EPS Bernard L. Schwartz Syposium:
The Economic and Security Future
Hyatt Regency Washington on Capitol Hill
Washington, DC
November 17, 2014
Session One
World Security Situation: Russia, Iraq, and Syria, and Beyond
Richard Kaufman:
Thank you, Jamie, for that nice sendoff for our conference and for this panel. Two of our panelists are here with me now, and hopefully a third will appear shortly.
What I would like to do is to provide some background and context for our discussion, and I’ll cite a few facts--most of them well known, but good to keep them in perspective--about the world security situation and where we stand today with respect to that situation.
The US is into a second decade of armed conflict in the Middle East. Tensions are rising with Russia, highlighted with the events in the Ukraine and Western economic sanctions. There is the potential for a confrontation with North Korea and Iran over nuclear developments. Tensions have also been increasing in the Far East between Japan and China. And China’s rise as a world power reflects an additional set of challenges to ourselves. Among the larger questions raised by the world security situation are whether we can arrest what appear to be the trends towards permanent limited war in the Middle East and elsewhere and renewed cold war with Russia, as well as the likely increases in defense spending that would inevitably follow if these trends continue.
Regarding defense spending—and we have a chart on the screen which illustrates the trends—we should be mindful that, although it has declined significantly under the Obama administration, it remains substantially higher in real dollars—and those trend lines are in real inflation-adjusted dollars—, higher than the Cold War average and higher than the peak Cold War level achieved in the mid- to late ‘80s. And if you look at the peaks on that chart, you can see Viet Nam, the first peak, the mid- to late ‘80s, the second peak, and the third is where we are today. We’ve just come down from the high level of that peak represented by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan down to a “lower level,” but just as high as the peak level of the Cold War.
In short, is this the new normal? If not, what can be done about it? We have three eminent and experienced experts to address these and related issues; and we will have sometime for audience participation.
I’ll ask each of our panelists, who are Carl Conetta, Bill Hartung, and Heather Hurlburt, to introduce themselves to save some time. And we should proceed right now. Carl, you have the floor.
Carl Conetta:
Hello. Good morning. It’s always a pleasure to be here, in part because, if there is an organization in the country that understands the intersection of economics and security, it’s this one, which I think is perhaps a lesson that is lost at that this time and has been lost for a long time on the past three administrations certainly, let’s say ranging from 1994.
I think that most of us here are old enough to remember, and all of us are smart enough to know that back in 1989, just about 25 years ago, the Berlin Wall came down. I don’t know if you recall Gorbachev at the time talking about the promise of a common home of Europe. A lot of us at the time were thinking more broadly than that, a common home, a common global home; that the way that nations would interact and develop security policies, address security issues, would be dramatically different than during the Cold War.
So now, 25 years later, I at least am rather distressed to take a look around and find that what we have seems to me to be a fine mess--not a common global home, but a fine mess. In fact, if we just roll back our perceptions 30 months, things seem to have gone south since then.
What are the contours of the fine mess? Well, the ones I think that most concern us [are], as Richard mentioned, the prospect of a new cold war or wars with China and Russia. The second is cascading war and instability across much of the Arab and Islamic world, stretching all the way from Central Africa up into South Asia. What are the implications of this? Well first, obviously, greater contention and less cooperation on many issues with China and Russia, while these two, China and Russia, potentially grow closer together and operating as a duo.
Another is revived and expanded military involvement, US military involvement in Syria, Iraq, possibly Lebanon, and also delayed withdrawal from Afghanistan. You know, we’re all already involved in a dozen other conflicts. So we see this pattern continuing.
A final implication, an obvious one, would be increased defense expenditure. Richard introduced this chart earlier. Today our defense expenditure, total expenditure, sits at about $585 billion, which is down from a high in 2010 of about $741 billion. I’m giving these numbers in inflation-corrected terms; they’re 2014 dollars. So we’ve seen a reduction of about $156 billion, and it’s evident at the far end of that trend line. War funding has declined by about $88 billion in real terms. That’s almost a 50 percent reduction in war spending, so-called overseas contingency fund. So most of the reduction that we’ve seen from that peak way at the end to today, most of it is because of the reduction in war spending.
Taking a look at Pentagon baseline spending, that’s come down by about $68 billion in real terms, and that’s about 12 percent, and that’s largely due to sequestration. Without sequestration the administration would have led us to a higher level—yes, reductions, but not nearly as steep as the ones we’ve seen.
