And I’m saying this shouldn’t be America’s problem. Let Israel and Australia and all the other “allies” deal with their own problems. America can’t afford to “help” the rest of the world, now is a time it needs to take care of itself first.
I suspect that the US military can be equally effective while cutting spending by 10% or more… There just needs to be pressure to cut unncessary costs. When was the last time military spending got a thorough audit?
I also suspect that the US military can be 30% weaker and no one will even notice… If current US-level military is really necessary, places like Australia would have been taken over by China and North Korea a long time ago…
America is not “helping” Australia, but rather defending its own strategic interests in the region. Australia as you noted, would rather spend money on healthcare than defense, so the US is projecting military power over the region.
Now you might think that the US does not have strategic interests in the region worth defending, but that’s a different argument to what you’re saying.
This I agree with. For example the US has a ton of military assets based in this country…not sure to defend against what…Canada? Redundancy is fine…but having thousands of F-16s based in the US doesn’t seem to serve an obvious purpose…
Military spending is normally 4% of GDP not including any wars. The war(s) are what’s crushing the budget. Is 4% of $14 trillion dollars too high? Probably, but asking to reduce it is political suicide. You’re labeled as making the US “unsafe.”
There’s also something to be said about spending more on defense than the next 15 countries combined. It tells the international community to back the f off. It tells them to respect the dollar as a reserve currency or we’ll bomb you. (This actually happens. Look up petrodollar warfare.) Basically spending is itself a defensive measure…saying that we’re the only BSD in the room.
Still, it’s too damn high.
Yep. As the world’s primary superpower, the US by default has an interest in keeping the world relatively conflict-free, and, quite honestly, much of world benefits from the US’s hegemony. The Yugoslavian breakup was a prime example of the success of the European approach to conflict resolution. Years of civil war and people chopping each other up. Finally, the US put in air cover (over the protests of Europeans) and the worst of the atrocities ebbed, though it still took a long time to wrap things up.
The US doesn’t use its power projection equially, of course, and the civil wars in Africa haven’t been a priority, and so you have somewhere between 6-8 million Africans who have died in civil wars in places like Chad, Rwanda, Congo. The fact that it doesn’t help in places where the US chooses not to go doesn’t mean that it isn’t helpful in places that the US does choose to go.
Then there are wars like Vietnam and Iraq where it gets used badly. But the US does have the ability to regret these actions, unlike more authoritarian superpowers, which simply throw more and more at it all the time and don’t really care how nasty it gets. That’s a small comfort if you happened to get picked up and tossed into al-Grahib, but there is a process to try to keep those things from happening.
Fora like the UN, regional security councils, etc., are useful for reducing the need for power projection, because some conflicts that do not need to escalate can be resolved beforehand, but without someone able to back up resolutions credibly, it’s too easy to flout agreements. The League of Nations following WWI was a prime example of that. Shay’s Rebellion in the US under the Articles of Confederation is another example.
What will the world look like when the Chinese are the economic superpower and start to take responsibility for world order. That’s an interesting thing to ponder. US dominance is far from perfect, but it’s probably a lot more benign than most major powers have been.
What is the appropriate size? US security policy has been about maintaining the capability to fight wars on two fronts since at least WWI, so that a war in Europe would not necessarily leave the US vulnerable to wars in the far east. Of course, we have (until recently) had two front wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which are arguably wastes of resources (I’ve been reluctantly in favor of the Afghan war, and against the Iraq war, although once Iraq was invaded, I felt that we had to be there to clean up the mess we made). However, these wars haven’t been as major as the imagined conflict with the Soviets, so arguably there is still some capacity to respond to the Chinese, if needed.
In addition, Al Quaida, means that many modern need to be fought differently, with special ops teams and cybersquads and (often) with a lot of technology. But one of the reasons that this is the most dangerous form of conflict today is because a conventional tanks-on-tanks, aircraft-on-aircraft, navy-on-navy conflict with the US is pretty much unwinnable by anyone. Take that dominance away, and you’re back to conventional wars (with the attendant temptation to use tactical nukes).
