Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions (2003) (24 page)

John Bolton and Jesse Helms, who have appeared several times in this narrative, represent a critical institutional peculiarity. Both are what are known as ‘conservative Republicans,’ generally meaning that they are devoted to ‘freedom’ and suspicious of government. They see the United States as having the most democratic form of government, are firm apostles of the American creed, and see American power and the American way of life as the ultimate model toward which the world will converge over time. Although Helms was on the Foreign Relations Committee and served as its chairman for many years until his retirement in 2002, and Bolton has had high-level positions in the State Department, they are suspicious of foreign governments, believing them to be less democratic and more welfare-oriented than the U.S. government, and also tend to see other countries as envious of American freedom. They have no use for the UN or other multilateral institutions, seeing them as corrupt, undemocratic, and dedicated to restraining or obstructing the benevolent power of the United States. They place complete faith in American power and put the highest priority on maintaining absolute sovereignty and freedom of action.

The influence of such views is greatly enhanced by the separation of powers in the U.S. government. Treaties must be ratified by the U.S. Senate before becoming law, and before they can be voted on in the Senate, the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee must put them on the schedule and conduct hearings and debate. The chairman can bottle up a treaty for years without taking action. Or he can insist on some other action as the price of bringing the treaty up for a vote. It is often the case that the president and a majority of the American people support a particular treaty or piece of legislation, but cannot obtain its passage because of the opposition of a powerful committee chairman. This combination of ideological views and institutional power is one reason America has frequently been at odds with the world.

THE ARMED ECONOMY

T
he third important aspect of American militarism is economic. Just as it has sought to keep key countries as quasi-client states, so the United States has sought to dominate key weapons and military technology. In 1948, U.S. defense spending was $9.1 billion, about 3.6 percent of GDP, having fallen from well over half of GDP in 1945.
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The outbreak of the Korean War led to a quick doubling of the military budget, and during the Cold War, defense spending of about 6-7 percent of GDP became a kind of rule of thumb. Given the size of the U.S. economy this resulted in a prodigious amount of arms spending – over the entire Cold War, the equivalent of $15.8 trillion in today’s dollars.
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This was not the unbearable burden for the U.S. economy that it would eventually prove to be for the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, there were regular outbreaks of angst over falling behind and of euphoria for the silver bullet weapons system that would make the United States invulnerable, and each of these cycles unleashed a new flood of spending.

The first panic came in 1954, when pictures of the Soviet May Day parade seemed to show a whole fleet of new Soviet bombers not derived from U.S. or British design and capable of reaching the continental United States. It was later shown that in fact the Soviets had only a few of these planes but had flown them in continuous circles over the May Day parade, making it appear that the supply was endless. At the time, however, there was great concern over the ‘bomber gap’ and powerful pressure to build more B-52
s
to ‘catch up with’ the Soviets. This pressure continued until the first U – 2 spy plane flights over the Soviet Union in 1956 showed that the gap was in favor of the United States. This fact did not stop presidential candidate John F. Kennedy from emphasizing, during the 1960 campaign, the need to close the dangerously widening ‘missile gap’ by creating an invulnerable retaliatory force of ICBMs to the tune of about $300 billion.
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After Kennedy was elected it was discovered that there really wasn’t a missile gap, but that fact, too, did not stop the appropriation of billions of dollars for further expansion of U.S. missile forces. In the missile and nuclear warhead race of the 1960
s
and 1970
s
, it is impossible to say whether we or the Soviets were the generator.

A modicum of stability seemed to be established in the 1970
s
with the ABM Treaty and various undertakings to limit testing. But the election of Ronald Reagan as president in 1980 again unleashed the American search for invulnerability. Reagan said the doctrine of MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction) that then guided U.S. nuclear deterrence strategy was itself mad. The notion of voluntarily accepting vulnerability was just un-American, and Reagan launched the $50 billion Strategic Defense Initiative, better known as Star Wars, to develop a system capable of knocking down any missiles launched at the United States before they could arrive. Few scientists thought the system could ever be made to work effectively, but neither doubts nor cost were any object when the goal was invulnerability. The end of the Cold War slowed this program but did not kill it. Rather it metamorphosed into the current National Missile Defense system, for which the United States abrogated the ABM treaty in 2001. As noted earlier, it was promoted as a defense against missile strikes from ‘rogue nations,’ but looks suspiciously as if it were aimed at China. Again, there are grave doubts about its effectiveness. As former Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition and Technology Jacques Gansler told me in August 2002, the system has not worked under the simplest of controlled situations and is very susceptible to decoys and other evasive measures.

Of course, if it can truly provide protection against the destruction of major U.S. population centers, it would be worth a substantial investment. But there are several ironies in the situation. First, despite years of research and billions of dollars of expense, the proposed system would have been useless against the kind of missiles that struck the World Trade Towers on September 11. It would be useless, too, against the hand-held Stinger missiles that helped bring the Mujahedin victory in Afghanistan and that nearly brought down an Israeli airliner over Nairobi on November 28, 2002. There are an estimated 700,000 of these missiles available around the world, many of them supplied by the United States to countries and groups with terrorist connections.
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These are truly the weapons of rogues: cheap, easy to carry and conceal, and capable of bringing air travel to a complete halt. Yet there has been virtually no effort, certainly nothing comparable to SDI and NMD, to control or defend against these weapons.

