These security situations will not get better on their own, because exploiting these situations is what helps keep the Muammar Qaddafis and the Kim Jong Ils in power. In short, where we let security deficits linger in the Gap, only bad actors will fill in the vacuum, and what they will provide is political intrigue, economic corruption, endemic violence, and a climate that facilitates the actions of the very same transnational actors we seek to defeat in this global war on terrorism. That is why taking down all the Saddams of the Gap is a good thing, because each regime change fixes a “broken window” and—by doing so—sends a signal to prospective bad actors regarding rule sets the Core is serious about enforcing.
Shrinking the Gap as a socioeconomic tragedy means first removing the security obstacles that survive like parasites in that chaotic political-military environment. It means understanding the military-market link, and trusting that connectivity will set the masses free much faster than economic sanctions, foreign aid, or UN Security Council resolutions. People in the Gap want the same freedoms we enjoy, either to say yes or no, but certainly to decide on their own. Rules enable that freedom to blossom, and security rule sets must always come first. You cannot build a future worth living if you are always running from fear, which is what consumes much of the creative energy now trapped in the Gap. America needs to release that energy not only because we will benefit from its application but also because it will leave a better world behind for subsequent generations.
But more to the point, there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. America has been living large in the global economy for so long that we simply forget we owe that world outside something in return. Americans constitute about one-twentieth of the world’s population, but somehow we manage to produce one-quarter of the world’s pollution and garbage while consuming one-quarter of the world’s energy. That is living large, or having a disproportional environmental “footprint.” But our economic “footprint” is just as huge. You could say America is expert at exporting sovereign debt and importing damn near everything else. How are we so able to live beyond our means? How do we consistently rack up federal deficits? We get the world to buy our Treasury bills because Uncle Sam is considered a great bet and the U.S. dollar is relatively cheap, considering it has long served as the world’s de facto reserve currency—almost as good as gold. In sum, we live large because selling our debt—both public and private—around the world has always been easy.
Wall Street will say, “We deserve to live large like that. We generate more than a quarter of the world’s wealth in GDP. And the deal on T-bills is simply too good to be true. Do you know what it costs to print those little pieces of paper? Almost nothing! And do you know what we get in return? VCRs, cars, computers. Stop complaining. If the world ever caught on to what a great deal we have going here, we could be in real trouble!”
Some economic experts will tell you that the reason America has yet to get into trouble on this seemingly unfair transaction is that, until recently, we have had no peer competitor in terms of reserve currencies. At the Cold War’s end, some thought the Japanese yen might aspire to that role, but then Tokyo’s bubble economy burst. A decade later, the European Union debuted the euro and now a real choice does exist. Eventually, a third choice will arise in the East, and it will probably center around a convertible Chinese yuan. Over time we will have serious competitors in the business of selling “futures worth creating.” If America, through its foreign policy and national security policy, begins to resemble a future that the rest of the Core does not wish to emulate, then they will put their trust elsewhere, like in the euro. The rest of the world could stop buying our debt, which in turn would make our military spending untenable over the long run.
Why has this not happened before? It has not happened because America’s essential transaction with the outside world is one of our exporting security in return for the world’s financing a lifestyle we could far more readily afford without all that defense spending. Does this make us the world’s mercenary? If it does, then we have lost little and gained much. Our cumulative combat losses since the end of the Vietnam War do not equal the price we paid in one day at Pearl Harbor in 1941 or on Normandy’s beaches in 1944. Meanwhile, we have enjoyed an unprecedented string of economic booms since the early 1980s, corresponding to the expansion of globalization from the Old Core to the New Core. How many hundreds of millions of people were lifted out of poverty across that time? And is that huge total worth the lives of American soldiers we have paid in this exporting of security around the planet?
If these wars are judged solely within the context of war, then I say no, because, frankly, as a national security strategist I value American lives above all others. But if these wars are judged within the context of everything else, then I say yes. America pays the most for global stability because we enjoy it the most, and because our exporting of security has played a crucial role in generating the best quarter-century in human history, one in which the world has integrated politically as never before, grown economically as never before, and reduced global conflict as never before.
Remove America’s export of security from that global equation and you will witness arms races cropping up all over the world, defense spending skyrocketing all over the Core, and mass violence erupting all over the Gap. That will not just depress our wonderful standard of living, it will cost the lives of millions upon millions. We can decide that America’s “national security” is all about keeping Americans alive and to hell with the rest of the world, but that pathway will yield a hell across much of the world. Simply put, we can pay up front or get billed later, but globalization’s advance will not wait for America to remuster a will once lost. By the time America were to reengage such a dysfunctional world, globalization would be lost. We made this mistake before in the “Roaring Twenties,” a decade that now looks very similar to the decade we just lived through, and America can certainly abdicate responsibility in this decade just as we did in the 1930s, but this time we can’t pretend we don’t know what we are doing.
