Rethinking Pax Americana with John Glaser
2017-10-01 · Guest: John Glaser (Director of Foreign Policy Studies, Cato Institute) · 51:47
Strategic necessity of US overseas military bases
Bob Zadek interviews John Glaser, Director of Foreign Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, regarding the strategic necessity and consequences of the United States’ vast network of overseas military bases. Glaser argues that the current posture of maintaining approximately 800 bases in 70 countries is an outdated relic of the post-WWII era that often provokes adversaries and entangles the U.S. in unnecessary conflicts.
Topics: Foreign Policy, U.S. Military Bases, Deterrence, National Security, Cato Institute, Geopolitics, Defense Spending, International Relations
Speakers:
- Bob Zadek: Host
- John Glaser: Director of Foreign Policy Studies, Cato Institute
- Jacob: Caller from San Jose
Introduction to Overseas Bases [00:00]
Bob Zadek: Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Bob Zadek Show, the only live libertarian talk radio show on the air all weekend and the longest-running libertarian talk radio show in California. Thanks so much for listening this beautiful Sunday morning. Have you ever woken up one morning or started to think and realized that something that you have taken as being a given, a true, a way of running your life, your business, your personal affairs—something you’ve just not thought about that much, but just assumed it was the right way to do it—and one morning you had this eureka moment when you realized what you’re doing is dead wrong? It’s counterproductive to whatever goal you wanted, and you said to yourself, or somebody said to you, “Change it. It’s all wrong. It makes no sense.” And they were right.
Well, that recently happened to me. I was reading a policy analysis published by Cato entitled “Withdrawing from Overseas Bases: Why a Forward-Deployed Military Posture is Unnecessary.” In other words, this scholarly piece looked into the wisdom, the value of the U.S. maintaining this empire around the world of staffed and well-funded military bases. And the piece, written by this morning’s guest, examined that tactic, which we have taken for granted—that we have to have bases around the world—and examined it in great detail. And I put down that piece and I said to myself, “John Glaser is right. None of this makes any sense whatever.”
And then I thought back and I thought about what I had been reading over the past months or years, and I don’t remember seeing even one piece examining the wisdom of this expensive and dangerous tactical or strategic decision. And there was none. Well, those days are over. This morning, we will discuss the wisdom of our maintaining around the world an enormous number at enormous expense of military bases. John, thank you so much for joining us this morning and for writing your piece. And to help the audience get to know you, you are a Director of Foreign Policy Studies at Cato. You research grand strategy, defense, U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, the rise of China, and related issues. And you earned a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from UMass Amherst and you studied at George Mason University. John, welcome to the show this morning.
John Glaser: Thanks for having me, Bob.
The Scale and Stated Goals of U.S. Presence [01:59]
Bob Zadek: And by the way, before we go any further, thanks so much for your thoughtful, well-researched, and perhaps provocative piece. Now, John, the subject this morning is forward deployment forces, or in everyday parlance, the maintaining of foreign bases around the world in other countries other than the U.S. and its possessions. Now, tell us about how large is that policy? How committed is the U.S. in terms of numbers of bases, amount of dollars, and number of humans who are there?
John Glaser: So, at the moment, we have roughly 800 overseas military bases of various sizes. They’re in about 70 countries, roughly. At the moment, that amounts to about 260,000 troops and military officials stationed at these overseas bases. And the dollar amount is tough to get down to precisely, partly because the Pentagon is notoriously opaque in its accounting, but also because there are actually multiple contradictory yet legitimate ways of counting. But a good rough estimate is that annual costs for this overseas military presence go from about $60 billion to $120 billion per year.
Bob Zadek: What is the assumed or stated goal of this expenditure? What are we presumably—underline presumably—what are we presumably getting for the money we spend and for the human lives we commit to this project?
John Glaser: So, it’s a good question. First of all, we should say what it isn’t doing. So what the goal is not is to defend the nation. So when we think of the military as an institution, we think of something that’s supposed to protect and defend U.S. territory and U.S. citizens from foreign attack. And that is explicitly not what these overseas military bases are for. So it’s important to say what they’re not for. But what they are for—and in the paper that you referenced, I narrowed down the strategic rationales to essentially three things: deterrence, reassurance, and contingency responsiveness.