What we can now expect, I think, is presidential candidates in 2016 will vie in bidding up the budget. I think a $70- to $100-billion increase in today’s dollars is likely by 2018. I think that’s a response to the current situation. I don’t think our armed forces need it, but I think the candidates need it for political purposes. So I think that we have a fight ahead of us if we’re interested in containing defense spending. Much of the progress of the past few years will likely be reversed.
I read an article not so long ago, March 2014, by Walter Russell Mead. He was trying to describe—I think if you remember, prior to our beginning the campaign, the renewed campaign in Syria and Iraq, there was a discourse in the country. It began with our withdrawal from Iraq, as our troops left fully December 2011. Not so long after, we began to have a debate in the country about isolationism: Did this signal a move away from our willingness to engage in the world? People would point to reluctance to get involved in Ukraine, reluctance to get involved in Syria, some of the reluctance to get involved in the Libyan conflict. What Walter Russell Mead suggested was that there’s underlying dynamic. It actually repeats itself. The United States is drawn into conflict. We see something in the world that needs to be done, some crying need, some serious security situation—World War II is the obvious example. We get engaged, and initially we enjoy success. But eventually mistakes are made and we withdraw. But shortly after withdrawing we see the consequences of withdrawal, which are too terrible to bear, and we reengage. So this is how Walter Russell Mead wants us to understand the current evolution of US policy. Put simply, what happens when we withdraw from the world? The world goes to hell. That’s the basic argument.
A couple of comments on this: First, it should be clear that over the past three years we did not generally withdraw from the world. What we did was withdraw troops from Iraq. We continue to be involved, as I just mentioned, in about 15 other conflicts worldwide. Generally speaking, our military remained fully engaged in the world with an average of about 250,000 troops continuously overseas. As we withdrew from Iraq, we increased our involvement in Afghanistan. So in no sense can we really say that what happened over the past period of time was a withdrawal from the world.
The second point, which I think is more important, is that the problems that we see today evolving in Ukraine, Syria, Iraq, and in our relations with China have probably more to do, I think is more accurate and it’s more obviously traced, to our overconfidence in military power and to our increased use of it—not to its absence. We are standing today in the ruins of a failed security policy that in its fundamental tenets spans three administrations. It comes in two varieties: neoconservative and neoliberal; that is, a red version and a blue version; a red pill, a blue pill. There are significant differences between the two, but their core propositions are the same.
What are they? First, US security depends on US global military primacy and America’s role as the world’s indispensible power. In a sense, we’ve arrogated for ourselves of global security organization. That’s the first premise. The important part of it is that our security depends on it; it’s not a choice in our security strategy. Beginning in the mid-1990s, the fundamental maxim was that this was not a choice; it was essential to our security that we maintain that position of primacy.
The second is that we can effectively put that primacy to work in transforming the security environment. So this is a novel use of the military, or let’s say it’s novel to emphasize the idea that our armed forces can actually a transformative force. What it really entails, I think, is several different things. We’ve used it to contain rising powers, to patrol the global commons, stabilize fragile states, extinguish extremism, reform or even overturn what we see as rogue nations. And I think what we’re doing today, what we’re seeing today, is the failure of those efforts at tremendous expense.
One of the interesting things about the Syrian conflict is that, if we take a look at, first, Iraq, our involvement there and our perception of Iraq evolved in two phases: In the first phase, the notion was to move in and topple a bad regime. What would happen with some assistance from us after that would be the rise of good actors and a transition to market democracy. What occurred instead was the emergence of insurgencies of various types and the development of a government that falls far short of our expectations. That was phase two. What happened in Syria as we held back for a few years is that both phases became obvious simultaneously, and this posed a dilemma for the administration; that in fact, it seemed as though there were no good actors, or the good actors were minimal in their influence on the situation. So in some sense the lessons of Iraq were brought alive in Syria simultaneously, and that stalled, and I think for good reason, our involvement there.
Over the past few years President Obama has tried—What he’s done is he’s restored the neoliberal version of this strategy. And what that does, it has a greater admixture of diplomacy and really an emphasis on more discrete, standoff uses of military power rather than major campaigns. That’s a significant difference. But the problem here is that we remain stuck in a paradigm that overemphasizes military power. Really what it says is that when we think about the choices in front of us, they come down to how much military power to use, for how long, and what type. As long as you’re operating in that paradigm, when you face a difficult situation, as we do in Ukraine and Syria, there is a tendency to escalate. So what we’ve done, or what we’ve seen, is that the blue version of this strategy—[what] I call a strategy—of proactive military primacy, the blue version tends to feed back into the red version, which is where we find ourselves today, and it’s the dilemma for us of how do we really extract ourselves from this particular paradigm. I’ll end there and we can continue the discussion. Thanks.
