Suicide of a Superpower_Will America Survive to 2025?

by Patrick J. Buchanan

  Hubris was in the air in that hour.

  In The End of History Francis Fukuyama wrote of the inevitable “triumph of the West” and the coming of a new world where liberal democracy would be the “final form of human government embraced by all.” Charles Krauthammer spoke of a “unipolar moment” when America ought to “go all the way and stop at nothing short of universal dominion.” William Kristol dismissed the “misguided warnings of imperial overstretch” and called for a Weltpolitik of “benevolent global hegemony.”6 Madeleine Albright instructed mankind on why America had a right to bomb into submission a small nation, Serbia, that had never injured us. “If we have to use force, it is because we are America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and … see further into the future.”7

  Thomas Friedman became the troubadour of globalization, “which on closer examination,” said Andrew Bacevich, “turned out to be a euphemism for Americanization.”:

  The ultimate goal, Friedman wrote in 1999, was “the spread of free-market capitalism to virtually every country in the world”—a process that would put “a Web site in every pot, a Pepsi on every lip, [and] Microsoft Windows in every computer.” Yet none of this was going to occur without the backing of hard power. “The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist,” Friedman declared. “And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps.”8

  Heeding the call after 9/11, George W. Bush launched his “global democratic revolution,” and, in the one memorable line of his second inaugural, set as America’s “ultimate” goal “ending tyranny in our world.”

  But now the songbirds of empire have all fallen silent.

  THE COLD WAR CONSERVATIVES

  “Historians will remember the past two decades not as a unipolar moment,” wrote Bacevich, “but as an interval in which America succumbed to excessive self-regard. That moment is now ending with our economy in shambles and our country facing the prospect of permanent war.”9

  If world history is the world’s court, as Hegel said, severe judgment is being passed upon this hubristic generation. Indeed, when one compares the reticence and restraint of our most successful Cold War presidents, Eisenhower and Reagan, to the reflexive interventionism of Bush I and Bush II, the contrasts are startling. Eisenhower ended the Korean War in six months and gave us seven and a half years of prosperity and peace, some of the best years of our lives. He refused to intervene to save the French army in Indochina. He refused to intervene to save the freedom fighters of the Hungarian revolution in 1956. He ordered Britain, France, and Israel to get their invasion armies out of Egypt. He inserted marines into Lebanon to prevent a coup after the Iraqi revolution of 1958, and withdrew them as soon as the crisis passed.

  Eisenhower created defensive alliances in the Middle and Far East modeled on NATO and built an arsenal so awesome it enabled Kennedy to back Khrushchev down in the Cuban missile crisis. But after he had ended the war he inherited he never got into another, and he left office with a prophetic warning about the dangers to the republic of a “military industrial complex” with a vested interest in a long Cold War.

  Reagan was another conservative of the old school, not looking for a fight. Believing, as Eisenhower did, in “Peace Through Strength,” he began a steady buildup of strategic and conventional forces, countered Moscow’s deployment of SS-20 missiles in Eastern Europe with Pershing and cruise missiles in Western Europe, and aided anti-Communist rebels on the periphery of the Soviet Empire—in Nicaragua, Angola, and Afghanistan. But Reagan never sought direct confrontation or conflict with the Soviet Union. When Solidarity was crushed on Moscow’s orders in 1981, Reagan declined to escalate the crisis and restricted U.S. support to the moral and material.

  Reagan deployed measured military force three times. He sent U.S. Marines into Lebanon, liberated Grenada after a Marxist coup, and struck Libya after Gaddafi’s bombing of a Berlin discothèque frequented by U.S. soldiers. After the terrorist attack on the Beirut barracks killed 241 of those marines, Reagan removed them and regretted ever having sent them in. He would call it the worst mistake of his presidency. In his last days in office, Reagan negotiated an arms control treaty for the removal of all U.S. and Soviet intermediate-range missiles from Europe. He had steered America to a peaceful end to the Cold War. Having begun his presidency decrying the “evil empire,” he ended it being patted on the back by smiling Russians in Red Square while walking side by side with Mikhail Gorbachev.

