I have a new article in the National Interest Online about the speech by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates during his recent visit to East Asia. His comments inadvertently underscored why U.S. foreign policy is such a mess. In one speech, he 1) made the North Korean nuclear crisis more dangerous, 2) greatly reduced the chances that China will exert itself to help solve the crisis, and 3) gave U.S. allies Japan and South Korea a green light to continue underinvesting in their own defense while free-riding on U.S. efforts. Other than that, it was a brilliant speech.
Gates is reputed to be the foreign policy “adult” in the Obama administration. If that’s true, we’re all in deep trouble.
President Obama came away from last week’s NATO summit in Strasbourg hailing the outcome as a great victory for U.S. foreign policy. He professed to be especially pleased with promises made by the allies regarding the mission in Afghanistan. Yet the European members of NATO gave him next to nothing. He asked for a substantial number of additional combat troops to supplement the surge of American troops he announced last month. Instead, the European allies agreed to send a mere 5,000 personnel, none of whom will be combat forces. Moreover, the bulk of that number (3,000) will be sent just temporarily to assist the Afghan government in the upcoming elections. The rest consist mainly of police and military trainers and wannabe nation-building bureaucrats.
These anemic gestures continue the lack of seriousness on the part of the NATO allies that I’ve written about here and here. During the Cold War, NATO was a credible security organization–although even then the Europeans underinvested in defense and liked to have the U.S. bear a disproportionate amount of the burdens. Now, though, the alliance has become a bad joke. NATO has just celebrated its 60th birthday, and Washington should take stepts to make sure that it’s the last birthday. NATO has become a very bad bargain for America, and we should terminate our involvement in this increasingly disfunctional alliance.
The price tag for the government’s attempted rescue of the nation’s financial system, which has been a spectacular flop so far, is likely to run into trillions of dollars. Yet very few participants in the policy debate (with the exception of Libertarian Party presidential candidate Bob Barr) have talked about making even modest cuts in federal spending to offset this vast new expenditure. That is nothing short of irresponsible–and both major political parties are guilty.
It is imperative to jettison nonessential expenditures. There are certainly plenty of candidates among domestic programs, starting with agricultural subsidies–a great reverse wealth-transfer mechanism in which taxpayers of even modest means are forced to fatten the bank accounts of even wealthy farmers. I’m not an expert on wasteful and unnecessary domestic programs, so I will leave it to others to suggest additional cuts in what is clearly a target-rich environment.
If many of Washington’s domestic spending programs are luxuries we can no longer afford, that is doubly true of our military and foreign policy expenditures. Foreign aid programs are obvious candidates for elimination. America has spent nearly a trillion dollars (measured in 2008 dollars) over the past 60 years, and all too much of that money has simply gone into the coffers of corrupt politicians and their cronies in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
But the wasteful spending goes far beyond foreign aid. The United States spends roughly as much on the military as the rest of the world combined. Promptly terminating the ill-advised crusade in Iraq would save $120 billion a year, but that is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Our current annual military budget is nearly $700 billion. Advocates of such a vast sum should explain why we need to have not one but two expensive new jet fighter programs when the U.S. already has overwhelming superiority in air power and there is no serious military competitor on the horizon for the next two decades–and perhaps longer. At least one of those programs should be terminated. The same is true of the program to build the Virginia class submarine, a weapon system that was designed to counter a Soviet system that was never built.
And someone ought to explain why the United States needs to keep nearly 100,000 troops in Europe to guard wealthy allies more than 6 decades after the end of World War II and nearly two decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Our trusty NATO allies, who have used the U.S. defense guarantee as an excuse to underinvest in their own defenses for decades, are now citing the global financial crisis as a reason to cut their already paltry military expenditures even further. But at the same time, they don’t want us to cut our military budget.
A similar situation exists on the other side of the world. The United States continues to subsidize the defense of South Korea, even though that country now has a population twice the size of its only adversary, communist North Korea, and an economy some 40 times larger.
It is time to expel the international military welfare queens in Europe and East Asia from the U.S. dole. We should have done that years ago, but the current financial squeeze makes that move not just desirable, but essential.
I never agreed with President Bush’s stark demand regarding the war against radical Islamic terrorism that “either you’re for us or you’re against us.” It seemed entirely reasonable to me that nations that had no dispute with the Muslim world might not want to get involved in that conflict. At the same time, though, it is not acceptable for foreign governments to pretend to be America’s allies and then knife us in the back when convenient. Our so-called ally Pakistan has done that before, and now has apparently done it again. Back in late 2001, there was evidence that Pakistan’s intelligence service, the ISI, helped Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters escape from U.S. forces in Afghanistan who were closing in on them.
Just this past week, U.S. intelligence agencies uncovered evidence that ISI operatives were again aiding the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Washington should make it clear to Islamabad that the time is long overdue to clean out terrorist sympathizers from the military and the ISI. If that doesn’t happen, we then know that Pakistan is an adversary, not an ally, and we should develop our policies accordingly.
The irony is that while U.S. leaders focused on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and Revolutionary Iran as the principal sources of trouble for genuine American security interests, the greatest damage has been done by two supposed allies, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. The Saudis funded anti-American schools around the world, and Pakistan not only helped put the Taliban in power in Afghanistan (and has periodically assisted it ever since), but was probably complicit in scientist A. Q. Khan’s nuclear proliferation activities to North Korea and other adversaries of the United States.
With “friends” like Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, America doesn’t need any enemies.