According to the Department of Defense’s “Active Duty Military Personnel Strengths by Regional Area and by Country,” U.S. troops are in 148 countries and 11 territories.
This worldwide archipelago of bases may have been justified when we confronted a Communist bloc spanning Eurasia from the Elbe to the East China Sea, armed with thousands of nuclear weapons and driven by imperial ambition and ideological animus against the United States. But the Cold War is history. It is absurd to contend that 1,000 overseas bases are vital to U.S. security. Indeed, it is our pervasive military presence abroad, our support of despotic regimes, and our endless interventions and wars that have made America, once the most admired of nations, among the world’s most resented and detested.
Liquidation of this empire should have begun at the end of the Cold War. Now it is being forced upon us by a deficit-debt crisis that the cost of that empire helped to produce. We cannot continue to kick the can up the road, for we have come to the end of the road.
Britain’s John Gray got it right:
The irony of the post-Cold War period is that the fall of communism was followed by the rise of another utopian ideology.… The collapse of American power that is underway is the predictable upshot. Like the Soviet collapse, it will have large geopolitical repercussions. An enfeebled economy cannot support America’s over-extended military commitments for much longer. Retrenchment is inevitable and it is unlikely to be gradual or well planned.17
The “utopian ideology” of which Gray writes is the idea we drank deep of at the end of the Cold War: that America, now the last superpower, had a mission from Divine Providence to use our wealth and power to lead mankind to a promised land of freedom, peace, prosperity, and democracy, even if it required decades of sacrifices of American blood and treasure in a new heroic “Long War.” Our inevitable disillusionment is now at hand.
So, what criteria should determine which alliances should be allowed to lapse, which bases should be closed, and which troops brought home? The yardstick should be whether the nations involved are truly vital to the national security of the United States.
OUT OF RUSSIA’S SPACE
From Churchill’s speech at Fulton, Missouri, in 1946, declaring an “iron curtain” had fallen across Europe, to Reagan’s stroll through Red Square in 1988, the United States was consumed by the Cold War. At times in that protracted conflict—the Berlin blockade of 1948, the Cuban missile crisis of 1962—confrontation threatened to erupt into a world war.
By the grace of God and wise statesmanship, we avoided those wars, unlike the great powers in the first half of that bloodiest of centuries. And when, two decades ago, the Soviet Union dismantled its empire, withdrew the Red Army from Europe, allowed the USSR to disintegrate into fifteen nations, and jettisoned Communist ideology, the casus belli of the Cold War disappeared. America’s Cold War mind-set and military alliances should have disappeared as well. Unfortunately, they did not.
Reagan would have seized the opportunity to convert Russia into a strategic partner and ally. For here was a great nation, still twice as large as the United States, with whom we no longer had a quarrel and whose hand was extended in friendship. Instead, cynically and opportunistically, we seized on Russia’s moment of weakness to bring six former allies and three former republics of the USSR, all of which had been set free by Moscow, into an alliance aimed against Moscow.
Why? If the crushing of the Hungarian Revolution and the suppression of Poland’s Solidarity movement in 1981 were not enough to rupture our relations with Russia, when did those countries become so vital to our security that we should go to war over them? If George H. W. Bush barely protested Gorbachev’s sending special forces into the Baltic republics in 1990, when did Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia become matters over which we should fight Russia, as we are now committed to do by our NATO alliance?
This was hubris of a high order. We obligated ourselves to defend nine new allies who added nothing to U.S. security, while antagonizing the world’s largest nation, which had sought our friendship. We added to our strategic liabilities, but added no strategic assets. We alienated a superpower to call Latvia an ally.
Why? The Russians had done as we wished—let the captive nations go, abandoned Communism, dissolved the empire, allowed fourteen ethnic minorities to establish new nations—and we treated them like Clemenceau treated the Weimar Republic. And we wonder why they resent us?
