Let’s bear in mind that a “concert of powers” such as Lind proposes almost certainly would not be a formal institution like the UN or NATO or the European Union. It’s something we could achieve by gradual stages of rapprochement with powers we’re on uneasy terms with now. Improved relations would be formalized in a whole series of bilateral treaties, not just one multilateral treaty.
I don’t get it. How is demanding democracy as a condition of entry more “arrogant” than demanding a certain standards of living as a condition of entry?
Moreover, making either demand isn’t the same as “forcing” them to do anything.
Actually, they formed an alliance two years ago.
The problem with a ‘concert of powers’ is that too many countries will talk that talk, but be totally unwilling to pony up in lives and treasure to pay for it. Look at NATO - NATO has worked about as well as any alliance of this sort can be expected to, but NATO countries haven’t been keeping their commitments and funding levels for most militaries outside the U.S. are nowhere near what they should be. Canada, for example, has until recently been spending about 1/3 to 1/4 of what it should to keep up with its NATO commitments plus its other military commitments.
A lot of countries that have agreed to cooperate in Afghanistan have put conditions on their involvement that keeps their own troops out of harm’s way (with notable exceptions such as Canada). And here in Canada, there is fairly strong opposition to our involvement in Afghanistan, even though we have lost less than 50 soldiers in the conflict. I don’t think you could get the people in Canada, France, Germany, and some of the other countries in question to contribute significantly more to some new alliance.
That said, I would love to see a new alliance of democracies, with hard standards for human rights and political freedom as a condition of joining. The biggest problem with the U.N. is that the very feature that was valuable during the cold war (giving your enemies equal say, and creating a forum for every country on the planet to take part) has become a major liability. The U.N. is corrupt, ineffectual, and these days is mostly used as a vehicle for America and Israel bashing or giving credibility and gravitas to 3rd world dictators who deserve neither.
But in the end, you have to get other countries to pony up the people and money, and that’s just not going to happen. I don’t think there’s a country on the ‘recommended allies’ list that is willing to double its military budget, which is probably what it would take for non-US militaries to develop a significant ability to project power around the globe.
The fact is, a lot of these countries bitch and complain about U.S. hegemony, but the only reason the U.S. is in that position is because rhetoric aside, these countries were more than happy to let the U.S. carry the military burden, allowing them to spend their money on more social programs.
You seem to be suggesting that the government of Stalin, for example, was more deserving of the “equal say” or “credibility and gravitas” provided by UN membership than those of present-day third-world dictators. How you figure?
Yeah, any global assembly of nations is going to end up bestowing the stamp of legitimate sovereignty upon some brutal thugs who arguably aren’t entitled to it. But I don’t really see that being more of a problem today than it was in the days of Stalin or Mao.
“The only reason”? I think you’ll have to back that up. The OP’s linked article (which as the OP notes was written by the decidedly non-radical Michael Lind, and published in the decidedly non-liberal National Interest) asserts very definitely that at least one of the reasons the US attained sole-hegemon status was that it deliberately undermined attempts by its potential rivals to challenge it.
If you’re arguing against that premise, let’s see your cites.
Duh! Up to now, the U.S. hasn’t wanted them to. If we step up to the plate and do all the heavy lifting and mix all the metaphors in response to every threat, why should they spend the kind of money a first-rate military establishment would cost?
The primary purpose of the U.N. during the cold war was the prevention of nuclear war. Thus, it was set up in a way that specifically created a deadlock on the security council of any measures that threatened one side or the other, while allowing the general membership to have a voice on the world stage. Because the Soviets and the U.S. were roughly equal in stature, the rules were set up to allow any country to join so that the Soviets could have their allies and the U.S. theirs.
Today, that feature of the U.N. is still creating the paralysis that was valuable during the cold war. Only now, that’s not so desirable. If you want positive action to be taken, the U.N.'s not very good at it. If you want a forum for banging your shoe and yelling at your enemies, it works wonders. That may have had value as an escape valve during the cold war - now it’s more likely to inflame tensions around the world and allow dictators to rise in stature.
The U.N. does some good work, but it’s generally not done in the Security Council. U.N. organizations like Unicef, the U.N. Population Council, the IAEA, and the IPCC are valuable and have made decent contributions to the world. But the General Assembly and the Security Council are increasingly irrelevant and counter-productive to the west, and U.N. peacekeeping is a joke. The people on this board will go absolutely apeshit over Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo Bay, but in the meantime U.N. peacekeepers around the world are routinely caught carrying out extortion, taking kickbacks from warlords, torturing people, and even taking part in the slave trade.
