The United States Could
Learn From Its British Ally
By Ivan Eland
March 31, 2015 "ICH"
- In the wake of the global recession,
beginning with the financial crisis of
2008-2009, the British government of Prime
Minister David Cameron took a different
approach from the U.S. governments of George
W. Bush and Barack Obama – eschewing massive
government stimuli (that is, profligate
spending) for the economy and instead
focusing on moderate belt tightening to
reduce budget deficits accumulating into
higher national debt.
That British budget
reductions, including 4.3 percent real cuts
in defense spending since 2010, has paid
off. The British economy has experienced
seven consecutive quarters of growth, three
percent growth last year, and low inflation.
With the upcoming British election,
convention wisdom might predict that Cameron
would ease off on the austerity and promise
to throw out government candy to better his
chances to win. Instead, he has promised the
British people even more frugality.
Usually, conservative
governments at least try to avoid defense
cuts. However, Cameron’s past military
reductions have already taken Britain below
the two percent of GDP per year defense
spending requirement of the NATO alliance.
Moreover, Cameron has promised to double
down and cut even more from the British
defense budget. The United States, which
currently accounts for 70 percent of the
alliance’s military spending, has complained
loudly to Britain that the United Kingdom is
losing military capability just when Russia
is acting up in Ukraine.
The British have always
been a reliable sidekick to numerous US
military adventures, but the British public
is now wary of following the United States
off the cliff – after the long disastrous
nation-building quagmires of Afghanistan and
Iraq. That helps account for Cameron’s
doubling down on defense cuts in the
election campaign.
Although Barack Obama’s
"sequestration" – across the board budget
cuts with some major exemptions – has helped
reduce the US budget deficit from the Bush
days, he has also raised taxes but added
significantly to the national debt. The
United States has not matched even the
moderate austerity of the British. As for US
defense, some slight cuts were made, but
sequestration has since been eased. The
United States still spends massive amounts
on defense – what the next nine countries
spend combined.
And the United States
regularly worries more about regional
threats – for example, Russia in Eastern
Europe and ISIS in the Middle East – than do
its allies in the particular areas. Now that
the US economy is finally showing some life,
the United States can be less concerned
about inducing short-term pain with
significant across-the-board cuts in
government spending (including previously
exempt entitlements); such wide reductions
are the only way to ensure that the United
States remains a great power well into the
future. In the long run, a robust economy
enables all other indices of national power
– military, political, diplomatic, and
cultural.
Another lesson can be
taken from Britain and its wartime ally
France. Although Britain and France were on
the winning side of both world wars, they
lost their worldwide empires, in part,
because those wars drained their coffers.
Even years later, they are, at best,
middling powers. The same could happen to
the United States. The Afghan and Iraqi
quagmires cost the American taxpayer $3.37
trillion, or almost one-fifth of the $18.2
trillion US national debt.
Substantial cuts in the US
defense budget would limit the ability of
politicians from both parties to regularly
meddle in faraway conflicts that don’t
affect US vital interests, but nevertheless
create new enemies that try to attack the
United States at home – such as the
Pakistani (as opposed to the Afghan)
Taliban, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula,
and perhaps someday ISIS from Iraq and
Syria, al Shabab from Somalia, and Boko
Haram from Nigeria.
Reductions in the US
defense budget would also require the United
States to create a plan to close a
significant number of military bases
overseas and abrogate a number of obsolete
Cold War alliances, which nowadays only
inhibit the flexibility of US foreign
policy. The next president, whether
Republican or Democrat, should plan to
substantially reduce such foreign
overstretch over a period of four years, so
that it could be completed in one
presidential term and thus not be reversed.
Unfortunately, with the hawkish Hillary
Clinton the probable Democratic nominee for
2016 and a big government Republican Party
(Tea Party veneer aside) that has already
forgotten the lessons of Afghanistan and
Iraq and has become more bellicose by the
day, a Cameron-style austerity program for
defense (and everything else) is extremely
unlikely.
Ivan Eland, Senior Fellow and Director of
the Center on Peace & Liberty, The
Independent Institute -
http://www.independent.org/