A Look at the American National Strategy

During the Cold War, the United States was the stronger of two superpowers in a bipolar world. The anti-Soviet alliance was not a traditional alliance of equals, but a hegemonic alliance centered on the United States. West Germany, Japan and South Korea were semi-sovereign U.S. protectorates. Britain and France were more independent, but even they received the benefits of "extended deterrence," according to which the United States agreed to treat an attack on them as the equivalent of an attack on the American homeland. America's Cold War strategy was often described as dual containment -- the containment not only of America's enemies like the Soviet Union and Communist China, but also of America's allies, in particular West Germany and Japan. Dual containment permitted the United States to mobilize German and Japanese industrial might as part of the anti-Soviet coalition, while forestalling the re-emergence of Germany and Japan as independent military powers. The Cold War officially ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union, but the United States has continued to pursue a dual containment strategy based on three principles: dissuasion, reassurance and coercive non-proliferation. Dissuasion Directed at actual or potential challengers to the United States -- commits the United States to outspend all other great military powers, whether friend or foe. This policy's goal -- in the words of the 1992 Defense Planning Guidance draft leaked from then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney's Pentagon -- is the dissuasion or "deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role." High levels of defense expenditures are not merely to overawe potential challengers. (In outlining possible competitors, Krauthammer noted, "Only China grew in strength, but coming from so far behind it will be decades before it can challenge American primacy -- and that assumes that its current growth continues unabated.") To again quote from the 1992 Defense Planning Guidance, "we must account sufficiently for the interests of the advanced industrial nations to discourage them from challenging our leadership or seeking to overturn the established political and economic order." Reassurance The second prong of the hegemonic strategy, entails convincing major powers not to excessively build up their military capabilities, allowing the United States to assume the burdens of ensuring their security instead. In other words, while outspending allies like Germany and Japan on defense, the United States should be prepared to fight wars on behalf of Germany and Japan, sparing them the necessity of re-arming -- for fear that these countries, having "renationalized" their defense policies and rearmed, might become hostile to the United States at some future date. Finally, the global hegemony strategy insists that America's safety depends not only on the absence of a hostile hegemon in Europe, Asia and the Middle East -- the traditional American approach -- but on the permanent presence of the United States itself as the military hegemon of Europe, the military hegemon of Asia and the military hegemon of the Middle East. In each of these areas, the regional powers would consent to perpetual U.S. domination either voluntarily, because the United States assumed their defense burdens (reassurance), or involuntarily, because the superior U.S. military intimidated them into acquiescence (dissuasion). American military hegemony in Europe, Asia and the Middle East depends on the ability of the U.S. military to threaten and, if necessary, to use military force to defeat any regional challenge-but at a relatively low cost. This is because the American public is not prepared to pay the costs necessary if the United States is to be a "hyperpower." Non-Proliferation Given this premise, the obsession with the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons and other Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) makes perfect sense. WMD are defensive weapons that offer poor states a possible defensive shield against the sword of unexcelled U.S. conventional military superiority. The success of the United States in using superior conventional force to defeat Serbia and Iraq (twice) may have accelerated the efforts of India, Pakistan, North Korea and Iran to obtain nuclear deterrents. As an Indian admiral observed after the Gulf War, "The lesson is that you should not go to war with the United States unless you have nuclear weapons." Moreover, it is clear that the United States treats countries that possess WMD quite differently from those that do not. So proliferation undermines American regional hegemony in two ways. First, it forces the U.S. military to adopt costly and awkward strategies in wartime. Second, it discourages intimidated neighbors of the nuclear state from allowing American bases and military build-ups on its soil. With this in mind, proponents of the hegemony strategy often advocate a policy of preventive war to keep countries deemed to be hostile to the United States from obtaining nuclear weapons or WMD. Balance of Power While the US is gravitated towards the hegemony strategy, it also places some focus on regional balance of power. As Henry Kissinger said; "In the end, peace can be achieved only by hegemony or by balance of power." The balance of power serves a variety of purposes; it helps achieve regional stability, avoidance of entangle due to reassurance strategy, and containment by regional allies of 'hostile' adversaries. Two notable examples of this strategy are South Korea and Japan. Problem In the long run, however, the rise of China -- and possibly other new powers like India -- is certain to create a multipolar world. At some point the cost of out-spending all other great powers combined will become prohibitive. At that point the hegemony strategy will be unaffordable, and even its proponents will be forced to seek an alternative. One might be a more heavily oriented balance-of-power strategy that takes the form of an alliance including the United States in a bipolar or multipolar world. Thomas Donnelly, a neoconservative associated with the Project for a New American Century, suggests that a less expensive alternative to U.S. hegemony would be an alliance of the United States, Japan, India and Britain, which he describes as "the de facto plan of the Bush administration, though officials dare not speak its name." Source http://ift.tt/1yHkHW2



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