US defense cuts

As spending on defense, diplomacy, foreign aid declines in years ahead, we can expect new limits on projection of American power.

By JPOST EDITORIAL
Leon Panetta 311 R (photo credit: REUTERS)
Leon Panetta 311 R
(photo credit: REUTERS)
After much Congressional acrimony, earlier this month US President Barack Obama signed into law legislation to raise the American debt ceiling, while cutting the federal budget deficit. This was but the first scuffle in what is likely to be a protracted battle to bring American deficits under control, and its consequences will resonate far beyond the United States.
The recent legislation mandates $1 trillion in spending cuts over the next 10 years – about $350 billion of which will come from the defense budget – and calls for a further $1.5 trillion reduction in expenditures in the next decade.
If a special Congressional panel can’t agree on the details of those reductions, an automatic trigger will further reduce the Defense Department’s budget by an estimated $600b.
Neither Democrats nor the increasingly vocal proponents of small government and low taxes in the Republican party (including the Tea Party wing) have the political will or inclination to protect defense spending.
As Michael Mandelbaum of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies has argued in his book The Frugal Superpower and in the pages of Foreign Affairs, as spending on defense, diplomacy and foreign aid declines in the years ahead, we can expect new limits on the projection of American power.
As the US will simply be able to afford to do less in the world, the kind of expensive post-Cold War military interventions the country has led in Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq will fade from the superpower’s foreign policy repertoire.
In 2010 alone, the US spent $167b. in Afghanistan and Iraq. The country is expected to spend over $700b.
on national defense in 2011, more in real dollars than for any year since the end of World War II. Much of this expense has been financed by debt.
Americans are a generous people, but they are also questioning whether the country has overreached.
Indeed, the Americans are growing weary of footing the bill for costly nation-building adventures overseas – especially if their benefit to US security is not readily apparent.
Even before the recent debt legislation, the signs of this precipitous shift were already plain to see.
Despite funding two wars, American defense spending already consumes a lower percentage of GDP (currently 5.1 percent) than it did during the Cold War.
The Obama administration is winding down US involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq, promising a total withdrawal from Iraq by the end of 2011, and a greatly reduced role in Afghanistan by 2014.
Obama has already presided over two rounds of defense cuts to spending: in 2009, $330b. was cut from future procurement programs, and in 2010, another $78b. was pared off the Pentagon’s budget.
While it belatedly supported intervention in Libya in March, the administration was careful to promise not to send in ground troops and passed off the mission to NATO and the Europeans as quickly as possible.
These are not mere accountants’ numbers. They represent a retrenchment of America’s international leadership role at the very time we are likely to face a host of new challenges in an increasingly unstable Middle East, including the undiminished threats of Islamic terrorism and nuclear proliferation in an emboldened Iran.
The American downsizing of defense, therefore, will have far-reaching consequences.
A day after Obama signed the deficit-reduction legislation, the new Defense Secretary, Leon Panetta, warned that automatic, across-the-board defense cuts “would do real damage to our security, our troops and their families, and our ability to protect the nation.”
The historian Donald Kagan has noted that the preservation of peace depends upon those states seeking that goal having the preponderant power. As the recent budget battle in Washington underscores, the dawning era of austerity may jeopardize not only American security, but also herald a less activist and less interventionist US foreign policy, and severely constrain the projection of American power in global affairs.
We, in the Middle East, cannot afford to look on with indifference, nor refuse to adapt to a changing strategic climate.