So That Security and Liberty May Prosper Together
Democracy is something we must always be working at. It is a process never finished, never ending.
— Edmund de S. Brunner
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than thirty cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of sixty thousand population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than eight thousand people. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”
President Dwight Eisenhower delivered these words to the American Society of Newspaper Editors at the Statler Hotel in Washington on April 16, 1953. It was the new president’s first formal address to the American people after just twelve weeks in office, and he titled it “Chance for Peace.”* In his more famous farewell address delivered eight years later, Eisenhower warned of the rise of a “military-industrial complex,” a “permanent arms industry of vast proportions” and its “unwarranted influence” in America’s corridors of power. These two speeches frame the presidency of a man who first commanded public attention as one of the U.S. Army’s most celebrated generals.
“Chance for Peace” was delivered at a critical historical moment. Joseph Stalin had been dead six weeks, and hopes for a less belligerent Soviet leadership were on the rise. The Korean War was grinding toward final stalemate. The United States announced the world’s first hydrogen bomb in January; the Soviets unveiled one of their own in August. The Soviets sent soldiers into East Berlin to crush a workers’ uprising in June. The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency engineered a coup to remove Iran’s prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, in August, and Vice President Richard Nixon’s visit to Tehran in December provoked days of deadly riots on Iranian streets. By expressing the cost of weapons in schools, homes, and hospitals, Eisenhower called on the Kremlin’s new masters to abandon the forced march toward armed competition that he feared would bankrupt both countries. He urged Soviet leaders to see that the Cold War and its terrible costs were not inevitable.
More than six decades later, there is no Cold War, no determined superpower enemy with friends in every region, no nuclear arms race, and no credible foreign threat to America’s survival. The risk of conflict with emerging China is limited by a deep economic interdependence with the United States that could never have existed between America and its Cold War communist rivals. Today’s Russia would love to check American power, but it lacks the Soviet Union’s ideological appeal, potent allies, and military reach. No coalition of would-be American adversaries measures up. Yet the United States continues to spend more on its military than all its potential competitors combined.1 It’s only natural that with so much money spent on advanced weapons, policymakers will find uses for them to justify the expense—and to be sure they perform as advertised—in ways that add to our debt, implicate us in crises that are none of our business, and further compromise our own security. Making matters worse, the 9/11 terror attacks have given birth to an enormous new security bureaucracy, one that deprives Americans of our privacy and inflicts lasting damage on relations with our allies.
For all these reasons, Ike’s message has never been more timely: “Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry,” he warned, “can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals so that security and liberty may prosper together.”2 That’s an ideal worthy of an exceptional nation.
President Eisenhower also understood that debt cripples a nation’s long-term strength, and that a balanced budget provides crucial support for both a dynamic economy and a strong military. During his final year in office, at the height of the Cold War, the U.S. government posted a more than $1 billion surplus. In 2013, the federal deficit topped $680 billion, down from $1.1 trillion in 2012. As of this writing, the U.S. national debt has surpassed $18 trillion. For perspective, in 1960, the national debt was about 52 percent of the country’s gross domestic product. By 1970, that figure had fallen to 34 percent. On October 17, 2013, it passed the 100 percent mark. In other words, the national debt now exceeds the value of America’s entire economic output. There are many ways to measure America’s indebtedness, and the sources of this slow-motion catastrophe extend well beyond defense spending, but we can’t afford to ignore the fact that in the decade after 9/11, government spending on security and the military grew by nearly 120 percent. Both presidents and lawmakers, Democrats and Republicans, have contributed to this growing problem.
As the next wave of would-be American presidents takes to the campaign trail and debate stage, listen carefully to what they say about America’s role in the world. Beware those who talk of responsibilities but never of price tags. Measure the costs of their foreign policy promises in American schools, homes, and hospitals—and in money that might have stayed in the taxpayer’s pocket. Reject those who claim that America can afford to police the world.
It’s time for a new declaration of independence—a proclamation of emancipation from the responsibility to solve everyone else’s problems. Americans deserve a government dedicated to the proposition that security and liberty may prosper together. We can no longer accept burdens abroad that undermine our values at home, sap our strength and resources, entangle us in fights that are not our concern, and threaten the heart of our democracy. This independent spirit is not selfish. It is neither cowardly nor defeatist. It is the foundation upon which Americans will build a prosperous and secure nation that can inspire the world to follow its example.
Overreach
It’s a tough job being the world’s policeman. A U.S. president who considers himself “leader of the free world” must worry over a very long list of other people’s headaches. Which of its former Soviet neighbors is Russia bullying this week? When will North Korea test-fire another missile? Is it America’s responsibility to ensure that Israelis and Palestinians sign a deal that neither side appears to want, or that China and Japan reach some agreement about who did what to whom in 1937? Must we intervene to ensure they don’t come to blows over a pile of contested rocks in the East China Sea? Yes, history matters, but that’s their history, not ours.
Is Venezuela selling weapons to Colombian rebels? Are Somali pirates attacking cargo ships in the Indian Ocean? Is Kandahar secure? Is Kashmir quiet? Are jihadis on the move in Mali? Is a despot in Syria about to slaughter large numbers of his own people? Something must be done, but if we accept the moral responsibility to do something about those things, aren’t we then bound to ensure that local strongmen aren’t doing the same in Sudan, Sierra Leone, and the Central African Republic? Or nuclear-armed North Korea? What would that responsibility cost? On what moral basis must we choose which of these burdens to accept and which to ignore? Pity the poor American taxpayer.