In the Middle East, the Israelis joke about when they know that an attack is going to come from their enemies - the U.N. blue helmets will fade away first. You know, the guys who are supposed to prevent conflict, who are supposed to act as the barrier between the two sides. All they do is buy Israel’s enemies time to re-arm and re-group, and then when the going gets tough, they bug out. Since everyone knows it, they are completely useless.
The U.N. oil-for-food program, set up to help Iraqis get food and other necessities without the money going to their dictator, was completely corrupt and actually diverted money to the dictator at the expense of the people.
The U.N., because it’s anwerable to everyone, is really answerable to no one. As a result, it has become more and more corrupt over the years, more and more secretive.
It was a problem then as well, but the benefit (helping prevent a global holocaust) was worth the cost. Absent that major benefit, all we’re left with are the costs.
I never said that. In fact, I was going to continue my post and say that American money and power displaced the others. And America wanted it that way. But regardless of how we got here, the fact is that most of these countries have pathetic military budgets, and the money that once went into the military has now been fully committed to social programs and therefore largely irretrievable. France, for example, has a military that is but a hollow shell of what it was 20 years ago. And yet, it has massive budget deficits and sky-high taxes. It’s not about to cough up another 4% of GDP to gain some kind of equal footing with the U.S. It just isn’t going to happen. And as long as the U.S. is providing the vast bulk of the money, weapons, and fighting men, it’s going to demand to do things its way.
Because then you’re not saying that democracy is the only way to do achieve those standards of living.
Yes, you do have a point there.
I guess I skipped over the idea that what I have in mind for this Concert is serving humanitarian purposes, to which end those countries that have citizens not fearing for their lives or unduly suffering can band together to help other countries not have citizens fearing for their lives or unduly suffering. My bad, I should have been clearer.
Well, that’s just the problem. We won’t be able to afford that indefinitely.
Why not? The U.S. currently spends 3.9% of GDP on defense. That’s not a particularly high number, historically. In fact, it’s only been lower than that in 8 years since the start of WWII. It’s not even particularly high for the modern era. In fact, it’s less than half the average from the start of WWII to today.
For some perspective:
(all numbers as % of GDP)
Current spending, FY2006: 3.9%
Average spending on military from start of WWII to today: 8.1%
Average spending during the cold war period, 1948-1991: 7.3%
Average spending during the 1990’s: 4%
Average spending during WWII: 32.5%
Average spending during Korean War: 13.5%
Average spending during main part of Vietnam war, 1968-1974: 7.4%
Average spending since 9/11: 3.6%
Current spending hasn’t even climbed back up to the 1990’s average, and those were the Clinton years with the ‘Peace Dividend’. The U.S. Army is hundreds of thousands of men smaller today than it was in 1992.
Not only could the U.S. sustain this spending indefinitely, it could double it and sustain THAT indefinitely, since that would simply represent the spending levels during the 40+ years of the cold war.
For one thing, because that level of spending is getting us into a whopping federal budget deficit. To sustain it indefinitely we would have to raise taxes, which the current Admin won’t do and any future admin will find politically difficult.
For another, it’s not just a matter of money. We don’t have the number of troops to sustain or expand our present role, and you can forget about bringing back the draft; raising taxes would be politically easy by comparison. (We could rely on mercenary forces like Blackwater but that’s always dangerous, or so said Machiavelli.)
Not true either. The 2006 Federal deficit came in at 1.9% of GDP. That’s lower than the deficit in all but five of the last 30 years. It’s also lower than the average of the last 30 years, which is 2.6%. It’s pretty clar that a 1.9% deficit is manageable pretty much indefinitely.
Of course, there are increased expenses from Social Security and Medicare coming up that will stress the budget, but if the defense issues are serious enough, the money can be found elsewhere. The federal budget is incredibly bloated. The Department of Education alone spends about a sixth of the entire military budget, and you could kill the whole thing and education would probably improve. Taxes are also much lower than in most industrial nations. The U.S. simply has enough economic ‘headroom’ to be able to afford far more military spending if the need is great enough.
The biggest problem for the military right now is that the economy is so strong that people don’t see the military as an opportunity to get ahead as they used to. If the economy gets weaker, you’ll see recruitment go up. And you can always find the right incentives to increase recruitment. Increased salary, benefits, signing bonuses, whatever. Raise the price, and the supply will follow. How they’d have to raise it, I don’t know.
Also, if the American People see the need for the military more so than they do now, recruitment will go up.