Deterrence is trying to scare an adversary into not doing something. So like our bases in South Korea, for example, are supposed to deter North Korea from invading South Korea. Reassurance is supposed to reassure our friends and allies that we will in fact come to their defense if they are attacked, and the presence of U.S. bases and troops there bolsters the credibility of those promises. And then contingency responsiveness is this big silly wonk word from the Pentagon, which means getting places quickly. So if anything should happen anywhere in the world, we have lots of bases and troops in every nook and cranny of the planet that can deploy quickly and intervene quickly.
The Shift to Global Policeman [05:40]
Bob Zadek: Now, just an observation—an obvious observation nevertheless, but an observation. The federal agency that is in charge of this is called, not by accident, the Department of Defense. That’s what their mission is. It’s not the Department of Foreign Policy. It’s not the Department of Environmental Studies. It is the Department of Defense. It is reasonable for a citizen of our country to assume that the Defense Department will spend its money solely on defense. And yet, in your answer to my question, the one thing you said that was astonishing is the one goal we don’t get from foreign bases is better defense. We weren’t protecting against a threat because indeed there is no threat to the United States in any one of these 70 countries.
So we have the Defense Department, which has mission creep on steroids. It is spending $60 to $120 billion with a “B” dollars a year doing something that is beyond its stated mission and indeed beyond the name of the agency. So what is the explanation? Does anybody dare to in government, Congress, look into this? Aren’t they examining this? Has anybody asked why we are doing it if the purpose is not defense?
John Glaser: Sure. So, you know, this massive overseas military presence really started in a real way—we had bases in decades and centuries past—but it was in 1945 that we really started to place military bases all over the world. And that’s a key inflection point because it’s at that point that the U.S. military and foreign policy establishment and political establishment in Washington, D.C. started to define U.S. interests in a really expansive way. So no longer was it our responsibility to protect ourselves from foreign attack, but it was our responsibility to protect lots of other countries from attack—70 or 80 countries around the world with whom we have formal defense treaties or security arrangements or more informal stuff.
And we started to say to ourselves, “Well, we’ve got to basically maintain world peace, world order.” So the first two things that the first two strategic justifications that I mentioned, deterrence and reassurance, those two things together are supposed to make the world a more peaceful place. They’re supposed to disincentivize other countries from going to war and all of this kind of stuff. I obviously think that the explanation for the massive reduction in interstate violence in the postwar era has happened for other reasons, not because we’ve had foreign bases. But really, this is of a part of the U.S. foreign policy establishment thinking that it’s the United States’ responsibility to play global policeman. It’s our responsibility to go abroad in search of monsters to destroy, in the words of John Quincy Adams. And it’s our responsibility to prevent war in distant areas that are none of our business, and it’s our responsibility to solve distant disputes that are not strategically important to us. And so that’s really the reason why people don’t question the fact that we have this massive military establishment abroad and these—this massive set of foreign policy responsibilities that aren’t actually the traditional definition of what a military and defense policy should do, which is protect the nation.
Bases as a Source of Instability [08:52]
Bob Zadek: But you know, the country has never had a serious discussion, in my knowledge, in my life on the planet—we have never had a serious discussion as a country as to whether or not we care all that much from a political standpoint whether there is peace on earth and goodwill towards men. We care that we are safe. We care that we enjoy freedom and we enjoy the rights that our country was founded to protect. But I don’t think the country, as I can detect public feeling, we would agree—we would vote in favor of being, as you said, the world’s policeman. And I kind of ask myself as you were speaking, gee whiz, wasn’t that why the UN, among other reasons, wasn’t that why the UN was founded? And who appointed us? We appointed ourselves, obviously, to be, as you said, the world’s policeman.
