Going over the fiscal cliff may not be good for the economy, but
it might have one valuable result: forcing Americans to reassess
our enormous defense budget.
Taking $492 billion away from the Pentagon over the next decade
wouldn't be hard to do if we forced other nations to take more
responsibility for their own defense—and used the opportunity to
reduce our overall troop strength. What's hard, and expensive, is
our vast array of overseas commitments.
Why do we maintain these deployments? Partly out of inertia,
partly out of a feeling they can't do any harm and partly from an
incessant fear that anything that happens anywhere poses a
potential danger to our security.
This last factor is hard to overstate. Earlier this year,
Dartmouth College political scientist Benjamin Valentino
constructed a poll that was carried out by YouGov. When respondents
were asked if they think the United States "faces greater threats
to its security today than it did during the Cold War," 63 percent
said it does, with only 14 percent disagreeing.
"It's astonishing to me," Valentino told me in an interview in
his campus office last month. Not only are we no longer under the
constant threat of nuclear annihilation, he notes, but we have few
actual adversaries. Many Americans are aware that we spend more on
the military than the next 17 countries combined. What they may not
realize, says Valentino, is that "of the next 10 biggest military
spenders, all but two (Russia and China) are allies." You have to
go to No. 25, Iran, to find a real enemy.
In world history, he says, "there is no precedent for the
strongest power to have allies among so many other military powers.
Russia and China are only quasi-adversaries." Iran and North Korea
are military pipsqueaks, with or without nuclear weapons