Two pieces got emailed to me in the last few days that nicely
illustrate just how entrenched semi-imperial thinking has become in
Washington, how wildly disconnected from the reality of US security our
foreign policy community’s threat assessments have become, and the
hysteria that greets serious debate on DoD’s size in this post-Great
Recession era of high unemployment and large deficits. This, by good-journalist-turned-disturbing-militarist Robert Kaplan, and this, by the ‘Iraq was a victory’ crowd at AEI. Here’s Kaplan:
“The bottom may be starting to fall out of the U.S. defense budget. I
do not refer to numbers when I say this. I am not interested in
numbers. I am only interested in public support for those numbers….
Actually, we might need a big army for an occupation of part of North
Korea… The public, in short, wants protection on the cheap. It may not
necessarily be willing to police the world with a big navy and a big air
force at least to the degree that it has in the past — that is, unless a
clear and demonstrable conventional threat can be identified.”
Read the entire article
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