RiverDad
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As noted earlier, I do believe our allies should also take measures to strengthen their defense capabilities. At the same time, I don't favor a policy of abandoning allies for numerous reasons:
1. The benefits that have flowed to the U.S. from a stable, prosperous, and peaceful Europe have repaid the costs of U.S. security investments and the Marshall Plan many times over. The dividends continue to flow to this day.
The question is how to allocate the costs of a stable world order. Obviously we benefit from a stable system which allows ME oil to flow to industrialized nations friendly to us. Absent oil from the ME it's hard to articulate a national interest for the US which would warrant our involvement in the region. There is a "security charge" that could be assigned to each barrel of oil and those costs should be borne by the nations that benefit from the oil, the secure transit routes and the stable international commercial environment created during Pax Americana. All those shoulds amount to nothing because the cost of providing the system falls on us.
3. Germany has contributed manpower and equipment to U.S. conflicts, including in Afghanistan. So, Germany has been actively backing the U.S., and even losing lives in the process.
And the US interest in Afghanistan is what exactly? Sure, sure, it benefits us to not have them be a terrorist base from which future attacks on the US could be launched, but beyond that why are we there trying to stabilize and modernize? Why is Germany there? Why was Canada there? We see that drone strikes into Waziristan work fairly effectively at disrupting terrorist operations, so if an Afghanistan absent western military presence ever began to move back towards being an Al Queda launching pad, the same drone policy could be rolled out there. Why are we wasting blood and treasure there?
4. Had the U.S. listened more carefully to German and French reservations about Iraq and chosen not to go to war, it might have saved some $2 trillion or more in direct and indirect costs, not to mention avoided human war casualties.
Let's keep in mind that the issue was never "go to war" versus "not go to war" for there still remained the issue of what to do with Saddam and the fraying sanctions regime. The alternative was "don't go to war and keep Saddam in power." I'm not saying that this would have been the wrong choice, just that the decision wasn't as simple as "don't go to war."
Without a prosperous and stable Europe, it is very unlikely that the U.S. economy and U.S. standard of living would be what it is. It is probably more likely than not that the U.S. would have been confronted with far more security threats than it has and just maybe the Soviet Union would have won the Cold War, creating a vastly different world than the one in which we live.
This is an extension of past policies being used to justify present policies. We can dispense with the past because that's a sunk cost. We have a stable and prosperous Europe now, so the justification for keeping up the military strength by appealing to Europe seems kind of weak. The issues today are different than in the immediate post-war era and during the Cold War. American strength vis a vis the world has declined in the intervening years. Secondly, as the years have progressed the allocation of budget resources in the Federal Government has changed as well. There has been a relentless increase in the social welfare component of the budget and this has been crowding out the growth of other functions. Defense is next on the chopping block because a.) people like free stuff and b.) our population is aging and they want their free Medicare.
The cost of maintaining American supremacy is high - what costs are we willing to bear in order to do so? Why should the cost of maintaining Pax Americana fall solely on the shoulders of the American taxpayer? Frankly, I can't see a way to reconcile what you suggest with both an aging population and the thirst for increased welfare dependency in the US.