You might think that in a time of near-universal worry about the growing deficit, a Democratic president might take the opportunity to trim the defense budget by a few bombs. But holding military spending at its current levels—much less trimming it by the trillion-or-so dollars that experts say could be cut—apparently isn’t on the table. Obama wouldn’t even include military spending in his proposed spending freeze. As an influential critic of military spending once said about the country’s ongoing indulgence in defense pork, “Twenty years after the Cold War ended, this is simply not acceptable. It’s irresponsible. Our troops and our taxpayers deserve better.” That’s true, and could be pretty good guidance for a willing politician. And all it would take for the president to follow it would be for him to listen to his own advice. ~Peter Suderman

Via Andrew

Peter is absolutely right that Obama’s military budgets are indefensible, but we certainly shouldn’t be surprised. Since he was elected to the Senate, Obama has never been a particularly strong critic of the size of the U.S. military, nor has he seriously challenged the idea that the military should be used all over the globe. Complaining about pork and waste in military spending is all very well, but when it does not include criticism of the sheer size of the overall military budget it is the equivalent of complaining about earmarks while ignoring entitlement spending. It is a fiscally meaningless gesture that is supposed to signal that you take excessive spending seriously when you obviously don’t. At the same time, Obama has been assailed from the start of his term as a neo-isolationist, defense-slashing fool. Despite continually increasing the Pentagon’s budget, he has regularly been accused of reducing it. His modest arms reduction treaty has been portrayed as a capitulation to Russia, and hawks simply ignore his funding for nuclear arsenal modernization because they have re-defined “modernization” to mean building an entirely new arsenal. Hawks have been screaming about Obama’s alleged hostility to missile defense at the same time that Obama pursues missile defense in eastern Europe. Even if Obama were inclined to cut military spending, the bipartisan caterwauling this would unleash would prevent him from making any headway. As we should all know by now, Obama doesn’t challenge or buck entrenched interests, and that is exactly what warfare state reform would require.

Suppose that Obama had proposed real, large cuts to the Pentagon’s budget. The hawks would be screaming even more loudly, but they would now be able to point to real reductions in military spending rather than inventing them out of thin air. This would probably be to the political advantage of Republican hawks, since the majority of the public is as indifferent to excessive spending in the Pentagon as they are to entitlement spending. Most voters are likely to react poorly to proposals that will “make America weaker,” as the hawks will inevitably claim. If Obama were actually the enthusiast for nuclear disarmament and foe of missile defense the hawks desperately need him to be, they would be hitting him twice as hard as they are now, but instead of making things up they would be attacking Obama’s actual policies.

None of this excuses the administration’s fiscal irresponsibility, but it should make clear that there will be no significant reductions in military spending until the leadership in both parties agree not to use those reductions to bludgeon the other side. If we do end up with a Republican House majority, that will in some respects be the worst of both worlds, since there is no powerful constituency in the GOP that wants military spending cuts and Presidents rarely offer to trim the part of the budget that gives them so much power and freedom of action. Republican Presidents typically wouldn’t think of doing this, and Democratic Presidents have no reason to try, since they are going to be accused of gutting American “defense” no matter what they actually do.

That makes things sound rather grim, and perhaps they are. The constituencies that strongly support reductions in military spending are progressives, libertarians and deficit hawks, which also happen to be three constituencies with the least influence in their respective parties when it comes to national security policies. Obama’s military budgets are huge because there are no significant political obstacles to making them that way and there are no political incentives to make them smaller. A first, small step in changing the way we talk about military spending involves referring to military spending as just that. If military spending is ever going to be reduced, most Americans will need to acknowledge that the vast majority of military spending has a tenuous or non-existent relationship to the defense of the United States. At the very least, critics of that spending should avoid casually referring to it as defense spending, when that is not the purpose of most of these expenditures.

