The single most important issue in allocating national resources is war versus peace, or as macroeconomists put it, “guns versus butter.” The vital role of peace for sustainable development is clear and unequivocal. As the world’s nations put it in the new sustainable development framework: “We are determined to foster peaceful, just and inclusive societies which are free from fear and violence. There can be no sustainable development without peace and no peace without sustainable development.”1
My argument is that the United States has been getting the war-and-peace challenge profoundly wrong, squandering vast sums and undermining national security as a result. In economic and geopolitical terms, America suffers from what Yale historian Paul Kennedy calls “imperial overreach.” If the Trump Administration remains trapped in expensive Mideast wars, much less expands them, the budgetary costs alone could derail any hopes for solving our vast domestic problems.
On this score, we can have some glimmers of optimism. On the campaign trail, candidate Trump regularly criticized the United States for overstretch in the Middle East and called for improvements in relations with Russia. So far so good, and indeed such an approach is vital not only for peace but also for financing a bold domestic infrastructure program. Yet candidate Trump also rattled the saber vis-à-vis Iran and China. Feeding an anti-Iran frenzy would gravely worsen rather than stabilize the Middle East. A new U.S. arms race with China would remove any realistic chance of rebuilding the domestic U.S. economy. And worse, it could gravely imperil peace.
It may seem tendentious to call America an empire and speak of imperial overstretch, but the term fits certain realities of U.S. power and how it’s used. An empire is a group of territories under a single power. Nineteenth-century Britain was obviously an empire when it ruled India, Egypt, and dozens of other colonies in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. The United States directly rules only a handful of conquered islands (Hawai’i, Puerto Rico, Guam, Samoa, the Northern Mariana Islands), but it stations troops and has used force to influence who governs in dozens of other sovereign countries. That grip on power beyond America’s own shores is now weakening.
The scale of U.S. military operations is remarkable. The U.S. Department of Defense has (as of a 2014 inventory) 4,855 military facilities, of which 4,154 are in the United States; 114 are in overseas U.S. territories; and 587 are in forty-two foreign countries and foreign territories in all regions of the world.2 Not counted in this list are the secret facilities of the U.S. intelligence agencies. The cost of running these military operations and the wars they support is extraordinary, around $900 billion per year, or 5 percent of U.S. national income, when one adds the budgets of the Pentagon, the intelligence agencies, homeland security, nuclear weapons programs in the Department of Energy, and veterans’ benefits. The $900 billion in annual spending is roughly one-quarter of all federal government outlays.
The United States has a long history of using covert and overt means to overthrow governments deemed to be unfriendly to U.S. interests, following the classic imperial strategy of rule through locally imposed friendly regimes. In the case of Latin America between 1898 and 1994, for example, a remarkable study by historian John Coatsworth counts forty-one cases of “successful” U.S.-led regime change, for an average rate of one government overthrow by the United States every twenty-eight months for a century. And note: Coatsworth’s count does not include the failed attempts, such as the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba.
According to Coatsworth’s powerful study:
Direct intervention involving the use of U.S. military forces, intelligence agents, or local citizens employed by U.S. government agencies occurred in 17 of the 41 cases. In another 24 cases, the U.S. government intervention was indirect. That is, local actors (usually military leaders) played the principal roles, but either would not have acted or would not have succeeded without encouragement or help from the U.S. government and its agents.3
This tradition of U.S.-led regime change has been part and parcel of U.S. foreign policy in other parts of the world—including Western Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia—though historians have not yet followed Coatsworth’s lead with such a detailed and precise accounting.
Wars of regime change are costly to the United States and often devastating to the countries involved. Two major studies have measured the costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. One, by my Columbia colleague Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard scholar Linda Bilmes, arrived at the cost of $3 trillion as of 2008.4
A more recent study by the Cost of War Project at Brown University puts the price tag at $4.7 trillion through 2016.5 Over a fifteen-year period, this $4.7 trillion amounts to roughly $300 billion per year—more than the total outlays from 2000 to 2015 for the federal Departments of Education, Energy, Labor, Interior, and Transportation, the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the Environmental Protection Agency combined.
It is nearly a truism that U.S. wars of regime change have rarely served America’s security needs. Even when the wars succeed in overthrowing a government, as in the case of the Taliban in Afghanistan, Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and Muammar Gadaffi in Libya, the result is rarely a stable government, and is more often a civil war. A “successful” regime change often lights a long fuse leading to a future explosion, such as the 1953 overthrow of Iran’s democratically elected government and installation of the autocratic Shah of Iran, which was followed by the Iranian Revolution of 1979. In many other cases, such as the U.S. attempts (with Saudi Arabia and Turkey) to overthrow Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, the result is a bloodbath and military standoff rather than an overthrow of the government.
What is the deep motivation for these profligate wars and for the far-flung military bases that support them?
During the period from 1950 to 1990, the superficial answer would have been the Cold War. Yet America’s imperial behavior overseas predates the Cold War by half a century (back to the Spanish-American War in 1898) and has outlasted it by another quarter century. America’s overseas imperial adventures began after the Civil War and the final conquests of the Native American nations. At that point, U.S. political and business leaders sought to join the European empires—especially Britain, France, Russia, and the newly emergent Germany—in overseas conquests. In short order, America grabbed the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Panama, and Hawai’i, and joined the European imperial powers in knocking on the doors of China.