Anti-Americanism is rampant in Russia and is not going to disappear. But the United States can alleviate this hostility by ceasing to deceive ourselves about our commitments and interests in the Baltic, the Caucasus, Central Asia, and Russia itself. We are not going to fight Russia over South Ossetia or Abkhazia or Georgia. We are not going to war over the Baltic republics. Nor is there any vital interest of ours at risk if Ukraine and Russia move closer. These nations have historic, cultural, and ethnic ties that go back to before the United States existed, and both face a world where their numbers are dwindling while the populations of Asian and Muslim neighbors are growing. A closer alignment of Ukraine and Russia seems natural and presents no threat to us.
As we have economic but not strategic interests in Russia’s “near abroad,” the United States should tell Moscow that, after we leave Afghanistan, we will close all U.S. military bases in her border states and Central Asia and restrict military sales to Georgia, Ukraine, and the Baltic republics to defensive weapons. And we would expect reciprocity in Russian military sales to Caribbean countries and Central America. If we want Russia as a friend, let us get out of Russia’s space and get out of Russia’s face.
This is not to declare indifference to the fate of the Baltic republics. It is to say simply that these are not nations over which we can risk war. The same holds for Ukraine and Georgia. Both were part of the Russian empire of the Romanovs. And as the August war of 2008 showed, where we stood by as Russia thrashed Georgia for killing its peacekeepers and invading South Ossetia, America is not going to fight the largest country on earth over some statelet in the Caucasus.
In coming decades, a Russia whose population is shrinking is almost certain to lose land and people in the Caucasus and the Far East, where its population is outnumbered 100 to 1 by Chinese. There is nothing we can do about this and the Russian reaction to its diminution and its ethnonational dismemberment is unlikely to be pleasant. As this is none of our business, let us get out of the way, now.
WHITHER NATO?
At the end of the Cold War, NATO was acclaimed as “the most successful alliance in history.” But it faced a dilemma, as did the March of Dimes when Drs. Salk and Sabin found the cure for polio. What does an alliance created to defend Europe from the Red Army and the Warsaw Pact do when the Red Army has gone home and the Warsaw Pact has ceased to exist? How does one defend the Elbe River line when the Elbe no longer divides Germany and Europeans travel freely from the Atlantic to the Urals?
As Russia had gone home, some of us urged back then, America should come home, cede NATO and all the U.S. bases in Europe to the Europeans, and become again what UN ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick called “a normal country in a normal time.” Our foreign policy elites, however, could not accept that the play was closing after a forty-year run and America’s starring role as defender of the West against a mighty and malevolent Soviet Empire was coming to an end.
“We are about to do to you the worst possible thing we can do,” said Georgi Arbatov, of Moscow’s USA Institute. “We are going to take your enemy away.”18 Writer John Updike echoed Arbatov: “Without the Cold War, what’s the point of being an American?”19 Senator Richard Lugar stated the obvious. With the Iron Curtain lifted, the Berlin Wall down, and Europe free from Lisbon to Latvia, NATO “has to go out of area, or go out of business.”20
America was not going to let NATO go out of business. Too many rice bowls would be broken. Thus, going back on a commitment we had made to Gorbachev, we brought the Warsaw Pact and three former Soviet republics into NATO. If the Russians feel
like victims of a bait-and-switch, can we blame them?
Today, the sixty-year-old alliance is facing what may be a terminal crisis. After 9/11, NATO went out of area to go nation building in Afghanistan. We are now late in the tenth year of that war. Some NATO allies have already left Afghanistan. Others are scheduled to. Others impose restrictions on use of their troops, such as no combat. U.S. troops, too, are supposed to end major combat by 2014, though, as General Stanley McChrystal conceded last year, the Taliban have fought us to a draw.21
Should NATO fail in Afghanistan, what is its future? Who does NATO then contain or deter? Who would NATO fight? With the Baltic republics in the alliance, NATO is committed to treat an attack on Estonia as an attack on England. Can anyone believe Germany or France or Italy would declare war on Russia over Estonia?
When, in the Arab Spring of 2011, rebels rose up to depose Colonel Khadafi, whose army was about to crush the last stronghold of resistance in the east, Benghazi, Britain and France prevailed upon Obama to conduct air and missile strikes to prevent a massacre. No such massacre had occurred in any city Khadafi had retaken, but Obama, with aides warning him that inaction could mean a new Rwanda, was stampeded into war.
