Between the U.S. and who? I don’t see any potential enemy power or enemy alliance that could make a “world war.” We’re almost certain to remain on good terms with Europe, Japan, Canada and Australia. Russia is suspicious of us but not actively hostile. China would rather sell us stuff than fight us. Our alliance with Pakistan probably annoys India, but no more than that. The Islamic states will never ally against us, their governments go in too many different directions. Southeast Asia is just as fractious. I really can’t see all of Latin America lining up behind Chavez and Castro. Africa hardly bears mentioning.
The real risk isn’t a ‘world war’, but a multi-front war. Having your soldiers tied down in one place can cause opportunism to create conflict elsewhere. If the U.S. was so tied down in Iraq that it was clear that it was unable to respond to aggression elsewhere, you might see little flashpoint wars break out elsewhere as rival factions and governments use the opportunity to attack each other or the U.S. So maybe Pakistan takes a swing at India, or smaller wars on the order of the Sudanese break out. Maybe someone like Kim Jong Il figures that it’s ‘now or never’ and goes after his neighbor (probably not the Koreas, but other countries with similar tensions).
Twenty years ago, the biggest risk to the U.S. was a global war. Today, it’s the ‘death of a thousand cuts’. Asymmetrical warfare, multiple smaller attacks around the globe, threats to America’s interests and allies, etc. The Americans can’t steam carrier groups everywhere.
Over time, this constant state of low-level warfare and terrorism could break the back of the American people and they’ll start giving in to demands and suing for peace whenever possible. But once you pay the Danegeld, you never get rid of the Dane. So it goes on, and on, and on…
The parallels to the decline of the Roman Empire are interesting. The Empire wasn’t overthrown by a stronger adversary. It was chipped away at on many fronts, while its own people grew more decadent and wealthy. The skirmishes required Rome to spend more money on legions, which put a strain on the treasury. Then it found it hard to raise legions of Roman citizens, and started hiring barbarians. Morale plummeted in the Legions. Sensing weakness, Rome’s adversaries pressed harder. Trade routes were cut offf. Rome had to withdraw from or lessen its grip on client states. The long decline began.
I can imagine similar scenarios. Wars in Africa, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, Central America. Constant terrorist attacks. Maybe the U.S. increases military funding more to meet the threats. This is unpopular during a good economy, but when a recession comes, the price looks to steep. An anti-war, anti-military candidate is elected. The military is cut back. Sensing weakness, anti-American forces, both military and economic, press forward…
The Bax Brittania isn’t that long ago. Fifty years ago, France was a military and economic collossus. The British Empire spanned half the globe. It didn’t take a military destruction of those countries to cause them to decline. It just took sustained pressure and populations increasingly unwilling to pay the price.
Could not a stable concert of powers prevent all that? Every member state would have a common interest in suppressing flashpoint wars; no one would have to carry the whole burden.
Sure, if you could get it to work. I’m actually a fan of the notion of a new UN-style organization composed only of Democracies. Others have talked about an ‘anglosphere’, or a new alliance of countries like the U.S., Britain, Canada, and Australia.
I just don’t know if other countries are willing to pay the price. You can already see sentiment in Canada building for pulling us out of Afghanistan, and we’ve only lost 48 soldiers. And if there’s any place where people should agree on military action, it’s Afghanistan. The forces we’re opposing are directly connected to al-Qaida. They’re a bunch of brutal thugs who, when they were in power turned their sports arena into a public execution facility where mostly women were killed for not knuckling under to the men. The left should be completely in favor of stopping that, but they’re not. Not in this country. They just want to pull all our troops out and forget about it. Let the U.S. deal with it, while they snipe and sneer and whisper conspiracy theories to each other.
If Canada can’t stand 48 casualties without losing its stomach, I don’t see much hope for a coalition of countries that put serious military resources into conflicts around the world.
Thankfully, we have the Harper government here now, so we’re staying in Afghanistan. If the next election puts the Liberals back in power, we’re gone.
The thesis is that we should form a “concert of powers” between:
the United States, China, Russia, Japan, India, Germany, France and Britain.
That is the UNSC + Japan, India, and Germany. It’s unclear to me how that could possibly be more effective than the UNSC as it exists today (assuming unanimity is required for action).