As of the 1890s, the United States was by far the world’s largest economy, but until World War II, the United States took a back seat to the British Empire in global naval power, imperial reach, and geopolitical dominance. The British were the unrivaled masters of regime change, for example in carving up the corpse of the Ottoman Empire after World War I. But the exhaustion from two world wars and the Great Depression ended the British and French empires after World War II and thrust the United States and Russia into the forefront as the two main global empires. The Cold War had begun.
The economic underpinning of America’s global reach was unprecedented. As of 1950, U.S. output constituted a remarkable 27 percent of global output, with the Soviet Union’s roughly a third of that, around 10 percent. The Cold War fed two fundamental ideas that would shape American foreign policy up to the present. The first was that the United States was in a struggle for survival against the Soviet empire. The second was that every country, no matter how remote, was a battlefield in that global war. While the United States and the Soviet Union would avoid a direct confrontation, they flexed their muscles in dozens of hot wars around the world that served as proxies for the superpower competition.
Over the course of nearly a half-century, Cuba, Congo, Ghana, Indonesia, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Iran, Namibia, Mozambique, Chile, Afghanistan, Lebanon, and even tiny Granada, among many others, were interpreted by U.S. strategists as battlegrounds with the Soviet empire. Often far more prosaic interests were involved. Private companies like United Fruit International and ITT convinced friends in high places (most famously the Dulles brothers) that land reforms or threatened expropriations of corporate assets were dire threats to U.S. interests, and therefore grounds for U.S.-led regime change. Oil interests in the Middle East were another repeated cause of war, as had been the case for the British Empire from the 1920s.
These wars destabilized and impoverished the countries involved rather than settling the politics in America’s favor. The wars of regime change were, with few exceptions, a litany of foreign policy failures. They were also extraordinarily costly for the United States itself. The Vietnam War was of course the greatest of the debacles, so expensive, so bloody, and so controversial that the Vietnam War crowded out Lyndon Johnson’s other, far more important war: the War on Poverty in the United States.
The end of the Cold War in 1991 with the demise of the Soviet Union should have been the occasion for a fundamental reorientation of U.S. guns-versus-butter policies. The end of the Cold War offered the United States and the world a “peace dividend,” the opportunity to reorient the world and U.S. economy from war footing to sustainable development. Indeed, the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 established sustainable development as the centerpiece of global cooperation, or so it seemed.
Alas, the blinders and arrogance of American imperial thinking prevented the United States from settling down to a new era of peace. As the Cold War was ending, the United States was beginning a new era of wars, this time in the Middle East. The United States would sweep away the Soviet-backed regimes in the Middle East and establish unrivaled U.S. political dominance. Or at least that was the plan.
The quarter century since 1991 has therefore been marked by a perpetual U.S. war in the Middle East, one that has destabilized the Middle East, massively diverted resources away from civilian needs towards the military, and helped to create massive budget deficits and the buildup of public debt. The imperial thinking has led to wars of regime change in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, and Syria across four presidencies: Bush Sr., Clinton, Bush Jr., and Obama. The same thinking has induced the United States to expand NATO to Russia’s borders, despite the fact that NATO’s supposed purpose was to defend against an adversary—the Soviet Union—that no longer exists. Mikhail Gorbachev has emphasized that NATO’s eastward expansion “was certainly a violation of the spirit of those declarations and assurances that we were given in 1990” regarding the future of East-West security.
There is a major economic difference, however, between now and 1991, much less 1950. At the start of the Cold War in 1950, the United States produced around 27 percent of world output. As of 1991, when the Cheney-Wolfowitz dreams of U.S. dominance were taking shape, that figure was around 22 percent. By now, according to IMF estimates, the U.S. share is 16 percent, while China has surpassed the United States at 18 percent.6 By 2021, according to IMF projections, the United States will produce 15 percent of global output compared with China’s 20 percent. The United States is incurring massive public debt and cutting back on urgent public investments at home in order to sustain a dysfunctional, militarized, and costly foreign policy.
Thus comes a fundamental choice. The United States can vainly continue the neoconservative project of unipolar dominance even as the recent failures in the Middle East and America’s declining economic preeminence guarantee the ultimate failure of this imperial vision. If, as some neoconservatives support, the United States now engages in an arms race with China, we rather than China are bound to come up short in a decade or two, if not sooner. The costly wars in the Middle East, if continued much less enlarged by the new administration, could easily end any realistic hopes for new federal investments in education, training, infrastructure, and the environment.
The far smarter approach will be to maintain America’s defensive capabilities but end its imperial pretensions. This, in practice, means cutting back on the far-flung network of military bases, ending wars of regime change, avoiding a new arms race (especially in next-generation nuclear weapons), and engaging China, India, Russia, and other regional powers in stepped-up diplomacy through the United Nations and shared actions on the Sustainable Development Goals, including climate change, disease control, and global education.
Many American conservatives will sneer at the very thought that the U.S. room for maneuver should be limited in the slightest by the UN. But think how much better off the United States would be today had it heeded the UN Security Council’s opposition to the wars in Iraq, Libya, and Syria. Many conservatives will point to Vladimir Putin’s actions in Crimea as proof that diplomacy with Russia is useless, without recognizing that it was NATO’s expansion to the Baltics and its invitation to Ukraine to join NATO that were primary triggers of Putin’s response.
In the end, the Soviet Union bankrupted itself through costly foreign adventures such as the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan and its vast overinvestment in the military. Today the United States has similarly overinvested in the military and could follow a similar path to decline if it continues the wars in the Middle East and invites an arms race with China. It’s time to abandon the reveries, burdens, and self-deceptions of empire and to invest in sustainable development at home and in partnership with the rest of the world.