which some research has shown with regards to military spending), then that means that 80% of the money spent is recovered. So the cost to the country is 20% of the 1.5-3% of GDP difference between America’s military budget and that of other major powers. It’s hard to argue that that’s the key difference - especially when other government agencies spend huge gobs of money for no apparent benefit at all.

For example, the Department of Education has an annual budget of somewhere near 50 billion dollars, and educational scores have declined since the DOE was formed. Why not blame them first?