But we are spending an awful lot of money. And John, as you have pointed out in your piece—and I’ll ask you to explain and expand upon it—that in fact, the presence of military bases is probably having the opposite effect: that it reduces the possibility of peace around the world rather than increases it. That was one of the most telling parts of your piece, and I wonder if you would share your thoughts on that issue—whether or not the very presence of military bases works contrary to enhancing world peace.
John Glaser: Right. So one of the biases that we see in the Washington, D.C. foreign policy establishment is that they have this misplaced overconfidence in the effectiveness of U.S. military force and U.S. military bases to make bad things go away. So, for example, part of the justification for our military base presence in Europe is to deter Russia from causing any trouble in Eastern Europe. But the expansion of NATO and the expansion of U.S. military bases and troops further and further east into Europe, and sometimes up to the Russian border in some cases, is the source of profound anxiety and lingering resentment in Moscow. And it’s actually hard to find someone in the Kremlin or in the Putin regime that talks about the justification for their recent military actions in Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014 in ways that don’t mention this creeping American military encirclement in Russia’s near abroad.
So in that case, we might as well—we might very well be antagonizing Russia to the point where they feel they need to act out. And this goes back in history, too. So, for example, we all know the story of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Soviet Union placed missiles in Cuba 90 miles off our shore. We felt very insecure about this. What’s often left out of the rehashing of that history, though, is the fact that the Kennedy administration placed Jupiter missiles in Turkey a matter of months prior to the Soviets putting missiles in Cuba. And our aim there was to deter the Soviet Union, to stop them from taking action that would be threatening to us or our allies. But it actually had the opposite of its intended effect. So the Soviet leader at the time, Nikita Khrushchev, told his Cuban ambassador—he also wrote a letter to President Kennedy at the time—saying, “Look, Turkey’s right on our border. You say you’re nervous about Cuba; at least it has 90 miles of ocean between you and it.” So they felt very insecure. So it’s not always the case that when you encircle an adversary with military bases and troops, that their reaction is to become a docile, passive power that’s ready to capitulate. Sometimes, in fact, you antagonize them to act out, and that obviously creates instability and not stability.
Bob Zadek: This is Bob Zadek. I’m speaking this morning with John Glaser from the Cato Institute. 408-BOB-SHOW to join my conversation. We are discussing the wisdom or absence of wisdom of the U.S. firmly entrenched policy of establishing and maintaining foreign military bases in about 70 countries around the world. 408-BOB-SHOW to join the conversation with John anytime.
Now, John, there had been recently some Hollywood movies and television productions dramatizing the Cuban Missile Crisis. And we might have learned from most of those programs that the missiles in Turkey, which were such an irritant—and that may minimize the importance—they were very important to Russia. And Russia reacted almost in kind: “Okay, you want to have missiles on our border? We’ll put some on your border.” So the Russian reaction of putting missiles in Cuba was really quite natural, and I dare say we would have done the same thing had the roles been reversed. And therefore, the presence of the Jupiter missiles in Turkey almost caused nuclear war. And a little-known fact, but a fact made apparent in these productions on the missile crisis, was that Kennedy agreed to Khrushchev: “Okay, you take your missiles out of Cuba, and we will quietly, after everything calms down, remove the missiles from Turkey.” And they did. So the Russian tactic of threatening to put missiles in Cuba actually worked, and it created a bit of stability when there was instability.
The Case of North Korea and Entanglement [12:13]
Bob Zadek: Now, John, you also pointed out that, of course, North Korea is very much in the news as a serious defense risk to the U.S. And the issue between the U.S. and North Korea didn’t start last week. It goes back a long, long ways. And as you have pointed out, the difficulties we have with North Korea today and that part of the world traces its history directly—there is not a dotted line, but a solid line—between the establishment of military bases and the difficulty in North Korea today. Explain that very important hard line between military bases and the difficulties with North Korea today.