I don’t see any need to re-invent the wheel here. We have NATO, which is an alliance of western democracies that could easily be expanded, if necessary, to include Japan and Australia or even India and rechartered to have a more global reach, if desired. If, at some point, China becomes more democratic and would like to join the club, that would be something to consider. But forming a military alliance with a non-democratic country seems unwise and unnecessary to me.
And of course when I said UNSC, I really meant the permanent members with veto power… They’re the ones the matter.
I don’t think anybody here is actually asserting that we can or should.
I didn’t rule that out at all, as you can see from my post of [05-30-2007 09:58 AM]:
So yes, as I already said, if we get attacked by enemies and/or involved in a major war, we will have lots more popular support for maintaining or increasing military funding. But the question in this branch of the thread is whether we can sustainably maintain our current military funding indefinitely, not whether we could ramp it up in the short term to deal with a sudden crisis. And my point here is that the political and economic costs of such a situation are just too high to be indefinitely sustainable. Sure, we may be able to win WWIII if it breaks out, but that doesn’t mean that we’d be able to go on fighting WWIII forever.
I thought that is what you were asserting when you said -
I am frankly not following your argument. You don’t seem to think we can sustain our current levels of spending on the military, although they are relatively lower than they have been during the Cold War, and we won’t maintain those levels, although we will if we are attacked and need to, because there is a coming crunch in entitlements spending that we are going to pay for in large part with military cuts that won’t come close to covering it.
Uh, okay.
Regards,
Shodan
I’m not getting why you’re not following it. I thought it was fundamentally pretty simple, to wit: It is not economically and politically feasible for the US to maintain indefinitely a level of military spending that will keep us in our current position of sole global military hegemon.
What’s so complicated about that? And what part(s) of it, if any, are you disagreeing with?
See Sam’s post #30.
Regards,
Shodan
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Reread the article in the OP. Unanimous positive endorsement would not always be required for action, nor need effective action always be multilateral; but unilateral action by any major power against the clearly expressed wishes of any of the others would have to be ruled out. As I noted above, a concert of powers would not have to be a formal institution with an actual voting procedure; but if Russian, French and/or Chinese diplomats tell the U.S., “We really, really don’t want you to invade Iran,” that course of action would be closed off, pursuant to treaty commitments – most likely, a separate treaty with each of them.
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Japan and Germany are not important military powers because U.S. policy has seen to that. We need to reverse policy on that point. It would make a difference. Let them carry more of the burden and we can afford to carry less.
- The system described above is not an “alliance” except in purely negative terms. E.g., we would not be obligating ourselves by treaty to defend China or Russia against an attacker, as with NATO members; but OTOH it is presumed there will be situations where we would participate in their defense simply because we share a common interest in an orderly world, our interest in democracy notwithstanding. (We helped both countries in WWII, for that reason, and they weren’t democracies then.)
I already did, and I re-read it just now to see if there was anything I missed, but I still don’t think it seriously challenges my position. For one thing, as Sam himself agreed, our current budget is severely out of whack, with massive deficits and a crippling debt service burden predicted on all sides (even by the Administration itself) within the next few decades if we go on as we are. So the current fiscal policy is clearly not sustainable. And I have yet to see any plausible scenario that suggests we are likely to get ourselves out of that fiscal hole with zero negative impact on the military spending that we consider necessary to maintain our current position of sole global military hegemon.
Apropos of which, it also has to be borne in mind that maintaining that position of sole global military hegemon isn’t a fixed cost. It’s just going to go on getting more and more expensive as other countries ramp up their own military development. Just to take a few examples, China is building up its military, India is building up its military, Russia is developing new nukes, Iran wants to get nukes, and so on and so forth. Whether we attempt to keep ahead of every other expanding military capacity around the globe, or we attempt to “preventively” disrupt or destroy their proposed expansions (e.g., by bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities)—either way (or both ways), that’s going to cost additional huge amounts in military spending, not to mention political capital.
We are already running pretty damn hard just to stay in place, in terms of global military hegemony and its costs. Meanwhile, the competitors are getting stronger, faster, and more numerous. Does this look sustainable to you?
I thought your position was that current levels of military spending were unsustainable. We managed to sustain much higher levels during the fifty years or so of the Cold War. If you believe this doesn’t seriously challenge your position, I suspect we will have to agree to disagree.
