Robert Farley has a provocative observation about the defense budget: “If an analyst had proposed, during the Reagan administration, that the U.S. outspend the Soviet Union by a factor of 5-10, he or she would have been laughed out of government by Republicans and Democrats alike.”
That’s a very good point. If you had a situation where we were confident that the U.S. was spending more than the U.S.S.R., that our NATO allies were collectively spending more than the U.S.S.R.’s Warsaw Pact allies, that South Korea was spending more than North Korea, and that Japan, Australia, etc. were floating around out there as additional sources of western strength you would say that Communism was being adequately contained and deterred. These days, though, the United States is maintaining a defense budget that’s ten times what Russia or China spend and yet holding that budget flat is considered an almost outrageously dovish position. And this even though our allies haven’t vanished. The combined defense spending of the UK, Japan, Germany, and France is considerably larger than the combined spending of Russia and China. And of course our contemporary relationship with Russia and China is far better than was our relationship with the U.S.S.R.
It seems to me that if you told the man on the street that you had a plan to spend double on defense what China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran spend combined that said man would assume you were proposing to spend a healthy amount of funds on national defense. Such a standard would, however, imply very large cuts.
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