Why Can’t Our Allies Defend Themselves?
Aside from denouncing drug smugglers, the most popular new theme of this year’s presidential campaign is bashing our allies – the feckless Germans and Japanese, even the Danes, Norwegians and Spanish. Every candidate, including the squishy vice-president, has demanded or at least suggested that our NATO allies and Japan pay for a larger share of our mutual defense.
“The Japanese case is scandalous,” says one authority in the field. “The political and psychological excuses that Japan has sold a succession of American administrations, including this one, for not sharing the defense burden equitably are little more than a gloss on a policy of chronic freeloading. “It is galling to be lectured by those whom we defend about the need to control our budget deficit. Indeed, if we were to reduce our defense effort to, say, the level of Germany, we could balance the American budget this year.”
This is the historic contradiction facing the American empire: The United States is financing the defense of its economic competitors, assuming costs and risks that they refuse to accept. Meanwhile, they are trafficking with the ‘enemy,’ even selling the reds high-tech hardware for modern weapons systems. The long-term consequences for America are clearly visible: The economy gets steadily weaker, deeper in debt and less competitive while our supposed allies ride the advantage by investing their capital in productive enterprises. The allies, it seems, do not take the Cold War “threat” as seriously as American political leaders do. For the Europeans and the Japanese, it’s a good deal, and they have no incentive to change. For Americans, it’s not such a good deal. As Representative Patricia Schroeder first observed long ago, “We have all the burdens of empire and none of the benefits.”
Some of the harshest observations about our allies, such as those quoted above, do not come from Pat Schroeder, Jesse Jackson or dovish left-wing wimps but from Mr. Hawk himself – Richard Perle. Recently retired as assistant secretary of defense for international security, Perle was the bristling intellect of Reagan’s Pentagon. No one believes more fervently in the Cold War struggle. No one plotted more skillfully for the Reagan arms buildup. Now Perle acknowledges that when he was in government, he spent a lot of energy hiding the freeloading of our allies.
In congressional hearings, Schroeder pinned Perle down on how the Pentagon covered up for the allies. Congress has ordered the military to make an annual assessment of defense-burden sharing among the allies, but Perle admitted that the numbers have been cooked. The reports, he said, are “an exercise in thinking of ways to put the best possible gloss on some pretty dismal figures. I know it because I superintended it – and looked for statistics to make the allies look good.”
Perle’s ex post facto candor is a hopeful development. Not because he wants to bring U.S. troops home from Europe (he doesn’t), or because he now admits the Soviet threat has been exaggerated by hawks like himself (he admits no such thing), but because when people like Richard Perle begin to come clean on this issue, it indicates that opinion leaders are finally acknowledging the absurdities of the Cold War strategy they have pursued for 20 years.
Uncle Sucker may be slowly waking up. Dare we hope that the next president will actually do something, like bringing home many of the 350,000 troops still stationed in Europe 40 years after World War II? Maybe. But only maybe. Campaign rhetoric is cheap. Resolving the Cold War contradictions will require great courage.
Pat Schroeder decided for various reasons not to run for president this year; she is laboring instead to influence the next president on this central question. As chairwoman of the special panel of the House Armed Services Committee on defense-burden sharing, the Colorado Democrat has been holding hearings, collecting hard evidence on the inequities, hoping to focus the debate that is sure to face the next administration. For years, Schroeder has been one of the lonely voices on the Armed Services Committee complaining about the bloated defense commitments of the United States and the free ride Europe and Japan have enjoyed. Now at last others may be ready to listen.
Instead of stacking the deck with like-minded witnesses, as congressional inquiries usually do, Schroeder is attempting to hear from both hawks and doves. The final report will have more impact when it reveals that a lot of stalwart cold warriors, like Perle, are fed up, too.
“The basic fact is that we keep grabbing the check,” Schroeder said, and the figures back her up. About $170 billion of the Pentagon’s 1988 budget of $285 billion goes to NATO. The United States devotes 6.9 percent of its gross national product to defense; the NATO allies devote only 3.5 percent. The disparity between the spending of the United States and Japan is much worse, because Japan spends only about 1 percent on defense. Each American citizen has $1,002 spent on his or her behalf on the military. For each German, only $359 is spent. For each Italian, only $187. For each Japanese, only $103.
In fact, the imbalance is probably even worse. Schroeder has found evidence that the allies pump up their defense costs with dubious accounting. The Japanese are the most outrageous offenders, counting as defense spending the rent and taxes theoretically lost on the real estate for American bases. They even count environmental damage caused by military installations. “Can you imagine if we put that in our estimate?” Schroeder asked. “God knows what percentage of our GNP we’d have in defense spending.”
Even more infuriating is how the allies squeeze extra dollars out of the U.S. military presence – demanding foreign-aid bribes in exchange for allowing American bases on their soil. “The base agreements are outrageous,” Schroeder said. “We’ve had base fights with Spain, Portugal, Greece, Turkey – all in NATO – and they each put the gun to our head and say, ‘Want to keep the bases here? You’ve got to increase foreign aid by x percentage.’ Turkey even gets to renegotiate those base rights every year. I don’t know what genius negotiated that deal, but every year we give Turkey the option to shoot at our feet and say, ‘Tap-dance, Uncle Sam!'”
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