Are budgetary constraints likely to engender a less expansive US foreign policy by restricting military expenditures? That is the fear of many who make their living by dealing with foreign policy, in the academia and the media, in government, the military and politics, and of course, in finance and industry.

The very intelligent Michael Gerson, former US president George W. Bush's speechwriter, has asked if the US President Barack Obama and Democratic internationalists intend to concentrate on "nation building" at home. He is rather free with the language of "decline" or even "impotence" to describe the consequences. 

Many who voted for Obama would think concentration on domestic reconstruction a good idea, but it is unlikely to happen.

Obama instructed Israelis and Palestinians to make peace during his recent visit to the Middle East, while reaffirming the alliance with Israel and threatening Iran, Syria, Hamas and Hezbollah. That hardly sounds like withdrawal from the Middle East, even if it is the graveyard of empires.

True, the US budget after the sequester, arbitrary reductions in spending in very large categories, provides for considerable reductions in the military. There is little reason to think that these will, in the long run, actually occur. Military bases and military production are widely distributed across the nation. There is no weapons program that does not have strenuous Congressional or Senatorial support because of the location of the firms profiting from it. Exceptions to projected reductions can always be negotiated between the political parties and between the Congress and the White House. In other words, the sequester can be nullified.

More importantly, the sequester enables the president and his secretary of defense to alter national military strategy by altering the composition of the military-industrial complex. It is entirely unclear that the US needs, as scheduled, 3,000 new fighter aircraft. The first 40 or so of the new planes to come into service are deemed too dangerous to fly, to the satisfaction of those who were skeptical of their procurement.

Modernized older planes, drones and missiles, will be much cheaper, and fulfill the same functions. The rising generation of military leaders no longer thinks of missions involving large fleets, massive land armies, and sufficient planes to fill the sky.

It is 10 years since the initiation of the calamitous Iraq War. The junior officers obliged to improvise guerilla warfare in Afghanistan and Iraq are now Pentagon planners and advocates of averting large deployments of the US manpower. Instead, political warfare teams, a few academic anthropologists and historians alongside them, including CIA and State Department officials, will construct local alliances, using techniques including but not limited to bribery, extortion and promises, true or false, of future favors.

The British ruled India with about 60,000 officials from the UK. The US ambition to dominate large areas of the world with a mixed civilian and military grouping of some two million is practical.

However, politics is not just a matter of cost and benefit analyses. There are aspects of US society which make it impossible to seriously reduce its militarization.

One is the pervasive obsession with external threat. A US majority is convinced that the Iranians are building nuclear weapons and that a preemptive attack against Iran would be necessary and legitimate. The old Cold War with the former Soviet Union and China continues in new forms. After the relative quiescence of the period 1990-2001, attacks on the New York City and Washington revived national anxiety. Now the fear of Islamic terrorism has been generalized.

The second component of US militarism is vicarious heroism. The military is recruited for the most part from the poorer and less educated segment of the population. I know of no survey data which measures, directly, the guilt of the more privileged parts of society at the sacrifices asked of its armed servants.

The ritual gestures of respect for the armed forces are a primitive substitute for political debate. Since the rise of modern US empire in 1898 with the war on Spain, militarization has constituted a unifying force. There is little reason to expect anything but its continuance.



The author is professor emeritus of Georgetown University Law Center. opinion@globaltimes.com.cn