Two years after being tossed out of power at every level, it’s about to waltz right back in, kicking aside the corpses of Democrats foolish enough to go along with the designs of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. This is good news for most conservatives. It’s slightly worse news for a smaller group of conservatives—namely, the ones who spent the end of the ’00s explaining why a Republican comeback like this was not really possible. ~Dave Weigel

I realize the article is over a week old by now, but there were a few things I wanted to say about it and about some of the follow-up posts. Obviously, it’s true that “reformist” conservatives did nothing to facilitate Republican gains in this year’s election, but what is equally true and not as clearly stated in Weigel’s article as it might be is that Republican gains are not driven by popular support for a positive Republican agenda of any kind. Neither are they being driven by an ideological rejection of the administration’s agenda. One can defend or mock the “Pledge to America,” and one can sympathize with or scorn Tea Partiers, but neither of them has much to do with reviving GOP political fortunes.

The reality is that Republican gains this year are the product of immense economic discontent and anxiety to which few conservatives have plausible answers. One doesn’t have to like the policy recommendations of “reformist” conservatives to acknowledge that they have been just about the only ones on the right trying to provide those answers. Their answers have tended to dominate discussions of reforming conservatism because they’re the only ones actively engaged in the conversation. When the dust settles and Republican office-holders are looking for advice on policy and legislation, “reformists” will win the day for lack of serious competition.

If the main observation of “reformist” conservatives is that Americans, including most Republicans, are comfortable with the existing welfare state and want their government doing more to alleviate that discontent and anxiety, that is pretty hard to contradict. As I have hinted at before, there is probably no worse time for an agenda of severe austerity and budget-cutting than in the wake of one of the worst recessions in the last century, and to the extent that conservative activists genuinely want to pursue an agenda of austerity and budget-cutting they need to understand that there will be no political rewards for their efforts. If the “reformist” proposal is that Republicans need to adopt policies that attempt to alleviate economic discontent and anxiety, one would think that their proposal would be taken more seriously now than it was before the bursting of the housing bubble, the financial crisis and the recession. One might say that the incoherence and fiscal irresponsibility of the “Pledge” are acknowledgments from the Republican leadership that the reformists have a good idea of what the public will and will not tolerate.

My apologies for the unusually long silence over the past week. I am a week overdue in addressing the responses to my last column, but I did want to make a few remarks about James Joyner’s careful rebuttal of my main claim of NATO’s obsolescence. First, here is James:

But our primary motivation was our own security, not selfless sacrifice for the love of our European cousins. Yes, we were there to protect Western Europe. But we were drawing the line on the limits of Soviet influence.

NATO’s premise from the very beginning was that we were all in this thing together. And that remains the idea behind the Alliance. “Out of area” and various mission sets are force planning concepts, not rationales for existence.

I regret if I gave the impression that I think the creation of NATO had something to do with “selfless sacrifice” or “love of our European cousins.” It didn’t. As James says, Americans were motivated by our own security to create the Alliance. This an important point, and one that weakens pro-NATO and anti-anti-NATO arguments considerably. It is because the creation of NATO was first and foremost an anti-Soviet measure designed to enhance American security that America has no need of it any longer. When James diverts later to make an appeal to a “Europe whole and free” as justification for NATO expansion, he is appealing to sentiment and the idea that the Alliance has everything to do with “love of our European cousins,” or at least sympathy for the Poles and the Baltic nations.

The idea that “we’re all in this thing together” makes a great deal more sense if there were a general conflict or geopolitical struggle in which Americans and Europeans share common cause. There is a strong desire to make the “war on terror” fit that description, but it doesn’t. This brings us back to the matter of “out of area” operations. James writes that “it simply made sense for the West to continue working together to achieve our shared interests,” but the idea that Europeans share security interests in central Asia or the Near East with America doesn’t really make sense. It’s true that the “out of area” missions are not attempts to find “new conflicts to justify NATO’s existence.” They are the product of deciding that the post-Balkans NATO will be an international stabilizing force. The “out of area” missions have resulted from the re-definition of NATO that already happened in the 1990s when member states were confronted with the Alliance’s obsolescence for the first time. Once NATO opted for international vigilantism in Kosovo, there were all kinds of conflicts that could conceivably require the Alliance’s attentions.

