Ted Galen Carpenter: Obama’s Security Strategy is Clueless
[Ted Galen Carpenter, vice president for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, is the author of eight books and more than four hundred articles on international issues. His latest book is Smart Power: Toward a Prudent Foreign Policy for America (2008). He is also a contributing editor to The National Interest.]
The most striking feature about President Obama’s new National Security Strategy (NSS) document is that there is very little new in it. True, the tone of the NSS is rather different from the Bush administration’s implied preference for unilateralism, but even that change merely takes U.S. strategy back to the days of the Clinton administration and most of its predecessors. In short, the Obama NSS is warmed-over liberal internationalism.
The principal theme in this NSS is burden sharing. The United States, the document stresses, cannot afford to be the world’s sole policeman. Washington needs partners who are willing and able to meet security challenges and help preserve global peace and prosperity.
But administrations since the founding of NATO in 1949 have emphasized the need for such burden sharing—with a spectacular lack of success. And successive generations of U.S. officials have vented their impotent frustration. President Dwight Eisenhower’s secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, warned the European allies in 1954 that if they didn’t do more for the common defense effort against the Soviet Union, the United States would have to conduct an “agonizing reappraisal” of its commitment to Europe. The NATO allies treated his warning as the empty threat that it was. Their security free riding on the United States barely diminished throughout the remainder of the Cold War.
President Obama is likely to find his search for willing and capable allies even more futile. The already inadequate military efforts of America’s European and East Asian allies have plummeted over the past two decades. Even Washington’s most significant security helpmate, Britain, is witnessing a free fall in defense spending. London’s defense budget for 2009 was a modest $62 billion—2.8 percent of the country’s Gross Domestic Product. And given Britain’s mounting financial woes, that spending level is certain to decline sharply. Indeed, the debate within the new Conservative-Liberal Democratic coalition government is simply about how much to cut and which weapon systems to terminate.
But Britain is a militarized Sparta compared to Washington’s other traditional NATO allies...
Read entire article at National Interest
The most striking feature about President Obama’s new National Security Strategy (NSS) document is that there is very little new in it. True, the tone of the NSS is rather different from the Bush administration’s implied preference for unilateralism, but even that change merely takes U.S. strategy back to the days of the Clinton administration and most of its predecessors. In short, the Obama NSS is warmed-over liberal internationalism.
The principal theme in this NSS is burden sharing. The United States, the document stresses, cannot afford to be the world’s sole policeman. Washington needs partners who are willing and able to meet security challenges and help preserve global peace and prosperity.
But administrations since the founding of NATO in 1949 have emphasized the need for such burden sharing—with a spectacular lack of success. And successive generations of U.S. officials have vented their impotent frustration. President Dwight Eisenhower’s secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, warned the European allies in 1954 that if they didn’t do more for the common defense effort against the Soviet Union, the United States would have to conduct an “agonizing reappraisal” of its commitment to Europe. The NATO allies treated his warning as the empty threat that it was. Their security free riding on the United States barely diminished throughout the remainder of the Cold War.
President Obama is likely to find his search for willing and capable allies even more futile. The already inadequate military efforts of America’s European and East Asian allies have plummeted over the past two decades. Even Washington’s most significant security helpmate, Britain, is witnessing a free fall in defense spending. London’s defense budget for 2009 was a modest $62 billion—2.8 percent of the country’s Gross Domestic Product. And given Britain’s mounting financial woes, that spending level is certain to decline sharply. Indeed, the debate within the new Conservative-Liberal Democratic coalition government is simply about how much to cut and which weapon systems to terminate.
But Britain is a militarized Sparta compared to Washington’s other traditional NATO allies...