What Sam Stone said. Cutting back military expenditure would be an excellent idea in the short term, and a hugely horrible one in the long term.
Now, cutting back on use of the military is another thing entirely. That, unfortunately, is the problem with having such a large, effective military machine: sometimes, some random asshole is going to take it for a spin.
Meh. If you didn’t have the problems of being a superpower, you’d have the problems of not being a superpower.
Like Bryan Adams. shudder
But, Canada doesn’t have any military clout. You have forces equal to ours man-for-man I’m sure, but you spend so little of your GDP on the military, comparatively, that all you can do with them is offer them in support of other countries’ military adventures. And that works out fine. Canada doesn’t need to “influence world events.” Nobody is afraid of Canada, and nobody hates you either; and it is for the latter reason that nobody ever attacks you.
Canada’s defense expenditure as a percentage of GDP is a paltry 1.14%. However, its absolute defense expenditure is CAN$22 billion, or more than all but ten other countries.
Since nations generally do not agree to fight their wars on a GDP-handicapped basis, I don’t think it matters how much Canada spends on its armed forces percentage-wise.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6476848121246965967# Here is the video of Ben Cohen and his Oreo cookie show of our budget. We do not have a reasonable amount of money in the military budget. We spend more than the rest of the world combined.
But that raises the question of how much more money other countries- the EU for example- would have to spend on their militaries if the Pax Americana wasn’t there. What if Britain and France had to guarantee that oil tankers would continue to move through the Strait of Hormuz, or that a belligerent Russia wouldn’t threaten to use force in Europe?? What if Japan were suddenly faced with a China that was contemplating invading Taiwan, or a North Korea poised to invade South Korea?
Britain is more than capable of ensuring that oil tankers continue to move through the Strait of Hormuz. Prior to 9/11, the RAF had as many aircraft permanently based in the Middle East as the US, including a significant number at Khasab.
Correction: There is a draft, it’s just not active at this moment. But there are still plenty of people around who were drafted to fight in a war, and we’re still dealing with some of the after-effects of that.
It’s the kind of thing a liberal college professor would say and be vilified for, “blaming” or even “hating” America. Interesting that it came from Buchanan.
Pfft. Professors. What do they know?