It’s true that the U.S. has intervened and will continue to intervene militarily in other countries without NATO’s support or approval, but it is hardly news to James that many of the new allied governments brought in during the last two rounds of NATO expansion were among the most willing and eager to lend political cover to the invasion of Iraq. Yes, a few NATO members strongly opposed the invasion, but by my count at least twelve Alliance members rallied behind the U.S. in a war that clearly had nothing to do with European security. Albania supported the Iraq war and sent a few dozen soldiers as part of the initial invasion. This was before it had formally been accepted into NATO, and it was mostly done out of gratitude for U.S./NATO support for the KLA terrorists in Kosovo, but one can also see Albanian support in terms of its desire to be accepted into the Alliance. Slovakia was another would-be member that sent soldiers to Iraq to secure its place in the Alliance.

The enthusiasm of central and eastern European governments to help invade Iraq was a small but significant political boost for pro-war arguments in 2002-03, and Italian and Spanish participation left Germany relatively isolated among the Alliance’s major European members. All of this helped to maintain the fiction that the invasion was a “coalition” war akin to the Gulf War rather than an overwhelmingly Anglo-American effort. I should add that all of this enthusiasm was only at the official, government level; the nations of central, eastern and southern Europe were against the war as much as any other European nation. Without NATO expansion since 1996, it is hard to imagine many governments in Europe besides Britain lending any support to the Iraq war.

Admittedly, these new NATO members are militarily very weak countries, and other than Poland they have not contributed much to U.S.-led war efforts. That just points to a more significant flaw with NATO expansion: it extends security guarantees to countries that contribute next to nothing and which are net liabilities to the United States. If the Cold War-era NATO enhanced American security, the post-Cold War NATO detracts from it.

Regarding NATO expansion, I argued last week that expansion has been clearly detrimental to European stability and security because of the role of expansion in escalating the “frozen” conflicts in the Caucasus. James’ reply on this point is probably his weakest:

The counter-argument to this is that the problem in Georgia was not the proposed expansion of NATO but rather the lack of it. Would Russia have invaded the sovereign territory of a NATO Ally, risking military retaliation from the West, over its rather meager interests in South Ossetia and Abkhazia? It’s unknowable but I rather doubt it.

Yes, that is the counter-argument, and it is one that doesn’t have much evidence to support it. Russia didn’t just happen to invade Georgia. Yes, it goaded Saakashvili into lashing out, but he was the one who lashed out and escalated the conflict. The Georgian war in 2008 was the result of Saakashvili’s belief that he had the backing of the West and could “reintegrate” South Ossetia without suffering the consequences of using force against a region he knew to be under Russian control. Would Saakashvili have shown greater restraint and patience if he had a formal security guarantee from NATO? All that he needed in 2008 was a vague promise given at the Bucharest summit earlier that year that Georgia would eventually be granted membership, and that was enough to enable his reckless behavior. Had Georgia been admitted to NATO earlier in 2008, it would not have made Saakashvili less reckless, but it would have obliged the U.S. and all our allies to defend Georgia or show our security guarantees to be the empty, and therefore dangerous, political gestures that I believe most of them really are.

My new column for The Week lays out the argument for the obsolescence of NATO and the dangers of keeping it going when it has no real purpose. These arguments will be very familiar to readers here, and I am indebted to conservative and libertarian critics of NATO from the past two decades for much of what I wrote, but I hope I have managed to re-state the case against NATO in an interesting way.

