“Governments are instituted among men,” our Founders declared two and a half centuries ago, to secure the rights to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”—that is, to ensure public safety and security, defend political freedom, and foster economic prosperity. Today Americans enjoy a level of security, liberty, and prosperity that surpasses that possessed by any previous society in human history: not in Classical Athens, Imperial Rome, Dynastic China, or Victorian Britain was a people so safe, so free, so rich. We meet tonight to debate how to sustain this happy state, for we know that neither peace, nor liberty, nor prosperity will sustain itself.
In arguing in the affirmative, I will present a case based upon a reading—a common-sense reading, I think—of history, not an exposition of political science theory. I cannot predict the course of human events with certainty: past performance is no guarantee of future results. I will describe correlations, not define causes. Nonetheless, comrades, I think it is no accident that our unprecedented happiness coincides with our unprecedented global power. To paraphrase my friend Robert Kagan, we live in a world America made. If America will not continue to make it, others will, and that world will be quite different as a result.
Let me begin by reestablishing the link between geopolitical leadership and military power. That force of arms is the ultimate resort of kings is not a new idea, but the very extent of American military prowess in recent decades has made us somewhat forgetful of this basic truth. There have been any number of fads that have clouded our minds in this regard: “geoeconomics” was supposed to have supplanted geopolitics; “soft power” and “smart power” were believed to be not only kinder and gentler tools of statecraft but also more efficient and effective. No longer, like Clausewitz, would we “compel our adversaries to do our will.” We would “attract” allies with clever diplomacy, the promises of democracy, the infinite riches of open markets, the siren songs of modern culture.
One need only follow the newspapers to be reminded of the role of military power in international affairs. Fielding an army is what makes the “Islamic State” a state and not just a group of terrorists. Iran is not seeking a nuclear capability simply out of national pride; it is part of a strategy to be the dominant power in the Middle East. Vladimir Putin held a referendum in Crimea after he conquered it. And in the South China Sea, the People’s Liberation Army is creating islands out of atolls in order to build airfields, not beach resorts.
Alas, each of these headlines records a retreat of US military power as well as the advance of other armies, of American “red lines” crossed or erased. The withdrawal from the Middle East has been the most marked; to compare the Middle East of 2009 to today is to tour a very bleak horizon. In West Africa, Boko Haram runs riot, not merely capturing villages and schoolgirls but also fomenting a sectarian war between Muslim and Christian. In North Africa, this administration’s feckless use of military power gave birth to the doctrine of “leading from behind.” In the Persian Gulf, we have abandoned the fragile but very real victory won in the Iraq surge and, in the process, witnessed the perhaps permanent dismemberment of a society and a state; in Syria, we have allowed a dictator to hang onto power by committing mass murder and driven our longstanding regional allies into an embrace of al Qaeda’s affiliate; and, worst of all, mistaken Iran’s interest for our own. Our strategy appears to be based upon Henry Kissinger’s quip about the Iran-Iraq war: “It’s a pity they both can’t lose,” he said. And, in fact they both did: Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and Ayatollah Khomenei’s Islamic Republic are two of history’s biggest losers, and their failures, to this day, matter to the United States and our interests. We lost, too. Hoping that a lose-lose proposition will be proved true is not a recipe for security, liberty, or prosperity.
Circumstances in Europe and East Asia are hardly better. If the level of violence is lower, it is only because Putin and Xi Jinping prefer to savor their meals rather than scarf them. But the stakes involved are immeasurably larger: Europe has been the focal point of international power since the Renaissance and East Asia may similarly be the key to the global balance of power for centuries to come. It was through victories in western Europe and the western Pacific that, in World War II, the United States became a global power; these are the two foundations of the remarkably peaceful, free, and prosperous international system that America then created and has nurtured for seven decades.
