So much for that “peace dividend.”
Since 1998, when the post-Cold War decline in defense spending finally ended, $7.2 trillion has been allocated for the Defense Department. Adjusted for inflation, this increase will be in excess of 100 percent by the end of the 2011 fiscal year.
Our current surge in spending will be roughly as large as that of the Vietnam and Reagan eras combined before the 2012 election season kicks in. By the end of this decade, President Barack Obama will have spent more on the Pentagon than any other post-World War II presidential administration.
A fifth of those expenses are taken up by operations in Iraq and Afghanistan – a far smaller portion than may be expected, but still a significant chunk of change. The ongoing “War on Terrorism” continues to cost the nation an amount of blood and treasure wildly disproportionate to the threat: you’re more likely to commit suicide than be killed in an airborn terrorist incident.
Even when the realms of foreign policy and national security are taken alone, the primary concerns for the United States remain other nations. They aren’t those 100 or so al Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan. They aren’t those hypothetical airport-stalking ‘nuclear terrorists.’ And, Liz Cheney to the contrary, they aren’t lawyers provided by the Department of Justice.
America’s troubles and challenges on the international scene all arise from nation-states like ours. This has been the case since at least World War I, and it never changed simply because one superpower collapsed.
So, why spend trillions chasing rogue criminals unaffiliated with any one country? Those efforts are obviously not necessary defensive measures. Rather, the global war on terrorism is the end result of a political culture wedded to the idea that the United States can somehow singlehandedly shape the international environment.
Of course, this post-Cold War illusion and the jingoistic idiots who desperately want to believe it have been discredited by now. Our world is increasingly multi-polar, and trying to change that fact has only furthered the process. Hence the dangerously bloated and overstretched war machine.
Until our political leaders cease giving in to demands that more limited resources be shipped off to war zones, our nation will continue its downward spiral in influence and respectability. Until they realize that the threats facing us, and their solutions, are not supranational but international, we will continue to lose allies.
Until they realize that we are not engaged in a defensive war at all, but an unnecessary imperial crusade, the debate on all of this will continue to be distorted by fear. Fear, not of the human or economic costs of perpetual war, but of a tactic available to virtually any nation or group: “terror.”
As we have found out the hard way for the last nine years, it’s pretty difficult to fight a faceless tactic.
Unless, of course, cost is no object.
For more opinions, read the March 3 column, Smells like tea spirit.
