During the Cold War, one’s view of the appropriate goals of American foreign policy usually went hand in hand with one’s notion of the proper level of spending on defense. Conservatives favored aggressive containment of the Soviet Union and wanted increased military spending. Liberals opposed active U.S. intervention abroad and demanded defense cuts.
No longer. These days, many conservatives call for increases in the defense budget while opposing American intervention overseas and seeking reductions in the scope of America’s foreign commitments. Congressional Republicans have added $ 11 billion to President Clinton’s request while arguing that the military should only be used in defense of “vital national security interests, ” not as a tool for promoting international order in places like Bosnia. Robert Dole has said he wants to err on the side of “spending a little too much on defense,” but, with the exception of missile defense, he hasn’t explained what the extra spending would be for.
Many of today’s liberals, on the other hand, have abandoned their old non- interventionist inclinations and have become, in the words of national security adviser Anthony Lake, avid “neo-Wilsonians,” seeking to use American power to good ends across the globe. Arch-liberals like New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis have demanded vigorous military engagement in Bosnia to stop genocide and bring peace. The Congressional Black Caucus supported U. S. military intervention in Haiti to depose a military dictatorship and restore the elected president. Liberals have wanted to stamp out famine in Sorealia, to halt genocide in Rwanda and Burundi, and to deploy U.S. forces to help in these and other humanitarian disasters.
Yet many of these same liberals have been cornplaining that the U.S. defense budget, which has been cut by 35 percent since the mid-1980s, is still too big. The New York Times editorial page, these days a haven for Bosnia hawks, is a budget dove when it comes to defense. The Black Caucus, vigorous militarists when the issue was Haiti, have rarely met a defense- spending proposal they liked, or for that matter even a foreign-aid proposal. If conservatives want to spend more and do less, liberals, far more recklessly, want to spend less and do more.
Can America’s role as global leader be supported by current levels of defense spending? The list of people who say no is hardly confined to Republican hawks. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff John Shalikashvili has warned that the procurement budget for new weapons, cut by 71 percent since 1985, is now dangerously low. Sen. Joseph Lieberman, a leading Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, has declared that the administration’s ” Bottom-Up Review” of U.S. defense strategy is “already inadequate to the present and certainly to the future.” Both the General Accounting Office and the Congressional Budget Office project shortfalls of $ 50 billion to $ 100 billion over the next five years just for funding existing force levels.
Most military experts acknowledge that we will not be able to carry out the officially declared “win-win” strategy of fighting two small wars in different regional theaters simultaneously. At a time when the likelihood of military action in the Persian Gulf in response to terrorist acts is increasing — along with possible trouble on the Korean peninsula — this inadequacy could soon prove perilous.
Liberal internationalists who favor global activism by the United States but oppose the defense spending needed to back it up are writing foreign policy checks that we will be unable to cash in coming years. Lake brags that the administration has “defined a post-Cold War role of leadership for the United States.” But the Clinton administration’s recent foreign policy successes — in Haiti, in Bosnia, and off the coast of Taiwan — were made possible by a military force constructed by Ronald Reagan. That force is now being rapidly depleted by the current inadequate level of defense spending.
There is willful self-delusion at work here. The international order that Clinton and other liberals seek to advance will not come about as a result of international goodwill, growing economic interdependence, or a common concern for the environment. Instead, it depends on the United States maintaining its military supremacy to deter and rebuff future threats to world peace.
In their refusal to acknowledge this fact, many liberals actually have much in common with Buchananite isolationists. Like the isolationists, they imagine that the current “threatless” world will somehow persist unaided into eternity. They don’t understand that the world is without serious threats, to the degree it is, because American power and American hegemony are largely unchallenged. Like the isolationists, liberals want to know why the United States needs to spend as much money on defense as “the next 10 biggest military powers combined,” without grasping the fact that the role of the United States in this post-Cold War era is entirely different from that of any other power.
The truth is, it will cost us much less to preserve the post-Cold War order than it did to create it. Today, defense spending is less than 20 percent of the total federal budget. In 1962, before the Vietnam War, defense spending accounted for nearly 50 percent of the budget. The increases necessary to maintain our global position and pursue an internationalist foreign policy would only require devoting to defense the same share of the budget it had before the Reagan buildup of the 1980s. This is not too high a price for maintaining peace and supporting our allies and our principles.