Not that our allies are ever satisfied with America’s help. Consider this passage from a memoir by former defense secretary Robert Gates on a conversation about Iran with the Saudi king:
[Saudi king] Abdullah . . . wanted a full-scale military attack on Iranian military targets, not just the nuclear sites. He warned that if we did not attack, the Saudis “must go our own way to protect our interests.” . . . He was asking the United States to send its sons and daughters into a war with Iran in order to protect the Saudi position in the Gulf and the region. . . . He was asking us to shed American blood, but at no time did he suggest that any Saudi blood might be spilled. He went on and on about how the United States was seen as weak by governments in the region. The longer he talked, the angrier I got.3
In fiscal year 2012, the American taxpayer provided 186 countries with a total of $42 billion.4 Many of the governments that receive this help want Washington to guarantee their security—even as they pursue their own agendas. Pakistan received $834 million in economic help and $361 million for its security services for fiscal year 2013, two years after Osama bin Laden was found hiding in a compound within easy walking distance of Pakistan’s most prestigious military academy.5 Since 2002, the United States has provided Afghanistan with more than $100 billion in financial aid. The American taxpayer will never know exactly how many of the schools and government buildings constructed with their money have survived—and how much of the money has simply been stolen. Imagine what $100 billion might have built at home.
Becoming Superman
How did we come to accept all these burdens? It was war that lifted the United States to superpower status and cast us in the role of international policeman—a responsibility that some in the United States remain all too eager to accept. The twentieth century’s two world wars elevated America, diminished our allies, and (temporarily) subdued potential rivals like the Soviet Union and China. Neither war was ever fought in an American city. Certainly, U.S. soldiers and their families paid dearly for both victories, but when the doughboys of the American Expeditionary Forces arrived in France in June 1917, World War I had already raged across Europe for nearly three years. About 116,000 Americans were killed during the Great War. Compare that with more than 1.7 million Germans, 1.7 million Russians, nearly 1.4 million French, about 1.2 million from Austria-Hungary, and more than 900,000 Britons.6 The war’s economic and psychological impact on these countries was without precedent.
A generation later, it took a “sudden and deliberate” Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor to bring America into World War II, and though the war in the Pacific began soon after, Americans didn’t arrive on the beaches of Normandy until nearly five years after Hitler’s invasion of Poland. American families made profound and permanent sacrifices for victory in World War II, but compare 418,000 Americans killed with the deaths of more than 20 million Soviets, 7 million Germans, and perhaps 3 million Japanese.
Then there was the economic toll. World War II cut Europe’s agricultural output by half and its industrial production by two-thirds. It leveled about 40 percent of buildings in Germany’s fifty largest cities.7 It cost Japan’s emperor more than 80 percent of his Asian territory. Many of Japan’s largest cities were left virtually uninhabitable.8 The war cost France 20 percent of its houses, half its livestock, two-thirds of its railways, and about 45 percent of its total national wealth.9 It destroyed seventy thousand Soviet towns and villages.10 Britain’s trade was cut to 30 percent of prewar levels, and the sun finally began to set on the British Empire.11 Impoverished China moved from Japanese occupation to civil war.
In America, on the other hand, after a dozen years of economic depression, the war created seventeen million new jobs to meet skyrocketing demand for weapons and materiel. American salaries doubled during the war, and savings accounts increased sevenfold.12 The U.S. standard of living surged, and unemployment virtually disappeared. By prudently resisting the call to arms for as long as possible, the United States became the world’s most powerful country, one that sometimes appears to believe that its destiny is to save the world from itself.
Despite Eisenhower’s warning, the United States then donned Superman’s cape. Gone were the days when Washington treated war as a last resort. Since the dawn of the Cold War, every U.S. president and the leaderships of both parties in Congress have led their country into conflict after conflict in the name of remaking the world in America’s image, allegedly to make us more secure at home. Did the war in Korea make us safer or more prosperous? What lesson did we learn in Vietnam? Forty years after the fall of Saigon, there is still no consensus answer to this question. Forget the brief military adventures in Grenada and Panama. Most Americans already have.
The end of the Cold War did not diminish the American appetite for a fight. Did the liberation of Kuwait put an end to Washington’s conflict with Saddam Hussein? Americans have spent hundreds of billions of dollars in Afghanistan. How did it become America’s longest war,* and what did American efforts there accomplish? The second war with Iraq cost hundreds of billions more. Is that country more secure today than it was in 2002? Have support for dictators, the ouster of leaders like Iran’s Mossadegh, Congo’s Patrice Lumumba, and Chile’s Salvador Allende, the Guantánamo Bay prison, the sorry spectacle at Abu Ghraib, torture, rendition, cyber-conflict, drones, and the sale of weapons to the enemies of America’s enemies made the United States stronger, safer, and more prosperous? Even if you believe they have, these kinds of policies are not sustainable in a world that debt-laden America no longer dominates.
Sometimes Washington’s attempt to impose its will produces the opposite of its intended result. In his 2002 State of the Union address, President George W. Bush identified an “axis of evil” consisting of North Korea, Iraq, and Iran. Bush administration officials warned that Iran was increasingly dangerous. But if the war on Saddam Hussein was intended in part as a message to Iran that it must give up its nuclear program or risk a U.S. invasion, it didn’t work. Instead, Iran’s leaders, who suddenly found themselves encircled by American troops in Afghanistan to the east and Iraq to the west, came to a different conclusion. The United States had not invaded North Korea, they could safely assume, precisely because the North Koreans already had nuclear weapons. The United States could afford to invade Iraq, Iranians reasoned, because it didn’t have nuclear weapons. The best way to prevent a U.S. invasion, therefore, was to develop a nuclear weapon as quickly as possible while Superman remained busy in Iraq and Afghanistan. Thus the money and lives lost in ousting Saddam only strengthened Iran’s determination to build a bomb.