John Glaser: Sure. So I think there’s two questions here. One is similar to the point we just discussed, which is that sometimes when you encircle countries with military bases and troops, their response is not to capitulate or be submissive, but to act out. And that certainly applies with North Korea. So if you think about North Korea’s position, they—you know, we’re allied with one of their sworn enemies, South Korea. We have 30,000 troops almost in South Korea right on North Korea’s border. We constantly engage in ostentatious military exercises right off the North Korean coast, in part to sort of demonstrate power projection and shows of force. And we kind of casually talk about regime change operations here in Washington, D.C. towards Pyongyang.
So that’s a situation in which they feel extremely threatened. And North Korea looks around the world; they look at what we did in Iraq when we said there was weapons of mass destruction and there weren’t any, and we went in and toppled the regime. They look at Libya, where the Gaddafi regime gave up its nascent nuclear weapons program in exchange for some sanctions relief, and a number of years later we went in and toppled his regime. They look at what we’re doing with Iran, which is that we engage in these meticulous and long, drawn-out negotiations and finally got the Iranians to make serious and significant concessions on their nuclear program, and then a new administration comes in, the Trump administration, and starts talking about ripping up the deal and ramping up a more hostile approach. So all of these signals North Korea gets. They say to themselves, “Look, we need a nuclear deterrent. We need to be able to defend ourselves. We can’t trust the United States not to come in here and cause a ruckus.” So that’s the first thing. Our military actions and our military bases and our encircling attempts around North Korea certainly do antagonize it and drive its nuclear ambitions.
The second thing I think you’re referring to is the fact that our military bases tend to entangle us in conflicts that are actually none of our business. And North Korea is a good case study in this. So if you think back to when we first started having a military presence there, it was in August 1945 when the Japanese surrendered. The United States established what was supposed to be a temporary military presence there. And it was only a couple of years later that, in fact, the U.S. General John Hodge recommended we withdraw fully. The Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Secretary of War, the National Security Council under Truman—all these people recommended that we fully withdraw, saying that Korea is of little strategic importance to us and our lingering military presence there could in fact entangle us in some kind of war following some provocation. And that provocation did indeed come in 1950 when the North invaded the South, and the United States got entangled in that war. We fought for a number of years, lost lots of soldiers ourselves. It was an extremely costly and brutal war. And in fact, we’re still involved in this dispute, even though I don’t think it really merits the amount of attention that we’ve given it and doesn’t actually amount to a serious threat to U.S. interests. But that’s an example of how just having bases in a place can kind of draw the United States in to conflicts that it otherwise wouldn’t deem important.
Bob Zadek: And that was to emphasize—that was a purely political decision in 1945 and contrary to the wisdom of the specialists in our government who were in charge of defense. So non-defense experts overruled the defense experts, and the result, if you fast forward, the result is all of the conflict—right now it’s verbal and saber-rattling—but all of the conflict nevertheless between North Korea and the U.S. And it should be pointed out that without that, that part of the world didn’t constitute a threat to the U.S. So the bases established in South Korea had nothing whatever to do with defense, and it was the bases themselves that created a threat to our national defense. And the threat is real, of course, because North Korea does possess nuclear capability.
So once again, the decision to establish foreign bases makes no defense sense whatsoever, yet we spend $60 to $120 billion a year on that project. This is Bob Zadek, speaking with John Glaser. We are discussing the wisdom of having 70 countries be our host for military bases. 408-BOB-SHOW to join my conversation with John. We’ll be back in 30 incredibly short seconds. Please stay tuned; there’s lots more to come.
Modern Warfare: Bases vs. Cyber Threats [18:00]
Bob Zadek: Welcome back to the Bob Zadek Show, the only live libertarian talk radio show on the air all weekend, the longest-running libertarian talk radio show in California. Thanks so much for joining me this morning with my conversation with John Glaser. We are talking about the wisdom or absence of wisdom of the U.S. maintaining at great cost and threat of loss of blood military bases around the world in approximately 70 countries.
Now, John, a while ago during our talk this morning, you said the assumed theory or the justification for the bases is to show our allies around the world that, yes, we’re there to help and we put our money where our mouth is—or in this case, our military presence where our mouth is—and we will be here to protect you. And in Western Europe and in Asia, we are protecting our allies presumably from the threat of Russia, if not other countries as well. Now, what struck me as being strange is if I were to hear somebody from the Defense Department justify foreign bases in that way, I would say that almost sounds like an argument in favor of having a cavalry division located in Germany to protect against a cavalry attack.
