John Quiggin, in musing on the relatively short lived era of the “hyperpower” (as measured by Thomas Friedman’s arc of enthusiasm), distills what is the essential moral:
A central lesson of this experience (of course, not one that Friedman or Joffe is ever likely to learn) is that the whole idea of a military hyperpower is a nonsense. The idea that military force can be used for any positive purpose (that is, other than as a defensive response to the use of military force by others) persists despite a lack of any significant supporting evidence. The US crusade in Iraq has cost, or will cost $3 trillion (not to mention the lives of thousands of American, and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis). That’s more than the US would spend on official development assistance for the whole world in 100 years at current rates (and the lion’s share of ODA goes to supporting military/geopolitical goals – the poorest countries get less than $10 billion a year between them). Things have gone pretty badly in Iraq, but even supposing that the ultimate outcome had been a stable and prosperous democracy, it’s clear that the benefit-cost ratio would be very low. You get a similar answer if you look at the whole period since Macarthur pushed on to the Yalu river back in 1950. And by comparison with other countries that have tried to use military power to pursue foreign policy goals, the US has done much better (or rather, much less badly) than anyone else.
Or as I have been fond of arguing over the years, falling prey to the seduction of “unipolarity,” and vastly overestimating its scope and permanence, only accelerates its unraveling.
As to the utility of military force in the larger sense, I was making a similar argument -if smaller bore – on Democracy Arsenal today
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