The US led the free world, in the second half of the 20th century.
This leadership was backed by a superb military and that military is still superb … and expensive [Defense – how much does the US spend?]
Foreign policy in the second half of the 20th century was focused on facing down communism and on guaranteeing the flow of oil from the middle east: these are receding concerns. We used to defend ourselves in our adversaries’ half of the field: that meant the pax Americana enveloped a large part of the planet (to the benefit of countries in western Europe and in east Asia).
The evidence (and this goes back to before President Trump, but has accelerated in his administration) is that we are less interested in doing that, now, and that we are turning away from the rest of the world and inward: there are no obvious foreign policy objectives, at present (except, perhaps, to reduce our overseas commitments).
Crunchicrant does not express an opinion on this trend: it is a rational response in a changing world; at the same time, the world has not been successfully ignored in the past.
Crunchicrant does worry that we have not done enough to understand and plan to confront today’s threats from overseas – nor to configure our security and defense resources to counter the risks they pose [Keeping us safe – the defense of the US].
(Exhibit A in making this case: COVID-19 – the pandemic has caused massive economic damage, and the risk it posed does not appear to have been thought through, at all – we have been hit from left field and have struggled).
It is only with such an understanding and plan that we can start to configure our security and military resources to meet the threats we actually face:
Our military capability is maintained at a cost to the American people (over $2,000 per person, per year), higher than the cost paid by citizens of any other major industrialized country [Defense – how much does the US spend?]. Germany, France, the UK spend in the $600-$700 range, per head per year. We cannot afford to pay for capability we do not need: if our foreign policy is withdrawal from the world stage, we do not need so vast a conventional military as we have. At the same time we may need to devote much more resource to new threats that confront us.
(Crunchicrant does not suppose that there is a total cost saving against our security and defense budgets – maybe, indeed, those budgets need to be increased: it does believe that there needs to be evolution in how security and defenses resources are configured.)
The World: what should the US be doing?