In as recently as the last presidential election, Russia caused apparently some mischief both in the U.S., in France, and probably in other countries by using cyber warfare to mess with our elections. It wasn’t really a direct Defense Department threat, but it was an attack of sorts. The word “attack” was used. So I wonder if you could speak to the fact that if you accept as a given—which you and I do not—that we have to protect our allies in this way, aren’t foreign military bases with tanks and things of that nature kind of the last war and not the next war? Because the weapons that our enemies or people who don’t like us would use are not the kind of weapons that soldiers with guns and tanks and weapons of war will be able to deter us against. Isn’t that kind of silly right now? It’s just the wrong tool for the wrong mission.
John Glaser: Yeah, and in an important way, that’s correct. So, you know, a lot of people argue—advocates of forward-deployed military bases argue—that the massive decrease in interstate conflict and violent deaths in battle since 1945 is because we have these overseas military bases. But I think the world is peaceful for a lot of reasons that don’t have anything to do with overseas military bases. So, for example, the fact that the great powers and some not-so-great powers possess nuclear weapons has greatly disincentivized war. But then again, that even might be redundant because the conventional military capabilities that most great powers have make war so costly that countries don’t want to engage in it anymore and they’ve learned their lesson from, you know, World War I and World War II and so on.
And then there’s economic interdependence—this notion that the more mutually beneficial trade you have with a country, the less likely you are to want to go to war with them. And then there’s this argument that there’s been this massive shift in the normative preferences of most of the civilized world, whereas not even a hundred years ago you could find leaders from various countries saying war is something to aspire to, it’s a cleansing national experience that we need to have once in a while just to make us manly and virtuous. And that’s in contrast to today, where even the warmongers among us kind of talk about war as a last resort. So there’s a trend towards less interstate conflict in the world.
And so any major conflict that we might have with Russia or China or one of these rogue states that are very weak is very likely not going to be characterized, as you indicate, by the kind of tanks and battalions and armored brigade combat teams and so on that states fought each other with in the past. They go for low-cost efforts like cyber conflict. And so it’s very astute point that these are just kind of outdated ways for the United States to defend itself, for the United States to defend other countries. But it’s also just, you know, it’s based on an exaggerated threat perception that Russia actually is going to start gobbling up countries in Eastern Europe in the absence of U.S. military bases, which is just not true. I mean, Russia’s a declining power; they have all kinds of demographic problems and corruption problems and economic problems. They have a lot of nuclear weapons, but they don’t really—they’re not a great power or a peer competitor the way they might have been close to in the years of the Cold War. So you’re quite right, yeah.
Global Comparison of Military Footprints [20:52]
Bob Zadek: Now, what’s also interesting is let us assume that other great powers—Russia, China, Western Europe—other great powers, maybe Western Europe doesn’t get included in that list, have just as strong instincts for survival as we do. So therefore, they would probably take the same defensive measures that we do. Well, we have decided that those defensive measures include military bases in 70 countries. So therefore, one would assume that our stated adversaries, those countries that are a threat to us, would also have lots of military bases because it’s a sensible strategy. So John, compare for us other great powers and what they have done with forward-deployed forces, with foreign military bases, as compared with the U.S. And let’s see if other countries agree that that is a sensible defense strategy.
