War on the Cheap

"WE WILL ACCEPT NOTHING less than total victory over the terrorists and their hateful ideology," President Bush told the Veterans of Foreign Wars last week. But, as they say both on the streets of New York and the ranches of Texas, talk is cheap. We now have a choice--in the vernacular, it is to put up or shut up.

That choice can no longer safely be postponed. We can tailor our national security policies to the economic resources we are willing to commit to those policies, or we can commit sufficient resources to allow us successfully to implement the policies the president has decided are in the national interest. Put differently, if we want to continue to speak loudly, we will have to buy a big, expensive stick. If, instead, we decide that all we care to spend will buy only a tiny twig, we will have to speak more softly.

The first alternative, which we might call neo-realism (some will call it neo-isolationism) is both practicable and not without appeal. Here is what it would entail. Abandon the idea that we can only be secure if we spread democracy to the peoples of the world, all of whom we assume are yearning to breathe free. Even if they are, it is up to them to work out the means for attaining that goal, just as many of the countries of Eastern Europe did, without Iraq-style interventions on our part. We are not prepared to spend the blood and treasure to help them.

Abandon also the idea that we can participate in the real-world global economy by pretending that world markets are organized in a way that allows us to achieve Adam Smith-like efficiencies by espousing free trade. We are playing against a stacked deck, as recent experience with China shows.

First, currency manipulation guarantees China an advantage over and above the natural comparative advantage provided by its relatively low wages. Second, a lack of regard for property rights allows the Chinese government and other economic actors to steal American technology and intellectual property. Remember: The Chinese government feels it has made a commendable display of virtue by promising to stop using pirated software sometime in 2007--and that is the government that is supposed to prevent what passes for the country's private sector from engaging in such thievery. More important, the advantage China gains from distorting the patterns of trade provides the funds it is using to expand its military presence in the Asia-Pacific region, fund military exercises with Russia, and extend the reach of its fighter fleet, nuclear submarines, and aircraft carriers.

So if we are to tailor our policies to fit our unwillingness to shore up our military power in the world, we have to abandon our long-held and, it can be argued, myopic view that more-or-less rigid adherence to free trade serves our geopolitical interests. True, we will sacrifice some of the efficiencies that have brought us a plethora of consumer goods at prices so low that they have offset the devastating impact of high oil prices on consumer budgets. But we will have traded cheap T-shirts for greater control over our monetary policy, and put something of a strain on the resources China is devoting to its military build-up.

Then, we must reduce our military commitments around the world. NATO now only serves the interests of a Europe that sees it as a handy source of what are called "assets" for its new, underfunded European army. South Korea has made it clear that it considers the presence of American troops in its country, placed there by us to serve as a "tripwire" (read, cannon fodder) in the event of an invasion by the more-than-slightly-mad North Korean regime, a threat to the virtue of its women and the safety of its nation. So bring them home.

In short, just as Ariel Sharon has shortened his defense lines and improved Israel's security by withdrawing from Gaza, George W. Bush can improve U.S. security by concentrating the nation's resources here at home, available for defense of the homeland and rapid deployment if direct threats must be dealt with, surgically, elsewhere. There are more examples, but you get the idea. On a limited budget, we have to use scarce resources in a way that maximizes our security.

Call this concentration of limited resources on defending the homeland neo-realism--an adaptation to our unwillingness to devote the resources needed to implement our current policies. It might send chills down establishment spines, but so long as our politicians are unwilling to provide the men and money to meet the commitments inherent in our current policies, it is the road best taken.