Bill Hartung:
Welcome. Carl did a lot of heavy lifting, which I’m grateful for. I have had this disturbing tendency lately to go short, and I’ll see if I can stick to that.
I’m going to talk mostly about resources and the politics going forward. I think, as everyone knows, supporters of higher Pentagon spending have pointed to ISIS, they’ve pointed to Ukraine, they’ve pointed to Ebola, and just to this general notion of turbulence to argue that we need substantial increases of Pentagon spending. And part of the argument is the more we spend, the more everybody else will behave, even if we don’t use our military. I think that’s a faulty argument, but it’s going to be part of the discussion. There’s a new book by Bret Stephens from The Wall Street Journal that consciously and aggressively makes the case for the United States as the world’s policeman, and I think we’ll hear more of that also. But in the short term, by which I mean next year, probably the year after, the Pentagon is not going to get what it wants. It’s unlikely to get full relief from the caps that were established in the Budget Control Act of 2011 because the larger issues are still in a deadlock. The Republicans won’t raise taxes, Democrats thankfully will be protecting as much as possible domestic programs, and the Pentagon will get caught in the middle. And some Republicans, even in the new Senate, newly elected, have said, well, maybe we can’t get this done next year; but if we have a Republican president, then we can do it. If we have a Republican president, then we’ll be back here, probably in larger numbers, in a year or two, trying to figure out what to do. And I say that in a totally nonpartisan fashion.
So essentially, I think even if the kinds of increases Carl talked about happened, I don’t foresee a period of endless growth as happened between 1998 and 2010, where the Pentagon budget went up every single year, which had never happened before in our history, not around any of the wars, never, period. And so I think the Pentagon and the contractors got a sense of this was going to go on forever more, and they planned accordingly. And a lot of the screaming about the caps on the budget are because of that, because of the unrealistic hopes and plans of the Pentagon, not [necessarily because] of what we need for our security. As Carl said, we’ve come down 10 percent or so in the last three years from the highest level since World War II, but we’ve cut out quite a bit more from what the Pentagon would have liked—tens and hundreds of billions of dollars, if you project forward. And so that’s going to be the fight, budget discipline of some sort, even if there are some slight increases in Pentagon spending.
Luckily for the Pentagon they have a whole other little fund they can use, the War Fund, or, as it’s called in Washington-ese, the Overseas Contingency Operations Account, because you don’t want to call it the War Fund, of course. And so what has been happening is a lot of things that belong in the Pentagon budget have been placed there. In 2014, probably about $30 billion of the $80 or so billion had nothing to do with the war in Afghanistan, had nothing to do with any wars; it was just things the Pentagon would like to have and couldn’t fit under the caps in their regular budget. And I expect that to continue, although I don’t think they can get $30 billion a year out of it because the war against ISIS is not the war in Iraq. With the recent increases in troops, we’re at about 2 percent of what we had in Iraq at the peak of the Bush-initiated war there. So even if the president listens to advice about putting in some sort of ground troops, it’s not going to be as costly. It’s going to be a very different-looking kind of conflict from what we saw in Europe or Afghanistan at its peak. So I think, using those as arguments for higher Pentagon spending is more of a political and PR argument than an argument grounded in our actual security needs.
So if choices have to be made, which they will have to be under any scenario, where we should we make them? I think there [are] a few obvious cases and many more that could be mentioned.
One of the problems is the Pentagon wants to buy a lot more weapons systems at a lot higher price than the level of money they’re going to have available. And so, for example, the F-35 combat aircraft is scheduled to cost $400 billion in procurement over the next couple of decades, and $1.4 trillion over its lifetime to procure, to sustain, and so forth—the most expensive weapons program ever undertaken by the Pentagon. And the thing about it is, it’s not a great airplane. It was designed to do many many things. It doesn’t do any of them particularly well, and it does them, obviously, at a high cost. So scaling back that program and, if necessary, building upgraded versions of current systems to fill in any gaps that occur could save tens of billions of dollars in the coming decade. I think if that’s not done in a planned way, it may be done against the will of the Pentagon just because of cost overruns. The last fighter plane, the F-22, the plan was to build 750, and they built 187. The price for 187 was twice what they said they could get 750 for. So I think some realistic planning is in order if we’re not going to have a train wreck in the F-35 program. And it’s going to be competing with an aero refueling tanker, with a new bomber, with whatever sorts of next-generation the Air Force wants to buy. You can’t just fit all those programs into the Air Force budget, even under an optimistic scenario.