From another perspective, the attempts of designated ‘Axis of Evil’ states like North Korea and Iran to obtain nuclear weapons and missiles may be more to defend against, than to threaten, us. Our tendency to replace regimes and our emphasis on overwhelming military power send a clear message of danger to many governments. And our recent experience in North Korea cannot have gone unnoticed. It has a few nuclear weapons and missiles and holds Seoul hostage. We have been forced to back away from our threats here while continuing to threaten Iraq with attack at any moment. The message couldn’t be clearer. Obtain nukes and the Americans will become more reasonable. NMD won’t change this tactic, because the nukes don’t have to be aimed at American soil.

The persistence of this and other systems demonstrates a depressing aspect of the American political system. You can’t kill a weapons system or a base. Once a project gets launched, it picks up bureaucratic and congressional champions who direct money to key congressional districts. The arms industry purposely spreads work widely around the country to assure the support of as many congresspersons as possible, particularly those who chair key committees. For example, in 1998, the Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, Republican of Georgia, managed to have $2.5 billion added to the defense budget for procurement of airplanes even the air force said it didn’t want, because the planes were produced in his state.
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Various regions’ economic and political need to keep weapons systems going perpetuates their proliferation, which in turn creates pressure for their deployment and use. Thus, although the F – 15 is often described as the world’s most advanced aircraft and the United States has more than one thousand of them, but the U.S. defense establishment is planning their replacement with the more advanced F-22. Another example of this process is a proposal to deploy space weapons that could ward off attack on U.S. space-based hardware and destroy the satellites and space hardware of other countries. There is no known threat to America in space, but the temptation is there to militarize it because we can, and for somebody the project means research grants and jobs and votes.

The arms industry is also a major exporter and provider of jobs. An iron law of business economics is that one seeks to amortize capital and R & D investments over as large a production run as possible, thereby reducing the per unit cost of these investments. With the United States spending approximately 70 percent of military R & D worldwide, it is not surprising that arms exports are a big American business. The Commerce, State, and Defense departments all maintain large staffs to sell and facilitate the export of American weapons to the world. In 1999, the last year for which statistics are available, the world’s arms trade rose to nearly $52 billion, after declining from $70 billion in 1989 to a low of about $40 billion in 1994. A little more than half of this was imports by developed countries, the rest by developing countries. U.S. exports, which accounted for 64 percent of these sales, are likely to approach 70 percent in the future based on sales agreements already signed.
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The top buyers of U.S. weapons are Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, Japan, Britain, Turkey, Israel, South Korea, Egypt, and Greece. If it looks to you as if the United States is sometimes arming both sides of a conflict, you’re right.

Much more than selling is involved. The United States uses arms arrangements to cement relationships with key countries, to standardize equipment and procedures globally, and also to gain a degree of control over foreign government policies. For example, Poland announced in January 2003 that it would procure forty-eight new F-16 fighters from the United States as part of its program to beef up its forces to meet its obligations as a new member of NATO.
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This is obviously good for General Dynamics, which makes F-l6
s
, and for the U.S. economy, but it has several other implications. For one thing, it further weakens competitive European aircraft makers by depriving them of a sale, thus raising their costs and making other customers more likely to buy the F-16. (This is counter to U.S. pressure for more European defense reform.) It makes the Polish Air Force interoperable with the U.S. Air Force but not necessarily compatible with other NATO forces. Because parts are to be supplied from the United States, it also gives U.S. officials leverage in the event that Poland wants to do something with those airplanes that is at odds with U.S. wishes. But that, of course, is the biggest question of all. What, exactly, is Poland going to do with those planes? Neither NATO nor Poland faces any significant threat that F-16
s
can address, and one might think that as a developing country Poland could make better use of the money. That was certainly the position of Brazil, whose new President ‘Lula’ announced at nearly the same time that he would cancel delivery of U.S. fighter planes ordered by the previous administration because Brazil has better ways to spend the money. This kind of behavior gets a head of state branded a ‘dangerous leftist.’

Poland may have been anticipating future arrangements such as those the United States has concluded with Japan, Korea, and a number of other countries under which they co-produce and even co-develop the weapons. U.S. deals to sell weapons systems, and especially aircraft, are often predicated upon the conclusion of what are known as ‘offset’ arrangements. This means that the buying country – say, Korea – will receive a license to produce part or all of the airplane in its domestic factories, and that the technology necessary to do so will be transferred from the original U.S. producer. A number of countries have used procurement of U.S. aircraft in this way to develop an indigenous aircraft industry where none previously existed. Japan has proven particularly adept at gradually making more and more of an airplane until finally it has become a full partner in the development of the next generations. This process actually raises the cost of the final product because it makes production runs shorter than if they were all made in the United States and exported off the shelf. Japan’s new FSX fighter will go for about $150 million per copy, while simply buying an equivalent off the shelf would cost less than half that.
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Beyond the immediate cost, the transfer of technology not only diminishes American industrial leadership but also makes critical weapons systems more easily available. This is all done in the name of improving U.S. security.

Whether it actually does that is not clear, but it certainly reduces the productivity of the U.S. economy. By spending 3-5 percent of our GDP on defense, we are in effect taking that much and investing it in products and services we will mostly never use. Thus at the first level, we lose the returns we would get by investing in productive assets. At the second level, we would gain more by simply exporting off the shelf, but we lose much of that gain through offset arrangements and joint development deals. Finally, at the third level, our inexpensively transferred proprietary technology is used by foreign competitors to improve a wide range of products and services that compete commercially with U.S. offerings. We lament that we have to do this because of our special responsibilities and burdens and complain that our allies don’t spend to maintain equivalent force capabilities. But the truth is that we want these responsibilities. We demand them, and the proof is the offset deals. The official story is we do these deals to defend our allies. But the allies demand bribes to accept the deals. Obviously they don’t see the threats the same way we do. They are taking advantage of our need to shoulder special burdens, and we beg them to do it.