R****a
发帖数: 6858 | 1 美国对外政策：战略收缩
来源: ognc 于 2013-02-18 07:58:39[档案] [博客] [旧帖] [转至博客] [给我悄悄
话] 本文已被阅读：198次
字体：调大/调小/重置 | 加入书签| 打印| 所有跟帖 | 加跟贴| 查看当前最热讨论主题
机器翻译的，凑合着看。原文在后。
一个不活跃的外交政策的情况
由Barry R.波森一月/二月2013，外交
尽管经历了十年的昂贵和优柔寡断的战争和不断增加的财政压力，美国政策制定者对美
国大战略之间的长期的共识仍然保持完整。作为总统竞选的共和党人和民主党人明确表
示，可以说外交政策的边缘，但他们同意这个：，美国要称霸世界的军事，经济，政治
，自冷战的最后一年，一个自由主义的霸权战略。这个国家，他们认为，需要保持其在
全球力量平衡的巨大领先地位，巩固其经济优势，扩大市场的民主社会，并保持其影响
力的国际机构，它帮助创造。
为此，美国政府已扩大其庞大的冷战时代的网络安全的承诺和军事基地。它加强了现有
的联盟，北约新成员加入，加强与日本的安全协议。在波斯湾，它试图用一个全副武装
的空气，海洋保护油流，和地面部队，这一目标消耗至少百分之15的美国国防预算。华
盛顿已经把中国列入观察名单，响了它在与联盟网络，不那么正式的关系，和军事基地。
美国的行动已经引起了雄心勃勃的对外政策项目一长串。华盛顿一直试图营救失败的国
家，军事干预索马里，波斯尼亚，海地，科索沃，和利比亚，各种试图捍卫人权，抑制
不希望的民族主义运动，并安装的民主政权。它也试图包含所谓的无赖国家反对美国，
如伊朗，伊拉克萨达姆侯赛因，朝鲜，和，在较小的程度，叙利亚。9 / 11后，打击基
地组织及其盟友的主要议题，但小布什政府确定本企业广泛，导致该国成为在阿富汗和
伊拉克战争的痛苦。尽管美国一直试图阻止核武器的扩散，核武装恐怖分子的前景已经
加入到这一目标的紧迫性，导致伊朗和朝鲜的恒张力。
在这个雄心勃勃的议程的追求，美国已经花费了数百亿的美元的军费——远远超过其朋
友的国防预算金额远远超过其潜在对手的总和。它一直是军事忙：美国军队已经花了大
约两倍，在冷战期间他们战斗后几个月。今天，大约180000的美国士兵继续驻扎在外国
的土地上，不包括成千上万更多的人通过在阿富汗和伊拉克的战争区域旋转。美国和盟
军士兵数千人失去了生命，更不用说无数平民在交火。
是时候放弃美国的霸权战略和取代它的一个约束。
这个散漫的，昂贵的，和血腥的策略有了无法估量的危害美国国家安全。它使敌人几乎
就杀死他们以最快的速度，不鼓励盟友支付为自己进行辩护，并使强大的国家联合起来
反对美国的计划，进一步提高执行其外交政策的成本。在上世纪90年代，这些后果管理
因为美国享有如此有利的权力地位和战争仔细选择。在过去的十年中，然而，该国的相
对功率的恶化，以及政策制定者进行了可怕的选择对战的战争和如何对抗他们。更重要
的是，五角大楼开始依赖现金持续输注只保留其目前的力量结构——消费水平，经济大
萧条，美国不断膨胀的债务是不可持续的。
是时候放弃美国的霸权战略和取代它的一个约束。这种方法将意味着放弃全球改革和坚
持保护狭隘的国家安全利益。这就意味着转变成军的较小的力去战争只有当它真的必须
。这将意味着从前沿基地除去大量的美国军队，为盟国提供自己的安全措施。因为这样
的转变将使美国花费资源只有国际最紧迫的威胁，这将有助于保持长期的国家的繁荣和
安全。
行动和反应
美国从冷战作为近代最强大的国家，一个地位，其多样化和非常发达的经济支持
Pull Back
The Case for a Less Activist Foreign Policy
By Barry R. Posen January/February 2013， Foreign Affairs
Despite a decade of costly and indecisive warfare and mounting fiscal
pressures, the long-standing consensus among American policymakers about U.S
. grand strategy has remained remarkably intact. As the presidential
campaign made clear, Republicans and Democrats may quibble over foreign
policy at the margins, but they agree on the big picture: that the United
States should dominate the world militarily, economically, and politically,
as it has since the final years of the Cold War, a strategy of liberal
hegemony. The country, they hold, needs to preserve its massive lead in the
global balance of power, consolidate its economic preeminence, enlarge the
community of market democracies, and maintain its outsized influence in the
international institutions it helped create.