The U.S. taxpayer hasn’t gotten better value for the money under President Obama, who has presided over a substantial expansion of the U.S. intelligence community begun under President Bush. During the Eisenhower years, military spending represented a higher percentage of U.S. GDP than it does today, but that was at an early Cold War moment before Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and other social safety net spending represented more than half of U.S. federal spending.13 And it was easier to understand the growth of the military-industrial complex at a time when two military superpowers were playing out a zero-sum competition for power and influence in every corner of the world. Today, America’s intelligence agencies are spying not only on potential threats to U.S. national security, but on the leaders of friendly countries like Germany and Brazil. Worse, evidence has emerged that the National Security Agency may have spied on members of the U.S. Congress. Why would the NSA do this? Perhaps merely because it can. Something has to change.
The Hidden Cost of War
When it comes to America’s wars, the price tags we know about are bad enough. Today, many of those costs, human and material, are hidden, making it all the more difficult for an “alert and knowledgeable citizenry” to ensure that Americans understand and endorse the actions that their government takes on their behalf and with their money. First, there was the end of selective service. Few Americans miss the chaotic confrontations of the 1960s, when policemen in battle formation faced off on city streets and college campuses with angry young Americans, many of whom feared they might be drafted and sent to fight in Vietnam. Few want a return of the draft, but when Richard Nixon abolished it in 1973, he took an important step toward hiding the true cost of war from average Americans.
That process continues today as hundreds of billions of dollars are spent each year to widen the U.S. military’s technological advantage over potential rivals and to make wars look less like bloody confrontations and more like video games. In particular, the use of drone aircraft further desensitizes Americans to their impact on the rest of the world by providing a lower-cost method of killing people that puts fewer U.S. soldiers in harm’s way. Unfortunately, some of the people killed by drones—we’ll never know exactly how many—are guilty mainly of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, including inside countries like Pakistan and Yemen with which the United States is not at war. Do Americans understand that? Are they aware what the rest of the world thinks of this practice?14 Do they care?
When it comes to hiding costs, it’s one thing to lower taxes during wartime, as President George W. Bush did in the early days of his global war on terror. But the use of drones takes this cynical logic to an ugly extreme—and they create new enemies for Washington to track. Drone strikes inside Pakistan and Yemen can never really make us immune to terrorist attacks inside the United States. Our actions in the Middle East and South Asia make us more vulnerable at home, by persuading a new generation of Pakistanis, Yemenis, and others that it’s better to attack Americans who aren’t wearing state-of-the-art body armor and flying robot aircraft. The end of the draft and the use of drones make it easier for presidents to pretend that Americans can have what they want without paying for it. And that makes America’s leaders much less accountable on the most important decisions that voters empower them to make.
Just as some want technology to do the dirty work, others say we can simply lean more heavily on our friends and allies. It worked in Libya, where U.S. financial and logistical support helped French and British pilots take down perennial headache Muammar Qaddafi. Isn’t that a possible model that might allow the United States to achieve more of its foreign policy goals at less cost and risk? Can’t the United States do a little more “leading from behind”? But Libya was an exceptional case. Qaddafi is that rare leader who had virtually no powerful friends outside his country, and the invitation to stop him came directly from other Arab governments—an extraordinarily uncommon event. More to the point, the end of Qaddafi has done little for the United States and has yet to bring peace for the Libyan people. Much more common is the case of Syria, where toppling a tyrant depends on the willingness of outsiders to send in ground troops. Neither Washington nor its European allies proved foolish enough to commit to another costly and potentially intractable war in the Middle East—coalition or no.
NATO Is Not the Answer
Yet the dream that Superman can simply ask his “Super Friends” for help will not go away, and Russia’s shift toward a more hostile approach to the West encourages the hope that NATO might finally find a post–Cold War mission. Is NATO prepared to fight for Ukraine? It’s satisfying to imagine an embarrassing loss for a Russian regime that appears to think its ability to manipulate its smaller neighbor provides evidence of its timeless greatness. Everyone likes watching a bully take one in the teeth.
Take a closer look. This is no simple morality tale, and a deeper understanding of Ukraine’s largely self-inflicted predicament tells an important story about the foolishness of our current foreign policy. Americans believe in self-determination. They believe that no country is simply another’s satellite, that empires are inherently immoral, that Ukraine should be allowed to decide for itself which clubs to join, and that Russians deserve no veto on this matter. But Ukraine’s central problem is that the corruption that plagued both its pro-Russian and pro-European governments has robbed that country of its ability to pay its bills. No revolution can solve that mundane problem.
Though a clear majority of its citizens are ethnic Ukrainians, more than seven million Russian-speaking ethnic Russians still live within Ukraine’s borders. In some cases, their families have occupied that land for decades or longer. We don’t understand the history, and it’s none of our business. What if Russia one day decides to make military mischief in Latvia or Estonia? These are former Soviet republics with larger Russian minorities than Ukraine has. In both these smaller countries, ethnic Russians make up more than a quarter of the population. Unlike Ukraine, those countries are NATO members. If Russia attacks, Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty will obligate the United States to treat an armed attack on Latvia as an invasion of Louisiana. How much public support can any U.S. president expect if he is one day forced to honor that pledge?
In March 2014, YouGov asked one thousand adult Americans if the United States should use military force if Russia attacks one of its neighbors. Just 40 percent said the United States should defend Poland, 29 percent would support a defense of Turkey, and just 21 percent would support a U.S. defense of Latvia. All three are NATO members. Only 56 percent of those surveyed would defend Britain.15 If you can barely get a majority of Americans to support a defense of Britain, it’s clear that the American people want no more foreign wars of choice.
NATO was crucial for Cold War success. But the Cold War is over. Russia is not our friend, but it is hardly a formidable superpower enemy, and America can no longer afford to bankroll so much of NATO’s operations. Lord Ismay, NATO’s first secretary-general, famously said in 1949 that NATO’s purpose was “to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.” Sixty-six years later, it’s unclear whether most Europeans still want the Americans in, but it is perfectly clear that the Germans are no longer down. Unless Europeans (particularly Germans) are willing to pick up a larger share of the tab for NATO operations, why should American taxpayers pour in billions of dollars more? Why should Americans lead a fight to defend Latvia or Estonia if Germany, now one of the world’s wealthiest nations, won’t share more of the cost?
