Chris Preble on American Military Dominance

Christopher Preble is the vice president for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute. His latest book is Peace, War, and Liberty.

This podcast episode includes references to the Eurasia Group Foundation, now known as the Institute for Global Affairs.

Transcript:

April 19, 2019

CHRIS PREBLE: A strong military can make the United States less safe because the temptation to use that force is nearly overwhelming. That's the problem of our power.

MARK HANNAH: It's a “man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail,” kind of a problem.

PREBLE: That's exactly right.

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HANNAH: My name is Mark Hannah, and I'm your host for None of the Above, a podcast where we seek new answers to America's foreign policy questions. We're a project of the Eurasia Group Foundation. In each episode, I'll be asking leading thinkers for their ideas to help guide the United States, which has found itself increasingly adrift in the world. This week, I'm speaking with Chris Preble. He is the Vice President for Defense and Foreign Policy Studies at the Cato Institute. He is also the author of The Power Problem: How American Military Dominance Makes Us Less Safe, Less Prosperous, and Less Free. His latest book is Peace, War, and Liberty. We are talking today about the paradox of American military power and how big military spending makes us less safe. Chris, thanks for joining me.

PREBLE: Thanks, Mark.

HANNAH: You've written that American military dominance makes us less safe, less prosperous, less free. That's the subtitle of your first book, The Power Problem. How does it make us less safe? People could say, “Well, it's not necessarily proportional to the threats we face,” but how does a strong military make us less safe?

PREBLE: What we are able to do is quite breathtaking sometimes, but that doesn't mean the military can solve every problem, or even that we should try to solve every problem. And the reason why our power can make us less safe is because it gets us involved in disputes we are not able to easily resolve. There is the danger of blowback against the United States. We've seen this tragically happen a number of times.

HANNAH: Can you tell our listeners what you mean by blowback?

PREBLE: That is, people retaliating against the United States precisely because we've gotten involved in their disputes. This is a delicate topic for a lot of different reasons, and Americans are uncomfortable hearing this. I especially want to emphasize that it's not the military's fault. The military is asked to do things that it shouldn't be involved in in the first place. So in Peace, War, and Liberty, I'm proposing an alternative to U.S. foreign policy as it has been practiced at least since the end of the Cold War. And in some respects, going back to the end of the Second World War.

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HANNAH: So you served in the Navy during the first Gulf War. What makes you think we're doing this wrong? What makes you advocate for a more limited military footprint?

PREBLE: Well, I got to see how well the Navy, as an organization, could deploy resources and assets and people quickly. And on a few days' notice. It's really a remarkable thing. But again, that Navy I was serving in was designed to fight the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union also had a navy, a navy that was in nearly as many places as the United States Navy. And so it was logical to me that the U.S. Navy would get smaller in the 1990s, and equally important, that other countries’ navies might get a little bit larger because they had grown dependent upon the United States. And it was not unreasonable to think they might want to do more to defend their vital interests. But that's the part the United States actually worked pretty actively to discourage. And I think it was to our detriment, ultimately.

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HANNAH: So you studied this. What kinds of military spending do you find most wasteful?

PREBLE: I think the part of the military that is most wasteful is there is so much money. Period. We're talking about a massive sum of money.

The very latest statistics we've seen say the president's budget requests will come in at around 750 billion dollars. That is for the Pentagon alone. We also have to factor in things like the Department of Veterans Affairs, which is in the $130 to $140 billion range. Homeland Security. There's a whole range of things. When you really talk about national security spending in the United States, it approaches a trillion dollars a year, which is just staggering. It's really hard to get our head around that, precisely because there is so much money. There will inevitably be a lot of waste because it's easy. It is easy to spend money wastefully. There is very little pressure on the military to spend money wisely because, well, there's so much of it. But I see it more in where I live. I live in Northern Virginia. Loudoun County. And many of the people who live in Loudoun County either work for the Defense Department, work directly for a contractor that sells to the Defense Department, or they work as a contractor or person in the intelligence community. Now, any one of them could point to what it is that they're doing and say, “What I'm doing is essential to U.S. national security.”

So what we really need to push back on are the rationales for why they're doing this. Not what they're doing, but why they're doing it in the first place. And that, to me, is the more important discussion.

