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Empire January 17, 2009

Reining in the Empire
August 31, 2008
Ivan Eland
Washington Times, Providence Journal, Press-Enterprise
Though Democrats and Republicans don’t always see eye to eye on foreign affairs, their goals and methods are in fact strikingly similar: seeking to advance democracy and human rights, fight terrorism and international crime, and prevent the kind of conflict we saw recently in Georgia, using U.S. military force when necessary.

Democrats typically hide behind the facade of multilateralism, preferring to use military force only when we have the blessing of the international community, such as the United Nations. Republicans usually are more ready to go it alone. Either way the United States still ends up meddling in the affairs of others in ways that would concern America’s Founding Fathers, who cautioned—as George Washington did in his Farewell Address—against military involvement overseas.

According to the Office of the Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Installations and Environment, in fiscal 2006, our far-flung military empire included at least 766 bases in more than 40 countries. We had some 275 bases in Germany alone; close to 100 each in Japan and South Korea; 54 in Italy; 50 in Great Britain; 20 in Portugal; 19 in Turkey; eight in Bahrain. These do not include U.S. bases in Afghanistan, Iraq, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan.

To support America’s network of international alliances, overseas bases and some 2.3 million men and women in arms, a manpower figure that both Barack Obama and John McCain apparently want to increase, the United States spends more than $400 billion per year, some 48 percent of total defense spending globally, not including the nearly $200 billion spent annually on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

The other countries of the world are not even in the same league. Even China and Russia, whose military budgets rank second and third globally, spend only a small fraction of what the United States does each year. In fact, according to the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, the U.S. spends more on defense than the next 16 highest-spending countries combined.

The logical question is: Why? Why do we have so much power committed overseas? Do we really need it and do we know when and how to use it?

Consider the Persian Gulf. Does the United States really need a large military presence in the Gulf to protect our access to oil?

As if we didn’t know it before the recent run-up in prices, oil is a highly valuable commodity and Persian Gulf countries are heavily dependent on it to earn foreign exchange because they have little else to export. In fact, the Persian Gulf countries need to pump and sell the oil at least as much as the United States and other Western countries need to buy it.

Thus, while there are no guarantees against temporary disruptions, the market in the long term will ensure that oil reaches the West. Even if instability in the Gulf makes the price go up, the industrialized economies will adjust, as they have over the last year. And if the higher prices help trigger an economic slowdown, prices will decline, as they have this summer. That’s how markets work.

It is a myth, therefore, that the United States must have military bases in the Persian Gulf to ensure the flow of oil.

The United States could eliminate most or all of its land bases in the Persian Gulf and elsewhere without compromising security or trade, relying on the Navy—offshore and out of sight; with its 11 large aircraft carriers and an equal number of smaller carriers—to do more of the heavy lifting. The United States could still be fully engaged in the world, with free exchanges of people, goods, money, ideas and culture and could still take military action when vital national interests, more narrowly construed, require it.

A meaningful debate on the proper U.S. role in the world is long overdue. The election campaign is a good time for this conversation to begin.

If reasoned debate does not lead to a more sustainable strategic vision, the United States is likely to be pulled into more Iraqs, at the expense of real security needs.

This article is adapted from a longer article, “Homeward Bound?” that appears in the current issue of National Interest, a quarterly journal of international affairs and diplomacy.

Source: http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=2381

india January 17, 2009

India—The Other Side of Glory
December 3, 2008
Alvaro Vargas Llosa
WASHINGTON—In recent years, the outside world’s idea of India has been tied almost exclusively to its glorious economic rise. The tragedy of Mumbai reminds us that severe religious, ethnic and nationalist differences remain. And these differences weigh heavily against India’s definitive rise.

There is no denying the leap forward (pardon my Maoist slip) made by India since the bold changes unleashed in 1991 by Manmohan Singh, then the finance minister and now the prime minister. India has become the world’s fourth-largest economy and its middle class has grown by a factor of four.

Unlike other Asian nations, India’s economic coming of age was based on high-tech industry and therefore an increasing ability to produce more with less. In 2006, comparing India and China, Gurcharan Das, author of the book “India Unbound,” described the country as “the world’s back office” as opposed to “the world’s workshop.”

No less worthy is the fact that in India democracy preceded economic liberalization. It has been said—and Chile, South Korea and Taiwan seemed to play into that narrative—that only autocracies could enable the painful process of opening up an economy to competition because democracies, with their conflicting demands and political divisions, tend to reverse free-market reform before it reaches a critical mass of people. India, with a 60-year-old democracy, throws cold water on that premise.

But for many Indians, development is still an elusive goal. The country is socially stratified and millions of citizens, led by wily politicians, define their identity in religious or ethnic—i.e., collectivist—terms. This holds India back from catching up with modern liberal democracies in which rights are by and large based on the individual.

Much of India’s terrorism, which has claimed about 12,000 lives since 1970, has been fueled by identity politics, whether it is Hindu fanaticism of the sort that demolished Ayodhya’s mosque in 1992 and massacred Muslims in Gujarat in 2002, or the heinous crimes committed by Islamic groups such as the Indian Mujahideen in New Delhi and Bangalore. Indian nationalism is reflected in the strength of the Bharatiya Janata Party, which stands to gain from the Mumbai attacks, and in the shortsightedness with which the Indian establishment has handled Kashmir, two-thirds of which is under New Delhi’s control, in the past two decades.

Citing the fact that Pakistan has been a dictatorship for much of its history and that its secret service has collaborated with terrorist groups, all of which is indisputably true, Indian leaders have tended to act defensively, letting the infection fester to the point at which external forces with broader agendas, such as al-Qaeda, are now making matters much worse.

Despite all this, relations between India and Pakistan have recently been improving. The democratically elected government of Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari has condemned Islamist terrorists in Kashmir and is in the process of purging the country’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency. India’s Singh seemed to respond positively to those moves.

The terrorists who attacked Mumbai, probably belonging to the Kashmir-based group known as Lashkar-i-Taiba, were aware of this new dynamic and wanted to throttle it. With many Indians now understandably calling for retribution, and with a general election looming, it will be difficult for Singh to decouple the pursuit of the perpetrators from the cross-border dialogue that was gaining momentum. The tragedy of reversing that dialogue will not be measured in the lives lost recently in Mumbai, but in those that will burn in the pyre of religious and ethnic hatred in the future.

All of which reminds us of something that many Indians never forgot, even as their country became the “world’s back office”—that the transit from backwardness to development is only in part an economic one. It also involves a profound change in people’s idea of identity. In India, that change will be doubly onerous because it will have to take place in the context of neighbors that are far less democratic, and under the pressure of sophisticated Islamic terrorists determined to stoke up hatred among groups from the outside.

But other countries have moved beyond identity politics or are in the process of doing so. India, which has already achieved so many wondrous things, can do it too. Until it does, the glory of its modern rise will not be complete.

souces: http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=2383

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