No More Nation-Building
Some say that terrorism is the greatest threat to America’s national security and that Superman must maintain an aggressive, “forward-leaning” global presence to destroy terrorists in their nests rather than try to find and stop them only after they have entered our country. We fight the terrorists “over there”—in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, and elsewhere—so that we don’t have to fight them at home, and we invest billions to rebuild countries like Iraq and Afghanistan, states that we have dismantled, in order to deny terrorists the ungoverned expanses of territory they need in order to live, plan, train, and launch attacks.
Unfortunately, as we’ve learned in recent years, the United States isn’t very good at building open democratic societies in hostile faraway places, and the expense is not worth the effort even if it were—not with urgent needs at home. We have more than enough power to destroy states, but we don’t have the resources we need, including U.S. public support, to rebuild them. U.S. withdrawal, always a mere matter of time, leaves vacuums of power in its wake, no matter how much we’ve spent to create the illusion of change. Terrorists know that recapturing safe havens is simply a matter of waiting us out or of moving across the border toward the next target of opportunity.
Are Afghanistan and Pakistan now free of Islamic militants? In Iraq and Syria, jihadis have built the best-funded terrorist group in the history of the world. If President Obama had been foolish enough to take down Bashar al-Assad and the Syrian military, who would rejoice? Those who see Syria as the next Turkey, a modern, moderate Muslim country? Or those who see it as the next Iraq, an inherently unstable sectarian battleground?
In countries without terrorists and where American interests are not under direct threat, our continuing presence is especially hard to understand. A quarter century after the end of the Cold War and seven decades after the end of World War II, there are still forty thousand U.S. troops stationed in Germany and fifty thousand more in Japan.16 It’s time for Europe and Japan to finally accept responsibility for their own security, to spend more money and risk more lives in their own defense. That is a role these wealthy countries should already have taken. Senior officials in Germany and Japan have admitted as much in recent years, and Washington should encourage them to spend the money and follow through.
Great Expectations
Americans imagine a world in which every country will one day embrace democracy. We know that some will take a long and winding road to get there. But in the end, we believe that “people power” will eventually trump tyranny. We assume that elections will replace bad guys with good guys, and that newly elected leaders will have to satisfy public demand for better government. Democracy, however, is a complex, long-term project. No country, not even the United States of America, has perfected it. And not even the United States has the staying power to ensure that the seeds it plants in foreign soil will one day take root—that they won’t be scattered by the first strong wind. Americans don’t understand the forces that block change and drive conflict in these countries, and the taxpayer can’t afford to keep boots on the ground long enough for America’s leaders to figure these things out.
Yet despite our recent setbacks, current U.S. foreign policy continues to represent the triumph of hope over experience, in part because there remains a messianic strain in America’s approach to the world. It existed long before April 1917, when President Woodrow Wilson spoke of the German Empire’s “reckless lack of compassion or of principle” and the resulting need to “make the world safe for democracy.” Whether it is Democrats ready to fight for universal human rights that we will never have the power to enforce or hawkish Republicans who want to defeat evil wherever it’s now making headlines, this fanaticism is alive and well. The long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have sent this grandiosity into hibernation, but like General Douglas MacArthur, it shall return. One day soon, shortsighted leaders in both parties will push us into new commitments that we don’t understand and can’t afford to sustain.
It’s not simply that we can’t police the world. It’s that we have no right to force those who disagree with us to see things our way. Americans like to believe that our country is so clearly a source of virtue that the rest of the world will invite us to bring about positive change in their lives. We believe that democracy is undeniably attractive and our commitment to it so obvious that others should simply trust us to create it for them within the borders of their countries.
We fail to see our double standards, but the world does not. The world sees that we criticize the conduct of elections in Russia and Venezuela—and that we laud every hollow “democratic reform” in Egypt or Saudi Arabia. We endorse the results of Israeli elections and condemn the outcome when Palestinians vote. We support self-determination for Kosovo but not Crimea. We tell Europeans which countries we think they should admit to the European Union. It’s easier to tell others what to do when the gap between your power and theirs is large, but that gap has narrowed. It will narrow further still.17
We accuse China, Russia, and France of cyber-espionage even as Americans spy on pretty much everyone else—including other Americans. How can we champion “rule of law” when we refuse to abide by international rules or submit to the collective judgment of others? We cheer when some anti-American autocrat faces justice before the International Criminal Court, but the U.S. Senate will not ratify an agreement that might submit an American citizen to its jurisdiction.18 How should we expect the rest of the world to respond to this double standard? We ignore the reality that others love their countries too, and that they don’t consider themselves to be “Americans at an earlier stage of development.” It is foolish and arrogant to believe that we know better than the citizens of other countries how their governments should spend, save, invest, and make laws.
Another flaw in our foreign policy: We love villains. Americans seem incapable of simply ignoring a foreign leader who shakes his fist at us, whether to make a name for himself at home or to express a legitimate grievance. And we make little effort to understand why his anti-Americanism makes him popular. It was easy to dismiss the late Hugo Chávez, Venezuela’s bombastic former president, as a narcissistic clown. There is ample evidence that he and his successor have inflicted lasting damage on Venezuela and its economy. We don’t have to trade with Venezuela—though we will surely continue to buy large amounts of its crude oil. We don’t have to offer its leaders anything of value. But if we refuse to try to understand Chávez’s appeal for the people who elected him, more than once and by significant margins,19 we will never understand Venezuela or any other country in which anti-Americanism can boost the career of an aspiring politician. If we don’t understand these countries, how likely are the people who live there to accept our advice on how they should be governed?
