But precisely with respect to nukes, the question is misstated: The issues is not whether you believe that the French will defend you or not, the question is whether you believe that the Russians or Iranians will be perfectly, completely and utterly confident that France will not intervene. Unless, of course, one believes that a nuclear power somewhere is sufficiently axe crazy to risk nuclear obliteration on the hunch that the cheese-eating surrender monkeys won't retaliate.
But I suspect that the matter is a lot simpler: People are used to thinking that the US hegemony is vital for European security because that is what they have been told to think. They never consider the French nuclear strike capability because it has never been introduced to their universe by the news that shape their views.
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
The other side of that point is that who, in Europe, really wants to make the kind of military expenditures that the United States does? The statistic one keeps hearing (and, no, I haven't verified it but it sounds right) is the the United States spends more in its military infrastructure than the next ten highest spending nations, combined. The corollary of that is that if you don't want an American-led system of international governance, then you have to sacrifice a lot more resources that now are enjoyed in the form of social benefits in order to replace the security bubble that American military and political power now provides. I think the French might actually willingly sign up to do that kind of work. I don't think anyone else of consequence in Europe, however, would.
Is that efficiently spent, or a bloated subsidy to the military-industrial complex? Because if it is just spent on expensive toys and duds like missile defence, your corollary doesn't follow.
I don't know either way. The peak-to-trough part of the business cycle is an outlier. Carnot would have died laughing.
People like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs packaged the research for popular consumption, but there would have been no Apple and no Microsoft without Whirlwind and SAGE.
At the same time vast amounts of military spending are pure pork - either spent corruptly, spent on projects that are plainly silly (like a 50s attempt to create a nuclear powered bomber), or militarily and diplomatically questionable, like missile defence.
The US could probably afford to cut military spending by 50 or 75% without losing any real military effectiveness.
But another way to look at it is who else has enough economic resources and domestic willingness to establish fully staffed and supplied military commands in every region of the world that are capable of toppling the governments of large, enemy powers? Who else has Naval and Air base networks allowing logistical movements capable of toppling governments of large countries like Iraq and Afghanistan. Note, that although it has not proven easy or possible to politically impose peace or allied governments in Afghanistan or Iraq by military means, America found it quite easy to remove, virtually single-handedly, the offending governments from power, which really was the only military objective in each adventure. Is there any other country, or collection of countries, in the world that has the capacity of doing that today (even Russia couldn't do it in Chechnya, a tiny country by comparison), because that is the infrastructure that would have to be replaced by any group of countries hoping to replace American power with their own collective version of a security bubble for liberal democratic governance.
Nor have these interventions, on balance, done very much for global security, democracy or human rights and dignity. While you may be able to name one or two cases over the last fifty or sixty years, for each case of high-minded humanitarian intervention, I can give you at least a handful - more like a dozen - colonial wars aimed at securing the shady dealings of various moneyed interests.
You forget Spain before Britain, and the phrase was coined to refer to the Spanish empire. The peak-to-trough part of the business cycle is an outlier. Carnot would have died laughing.
This means that opting to go America-free in terms of international commitments might by the same as becoming trade free regarding the level of external contact outside of the EU that currently exists. Perhaps that's okay and even a desirable outcome, but it might behoove us to look first and see what kinds things that we do actually like in the world today might not exist were it not for the sizable commitment made to international institutions by the United States and that might then have to be replaced by someone else if the US was to reduce its provision (or capability) of providing them.
At the very least, with the threat of expanding additions of carbon and greenhouse gases by non-OECD countries, a means of asserting and compelling international commitment outside of a narrow EU region are probably necessary for the well-being of the EU.
In other words, if Europe cannot defend our territorial integrity, it is not for a lack of money thrown at the problem.
(I mean, wow, for all its failures to militarily impose peace and good governance in Iraq and Afghanistan, the US did manage to completely take out the governments and military forces of two large countries in a matter of weeks. That's actually pretty astounding. Like I said up thread, even once-mighty Russia couldn't do that in tiny Chechnya, a region 30 times smaller in population than Afghanistan.)
Afghanistan defeated the Indians, the British, the Russians, and is well on its way to defeating the US. When there's hardly much of a government to start with, blowing up the capital hardly counts for anything.
The most spectacular feature of US military intervention since WWII is its almost endless capacity for failure.
The US can just about handle tiny impoverished states in its back yard. It's fairly good at interfering in other countries through 'covert diplomacy' psyops, and economic oppression.
But as a military power, it's a joke. The US failed in Korea, failed in Vietnam and Cambodia, failed in Iraq and is failing in Afghanistan and against Somalian pircay. In any conventional confrontation with a reasonably sized enemy, the US military machine will be cut to ribbons.
santiago:
governments in places like Iran worry about hostilities against French ships or other assets because they know the French can use American logistical resources to hit back, if needed.
Why would Iran open hostilities against French ships?
Not that Europe couldn't mount a potentially heavy-handed economic retaliation in such an event, even if we can't terror bomb their capital. International power is not measured simply by the amount of powder you can burn over somebody's cities.
And it worked precisely as well too.
By comparison, since the American survival of the cold war, the US has militarily defeated Panama in 1990, Iraq in 1991, Serbia in 1999, the Taliban government in Afghanistan in 2001, and the government of Sadaam Hussein in 2003. America's military defeats so far really only include its small operation in Somalia. In Iraq and Afghanistan, the jury is still out on the new military missions of supporting new and sustainable governance institutions, but with the the strengthening of Nouri al-Maliki's clout since Obama's declaration to withdraw forces earlier, that mission actually looks brighter now under Obama's strategy than it did a short time ago under Bush.
