Michael Auslin does his best to paint a picture of the dire “dimming of our age” (via Scoblete) that will come with gradual reduction in U.S. military presence overseas, and the future he predicts does not seem very gloomy at all:

The upshot of these three trends will likely be a series of decisions to slowly, but irrevocably reduce America’s overseas global military presence and limit our capacity to uphold peace and intervene around the globe. And, as we hollow out our capabilities, China will be fielding ever more accurate anti-ship ballistic missiles, advanced fighter aircraft, and stealthy submarines; Russia will continue to expand its influence over its “near abroad” while modernizing its nuclear arsenal; and Iran will develop nuclear weapons, leading to an arms race or preemptive attacks in the Middle East.

Under such conditions, global trade flows will be stressed, the free flow of capital will be constrained, and foreign governments will expand their regulatory and confiscatory powers against their domestic economies in order to fund their own military expansions.

In other words, unsustainable U.S. hegemony will not be as great as it was, and that will mean that other major and rising powers will be able to exert something more like the normal influence in their regions that such powers have exerted throughout most of modern history. Will there be conflicts in such a world? Of course, there will be, but we already have a number of conflicts in the world that have either been deemed irrelevant to the maintenance of Pax Americana or they are the products of policies designed to perpetuate Pax Americana. In practice, securing this “peace” has involved starting several wars, the largest and most destructive of which has been the war in Iraq, as well as supporting proxies and allies as they escalated conflicts with their neighbors.

China will build up its military, as it is already doing, and Russia will continue to extend its influence into its “near-abroad,” and Iran will develop nuclear weapons. What is important to stress here is that all of these things already are or soon will be happening anyway. These things are happening despite, and perhaps in some cases because of, American military presence in their respective regions. The reality of multipolarity makes these first two more or less unavoidable, and as we have been seeing over the last few years there is nothing short of full-scale war with Iran that could realistically interrupt the development of its nuclear program. If Iran definitely decides to acquire nuclear weapons, there is remarkably little that any outside government can do to prevent this from happening. One sure way to guarantee that Iran pursues this route is to continue to act punitively towards Iran. If Western powers actively resist Russian efforts to exercise influence along its own borders as the U.S. and some European states have been doing, all that will result is the use of Russia’s smaller neighbors as Western proxies. This will have very unfortunate consequences for the proxies, which the Russians will intimidate and/or attack and which Western powers will not aid in direct conflicts with Russia.

Too many American policymakers and policy analysts remain devoted to restoring a degree of American preeminence that existed in 1991-92 and will probably never come again. The reality is that we may not even see American preeminence c. 2008, much less the way it was twenty years ago. Our policies and our military deployments around the world have not adjusted to this reality. Now some of our closest allies are forcing us to come to terms with the way the world has changed.

Of course, one could simply dismiss Auslin’s argument as an attempt to justify the current, indefensible size of the absurdly overgrown warfare and security state. This would hardly be the first time that a defender of an entrenched government program or institution resorted to exaggerating the calamities that reduction in services would create. It is also not the first time that such a defender simply imagines a threat to the program or institution. As usual, the danger/promise of reducing America’s overseas military presence is not nearly as great as Auslin claims.

What provoked this vision of the “dimming of our age”? The British Foreign Affairs Select Committee’s report pronouncing the “special relationship” dead and the continued resistance by the DPJ government in Japan to the location of a Marine air station in Okinawa. Oh, and health care. It is telling that the foreign examples Auslin provides are the results of national backlashes against perceived excessive identification with or dependence on U.S. power. Britain walked in lockstep with the United States before and during the war in Iraq, and it was badly burned by the experience. Japan has tolerated a continued military presence on Okinawa despite a history of abuses suffered by the civilian population. Some of our best allies feel used or put-upon, and their complaints stem from precisely the sort of overbearing hegemonist attitude that tends to treat many of our allies more like satrapies rather than treating them as sovereign, independent states with their own interests.

So some of the countries that theoretically benefit most from the American ability to “to uphold peace and intervene around the globe” want to adjust their relationships with the U.S. so that their national interests are better served. Britain and Japan are not proposing to scrap their alliances with America, nor are they necessarily declaring their opposition to America’s active role in their parts of the world, but they do seem to be saying that they should give more thought to how often their security and foreign policies line up closely with our own. Instead of taking advantage of the potential for increased burden-sharing these moves represent and instead of encouraging allies to tap into their own resources to provide for their defense, we hear laments foretelling the “dimming of our age.”

As for the so-called “romantic belief in global fraternity,” which very few people actually hold, there have been no greater romantics than the idealists who have deluded themselves and many of us that the interests of the rest of the world and the interests of the United States frequently converge. American hegemonists have been fairly certain that democratization and globalization advance American power, and so they have tried to encourage both on the unfounded assumptions that economic interdependence and democracy will tend to prevent conflict and will lead other governments to align with Washington. As both emerging-market democracies and long-established industrialized democratic powers have been showing us in recent years, neither democratization nor globalization magnifies American power, but instead has tended to create more increasingly powerful centers of resistance to Washington’s policies. In a way, that is a credit to past successes of U.S. policy: American power provided the protection and shelter to permit war-ravaged nations to rebuild and become capable of providing for their own needs and defense. The collapse of the Soviet Union gave us the chance to end our abnormal and untraditional global role, and Washington failed to seize the opportunity. We are now at a point when we can still disentangle ourselves from many places around the world largely on our own terms and when we can shift the burdens for regional security to the regional powers and institutions that are capable of taking them up, but there seems to be no political will and no imagination needed to make this happen.