But nobody is expecting that we’re actually going to have a 1.9%-of-GDP deficit indefinitely. Not even the current Administration. As OMBWatch notes,
Our current fiscal policy is widely agreed to be unsustainable, e.g. in the US Government Accountability Office’s Long-Term Fiscal Outlook report (pdf).
“Finding the money elsewhere” is a comforting-sounding vague phrase that in actual practice can have severe political costs, though. Your suggestions for where we might actually find the money are not particularly reassuring:
Not according to the 2006 federal budget proposal figures. There the 2006 DoEd budget was a mere $56 billion, compared to the $419 billion budget of the Department of Defense. So the DoEd budget was less than one-seventh of the budget for the DoD alone.
And that doesn’t even take into account the other spending for the military, such as the discretionary spending that actually funds the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (which annually exceeds the entire DoD budget).
Gee, all along the fiscal conservatives have been telling us that we can’t afford to increase taxes—or even have to cut taxes—because our economic strength relies on our comparatively low-tax environment. Now suddenly higher taxes are being presented as available “headroom” for increases in military spending?
:eek: :eek: :eek: :eek: Um, Sam, you’re saying here that what the US military needs to overcome its recruitment problems is increased poverty and economic desperation among US civilians. I don’t think that’s going to fly as a political recommendation.
Okay, this approach to a solution sounds a little more positive. However, as you note, it involves an unspecified number of metric assloads of additional military spending. This also has problems, politically speaking.
In practical terms, “seeing more need for the military” among the general population means “being attacked by enemies and/or getting involved in a major war”. This has some pretty obvious downsides too.
In short, all the potential fixes you’ve proposed for the problem of US military overstretch in its current role are economically and/or politically so expensive as to be unconvincing as practical policy suggestions.
Yeah sure, we have enough resources to handle a temporary crisis in military funding by emergency spending measures. But the question here is whether the US can afford to maintain its role as unchallenged global hegemon consistently and indefinitely. I don’t think you’ve offered any really persuasive arguments that it can.
I don’t mean to sound suspicious, but your attitude here does rather remind me of radical Norquistian “drown-it-in-the-bathtub” strategy: Load up the budget with reckless and unsustainable deficits, keep reassuring the masses that the financial problems are manageable, and when fiscal crisis strikes, demand massive emergency cuts in domestic spending to save us from disaster. Voila, government domestic spending largely eliminated: mission accomplished.
Even if one sincerely believes that the government ought to be spending very little on social-welfare programs, ISTM that this approach is a criminally reckless and destructive way to get there.
Yes, I said as much. The fact remains that current U.S. military spending is about half of the post-WWII average. Since the U.S. has maintained spending levels much higher for more than a half century, I don’t think it’s reasonable to say that it’s ‘unsustainable’, any more so than you can say that any other government spending program is unsustainable.
What I was trying to say is that since the military budget is near historical lows as a percentage of GDP, money can be found elsewhere in the budget if the political will is there. And since taxes are much lower than most other countries, there’s clearly room to raise taxes to fund the military if the political will is there.
In fact, measured as a percentage of GDP, the U.S. ranks 26th in the world in defense spending. Many other countries spend more of their resources on their military.
When people say things like, “The U.S. spends more on its military than the next X countries combined”, it sure sounds unsustainable. But the U.S. spends more in absolute dollars than most countries on just about everything, because it’s an economic colossus. Looked at as a percentage of GDP, U.S. military spending looks perfectly sustainable indefinitely.
Oh, for Pete’s sake. Can you find something real to argue about? You know what I meant. I’m talking about sustainability in terms of whether the U.S. can afford to maintain its military status in an absolute sense (as in, it won’t break its economy maintaining a military). In that context, it’s perfectly fair to point out that if the need were great enough, the U.S. could raise taxes significantly and still stay in a competitive position with respect to the world, since the world on average has higher levels of taxation.
This has nothing to do with whether or not I think tax hikes are a good idea. I’m merely talking about whether or not the U.S. CAN sustain its military strength indefinitely.
Of course not. What I’m saying is that if the economy stays strong, the U.S. can afford to pay the military what it needs. If the economy goes in the dumper, one side effect will be to lower the cost of recruitment, since more people will seek opportunities in the military.