Indeed, despite the many challenges we face, this system—the work of a century of American effort—remains fundamentally sound. Our strengths—social, political, economic, and military—endure. America is forever renewing and reinventing itself in ways that others cannot. New leaders step forward to meet the tests of their times. Allies everywhere are willing to march along with us. If we will fight to keep the American peace, we will prevail.
But we must lead. We must, like an infantry lieutenant, say, “Follow me!” If we will the ends—safe lives, lasting liberty, and the many pursuits of happiness—we must will the means.
To begin with, this means restoring the size and strength of our armed forces. We spend a lot of money on military power; about $600 billion dollars this coming year. At the same time, that figure represents a constantly shrinking slice of our national economy; by the time Barack Obama leaves office, baseline defense spending will shrink to less than 3 percent of gross domestic product. By contrast the average defense burden over the five decades of the Cold War was 6 percent of GDP. Dwight Eisenhower, supposedly the paragon of budget discipline whose warning against the “military industrial complex” remains a motto for free-spending liberals today, reduced defense spending to 8 percent—yes, 8 percent—of GDP.
Increasing the level of military spending modestly—to 5 percent of GDP—would neither bankrupt the government or the country. It would, if invested with intelligence and employed with determination, supply the margin of difference between the need to retreat and retrench—for we have lost the capacity to sustain the system we have built—and the ability to restore a favorable balance of power.
Now some assert, on the Right as well as the Left, that foreign “entanglements” create more problems than they solve, that “America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” That we are “the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all,” but only the “champion and vindicator of her own.” But this is only to observe that our foreign policy and military forces are not used simply to satisfy our political principles, but to advance our interests. The business of championing and vindicating, of securing our liberty and prosperity, is a constant and continual effort. Nor is the business of fostering liberal governance elsewhere a quixotic quest—though it is a deeply moral endeavor—but a hard-headed and realistic undertaking to sustain the victories won at the greatest cost in blood and treasure. Germany and Japan have become pillars of the liberal international system not merely because their tyrannies were destroyed by American arms, but because their polities were rebuilt along American lines. Because the Germans and Japanese are now “like us,” to use James Fallows’ term, we have no need to fear them.
I want to conclude by reflecting upon yet another founding source of American statecraft, George Washington’s 1976 Farewell Address. This is perhaps the most misunderstood and misquoted text in the American cannon, cited frequently as the source of our alleged isolationist tendencies. Our first president commented favorably on our “detached and distant situation” from the world’s—particularly Europe’s—troubles. “Why quit our own to stand upon foreign ground?” he wondered. But, like John Quincy Adams a generation later, he foresaw the day when American strength would supplant the new nation’s weakness. Thus Washington concluded:
The period is not far off when we may defy material injury from external annoyance; when we may take such an attitude as will cause the neutrality we may at any time resolve upon to be scrupulously respected; when belligerent nations, under the impossibility of making acquisitions upon us, will not lightly hazard the giving us provocation; when we may choose peace or war, as our interest, guided by justice, shall counsel.
From before the United States won its independence, English-speaking peoples in North America have had a keen appreciation of the international balance of power and a global view. Further, we understand the need for military strength and we wish to possess it in abundance; Alexander Hamilton described early America as “Hercules in a cradle.” Finally, the use of power and the purpose of politics is, for us, a moral undertaking. Thomas Jefferson wrote to James Madison of the American “empire FOR liberty”—not, in this case “OF liberty.” The use of the word “for” is critical; for Jefferson and Madison—indeed the Revolutionary generation to a man—understood that liberty could only be won through the use of power.
So I see the truth of tonight’s proposition—that our security, our liberty, and our prosperity depend upon our will to lead and our ability to fight—to be as close to a law of physics as human affairs will allow. Nonetheless, it is not, as the Declaration hoped, a self-evident truth; it must be proved in fact. I ask those of you who agreed initially to reaffirm this truth, and those who doubted then to now believe.
from AEI » Latest Content http://ift.tt/1JGMvLH
0 التعليقات:
Post a Comment