I’m not even going to bother to link to Robert Samuelson’s Washington Post column this morning. He thinks we should be spending a lot more money on our military.
Rather than spending a lot more on our military why not just right-size it? Pay for the military we need to defend the country, not for the military we need to knock down every dictator we don’t like. Or prop up regimes that are inherently unstable and hate us anyway. Our interventions in Iraq, Yemen, and Libya have been disasters. No, we haven’t lost thousands of American lives in Libya or Yemen but that’s not the only yardstick. Thousands of Yemenis and Libyans have died and it hasn’t made us a bit more secure.
We also need to make our alliances less one-way affairs.
As you know I have a radically different view of America’s role in the world than the one prevalent among our military and foreign policy establishment. I think we need strong allies. They want our allies to be weak and subordinate. The preference appears to be for us to have the only military in the world, a completely unrealistic goal.
Saying you will spend more on the military seems mostly like signaling to one’s base. It is also a way to sustain military spending as welfare for a lot of states. Get rid of the military spending that is really just jobs programs spread widely, and give up on military adventures that do not benefit the US, and I find it hard to believe that we would need increased spending.
Alliances that also benefit us sound like a great idea also. Just out of curiosity, if we went through a list of allies, how many would we decide are alliances out of which we receive significant benefits? Forget 50/50, may be even just 80/20.
Steve
That’s what I think.
As to the other, I don’t believe we have allies any more—just clients.
Just clients? Hmmm, the other question I think we should ask is which supposed allies cost us the most? Take South Korea as an example. They have grown relatively wealthy while we have provided their security. Suppose we weren’t there with our troops, for whom we pay. Does South Korea even want/need nukes if we don’t have a large troop presence in South Korea? Not so sure.
Steve