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An End to Hegemony

Democratic nations in the region, worried that the United States may be losing influence, turn to Washington for reassurance that the U.S. security guarantee remains firm. If the United States cannot provide that assurance because it is cutting back its military capabilities, they will have to choose between accepting Chinese dominance and striking out on […]

Democratic nations in the region, worried that the United States may be losing influence, turn to Washington for reassurance that the U.S. security guarantee remains firm. If the United States cannot provide that assurance because it is cutting back its military capabilities, they will have to choose between accepting Chinese dominance and striking out on their own, possibly by building nuclear weapons. ~Robert Kagan

Hegemonists often say things like this, as if this is supposed to discourage Americans from reducing our military presence overseas. Since we can assume that China’s neighbors are not going to accept Chinese “dominance,” that means that they will have to start providing for more of their own security. It is possible that this will mean that some democratic states will acquire nuclear weapons. That is not ideal, but as long as China is a nuclear-armed state its neighbors are presumably going to want to have the protection of a nuclear deterrent. If it will not be ours, it will have to be theirs, and it makes more sense to start making the change to greater allied self-defense and less dependency on the United States when regional threats are reasonably well-contained. There’s really no reason why the U.S. should still be providing security guarantees to wealthy, self-sufficent democracies twenty years after the end of the Cold War. The underlying assumptions in Kagan’s argument here are that our allies cannot be trusted to make sound independent foreign policy decisions, and they cannot be trusted to have nuclear weapons. This is never quite stated openly, but this is what hegemonists mean when they say this.

The same applies to Kagan’s warnings about growing Iranian power in the Near East. It is supposed to be considered a disaster that allied states might start assuming more of the burden for their own security. Kagan’s argument is circular reasoning: the U.S. must provide security for the region, or else regional states will have to provide their own security, so the U.S. must provide security for the region. This is supposed to be a compelling case for endless U.S. military involvement around the world?

Kagan continues:

In the 1990s, after the Soviet Union had collapsed and the biggest problem in the world seemed to be ethnic conflict in the Balkans, it was at least plausible to talk about cutting back on American military capabilities. In the present, increasingly dangerous international environment, in which terrorism and great power rivalry vie as the greatest threat to American security and interests, cutting military capacities is simply reckless.

Of course, hegemonists did not consider military reductions plausible in the 1990s. According to them, the international environment is always “increasingly dangerous,” and they describe it this way no matter what is actually happening. The reality is that terrorism is not that great of a security threat. It is a real threat, and it is one that should be taken very seriously, but if it represents one of the two greatest threats to U.S. security and interests it becomes clear that reducing the American military presence overseas and reducing military spending overall are very reasonable and appropriate responses to the reduced threats of our time. If we are honest, we will have to acknowledge that while there are other major powers, it is an exaggeration to speak of “great power rivalry.” Granted, China is interested in regional hegemony, and so is Iran, but in what respect does either of them figure as a rival, except that the U.S. insists on denying them the status they seek in their own regions?

Kagan is correct that the only way to make substantial reductions in military spending is to reduce the size of the military, which means eliminating some of its missions:

To cut the size of the force, however, requires reducing or eliminating the missions those forces have been performing.

He states later on:

The only way to find substantial savings in the defense budget, therefore, is to change American strategy fundamentally.

That’s also right. If our existing security commitments make us “the only regional balancer against China in Asia, Russia in eastern Europe, and Iran in the Middle East,” it is well past time to scrap those commitments or at least begin the process of shifting the burden for these commitments to regional allies that have more than enough resources to meet them. The U.S. has no business being a regional balancer against any of these states, and the U.S. should not be expected to bear the burden for defending all of the nations of these regions.

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