Ten days of U.S.-led air strikes sent Khadafi’s forces reeling. Then, Obama handed the mission over to NATO. But without U.S. air and naval power, NATO could do no more than maintain a stalemate in a civil war in a militarily enfeebled nation of six million people. Without the United States, the claim that NATO is a great power is fiction.
Moreover, Europeans are facing a debt crisis that is forcing new cuts in their already anemic military budgets. “[A]ll over Europe governments with big budgets, falling tax revenues and aging populations are experiencing rising deficits, with more bad news ahead,” reports the New York Times:
With low growth, low birthrates and longer life expectancies, Europe can no longer afford its comfortable lifestyle … without a period of austerity and significant changes. The countries are trying to reassure investors by cutting salaries, raising legal retirement ages, increasing work hours and reducing health benefits and pensions.22
The armed forces of Britain, France, Germany, and Italy, shadows of the million-man armies of their grandfathers, face even deeper cuts in personnel. By 2050, according to the European Commission, the number of Europeans over 65 will double. In 1950, there were 7 workers for every retired European. In 2050, the ratio will be 1.3 to one.23 Europe is aging and dying. Why would Europeans conscript their dwindling number of sons to fight in far-off lands? Why not rely, as always, on the Americans, who seem to relish the role? Out of area or out of business, said Senator Lugar. Having gone out of area, and come home disillusioned, NATO Europe must soon come to see the wisdom of the alternative.
EXITING THE ISLAMIC WORLD
Since 1991, the United States has fought a Persian Gulf war to liberate Kuwait, invaded and occupied Iraq and Afghanistan, used Special Forces and Predator drones to strike enemies in Somalia, Yemen, and Pakistan, imposed crippling sanctions on Iran, backed Israel in its wars in Lebanon and Gaza, and led a NATO attack on Libya.
We fight them over there, it is said, so we will not have to fight them over here.
Yet no Afghan or Iraqi or Somali or Yemeni or member of Hezbollah or Hamas ever attacked us—over here. September 11 was largely the work of fifteen Saudis sent by a Saudi, Osama. And while we are able to smash armies and depose despots, we have proven incapable of building nations or winning the hearts of peoples whose lands we have occupied. After sinking the wealth of an empire into Iraq, we have a regime that asked Tehran to bless its coalition, and that owes its existence to Moqtada al-Sadr.
The cost of our war in Iraq has been high: 4,400 dead, 37,000 wounded, $700 billion sunk, 100,000 Iraqi women widowed, hundreds of thousands of children orphaned. Sunni have been cleansed from Baghdad. Christians have endured pogroms and martyrdoms. Four millions Iraqis have been uprooted from their homes. Two million have left the country. As was said of the Romans: Ubi solitudinem faciunt pacem appellant. Where they make a desert they call it peace.
Across the Islamic world, we have broadened and deepened the reservoir of hate in which Al Qaeda fishes. “From the Mediterranean to the Indus Valley,” writes Geoffrey Wheatcroft, quoting diplomat Aaron David Miller, America is “not liked, not feared, and not respected.”24
The “inconvenient truth about the Arab world today,” writes Eugene Rogan, an historian of the Arabs, “is that, in any free election, those parties most hostile to the United States are likely to win.”25 Elections in Egypt, Lebanon, Palestine, and Iran in the Bush years bear him out.
In the Middle East, democratization means Islamization, as seen in the recent Turkish elections in which the masses voted to deliver the coup de grâce to Ataturk’s secular state. Should the National Endowment for Democracy succeed in bringing free and fair elections to post-Mubarak Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, allies of the United States could be swept away.
We came to Afghanistan as liberators, but are seen now as occupiers, imposing our ideas, values, and satraps. After eight years of war in Iraq and ten in Afghanistan, we are coming home with Iraq going its own way and Afghanistan tipping toward the Taliban.
Why did we not succeed? First, because we are poor imperialists who lack the patience and perseverance of the British. Second, because the age of imperialism is over. What all peoples demand today is self-determination, sovereignty, and freedom from foreign domination. Third, because it was always utopian to believe we could impose a system rooted in Western secular values on people steeped for ten centuries in Islam. The war to do so has only made us enemies where they did not exist.