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HANNAH: The argument for a more limited military, a more restrained foreign policy, goes back to Dwight Eisenhower, who warned us of a military industrial complex. Why do you think nobody has been able to right size the military?

PREBLE: The fact that the United States did not have a permanent armaments industry for most of its history meant that we were less likely to become involved in foreign conflicts. Once that military was stood up and was at the disposal of the president of the United States, he could then use that power and put U.S. forces into harm's way and effectively dare Congress to cut off the money, which they would not do. The founders never intended for the president of the United States to have this much power at his disposal. Then there is the economic component of the military industrial complex. You have communities in the United States that, especially in the Cold War period, grew dependent upon federal spending, especially federal military spending, and they became more supportive of wars which in the past would have been seen as an opportunity cost. The third factor that's really critical, that we talk about a lot here at the Cato Institute, is fear. During the Cold War, the fear was, well, fairly obvious. The Soviet Union, nuclear weapons, thermonuclear weapons. It looked really bad, right? And appropriately so. Today, the fear is terrorism—and has been since 9/11—and increasingly, China. I think you could not sustain a large and expensive and active military only on the basis of economics.

HANNAH: So, what tools aren't getting used? What tools in our tool box are getting neglected as we overly rely on the military?

PREBLE: One is traditional diplomacy, which is sort of, strangely, not respected right now in the United States and hasn't been for some time. The notion that the United States would negotiate with other countries, identify areas of potential common interest, and try to—in a collaborative way—solve problems. I mean, this is how foreign policy was conducted for a long time. And yet Americans seem to have a real skepticism about traditional diplomacy. If you look at the way the Trump administration's first move was to attempt to essentially gut the State Department, it cast, unfortunately, a very long and unhappy pall over Foggy Bottom, which they're only now starting to recover from, I'm afraid.

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PREBLE: Another instrument of U.S. foreign policy is trade. The United States obviously has a large and attractive market, and we produce things the rest of the world wants. And the notion that we would throw up arbitrary barriers to buyers and sellers is, to me, foolish on economic grounds. But it's equally foolish on grounds of human liberty and flourishing, which is very much consistent with what the founders intended. This country would trade with the rest of the world. That was always their intention.

HANNAH: Do you embrace American exceptionalism, and do you think the founding fathers embraced American exceptionalism?

PREBLE: I absolutely do embrace American exceptionalism in the sense that some of the things that make this country different from other places include our willingness to interact with others, to be welcoming of others. This is what I think makes us exceptional. You know, we were formed by a bunch of misfits. We were the island of misfit toys. I mean, I think there's something about the people who want to come to the United States—even back then, and even to this day—to create a better life for themselves and for their families.

That's what makes us exceptional. And I think, unfortunately, we're losing some of that.

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HANNAH: One of the rationales we gave for such a large military footprint is that we're promoting liberty and freedom and human rights for people all around the world. But is the military the right tool for that job?

PREBLE: As a libertarian, I do believe passionately in the desire of human beings to live free lives, to be free of interference from others. But precisely because the U.S. military is an instrument of force by its nature, a lot of times when we say we're promoting liberty, people aren't choosing liberty. Even if you can force them into wanting it, does that mean they only want it as long as you're forcing them?

No, that's the wrong model. The good news is that liberty has spread around the world, not mostly by force. Most of the people that have chosen to create societies that are respectful of human rights and respectful of individual liberty have grown up organically, as did ours. Sure, we had to fight a war to drive off the British, but the foundations of that model of governance were the British model. You know, there are certain principles about what a citizen expected of his or her government, and what the government owed them in return. That is not mostly imposed by force in the United States. Sure, the U.S. military has gone places and has helped to create conditions that were conducive to democracy. But that doesn't mean the United States military is mostly responsible for promoting democracy. I just don't think it should work that way. I don't think it does work that way.

HANNAH: What are the affirmative policy alternatives that you would like to see enacted if you had thirty minutes in the Oval Office with the president, or had your candidate elected?

