The President deliberated for weeks before deciding to ask Congress for authorization to attack Syria. He’s working the phones to gather votes but will his budget provide future Presidents with the resources to carry out similar actions? (Credit: Telegraph)
On August 14, the Secretary of the Army gave his subordinates an order: produce a list of cuts that will reduce spending by 25 percent.
A week later, a chemical weapons attack near Damascus left an estimated 1,429 dead, moving the President to ask the military to prepare for a retaliatory strike against the Assad government. Even a limited assault would cost hundreds of millions of dollars, according to defense experts.
The two events illustrate the intersection between what we thought would dominate Washington’s attention during the first weeks of September – fiscal policy – with what actually will occupy Congress – a debate over whether to attack Syria. The two are more closely related than we might think, raising the question of how much money we are willing to spend on shaping America’s role in a changing world.
The President seems of two minds about this. He sincerely believes that the U.S. must act in cases where foreign governments behave immorally, even if that means going it alone. But he also favors massive reductions in defense spending that will impair his own capacity and that of his successors to act in the future.
The Secretary of the Army’s memo is blunt in asking his staff for a list of cuts. The President’s desire to roll back military spending, coupled with GOP willingness to enforce across-the-board cuts in defense outlays, have created a dire situation.
“Let there be no mistake, aggregate reductions WILL TAKE PLACE. The money is gone; our mission now is to determine how best to allocate these cuts while maintaining readiness. We expect Army leaders, military and civilian, to seize this opportunity to re-shape our Army. This effort will take PRIORITY OVER ALL other Headquarters, Department of the Army activities.” [Emphasis in original, showing that the cuts have not affected the Army’s CAPS LOCK or bold keys.]
Although military leaders hope to “maintain[] readiness” despite the fact that “the money is gone,” the memo puts “readiness” on the chopping block, along with “operational force structure.” Reshaping the Army may involve eliminating inefficiencies but it will also inevitably leave it weaker. It will shed muscle along with the fat.
That appears to be the President’s intention. He has taken a more dovish tone than his predecessor, proclaiming last June in Berlin, “We must move beyond a mindset of perpetual war.”
The budget he sent Congress earlier this year seems to envision not only an end to perpetual war, but a decade of unprecedented tranquility and peace. The President has asked Congress for steep reductions in defense spending as a percentage of GDP over the course of the next decade. These cuts, to be clear, are not the result of sequestration. They represent the President’s request to Congress on military spending. Such spending has declined markedly over the course of decades, as the chart below shows. [You can enlarge the chart by clicking on it.]
Defense spending as a share of the economy has plunged by more than half over the past 50 years, to its current level of 4.2 percent from 8.9 percent in 1963. It fell sharply during the 1970s with the end of the Vietnam War, rose somewhat during the 1980s Reagan defense buildup, then fell again during the 1990s with the end of the Cold War. President Bush’s War on Terror caused it to rise again, but it has declined since President Obama took office, from 4.7 to 4.2 percent of GDP.
If President Obama has his way, military spending as a share of GDP will drop below 3 percent in 2017 for the first time since before Pearl Harbor, then fall further, reaching 2.5 percent in 2022. While Pentagon spending will sink, the President wants overall government spending to remain robust, averaging 22 percent of GDP over the 10-year period, somewhat higher than the average over the previous 40 years. Most of that spending will be on programs that transfer money to individuals. In 2023, government spending on entitlement programs and debt service will together constitute over 77 percent of what the government spends and consume more than 85 percent of the revenues it collects, if the President has his way.
In short, President Obama is budgeting for a new Aquarian age, in which America remains serenely detached from world events.
But while an isolationist America might suit Rand Paul just fine, it is very much at odds with the moral outrage that the President has expressed over Syria. In his address on Saturday announcing that he would seek Congressional approval before striking Syria, the President said of the Assad regime, “this menace must be confronted.” Assad had perpetrated a “massacre[],” an “assault on human dignity,” and made a “mockery of the global prohibition on the use of chemical weapons”; all of which may well be true.
“We are the United States of America,” he said, “and we cannot turn a blind eye to what happened in Damascus.”
We can, of course, and most often do, turn a blind eye to atrocity. I’m not suggesting that’s good or bad, merely saying that it is an option in this case as it is in countless others. The world is full of tyrants who perpetrate horrors. Granted, the President believes that Assad used chemicals, but Syria is among the handful of states that has neither signed nor acceded to the convention on poison gases, and the President seems strangely copacetic with Assad’s use of more commonplace brutality to kill 100,000 of his countrymen. The President also mentioned “the cost of doing nothing,” something he frequently does in other contexts; there, as here, he does not itemize those costs. Suffice to say that it generally costs less to avoid war than to wage it.
I want to be clear that I’m not questioning the President’s judgment. If Assad perpetrated this atrocity as the President believes, he has indeed committed a heinous crime. It is appropriate for the President ask Congress to authorize a military response. I just can’t reconcile the President’s moral conviction that the U.S. is responsible for enforcing international norms with his budgetary proposal that calls for military spending to shrivel. We can’t declare a national responsibility to right global wrongs while adopting a budget more consistent with 1930s isolationism.
The President’s rhetoric on Syria is manly and moral. But enforcing morality can’t be done on the cheap. We can be a peaceful nation that “turns a blind eye” to far-away atrocities. Or we can shoulder the obligation to bring tyrants to heel. We just can’t do both.
Congress will decide in coming weeks whether to give the President authority to do what he thinks necessary in Syria. That will be a decision of great significance. But it may do less to determine the role we will play in the world than subsequent negotiations over the budget.