More Militarism Puts America on the Road to Ruin

Walter Russell Mead ends his latest column with some random assertions, mindless talking points, and a call for violence:

Crows cluster where scarecrows fail. If Team Biden wants a world with fewer challenges to the American order, it must restore respect for American power, competence and will. Step one would be to submit a serious defense budget to the Congress, one that demonstrates American resolve to support our friends and deter our adversaries in key global theaters.

Step two is to kill some crows.

Mead still subscribes to a discredited worldview according to which the U.S. overawes other states through sheer might and resolve, and if there are ever any problems in the world it is because the U.S. has not thrown enough money at the military and killed enough people. This is the sort of deranged analysis that would have been quite popular around 2003-04, but it is wrong and it has nothing to offer us today. It is nothing more than crude militarism. Whatever is wrong with U.S. foreign policy, it isn’t going to be fixed by giving more funds to the Pentagon and killing “crows.”

The U.S. has spent more than twenty years killing people all over the world ostensibly in the name of security and counterterrorism, but obviously it hasn’t made the world more stable or secure. It definitely hasn’t reduced the number of terrorist groups in the world. The military budget is higher in real terms now than it has been at almost any point in American history and it is equal to the next seven top military budgets combined (most of which belong to allies), but somehow we still need a “serious” budget that will fill adversaries’ hearts with fear. No matter how big the budget gets, it will never satisfy the militarists and they will always spot some new threat that “requires” it to grow by another half trillion dollars.

An $850 billion military budget request is not “shockingly inadequate” by any reasonable measure. It is obscene and excessive. We can only guess how many trillions Mead’s militaristic agenda would involve since he never bothers to specify how much he thinks is needed. Portraying one of the largest military budgets on record as a signal of “retreat” is ridiculous even for Mead.

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Daniel Larison is a contributing editor for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.