John Glaser: Sure. Yeah, it’s a good point. So it’s important to point out that this forward-deployed military presence is a peculiarly American preoccupation. No other country in the world engages in any kind of policy like this on the scale that the United States does. And our geopolitical competitors don’t even come close. So while we have 800 overseas military bases, Russia has just nine outside its sovereign territory. China has just one in Djibouti. And so that discrepancy alone should probably warrant and generate a lot of questions and skepticism about: Do we really need all these bases? What are they actually getting us? Is it wise that we have them? Other countries seem to have decided that overseas military bases are either all cost, no gain, that they don’t provide a significant advantage in geopolitical competition or increase in state security and so on. And yet the United States engages in them. And as we’ve been talking about, I think, you know, that is pretty shrewd. They’ve decided correctly. You know, the United States is not safer by having all these military bases in all these other countries, and we’re not richer for it either because it costs a lot of money and it also sort of risks entangling us in all kinds of conflicts and quagmires abroad, which we might not otherwise involve ourselves in if we didn’t have these bases. So, you’re exactly right. I think other countries have decided that it’s not quite in their interest to have a massive global worldwide military presence, and the United States should probably wise up and join that club.
Bases as a Catalyst for Terrorism [24:28]
Bob Zadek: Now, what’s also interesting—so we have—you have argued quite persuasively, almost conclusively, that as a defense tactic, foreign military bases make no sense. Well, that would seem, if we stop there, that it’s just a waste of money. But it goes beyond that, I think, John, as you have pointed out: that it indeed—the very presence of foreign military bases—you have given us the example of Korea—increases the threat to the U.S. Certainly it has been argued by you and by others around the world who have thought about this issue as much as you have, that the very presence of military bases is an irritant which invites conflict which would not be there without the military bases. Certainly that’s true in the Middle East, and many have observed that the presence of military bases in Saudi Arabia and around that part of the world created conflict that might not otherwise exist. If you agree, could you expand upon that a bit?
John Glaser: Yeah. So this is important. One of the leading scholars on terrorism is a political scientist at Chicago University named Robert Pape. And he’s written a lot about the phenomenon of suicide terrorism. And what he’s concluded is that the primary motivator for suicide terrorists is resistance to foreign occupation or something that can be perceived as foreign occupation. And as this is just an example because I disagree with this guy so much on everything else, but Paul Wolfowitz, who was a high-level State Department official in the George W. Bush administration and a prominent Iraq war advocate, said in 2003 that the presence of U.S. military bases in Saudi Arabia was one of the primary grievances cited by Bin Laden and was a major recruiting device for Al-Qaeda to prompt more extremist Muslims to join their ranks and try to attack the United States.
And you know, it’s an irritant not only to great powers to have U.S. military bases abroad, but it’s also an irritant and a source of grievance for lots of Muslims in the Middle East who resent the presence of U.S. military bases there. Saudi Arabia is considered holy land—the land of the two holy cities, Mecca and Medina—by a lot of Muslims. And so this is just another example of instead of a country deciding that it feels antagonized and encircled and insecure and therefore needs to act out, but individuals, non-state actors, deciding in a kind of blowback type of way, “Hey, we’re going to develop this set of grievances against the United States partly because they surround us with military bases, they support dictatorships that rule over Muslims partly in exchange for hosting U.S. military bases.” And so, yes, you’re certainly right that not only does this cause instability in terms of interstate relations, but also with non-state actors. And of course, since 9/11, terrorism has been one of the primary justifications for a massive overseas military presence in the Middle East, and that’s exactly backwards.
The Reality of the “Long Peace” [27:59]
Bob Zadek: When I posted your appearance on my show this Sunday on my Facebook and other social media, announcing with great pride that you’re going to join me this Sunday, some of the comments questioned your observation and my posting that we were living in relatively peaceful times and there was less loss of life from armed conflict than there has been in the past. And a lot of people, I dare say not especially informed, objected to that observation and they said things like, “We’ve been at war for the past X number of years, a large number of years.” And of course, we have been fighting battles for a long time during my lifetime, but not necessarily at war. But some of those wars, like in the Middle East, may have been caused by the very presence of military bases. Earlier in our show, you observed that these have been relatively peaceful times. And since that is contrary to what some people believe, I wonder if you can expand upon that and explain the decrease in armed conflict around the world as compared to earlier in the history of our planet.
