This seems like a good start. Nuclear weapons, we are told, can destroy the planet and reducing the stockpile reduces the potential for their use. Starting on that process, together with Russia, would make the planet safer. That is, assuming that the United States and Russia are threats to use nuclear weapons; if they are not, all this talk of reducing stock piles is just so much chin music.

Obama went on, “[That] will then give us a greater moral authority to say to Iran, don't develop a nuclear weapon; to say to North Korea, don't proliferate nuclear weapons."

This is also good, assuming that Iran and North Korea will accept the moral authority of a reduced nuclear United States. If not, then the talk of moral authority is more chin music.

It seems obvious that Obama is on the road to nuclear disarmament: a noble cause. But, the world has been down the disarmament road before. During the period between World Wars I and II, many countries sought to limit the size of their military components through a series of treaties. The problem that ensued was described by journalist/philosopher Walter Lippmann in his 1943 book U.S. Foreign Policy: Shield of the Republic: "The disarmament movement was, as the event has shown, tragically successful in disarming the nations that believed in disarmament. The net effect was … to reduce them to almost disastrous impotence on the eve of the Second World War'' 

Can we learn from Lippmann’s historical analysis? Should we project that if we, the Russians, the French, the British and the Chinese all rid ourselves of nuclear weapons, the rest of the world follow suit? Or will our actions reduce us to, as Lippmann put it, “disastrous impotence” in the face of new nuclear powers such as Iran and North Korea?

As distasteful as it is to think of it, no weapon invented has not been used. Maybe, as the Mutually Assured Destruction program taught us that, while risky, the best we can hope for is to reduce tensions while maintaining vigilance and our own nuclear program. Maybe.

Obama’s success abroad

President Obama’s trip abroad last week has been categorized by many as a failure. Whether or not you agree with his objectives, he was not successful in getting many agreements. He wanted to get the Europeans on board with financial stimulus programs and he failed. He wanted to get the Europeans to send more troops to Afghanistan and got a nominal 5,000 mostly non-combatant troops until the Afghan election; practically speaking, he failed. He encouraged the Europeans to accept Turkey into the European Union and he failed. He wanted the Europeans to begin a European bank bailout program and they wanted the International Monetary Fund (to which the United States is a heavy contributor) to bailout their banks and Obama failed.

Superficially, there was agreement on fighting international tax fraud but no practical details; one could say that Obama failed.
 

Even the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei rebuked Obama for his taped greeting to Iran. And to add to Obama’s abuse, many European columnists were scornful of him.

It sounds like he was totally ineffective. After all, a George W. Bush could have … could have… probably accomplished much the same thing and the Europeans generally held Bush in disdain. Despite the fact that Obama is generally liked, European leaders have their own agenda and it is not America’s.

But I think Obama did accomplish something positive for this country. He is, to many European folks, a hero; they genuinely like him. The European folk perceived Bush as arrogant and pushy. Obama, on the other hand, seems to them to be more like a European; he is multilateral, agrees with them that America has made mistakes and contributed to the economic downturn, and he seems more willing to listen. Obama had a successful public charm offensive.

A charm offensive may not have much impact in the short run but it may in the long run. Remember France’s Jacques Chirac and Germany’s Gerhard Schröder got considerable political traction from opposing Bush and America. Sarkozy and Merkle will not be able to play that game with an American leader who is popular among their constituents. Even in Iran and Venezuela, where there is official opposition to America, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Hugo Chavez have cut back, ever so slightly, on their anti-American rhetoric.

So was Obama’s trip abroad successful? I think so. He couldn’t accomplish the impossible but he set the stage for future efforts by beginning to build a constituency of his own among the general public and with that constituency European and other foreign leaders will less willing to cross him. I don’t think that he could have done more.

Budget defense

Having a military is expensive. Having a good military is very expensive. And having a military as good as America’s is, is really really expensive and beyond the abilities of most countries.

