A left-wing foreign policy
Roxborough, Ian
jAMES B. RULE invites the left to think carefully about foreign policy, and in particular about the use of military force by the United States ("On Evils Abroad and America's New World Order,"...
...However, it may cost more to keep the peace than to wage a cold war—even if we accept Rule's claim that the United States should drastically reduce its global ambitions...
...We need to go deeper into the debate that Rule has opened and ask what kinds of military forces the United States should pay for...
...Rule's article has two main parts: in the first section he demonstrates, correctly, how U.S...
...It would be desirable to have the capability to rapidly stop ethnic cleansing...
...Bases the military does not want are kept running because local congress members don't want to lose votes...
...In the second he discusses the principles on which U.S...
...What kind of military force does the United States need for this...
...This, and concern about casualties, forces the United States to rely too heavily on air power...
...A rapid strike force will also be needed for use in emergencies, such as situations where ethnic cleansing is beginning, or where a civil war is about to break out, or where a democracy is about to be invaded by a foreign power...
...I'm not sure that we on the left have a particularly encouraging track record on this...
...A second way to cut military expenditures is to drastically reduce many of the forces that were configured to fight the Soviet Union...
...We should demand major reform of the Department of Defense and of the procurement process...
...Rule suggests stringent criteria for the use of American military force...
...They will need special training and equipment, and they should be a hybrid between civilian police, aid workers, and light infantry...
...The United States should develop a global strike force as a matter of urgency...
...This is not so different from current American practice...
...American forces stationed in Korea and Germany could be eliminated...
...The tentacles of the military-industrial complex have reached deep into American society, and digging them out will require sustained effort...
...The United States does not have this capability at present, even in such relatively accessible places as southern Europe and the Middle East...
...It will cost money...
...We should accept Rule's invitation to debate...
...Since any threat of this kind will not arise for several years, the main military effort now should go into innovation and experimentation, rather than procurement...
...Its creation is an urgent necessity...
...It is not clear that it will be wise in the near future to invest too heavily in manned aircraft and in aircraft carriers...
...In such circumstances it would be desirable to have the capability to intervene militarily with decisive force in a matter of days...
...Many large armored forces could be turned over to the Reserve and National Guard...
...And what kinds of military forces should the United States therefore develop...
...They would cost money...
...First, there is a lot of pork in the defense budget...
...Peace does not keep itself...
...The difficulty is that the present level of military operations is stretching the U.S...
...military force be employed...
...As the biggest player, the United States has played a central role, and without U.S...
...Such wars are now unlikely...
...One way to do this is to attempt to detach the inevitable position of world leadership from ethnocentric moralizing and crusades to remake the rest of the world in America's image...
...Although much of the responsibility for this lies with our elected leaders, the pressures from within the military for the procurement of baroque weapons are immense...
...Smart bombs are sent on their way by an intelligence and targeting system that has hardly changed since the cold war...
...At present the United States does not have such capabilities...
...There is also a corollary question: against whom, and how, might U.S...
...This is best done with diplomacy and by developing air and naval forces that can deter through a credible, technologically sophisticated strike force...
...This was the cold war template, and the war against Iraq in 1990-1991 served merely to solidify this as the war-fighting method for the post—cold war period...
...military forces that is hard to sustain...
...jAMES B. RULE invites the left to think carefully about foreign policy, and in particular about the use of military force by the United States ("On Evils Abroad and America's New World Order," Dissent, Summer 1999...
...he is pointing us in the right direction...
...The result is that U.S...
...The first requirement is to strengthen and expand an already costly logistical and communications capability...
...In some instances, as Rule says, considering questions of feasibility will stop a proposed operation in its tracks...
...They could be acquired...
...military expenditures have not fallen much from their cold war levels...
...Rule is surely right that we should attempt to move the United States toward the goal of becoming a "normal country...
...Although his general argument is that this can be done with perhaps half the current level of military spending, his list of occasions in which the United States might use its military forces is, in fact, quite expansive...
...military expenditure remains at roughly its cold war average...
...The two parts are linked by an implicit assumption that defense spending during the present period of "peace" ought to be substantially less than during the cold war...
...We may not all agree with his answer, but there can be no doubt that this is the fundamental question...
...It would be desirable, I think, to have the military capability to halt an invasion in a DISSENT / Fall 1999 73 matter of a day or two...
...Rule is right to note that there has been no "peace dividend...
...IAN ROXBOROUGH is professor of sociology and history at the State University of New York at Stony Brook...
...We should oppose the use of military force if it is unlikely to produce the political end state desired...
...Such a force does not exist at present...
...But I believe the central problem is less that military spending has not declined substantially from cold war levels than that the United States is maintaining the wrong kind of military force...
...Weapons are manufactured in order to generate employment in the home districts of congress members...
...But we might wish to create the military capabilities that would allow certain kinds of action to become feasible...
...Rule is right on the mark when he demands that we ask for what purposes the United States should employ military force...
...The process of developing a post–cold war institutional order has moved forward hesitantly, and on a largely ad hoc basis...
...But the bottom line is that peace may be just as expensive as the cold war, and perhaps more so...
...At one end of the spectrum, there is a need to deter future armed conflict with rising regional powers such as China (and possibly a resurgent Russia...
...The United States needs now to organize its military for different scenarios...
...The left is likely to support many of these interventions...
...military to the limits, producing a wear and tear on U.S...
...The current American military machine is a strange mix of deadly, high-tech weapons mounted in a cumbersome organization that takes weeks and months to deploy to trouble spots...
...participation other nations have been reluctant to act...
...At the other end of the spectrum, the United States will probably decide to intervene, much as it has done in the last ten years, in trouble spots around the globe in a variety of peace and humanitarian operations...
...All this will cost money...
...But the dilemmas he describes will be more difficult to solve than his essay suggests...
...it requires institutional arrangements for deterrence, for the resolution of differences, and for the enforcement of the norms of the international order...
...military intervention ought to be based...
...Refueling tankers, transport aircraft, and satellite communications are the first priority, not tanks and artillery...
...THERE ARE savings that can be made...
...He lists "[t]hreats of imminent use of weapons of mass destruction, genocide or other large-scale losses of life, flagrant violations of elementary norms of international conflict (including invasions), imminent threat of environmental disaster (for example, nuclear contamination), and grave dangers to democratic and pluralistic institutions...
...At present the overwhelming bulk of the military is designed to fight a large, conventional conflict, using armor-heavy forces and high-tech weapons, against a similarly equipped enemy...
...A second requirement is a large force of lightly armed constabulary troops to keep the peace...
...Frequently 74 DISSENT / Fall 1999 allied to both moralizing and humanitarian impulses, American micro-management of global affairs generates resentment and enemies...
...The heart of the matter is, as Rule says, not the budget as such, but America's sweeping ambition for world hegemony...
Vol. 46 • September 1999 • No. 4