Now for the Navy, they are going to build, or hope to build, a new generation of ballistic missile submarines which cost at a minimum $5 billion each, before we factor in the cost of overruns. And they, again, will be competing with the surface fleet. If they continue with their program, it will eat up more than half the Navy’s procurement budget for the foreseeable future. The Navy’s tried to solve this by saying, well, it’s really a national need, it’s not a Navy need; so lets create a sea-based deterrent’s fund, and we’ll put the submarine over there. Then it won’t be competing with the shipbuilding budget. But it’s the same Pentagon budget, it will have the same upper level; so it’s just sort of a gimmick. It’s rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, basically.
So one argument, one suggestion, which is modest, would be to build eight of these things instead of twelve, and they can be configured so that they could actually launch the same number of warheads as twelve could. I think that’s a modest and useful thing that could be done. I think we could probably go further if we actually had further reductions in Pentagon spending.
Oh good! I’m really using up my time here. So given that some studies have shown we could deter any potential adversary from attacking us with nuclear weapons with a few hundred weapons—we have many thousands—there’s much room there for cutting and restructuring.
And finally we have the Army, which would like to have 490,000 troops. It’s only currently funded for 420,000 troops, and I think could stay at the level or lower, because I don’t believe we’re going to fight another Iraq or other Afghanistan. I think this notion that the current threats and conflicts justify large increases in troops on the ground, I think that’s a faulty argument.
Finally--I think probably this will be dealt with more in questions, given the amount of time I have—the United States is now the world’s leading arms-exporting nation. A couple of years ago we sold $69 billion in weapons, which was the highest level ever recorded, and there [are] problems with that in terms of reliable partners. We’ve armed countries that have engaged in military coups; we’ve armed countries that have given their weapons over to their adversaries, as the Iraqi army did; we’re going to be arming countries that have sectarian divisions, where some of the weapons are going to be used to repress the civilian population, instead of fighting the adversary that we’ve assumed they were fighting. And yet the head of the Pentagon’s arms brokering agency said the reason to do this is so we have more capable partners, so we don’t have to intervene ourselves. And the thing about that is, we’re arming over 100 countries just through the Pentagon’s main program, so obviously we’re not intending to intervene in all 100 countries. And if we were, I think we would have a major rethink of our strategy that would have to happen now.
So I think in that area we need stronger human rights provisions, stronger consideration of stability, and a stronger consideration of where these weapons are going to end up. For example, in Afghanistan, many of the weapons we’ve sent there ended up with Islamic extremists who are now fighting the United States or our allies.
So I think I’ll leave it at that. I guess my main point is we don’t need to increase Pentagon spending under any current scenario, and we need to get our arms exporting policy under control, or we’re going to be emboldening and actually arming our future adversaries. Thank you.
Heather Hurlburt:
Well, the joy of batting cleanup after these two distinguished gentlemen is that it’s basically my job to provoke; so I will try my best to use my 15 minutes to provoke and make sure we have a good, lively Q&A.
So I want to start by going back to Richard’s question about the new normal and suggesting that the new normal will have two or three features. Most fundamentally, as long as our domestic political new normal is caught on this every-two-years seesaw with such heightened polarization in between that we flip back and forth but can’t really talk to each other in the meantime, it’s going to be very difficult to have any kind of coherent US national security strategy, even a coherent strategy that we don’t like. The bad news is that a coherent strategy that we like is unlikely to emerge; the good news is a coherent strategy that we don’t like is also unlikely to emerge. So that would be point one.
Point two, a topic you’re going to talk about at greater length this afternoon: As long as we have that same kind of incoherence about our energy future, the foundations of our security policy will also be somewhat confused, because the two are quite closely related and, frankly, because the rest of the world is watching to see what the US does about its own energy future. So those two factors, which are not usually discussed so much when it comes to national security policy, are really foundational in a way that I think is often not well enough understood. And as long as they’re incoherent, our security policy is going to be incoherent, and I don’t care who the president is.
Now, having said that, a couple of observations about the security environment: One is just to say that even realists and even right-thinking economists do tend to fall into the trap that is more often attributed to neoconservatives, which is thinking that everything is all about us. And frankly, one of the biggest shifts that the American strategic conversation needs to make overall is to recognize that not everything in the world is our fault. Not everything in the world is happening because we made it happen, good or bad. And sometimes, and more and more in the future as we have moved into an era where the US does have peer powers economically, if not militarily—[sic].
And just as a note to give an example of that, a couple of the things that have contributed to the scrambling and angst about the security scene in the last year, Russia and its neighbors: A Russian government under Vladimir Putin would have designs on its neighbors, would have very strong views about its neighbors’ security status and identification regardless of what the US strategy is. There is no strategy that the US can have that will stop Putin from having certain particular views about what his neighbors should be like. And I invite you to conduct the thought experiment of what US attitudes toward Mexico would be, and does that change based on who’s in power in the Kremlin. No, it does not. So that would be point number one.