There have been two distinct, related arguments going on concerning the administration’s claim to have the authority to assassinate U.S. citizens. The first, more important argument is over the administration’s refusal to allow review or accountability for the power being claimed. The problem here is obviously that the administration is claiming the authority to order the death of a citizen on the basis of evidence that the public cannot see as part of a process that allows for no legal remedy if this power is abused. If someone tries to sue, the government will shut down the lawsuit by invoking secrecy and national security. This is the very definition of unaccountable, lawless government. Defending the particular instance of targeting al-Awlaki for assassination doesn’t even address the main question, which is the administration’s effective claim to be beyond the law.

In al-Awlaki’s case, there may be ample evidence in the public domain to persuade us that he has committed treason and has sided with the declared enemies of the United States, but the administration is claiming that it would have the authority to order a citizen’s death solely on the basis of evidence not available to the public, and it could theoretically carry out that order anywhere. We have to trust that this does not apply to potential targets in the U.S. because there are more “practical” ways of apprehending them, and because it is formally against the law, but who exactly would hold a future administration accountable if it violated the law?

It is the outrageous nature of the claim and the enormous potential for abuse that provoke outraged complaints against tyrannical government. If this actually were just a narrow claim about the authority to kill a handful of enemy operatives, the debate would be a lot less heated and it would be rather less important. What we’re talking about is the executive’s ability to create unchecked authority for itself to kill citizens it deems guilty as part of an essentially undefined, open-ended, global conflict that has no apparent end.

The second, related argument concerns the name defenders of the administration’s claim give to the action of killing these individuals. The word assassination evokes many negative associations, so there is an instinctive reaction against using it, but it is the proper word to describe what happens when someone gives an order to eliminate a key member of another state/army/organization.

Andrew doesn’t want to call it that, because he seems to think that calling it assassination undermines the argument that it is a legitimate act of war, but it is often during wartime when key members of the other side are targeted for assassination. Andrew defines assassination in a sufficiently narrow way that it can’t ever apply in wartime. The Assassins were engaged in warfare against their enemies. Killing by stealth and surprise was their preferred tactic, because it was effective and compensated for their military weakness. Essentially, Andrew has been repeatedly making the argument that killing al-Awlaki is legitimate because he is a key member of Al Qaeda, but then furiously denies that killing him would be an assassination. If he weren’t a key member of Al Qaeda, it wouldn’t be an asassination, but would simply be a murder. Most critics of this outrageous power-grab are willing to concede that al-Awlaki is what the government claims that he is, but it doesn’t follow that the government gets to have unreviewable authority to order the assassination.

In my last post, I compared the unwillingness to call assassination by its proper name with the refusal to call torture by its proper name. That still makes sense to me, but it confused things a bit. Defenders of torture were never really willing to defend torture by name, so they had to keep re-defining torture to include fewer and fewer things. What we have in the current debate is a preference to avoid using a word because it has associations with illicit killing, but at the same time the act is not necessarily illicit in the context of war. So in this debate the correct word has to be avoided because it makes the administration’s claim sound worse. It is the nature of the claim to unreviewable authority to order deaths on secret evidence rather than the name of the type of killing that is truly outrageous.

My insistence on calling such killings assassinations comes from a weariness with our culture’s habit of dressing up everything with euphemisms. Even though it was/is a war of aggression, the invasion of Iraq is not called a war of aggression, our continued combat presence in Iraq is re-defined as “residual forces” because we have decided to declare an end to combat operations, and occupation is called nation-building. People use euphemisms for two main reasons: to put others at ease, or to put oneself at ease with something that is genuinely disturbing. Calling these killings assassinations doesn’t concede all that much, which is why it is all the more remarkable that supporters of the administration’s power-grab keep rejecting it.

We should all be able to agree that it is the power-grab, rather than the specific reason for the power-grab, that is troubling and outrageous. Indeed, the more legitimate of a target al-Awlaki is, the less justifiable the administration’s claim becomes.

Peter Lee writes in The Asia Times on the dispute over the Senkaku Islands:

Judging from the Asahi article, Prime Minister Naoto Kan was not pleased that his term had begun with a major diplomatic dust-up courtesy of Maehara and his patron, Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) secretary general Katsuya Okada.

