Military Neglect on Our Part

by Paul A. Rahe

We were given fair warning on Tuesday when Robert Gates arrived in China. I doubt, however, that we will heed it. Liberal, commercial polities have a tendency to be caught flat-footed at the beginning of an armed conflict, and what is true for them is even more egregiously true for the modern democracies so aptly described as welfare states. War, defeat, and a profound loss of prestige are, I fear, the catastrophes that we are now courting – as the Chinese military ostentatiously indicated by brazenly test-flying their first stealth fighter, one larger than any in our larder, just a few hours before our Secretary of Defense sat down for discussions with Chinese President Hu Jintao.

The blunders that we are now making are by no means unprecedented. The first example that comes to mind is England under William III, which was arguably the first fully modern, fully commercial polity in human history. As Winston Churchill points out in his Marlborough: His Life and Times, England’s Dutch king fought vigorously to maintain in England in the wake of  the War of the League of Augsburg (1689-97) a standing army as a deterrent, but he was thwarted by a Parliament weary of war, unfriendly to taxation, and intent on harvesting a peace dividend. In the absence of an England capable of deploying on the continent of Europe an expeditionary force at a moment’s notice, when the last Hapsburg monarch of Spain died without issue, Louis ignored the terms of his marriage with a Spanish Infanta and connived in installing on the Spanish throne his grandson Philip, who was in line to inherit the French throne as well. Given their immense wealth and their holdings in the New World, the unity of France and Spain would have had as its practical consequence the establishment of a universal monarchy dominant over Europe. This was the very eventuality that the War of the League of Augsburg had been fought to prevent, and in response the English, the Dutch, and the Hapsburgs in central Europe launched the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-13), which the first two of these states were initially – thanks to the natural propensity of liberal, commercial polities – ill-equipped to fight.

Churchill – who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in part as a recognition of his remarkable accomplishment in Marlborough: His Life and Times – composed this magisterial study in the 1930s, and one cannot read it without realizing that writing this work was a central part of his intellectual preparation for becoming a wartime Prime Minister. Britain was caught in the toils of the Great Depression at the time, and he watched in horror and raised his voice in protest as Germany under Hitler rearmed and as Britain and France succumbed to wishful thinking and repeatedly chose butter over guns. The Second World War – and the casualties accompanying it – were the price that was paid for the improvident stewardship of the political leaders of Britain and France.

I mention these disgraceful examples because I suspect that we are following in their wake.

In the aftermath of the Cold War, we cut back dramatically on the size of our military establishment. We had the men and equipment to fight the first Gulf War with ease. We barely had enough to manage the second Gulf War, and we stretched our resources to the limits in fighting the insurrections that took place in its aftermath and in the aftermath of our intervention in Afghanistan. To his discredit. George W. Bush failed to face up to our inadequacies, and Barack Obama, in his eagerness to reallocate resources to the entitlement state, has made things much, much worse. It says much about him – but it also says much about the propensities of liberal democracies – that he is now intent on making further cuts and that he is likely to get his way.

It is exceedingly difficult to defend large peacetime military budgets. If our preparations for war are adequate, they are nearly always made to seem unnecessary. If they are adequate, they tend to deter aggression, and we find ourselves in possession of a plethora of military resources that we have no pressing need to use. It is always tempting in such circumstances to suppose that the expenditures incurred were a colossal waste, and we are then inclined to sacrifice military preparedness for cuts in taxation and expenditures on social welfare programs. All that it takes to justify such a shift in resources is wishful thinking, and wishful thinking is something that human beings are exceptionally good at – especially when there is some darling domestic outcome that they have their hearts set upon.

In the Pacific, we are witnessing a dramatic shift in the balance of power. Earlier this year, the Chinese fielded missile forces capable of annihilating in a matter of minutes all but one of our bases in Asia. The handwriting is on the wall. In a few years, they will have missiles capable of eliminating the last of these. This year, they also fielded missile systems capable of finding and sinking our aircraft carriers in the western Pacific. In 2009, when Robert Gates cut back radically on the budget for acquiring in great numbers F-22 stealth fighters, he reportedly did so on the presumption that the Chinese would not be able to produce stealth fighters in any number before 2020. He was dead wrong.

What the Chinese military did on Tuesday was intended as a humiliation for and a warning to us. To all appearances, it was also a stab at the Chinese civilian leadership. Hu Jintao was apparently unaware of what was going on. It is impossible to be certain about the meaning of the Chinese military build-up and of the tone of belligerence that has accompanied it. In their public statements, our leaders and opinion-makers tend to dismiss both as unimportant. It is only natural, they say, that an emerging power should flex its muscles and bully its neighbors. Ignore their belligerence, they say. Defer to them, treat them with the respect due a great power, and that belligerence will dissipate.

These observers may be correct, and I certainly hope they are. But I have my doubts. China is not a liberal democracy and has never been one. It is culturally distinct from the West. For the most part, in the last four decades, it has played by the international rules gradually worked out in the West in the three and a half centuries years that have passed since the Treaty of Westphalia brought the Thirty Years War to an end. But it is by no means clear that, as China gains in economic heft and military power, it will continue to play by those rules. I would not be surprised at all if the Chinese were to renounce the international system and follow in the wake of the Japanese by attempting to establish military hegemony in the western Pacific and to set up on mercantilist lines a new Greater Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere.

It is perfectly possible that, when the history of our times comes to be written, it will barely mention 9/11, the Iraqi and Afghan conflicts, the recession of 2007, Obamacare, the Tea-Party Movement, and the crisis of the entitlement state. It is perfectly possible that it will focus instead on the improvident stewardship of Barack Obama and the wishful thinking to which the American people fell prone. We can only hope that what happened in China on Tuesday turns out to be a wake-up call for the Republicans. As Vegetius put it long ago, “If you want peace, prepare for war.”


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Posted Jan 13th 2011 at 6:05 am in Defense, Federal Spending, History, News, Obama, Tea Party, taxes | 57 Comments