PREBLE: I think the alternative foreign policy is one where the United States is engaged throughout the world, but less so militarily. We are already engaged economically and culturally. Americans buy and sell goods all around the world. They travel. They send their kids to foreign universities. That is all a form of cultural and even economic exchange that is enormously rewarding. And it's also, I think, conducive to peace. I think we should invest more heavily in those other instruments of power. I think we should be open to trading with others. I think we should remove the few remaining barriers that exist to trade. It is, after all, mutually beneficial. It is non-coercive. It is peaceful. It is all the things that libertarians respect and love.

HANNAH: And same with immigration, right? You would be open to more immigration.

PREBLE: Correct. That's absolutely right. First of all, there is a basic human right to move yourself. And I think we should celebrate that. And I think we should challenge those who would deny people the ability to move like that. That just seems to me to be a basic instinct. Now, that doesn't mean countries aren't allowed to create rules governing who is entitled to citizenship. That's all perfectly fine. That's reasonable. I don't have any quarrel there, but the notion that we will throw up walls quite literally preventing people from coming in or leaving is, to me, just very backwards thinking. The essence of American exceptionalism is we're made up of people from lots of different places. I wouldn't have it any other way.

HANNAH: What would we call this kind of foreign policy? Because the prevailing consensus has been coined “liberal hegemony” or “benevolent hegemony,” as you called it in your book, The Power Problem.

PREBLE: I think a notion of peaceful, voluntary engagement is certainly better than the notion that the only way the United States can be secure is through the threat of violence.

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PREBLE: We frame our discussion about foreign policy so often on military grounds. That's why we use the word restraint, to restrain the use of the military. But precisely because that has a negative connotation, I do think it's incumbent upon those of us who believe we use the military too much to speak as much, if not more so, about what we're for. We here at the Cato Institute are sort of forcing ourselves to talk more proactively about the things that we're for.

HANNAH: You mentioned that the position you hold is not necessarily a popular one here in this town. It's somewhat contrarian. What is it like being a foreign policy expert who is in the minority right now? Do you get invited to fewer dinner parties?

PREBLE: As a foreign policy analyst here in Washington, D.C., who says things that are not always popular, it's probably true that I don't get invited to as many dinner parties as some others do. On the other hand, when I travel outside of this city, I find that many people I meet and talk to—many people who are not foreign policy experts on any stretch or even pay that much attention to foreign policy—seem to like what I have to say. They seem to like the idea that the United States should be interacting with people around the world. They seem to agree with me that the wars we've been fighting haven't seemed to work very well, and they wonder why we went into them in the first place. They wonder why we spend so much on the military relative to other things we could be spending that money on. And so I do think President Trump tapped into this gap, obviously, between the public and the elites and really exploited it fairly ruthlessly. So it doesn't surprise me when I go outside of D.C. and the Beltway area that people respond fairly well to what I have to say.

HANNAH: You're getting more barbecue invitations in Fort Lauderdale than you are dinner parties in Foggy Bottom.

PREBLE: I’m a big barbecue fan so, yeah, I need to find as many good barbecues as I can.

HANNAH: Who do you see as some of the political leaders that might carry that banner? Cato is a nonpartisan. You guys kind of famously straddle partisan lines, but lean conservative.

PREBLE: Well, Cato is a libertarian think tank. So we believe in principles of limited government, individual liberty, free markets, and peace. Those are sort of our four core guiding principles, and the kinds of people who are open and, in fact, advocates of greater trade with the rest of the world—more peace, more individual liberty—are candidly sort of few and far between. The two major parties are sort of competing with one another in terms of who can be more hawkish, more inclined to use the military, finding new and more creative ways to limit people's access to certain goods and services depending upon where they're produced. And so I do think we have an important challenge on our hands. I happen to think that freedom is consistently believing in people's ability to interact with others. This should guide our conduct. It seems like that's not particularly popular these days.

HANNAH: It’s kind of a quaint notion, but a distinctly American one. In any case, thanks so much for your time

PREBLE: Thanks, Mark.

HANNAH: I'm Mark Hannah, and this has been our first episode of None of the Above, a podcast from the Eurasia Group Foundation. If you enjoyed what you heard, we appreciate you subscribing on Google Play, iTunes, or anywhere else you find podcasts. Thanks for joining us.

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