unlimited freedom of unilateral military action by any major power – which is what we’ve got now in practice as the Iraq War proves;
a requirement of positive endorsement of such action by the UN Security Council, which is what we’re supposed to have now but don’t really;
a veto power by any member of the concert of powers over any other’s military actions, without a requirement of unanimous positive endorsement.
Under the third arrangement, if we want to invade Iran, any other member could stop us, but otherwise, we would not have to secure their permission; they might dislike it strongly enough to stay out of the fight but not strongly enough to prevent it.
That is just incredibly naive. Treaties between real allies sometimes work, because everyone has a vested interest in the treaty working. Everyone’s goals are aligned, so the treaty simply formalizes the relationship and makes sure everyone understands their responsibilities. Even then, they get violated when countries have a fiscal crunch and can’t afford to meet their obligations (or can afford it, but for political purposes choose not to).
But treaties between enemies are generally very cynical things. They might work when the consequences for breaking it are dire and have real teeth - some trade agreements are like that - breaking them invokes retaliation that is painful. But treaties that simply rely on the honesty and word of your enemies aren’t worth the paper they are written on. How long did the non-agression pact between Germany and the USSR last again? Answer: It lasted exactly as long as Germany decided it was in its best interests.
And the problem with a democracy entering into such treaties with authoritarian countries is that the democracies are more constrained in keeping their word than are the authoritarian countries. Break a treaty in a Democracy, and you take a political hit from your people. But a dictatorship can break it whenever it damned well feels like it, with no consequences. Thus, Iran was a big fan of the non-proliferation treaty so long as it didn’t have the technical ability to violate it anyway. It had nothing to lose, and lots to gain from keeping other countries from building nukes. But as soon as it had the ability to join the nuclear club, the treaty became so much scrap paper.
Reagan managed serious arms reductions with the Soviets not by signing meaningless treaties, but by threatening them with serious consequences. He got theater nukes reduced in Europe only after he met the Soviet buildup of such weapons with more and better American weapons. The Soviets needed to realize that they couldn’t win that game before they were willing to take serious action.
And besides, I certainly wouldn’t want my enemies to have veto power over what I believe I need to do to defend myself. Especially when I know that I don’t really have veto power over them, because they’ll just do what they want as soon as it’s convenient for them.
Which is all that would be done. You aren’t suggesting that the treaty contain a clause authorizing the other parties to attack if the treaty is broken, do you? That would be a nice little recipe for WWIII.
So, like I said before, this would be just like what we have in the UN now, except give a more prominent role to India, Germany and Japan. And the US would ignore the treaty when we chose to do so just like we did with the UN in 2002 in Iraq and 1999 in Kosovo/Serbia.
I don’t know why you hold that Lind guy in such awe. He seems to just come up with one nutty idea after another. The guy has been all over the political map and is now pushing something called “radical centrism” as he tries desperately to make himself relevant.
My position, which you seem to keep misunderstanding no matter how clearly and repeatedly I state it, is that levels of military spending required to keep the US in its current position of sole global military hegemon are unsustainable.
But that’s irrelevant. During the Cold War, we weren’t maintaining a position as sole global military hegemon.
If we had attempted to do so, it would have required essentially crushing the military capacity of the USSR. And that would have involved, at best, crippling expenditures in the effort to achieve indisputable and overpowering supremacy in the arms race, and at worst, global thermonuclear war. We could not have afforded that kind of cost indefinitely, and it was smart of us not to try.
Since the collapse of the USSR, maintaining the position of sole global military hegemon has been uncharacteristically cheap. Over the past fifteen years or so, with the USSR a spent force, and most of the other nations in the world having been accustomed to depend either on our military protection or the Soviets’, we’ve had essentially the only superpower-worthy military left in the world. But that situation is not at all typical in our history, and there’s no a priori reason to think that the rest of the world will be satisfied to continue it indefinitely.
