Last week, US President Barack Obama offered the Gulf countries an “ironclad commitment” that the US will “use all elements of power ... to deter and confront external aggression” against them. It was just the latest in a series of military commitments and actions from a president who declared in 2011 that “the tide of war is receding” and that the US could concentrate on “nation-building here at home”.
Obama has ordered US forces to support a Saudi bombing campaign in Yemen; dispatched the Navy to the Arabian Gulf to safeguard shipping there; sent US planes on hundreds of bombing missions in Iraq and Syria; and deployed troops in Poland and elsewhere in Eastern Europe in response to Russian provocation. Last week, his administration said the Navy may intensify operations in the South China Sea to challenge Chinese sovereignty claims there.
There is nothing misguided about Obama’s great-power activism. To the contrary: It carries a lesson for the candidates who would succeed him. The world depends on the US and wishing that America could withdraw — or declaring that it will engage only in regions that it deems vital — turns out not to be a basis for sustainable policy. Had Obama not pulled out too hastily from Iraq, had he not stayed aloof so long from Syria, some of his recent deployments might not have been necessary, and others could have been carried out from a stronger position. Even now, the level of his commitment, to the war against Daesh (the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant), for instance, does not match his policy goals. But he has recognised that withdrawal is not an option.
That recognition, though, has yet to lead to its inevitable corollary: If America is going to ask the military to do more, it will have to pay more. Obama is threatening to veto the annual defence authorisation bill, which the House approved last Friday 269 to 151, because it would give him too much money. Actually, it would give him about as much money as he requested. But because that amount would bust budget caps, and because Congress has not agreed to comparably bust the budget caps for domestic spending, Obama says he would rather not have the funds.
“Why?” his Defence Secretary, Ashton Carter, asked in testimony to the Senate earlier this month. “Because the strength of our nation depends on the strength of our economy and a strong military depends on a strong educational system, thriving private-sector businesses and innovative research. And because that principle — matching defence increases with non-defence increases dollar-for-dollar — was a basic condition of the bipartisan agreement we got in 2013, the president sees no reason why we shouldn’t uphold those same principles in any agreement now.”
The strength of the nation does depend on its economy and Congress is shortchanging domestic priorities. To fix that, taxes would have to rise and the growth in entitlement programmes to slow — which neither the president nor Congress wants to talk about.
If Obama could persuade Republicans to spend more on education, say, by holding the military hostage, it might be justifiable. The problem is that Republicans showed, with the sequester, that they are perfectly willing to let national security suffer if the alternative is spending more on domestic programmes.
And so the commander-in-chief has to decide: Will he shoot the hostage?
Because America’s national security already is suffering. “Readiness remains at troubling levels across the force,” Carter said in the same Senate testimony, and that is official understatement. Defence spending has been cut 21 per cent in real terms over the past four years, according to Representative Mac Thornberry (Republican-Texas), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee and an advocate of the budget passed last Friday. As the military is asked to do more with fewer resources for training, the result will be more casualties. As former Army officer Lindsey Neas wrote in the Washington Post last month: “Today’s minimalist approach has supplanted yesterday’s moral obligation to provide adequately for troops.”
The usual responses are that much of the defence budget is misspent and that the US still spends far more on its military than any other country. Both are true. Sadly, though, there is no “fraud, waste and abuse” budget line that everyone can agree to zero out. And the US is called upon to do more than any other country; the way to deter war is by remaining stronger than the rest. Which is why it is also true, as former defence secretary Robert Gates and more than 80 other defence experts recently wrote, that planned defence cuts “present a grave and growing danger to our national security”.
It is not right to ask the military to protect us in the real world while operating on a budget designed for a world in which the tide of war is receding.
— Washington Post
