Brilliant New Conservative Talking Point Revealed: No ‘Peace Dividend’
Brilliant New Conservative Talking Point Revealed: No ‘Peace Dividend’
It’s official: Accusing President Obama of trying to cash in a “peace dividend” is now a conservative talking point. Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) first floated this argument in a speech last week at the American Enterprise Institute (a place which has contributed far more than its share of bad conservative ideas.) It was then pushed by AEI’s magazine wing. Today it’s a headline in the Washington Times and parroted by Washington Post blogger Bill Kristol, who lets fly with this gem:
It’s one thing to run deficits to fight wars and defend the country. It’s another to throw money at everything except defense and to increase the national debt while skimping on defense spending over the next several years, to the point where such spending will be, by 2016, at its lowest percentage of GDP since before World War II. Is the world really the safest it has been since the 1930s? Is it responsible to declare a peace dividend when we’re not at peace?
To read this, you might think that someone had actually “declared a peace dividend,” other than conservatives attacking the idea that there is one. As conservative talking points go, charging President Obama with trying to cash in a “peace dividend” seems pretty silly, both stylistically and substantively. A peace dividend sounds like something people would really like, not something they’d hate the president for cashing in.
As for comparing defense spending in 2016 to 1930 as a function of GDP — well, let’s just say that your average eighth grade could probably explain why that’s silly. But I will use this graph which I’ve stolen from Yglesias:
As always, conservative arguments speak volumes about the esteem in which they hold their intended audience.
5 Responses to “Brilliant New Conservative Talking Point Revealed: No ‘Peace Dividend’”
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Obama’s black ops budget of $50 billion is ten times Iran’s whole military budget.
May 12th, 2009 at 6:01 pmJust how dim are you? Oh — well, at least as dim as Yglesias.
Yes, U.S. defense spending has been a multiple of any other country’s. But that’s been true for many years, during both Republican and Democratic administrations.
For deterrence to work, potential military encounters can’t be a dice throw. We’re not playing Risk here. We’re talking, quite literally, about the future of not only the United States but the entire world.
If the world’s sole superpower were not the United States, then you wouldn’t see other countries with military budgets where they are. They’d be many times larger, so they could compete with the U.S. (and each other). And we’d see countries like France and China and Russia in the sorts of wars that ravaged the entire world during the first half of the 20th Century, before America had become a military superpower.
But since WW2, America has paid the price of being the world’s policeman — at least in policing major-country conflicts on the scale of the world wars — and our only rival and direct, active opponent in that finally broke from the strain of trying to keep it up in 1991-1992 when we won the Cold War.
But for the absolute certainty that America had the military power in-hand to wage and win any conceivable war, nuclear or conventional, the second half of the 20th Century would very likely have duplicated the first — except with vastly more powerful weapons and consequent loss of life.
We’re able to do this — to bear any burden, pay any price, in the defense of freedom, to quote JFK — at what is still a small portion of our GNP. Yes, we pay a price that’s wildly disproportionate to our share of world population — but not to our share of world commerce (which benefits not just us, but the entire world). We’ve done it because it’s been worth it, and because people in both parties who are more mature and history-conscious than you or Yglesias have recognized that.
May 12th, 2009 at 6:15 pmI agree with the exception of the graph. It doesn’t do enough to explain the problem. We spend $450 Billion on our military but how much of that is waste? bribes? It’s not so much about how much we spend as what we get for what we spend.
The Chinese are able to keep costs down for their military because they don’t rely so heavily on private defense contractors. If we cut out the middle men in the Defense Industries we’d save billions.
It costs us millions to produce a Nuclear weapon and the Chinese can produce one for a fraction of the cost to do the exact same thing. Stop turning War into a business and we’ll find defending ourselves is much cheaper.
May 12th, 2009 at 7:57 pmI would like to see the GDP equivalent for China, Russia, Japan, and Germany in 1930 compared to the United States at that time. BMIC (before Military Industrial Complex) we may have been way down on the graph while the countries gearing up for war or already in one (China-Japan) were way up. With such a comparison wouldn’t the U.S. then look like a nation always in war or preparing for war? Would that help more Americans understand the danger? Just thinking!
May 13th, 2009 at 10:05 amProgressive? Reuters reported:
U.S. defense spending, pegged at $534 billion for 2010, excluding the cost of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, will be up 4 percent from this year and is not expected to decrease for the next few years.
May 13th, 2009 at 2:26 pm