The Power Problem

I wanted to take a moment to recommend a new book by Chris Preble, the top foreign policy guy at Cato, called The Power Problem: How American Military Dominance Makes Us Less Safe, Less Prosperous, and Less Free. The book’s got a good explanatory subtitle, but to briefly sketch the thesis Preble argues that our over-large military establishment isn’t just a waste of money, but actually harmful to our security. The reason is that it spawns a self-justifying ideology about the appropriate American role in the world that leads us to repeated foreign policy blunders. If we had much less military capacity, we would have a much narrower definition of the strategic purpose of our military—to defend the country against threats—and would find that we were happy with that equilibrium. But the large military spawns a grandiose strategic concept that winds up writing checks that even a gigantic military can’t cash.

I think this analysis is dead on. My prescription would not be quite as radical as Preble’s. I think the main flaw with it is that he doesn’t take his own analysis seriously enough—for a variety of reasons, it’s just not going to be the case that America suddenly decides to abandon its aspirations to play a global leadership role. Under the circumstances, I think it’s important to try to think of plausible ways for us to play that role in a constructive way rather than a self-defeating and destructive one, rather than just kind of saying from the sidelines that we should abandon the whole thing. That said, my own views are sufficiently far outside the mainstream that I hardly see any point in quibbling with people who would exercise even more military restraint than I would.

The video of a recent event that Preble did with my colleague Larry Corb and The American Conservative‘s Scott McConnell is also worth watching. It shows that the coalition of people calling for a serious rethink of American strategy and defense spending priorities—a group in which I would include myself—is as ideologically diverse as we are ineffective in actually getting our way. Barack Obama’s taken a lot of good steps so far, but realistically the gap between the change we need and the change we’re going to get remains pretty big.