You, and to a lesser extent Sam, seem to think that I’m arguing that we just can’t afford to keep a big-ass high-tech military. That’s not so: I don’t foresee any time in at least the next century or so when the US won’t be committed to maintaining a big-ass high-tech military. What I’m arguing is that we can’t indefinitely keep it big-ass or high-tech enough to maintain supreme and unchallengeable global military dominance of the sort we’ve had for the past fifteen years or so.
If you disagree with this position, will you kindly address it as stated, and not just keep hammering away at the “current levels of military spending” strawman?
You seem to be arguing that spending when in competition with another super power was sustainable, but spending less to maintain a position with no other super power is not.
This is nonsense. We spent roughly half the percentage of GNP as the Soviets, but were able to sustain it because our economy was something like twice as large as the USSR’s. We won the Cold War with those levels, thus achieving our position as the preeminent military (and economic) power in the world.
We did not need to cripple ourselves trying. Our strategy (mostly of guns and butter) worked, and we won the competition. I grant you, this was primarily an economic and psychological victory, but we did not need to “crush” or attack the USSR to win. We used higher levels of military spending, true, but we could (in theory, given the political will) do the same if the need arose in the future. Do you dispute that?
OK, all you need to do is to address why our spending will be crippling with no superpower competition.
IOW, the US is able to maintain its position as hyperpower for fifteen years or so with lower levels of spending than were necessary with a major competitor. But we can’t sustain those lower levels, even if our economy has doubled or tripled from what it was during the Cold War, you allege.
If you are arguing that the only way to win the War on Terror is to overthrow every tinpot dictator in the Third World, I don’t agree. We will maintain our position (supposing we do) by maintaining a highly productive and dynamic economy. If we do this, and we have the political will, we can maintain a level of spending that will protect ourselves and our interests. If some major, hostile rival arises, we can return to the same proportions of spending as in the Cold War. If it is a hundred brushfire wars, then we can pick and choose - wipe out those who present a genuine threat, and defend ourselves and economically and psychologically outwit the rest.
We won the Cold War, not by crippling ourselves with excessive spending, but by spending about the same in absolute terms as the USSR but much less as a proportion of GDP. We could do this, because our economy is so much more efficient than a communist one. Same as with the backward and undeveloped Islamo-fascist regimes that present the most immediate threat, or basket cases like North Korea. The danger from the Axis of Evil types is that they will develop nukes and attack our allies, like Israel or South Korea or Japan (or fuck up the oil supply short- and medium-term). It is hardly that they are going to grab market share from us because of the dynamism of their economies. That threat comes more from China, and does not require military spending to counter.
Can you really not figure out what I’m actually arguing, after all this time?
Once again: I’m arguing that it’s not indefinitely sustainable to be the sole global military hegemon. It may well be long-term sustainable to maintain a position that’s militarily competitive with, or even somewhat superior to, other global poles of military power—as it was during the Cold War. But it’s not indefinitely sustainable to be the ONLY global pole of military power.
You have not provided a single shred of evidence to rebut this position. In fact, up to now you have not even addressed it. You just keep changing the subject to other topics, like whether we can maintain current levels of defense spending as a percent of GDP, or whether we need to overthrow every dictator to win the War on Terror, or other irrelevancies.
But during the Cold War, which consisted of most of the time after WWII, we weren’t the sole global military hegemon.
The fact that we could eventually win the Cold War (which, remember, took most American hawks by surprise when it actually happened) after several decades of bipolar competition doesn’t demonstrate at all that we can continue indefinitely in a post-Cold-War state of unchallenged, unipolar supremacy.
I’m not saying that our spending will be crippling with no competition. I’m saying exactly the opposite: that maintaining a position as the sole global military hegemon is not indefinitely sustainable precisely because at some point there will be competition.
Nowhere have I claimed that we can’t maintain a level of spending sufficient to protect ourselves. I’m merely saying that we can’t indefinitely maintain a level of spending that will keep us in an unchallenged position as the sole military global hegemon while keeping the world strictly unipolar.
