What weapons for the West

We live in dangerous times, when a new kind of leadership is required. It’s as simple as that. We have to be aware of the dark side of every event not because the future will necessarily be bad, but because that is what foreign policy crises have always been about. Peacekeeping and peacemaking, in particular, will become increasingly difficult. Indeed, global security necessitates shared aims and centralized management. Only strong rulers can justify the historic about-faces necessary for peace.

The relative weight of the West in the world – its cultural and political legitimacy to rule international relations – is based on four pillars: population growth, economic growth, technological advancement, and military might. This has been a constant throughout history. The diminishing West is the result of demographic decline, the rapid global spread of technology, repeated economic crises, and fiscal instability. Meanwhile the climate of our time is confirming the ancient rule of power: military balance, sooner or later, becomes an expression of the world’s economic equilibrium.

Data published recently by the Jane’s Defence Weekly illustrates this striking shift of balance: the West is disarming, the rest of the world is rearming. Over the next four years, the US share of world defense spending will fall from 50% to 42-39%. That of Europe will fall to 16%, more or less equal to the 15% level China will reach by 2015 starting from its current 5%. Russia will rise from 2.75% to 4.75%; South Asia (India and Pakistan) from 2% to 4%; and South America from 2% to 5%. As the world budget remains the same over next four years, the military spending of the rising powers known as BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) will grow by 150%.

Let’s start with a basic truth about military spending: the West (US and Europe) can maintain its share of the global total either by maintaining its GDP in relation to world production or by increasing the share of its own GDP that it devotes to defense. The first option is based on economic dynamism and is sustainable. The second, based on a sacrifice of competing spending priorities, is unlikely to work over the long term.

During the 1990s, the US share of total defense spending was both steady and sustainable, since the country’s weight in the global economy was roughly unchanged over the decade. In the 2000s by contrast, the US was neither steady nor sustainable. The nation increased its share of world defense spending from 36% to 50%. However, because the US share of global GDP was shrinking, the US could only achieve such an increase by choosing guns over butter. Is the constraint on military spending evidence of a general decline of the West?

A look into the future shows that the pendulum seems almost certainly to be swinging back. As the new century progresses, two trends are emerging and working against each other. Even if the US were to maintain military spending at a constant share of its own GDP, the nation’s shrinking weight in the world economy would cause its share of global spending to decline to 42% by 2015. If Barack Obama’s plan for defense cuts is implemented (right now the President has called for a projected 7% cut in the Pentagon budget) the US share will fall further. If China or some other rising power chooses to make defense a higher priority, Western military preeminence could decline even more precipitously. These are the alarming trends, as a new Council on Foreign Relations analysis demonstrates. The authors, Neil Bouhan and Paul Swartz, illustrated that the deep drivers of defense spending point to the atrophy of America’s weight in the world.

Of course military budgets must be measured against military needs. And these needs can be refashioned through diplomacy, alliances and partnerships. America is at a crossroads of the sort that faced the British Empire at the dawn of the 20th century, as it contended with rising America, an expansionist Russia, and fast-industrializing Germany and Japan. Facing relative economic decline, Britain chose to surrender its interest in Latin America to the United States, support Japan in order to check Russia in the East, and make up with France so as to confront Germany. Britain as a declining power managed to hang on for quite some time with intelligent policy planning. Strategy becomes essential when money is scarce.

If we recalculate the US share of global defense spending by adding European countries, NATO and other allies such as Japan, South Korea and Saudi Arabia to the US basket, the same trend emerges. The combined military budget came to 77% of the global total for 2005. By 2010 it fell to 72%. By 2015 it is projected to fall to 65%. It is still a huge proportion, but a diminishing one.

The numbers say a lot. They especially convey how the already disproportionate balance between the US and European countries has become more lopsided since the end of the Cold War. If Europe had kept its promises the world today would be different. The US and EU would perhaps be negotiating a new relationship based on the equality of their respective forces, rather than pay the price of disparity. United Europe has achieved miracles in economics and in politics, but it has also shown that economic power does not automatically translate into geopolitical power.

It was an illusion that an economic power such as Europe could be self-sufficient without enlarging its military budget. And yet, wealth alone is not enough. That said, it is even more illusory to believe that today’s decreasing economic power, strongly influenced by budgetary constraints, can maintain its role in ensuring international security.

The most obvious consequence of these illusions is the more marked divergences between the US and Europe in the management of missions in Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya. The gap between the theoretical military power of Western states and their technical and political success has grown with each mission. The strategic advantage at the end of the Cold War has vanished. Ten years after 9/11 the West as a whole is going through a phase of general retreat, due to both budgetary constraints and the disappointing results of intervention in the name of democracy.

As the world lunges into an even more dangerous situation than what we see today, a superstitious disregard for one’s own waning power will be fatal. Finding a new balance between security and economic priorities means, in all likelihood, an unprecedented sharing of the burden. Thus, a policy of alliances, even unscrupulous ones, would be well advised. On the other hand, reducing military commitments inherited from the past does not stave off the unforeseen emergencies that will inevitably arise. Leadership – domestic, regional or global – entails some sense of possibility.

One of the perennial weaknesses of policymakers is to ascribe their own failure to forces that are entirely beyond their control. Those who refuse to passively accept fate, who will resort to the utmost cunning to vanquish more powerful forces, must not ignore the factors that forewarn them of an imminent crisis, nor can they shun those that may forestall them. And their best weapon is strategy.

(Tratto da Longitude)