Point number two is China. Similarly, China’s attitudes toward Japan, China’s attitudes toward Korea, China’s concerns about its outer island chain, China’s concerns about Tibet and the Uyghurs—the US can affect those only at the margins. And if you have a leader of China, as we do, who is balancing his own very challenging set of domestic issues with concerns about how China is perceived in the world, China’s resource needs, etc., there is no policy Washington can pursue, whether it is intense military engagement, whether it is complete standing off, that will make China a status quo actor in the region. And those are two very very big issues, obviously--I’ve just covered, what, two-thirds of the world—where the US is going to face choices about responding. There’s no action that we can make that gets us out of that dilemma; there are just actions that just improve or harm different interests that we have. And that’s not a conversation that we’re used to having domestically, which I think is part of why this period just creates so much angst for us.
Then we come to the Middle East, where, frankly, the US does have to take somewhat greater responsibility for uncapping the bottle and letting the forces of chaos and destruction out by the decision to invade Iraq and also, frankly, by the decades of propping up repressive forces across the region. But even here you now have sectarian conflict, you have expressions of domestic angst, so you have a Sunni versus Shiite conflict, you have a secular versus extremist conflict, and then you have the good old Israeli-Palestinian conflict layered over the top. And again, there is nothing that the US can do that will wipe any of those off the screen; so you’re faced with a future where the US has to decide what its interests are when facing those conflicts.
So that brings us to this question of what’s the new normal. So regardless of whether you believe with Carl that in fact US withdrawal from the world wasn’t actually tried, if you think that President Obama was just another wrinkle in the traditional model of neo-liberalism as it’s always been; or if you think, as is now becoming popular, at least among the right wing of the Democratic Party, that Obama was a significant departure. By the way, one of the funniest Washington meetings I’ve been in in the last year was hearing Walter Russell Mead speak to a roomful of Republicans who kept asking him over and over, Isn’t it true that President Obama is grossly outside the stream of American national security strategy? And he shrugged his shoulders and said, no, no, he’s well within normal. And the room was very disappointed by that. But you do now have this narrative emerging within the Democratic Party that there are two dramatically different strands. Again, whether you think that’s true or not is an interesting question; but regardless of your views on what’s actually happened over the last six years, the experiment with withdrawing from the world is now over, de facto. What is that going to mean, and how is it going to play out?
Number two, again, regardless of your views on whether this actually happened or not, the experiment with getting the US off [a war footing?] is also over. It will be a very interesting thing to follow in the coming days, whether Congress is able to negotiate and vote on a new authorization for use of military force in Iraq and Syria, which, on the one hand, seems like a minimal constitutional requirement. On the other hand, there’s been a certain amount of reluctance lest we put into law an even more expansive view of what an administration is permitted to do militarily around the world than is already the case. So that’s going to be a fascinating political development to watch.
So a third piece of the new normal which Washington is very much grappling with is this question of what is an interest and what is of vital interest. You saw very clearly play out in the midterms that the Republican Party calculated that the very high levels of anxiety that Americans feel, which my view is can be traced back to economic and cultural anxiety at their roots, but they also pop up in the discussion about national security issues. So you had a fascinating set of focus groups where, in September, you do this bipartisan focus group of women with children. They’re all very anxious about ISIS. You come back and do the same focus group in October, same women, same level of anxiety; but the subject of the anxiety has totally transitioned from ISIS to Ebola. So once you understand from a political point of view that there is that well of anxiety out there to be tapped, it’s almost irresistible to tap it. And when you look at the outcomes of this election and you see that women’s turnout was down, and that the gender gap was not as large as it had been in the past, then you say, well, at the margins in some of these close races we regretfully have to acknowledge that this strategy probably worked; so we can expect to see it again. In an election where one of the candidates is expected to be a woman, we can certainly expect to see it again. So our political culture for the next two years is going to feature intense fear-mongering, and that is going to make it much much harder to have rational conversation about national security issues.
Now, the other side of that, which is fascinating, is that it hasn’t been that long since Congress and the administration were unpleasantly shocked by uniform bipartisan public reluctance to intervene militarily in Syria. I know it feels like a long time ago now, but remember Labor Day 2013? People still don’t know quite how to interpret what happened. One percent of the entire voting population of the State of Vermont called its legislators and said, Vote no--just incredibly high rates of public engagement that weren’t ginned up peace groups, that weren’t ginned up by political activists. The peace groups were chasing this, frankly. So there is this perception in both parties, there’s this anxiety looking at Rand Paul on the right, looking at, frankly, our keynote speaker later today, Jim Webb, on the left, there is an awareness in politics that, the when-in-doubt-push-the-fear-button, when-in- doubt-let’s-pick-another-country-and-bomb-it strategy could go too far; that Americans, if anxiety is very high, war fatigue is also very high.