John Glaser: Sure. It’s perfectly reasonable and totally understandable for people to listen to the claim that the world is more peaceful now than it has been in the past and reject it out of hand. Because indeed, it doesn’t seem like that; it certainly doesn’t feel like it. But I think a lot of the discrepancy here has to do with greater awareness of what’s going on around the world and instantaneous news media that goes across the planet at light speed, social media that makes everyone more aware of what’s going on. And that is part of what leads to a bias that we’re actually living in dangerous times now compared to in the past.
But the scholarship on this is pretty clear and conclusive. So if you read The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker at Harvard University—it’s a thick book and he makes the case pretty clear, gathering all kinds of data in terms of the average number of battle deaths that occur per war and the average number of interstate conflicts—that is to say, when one state or country has a war with another state or country—the rate of those incidences has just been going down pretty rapidly since World War II. And it’s for some of the reasons that I already mentioned: nuclear weapons, the extreme destructive nature of modern industrial militaries, economic interdependence which now is more prevalent and mutually beneficial, lifting millions of people out of poverty all the time. So the states have kind of come to the conclusion that interstate war—going to war with another country—is way too costly to preoccupy yourself with, and you can kind of achieve your national interests by staying at peace and engaging in trade and other peaceful activities rather than going to war.
But the data on this, as I say, is pretty clear. The rate of interstate war, the average number of battle deaths per war has gone down. There’s been a slight uptick in the rate of civil wars where non-state actors or two sides of a country engage in war in their own country, and those can get pretty nasty as we’ve seen in Syria. But even accounting for those, the rate of interstate violence, the rate of battle deaths the world over has gone down. The data show pretty clearly.
Caller: The Philippines and China [31:59]
Bob Zadek: We have a caller, Jacob from San Jose. Welcome to the show again this morning, Jacob. What’s on your mind?
Caller (Jacob): Yes, Mr. Glaser. Don’t you find it curious that the gigantic air base in the Philippines that the United States government had, Clark Air Force Base, and the gigantic naval base we had in the Philippines, Subic Bay Naval Base—that didn’t prevent the expansion of China into the South China Sea at the time of Lyndon Baines Johnson’s administration? How do you explain that? And also, some experts say, getting to your point of non-defense experts being overruled by defense experts, or you were saying that non-defense experts are overruling defense experts in our operations in foreign areas. How do you sort that out?
John Glaser: Well, if I understand—so first of all, with regard to the Philippines, it’s a very good point about the past, and I’m even more concerned about the present. So China, for example, has maritime and territorial disputes with all of its neighboring rivals, most of whom along the Asian littoral we happen to have alliances with or military bases there. And if China—if there’s some kind of inadvertent escalation that China engages in with its neighboring rivals in the South China Sea, we very well could get entangled in that kind of conflict. And you’re right to point out that it didn’t deter China in the past, and they don’t seem to be deterring China currently in its claims in the South China Sea.
With regard to non-defense experts overruling defense experts, that indeed does happen. Partly it’s because there’s a kind of zeitgeist among policy experts in Washington, D.C. that we need to have this expansive military posture and definition of our national interests. But it’s also the case that the military’s bias tends to be that they want to definitely uphold our current set of commitments, which are extremely expansive. But sometimes they tend to be reluctant to engage in new military commitments. So, for example, the Obama administration got a lot of pushback from the military, particularly the Joint Chiefs of Staff, against going into Libya and engaging in that kind of air war against the Gaddafi regime. But it was really pushed by people like Hillary Clinton and Samantha Power and a lot of these kind of “humanitarian interventionists,” quote-unquote. And they got overruled. And so once, of course, we were engaged in it, the military was supportive of our efforts in Libya, but it’s usually the case that the military is weary of getting into new conflicts because they know what war is like and expanding our commitments. But there’s a civilian aspect to this that really pushes us to stick our nose in even more places around the world.
Bob Zadek: Jacob, thanks so much for your call this morning. Always nice to hear from you.
