Why does the United States spend more on national security than the
rest of the world combined, and why do so many members of the foreign
policy community believe that it is either in our interest or our
responsibility to interfere in so many places around the world?
As
I've noted before, one of the most striking things about the recent
economic downturn is its scant impact on America's global agenda. States and local governments are cutting budgets drastically, firms are
laying off millions of employees, families across the country are
trimming expenses and scaling back plans, and even SecDef Robert Gates
is taking a modest whack at the armed services' budget request (though
the actual budget will still increase next year). Meanwhile, the Obama
administration just revised its budget deficit forecast upwards, to
$1.8 trillion (we're talking real money here). Yet our foreign
policy ambitions and international commitments -- in other words, the
number of costly items on the foreign policy agenda -- seems not to have
been affected at all.
One explanation is that this
unbalanced situation is just left over from the Cold War, when we had
good reason to spend a lot on defense and maintain a big overseas
military presence. George H. W. Bush did cut defense spending when the
Cold War ended (remember the "peace dividend?"), but it started
creeping back up again under Clinton, who had his own problems
disciplining DOD and kept U.S. forces busy with "dual containment" and
various acts of nation-building. It continued to rise once the "war on
terror" began in earnest after 9/11, and is pretty much back at
late-Cold War levels now.
A second explanation combines some form of "hegemonic stability theory" and the theory of collective action. As Samuel Huntington, Tom Friedman, William Wohlforth, Michael Mandelbaum,
and many others have argued in recent years, American dominance
supposedly reinforces peace among the great powers, preserves a
more-or-less open world economy, keeps the sea lanes free (except near
Somalia), and provides assorted other collective goods. The United
States does these things our of its own self-interest (or so the
argument runs), but that inevitably means that other states can
free-ride on its efforts. So the United States ends up spending a lot more than
our allies do as a percentage of GDP, but we can't cut back because it
would supposedly jeopardize vital interests. In short, we're
stuck.
A third explanation might be America's liberal ideology and its sense
of mission. In this view, the U.S. spends more because its citizens
believe in spreading American ideals around the world. It takes a lot
of hard and soft power to do this, and it sometimes leads to costly
quagmires or hostile backlashes, but it is our historic mission and we
should not shirk it. (Funny how every global power sees itself this way: Britain had the "white man's
burden," France la mission civilizatrice, and the former Soviet Union claimed it was leading the world to the socialist paradise.)
These explanations aren’t mutually exclusive, and they probably help
explain why the United States spends and does more than others do. But they
don't tell us whether our current level of effort is excessive,
optimal, or actually self-defeating. On that issue, I recommend
Christopher Preble’s excellent new book, The Power Problem: How American Military Dominance Makes Us Less Safe, Less Prosperous, and Less Free. (Full disclosure: it's in a book series I co-edit, although I wasn't
the series editor who reviewed this particular book). Preble tackles
the familiar justifications for American dominance head-on, and shows
that the usual pieties about global stability or spreading democracy
are far from airtight.
Unlike Preble, I still think a margin of superiority is a good thing,
but I agree that we've got a much bigger margin than we need and we
often use it in the wrong way. Instead of exploiting our favorable
geopolitical position and acting like an offshore balancer, and playing
hard-to-get so that other major powers will bear a greater share of the
burden, the United States has declared itself to be the "indispensable
power" and decided that it’s got to take charge nearly everywhere. The
result, as you may have noticed, has not been all the salutary. Instead of stabilizing the key strategic areas of the world -- something
we used to be pretty good at -- in recent years the United States has been
an actively destabilizing force. And instead of spreading U.S. values, we've ended up undermining them here at home and discrediting them abroad.
Moreover, as Preble notes, excessive U.S. dominance encourages others to act irresponsibly. To use Barry Posen's apt terms,
states either "free ride" on Uncle Sam (think Japan, or much of
Europe), or they engage in "reckless driving" (think Israel, Georgia
last summer, or maybe Pakistan), because they are confident we'll bail
them out if they get into trouble.
Part of the problem here is structural: when you're the 800-lb gorilla, it's hard to imagine that there
are things you can't do and its easier to succumb to a sense of hubris. That's what happened to Bush in Iraq, and it may be happening to Obama in Central Asia no matter how much he tries to guard against it. But there's another explanation for America's
disproportionate dominance and continued global activism: an imbalance
of power between organized interests who tend to favor greater involvement and
those who tend to argue for restraint.