So you’re going to see over the next couple of year this very interesting dance in Washington, and this is why I agree with Bill and disagree with Carl that we’re not going to go back to the full upward slope on the Pentagon spending curve anytime soon. But the really interesting thing that’s going to happen is that, in addition to the weapons systems driver that Bill mentioned, another major major driver of Pentagon budget growth right now is health care and retirement benefits. So some considerable irony here that the alleged out-of-control cost growth that was of such concern when there were protests about public tensions, when we’ve seen the knocking down of public tensions, when we’ve seen the pressure on cost control and health care—it’s funny how that’s happened in the military, and there hasn’t really been a lot of outcry about it. And indeed, members of Congress who fall all over themselves to make sure that there aren’t COLAs for civilians, every year amp up and vote the military a higher COLA than the one the Pentagon requests for it. Actually only the last couple of years has that annual little charade been arrested.
This year, again, the Pentagon put forward a budget with some requests to do probably not enough, but some pretty hard things in terms of asking members of the military to pay a copay when you go see a doctor. Now, nowhere when you signed up did it say, I will serve my country and risk death and never have to pay a copay. But there continues to be a political debate about whether any of these reforms are feasible, and again, quite ironically, because if you’re a military advocacy person and you see how this has gone down on the civilian side, and you say no way, we’re not letting this happen to us. So there’s a fascinating, really interesting way that our political economy is now playing itself out in a mirror.
What you will see going forward is that increasingly there will be conflict between the contractors and the war fighters who want to take that money and put it into airplanes that don’t work, and retiree groups and citizen pressure groups who want to keep the money with the people. So you now have sort of the equivalent of the AARP, only military.
And in a way, the big fight is going to be an internal one within the Pentagon, and we’re going to see this this year. There will be a compensation commission that was supposed to be bipartisan, that was supposed to present recommendations in the spring. It looks as if they may be too nervous of the political fallout to present recommendations. But then, if you can’t cut, if you can’t even change the conditions under which new members get benefits, get retirement, if you can’t ask retirees who are pulling down six-figure salaries in the private sector to pay for their own health care, then you don’t have money for weapons systems, you don’t have money for training, you don’t have money for nifty unmanned gadgets. So that’s going to be actually the key fight, and it’s going to pick up on our domestic politics in really interesting ways, at the same time, for reasons Bill referred to, you’re going to see out-and-out warfare among the services.
Because the Navy and the Air Force say exactly what Bill says: Sure, we’re not going to be invading anymore countries soon, we can cut the Army; but we need more of our gadgets. And then the Army will say, Well, yeah, look at you guys. You’re not actually winning the war in Syria with your planes and your missiles; so the only way you can win wars is with us, so you need more of us. And particularly in the last decade, as long as the cost curve looked like that, everybody got what they wanted, and so we as a society have forgotten a little bit what that kind of warfare looked like.
But over the next two years we are going to be in an environment where we the public, we the influencers, are going to be the targets of this really vicious warfare, at the same time, as I mentioned at the beginning just to circle it back around, [as] our political leaders have no incentive to stake out really strong strategic positions because the public can’t figure out what those strategic positions correspond to and what they want. So you’re looking at a very muddled period here at home. And again, it would be nice to say that’s somebody’s fault, but it’s a conflation of factors; we can’t talk to anyone person or party, much as I usually like to blame things on one party. But we can’t point to any one person or party and say, this is their fault; at the same time as Russians and the Chinese are very clear on what they want, ISIS is very clear on what it wants, and we may or may not have views about what’s effective, but we’re not going to be able to—you cannot have an effectiveness conversation in Washington right now.
And I’ll just close with this point as I see I’m about to get a red card. Yeah, it is like soccer. Do I get to bite someone first?
We’re in this crazy moment right now where, odd as it is, our military, our military leaders are actually one of the proponents of making hard choices, the proponents of saying, you know what, yeah, as a retired four-star, I don’t need to be getting free health care, I don’t need to be getting 98 percent of my salary; proponents of saying, you know what? We can’t intervene everywhere in the world; we need more clarity about that. A panel of retired generals debating whether or not to intervene in Syria would be really fascinating. But because of the political realities I’ve laid out, there’s no room to have that conversation. And you then get into this very dangerous position where the uniformed military is incredibly frustrated with the civilian society because the civilian society cannot have the kind of conversation that the military sees as necessary, not because we civilians are stupid, or weak, or ill-disciplined, but simply because our incentives, our economic and political incentives are so perverse right now.
