No historic basis for U.S. militarism

By PAUL C. CAMPOS

SCRIPPS HOWARD NEWS SERVICE

A few years ago I visited the Huntington Library in Los Angeles, where among other things I saw an original manuscript of an annual budget for the federal government, which George Washington had submitted to Congress.

The most interesting feature of this document was the appropriation for what in those less euphemistic times was called the Department of War. As I recall, it included salaries for eighteen employees.

This reminded me that Washington, like most members of America’s founding generation, was at best ambivalent about the idea that the United States should maintain any sort of standing army (this wariness is reflected in the controversial first clause of the Second Amendment, regarding the need to maintain “a well-regulated militia.”).

Washington was both an accomplished general and an eminently realistic politician, and even in the late 18th century he recognized that a permanent professional military was becoming a necessary evil of the modern nation-state. But that didn’t mean he was happy about the fact.

Consider Washington’s farewell address to the nation, and in particular the famous passage on the importance of avoiding “foreign entanglements.” When reading this speech it’s impossible not to be struck both by Washington’s eloquence and his foresight. (If you want to get depressed, consider that Washington wrote the address himself, and then imagine what a similar speech actually composed by George W. Bush would sound like).

Indeed, what would Washington say to his countrymen today, if he were to be informed of the following?

UThe United States accounts for more than half of the world’s total military spending. America spends nearly ten times as much on its armed forces as the second-highest military budget in the world.

UMore than half of the federal government’s discretionary spending ($625 billion dollars in 2007) is devoted to the armed forces. In real dollars, U.S. military spending has nearly doubled over the last decade.

U The U.S. military currently maintains more than 800 overseas bases, in more than 130 countries. We have more than a quarter of a million uniformed troops stationed outside the United States (this figure doesn’t count support personnel and military dependents).

American empire

Would Washington be happy to discover that, 220 years after he became our first president, the sun never sets on the American empire? I suspect he would be appalled.

What might appall him even more is the fact that there seems to be almost no opposition to any of this from what is considered respectable political opinion. Consider the three persons who our political process has deemed fit to vie for the presidency.

John McCain, of course, has based his whole political career around the enthusiastic embrace of unrestrained militarism. For example, he’s positively thrilled by the thought of keeping American troops in Iraq for another century, as long as they are maintaining a Pax Americana.

It would be nice to imagine that either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama provides a meaningful alternative to the idea that we should maintain gargantuan armies in order to keep the world an orderly place — but that requires a very creative imagination.

Clinton has complained that President Bush isn’t spending enough on the military, and indeed her campaign has become a special favorite of defense contractors. Obama provides slightly more hope for a foreign policy that’s based on some idea other than that America should be policing the world, but he too has called for more military spending.

All this should lead us to remember another presidential farewell address, by the infamous radical leftist Dwight Eisenhower. “In the councils of government,” he warned, “we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

X Campos is a law professor at the University of Colorado.