Long live the military-industrial complex

Writing for Salon, Michael Lind examines the connections between America's continued Cold War militarism and its crippling trade deficits.

During and after the Korean War, the U.S. rebuilt its military and stationed troops along "tripwires" from Central Europe to East Asia. The U.S. encouraged the formation of the European Common Market (now the European Union) in part to provide the West Germans with markets. In Asia, Mao Zedong's victory in China cut off Japan's China market, so the U.S. offered the American market to Japanese exporters, which initially were not considered a threat to American businesses.

Thus began the Grand Bargain at the heart of U.S. Cold War strategy toward West Germany and Japan, the "markets-for-bases" swap. In return for giving up an independent foreign policy to their protector, the United States, the West Germans and Japanese would be granted access to American markets (and, in the case of the Germans, access to Western European markets).

[...]

For half a century America's economic establishment, turning a blind eye to Asia's crude and Germany's subtle mercantilism, pretended that American protectionism was the greatest threat to the world economy. It is gradually dawning even on former free-trade fundamentalists that you cannot have a liberal global trading system in which three of the four largest industrial capitalist countries -- China, Japan and Germany -- pursue policies that permit them to enjoy perpetual trade surpluses, which require perpetual trade deficits by the U.S. and other countries.

Meanwhile, the security half of America's global strategy is headed for a crash as well. Since the end of the Cold War, the U.S. has mindlessly sought to fill every power vacuum from the Balkans to the Persian Gulf to Central Asia, while spending far less on the military than it did in the Cold War. The U.S. has gone into debt to finance the Iraq and Afghan wars. You don't have to be a grand strategist to figure out that extending territorial commitments without commensurately expanding funding and troop levels is a formula for strategic and perhaps national bankruptcy.

By declaring that the new deficit commission would not consider any cuts in military spending, only in entitlement spending, President Obama reflected the preferences of America's policy elite. Its members would gladly cut Social Security and Medicare in order to pay for bases and "nation-building" abroad. In the same way, for half a century, America's foreign-policy elite tolerated the targeted deindustrialization of America by Asian mercantilist states, as long as those countries did not challenge America's global military hegemony.

At some point, one would think the U.S. would realize that perpetual war was counterproductive. Since mass death, preserving human rights and the Geneva Conventions, maintaining international relations and upholding basic level of compassion don't seem to be deterrents, maybe basic economics could be the tool to curb the Pentagon's spending.

Unfortunately, the Cold War mentality persists, and Barack Obama, who was supposed to usher in a new generation of leadership, refuses to change course. Maybe it isn't "politically convenient" to stop the war machine right now, so we'll just have to wait for leaders with the spine to stand up to the Booz Allens and Boeings and Northrop Grummans (as well as their enablers) of the world. In the meantime, I can't wait for the 'Invade Iran in 2012' posters to spring up. Now that sounds politically convenient.