Threat Inflation and the Defense Establishment [37:59]
Bob Zadek: John, as we wind down, there’s one more topic I want to just touch upon somewhat briefly: the whole concept of defense. What exactly are we afraid of? Russia, although our—I was trained, I grew up in the ’50s and I was trained Russians are going to attack us, and we had air raid drills in our school and we were told, “Don’t face the window, you’ll get zapped by atomic weapons if there’s an atomic attack.” So Russia was our enemy, was a military enemy at one time. There’s nothing I have seen in the past large number of years that made me think even remotely that Russia or China or anybody else was a military threat. Russia doesn’t seem to have, unlike the communist era when the Russian communist USSR’s stated goal was to subject all of the world to communism and control by Russia—neither Russia nor China have any such aspirations. So at the very core, what exactly are we afraid of?
John Glaser: Yeah, it’s a good question. And you know, the United States is probably the most secure great power in history. We have giant oceans to our east and west, which protect us from most kinds of conventional military threats. We have weak, compliant, and friendly neighbors to our north and south. We have a massive nuclear deterrent, which of course prevents countries from even thinking about attacking our sovereign territory or trying to invade our territory or anything like this. We make up almost 40% of worldwide military spending. And this is all happening in an era of decreased interstate war and violence.
And so the United States is extremely secure, and yet we preoccupy ourselves with all of these minor threats and we inflate them in our minds. So, for example, terrorism. The number of people that have been killed by terrorism—all kinds of terrorism, not just Islamic terrorism—the number of Americans that have been killed by terrorism since 1968 is about a thousand people. A thousand people over 50 years is nowhere close to justifying trillions of dollars in foreign policy adventures, hundreds of billions of dollars spent here at home to curtail our civil liberties in the name of security or engage in security theater at airports and so on. None of—I mean, this is so disproportionate to the actual threat that we face. I mean, more people per year get struck by lightning than are killed in a terrorist attack. So terrorism has been framed as a war to be won in the post-9/11 era; it’s actually just a manageable problem that law enforcement and intelligence agencies should try to mitigate as best they can. But it’s a manageable problem, not a war to be won.
And that happens with state enemies as well. So the threat of Russia is always exaggerated. I already talked about how they’re kind of a declining power with all sorts of internal problems and can’t hold a candle to the power of the United States. And China as well—the threat from them is exaggerated massively. And then we go through rogue states like North Korea, which is dangerous—it’s not good that such an erratic and authoritarian regime has nuclear weapons—but they have a defensive posture. Everything they say about—every threat they make is essentially defensive. It says, “If you do this, then we’ll do this.” And Iran—that’s hugely ironic, the amount of focus we have on Iran being a threat to the United States. I mean, 94% of the Islamic terrorism attacks on Americans since 9/11 have been Sunni and Wahhabi, not Shiite, which means that mainly it’s been funded and furthered by our own allies like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan and other Arab Gulf states. And so if it’s really a threat that needs to prompt us to impose sanctions and threaten war, then why aren’t we doing that with our allies? And I think that just proves that it’s not that big a threat when Iran funds its proxies or what have you.
So the United States has a problem, and that’s that we massively exaggerate the threats that we face. And in part, that helps fund and keep budgets high for this massive national security establishment that we have, whether it’s the military-industrial complex or the Defense Department itself or the massive number of proliferating agencies that are supposed to keep us safe but actually just kind of suck from the public trough. And we need to think hard about how we deflate some of these threats and think more strategically and prudently about how the world works.
Conclusion and Resources [41:59]
Bob Zadek: So let’s just declare peace and bring the boys home. John, thank you so much for sharing your wisdom with us. It was a great piece that you wrote; I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it. John is with the Cato Institute. John, we have about 30 seconds left. How can our friends out there follow your writing?
John Glaser: Well, they can go to cato.org and click on “Experts” and I’m on that page. They can also follow me on Twitter at @JWCGlaser. That’s my Twitter handle.
Bob Zadek: “Expert” is a gross understatement. Thank you again for being on my show this morning. We hope to have you back real soon. And to all of my friends out there, let’s just all declare peace. How about that? This is Bob Zadek saying so long for now. I’ll be back again next Sunday with another hour of ideas, not attitude. Thanks so much for listening and have a nice Sunday.