BUT THE RISE OF A MAJOR RIVAL MEANS PRECISELY THAT WE WILL NO LONGER BE THE SOLE GLOBAL MILITARY HEGEMON. For heaven’s sake, you’re arguing my point for me and you don’t even seem to realize it.
Because, while my own politics are rather more lefty, almost everything Lind has written (and I’ve read nearly all of it) seems to me to make a whole lot of sense, including radical centrism – a tendency that now has its own think-tank, the New America Foundation.
By his own account (in Up From Conservatism) he has not been all over the political map, he has remained in the same place while the boundaries of the map moved (rightward) around him. I would call him a Rockefeller Republican for the Information Age.
Currently, we are the sole global military hegemon. We have maintained that position for fifteen years or so, spending at a sustainable rate of percentage of GDP.
We became the sole global military hegemon by spending at a somewhat higher but still sustainable rate for fifty years.
Should another military rival arise analogous to the USSR, we could muster the political will to increase our spending so as to defeat the rival (as we did the USSR). Your notion that we must necessarily cripple ourselves by “crushing” any major rival is wrong, as demonstrated by how Reagan won the Cold War.
So, if no rival arises, we can maintain our current sustainable level and remain the sole global military hegemon. If one does arise, we can return to Cold War levels of spending and once again become the sole global military hegemon.
Underlining and bolding a stupid assertion doesn’t help anything - it remains stupid. As I mentioned earlier, we showed that we could sustain our levels of Cold War military spending long enough to out-compete the USSR economically. That’s how we became the sole global military hegemon. We could do it again, should some rival arise, and thus return to being the sole global military hegemon.
Your mistake is to believe that ruinous levels of military spending are necessary for the US to become sole global military hegemon. They were not necessary during the Cold War. They are not necessary now. The only argument you have produced to date that they would be necessary in the future is that we would have to deal with the coming entitlements crunch with military cuts, and I can’t tell if you’ve backed off from this or not.
So? We became the sole global military hegemon with sustainable levels of military spending.
Well, it didn’t come as a surprise to Reagan. Do you need a cite about phrases like “the ash heap of history”?
At which point we return to Cold War (non-ruinous) levels of spending, and eventually return to being sole global military hegemon.
This is probably where your mistake comes in. You are asserting (without evidence) that the rise of some rival means that we must instantly increase spending to ruinous levels. We don’t need to do that. We didn’t need to do it during the Cold War; merely spend enough militarily to stave off the military threat and win the competition economically. As I mentioned, if you could trouble yourself to read.
You are asserting the necessity for the US to instantly increase military spending to non-sustainable levels, the instant a rival appears. Such was not the case during the Cold War; what is your evidence that it will be necessary in the twenty-first century?
You are not patient enough. It took us several decades to defeat the USSR, but there was no need to bankrupt ourselves doing so. The US economy is much larger now. Higher levels of spending (in absolute terms) are much easier to achieve now.
That’s one of the troubles with you liberals; you are too eager to surrender. There was some of it during the Cold War, there is some of it now during the war against Islamo-fascism.
Hopefully we can elect strong leaders rather than liberal weenies.
Emphasis added. Even if we did eventually out-compete any new rival as we did the USSR, during the duration of the bipolar competition (which took several decades in the USSR’s case, remember) we would not be the sole global military hegemon. Thus, we would not have indefinitely remained the sole global military hegemon.
So in fact, my position is not wrong, by your own showing.
You are still misinterpreting what I said. I didn’t say we crippled ourselves by winning the Cold War. I said that we would have crippled ourselves in any effort to eliminate the USSR’s status as a military superpower immediately in order to attain sole-global-military-hegemon status without waiting for it.
Only if we wish to remain indefinitely the sole global military hegemon.
You now appear to have moved the forensic goalposts to argue in favor of the sustainability of some kind of hegemony cycle, where we compete against a military rival for a while, defeat it, maintain unchallenged sole-global-military-hegemon status for a while, compete against a new rising rival for a while, and so on.
