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This is my father's weekly column.
THE DECLINE OF THE AMERICAN EMPIRE III-AN UNSUSTAINABLE MILITARY DEPLOYMENT (1/19)
This is the third column following my post-election piece on the decline of the American Empire. This week I will look at the implications of our unsustainable military deployment.
I would like to believe that national decisions would be made on the basis of a clear ethical imperative in which we seek a non-violent, peaceful world where swords became plowshares and spears pruning hooks. With that scenario we would make national judgments leading to a significant reduction in arms, and employ a commitment to international goodwill. Nevertheless, I am not so naïve as to believe that the United States will be persuaded to move in that direction. We are not a nation of pacifists. If America changes course it will not be because we have responded to an ethical imperative, but because we can no longer sustain the current pattern.
At stake is America’s survival as a responsible nation. We have been the strongest kid on the block since the end of World War II. But that era is drawing to a close, and the time is approaching when we can no longer control the rest of the world by dint of our military and economic power. Currently the United States has bases in 150 countries staffed by 370,000 members of the armed forces. If the sun once never set on the British Empire, it now never sets on America’s overseas military bases. But the world is changing, and we already may be experiencing a slow decline in our domination. Evidence continues to mount that other nations are out-producing us, making them less in awe of our military strength. The next period of history will probably be determined by industrial capacity and not by brute force. What is more, we continue to base our military strength on weapons we dare not use. How do you fight an insurgency or a terrorist cadre with atomic devices.
A fundamental military axiom suggests that to be constantly on the defensive is to be put in a weak position. A second axiom suggests that no battle plan can be successful when the front-line troops outrun their lines of supply. Given these two rules of war, we are on the verge of generating an unsustainable deployment.
America went on the defensive on September 11, 2001. Since that day we have been consumed by a rearguard mentality. Anyone who has taken an airplane trip is fully aware that we are a fearful people. Our panicked invasion of Afghanistan to chase a fugitive we have not found in all these years, and our even more irrational invasion of Iraq to defeat an enemy which never fired a shot at us, are evidences of our national paranoia. And all at the loss of over 5,000 American lives, and who knows how many tens of thousands of deaths among Iraqis and Afghans. Sadly, the end is not in sight. The enormous cost of the Department of Homeland Security is just another indication that we live on the defensive. Perhaps the harbinger of this delusion came much earlier when we poured hundreds of thousands of troops—at great cost of American blood and money—into a war in southeast Asia we could not and did not win.
There is increasing evidence that our military deployments around the world have outrun our ability to supply them. The clearest sign of this is the unpayable debt we have accumulated in order to fund these undeclared excursions. If all the costs are included they approach ten trillion dollars. That figure accounts for the lion’s share of our national debt. And we can no longer afford to keep that economic supply line intact. It has all been piled on succeeding generations, and now the pile is starting to slide back on us.
In the meantime, forty percent of our federal expenditures come from borrowed money, principally from China. The former “poor man of Asia” has become the nation in the world with the most ready liquid assets. If there was an era when America’s economic strength guaranteed a safer world in which our empire was almost universally respected, that time is over.
Having spent the last three columns on the issues which indicate that the American Empire is beyond the top of the hill and now on a descending path, for the next several weeks I want to look at a few alternatives.
Charles Bayer
Charles Bayer is a somewhat retired theological professor and congregational pastor. He and his wife live at Pilgrim Place in Claremont, Calif., where he is still involved in writing a newspaper column and a variety of other jobs, boards and activities.
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