More bad arguments for sustaining America's defense spending.
Usually when people stump for the present defense budget, they argue that the U.S. bears unique global responsibilities or else faces threats from major industrial powers like China and Russia. Marc Thiessen takes a different approach:
The war on terror is far from over. We face potential conflicts with Iran, North Korea, Yemen and Somalia. And as we learned on Sept. 11, 2001, new threats can emerge suddenly to surprise us. Despite this, Washington is once again prematurely claiming a â??peace dividendâ? â?? except this time without the peace.
Really. Yemen and Somalia are not countries that we could face a conflict with - they're barely functional states. We are arguably in conflict with a few hundred (or less) individuals within those countries but that's hardly a rationale for sustaining massive wealth transfers to the Pentagon. Iran and North Korea are slightly more formidable adversaries but benchmarked against the U.S. and, of course, the regional states downwind of any potential aggression (South Korea, Japan, Israel, Saudi Arabia), the gap in budgets and capabilities is huge.
In many ways this is the mirror image of the irresponsible approach described yesterday, where an arbitrary set of budget cuts are identified with no reference to strategy. In this instance, defenders treat the status quo budget as inviolate and then cobble together whatever rationale they can grasp, no matter how untenable, to defend it.