The sustainability of such a cycle is somewhat more plausible than that of an indefinite period of completely unbroken unchallenged sole global military hegemony (although it’s still a hypothetical situation). But the two are not the same thing, which is why your arguments in favor of the former don’t seriously challenge my skepticism about the latter.
I’m plenty patient. But when I say “indefinitely maintained sole global military hegemony”, I don’t mean “indefinitely maintained cycle between sole global military hegemony and superpower competition”, with which you are apparently trying to conflate it.
Nice try, but insults directed against the courage and patriotism of liberals will not distract me from pointing out the blatant logical holes in your arguments.
Is that what you’re on about? The fact that we would not be the one-and-only for some period of time?
This is what I mean - what is your evidence that we will find the need to instantly ruin ourselves with military spending the instant some rival appears? We didn’t do it during the Cold War.
Which is why I have mentioned several times that this is not necessary, nor is anyone suggesting it, nor has anyone ever suggested it (other than you).
Your argument seems to be “if we try to do something we have never tried to do in the past, and which nobody thinks we should do in the future, we will ruin ourselves”, well, this might be true. Unfortunately, there is no precedent for believing that this is something we would try.
A strawman, and not a terribly good one. It’s like arguing that we cannot provide health care for all citizens, because an incurable disease might arise and then we would feel obligated to spend every penny we have and every cent we can borrow only on trying to cure it. We didn’t do this for AIDS, and we didn’t do anything similar in the Cold War, and I see no reason to believe that we would try it in the future.
If you have some reason to believe we would, well, knock yourself out.
Yes. That, in fact, is the fundamental issue that this whole thread has essentially been about from the beginning. Note my original remark to this effect all the way back in post #4:
At present, you appear to have expanded the discussion (which is a kinder way of putting it than “moving the goalposts”) to include the additional question of whether and how we could be confident of being able to move back to “one-and-only” status after shifting to power-sharing “for some period of time”.
That is a very interesting question in its own right, and I’ll be only too happy to discuss it, if you’ve finally grasped the original point I was making. If you still don’t get it, say so and I’ll go over it again. If you do get it but disagree with it for some reason, please produce your arguments against it.
If you want to define “competition” as “power-sharing”, feel free. We shared power during the Cold War with the UK and NATO, but we competed with the USSR.
I would be more interested in your reasons for believing that the mere presence of a military rival would trigger an insistence by the USA that we need to defeat them now, this instant, and therefore we have to ruin ourselves with military spending. You seem to have been arguing that levels of military spending compatible with “power-sharing” in whatever sense you meant during the Cold War wer not ruinous, but “power-sharing” in the twenty-first century necessarily must be.
As I mentioned, it’s a strawman, unless you can show some indication.
I suspect it is merely an assumption on your part, like -
based on spending 3.9% of GDP on the military. Or you could address your claim that you “don’t think anybody here is actually asserting that we can or should” deal with the entitlements crunch with mostly cuts to the military after saying -
As I thought I already made quite clear, I don’t believe that. Only IF we tried to maintain absolutely uninterrupted and unchallenged continuous dominance as sole global military hegemon—which, as I’ve said over and over, is something that I don’t see happening—would we attempt to insist on defeating any military rival “now, this instant”.
I think its all a moot point-the USA is LOSING its taste for empire. the “American Century” (proclaimed in 1945-by Henry Luce), is pretty near its end. We have learned (in Somalia and Iraq) that other people DON’T necessarily want to be like us. We have also learned that China intends to supplant us as an economic power (and we -very foolishly-have allowed them to exploit us). Plus, the increasing sophistication of robotic weapons means that projecting power with a surface navy is suicidal-and the next world crisis (the depletion of oil sources) has no military solution.
So, let’s all have a drink, close down West Point and Annapolis, and reflect on the folly of empire-and strenthen our border defenses-as we are about to be invaded by the 3rd world.
Historians in 2107 will (no doubt) be amazed at the extent of our post WWII foolishness!