The Public Goods Providing Empire
Thoreau of UO argues that the provision of “empire”, by which she means military and strategic dominance of the globe, is a huge drain on the economy, the pocketbooks of Americans and a huge misallocation of government resources. I think Thoreau and I agree on a lot: namely that the Iraq War is bad and that we spend too much on defense. But like many libertarians, he sees two options: the current mix of tax cuts, massive increases in defense spending and preventive war or withdrawing from empire. But there’s an alternative — the basic liberal internationalist one.
In this world, which Obama and Clinton both basically envision, we still spend the most on defense and maintain military predominance on the globe. But we will also recognize that our time on top is finite and so we try to strengthen international institutions to takeover the good parts of empire. Thoreau, like many empire-opponents, has a mechanistic view of how US hegemony operates. To many, the Iraq war was the inevitable by-product of our imperial stance. But this is decidedly untrue; Al Gore, for instance, believes in the two-party basics of US hegemony, but it’s certainly doubtful whether he would have invaded Iraq. There were many in the foreign policy community who managed to think: hegemony good, unilateral preventive war bad.
But even if dominance doesn’t necessarily result in horrible boondoggles like Iraq, why is it still a good thing? Thoreau is right that the costs of carrier fleets, submarines, marine divisions, airplanes etc etc are quite high. So what are we buying? Michael Mandelbaum, in his book The Case for Goliath, makes the argument that the US is like a world government. What he means by “word government” is that the US, because of its economic and military strength, can provide public goods to the world that would be too expensive for any other country or group of countries to provide on their own. The most important of these public goods is the safe passage for shipping and the general reassurance we provide to actors in the international system.Mandelbaum explains:
The American role in supplying the necessary service of enforcement for the international economic order is similar to the American provision of reassurance in security affairs. Both roles arise from the global deployment of American military forces, the original mission of which was neither economic enforcement nor reassurance but rather the deterrence of the Soviet Union and other Communist countries. The United States Navy patrolled the world’s two greatest oceans principally to keep the sea lanes of communication open in case of war: The protection this afforded commercial ship-ping came as a by-product of that mission.
The parallel between reassurance and enforcement goes even further. The purpose of each is to foster confidence, the confidence that normal, desirable political and economic activity will proceed uninterrupted. Because they guarantee what is normal and therefore not usually considered worthy of note, the two roles are not visible and for that reason not appreciated. They are taken for granted. They are being successfully carried out if and when nothing noteworthy happens.
This does not, however, mean that they are unimportant. To the contrary, to the extent that reassurance keeps at bay the kind of political conflict that produced the two world wars of the twentieth century, and enforcement permits the international economy to flourish, nothing the United States does in the world is more important. In this way the Goliath of the twenty-first century serves to soothe the nerves and ease the everyday lives of the inhabitants of weaker countries, rather than terrifying them as the original Goliath did.
The United States provides some order to the international system that, while imperfect, seems to be better than most alternatives. Of course, we should try to distribute some of these burdens through institutions, and not squander treasure and goodwill by engaging in unilateral preventive war. It’s just that many of the benefits of empire/hegemony/predominance are hard to discern and often taken for granted, while the negative sides – like Iraq – are all too visible.