Well, Sam can speak for himself, and quite well, but I think he made a pretty good case that we could maintain a 1.9% deficit for a while yet.
So I rather doubt that our current budget is “severely out of whack” in terms either of the deficit or of military spending. We managed worse of both in the past.
Then you seem to be alternating between saying “we will address the coming entitlements crunch with military cuts” and “no rational person thinks we can address the coming entitlements crunch with military cuts”.
I thought we had agreed that, if the need arose, the political will to maintain DoD spending could be found. Now you are saying that the coming crunch will be such as to make this impossible. I doubt that.
What seems to me to be beyond debate is that we need to address the coming implosion in entitlements, especially Social Security and Medicare, and that we can’t do this solely with cuts to other programs, nor solely with tax increases. ISTM that American superiority is founded much more on our economic power than our military. The fiscal discipline necessary to address the real and coming problem will do much (IMO) to maintain our power even with the same or somewhat reduced levels of military spending.
Regards,
Shodan
I don’t think that’s “beyond debate,” but if you do, start a new thread.
It’s a matter of perspective, guys. U.S. military spending is 3.9% of GDP. In a good year for economic growth, the GDP grows by that much. Ultimately, when you’re talking about sustainability, it’s the 3.9% number that’s important. Not the debt, or the deficit, or entitlements. You can afford to spend 3.9% of ANYTHING indefinitely if the political will is there. I mean, really… People in the U.S. spend $34 billion a year on their pets. Over the last 20 years, farm subsidies have cost non-farm taxpayers about 80 billion a year in taxes, tariffs, and higher food prices. The Department of Education gets 56 billion a year. Housing and Urban Development gets 34 billion. The Dept of Agriculture gets 20 billion. Homeland Security get 30 billion.
But in any event, the discretionary programs aren’t where the budget crunch is coming from, and they aren’t where the solution lies. By 2010, Social Security and Medicare together are expected to cost about 1.1 trillion dollars per year, up from 880 billion in FY2006. That’s half the entire military budget, just in increases in payments to the eldarly in four measly years.
THAT is what’s unsustainable. That’s where the out of control growth is. If you think we need to gut the military to increase entitlements to old people, well, that’s your choice. But even if you cut the military budget in half, those savings will be erased by entitlement gains by 2010. Then you’re right back into the same situation.
What’s needed is entitlement reform, not slashing the military budget. You could start by means-testing medicare, or putting deductibles on medical treatments for wealthy seniors. Retired people have more wealth than any other sector of society, and it’s ridiculous that they should get free medical care paid for by taxes on people much less wealthy than they are. Bill Gates and Donald Trump don’t need free health care and social security payments.
But once again - we’re talking about 3.9% of GDP. That’s a sustainable number, period. The only question is whether the people are willing to pay it, not whether they can.
I don’t see the difference. We can still act alone now if we want to (witness Iraq), but it has no international sanction. What you’re describing is an alliance of convenience, which we can form anytime with anyone.
Japan maybe, but not Germany. At least not anymore.
Again, we can form an alliance of convenience at any time, and that’s exactly what our “alliance” with the USSR during WWII was. But for the concert to have any meaning, it has to have some sort of long term goal.
That’s the difference.
So… You want to deliberately tie the U.S.'s hands by putting it in a position where the countries most likely to come into conflict with it in the future have veto power over U.S. foreign policy?
You’re willing to put U.S. foreign policy into the hands of Vladimir Putin, on the hope that he’ll play nice and not try to play the situation to his advantage?
And how is this really different than what the U.N. is today, other than that a couple of countries are missing?
See, it makes sense to form alliances with countries who really are your allies. It makes little sense to form an ‘alliance’ with your enemies. Because they’re not your allies. Being your enemies, you can count on them to game the situation to their benefit. The U.S.S.R was great at this. If a proposed measure (nuclear freeze, for example) worked to its strategic benefit, it was all for it. If it didn’t, it wasn’t. Or it would pay lip service and then ignore it. the U.S.S.R signed the ABM treaty, then almost immediately violated it by building a radar in Krasnoyarsk.
Iran signed the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. How well did that work out? North Korea signed an agreement with the U.S. and IAEA to not continue its nuclear program. Seems to have worked really well.
No, a position where the veto power makes them the countries least likely to come into conflict with us in the future.
So, why did you say…
I ask again, what’s the difference?