At first it looked fairly interesting, perhaps even modestly promising, from the perspective of somebody who worries about the United States being overcommitted overseas and stretched rather thin militarily to meet some of the challenges that could arise from chronic overcommitment. But the more one looks at President Bush’s ostensibly dramatic announcement that he plans to reduce U.S. troops in Europe and Asia by 60,000 to 70,000 personnel, the less interesting it becomes.
It might be more than simply a political campaign-related effort to garner a few headlines and try to create the appearance of being able to think strategically in the face of conditions that have changed drastically since the end of the Cold War. But it wouldn’t do to bet the farm on it.
The response from the president’s major-party opponent, Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, who calls it, according to the AP, “a hastily announced plan that raises more doubts about U.S. intentions than it answers” – though that statement is true enough as far as it goes – is even less encouraging to those who believe American foreign policy could do with some serious rethinking and reconsideration.
Questions, Questions
The president, as might have been expected at a VFW convention, emphasized benefits to those now in the military. “Over the coming decade,” he said, “we’ll deploy a more agile and more flexible force, which means that more of our troops will be stationed from here at home.” Therefore, “our service members will have more time on the home front, and more predictability and fewer moves over a career.” For military spouses, that would mean “fewer job changes, greater stability, more time for their kids and to spend with their families at home.”
That’s nice, but how much reality can we expect from such a set of promises?
The first hint that there’s less than meets the eye is the phrase, “over the next decade.” That’s not exactly moving with lightning speed. The government has already announced, early in June, that it plans to move about 12,500 of the 37,500 troops now in South Korea out of that country by the end of 2005. It is unclear from the president’s speech whether that already-planned (though not yet executed) redeployment is part of the 70,000 to be redeployed worldwide.
The best bet, also, is that the troops moved from South Korea are more likely to go to Iraq than to bases back home. If that’s what happens, it will hardly contribute to stability and greater peace of mind for military people or their families. The troops in South Korea, while near enough to the heavily militarized “demilitarized zone” to be under a fairly constant potential threat, haven’t been near combat. And while they might be of some assistance in the unlikely event of a North Korean military attack on the South, their chief function since the end of the Korean War is to serve as a tripwire – to assure that in the event of an attack some Americans would be killed or wounded, thereby assuring that more American troops would be sent to Korea to avenge them.
To be sure, American troops in Korea are subject to significantly more disapproval from the South Korean populace than in decades past, especially when they do such things as inadvertently kill South Koreans, Still, it seems at least possible that service in Iraq would be notably more stressful.
The Joys of Kazakhstan?
I talked with Chalmers Johnson, author of The Sorrows of Empire, a retired University of California political science professor (who worked with the CIA during the Cold War), on Monday. He reminded me that while President Bush talked about moving troops from Western Europe and Asia, nobody had even discussed closing any of the 702 overseas bases in at least 130 countries.
Johnson also noted that while some of the troops now stationed in Germany might actually be called home in their first move, what administration officials have been talking about recently – and what is already underway to a great extent – is repositioning troops from “Old Europe,” mainly Germany, to “New Europe” and beyond.
That means more troops in Poland, Romania, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan. “While the administration talks about encouraging democracy when the subject is Iraq,” he told me, “it is increasing its ‘friendly’ military presence in some of the most authoritarian regimes on the planet,” referring especially to some of the former satrapies of the old Soviet Union in the “stans” of Central Asia.
It seems curious to me, but many countries, at least at first, welcome U.S. bases. There are reasons. Troops bring U.S. dollars, some of which find their way into other parts of the local economies beyond prostitution and saloons. Over time U.S. troops come to be resented in most countries in which they are stationed, but the initial phases of bases can be generally pleasant and for some locals profitable. U.S. military personnel, at least those who get off the bases to take a look at the countries, tend to be the open, pleasant people most Americans tend to be – although there’s no question there are ugly American exceptions. The presence of U.S. troops tends to reinforce at least the image of the regime in power and perhaps serve as a subtle damper on homegrown dissent against tinpot dictators.
