Neocons: they’re not necessarily a bad thing

Date

April 10, 2014

‘Like it or not, global stability depends on American global leadership.’ Photo: AFP

Eleven years ago last week, Baghdad fell to US forces. Donald Rumsfeld, who at the time was serving as George Bush’s defence secretary, famously dismissed the lawlessness that followed the collapse of Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship by oh-so-helpfully observing that ‘‘stuff happens’’. The Bush administration, from the president on down, seemed serenely confident that for all the madness of those first weeks, Iraqis would soon take advantage of their liberation and partner with US-led coalition forces to build a new democracy.

As we all know, that’s not quite how it played out. From 2003 to the end of 2011, when US forces declared a formal end to their operations in Iraq, 4803 American, British and other allied troops died in the conflict. These are the deaths that badly damaged the reputations of Bush, Tony Blair and other leaders who sought regime change in Iraq. The overall human cost of the war in Iraq was much larger still. One oft-cited survey found that as many as half a million Iraqis died during the US-led occupation, a number that includes those who died directly from violence as well as those who died indirectly from maladies caused or exacerbated by the bloody civil war and the displacement it caused.

Though we can’t know what the world would have looked like had the Bush administration not chosen to wage war in Iraq, and though it is at least possible that the region and the world might have looked even worse with Saddam Hussein still in power, I find it hard to imagine that the benefits outweighed the enormous costs. Most Americans would surely agree. At a bare minimum, those who favoured the war might have hoped for a democratic Iraq in which the rights of ethnic and religious minorities were respected and that was more closely aligned with the United States than Iran. The new Iraq fails on both of these counts.

Given all of this, why am I still a neocon? Why do I still believe that the US should maintain an overwhelming military edge over all potential rivals, and that the country ought to be willing to use its military power in defence of its ideals, as well as its interests narrowly defined? There are two reasons. The first is that American strength is the linchpin of a peaceful, economically integrating world. The second is that we know what it looks like when America embraces amoral realpolitik, and it’s not pretty.

Like it or not, America’s failure in Iraq does not change the fact that global stability depends on American global leadership, and American global leadership costs money. The US is at the heart of a dense web of alliances. It extends formal security guarantees to more than 50 countries. Some see these alliances and guarantees as little more than a burden the US can no longer afford. Yet what they actually do is dampen security competition. They reassure partner countries that they needn’t build up their militaries to defend themselves against their neighbours, which then reassures their neighbours that they needn’t build up their militaries. This virtuous cycle is one of the central reasons Western Europe and Japan recovered so quickly after the devastation of World War II, and why globalisation has helped ease poverty around the world. For this virtuous cycle to be maintained, however, US security guarantees must be considered credible. It must be clear that when the US makes a security commitment to another country, that commitment will be met. This in turn means that the US military must have the power and the reach to defend countries far from our borders.

America’s 2012 defence spending surpasses that of China, Russia, Britain, Japan, France, Saudi Arabia, India, Germany, Italy and Brazil combined. Stack up the US against the same list of countries on health or education spending and you’ll find that it spends an impressive amount in those domains too. The health and education sectors, like the military, are sectors that depend on hiring and retaining trained personnel. Keeping smart, hard-working people in these sectors means paying wages high enough to keep them from taking jobs elsewhere, including in sectors where productivity growth is much higher. That is expensive. Personnel costs absorb half of the US military budget, as opposed to a third of China’s. There are things itcan do to contain high and rising personnel costs.

Liberals who want to raid the defence budget to finance social programs and libertarians who want to slash it to finance tax cuts need to wake up. A weaker US military will mean a more dangerous world, and that will jeopardise everything that matters.

The neocon impulse proved badly misguided in Iraq, where it contributed to a moral calamity. But there are other cases, in South Asia in 1971 and in Bosnia in the early 1990s, to name two examples among many, where it might very well have prevented one.

Reihan Salam, a Slate columnist, also writes for the National Review. He is the co-author, with Ross Douthat, of Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream.