Letting go of ineffective behavior

Let's let go of War. Hard Military Power doesn't work. Witness the Israelis in Gaza, the Americans in Iraq. Here's Francis Fukuyama in Is America Ready for a Post-American World?

This weak-state world has a lot of implications for American power. We need to consider this very perplexing fact: The US spends as much on its military as virtually the entire rest of the world combined. And yet it is now five years and counting since the US invaded and occupied Iraq, and to this day we have not succeeded in pacifying it fully. That is because of the changing nature of power itself. We are trying to use an instrument—hard military power—that we used in the 20th century world of Great Powers and centralized states in a weak-state world. You cannot use hard power to create legitimate institutions, to build nations, to consolidate politics and all of the other things that are necessary for political stability in this part of the world.

It's time to turn swords into plowshares...it's not just that we spend more than everyone else - it's time to recognize that we don't have an inexhaustible supply of money to burn and spending so much on hard military solutions has become ineffective and wasteful. Defense spending sucks up nearly half of our budget, corrupts our politics, and doesn't get us that much.

I'm not saying we get rid of military spending altogether and go bare, facing real threats with daisies in our hands, but what if we were to scale back to oh, say half of what we currently spend? It would still be a gargantuan amount. This is not to mention that all that money buys solutions that are no longer appropriate to the threats we face - which is, quite frankly, dumber than dumb. We are busy remodeling our Maginot Line while a blitzkrieg is preparing to go around it. Would we really be less safe if we quit wasting money that we don't really have? Aren't our economic threats at least as great as our military ones?

In short, we face a world in which we need a very different set of skills. We need to be able to deploy and use hard power, but there are a lot of other aspects of projecting American values and institutions that need to underlie a continuing leadership role for the US in the world. The Clinton administration’s efforts in the Balkans, Somalia and Haiti to do nation building were criticized as “social work.” The critique was that real men and real foreign policy professionals don’t do this kind of nation building or deploy soft power, but rather deal with hard power with military force.

The problems that the US face are really ones that are we ourselves have created. None of the problems and challenges that the US faces are insoluble. The problems are really political and institutional ones.

There are three particular areas of weakness that the US must remedy if it is to get through the set of challenges I’ve outlined. These three are, first, the diminishing capacity of our public sector; second, a certain complacency on the part of Americans about understanding the world from a perspective other than that of the US; and third, our polarized political system that is incapable of even discussing solutions to these problems.

Neither the Left nor the Right has had the political courage to suggest raising energy taxes, which has been the obvious way of dealing with foreign energy dependency and encouraging alternative sources of energy. And so the political culture that we have created as a result of this kind of politics is incapable of making the decisions that we need.

These are serious times that call for serious discussion. If we are broken, we should acknowledge the facts and start talking about what to do about it. And by everything I can see, we are broken. We should start our national conversation by acknowledging some basic facts. One is that we can't spend like drunken sailors on shore leave any more. The second is that banging our head against the wall is not an effective strategy. Shoot first and ask questions later just gets you a bunch of dead innocents and pissed off natives.