America's rise to global
primacy was accompanied by the creation of a well-developed set of
institutions whose stated purpose was to overcome isolationist
sentiments and to promote greater international activism on the part of
the United States. American liberal internationalism didn’t just arise
spontaneously as America's relative power grew, it was actively
encouraged by groups like the Council on Foreign Relations (founded in
1921), and a whole array of other groups and organizations. These
institutions don't always agree on what specific actions the United
States ought to take, and they aren’t the sort of clandestine
capitalist conspiracy depicted by Lyndon Larouche and other fringe
groups. But together they stack the deck in favor doing more rather
than less.
Who do I have in mind? For starters, there are various civic action
groups like the Foreign Policy Association, the World Affairs Councils,
the Veterans of Foreign Wars, or the United Nations Association. Then
there are mainstream international affairs institutions like the
Council on Foreign Relations, the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, or
the Boston Committee on Foreign Relations. (More disclosure: I've been
a member of all three, and still belong to two). Add to the mix
heavyweight think tanks like the Brookings Institution, the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace, the American Enterprise Institute,
or the Heritage Foundation. Again, the people who work in these groups
often disagree about specific policy choices, but virtually all of them
tend to favor the energetic use of American power overseas.
These institutions of international activism get funding from
foundations like the Ford or MacArthur (on the center-left), or Bradley
and Smith Richardson Foundation (on the right), as well as American
corporations who have an obvious interest in keeping the United States
busy around the world. Wealthy individuals with particular foreign
concerns help finance their activities as well. The people who work in
these organizations do so because they believe in the mission, but
notice that pressing an activitist agenda also creates more government
positions to aspire to. After all, if the United States had a more
restrained foreign policy and a smaller foreign affairs establishment,
there would be fewer jobs to compete for whenever the White House
changed hands.
But wait, there’s more! In addition to the various general-purpose
groups named above, there are also a vast array of special interest
think tanks, committees, groups, and lobbies with their own particular
international agendas. Whether the issue is Cuba, Darfur, the Middle
East, Armenia, arms control, trade, population, human rights, climate
policy, or what have you, there is bound to be some group pressing
Washington to focus more energy and attention on their particular pet
issue. And with 535 Congresspersons to choose from, there's a good
chance you can find at least one to promote your agenda on the Hill. And let's not forget that lots of countries have gotten pretty good at
manipulating the Washington scene, often by appealing to our own
ambitions and telling us how much they really need our help.
By the way, I won't be offended if you toss in public policy programs
like John Hopkins’ School for Advanced International Studies, Tuft’s
Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Princeton's Woodrow Wilson
School, or my own employer, the Harvard Kennedy School. These
institutions are dedicated to various forms of social engineering at
home and abroad, and to preparing students for careers of public
service. I'm all for that, because there are in fact plenty of big
problems out there and I'd rather they were addressed by people who
were trained to do so. But no matter how well we train our students to
weigh alternatives carefully, the raison d’etre of these programs reinforces the same message: don't just sit there, DO SOMETHING!
By contrast, there are at most a handful of institutions whose core
mission is to get the United States to take a slightly smaller role on
the world stage. There is the CATO Institute (where Preble works) and
maybe a few people at the Center for American Progress and the New
America Foundation. And there are plenty of peace groups out there
with an anti-interventionist agenda. But these groups are hardly a
match for the array of forces on the other side. And apart from Steve
Chapman at the Chicago Tribune, I can’t think of a major
mainstream columnist or media commentator who is a consistent voice for
a more restrained foreign policy. Lots of pundits want a smarter
foreign policy (though they often disagree about what that would be),
and most of them have a pet issue or two that they like to flog, but
how many have been arguing for doing somewhat less as a general rule?
In short, what I'm suggesting here is that America's role in the world
today is shaped by two imbalances of power, not just one. The first is
the gap between U.S. capabilities and everyone else's, a situation that
has some desirable features (especially for us) but one that also
encourages the United States to do too much and allows others to do
either too little or too many of the wrong things. The second
imbalance is between organized interests whose core mission is
constantly pushing the U.S. government to do more and in more places,
and the far-weaker groups who think we might be better off showing a
bit more restraint.
Ermal Meta/AFP/Getty Images
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