Got a cite for ‘assloads of new spending’? Frankly, I don’t know what it would cost to increase recruitment enough to being the military back up to 1980’s levels. But there’s about 1.4 million people in the U.S. military. Increasing all their salaries by $10,000/yr would cost $14 billion a year, or less than 3% of the DOD budget. Add in the 850,000 reservists, and you’re up to a budget increase of maybe 5-6%. Would $10,000 on average do it? I don’t know. But even if they had to increase the budget by 10% and give each soldier an extra $20,000, that would still only be a 10% budget increase.
Yeah? So what? Are you saying that if the U.S. was attacked by, say, Iran, that support for military spending would decline? If not, what’s your point?
Well, that’s your interpretation. I showed that the U.S. has maintained spending levels almost twice as high as they currently are throughout the entire modern era. I also showed that the deficit is near historic lows, and well below the historical average of the modern era. Yet you want to claim that it’s ‘unsustainable’. I’d say the burden of proof is on you.
I haven’t displayed an ‘attitude’, nor did I suggest policy. My message was merely a recitation of the facts.
Good thing my message said absolutely nothing about social spending or ‘starving the beast’ then, huh? In fact, I said the opposite - that current military spending is NOT starving the beast. For once, try responding to what I actually say, rather than trying to read between the lines to discover my nefarious hidden agenda.
The overall fiscal policy is unsustainable, as evidenced by projections from sources such as the GAO report in my link, which show deficits starting to grow rapidly by 2010 (assuming current tax cuts stay in effect and spending grows with the economy), and increasing to 20% of GDP before 2040. Since military spending is such a huge chunk of our federal expenditure, our military program is facing sustainability problems too.
Sure, we could preserve military spending while simultaneously avoiding huge deficits if we slashed most other spending. But I don’t think that counts as realistically “sustainable”, simply because it’s so unlikely that the public would support it.
But on our current course, we are set to break our economy. And maintaining our military at current levels is a big part of that, because the military is such a big part of spending.
That being attacked by an enemy, and/or getting involved in another major war, which is what it would take to raise the public’s perceived need for the military by a really substantial amount, would be very costly.
You are trying to argue that getting our military out of its current spending and staffing hole would be indefinitely sustainable—but to do that, you have to postulate major additional costs that are either not economically sustainable or not politically feasible, or both, over the long term.
You seem to be falling back on the claim that if the political will were there, we could spend as much money on the military as our most hawkish leaders wished while accepting the severe sacrifices it required us to make in other areas, and keep doing it indefinitely. Well, yeah, sure. And if my aunt had balls, she’d be my uncle.
But the premise isn’t realistic, and therefore the conclusion isn’t believable.
The U.S. found the political will to maintain spending levels twice as high for 50 years. I don’t think it’s a major stretch to say it’s impossible to maintain it for another 50.
And yes, there’s a fiscal crunch coming. Why it should be paid for on the back of the military is beyond me. You’re making the unstated assumption that military spending is somehow less necessary than welfare, HEW, the Dept of Education, Medicaid, Medicare, farm subsidies, and low taxes. That’s a value judgement you’ve made, but it’s not a valid argument for stating that current levels of military spending are unsustainable. What you are saying is that in your opinion they are undesirable, but that’s not the question.
I’m not claiming that it should be, I’m just predicting that it will be, at least in large part. And the reason is that all the other funding alternatives you mentioned are either insufficient in size to cope with the crunch by themselves, or have too much popular and political support to be slashed to the levels that would be required to cope with the crunch while leaving the military untouched.
The strain on military funding is exacerbated by the fact that, as BG noted earlier, even at the current levels of military spending, the military is struggling to maintain its ability to fight the wars we’re already committed to. Actually fixing this problem so that the military is comfortably maintained at a level robust enough to cope with the demands on its personnel, would be even more expensive.
Like I said in my first post, it’s not a question of whether we stop being the sole global hegemon, but when. Sure, we could hang on to unrivaled military supremacy for at least several more decades, if for some reason we decided to put all our “political will” into it and cope with the coming fiscal crunch exclusively “on the back of” non-military programs. But what rational person thinks we’re actually going to do that?
Yes, nations whose funadmental interests clash do occasionally do that: Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact - Wikipedia
But Hitler’s and Stalin’s fundamental interests clashed because each had very different plans for Europe’s future. How do China’s and Russia’s fundamental interests clash?
I would think that no rational person believes that we can deal with the coming crunch in entitlements like Social Security and Medicare exclusively with cuts to the defense budget.
And I think you are ruling out something that ought not to be disregarded. If WWIII breaks out and is non-nuclear, I bet the US would find the political will to fund the military at whatever level it needed. If someone is shooting at you, guns seem a lot more desirable than butter.
Regards,
Shodan