^ bchad, is there a conclusion in there? felt like i was reading an economics book
If you are looking for a sum of spending that is the “correct” size, then no, there is not a conclusion.
If you want to know the logic behind why the US thinks its military budget needs to be so much larger larger than virtually any other country’s, then read away.
By the way, it’s politics that drives this, not economics, although economics is a big part of politics.
High debt levels from structural deficit spending are always inflated away. There is no other way. In the long run, and we’ve already hit the long run, in order to avoid insolvency, inflation is always sufficient that the cost of servicing the national debt does not exceed a certain fraction of GDP.
Already the U.S. national debt is several times GDP, when you include already accrued but unfunded Social Security liabilities, and miscellaneous liabilities for, e.g. an otherwise insolvent Postal Service. The fact that Social Security obligations are indexed to inflation means that the government, in order to remain solvent, will continue, as far as possible, to report a CPI that is less than the true measure of inflation.
The solvency constraint on the cost of servicing the debt means that interest rates must remain low until the majority of the debt has been inflated away, and the GDP has grown dramatically in nominal terms.
Inflation will have well taken root and become rampant by that time, and the Fed will then be free and in fact have no other option to retain the credibility of the dollar than to raise interest rates a la Volcker. I don’t want to be invested in bonds until after that happens.
Deficit spending drives inflation, and it means that in the long run inflation must exceed the interest rate on the national debt by the same fraction that goverment spending exceeds tax revenues.
All depends about future foreign policy in the Middle East. It all comes down to that at the end.
Makes sense to me, but maybe I just don’t get it.
The international people I meet on my adventures are really fun. They ask me about this stuff and I say “well, no I don’t think they Americans realize they are in a period of decline, they think it’s just ‘a slump’ and things will bounce back”. They look wide-eyed at me and say “are you serious! but how can they possibly think that?”. Denial is my only answer. Either that or my analysis is incorrect and they aren’t screwed.
But I mean this whole “America world police” thing is great when you can afford it, but I think it’s time to admit that time is over and wise-up. How can you “protect the world” (and that is not what they are doing anyhow) when you are living in a decaying HELOC’d hut? Doesn’t make sense. But sobering up is hard to do when you’ve been high a long time.
What Americans say is not necessarily what Americans do.
Like bchad said, if we were the world police we would have stopped massacares of innocent people in Africa. But we don’t care. We would rap Israel on the knuckles for settlements, but we don’t dare. We would not allow CIA to kill any young Muslim guys and call them militants after they are killed.
So Americans protect their own interests just like every other country. But we are, in fact, much more involved in the world trade and world politics than any one other country. Look at the number of bases. Americans are still in Germany and expanding NATO against Russia. China is surrounded by her enemies and America’s allies (Japan, Taiwan, Philippines, maybe India.) Some of it is holdover from WWII because bureaucracies die hard.
Americans have infinite optimism in part due to “USA USA” they hear everywhere. How many Koreans hear “Korea #1” or Indians hear “India #1”? For one country (i.e. not EU), USA is still the biggest economy by far. 4% GDP is nothing. Plus, our young Mexican immigrants are making sure we have more Americans in the future than the dying EU and Japan 
Don’t forget the dying Russians too.
I support a strong US military, but clearly there is room to cut. I’m not qualified to say how much and which programs, but there has to be something. While the US has to protect its interests overseas, it seems that it ends up protecting a lot of other countries’ interests at the same time. I would like to see some other countries start to step up. Doesn’t the EU benefit from a “stable” middle-east? Doesn’t the entire world benefit from a non-nuclear Iran (excluding Iran of course)? Doesn’t China benefit from “stability” between the Koreas? Maybe we just don’t hear about it here, but why aren’t the navies of EU countries sailing through the Persian Gulf as a show of force?
^ I like that argument, but that’s how it works inside the US as well.
The homeless bums benefit from national security paying no taxes. There’s an official economic term for it, positive externality ?
And you could be here illegally, have a medical emergency, and no hospital can turn you down. What happens when you run up a $50k bill and are dead broke and just walk away.
The system pays for it. And by system, I mean the rest of us who work our butts off trying to make a decent living.