  In the decades after Reagan left and before Bush II departed, hubris became the hallmark of American foreign policy. Bush I intervened in Panama, attacked Iraq, liberated Kuwait, planted U.S. forces in Saudi Arabia, and intervened in Somalia, leading to a massacre of Delta Force troopers in Mogadishu in a bloody engagement that came to be known as Black Hawk Down.

  Clinton invaded Haiti, intervened in Bosnia, bombed Serbia for seventy-eight days, and sent U.S. troops to effect a secession of her cradle province of Kosovo.

  George W. Bush invaded Afghanistan, declared Iran, Iraq, and North Korea an “axis of evil,” warned the world that we would maintain military supremacy in every vital region of the globe, declared a Bush Doctrine of preventive war and used it to invade and occupy an Iraq that had never threatened or attacked us, and launched a global crusade for democracy that featured demonstrations to dump over governments and install pro-American regimes in Serbia, Ukraine, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, and Lebanon, as Kermit Roosevelt and the CIA had done in Iran in 1953.

  Clinton and Bush II pushed NATO right up to Russia’s front porch, bringing six former Warsaw Pact nations—East Germany, Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, and Romania—and three Baltic states that had been part of the Soviet Union into an alliance created to contain Russia. Only European resistance stopped Bush II from putting Ukraine and Georgia on a fast track to NATO membership, which would have meant that should there be a Moscow-Tbilisi clash, America would instantly be eyeball to eyeball with a nation possessing thousands of nuclear weapons.

  Barack Obama doubled U.S. forces in Afghanistan, began drone strikes in Pakistan, and launched a war on Libya.

  And what has all this compulsive interventionism availed us?

  We are less secure, less respected, less confident, and less powerful than we were in 1991. And is the world a better place?

  RECEDING TIDE

  The American empire has begun the long retreat.

  In Lebanon and Ukraine the “color-coded revolutions” have been reversed. The U.S. commitment to Afghanistan has topped out at 100,000 troops and they have begun coming home. Military withdrawal from Iraq is to be done by year’s end. These two wars may prove the last hurrahs of neo-imperialism, unless the nation is stampeded into another “preventive war” on Iran.

  Looking back, the long retreat of American empire began decades ago. U.S. forces left Southeast Asia in the early 1970s and U.S. bases on Taiwan were abandoned. In the 1990s, the United States was ordered to vacate Clark air base in the Philippines and the U.S. naval base at Subic Bay. The U.S. footprint in Japan is shrinking. U.S. forces in South Korea are at the lowest level in sixty years. The eastward march of NATO has halted and the door has been closed to Ukraine and Georgia. America is not going to fight Russia over Tbilisi’s clam to South Ossetia or who has sovereignty in the Crimea. The ballistic missile defense Bush II began to erect in Poland and Czechoslovakia has been put on hold.

  The long retreat comports with the national interest and the will of the people. In 2009, the Pew Research Center found that 49 percent of Americans thought the nation should “mind its own business internationally and let other countries get along the best they can on their own.”10 Only 44 percent of respondents disagreed. This is a dramatic reversal from a decade ago when 30 percent thought America should mind its own business, and 65 percent disagreed. Not in forty years had a survey found anti-interventionist sentiment this strong. Americans are g
rowing weary of playing Atlas, holding up the world.

  For those who have argued since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 for the shedding of Cold War alliances and war guarantees and a return to a traditional policy of nonintervention, if U.S. interests are not imperiled, this is welcome news. What is less welcome are the reasons for America’s retreat.

  A relative decline in strategic power is not necessarily a crisis. The U.S. share of world power declined from 1945 to 1960, due to the recovery of Europe and Japan. America’s real power grew under Eisenhower. Her recent decline, however, has been both relative and real. Its causes:

  First, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that have cost us 6,000 dead, 40,000 wounded, and over $1 trillion. These wars destroyed our post-9/11 national unity, alienated the Islamic world, and enlarged the pool in which al-Qaeda fishes.

