The Foreign Service Journal, November 2007

claimed status as the sole remaining superpower. But we’re clearly bothered by being seen as less relevant. Our answer to this seems to be to build an even more powerful military. Some of you will recall newspaper reports that our defense spending is only about 3.6 percent of GDP, reflecting a defense budget of only — I emphasize only — $499.4 bil- lion. But a lot of defense-related spending is outside the Defense Department’s budget. In Fiscal Year 2007, we will actually spend at least $935 billion (or about 6.8 percent of our GDP) on our military. Outside DOD, the Department of Energy will spend $16.6 billion on nuclear weapons. The State Department will disburse $25.3 billion in foreign military assistance. We will expend $69.1 billion on defense-related home- land security programs and $69.8 bil- lion for treatment of wounded veter- ans. The Treasury will pay out $38.5 billion on unfunded military retire- ments. We will allocate $206.7 bil- lion for interest on war debt. Other bits and pieces, including satellite launches, will add another $8.5 bil- lion. Altogether, I repeat, that’s about $935 billion. But there’s no sign that all this military spending, though vastly more than the rest of the world’s combined, and the power- projection capabilities it buys are regaining international leadership for us. In Latin America, Brazil is assuming the mantle of regional leader, even as Hugo Chavez and other defiant nationalists seek to gain influence at our expense. In Europe, transcontinental integration is proceeding without reference to us or our views about the roles of strategically important countries like Turkey and Ukraine in the European Union. New relationships are being forged with Russia. European policies toward such problem states as Iran, Iraq and Israel increasingly diverge from our own. Asia is returning to its pre-modern status as the center of gravity of the world economy. Events there are being dri- ven not by us, but by the restored wealth and power of China and India, a newly assertive Japan, strategic reposi- tioning by both parts of Korea, growing partnerships between Muslim nations in Southeast Asia and the Arabs and Persians, the de facto reintegration of Taiwan with the rest of China, and a bloom of pan-Asian political and eco- nomic arrangements from which we are absent. In the Middle East, Iran has been empowered by our blunders in Iraq, Palestine and Lebanon. Saudi Arabia has awakened from its traditional risk-averse passivity to fill the diplomatic vacuums we have created. Israel is even more despised and isolated than we are, and together we are rapidly multiplying the ranks of terrorists with regional and global reach. And so it goes. An Unfamiliar and Unanticipated World The world before us is both unfamiliar and unanticipat- ed. Our military-industrial complex securocrats and pun- dits keep arguing for more carriers, submarines and fighter bombers. This is good for the defense industrial base. But in terms of stopping terrorists, it is, I am afraid, an American equivalent of the Maginot Line: the building of an impregnable deterrent to the threat of the past, not the future. Like the French generals of World War II, our defense planners are preparing for the return of a familiar enemy, some new version of our sadly vanished Soviet adversary, that will rise to compete with us for global hegemony and that we can hold to account for failing to constrain attacks on us by lesser ene- mies. But that is not what is happen- ing, and it must now be doubted that it ever will. In the world of the early 21st cen- tury, the major ideological contest is between those who share our past faith in the rule of law and the new American contempt for the notion that we should, like others, respect the United Nations Charter, the Geneva Conventions and other elements of international law. In some senses, we have met the enemy, and he is who we used to be. We can count on no common threat to rally the world behind us. In the new era, there are no blocs and no clear battle lines. Those who are our allies for some purposes may be our adversaries in respect to others, and vice versa. For all of our military strength, the demands on our diplomatic skills will be the greatest in our history. The stakes are high, and the margins for error of our foreign policies are steadily nar- rowing. Yet we are training our diplomats for the transfor- mative tasks of imperial administration. Like our military planners, our diplomatic leadership has it wrong. Our empire was stillborn. We just didn’t notice. Our post–Cold War global hegemony is being under- mined, not by a peer competitor but by a combination of our own neocon-induced ineptitude and the emergence of countries with substantial power and influence in their own N O V E M B E R 2 0 0 7 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 45 The world now fears our savagery but has lost confidence in our fair- mindedness, judgment and competence.