So that’s your next two years. Look forward to it.
Richard Kaufman:
Well, thank you, Heather. I think some of the remarks of the panelists were biting actually, but at least there was no body checking. And we do have time for some audience participation at this point, unless any of the panelists would like to comment on what others were saying. Or should we just go to the audience? Why don’t we just go to the audience.
Q:
I’m […?] of the Naval Postgraduate School. Incentives matter. How do we change them? So often it’s a function of getting Congress to change the incentives.
The other thing I want to ask, which is sort of a burning issue of mine, which is, I think one of the greatest problems we face on the planet is unemployment, and I don’t hear anybody talking about how we create employment where people get something to do, have some income, and have some sense of self-respect. And everybody I ask about it, they say, well, so-and-so wrote an article. Well I’ve never heard of that article. It’s just not a part of the conversation, and I think it goes along with climate frankly.
Richard Kaufman:
Before anybody responds, I would remind everybody that the next panel is on growth and jobs; so we do have something to say about the subject. But does anybody want to react?
Carl Conetta:
On the unemployment issue, one characteristic of our security policy—and again, this has been true since, certainly, the mid-‘90s, and it had been a bit different earlier on. So we look at the world, we see problems, and we try to identify bad actors and bad regimes. That’s a view of the world that is well suited to the application of military power. We’re very good at removing bad actors and bad regimes.
What we don’t do is really—or we’re not very good at, or it certainly isn’t the leading aspect of our policy—is to ask what lies underneath? Where do these regimes come from? Where do these actors come from? What generates the soil in which an organization like the Islamic State can actually grow and in very short order take over the Sunni insurgency? So those are the questions we need to look at. I think that clearly the youth bulge in the Islamic world is very important. Growing inequality inside countries is a principal driver of conflict. It’s not so much inequality between countries anymore. But what we see is the growth of dispossessed people, often ethnically distinct within their societies, and dispossessed regions, sometimes backed up between two countries. So you take a look at Pakistan and you take a look at Afghanistan, we have regions of very low levels of development backed up against each other, basically dispossessed by their government. The same is true if we look at the Sunni areas of Syria and of Iraq. Areas that have been dispossessed are ripe for the types of insurgency that we see.
So a real question is, yes, the unemployment question. One way we begin to address that is we really need to think about how do we govern the process of globalization and really the neo-liberal economic policies that both drive it and are a result of it? How do we begin to govern it? There’s an institutional deficit on a world scale. There also is a democratic deficit. So we aren’t governing it, we’re letting it govern us; and one of the results is the type of fragile states, weak states, that we see that are areas of great conflict and concern for us. So I think that’s right on the mark.
Q:
Paul Gallagher with ERI News Service. I’d like to raise an idea and see your reaction to it, that the problem is not the size of the US budget or the United States being the primary military power in the world—there’d be nothing wrong with that. The problem is the policy of the last two administrations to continually confront China and Russia with [?] revolutions, regime changes among their allies, and provoke them to the point of capitulation or more, and that this policy has been a failure; that the policy of globalizing the Philippines and Australia and Japan and Viet Nam against China has failed. This policy has actually been carried out in an unconstitutional way, with the president starting discretionary wars without asking for or thinking that he needs any authorization from the Congress unconstitutionally. And so what about the idea that the abandonment of this policy of clearly putting China in the position of Germany 100 years ago, the driver of the world economy that has to be stopped, what about abandoning this policy as a greater guarantee of our security?
Heather Hurlburt:
So, respectfully, that falls into the trap I mentioned of thinking that it’s all about us, because, again, the Japanese, the Vietnamese, the Koreans really don’t need any egging on from the US to act in ways that provoke China and vice versa. So it would be really great if there were something the US could do that would cause those tensions in the region to go away; but there isn’t.
Similarly, you know, Ukrainians wanted a functioning government. Now it is the case, Ukraine is a great example where, frankly, very often the prize for most short-term foolish diplomacy goes to the US, but in this case the Europeans win the contest hands down, and the economic negotiations and the way they took place with the Ukraine were a goad that I think the European Union did not think through in its entirety. But the fact that Russia clearly had a military plan prepared to zip right in and pick up Crimea and then move on the way it has done—again, it would be great if it were the case that, oh, the US could just change its behavior and Russia would change its behavior; but there are regional dynamics there that are every bit as real and every bit as based in strategy and interest calculations as ones either in place by the US or ones that you might like to be in place by the US in some alternate universe.