  Second, our imperial arrogance caused nations to unite to resist our hegemony, and we deliberately antagonized nations like Russia that had wanted to associate with us. People treated like untrustworthy friends and potential enemies often end up becoming so.

  Third, the financial meltdown brought on by the collapse of a housing bubble that government policy created, the easy money policy of the Federal Reserve, and the amorality and casino mind-set of Wall Street.

  Fourth, the dismantling of America’s industrial base and its export to China under a trade policy that puts the profits of transnational corporations ahead of the prosperity of the republic. Our economic independence is history. We rely on foreign factories to produce the necessities of our national life, and on foreign governments for the loans to pay for them.

  Fifth, the failure of the U.S. government to secure our border with Mexico and stop a poor peoples’ invasion that is bankrupting our states and will, left unchecked, end our existence as one nation and people.

  Sixth, the rise of rival powers that exploit for nationalist ends the global economic system established by the United States.

  Seventh, a blindness in our leaders to see that the interdependent world for which they and we were made to sacrifice so much, a world of old and new democracies tied together by trade, is a mirage. Nations put national interests first.

  ASSETS AND LIABILITIES

  In U.S. Foreign Policy: Shield of the Republic, published in 1943, the famed columnist Walter Lippmann looked back on the division in the nation over going to war, and our unpreparedness at Pearl Harbor. We Americans, he wrote, “had forgotten the compelling and, once seen, self-evident common principle of all genuine foreign policy.”

  A foreign policy consists in bringing into balance, with a comfortable surplus of power in reserve, the nation’s commitments and the nation’s power. The constant preoccupation of the true statesman is to achieve and maintain this balance.11

  When a nation lacks the power to honor its treaty obligations or defend its vital interests, its foreign policy is insolvent. Examples abound when U.S. foreign policy was bankrupt, in that we had undertaken obligations which we lacked the power to honor. Had it not been for the Royal Navy guaranteeing the Monroe Doctrine, whereby we instructed the great powers of Europe they were to cease seeking colonies in our hemisphere, that doctrine would have been an embarrassing joke.

  During the Civil War, we could do little about the annexation of Mexico by France’s Napoleon III in the most flagrant violation of the Monroe Doctrine before the Cuban missile crisis. But when the Confederacy fell and Andrew Johnson sent General Sheridan to the border with 40,000 battle-hardened Union troops, and Secretary of State Seward sent a general to Paris to tell Napoleon to get out of Mexico or we would come in and throw him out, we had that “surplus of power” to enforce our will and uphold Monroe’s doctrine.

  By 1941, U.S. foreign policy had been bankrupt for two decades. For Wilson had agreed at the 1919 Paris peace conference to a Japanese mandate over the Marshall, Mariana, and Caroline Islands, which lay between Hawaii and the Philippine Islands. And Harding had signed a Washington Naval Agreement that scuttled the fleets needed to defend the Philippines, leaving Japan’s navy dominant in the western Pacific. Wrote Lippmann, “We are today liquidating in sweat and blood and tears, and at our mortal peril, the fact that we made commitments, asserted rights, and proclaimed ideals while we left our frontiers unguarded, our armaments unprepared, and our alliances unformed and unsustained.”12

  It is a thesis of this book that U.S. foreign policy is again insolvent. For the commitments we have undertaken over six decades cannot be covered by our overstretched and declining military power. If several outstanding IOUs were called in at once, U.S. strategic bankruptcy would be apparent to the world.

  On the asset side of the balance sheet, the United States still possesses thousands of nuclear weapons and the ability to deliver them anywhere on earth, more than enough to deter Russia and China, the only nations with the weapons to inflict mortal wounds on us. Nor is there any quarrel between us and either of those powers to justify nuclear confrontation.