Why are we so sure that we know how each developing country should develop? Americans would never put their most important decisions in the hands of a foreign government. We don’t even trust our own government.* Is it really our responsibility to bring justice to the people of Tibet, Taiwan, Kuwait, Kosovo, and Kashmir? How much money should we spend and how many lives put at risk on behalf of these places? The true source of America’s exceptionalism is the drive to create a more perfect union at home, a subject of considerable neglect in recent years, and the moral compromises and ugly contradictions of our foreign policy undermine international perceptions of who we really are and what we believe.
Perhaps Americans are finally beginning to catch on. Remember that poll published in December 2013 by the Pew Research Center and the Council on Foreign Relations? The one that detailed what the report’s authors called “the most lopsided balance in favor of the U.S. ‘minding its own business’ in the nearly 50-year history of the measure”?20 A CNN/ORC International poll released that same month found that 82 percent of Americans opposed the war in Afghanistan, making it the most unpopular conflict in U.S. history.
We can’t promote democracy abroad while ignoring the popular will at home.
Damage at Home
Freedom is fragile. Americans must protect it right here at home. For all the damage a foolish foreign policy inflicts on U.S. interests abroad, the greatest damage is done inside the United States. First, a strong interventionist foreign policy strengthens the federal government in ways that distort the constitutionally prescribed balance of power between Washington and the states. The country’s founders believed that dividing rights and responsibilities between the federal and state governments protects personal freedom and allows the states to serve as political and economic laboratories for the benefit of all Americans. Our superhero foreign policy draws rivers of taxpayer dollars toward the center, empowering Washington at the expense of local governments.
It also empowers the president at the expense of Congress in ways that upset the balance that the authors of the Constitution took great pains to design. Our superhero foreign policy has weakened not only our economy and our international reputation but also the respect of our leaders for America’s founding principles. The founders did not intend to leave questions of war and peace in the hands of a single individual, even one who has won a national election. There are too many lives, too much money, and too many interests at stake to concentrate so much power in the executive. James Madison, who would later serve as president, wrote in 1793 that “the power to declare war, including the power of judging the causes of war, is fully and exclusively vested in the legislature. . . . The executive has no right, in any case, to decide the question, whether there is or is not cause for declaring war.”21 As Madison wrote to Thomas Jefferson in a letter in 1798:
The Constitution supposes what the history of all Governments demonstrates, that the executive is the branch of power most interested in war and most prone to it. It has accordingly with studied care vested the question of war in the Legislature.22
Jefferson did not waver from this opinion even after becoming president, noting in 1805 that “Congress alone is constitutionally invested with the power of changing our condition from peace to war.”23 This argument appears again each time a president begins talking about using the country’s military might. Too often, Americans form their opinions on war powers and the proper roles of the president and Congress based mainly on the strength of their own allegiance to the president’s political party. America can’t afford that sort of complacency. Not with so many lives and taxpayer dollars at stake. On questions of war and peace, Congress is not an inconvenience. It is the guarantor of our security and our liberties.
Our superhero foreign policy also poisons American democracy by intensifying the need for official secrecy. This problem comes in two forms. In an age when secrets are often exposed by whistle-blowers of various stripes and sophisticated cyber-activists, it has become increasingly difficult to hide the fact that America spies even on its allies. What happens to U.S. influence and prestige when our dirty secrets are exposed? Each foreign government will wonder whether our president was aware of this spying, and the answer is damning either way.
Our spy agencies also want to keep secret what they do within U.S. borders. Involvement in so many actual and potential conflicts overseas breeds fear that there are enemies within. In the 1950s, we feared infiltration by communists. Today it is terrorists. Why does America have seventeen different intelligence agencies?* Why are most of their budgets classified? How many U.S. companies work with them? How many taxpayer dollars are they sharing with foreign governments? Who exactly are the watchers watching? Who is watching the watchers? How can Americans hold their intelligence agencies accountable? There can be no “alert and knowledgeable citizenry” until the average American can answer at least some of these questions.
We are not allowed to know exactly how many Americans work for the U.S. Defense Department, how many bases our military operates overseas, or how many foreign countries host them. As a result, we don’t really know how much of our money our Defense Department spends each year, but we can say with confidence that our superhero foreign policy diverts resources away from those parts of our economy that promote and protect prosperity. According to a Harvard University study published in 2013, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will cost Americans between $4 trillion and $6 trillion when “long-term medical care and disability compensation for service members, veterans and families, military replenishment and social and economic costs” are added to the more direct costs of combat operations.24 Without cutting other defense spending, how many schools, homes, and hospitals might $4 trillion have built? How might our economy have responded over the past decade if we had simply left that $4 trillion in the taxpayer’s pocket? Why are we investing in other countries when so many of those dollars are needed in our own country? Americans were asking this question before Dwight Eisenhower became president. Decades later, there is still no good answer.
What About Trade?
Doesn’t our superhero foreign policy enhance American prosperity by creating opportunities for trade that boost our economy? It should be clear by now that expanded cross-border commerce isn’t an absolute good for American workers. Trade agreements have the potential to benefit all who participate in them, but too often deals negotiated by political elites on behalf of economic elites overwhelmingly benefit elites—and they widen the gap between rich and poor in ways that further polarize American society. Enhanced trade with Mexico and China has killed large numbers of manufacturing jobs. That’s good for the companies that can lower their production costs by outsourcing jobs. It’s not so good for the millions of Americans thrown out of work as a result.
Before we commit our country to a new generation of trade deals, let’s revisit the North American Free Trade Agreement. To mark the twentieth anniversary of NAFTA in early 2014, Public Citizen, a nonprofit think tank and advocacy group, published a report on the trade deal’s economic impact.25 The results were grim. Before NAFTA was enacted, President Bill Clinton pledged that the agreement would create one million new U.S. jobs in the first five years of its life. Instead, according to Public Citizen, “U.S. firms used NAFTA’s new foreign investor privileges to relocate production to Mexico to take advantage of that country’s lower wages and weaker environmental standards . . . creating a massive new trade deficit that equated to an estimated net loss of one million U.S. jobs by 2004.”26
Washington understood, of course, that changes brought about by NAFTA would “displace” significant numbers of workers. That’s why the government created Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA), a big federal program designed to train workers for new jobs and other industries. According to the Public Citizen report, more than 845,000 manufacturing workers have been certified for TAA since NAFTA took effect. But, warned the study, the TAA program isn’t easy to qualify for and only covers some of the jobs lost.