So there are many many things that US policy could do differently; but just the US behaving differently is not going to remove aggression and tension in the world.
Carl Conetta:
So let me do a counterpoint. Without speaking to all of the efforts that the United States has made in terms of encouraging the growth of market democracy in various place and how it’s been done, I think China is substantially concerned about the US presence in the Pacific and the way that is exercised. The United States is a Pacific Power; there’s no question about that, we’ve been that for a long time. The question is how do we exercise our power and to what extent do we respond to Chinese initiatives with military initiatives of our own? […?] is a concept that puts the existence of China at risk. Now that is a move from what is currently a sort of a regional tension between us and them to a move that involves existential concerns. That looks more like a cold war. I think we’re actually not in a cold war with China or with Russia at this point; but we certainly have the option to go there. So it isn’t so much a question of, is it all up to us; it certainly is not all up to us. Nonetheless we are the world’s richest power, we have the largest military, we’re very active in the world. The United States makes a difference. So we can choose to do things that either exacerbate a situation, or potentially move it in a better direction.
And I think in the case of China, beginning as early as 1996-1997, our military planning document began to explicitly identify it as a potential enemy, and we have developed our deployments in the Pacific along those lines. Well, what was the idea? The idea quite clearly was to shape the evolution of Chinese policy. They would see that if they continued or went down a path of confrontation with the United States, if they weren’t willing to accept a junior partnership within a world order essentially written in Washington, D.C., that they were going to have to face US power. The idea was that they would buckle, when what in fact happened is that they did not buckle. And I think it’s contributed significantly to how they relate to countries in that region, that they are concerned about control of the South China Sea, which they actually shouldn’t be concerned about except for the presence of the United States. And they are ramping up their capacity to grab resources locally because they are concerned about the flow of resources from outside of that region. Again, what are they concerned about? They are concerned about us.
In the situation of Russia and the Ukraine, I think it’s right that we have a Russia practicing power politics; but we also have a situation in which all of the players have really tempted Russia, and they have created a situation and contributed to a situation that went south very rapidly. They are ways to diplomatically resolve that. It might mean that all of Ukraine does not develop as quickly as we would like along the path of market democracy; but what is the price of going in the other direction? The price has been that we’ve moved from a situation of disagreement—I mean, there have been disagreements internal to Ukraine for a long time between different sectors of the country, people who face east and people who face west, and they haven’t been resolved, but let’s say they’ve been negotiated on and off through several elections without the type of conflict in the recent past. So I think the role that we played in there essentially by scotching or lining up against efforts by other European powers to find a compromise solution contributed to this thing going south and [to] ramping up tensions between the two. And what’s the price we’ll pay? We will pay the price in attempting to have a resolution in Syria and attempting to have a resolution of our disagreements with Iraq. Because Russia could play a positive role, but I think it will tend toward not playing as positive a role as it could because of the situation in the Ukraine.
Heather Hurlburt:
I’m just going to jump back in because of none of us mentioned Iran and we all should have since we’re in the last week of those negotiations. And it is a fascinating thing that up till now Russia has played a much more positive role than anyone would have predicted. If they […?] there, and they are weighing their own economic incentives, which is on the one hand, if a deal goes through, they stand to gain by the nuclear cooperation which is foreseen in the negotiations; on the other hand, if a deal doesn’t go through, it keeps Iranian oil off the market and helps prevent the price for Russian oil from falling any lower. And for all that, Putin holds all the short-term cards geopolitically; long-term his economy is terribly weak and he knows it, and low oil prices will threaten to fall below levels that won’t sustain the economic and military power projection capabilities plus some kind of minimum social peace. So again, Russia has up till now been shockingly cooperative, frankly, in the Iran negotiations given the level of hostility over Ukraine; but what is Russia weighing? Russia is weighing not first and foremost its enmity to the US, although that’s undoubtedly a factor; but it also has its own internal calculations to make.
And just one other thing I want to say: that in fact on Ukraine the most problematic actors were Europeans, and that actually it was, in my view, you want to blame somebody for this, you blame the Poles and then you blame the British and the French for not reeling in the Poles, and then the US, frankly, kind of trailing along a bit behind this; and the situation got out of control. But just again, that all of this is more complicated than either, oh, there’s something the US could do; or, oh, the US is the white knight riding in from outside.
Richard Kaufman:
With that we have to make room for the next panel. And I want to thank our panelists for a very stimulating discussion and our audience for taking part.
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