Commentary

Mar 22, 2023

Warrior Maven

Should the US Scale Back its Global Presence?

Founder of the Quincy Institute wants the United States to give up its “fantasy” of world hegemonic leadership

USS Harry S. Truman in the Persian Gulf. (Daniel Hawkins via US Central Command)

(Washington D.C.) In both “After the Apocalypse” (2021) and “The Reckoning that Wasn’t” (2023), Professor Andrew Bacevich, one of the founders of the Quincy Institute, wants the United States to give up its “fantasy” of world hegemonic leadership, and adopt the foreign policy principles of “realism, sobriety, and an appreciation of limits.”

If coupled with an emphasis on “purposefulness, discipline”, and an “economy of effort”, the US would adopt the very things Bacevich explains that George Kennan in his “Long Telegram” on Soviet conduct had hoped America would in the post-World War II era embrace. The idea is to use American military power minimally, and as such also keep in check what President Eisenhower warned was a too powerful military-industrial complex.

With the tragic end of US military involvement in Afghanistan, and wars in Iraq and Libya fresh in the minds of millions of Americans, caution and restraint in the use of American military power does not seem like a bad set of recommendations. When added to the equally tragic outcome of the war in Indochina, it is understandable that critics of the US military believe new international rules of engagement would make sense, particularly the idea of jettisoning a hegemonic role for the United States. To me its counter-intuitive, but there has always been a strain in the US public that has embraced as attractive the idea of “peace through retreat.” After all, if the US doesn’t have such a large military and a less than robust network of overseas facilities, maybe the US would be less involved in wars overseas. In pursuit of that goal, Bacevich calls for a nearly fifty percent cut in the US defense budget and a major drawdown of US military bases overseas.

But before we discuss how and when the US should use military force outside the United States, and the cost and size of the US military posture, Bacevich makes a large number of assumptions, including that (1) the wars we fight are often unwinnable, and (2) the greed of the military and defense industry drags us into wars we should not fight. ‘

Bacevich also undergirds his argument with a discussion of Kennan’s containment strategy, the conduct and outcome of the war in Vietnam, the impact of the US policy of détente and peaceful co-existence, the relative wisdom or lack thereof of Eisenhower’s farewell warning, and the actual policies adopted by President Reagan to end Cold War #1.

On all these counts, Bacevich gets things wrong.

For example, Kennan did advocate keeping Moscow within certain geographic borders but then inexplicably opposed President Truman’s use of American military forces to free the Republic of Korea of both communist Chinese, Russian and North Korean forces. (Russians participated in the war but wore North Korean uniforms.) If ever there was a use of American and allied military force that was both necessary and successful, it was here between 1950-53.

The ROK is now the world’s tenth largest economy, a largely free and democratic country, whose security is necessarily guaranteed by the presence of American military forces, the absence of which would likely precipitate a North Korean invasion. And it may not be a coincidence that Quincy Institute fellow Doug Bandow continues to advocate the US withdrawal of forces from the peninsula, not because war will not ensue, but from a mistaken idea that war on the Korean peninsula is inevitable, and Bandow simply wants to avoid any US involvement, particularly an involvement that might mean a North Korean nuclear missile being launched against American cities.

Much of the concern over US military involvement in wars reflects the US fight in Vietnam and Ind0-China that lasted for 20 years. But as a new book on the subject has explained--which Victor Davis Hanson has recently aptly summarized-- it was liberal reporters opposed to the US military that falsely pushed the Kennedy administration into a coup against South Vietnam’s Diem, having been duped into such a position by a Viet Cong enemy agent.

By 1972, the South Vietnamese were able to take on the North’s army and defeat it, and then a shot at victory was thrown away by a radical US Congress which voted to eliminate all support for the South, even as that same Congress knew South Vietnam did not have its own defense industry from which to produce the weaponry needed to prevail over the North.

And as Singapore’s long serving former premier Lee Kuan Yew explained, the US fight in Vietnam gave breathing space to the Western Pacific economic tigers to create and sustain democratic institutions from the Republic of Korea, the Philippines, Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia, as communist terrorism and wars of national liberation were kept at bay.

But here again it was not the military that threw away a victory in Vietnam, but the politicians that also simultaneously adopted a policy of détente and peaceful coexistence with the USSR, under the assumption that as Henry Kissinger explained, the American people were not interested in fighting another war immediately after ending the US involvement in Indo-China.

Indeed, the American anti-war left and especially the Democratic Party turned against the military but not their own party that sent over 500,000 troops to Vietnam in the first place. It was after all President Nixon that gradually withdrew US forces while training the South Vietnamese to take over the fighting.

But détente and peaceful co-existence ushered in a decade of Soviet advances as some 18 nations from Vietnam to Ethiopia to Nicaragua to Angola fell to communist guerillas and terrorists, wars largely funded by the USSR, Cuba and China. And then add in the collapse of the government of Iran that gave us the Islamic Republic and its now more than four decade long reign of terror. As the Soviets themselves believed, the correlation of forces by the end of the 1970s had apparently so moved in Moscow’s direction that the end of the US dominant role in the world was soon to be achieved.