Okada and Maehara are the two most powerful proponents of a strong US alliance within the traditionally leftist and non-aligned DPJ.

If Lee’s account is right, what we have here is an instance of an overzealous cabinet minister in an allied government creating a major incident out of a manageable, minor episode. What is more, we see that the minister was doing it to pull the U.S. into the dispute and solidify the U.S.-Japanese alliance by creating the false impression that Japan was responding to reckless Chinese actions. Of course, the alliance wouldn’t have needed nearly so much solidifying if Washington had forced the new DPJ government to abide by a wildly unpopular Okinawa basing agreement that brought down PM Hatoyama.

Beyond the recklessness of the Japanese foreign minister, Lee argues that it has been the administration’s increased focus on East Asia (“the return to Asia”) that has encouraged U.S. allies in the region to become more combative in their relations with China. That may or may not be the case, but it certainly sounds plausible that the perception of greater U.S. involvement in a region would encourage allies to take a harder line on territorial disputes with their neighbors. We have certainly seen how unflinching U.S. support can lead reckless leaders in allied countries to take more aggressive actions on the assumption that the U.S. will back them in a crisis. As it turned out in the case of Georgia, there was an unrealistic expectation of U.S. backing that came from taking Bush’s rhetoric too seriously, and it proved disastrous for Georgia. Fortunately, it seems that PM Kan has done enough to defuse the crisis for the moment.

Additionally, according to Lee, the entire claim that China declared the South China Sea to be a “core interest” may have been a significant exaggeration of China’s position or simply an invention of a position that the Chinese government has not taken. If that’s true, and China hasn’t claimed the South China Sea as a “core interest,” it is possible that the entire framing of recent Chinese actions has been completely wrong. That would make the alarmists warning about Chinese military ambitions even more woefully wrong than they already were, and it would make a big difference in assessing the reasonableness of U.S. guarantees to Southeast Asian nations that America will guard against a Chinese claim that China may not have made. Like delusional fears of Russian “expansionism” two years ago, the alarms about aggressive Chinese claims may be false ones that are being sounded to rationalize greater American involvement in regions where it is not needed.

I recommend reading all of Lee’s column. He is certainly making sense when he writes the following:

The fine lines between spin, self-delusion, and lazy disregard for geopolitical realities seem to be blurring, at least in the foreign affairs quadrant of the Western media.

That would be pretty much par for the course, but that’s no reason why the rest of us have to go along with it.

It is interesting how uncomfortable the word assassination makes supporters of the President’s supposed power to order the assassination of U.S. citizens. It’s actually not that different from the contortions defenders of torture engaged in to avoid admitting that they were defending torture. Aggressive interrogation methods? Well, sure, that was all right, but torture is clearly wrong. The same meaningless distinction seems to be at work here. As long as we don’t call the assassination of U.S. citizens assassination or execution, but refer to it in some other way, it becomes a bit easier to rationalize and defend.

For years, Israeli targeted killings of militant leaders in Palestine have been referred to as assassinations, and no one has any objections to calling them that because this is what they are and because the people targeted in these assassination attacks are usually members of terrorist groups. Indeed, the bulk of Andrew’s response to Glenn Greenwald is that Al-Awlaki is a member of a terrorist group and is therefore a legitimate target, but he refuses to call killing him an assassination when that is the only thing we could possibly call it. When the U.S. government targets Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders for execution by drone strike, these are sometimes called “decapitation” strikes, which isn’t quite the same as calling it an assassination. Nonetheless, a decapitation strike achieves the purpose of assassination, which is typically to eliminate a high political/military leader to try to throw a government or army or organization into chaos.