In addition, NAFTA drove wages lower as workers were forced to accept whatever new jobs they could find. This problem was not limited to sectors directly impacted by NAFTA. As fired workers went looking for work in other industries, like food service and hospitality, jobs that can’t be “offshored” to Mexico or China, they pushed down wages in those sectors too, according to the study. Nor did NAFTA lower food prices, easing the pain for consumers with less income. In fact, according to Public Citizen, “Despite a 188 percent rise in food imports from Canada and Mexico under NAFTA, the average nominal price of food in the United States jumped 65 percent since NAFTA went into effect.” All these factors are helping to increase the gap between rich and poor in America and to shrink our middle class. We shouldn’t be surprised then that many Americans surveyed by polling firm Angus Reid Public Opinion in 2012 were sour on the benefits of NAFTA for workers and the broader U.S. economy. According to the results, significant percentages felt the deal had been “good for manufacturers (47%), employers (45%) and tourists (40%).” Just 34 percent said that NAFTA had benefited the U.S. economy, and 25 percent said it had been “good for workers.”27
At least NAFTA benefited Mexico, you might think. Not so, said a 2009 study by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.28 According to the study’s authors, “The evidence points overwhelmingly to the conclusion that Mexico’s reforms, backed by NAFTA, have largely been a disappointment for the country. Despite dramatic increases in trade and foreign investment, economic growth has been slow and job creation has been weak.” The more recent Public Citizen report adds, “Despite promises that NAFTA would benefit Mexican consumers by granting access to cheaper imported products, the cost of basic consumer goods in Mexico has risen to seven times the pre-NAFTA level, while the minimum wage stands at only four times the pre-NAFTA level.” It’s unclear why prices rose, but it’s clear that they did, despite the promises of NAFTA’s champions. That’s been bad news for impoverished Mexicans—and bad news for low-wage American workers who find themselves competing for work against illegal immigrants crossing the U.S.-Mexican border in search of a better life for themselves and their families.
Finally, trade is just one more aspect of U.S. foreign policy that focuses too much power in the hands of a single individual. As part of his plan to negotiate a Trans-Pacific Partnership, a colossal U.S.-led trade deal involving a dozen countries on either side of the Pacific, President Obama has called on Congress to give him “Trade Promotion Authority,” popularly known as “fast track.” This would grant him the power to negotiate a deal with all these other governments and to put the final draft before Congress for a simple up-or-down vote. No member of Congress is allowed to ask for any changes to the agreement or offer amendments to its text. Presidents of both parties have used this power in the past to get the deals that they and their supporters want without interference from individual lawmakers.
Why should we trust any president, Republican or Democrat, with authority to make decisions affecting the lives and livelihoods of so many millions of Americans without vital input from Congress? Shouldn’t the American people and their representatives have a more direct say in the content of the big trade deals that define the parameters of our prosperity? Trade creates winners and losers within every country that participates, even if it’s good for a country’s economy as a whole. Every American deserves to know the details hidden in these deals.
The Ultimate Fear
Democracy is a living thing, and it can’t be built like a wall. It’s a continual process, a political ecosystem, a permanent revolution—one that can move backward as well as forward. It requires Eisenhower’s “alert and knowledgeable citizenry” and a long-term, open-ended commitment to check the power of government. Our democracy depends on respect for our liberties and a healthy balance between Washington’s authority and the rights of the fifty states. Government has no right to listen to your phone calls, read your e-mail, collect your bank records, or follow you through the Internet without good cause. These are violations of the constitutional right of American citizens to be “secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.” Nor should your government be allowed to detain you indefinitely without trial.
Yet all these values remain under threat, because various pieces of post-9/11 legislation have attempted to expand the government’s ability to do all these things. The greatest threat that a superhero foreign policy poses for American democracy comes not from the enormous debt it imposes or even the heightened threat of terrorism itself, but from the potential impact of another large-scale attack on U.S. soil on the rights and privacy of American citizens. It is not China or Russia or Iran or any other emerging power or rogue state that threatens our freedom. The only government on earth that can strip Americans of their civil liberties is headquartered in Washington, D.C.
In short, there is no greater threat to American freedom and our civil liberties than a fear-driven response to a new terrorist attack and the misguided foreign policy response it might provoke. The attacks of September 11, 2001, created a new kind of fear for the average American, one that seemed to demand a forceful response of historic scale. The toppling of the Taliban in Afghanistan wasn’t a satisfying enough answer. Our government went in search of other villains. The result: the two longest and most expensive wars in U.S. history.
Beyond the costs imposed on our military is the price we have paid at home. As more revelations emerge about the thousand ways in which our government now monitors our lives, we face a disturbing truth—Americans are not even legally entitled to know how much of our privacy we have surrendered. Security cameras we once would have rejected as Orwellian are now a fact of daily American life. U.S. companies with familiar names share data about our private lives and personal choices with the government we have empowered to protect us. How much more of our freedom will we hand over to faceless bureaucrats the next time a gang of jihadis hits the jackpot? What do all those cameras and the salaries of officials charged with monitoring them cost the American taxpayer? And how much more of our privacy will we surrender in years to come?
It is not power that makes America exceptional. It is freedom. Our freedom is at risk, and we must protect it.
Independent America—Democracy in One Country
Those who want Washington to police the planet and remake the world in America’s image dismiss those who disagree with them as “isolationists.” This word, this expletive, is not meant to shed light but to close conversation. It’s a dismissal of every legitimate reservation that ordinary Americans have about the obvious foreign policy excesses and costly miscalculations of their government. Worst of all, it’s an accusation that those who believe these excesses and mistakes damage our country are simply “rejectionists,” carping critics with no positive vision.