  The U.S. Navy, though not half of the six-hundred-ship armada Reagan built, remains larger than the combined fleets of the next thirteen largest naval powers. According to former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, the U.S. Navy can carry twice as many planes as all the other navies of the world combined. The U.S. Air Force is unequaled. No nation has a bomber force to match America’s B-52s, B-1s, and B-2s, or her thousands of fourth- and fifth-generation fighters. U.S. defense spending is four times that of Russia and China combined and 44 percent of world military spending.13

  But when the number of Americans on active duty is factored in—one-half of 1 percent of the population—the picture changes. Although we have commitments to defend scores of nations in Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and Oceania, U.S. forces are but one-tenth the size of our active-duty forces at the end of World War II, and not half the size of the peacetime army of Eisenhower. And these forces are spread all over the world. We have 50,000 troops in Iraq, 100,000 in Afghanistan, 28,000 in Korea, 35,000 in Japan, 50,000 in Germany.

  If the responsibilities of the U.S. military were restricted to defense of our homeland and hemisphere and the seas around us, we possess that surplus of power of which Lippmann spoke. What, then, is the problem?

  It is the other side of the ledger: the liabilities, the commitments we have made.

  Although we spend more on defense than the next ten military powers combined, we can no longer defend every ally to whom we have given a war guarantee in the six decades since NATO was born. Two relatively small wars by twentieth-century standards, in Afghanistan and Iraq, have stretched the army and Marine Corps to the limit.

  AN INVENTORY OF EMPIRE

  While we have more than enough power to secure the republic, we cannot sustain the empire. Pax Americana is coming to an end. The only question is whether the liquidation of the empire will be done voluntarily and rationally, or after some strategic debacle like Saigon 1975 or a financial and economic collapse like that of 1929. One way or another, the last Western empire is coming down.

  The signs are everywhere. After a decade of war, the United States has failed to convert either Iraq or Afghanistan into a pro-Western bastion or democratic beacon. As U.S. forces depart Iraq, that Shia-dominated nation is tilting toward Iran and the rising political figure is the anti-American Moqtada al-Sadr. As U.S. troops prepare to depart Afghanistan, the Taliban are closer to a return to power than they have been since 2001.

  Should North Korea invade the South we would not have a fraction of the troops to send that we did in 1950. Should Moscow decide on teaching Estonia a lesson, how would we honor our NATO commitment to treat an attack on Estonia as an attack on the United States? Russia’s chastisement of Georgia, when Tbilisi tried to retrieve its lost province of South Ossetia, showed that NATO’s writ does not run to the Caucasus. Ukraine, sensing the shift in the balance of power, has agreed to Russia’s demand to keep her naval base at Sevastopol in the Crimea until 2042. As U.S. force levels in Asia and the Pacific are drawn down, Ch
ina’s real and relative power, augmented by annual double-digit increases in defense spending, grows.

  Where the Chinese have hard currency reserves of $3 trillion, we borrow from Europe to defend Europe. We borrow from the Gulf States to defend the Gulf States. We borrow from Japan to defend Japan. Is it not a symptom of senility to be borrowing from the world so we can defend the world? How long before we borrow our country into bankruptcy, so our foreign policy elites can continue to play the empire game?

  Every year, the U.S. Government goes tens of billions deeper in debt to finance foreign aid. Why? A January 2011 CNN poll found that 81 percent of Americans want foreign aid cut.14 At the Copenhagen summit, Secretary Clinton pledged the United States would take the lead in raising $100 billion a year to help Third World nations cope with climate change. Where is our $20 billion annual share to come from? From borrowing? But the foreign bankers lending us the money to sustain the empire are awakening to the truth that an America running regular deficits of 10 percent of GDP will never pay them back in dollars of the same value as the ones they are lending us.

  How can the United States draw down its forces to help put its house in order, while defending what is vital? The first place to look is at the global archipelago of U.S. military bases. According to author Laurence Vance, “There are, according to the Department of Defense’s ‘Base Structure Report’ for FY 2009, 716 U.S. military bases on foreign soil in thirty-eight countries.”15

  Yet, according to an expert on the subject, the late Chalmers Johnson:

  “The official figures omit espionage bases, those located in war zones, including Iraq and Afghanistan, and miscellaneous facilities in places considered too sensitive to discuss or which the Pentagon for its own reasons chooses to exclude—e.g., in Israel, Kosovo or Jordan.” Johnson places the real number of foreign bases at 1,000.16