The trouble for supporters of this outrageous power-grab is that the word assassination deservedly has strong negative associations. Once they start saying, “Yes, we believe the President has the authority to assassinate U.S. citizens under certain circumstances,” they start to sound rather callous and seem to show serious disregard for the rule of law. Assassination is usually something that fanatics or ideologues do to those in power, so it is a little strange when it is applied to the actions of governments against individuals, but assassination is a tactic that can be used by states or by individuals. It doesn’t cease being an assassination if it is ordered by the government, and it doesn’t cease being an assassination if it is done to someone who belongs to a terrorist group. Al-Awlaki may be everything the government claims that he is, just as Padilla might have been, but that doesn’t eliminate the protections afforded by citizenship. However, even if al-Awlaki’s treason did negate his legal protections as a citizen, the government would still be assassinating him if it had him killed. If supporters of this outrageous power-grab are uneasy about calling it by its proper name, perhaps they should reconsider whether they actually want to support it.

I was saddened to learn of the passing of Joseph Sobran. Mr. Sobran was a favorite columnist of mine, and not simply because I generally agreed with him. He was an outstanding writer, as even most of his critics would agree. Some of his most memorable work was on his study and appreciation of Shakespeare, including the book he authored on the identity of Shakespeare. I was fortunate to have exchanged a few messages with him earlier this decade when Sobran’s was still in operation. In my dealings with him, Mr. Sobran was cordial, thoughtful and very generous with his words of encouragement and advice. May God grant rest to the soul of His servant.

I just don’t think that a Republican can convincingly oppose the president using talking-point platitudes. ~John Bolton, explaining why he is considering a presidential bid.

I think in the last two years, President Obama has deliberately, consciously downplayed the threats that the United States faces in the world. I don’t think he’s interested in national security….I don’t think he fundamentally believes that it is his job to advance American interests. ~John Bolton, offering up talking-point platitudes.

When I first heard murmurings about a possible Bolton run, I thought it had to be some sort of inside joke that made sense only to people at AEI. Personally, I would find a Bolton for President campaign very entertaining. Just imagine the spectacle at the primary debates as Bolton keeps trying to out-hawk everyone on stage. He could provide some of the major candidates with a perfect foil to show that they aren’t reckless and belligerent, or the other candidates will get into an escalating shouting match with him as they try to prove that they are far more gung-ho and aggressive than he is. It could really liven up what promise to be otherwise very dull events.

Obviously, Bolton has no illusions that he will be competitive as a candidate. He says he wouldn’t run a “typical” campaign, which means that he probably wouldn’t bother meeting with people in primary states to ask for their votes, but it wouldn’t matter if he did. Nothing could be more uninteresting to most primary voters of either party in the coming decade than a single-issue candidacy focused on the idea that the U.S. needs to be more activist and aggressive in the world. Iraq and Afghanistan are going to leave the public so sick of foreign entanglements for the next ten years that Bolton’s message will be very unpopular. Bolton is contemplating a run as a way of promoting his particular brand of hawkish foreign policy and forcing the major contenders to grapple with the issues he wants them to pay attention to, and as far as it goes it doesn’t matter very much.

What I do find interesting is Bolton’s apparent perception of the likely Republican field. It seems that he regards the likely contenders as being so unequal to the task of facing off against Obama on national security issues that he thinks it might be necessary to launch a protest candidacy as a way of bringing them up to speed. What I find amusing about all of this is that Bolton isn’t going to be critiquing Obama with anything more than “talking-point platitudes,” either, and there is really no need for Bolton to represent the interests of hawkish interventionists, since almost every likely Republican contender embraces Bolton’s worldview more or less completely.

Bolton’s latest remarks are much more amusing because they happen to have come out the day after a Robert Kagan column claiming that the main problems that Kagan and Bolton have had with Obama’s foreign policy are disappearing. Most of Kagan’s argument is horribly misleading to the extent that he simply invents the difference between the first year and a half of Obama’s foreign policy and the administration’s recent statements and decisions, but the more that the Kagans of the world are satisfied with the direction of Obama’s foreign policy the more ridiculous Bolton’s protests appear.