That charge is false. Those who want Washington to declare our independence from the responsibility to solve everyone else’s problems believe that America has profound untapped potential. Imagine what might become possible if we redirected the attention, energy, and resources that we now squander on a failed superhero foreign policy toward building the America we imagine, one that empowers all its people to realize their human potential. We stand on the verge of a crucial historic choice. We can continue to spend too much of our wealth and resources and too many American lives in a vain attempt to micromanage the evolution of global politics. Or we can rededicate ourselves to realizing the vision of our founders, one built atop respect for individual liberty and the awesome potential it creates for positive change.
Americans—genuine conservatives, true-blue liberals, and everyone in between—believe in freedom. We believe that there is no legitimate government without the consent of the governed. We also believe that these rights should be universal. But we know—or ought to know—that other societies have other values, and that we can’t simply force our faith on others no matter how certain we are that our system is best. The best way to promote our ideas and values around the world is not by bribing or blackmailing other governments to accept them, or by imposing them at gunpoint, but by rededicating ourselves to perfecting democracy at home. It is within our power to build “democracy in one country.” Our country. Only by building an America that lives up to its best ideals can we expect the citizens of other nations to demand that their governments follow America’s lead.
By abandoning the ambitions of our leaders to police the world, we can invest much more to protect the homeland from the game-changing terrorist attack that might push America permanently off course. We can devote much more money toward rebuilding our infrastructure, creating the education system that the next generation of Americans deserves, and caring properly for those who have worn our country’s uniform, while leaving enough in the taxpayer’s pocket to power our economy into the future.
First, we must rationalize military spending. That means defending against tomorrow’s true threats. To build and maintain the military we need for the twenty-first century, it is far more important to spend wisely than to spend more. We must devote our resources not to the expensive weapons that helped us win the wars of the past but to the lighter, smarter weapons needed to combat terrorist and other threats to the homeland that we are sure to face in years to come. Tomorrow’s wars will be waged not with aircraft carriers and heavy bombers but with information—and the intelligence and expertise needed to understand and use it. They will be won less often on land or sea than in financial markets and in cyberspace.
We must never forget that national security begins at home. To secure the homeland, we must finally make the investments needed to protect our borders, ports, airports, and public infrastructure against terrorist attack. But we must also invest in our country’s resilience, our ability to bounce back from disasters, natural or unnatural, and continue building a safer and more prosperous America. We must increase public awareness of the threats we face and how to manage them—at the federal and local levels and in every American home and workplace.
Finally, a word on immigration. Illegal immigration is a serious problem in need of a serious solution. But we must always continue to welcome those who would come to this country legally, as millions have done since our founding. The best and brightest, those hungry for a better life and willing to work for it, have always made the United States stronger. That is true not just for high-skilled workers from developed nations, but for those from poorer countries who have never had a chance to show what they can do. Immigrants add not only to the skills of our workforce but to the nation’s innovative potential. Make them Americans. Educate their children. Celebrate their successes and all that it means for our future. Closing our borders to terrorists must never mean closing our country’s doors to those who enter the United States legally seeking a better life.
Rebuild Our Public Infrastructure
Why are we investing in public infrastructure in Afghanistan or Iraq instead of at home?
We must rebuild our shamefully crumbling physical infrastructure. In their book That Used to Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back, authors Thomas L. Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum reported on an alarming 2009 study from the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) called “A Report Card for America’s Infrastructure.” The study gave the United States an overall grade of D, noting that little had changed in the quality of America’s roads, bridges, rail, dams, drinking water, and other elements of public infrastructure since the organization’s previous study in 2005, other than the amount of money needed to improve them. In 2005, the ASCE estimated that it would cost $1.6 trillion to repair the country’s infrastructure. By 2009, that figure had risen to $2.2 trillion.29
Fast-forward four years. In 2013, the ASCE issued another update, one that provides estimates of the funding needed by 2020 to “maintain a state of good repair,” the equivalent of a grade of B, in these same categories of public infrastructure. The latest report elevated America’s overall score from D to D+ but increased the estimated cost of investment needed to achieve that goal to $3.6 trillion. Categories included aviation, bridges, dams, drinking water, energy, hazardous waste, inland waterways, levees, ports, public parks and recreation, rail, roads, schools, solid waste management, transit, and wastewater. Solid waste scored a B−, while grades in the other fifteen categories ranged from C+ to D−.
The economic impact of this failure can be measured. According to the report, “The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) estimates that the national cost of airport congestion and delays was almost $22 billion in 2012. If current federal funding levels are maintained, the FAA anticipates that the cost of congestion and delays to the economy will rise from $34 billion in 2020 to $63 billion by 2040.” In addition, “deficient and deteriorating transit systems cost the U.S. economy $90 billion in 2010,” and “forty-two percent of America’s major urban highways remain congested, costing the economy an estimated $101 billion in wasted time and fuel annually.”30 This is one small corner of a much larger and more frightening problem.