Mr. Johnson, however, expects some resistance from the military itself. The bases in Germany are cushy and close to ski resorts and other amenities. “I suspect Douglas Feith has no idea how primitive conditions can be in Romania, for example,” he told me, “but you can bet the military brass does.”
Punishing (Former?) Allies
Chalmers Johnson also noted that moving troops out of Germany will inevitably be seen as political punishment for the Germans, who were notably reluctant to be part of the “coalition of the willing” in the Iraq invasion. Others have suggested the same. In a USA Today story Tuesday, Pat Towell of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments says many will see a significant reduction in troops as retaliation against Germany. “If this action had been taken by the first President Bush, it would have been interpreted very differently,” Towell said. This administration’s “intentions may be as pure as the driven snow, but people will read into this based on the current events.”
Hmmm. The governments of Germany and South Korea might see things differently, but I suspect few German or South Korean ordinary citizens would see removing U.S. troops as punishment.
Mention of the first President Bush should serve as a reminder that it would have made sense to make these realigning moves a decade or more ago rather than over the next decade. While they are now sometimes used for other purposes, often as stopovers or hospital facilities for troops engaged in the Middle East, the troops and bases in Germany were designed to serve as a deterrent against a possible invasion or hostile action by the Soviet-dominated Warsaw Pact countries. That threat, however real it once was, is no more. It is long past time to recognize that fact and draw down the troops accordingly. But it should be noted that even in the midst of talking about pulling U.S. troops out of current bases, other bases in other parts of the world are being opened or expanded even as we speak, not just in Central Asia and Kosovo, but in the Persian Gulf and parts of Africa, and nobody expects them to be subject to closure any time soon.
“This story is in the details,” Chalmers Johnson told me, “and Bush never provides any details.”
Among the current details Americans should be more familiar with is that the U.S. currently deploys some 253,288 uniformed personnel overseas, plus an equal number of dependents and Department of Defense civilian officials. The 702 admitted overseas bases (recent Pentagon figures don’t mention the huge Camp Bondsteel installation in Kosovo) employ more than 44,000 locally hired foreigners. The Pentagon owns some 44,000 barracks, hangars and other buildings overseas and leases about 4,800 more.
Your tax dollars at work.
Policy Drives Logistics
In a sense, however, all these are details. You can argue as to whether we need 200,000, 250,000 or 300,000 U.S. troops overseas, whether the number of troops in Iraq should be increased (as Kerry has suggested, if you can believe a politician running for office) or decreased, or in which particular country particular kinds of bases should be located. But as long as the United States (or its foreign policy elites) considers itself the policeman, sheriff, democratizer, stabilizer, peacemaker, nation-builder or whatever of the world, a certain number of troops are inevitably going to be stationed in semi-permanent garrisons overseas.
Of course, there is some evidence – Chalmers Johnson details a good bit of it in his Sorrows of Empire – that such extensive commitments lead to an increasing militarization of policy or having policy driven by a military overseas too large to be ignored and often enough serving what had traditionally been the functions of diplomats. But ultimately, our elites have large overseas ambitions that are expressed fairly independently of the location of troops. As long as Americans acquiesce in letting our elites (most of them civilians and many of them in fact deeply resented by military people as naive about the implications of their globe-straddling rhetoric) place such large ambitions at the center of policy, we’ll have large numbers of military people overseas.
There have been a number of books, from Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke’s America Alone to Jeffrey Record’s Dark Victory to Anonymous’ Imperial Hubris, critical of the Iraq war. But few of them, with the possible exception of Andrew Bacevich’s American Empire, offer a comprehensive policy alternative to what former Gen. William Odom calls, in his book title, America’s Inadvertent Empire.
Perhaps I’ll have to write the book that makes the case, in today’s world and in the face of today’s challenges (many of them much more real than Saddam’s WMD), for a comprehensive policy of leading by example rather than by force, of nonintervention and war-avoidance. Until that option is at least on the table – and I would argue until it is at least begun to be adopted – the presence of hundreds of thousands of troops in thousands of bases and hundreds of countries will simply be a feature of the global landscape, and a permanent drain on U.S. taxpayers and American prosperity.