When America turned its back on the world following World War I, the globalization it inevitably helped destroy was largely of Europe’s creation. But the globalization of today is largely of America’s creation. We set it in motion following World War II, deliberately salvaging Western Europe and Japan when we could have just as easily walked away from these tasks. We protected these embryonic pillars of Globalization II through three and a half decades of Soviet military threat, and when that threat began to recede, we played bodyguard to Globalization III’s inclusion of the emerging markets—more than half the world’s population. We provided the security glue that let Developing Asia focus its resources on export-led growth despite remaining a powder keg of unresolved political-military disputes and rivalries. We stepped up to manage bad security situations in the Persian Gulf and the Balkans while Europe moved confidently toward economic union and simultaneously cut defense spending across the board. It was America that stood up as Gap Leviathan across the 1990s, after the Soviet bloc collapsed and ended its decades of malicious mischief there. So while the European Union and NATO progressively expanded to absorb former Soviet bloc states, it was the U.S. military that saw its crisis-response load increase fourfold around the planet. You want to know one very important reason the nineties were such a go-go decade? Because American G.I.’s were deployed all over the Gap, minding it while the Old and New Cores of globalization integrated unceasingly.
America provides the world a security product that is unrivaled, that has made globalization the immense success it is today for roughly two-thirds of the world’s population, and that export will serve as the crucial first ingredient to extending globalization to the remaining third that currently does not enjoy its peace and prosperity. I see the Pentagon as both Leviathan to this world-historical process, and as System Administrator. By Leviathan, I mean America provides the might that will eventually outlaw all mass violence in the Gap, and by System Adm
inistrator, I mean America must make right every security deficit it seeks to fill throughout the Gap. For if we simply engage in drive-by regime change without waging the peace that must follow all such wars, then all our victories will remain forever hollow, and they will necessarily be repeated time and time again. Desert Storm was a hollow victory because all it did was beget Operation Iraqi Freedom, and that victory will likewise ring hollow until Iraq as a whole is integrated into the global economy and thus safely netted into the Core’s collective security.
When America’s exporting of security succeeds, integration follows, not just for the country previously isolated by conflict, but for neighbors likewise previously tainted in terms of investment climate as well. The Balkans are on a completely different track today from the one they were on just a decade ago, and America’s military intervention was crucial to turning that tide. Central Asia will be a different place a generation from now because America is progressively guaranteeing its stability through the insertion of our military bases there. Without our exporting of security, that region expected nothing better than serving as playing board for a “great game” unfolding between a host of regional powers (e.g., Russia, China, India, Iran, Turkey), none of whom possesses the wherewithal to actually increase regional security; the best they could hope to do would be to partition it. The Persian Gulf of tomorrow will scarcely resemble today’s if America successfully generates security and connectivity in an Iraq where, for an entire generation, there was nothing but isolation and war.
Of course, the rest of the Core must step into these improved security situations in order to enable political, social, and economic integration. Absent that follow-through, America’s wars are nothing but wars, yielding neither economic gain nor political empire. They are just unwanted long-term babysitting jobs that benefit no one in particular. Thus America’s essential transaction with the world is rendered null and void without the payoff associated with expanding globalization’s frontier.
These transactions, therefore, are all highly connected. If you remove America as Gap Leviathan, you burden Europe with security spending right at a time when its population is aging dramatically. The same can be said for Japan, which after a decade of economic recession sports the world’s largest bond market.◈ As the recent Core-wide (excepting China) recession demonstrated, the world’s biggest economies (U.S., EU, Japan) now rise and fall together.◈ America can certainly push off its “defense burden” onto NATO and Japan, but in tough economic times, this is nothing more than rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
Meanwhile, any steps taken by America to reduce its exporting of security across Asia will threaten regional stability right at a time when every nation there is waking up to the reality of China’s enormous economic power. But how stable is that economic engine of growth? One day China suffers SARS and its economic juggernaut virtually stops on a dime, because of plunging retail sales, a slump in export demand, and a collapse in tourism.◈ The Chinese leadership, confident of its national security, pushes for selectively aggressive reforms as a result, instead of the usual stonewalling and repression, and FDI flows remain strong as a result despite all those canceled business trips.◈
But imagine the combination of a financial panic in China and a strategic standoff between Beijing and Washington over Taiwan, or perhaps just a downed spy plane. Would globalization suffer as a result? Only if you think China is easily removed from the Core’s economic transactions. Paul Krugman likes to point out that China’s central bank is one of the main purchasers of Treasury bills in the world, so—in effect—they finance our trade deficit. Who is the biggest source of that deficit right now? The Chinese economy, of course! What do they sell us most? Goods manufactured by Chinese labor working in U.S.-owned factories. But say, all of a sudden, China decides America’s vision of a future worth creating through a war on terror is not their preferred pathway. As Krugman argues, “Nobody is quite sure what would happen if the Chinese suddenly switched to, say, euros—a two-point jump in mortgage rates?—but it’s not an experiment anyone wants to try.”◈
All the same arguments are easily applied to the Persian Gulf, home to 90 percent of the world’s excess capacity for oil production. If America lets a Saddam run wild, or lets an Iraq-Iran “tanker war” stop oil flowing from the Gulf, or lets an al Qaeda hijack Saudi Arabia and yank it back to some seventh-century definition of the “good life,” does anyone believe only a bunch of “crazy Arabs” and “Zionist Jews” will suffer in the end? What happens to Developing Asia’s growing economies that will need twice as much energy in 2025 as they need today, when they are already quite dependent on the Gulf for oil? What happens to the rest of the Gap that suddenly finds itself priced out of the energy market unless it submits to crushing public debts, like those South America suffered in the 1980s, thanks in large part to the OPEC oil shocks of the 1970s? Does anyone doubt the generals will not return? Or that an America, too busy trying to put out fires in the Middle East, will forget sub-Saharan Africa’s resulting plight in a heartbeat?