We failed to understand what motivated our attackers. They did not come to kill us because they abhor our Constitution, or wish to impose Sharia on Oklahoma. They were over here because we are over there. They came to kill us in our country because we will not get out of their countries. Terrorism is the weapon of the weak who wish to be rid of foreign domination. From Plains Indians to Afghan mujahideen, from Menachem Begin’s Irgun to the Algerian FLN, from the IRA of Martin McGuinness to the ANC of Nelson Mandela, it has ever been thus.
Terrorism is the price of empire.
Anti-Western terror comes out of countries where the West is seen as overlord. When the British left Palestine, the Stern Gang attacks stopped. When the French left Algeria, the Paris bombings ended. When the Russians pulled out of Afghanistan, the mujahideen did not follow. When the U.S. Navy stopped shelling and the marines left Beirut, the attacks on Americans in Lebanon ceased. Osama bin Laden ordered 9/11 because U.S. troops were stationed on sacred Saudi soil that is home to Mecca. We will never end terrorist attacks on this country, until we remove our soldiers from those countries.
If we have a vital interest in that part of the world, it is that no hostile power should be able to shut off the flow of oil, the lifeblood of the industrial West. But the countries of the Middle East also have a vital interest in seeing to it that the oil flows. Without oil exports and the revenue they produce, the Middle East would sink to the level of the sub-Sahara.
CHINA’S CHALLENGE
In a 2008 survey of two dozen countries by the Pew Global Attitudes Project, the nation that emerged first, measured by the satisfaction of its people, was China. No other nation came close. “Eighty-six percent of Chinese people surveyed said they were content with the country’s direction, up from 48 percent in 2002.… And 82 percent of Chinese were satisfied with their national economy, up from 52 percent.”26
Considering whence the Chinese had come, out from under the mad murderous rule of Mao, support for the course set by Deng Xiaoping is understandable. Yet, for decades, China has denied couples the right to have a second child and its people the right to choose their leaders. The regime persecutes Tibetans, Uighurs, and Christians. Marxist ideology has been set aside but has been replaced by an ethnic chauvinism reminiscent of Central Europe in the 1930s. Yet, 86 percent of all Chinese were c
ontent with their country’s direction.
High among the reasons for the sense of satisfaction and pride is that China had been growing 10 to 12 percent a year for decades. Rising prosperity and burgeoning power, national unity and international respect, seem more important to the Chinese than freedom of speech, religion, assembly, or the press.
Contrast the contentment of the Chinese with the dissatisfaction of our own countrymen. In that Pew survey, only 23 percent of Americans said they approved of the nation’s direction. Only one in five was satisfied with the economy. And that was before the October 2008 crash. While this was in the final days of the Bush presidency, negative views about the direction of the country had returned by the end of Obama’s first year.
Democratic capitalism now has a rival: autocratic capitalism. In Asia, Africa, and Latin America, nations are looking to China as a model, as, in the 1930s, European and Latin nations looked to the Italy of Il Duce, where the trains ran on time, and the Germany of Hitler, with its stunning recovery from the depression. Yet, while China, having doubled its share of the world economy in two decades, is the rising power and America a declining power, the imperative remains—avoiding what happened between a fading Britain and a rising Germany in the twentieth century: ten years of war that bled and bankrupted both.
There are no issues between America and China that would seem to justify conflict. But, in the event of an economic reversal such as Japan suffered in the 1990s, Beijing could provoke a crisis to unite and divert a vast population that saw its prosperity disappear and hopes dashed. The most likely site for such a crisis is the Taiwan Strait.
While the United States is not going to war with China over an island every president since Nixon has conceded is a part of China, we could not sit passively by and watch as Taiwan, our former ally, was attacked, blockaded, or invaded. Beijing needs to understand that a price would be imposed. But, given the thickening ties between Taiwan and the Mainland, it is hard to see why China would risk alarming Asia and enraging America by provoking a crisis. Indeed, Asian apprehension over the rising power of China offers the best hope of containing Beijing.
Suicide of a Superpower_Will America Survive to 2025? Page 39