After reading about President Obama’s strategy for conducting the war in Afghanistan I began wondering why we were even there. After all, George Washington warned us in his Farewell Address to “avoid foreign entanglements”. We have ignored his words.
Through the years our government has found many reasons to send our troops overseas and we are now continuing with President Bush’s “preventative war strategy to contain rogue states”. Is this really a war on terrorism, or something else? We have built an empire and it continues to grow every year. Don’t you think it causes resentment overseas? Consider how you’d feel about a Chinese military base here. The Pentagon currently owns or rents 716 overseas bases in 38 countries and has another 4,863 bases in the United States and its territories. In just one country, Germany, we have 18 air and army bases. http://www.acq.osd.mil/ie/download/bsr/BSR2009Baseline.pdf
Also, consider the fact that we spend more on our military than does the entire rest of the world combined – over $600 billion per year. This is big business, as a matter of fact, too big to fail. As our war machine grows so does the need for new wars and the new reasons to justify them. Although it may take years for the public to be properly conditioned for the next war, there will always be another. We are now being conditioned for military action in Iran and Yemen. The obvious bungling of our intelligence in the near-catastrophic Detroit plane incident at Christmas makes you wonder. Are our intelligence agencies really that stupid or is there a method behind this madness?
“Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes … known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.… No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.” — James Madison, Political Observations, 1795
Mr. Shaw, I understand your perspective, and believe that you are concerned about our seemingly endless desire to control the actions of people we disagree with. We do this politically with acts of congress and from time to time, militarily with acts of war.
I do not intend to argue over whether we should be doing so, but want to comment on the change we made from trying to stay neutral into serving as the world’s police. Also, I want to make the leap from policing the world to how we created this situation by not promoting constitutional governments, and free market capitalism.
We have not been a free market capitalist country with a constitutional government long enough to have to compete with another one. If there were another one, we might come to declare war on one another over some wrong or resource, but it has not happened yet. Not so for socialist countries. As Margaret Thatcher said, “The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.” You can substitute in any resource for money. Socialism requires an ever increasing supply of resources as the pay-outs exceed production in the absence of free market incentives.
This is why the Soviet Union “annexed” the former Soviet Block countries into the block; to increase the resources it had without having to actually produce them. Once we stopped Soviet expansion, they consumed all the public stores while eliminating most market incentives to produce. Similar parallels, in my opinion, can be drawn for all modern wars. Some tyrant sees his neighbor’s resources as the only thing missing for his brilliantly conceived plans for utopia in his own country. He attacks that country with the sole purpose of seizing their resources and enslaving their producers.
Where this all changed was following WWII, specifically in production and industry in the years following its end. When Germany captured Poland and took over its factories, they pointed guns at the worker’s heads and told them to produce more or die. Their productivity doubled. When they attacked Great Britain, the British workers were encouraged to increase production in protection of the homeland and the crown. British productivity tripled. American producers were told that we would meet the same fate as the Brits and were encouraged to compete for contracts to produce material for the effort and our free market economy increased production by 25 times.
Following the war, we had the only mostly-undamaged manufacturing capacity in the world. We agreed to protect allies and conquered alike with our substantial military resources so that they would not have to divert resources from reconstruction to defense. Of course you are aware of all of this, but what happened next is where the path forked.
We could have insisted that each of the players adopt U.S. style constitutional governments so as to slow the rise of future tyranny. We could have insisted that they convert to free markets. We could have encouraged them to compete with us for contracts, military and otherwise with their own manufacturing. You can argue that we did this to some degree. But, I assert that we created a welfare like condition which lead to a generation or more of Europeans raised with a sense of entitlement and socialistic thinking. As a result, our markets became the place in the world to invest and our manufacturing thrived despite no longer encouraged to produce at 25 times pre-war levels. At the same time, Europe languished despite not needing defense spending and unprecedented demand for goods and services. Japan was still burning wood to power their public busses well into the 1960’s. The only lasting difference between us and them was that they were all socialistic, central planning, societies and we were free market capitalists. We thrived, they languished, and we supported their economic retardation with our generosity, like what we do to inner city kids, but on a global scale.
This explains how we got here and why we have military bases all over the world, and why none of the countries where those bases are located want us to leave. We are in all of them at the host country’s request. This also explains why we are the only ones who feel any obligation, or indeed have the ability, to help those countries not already covered by our international welfare.
We continue to create socialist, dependent countries who cannot, and will not, look after themselves. They expect us to pay for their defense on their terms, and any other program that comes along, from AIDS treatment to global warming. Until now, that was OK since we had all the wealth created from being the only country with a constitutionally limited government in a free market capitalist economy. In my opinion, one way out of this spend and defend situation would be to encourage them to compete against us in the freedom and prosperity race. I say freedom and prosperity because a communist-capitalist country looks a lot like China when they pop up.
The converse would put an end to our feeding of this cycle as well, but by lowering us into the same state as the rest of the world. We could ignore the constitutional limits and destroy the free market. We could bring our guys home as we can no longer afford to protect everyone and allow the world to control its population through war and pestilence, and allow our own to be controlled by these factors as well.
My generation may well see us try to get out of the promises we have made to protect our allies. Care to guess which motivation will drive such change?