The United States not only leads the world in absolute military expenditures but also in defense spending as a percentage of Gross National Product (GDP). According to the CIA Factbook, the United States spends 54% of all defense expenditures world wide. We spend about 4% of our GDP on defense and the rest of the world combined spends a little over 1%.

It’s nice to be number one but damn – it’s expensive! For every defense dollar outlay, that is one less dollar that can be invested in the U.S. economy or for infrastructure such as roads, schools and services. In other words, defense spending, however necessary you may think it to be, is a drain on our economy. If you don’t think it is drain, check out the former Soviet Union who spent – officially — up to 27% of their GDP on defense and went bankrupt. (In a closed command economy, such as the Soviet Union had, it is hard to get an accurate estimate as to how much was actually spent on defense and the some military experts think that the actual amount may have been a multiple of the official number.)

How did we in the United States get to the point where, with less than 5% of the world’s population, we spend 54% the world’s defense budget? It seems clear that we are spending and doing more than our share. We got here because we reacted to the post-World War II situation in a rational manner.

After World War II, we had the economic engine that drove the world. We could afford a Marshall Plan and a generous foreign aid program. Seeing a threat from Russia and seeing our allies with scant resources, we took on the burden of providing for the “common defense” for them as well as ourselves. Thus it was relatively easy for the allies and they have continued to follow that path of least resistance (i.e., letting Uncle Sam provide the defense dollars) while they built and ran their economies with a relatively skimpy military budget.

Many Americans have actually been concerned with defense spending even in times of military build-ups. In 1941, as the United States prepared for World War II, Senator Harry Truman (D, MO) established a committee to oversee the military budget and avoid excesses. He saved the taxpayer millions of dollars while the U.S. armed forces had the best in materiel and enough left over to aid the allies.

As the United States began dealing with the post-war Soviet Threat, President Eisenhower wanted a credible force to deal with them and, at the same time, realized that over-spending could put our economy in jeopardy. Ike knew we could hold down the cost of a sizable, well-equipped force by relying more on a nuclear deterrent and we did.

So here we are again, saving the world and ourselves from the threat of terror, nation-building in Iraq and Afghanistan, preparing for other terrorist plots and trying to maintain a credible threat to hostile nation-states. It’s a tough row to hoe during times of economic expansion but in current times, the additional brake of defense spending puts on a falling economy is not at all helpful.

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has proposed an increase of 4% in the Defense Department budget for 2010 to a nice round figure of $534 billion. Some think that the budget is too small and cuts too many crucial high tech items that will be necessary in the future (like the Army's $200 billion Future Combat Systems and a reduction in the number of F-22 fighter jets from 648 to 187). Given the cost over-runs on the F-22 and the potential for the same on the Future Combat Systems, Gates proposal makes economic sense. But does it make sense from a military planning perspective?

Gates said the programs that he is curtailing "do not adequately reflect the lessons of counterinsurgency and close quarters combat in Iraq and Afghanistan." That may be true but it reflects the wars we are fighting today; does it reflect the needs of future combat? That’s hard to say.

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National defense is like insurance: you take a lot of money out of your budget and spend it on insurance and, if you’re lucky, it’s just a waste of money. If you’re unlucky, it comes in handy. Insurance can be cheaper if you have large deductions – it’s too bad our allies can’t be convinced to pick up the cost of deductions for our mutual defense insurance.

In the meantime, we will continue to protect the world to the best of our abilities and hope we don’t go broke doing it.

Somali pirates

Conservative talk show host Laura Ingraham commented on why President Obama did not criticize the Somali pirates. “You never know how many Somali pirates are in the United States who have been registered to vote by ACORN. You don’t want to alienate that constituency.”

Quote without comment

Analyst Jeung Young-tai of the Korea Institute for National Unification, commenting on North Korea’s rocket launch last week: “No country will be naive enough to believe that it was a peaceful space program. North Korea is on the threshold of becoming an intercontinental ballistic missile country.”

Robert J. Kulak

West Hartford, Connecticut