Барак Обама - The Audacity of Hope

On the other hand, it’s time we acknowledge that a defense budget and force structure built principally around the prospect of World War III makes little strategic sense. The U.S. military and defense budget in 2005 topped $522 billion — more than that of the next thirty countries combined. The United States’ GDP is greater than that of the two largest countries and fastest-growing economies — China and India — combined. We need to maintain a strategic force posture that allows us to manage threats posed by rogue nations like North Korea and Iran and to meet the challenges presented by potential rivals like China. Indeed, given the depletion of our forces after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, we will probably need a somewhat higher budget in the immediate future just to restore readiness and replace equipment.

But our most complex military challenge will not be staying ahead of China (just as our biggest challenge with China may well be economic rather than military). More likely, that challenge will involve putting boots on the ground in the ungoverned or hostile regions where terrorists thrive. That requires a smarter balance between what we spend on fancy hardware and what we spend on our men and women in uniform. That should mean growing the size of our armed forces to maintain reasonable rotation schedules, keeping our troops properly equipped, and training them in the language, reconstruction, intelligence-gathering, and peacekeeping skills they’ll need to succeed in increasingly complex and difficult missions.

A change in the makeup of our military won’t be enough, though. In coping with the asymmetrical threats that we’ll face in the future — from terrorist networks and the handful of states that support them — the structure of our armed forces will ultimately matter less than how we decide to use those forces. The United States won the Cold War not simply because it outgunned the Soviet Union but because American values held sway in the court of international public opinion, which included those who lived within communist regimes. Even more than was true during the Cold War, the struggle against Islamic-based terrorism will be not simply a military campaign but a battle for public opinion in the Islamic world, among our allies, and in the United States. Osama bin Laden understands that he cannot defeat or even incapacitate the United States in a conventional war. What he and his allies can do is inflict enough pain to provoke a reaction of the sort we’ve seen in Iraq — a botched and ill-advised U.S. military incursion into a Muslim country, which in turn spurs on insurgencies based on religious sentiment and nationalist pride, which in turn necessitates a lengthy and difficult U.S. occupation, which in turn leads to an escalating death toll on the part of U.S. troops and the local civilian population. All of this fans anti-American sentiment among Muslims, increases the pool of potential terrorist recruits, and prompts the American public to question not only the war but also those policies that project us into the Islamic world in the first place.

That’s the plan for winning a war from a cave, and so far, at least, we are playing to script. To change that script, we’ll need to make sure that any exercise of American military power helps rather than hinders our broader goals: to incapacitate the destructive potential of terrorist networks and win this global battle of ideas.

What does this mean in practical terms? We should start with the premise that the United States, like all sovereign nations, has the unilateral right to defend itself against attack. As such, our campaign to take out Al Qaeda base camps and the Taliban regime that harbored them was entirely justified — and was viewed as legitimate even in most Islamic countries. It may be preferable to have the support of our allies in such military campaigns, but our immediate safety can’t be held hostage to the desire for international consensus; if we have to go it alone, then the American people stand ready to pay any price and bear any burden to protect our country.

I would also argue that we have the right to take unilateral military action to eliminate an imminent threat to our security — so long as an imminent threat is understood to be a nation, group, or individual that is actively preparing to strike U.S. targets (or allies with which the United States has mutual defense agreements), and has or will have the means to do so in the immediate future. Al Qaeda qualifies under this standard, and we can and should carry out preemptive strikes against them wherever we can. Iraq under Saddam Hussein did not meet this standard, which is why our invasion was such a strategic blunder. If we are going to act unilaterally, then we had better have the goods on our targets.

Once we get beyond matters of self-defense, though, I’m convinced that it will almost always be in our strategic interest to act multilaterally rather than unilaterally when we use force around the world. By this, I do not mean that the UN Security Council — a body that in its structure and rules too often appears frozen in a Cold War — era time warp — should have a veto over our actions. Nor do I mean that we round up the United Kingdom and Togo and then do what we please. Acting multilaterally means doing what George H. W. Bush and his team did in the first Gulf War — engaging in the hard diplomatic work of obtaining most of the world’s support for our actions, and making sure our actions serve to further recognize international norms.

Why conduct ourselves in this way? Because nobody benefits more than we do from the observance of international “rules of the road.” We can’t win converts to those rules if we act as if they apply to everyone but us. When the world’s sole superpower willingly restrains its power and abides by internationally agreed-upon standards of conduct, it sends a message that these are rules worth following, and robs terrorists and dictators of the argument that these rules are simply tools of American imperialism.

Obtaining global buy-in also allows the United States to carry a lighter load when military action is required and enhances the chances for success. Given the comparatively modest defense budgets of most of our allies, sharing the military burden may in some cases prove a bit of an illusion, but in the Balkans and Afghanistan, our NATO partners have indeed shouldered their share of the risks and costs. Additionally, for the types of conflicts in which we’re most likely to find ourselves engaged, the initial military operation will often be less complex and costly than the work that follows — training local police forces, restoring electricity and water services, building a working judicial system, fostering an independent media, setting up a public health infrastructure, and planning elections. Allies can help pay the freight and provide expertise for these critical efforts, as they have in the Balkans and Afghanistan, but they are far more likely to do so if our actions have gained international support on the front end. In military parlance, legitimacy is a “force multiplier.”

Just as important, the painstaking process of building coalitions forces us to listen to other points of view and therefore look before we leap. When we’re not defending ourselves against a direct and imminent threat, we will often have the benefit of time; our military power becomes just one tool among many (albeit an extraordinarily important one) to influence events and advance our interests in the world — interests in maintaining access to key energy sources, keeping financial markets stable, seeing international boundaries respected, and preventing genocide. In pursuit of those interests, we should be engaging in some hardheaded analysis of the costs and benefits of the use of force compared to the other tools of influence at our disposal.