This is why I am amused by the notion that somehow the United States can act unilaterally in security affairs. Yes, we can wage war without asking anyone’s permission or help, but the idea that we can somehow wage war isolated from the web of economic and political transactions we are continuously conducting with the outside world is simply ludicrous. In the era of globalization, there is only war within the context of everything else, and the idiots who sometimes wage war as though it were an end unto itself.
Is America guilty of that idiocy in the Persian Gulf? On some level, yes. There were Pentagon strategists who thought they could wage war in the Gulf as if it were some isolated venue, and not smack dab in the middle of the Muslim world and global energy supplies. They dreamed of organizational charts, and seamless transitions, and easily engineered milestones of success, only to be knocked upside the head by the everything else and everyone else determined to sabotage those desired outcomes. When the United States committed itself to rebuilding Iraq after the war, it committed itself to integrating Iraq with the world at large, so our “unilateralism” in war merely set in motion the inevitable multilateralism of peace. To the extent that, before the war, the Pentagon bragged inappropriately about being able to transition postwar Iraq to a stable domestic situation in eighteen months or less, strategists there inadvertently raised the diplomatic price of the bargain the White House inevitably sought from the rest of the Core when that ambitious vision proved false.
In exporting security around the planet, the United States is conducting a transaction essential to globalization’s day-to-day health, not to mention its long-term prospects for expansion. In effect, by exporting security to the Gap, we trade our excess security for the Gap’s excess instability.
How does the Pentagon connect to this complex transaction? Our humanitarian assistance works to mitigate suffering throughout the Gap, which can lead to unstable refugee flows if not properly addressed. Our crisis response helps to contain and isolate explosions of social and political anger within the Gap, which protects investment climates in neighboring countries otherwise tainted by spillover. Our projection of combat power deters state-based acts of aggression throughout the Gap, which, because they are often motivated by desire to control natural resources, would otherwise disrupt what slim connectivity the Gap currently enjoys with the Core. Finally, the day-to-day presence of our military forces throughout the Gap, along with the military-to-military ties they promote, increases the political will of Gap countries to tackle internal and transnational security issues, like terrorism and drug trafficking, in addition to obviating regional arms races that might otherwise unfold. In short, America gets a lot for about 3 to 4 percent of its GDP being devoted to the Defense Department, while the Core gains the greatest military contractor the world has yet seen—and interest on those T-bills to boot!
So it is not simply a matter of America deciding that it has the right to decide for the
entire planet as to when, where, and why wars will be waged. By outsourcing the Leviathan function to the United States, the rest of the Core is essentially paying us to make those decisions wisely, albeit in consultation with them. Because our military has advanced so far beyond what the rest of the Core possesses, our allies have, by and large, lost their ability to fight alongside us unless we make special provisions for their participation, something we are becoming increasingly unwilling to do.
That leaves most of our allies able to join only in the postwar security generation or peacekeeping phases, which accounts for their great interest in our long-term commitment to such activities. Without such commitment, our allies essentially get left holding the bag, meaning the Pentagon could easily generate more postwar long-term babysitting jobs than the rest of the Core could readily handle. This is why America’s story line regarding where this is all going is so absolutely crucial to gaining prewar and postwar coalition support. I am not just talking about Afghanistan and Iraq but all the other regime changes to come as well, because shrinking the Gap will involve the fall of many a “big man” there, in addition to all the terrorist networks we collapse. As this long-term effort unfolds, do the same allies need to cooperate with us in both war and peace? Absolutely not.
In fact, we do well to encourage specialization by individual countries in both realms—warfare and peacekeeping.◈ Our mottoes for coalition partners, therefore, must be come as you are (meaning, bring what you can), and come when you can (meaning, we will take your help in either the warfare or peacekeeping segments of any major military intervention). As we have seen in postwar Iraq, soldiers die in the same numbers waging peace as they do waging war. It just takes longer. So there is no legitimate hierarchy of national sacrifice to cite here: if you as a nation are willing to put your people at risk in peacekeeping or in warfare, America must welcome you with open arms.
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