Constraints and foreign policy

By Fester:

We're broke, and we are overpromised. 

Fabius Maximus is attempting to start a discussion on defense/security policy in a world where the United States actually faces a significant budget constraint.

The most exceptional aspect of American political behavior is the belief that we need not count the costs of national greatness.... In most of these money is no object in the pursuit of security (or other goals, often quite chimerical). That is an exceptional way of thinking.... That era will close soon, and the United States will return to earth. Like everyone else, we will have to consider what foreign adventures we can afford before starting them — weighing their costs and benefits — and stop wars whose costs spiral out of control.

Neither party is particularly prepared for that conversation. The Republicans have never seen an unconditional defense appropriation that they won't pass. Democrats are only willing to tinker around the margins of defense policy for fear of being seen as weak. Remember our national 'leadership' in the Fall of 2002, or the fights for more MRAPS and body armor.

There were very few questions about the core premise of the invasion and occupation of Iraq at the leadership level, and besides Obama's legitimate judgment argument, there is little core disagreement about the vitality of all other countries bending to our will. The same has been seen in the debate on Iran, Pakistan (the difference is whether we are overt or covert) and who is the better ‘friend’ of Israel when that is such an interestingly massive and understated complex situation papered over with a few platitudes.

We are entering a world where we are not the center of it any more. There are other actors with agency and leading roles in that world. This adjustment will be easier if we as a society and, more importantly, if the political leadership recognizes that times have changed and the fantasy that has dominated our discourse that we can act with only minimal constraints (internal or external) has ended so that the core debate is on the means instead of ends of policies.

We’re not ready for that conversation despite it rapidly approaching us as the numbers won’t add up without significant foreign financing with strings attached to it. And this will be the core foreign policy problem that neither campaign is willing or able to address.  The American freedom to maneuver, to create coalitions through various forms of power, incentives, threats, and appeals, has been and will continue to be curtailed.  We will not see the US Navy laid up at its docks like the Soviet Red Banner Fleet was in 1991, but our ability to support current trends in foreign policy will be sharply curtailed by our economic crisis.