The idea as Bacevich posits that the Committee on the Present Danger, or its founder Paul Nitze, or candidate Ronald Reagan created a new Cold War after Vietnam is preposterous. The USSR and its myriad allies around the globe, including its eastern European Warsaw Pact, was stoking war and terrorism around the world, including literally thousands of terrorist attacks in Europe and the United States.

Bacevich claims a less hostile and overt use of military force by the United States would also help produce domestic tranquility. The opposite took place post 1969. President Nixon determining early in his Presidency that as the FBI informed the White House, the Black Panthers were being paid by Communist China to assassinate US policemen, while the terror groups the Weatherman and Black September and Red Brigades rampaged over Europe and the United States, fueled with funds from the Soviet empire, all occurring as the US withdrew from Vietnam, defense spending was curtailed, and the US pursued détente.

During the 70’s, the US was very much in retreat, the very thing the opponents of the military industrial complex advocated. In 1976 and 1980, then candidate Reagan ran against détente, calling for a renewed defense spending for the United States. With the giveaway of the Panama canal—now managed on both ends by the Chinese communist party---the fall of Iran, Nicaragua and Grenada, and the possible loss of Columbia and El Salvador, Kennan’s containment policy was looking like a smashing failure.

When Reagan was elected to the US Presidency, it was assumed he was going to get the US involved again in a hot war, but this time with the USSR and possibly ending in nuclear Armageddon. The nuclear freeze was being pushed by US disarmament groups and the Soviets, even with the support of American bishops and a pastoral letter calling into question the very idea of deterrence.

Reagan flummoxed his critics by proposing a major nuclear modernization effort, a 100% cut in all INF type systems, and a huge 50% cut in strategic long-range nuclear arms, both of which were adopted in 1987 and 1991 respectively. Kennan opposed both ideas, embraced continued détente, and warned against the US deployment of the Pershing and GLCM missiles in Europe.

Reagan, Thatcher, the Pope and Kohl stuck together on the Allied NATO missile deployments, and as a result destroyed Moscow’s strategy of splitting the NATO alliance. Far from containing Soviet deployment of thousands of SS—20 missile warheads, Reagan proposed to roll them back completely, a proposal made in November 1981 which was immediately dismissed by the disarmament community as a “trick” proposal designed to elicit an almost automatic Soviet “nyet” and thus allow Reagan and the military industrial complex to continue their nuclear build-up.

The tenor of the times was well captured by the first two questions asked of the new President in 1981 at his first press conference. One was whether the US would observe the SALT II arms proposals (which were not ratified by the US Senate), and two, would the US continue a policy of détente. Reagan’s response was how could one call a massive build of Soviet nuclear weapons “arms control.” And he rejected the policy of détente in favor of a new US policy whereas the President himself noted, “we win and they lose.”

Added to the nuclear modernization proposals by Reagan that finally were put together and rescued by the 1983 Scowcroft Commission report, was a 1983 missile defense proposal that was secretly put together and supported by the entirety of the US Chiefs of Staff. For the first time since the 1972 ABM Treaty, the US was going to get back into the missile defense business, a US initiative that panicked both the Kremlin and the US disarmament community as well as Mr. Kennan.

The late Bud McFarlane, Reagan’s national security adviser, explained at an AFPC event in Washington that when he met with senior Senators on the Armed Services Committee shortly after Reagan’s 1983 SDI announcement, they wanted to know when the US would be ready to trade it away for an arms control deal, so the Senate would not have to support missile defense for too long.

McFarlane guessed 4 years---indeed exactly the time it took for the INF Treaty to be inked, ironically following Reagan’s rejection of Gorbachev’s insistence on killing missile defense at the 1986 Reykjavik summit.

McFarlane also noted how at least 14 times at the summit, Reagan, speaking without notes, beat back Gorbachev’s constant push to kill SDI, explaining to the General Secretary that even if nuclear armed missiles were banned, missile defense was a necessary insurance policy in case some madmen decided to again build and launch nuclear armed missiles.

Particularly important is to underscore that Reagan’s strategy of rollback was not Kennan’s containment. In fact, Kennan’s opposed nearly everything Reagan proposed to end the USSR’s empire. Reagan’s success was also based not on the geographic underpinnings of Kennan’s “containment” approach, but because Reagan also understood the ideological basis for communism--the literally “evil” nature of Soviet conduct. When Grenada was liberated from the Soviet camp, Kennan too joined the naysayers and opponents, apparently unaware of the critical symbolism of taking back from the Soviet empire the first bit of real estate since 1917. It meant the US was serious!

As Myron Norquist detailed in the September 2000 National Intelligencer, Reagan’s assault on the Soviet empire involved major economic initiatives, including cutting off concessionary bank loans to the Eastern Bloc and the Soviet Union itself, decontrolling the price of oil (and thus partially emptying the Soviet exchequer), while also making Moscow’s foreign adventures in Angola, Afghanistan, Nicaragua, El Salvador too costly to sustain. As Norquist detailed, the estimated cost in foreign exchange to the Soviets to sustain their empire skyrocketed to an estimated $100 billion annually, unsustainable when total Soviet foreign exchange earnings were only a little north of $30 billion in 1981.