Invest in American Education
The ASCE had similar dire warnings about the state of America’s schools:
Public school enrollment is projected to gradually increase through 2019, yet state and local school construction funding continues to decline. National spending on school construction has diminished to approximately $10 billion in 2012, about half the level spent prior to the recession, while the condition of school facilities continues to be a significant concern for communities. Experts now estimate the investment needed to modernize and maintain our nation’s school facilities is at least $270 billion or more. However, due to the absence of national data on school facilities for more than a decade, a complete picture of the condition of our nation’s schools remains mostly unknown.31
Our failure to invest properly in the education of our children extends well beyond the money we spend on buildings and equipment. Every three years, American fifteen-year-olds participate in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), a test given by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development to more than half a million students in sixty-five countries. Students are tested in reading, math, and science. The most recent test, given in 2012, produced predictably mediocre results for Americans, who scored at or below average in all three areas. More worrying, the results suggest that students in many other countries are improving their scores while there is little change in U.S. results, a formula for future failure.32
By bringing the money we spend abroad back home, we will have the resources we need to build safe, state-of-the-art schools with state-of-the-art teaching tools. We can invest more money in better wages for our teachers to ensure that the profession attracts smart, talented, and creative men and women who might otherwise enter other professions in search of better-paying jobs. There is ample evidence that better-paid teachers produce better results in the classroom.33 We can reduce class sizes across the country to ensure that educators spend less time policing behavior and more time teaching. Aware that a hungry student is more likely to have trouble concentrating, we can provide students with nutritious meals. We should also invest not just in schools but in preschools to give our kids a critical head start.
Care for Our Veterans
By bringing the money home, we will finally provide our veterans with the first-rate health care they deserve. As of this writing, hundreds of thousands of those who have served in this country’s wars are trapped in a bureaucratic nightmare that frustrates their ability to receive the physical, mental, and emotional health care they need. Veterans of the war in Vietnam, who make up nearly 40 percent of those filing new benefit claims, now face a wide variety of health challenges related to advanced age. Another 20 percent of claims comes from service members returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. We will be investing enormous sums in their care for decades to come; payments to veterans of World War I did not peak until more than half a century after that war ended.34
It’s not enough to think generously. We must also think creatively. Instead of pouring more money into a Veterans Administration that is not equipped to care for the growing numbers who need help, we should follow the wise counsel of retired colonel Jack Jacobs, one of America’s most distinguished veterans. Colonel Jacobs has argued persuasively that those who have served our country deserve better than the VA can provide. “There is no reason that veterans who would otherwise wait for months to be seen at a VA health clinic can’t be seen by private doctors, the same doctors who treat everyone else,” he wrote in May 2014. “The procedure doesn’t need to be complicated: patient is seen by private doctor, private doctor treats patient, doctor sends bill to government, government pays doctor.” As Jacobs points out, “We already have Medicare and Medicaid, which could serve as templates for a veterans program without facilities or physicians.”35 Without a superhero foreign policy to finance and manage, government will have more money and more time to think through these challenges.
Put the Money Back in the Taxpayer’s Pocket
Finally, we can leave more money in the taxpayer’s pocket. Never has it been more important to allow Americans to keep more of what they earn. America’s recovery from the Great Recession has been painfully slow, in part because millions of Americans are still so busy digging out of personal debt and putting aside the extra dollar to rebuild their retirement savings that consumer spending remains much less than it should be. Instead of sending their money to Washington so that policymakers can use it to play international superhero, let ordinary Americans use it to stimulate growth, create jobs, and reexpand the country’s beleaguered middle class. There is no better stimulus plan.
For all these reasons, it is time for Americans to declare their independence from a foreign policy that bankrupts our treasury, depletes our energy, undermines both our credibility and our self-confidence, and cannot be sustained. As Ike warned in his farewell address to the nation, “We . . . must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering for our own ease and convenience the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow.”
Let us declare independence from commitments abroad that undermine our democracy and compromise our values. Let us better understand the world before we try to remake it, define our national interest modestly, and make American peace and prosperity a model for other nations.
*******
Let’s return to the quiz you took in the introduction. Here is how a champion of Independent America might answer (in italics with a brief explanation for that choice).
An Independent America Answer Key
1. Freedom is:
a. The right of every human being.
b. Fragile. Americans must protect it right here at home.
c. In the eye of the beholder.
We cannot effectively preach democracy abroad until we practice it at home.
2. America is:
a. Exceptional because of what it represents.
b. Exceptional because of all it has done for the world.
c. Not an exceptional nation. America is the most powerful, but that doesn’t mean it’s always right.
Our example is more powerful than our most powerful weapons.
3. Which of these statements best expresses your opinion?
a. America will be better off if we mind our own business and let other countries get along the best they can.
b. America must lead.
c. The primary purpose of U.S. foreign policy should be to make America safer and more prosperous.
We can’t build and sustain a risky and expensive foreign policy without lasting public support, and that support is no longer there.
4. China is:
a. America’s greatest challenge and greatest opportunity.
b. The place where too many American jobs have gone.
c. The world’s largest dictatorship.
We have much less influence with China’s leaders and the Chinese people than we like to think. Let’s devote our time, energy, and resources to restoring the strength of our economy.
5. America’s biggest problem in the Middle East is that:
a. Washington supports the region’s dictators rather than its people.
b. Washington ignores small problems until they turn into big ones.
c. Washington believes it can manage an unmanageable region.
It’s time to accept that we can never bring peace and stability to the Middle East.
6. U.S. spy capabilities:
a. Will always be a double-edged sword.
b. Threaten our privacy.
c. Are vital for protecting America.
Compromising the principles on which our nation was founded will not make us safer.
7. The primary responsibility of the president of the United States is:
a. To advance U.S. interests at home and abroad.
b. To promote, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.
c. To lead.
We are a nation governed by laws, not by men and women. May it ever be so.
8. Which of the following best expresses your view?
a. A great leader can change the world.
b. A great leader must lead by example.
c. In the real world, any leader must often choose the least bad of many bad options.
We cannot ask others to follow our example until we live up to our own ideals.
9. Which is the most at risk?
a. America’s economy.
b. America’s international reputation.
c. The respect of our leaders for America’s founding principles.
Our Constitution and our faith in rule of law have created our economic strength and international influence.
10. I hope that by the year 2050:
a. America will share the burdens of leadership with reliable, like-minded allies.
b. Americans will have created a more perfect union at home.
c. American leadership will have helped as many people as possible around the world topple the tyrants who deny them the freedom they deserve.
Americans are builders. We must never stop building the America we deserve.