As for the often repeated narrative that Reagan was a war monger, his use of military force over eight years was actually as Kennan urged “limited, sober and realistic.” Except for the peacekeepers sent to Lebanon which the President later acknowledged was a mistake.

Key was of course the assistance to Solidarity, as Poland was recognized as the lynchpin to the end of the USSR, where assistance delivered with the courageous help of Pope John II (who survived a Soviet assassination attempt) and the Vatican eventually led to the first free election in the Soviet empire in nearly three quarters of a century.

But connecting the Soviets to terror attacks on the West was no easy task. Early in the Reagan administration, Secretary of State Haig, having read Clare Sterling’s works on terrorism, told the US Congress that to end terrorism one had to go to the source and in this case that would be the Soviet Union and Cuba.

The response was angry and dismissive. How dare the administration threaten Havana and Moscow, thundered angry progressive Congressional critics. The New York Times weighed in, assuring Americans that wars of national liberation were spontaneous efforts to secure freedom in an oppressive imperialist and colonial world the US military industrial complex helped sustain. In response to Haig’s testimony, Congress ordered the CIA to do an assessment of whether the Soviets really did or did not support terrorism, whether the PLO or Red Brigades or the Weatherman.

CIA Director Casey ordered a report and received a memo claiming that the USSR did not support international terrorism, with backup evidence for the claim including a folder of TASS and Pravda editorials denying Soviet involvement. Casey was dumbfounded at the juvenile conclusions and told a new team to go back to the drawing boards. As Robert Gates, a future defense secretary and involved in the assessment explains, the next report told the facts that indeed the Soviets were responsible for funding terrorism, but that even this report under evaluated the extent of Soviet involvement as was revealed after the fall of the USSR.

As we look down the road, the disarmament community is once again warning the United States not to exaggerate the Chinese threat, reduce our nuclear weapons, even unilaterally, end missile defense plans, and have an arms control dialogue with Iran, North Korea, China and North Korea to dimmish instabilities.

Again the military-industrial complex is fingered as the culprit by Bacevich, as he calls for a defense budget of two percent of our GDP, or an implied $500 billion budget some $350 billion or 40% less than today.

When measured in purchasing power, however, much as the Heritage Foundation did last year, the US defense budget would be less than that of China or Russia. When adjusted for projected inflation from 2023-30, the defense budget Bacevich approves would be equivalent to the defense budget of 1991 or around $300 billion. And given the CPI index for the US since then has been over 100%, Bacevich is proposing a defense budget equivalent to $150 billion annually, or the combined defense budgets of Saudi Arabia, Japan and the Republic of Korea.

As for President Eisenhower’s farewell warning about the military industrial complex, in 1958-60, former General officers and members of the US military campaigned for a larger defense budget. They blamed then President Eisenhower for shortchanging the military.

These officers were hired by the defense industry to make the case for more weapons, which then candidate Senator Kennedy took up in 1960 claiming both a bomber and missile gap in the US strategic balance with the USSR, charges Kennedy knew to be exaggerated.

Eisenhower never took money from the defense industry when he retired from the Army and he resented some of his former colleagues “cashing in” as well as their criticism of his defense policies. It is true Ike’s massive retaliation strategy relied on the use of nuclear weapons to stop a Soviet attack into western Europe, but it was critical as it would have bankrupted the United States to match the Soviet conventional forces in Europe.

The retiring President turned over the speech writing to three people—a pacifist editor of the New Republic, a Navy commander who resented the Army and USAF getting too much of the then $49 billion defense budget; and Richard Moose, whose son would go on to be a top Senate staffer responsible for future defense budgets.

He explained that in 1949, the then Secretary of Defense was pushing for a cut in the defense budget from around $12 billion to $7 billion. Paul Nitze, then a young defense expert, was asked to put together an alternative defense plan reflecting the realistic defense needs of the US but without a price tag and sell the force structure plan to then President Truman.

In the spring of 1950, Truman was ready to adopt the plan but without knowing the price tag. But having previously withdrawn US forces from Korea and having declared Korea beyond the US defense perimeter, Truman tried to offset the US withdrawal with a military assistance package for the Republic of Korea. In January 1950, the House turned it down 193-191, relying in part on assurances from the CIA that the DPRK could not invade the ROK without Soviet forces marching with Pyongyang, for which the agency said there was not any indication, a point the agency continued to assert right up the June 25th invasion.

In June 19650, the North invaded the South, resulting in some 2.5 million dead Koreans and 35,000 dead American soldiers.

After the war ended in 1953, the US defense budget proposed to Congress as determined by the new Eisenhower administration, was $43 billion. Exactly the budget number of the defense plan put together by Paul Nitze in April 1950---the very patriot repeatedly accused of creating the Cold War on behalf of the military-industrial complex which Eisenhower wanted to reign in.

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