To this end, the U.S. government has expanded its sprawling Cold War-era
network of security commitments and military bases. It has reinforced its
existing alliances, adding new members to NATO and enhancing its security
agreement with Japan. In the Persian Gulf, it has sought to protect the flow
of oil with a full panoply of air, sea, and land forces, a goal that
consumes at least 15 percent of the U.S. defense budget. Washington has put
China on a watch list, ringing it in with a network of alliances, less
formal relationships, and military bases.
The United States' activism has entailed a long list of ambitious foreign
policy projects. Washington has tried to rescue failing states, intervening
militarily in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Libya, variously
attempting to defend human rights, suppress undesirable nationalist
movements, and install democratic regimes. It has also tried to contain so-
called rogue states that oppose the United States, such as Iran, Iraq under
Saddam Hussein, North Korea, and, to a lesser degree, Syria. After 9/11, the
struggle against al Qaeda and its allies dominated the agenda, but the
George W. Bush administration defined this enterprise broadly and led the
country into the painful wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Although the United
States has long sought to discourage the spread of nuclear weapons, the
prospect of nuclear-armed terrorists has added urgency to this objective,
leading to constant tension with Iran and North Korea.
In pursuit of this ambitious agenda, the United States has consistently
spent hundreds of billions of dollars per year on its military -- far more
than the sum of the defense budgets of its friends and far more than the sum
of those of its potential adversaries. It has kept that military busy: U.S.
troops have spent roughly twice as many months in combat after the Cold War
as they did during it. Today, roughly 180,000 U.S. soldiers remain
stationed on foreign soil, not counting the tens of thousands more who have
rotated through the war zones in Afghanistan and Iraq. Thousands of American
and allied soldiers have lost their lives, not to mention the countless
civilians caught in the crossfire.
It is time to abandon the United States' hegemonic strategy and replace it
with one of restraint.
This undisciplined, expensive, and bloody strategy has done untold harm to U
.S. national security. It makes enemies almost as fast as it slays them,
discourages allies from paying for their own defense, and convinces powerful
states to band together and oppose Washington's plans, further raising the
costs of carrying out its foreign policy. During the 1990s, these
consequences were manageable because the United States enjoyed such a
favorable power position and chose its wars carefully. Over the last decade,
however, the country's relative power has deteriorated, and policymakers
have made dreadful choices concerning which wars to fight and how to fight
them. What's more, the Pentagon has come to depend on continuous infusions
of cash simply to retain its current force structure -- levels of spending
that the Great Recession and the United States' ballooning debt have
rendered unsustainable.
It is time to abandon the United States' hegemonic strategy and replace it
with one of restraint. This approach would mean giving up on global reform
and sticking to protecting narrow national security interests. It would mean
transforming the military into a smaller force that goes to war only when
it truly must. It would mean removing large numbers of U.S. troops from
forward bases, creating incentives for allies to provide for their own
security. And because such a shift would allow the United States to spend
its resources on only the most pressing international threats, it would help
preserve the country's prosperity and security over the long run.
ACTION AND REACTION
The United States emerged from the Cold War as the single most powerful
state in modern times, a position that its diversified and immensely
productive economy supports. Although its share of world economic output
will inevitably shrink as other countries catch up, the United States will
continue for many years to rank as one of the top two or three economies in
the world. The United States' per capita GDP stands at $48,000, more than
five times as large as China's, which means that the U.S. economy can
produce cutting-edge products for a steady domestic market. North America is
blessed with enviable quantities of raw materials, and about 29 percent of
U.S. trade flows to and from its immediate neighbors, Canada and Mexico. The
fortuitous geostrategic position of the United States compounds these
economic advantages. Its neighbors to the north and south possess only
miniscule militaries. Vast oceans to the west and east separate it from
potential rivals. And its thousands of nuclear weapons deter other countries
from ever entertaining an invasion.
Ironically, however, instead of relying on these inherent advantages for its
security, the United States has acted with a profound sense of insecurity,
adopting an unnecessarily militarized and forward-leaning foreign policy.
That strategy has generated predictable pushback. Since the 1990s, rivals
have resorted to what scholars call "soft balancing" -- low-grade diplomatic
opposition. China and Russia regularly use the rules of liberal
international institutions to delegitimize the United States' actions. In
the UN Security Council, they wielded their veto power to deny the West
resolutions supporting the bombing campaign in Kosovo in 1999 and the
invasion of Iraq in 2003, and more recently, they have slowed the effort to
isolate Syria. They occasionally work together in other venues, too, such as
the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. Although the Beijing-Moscow
relationship is unimpressive compared with military alliances such as NATO,
it's remarkable that it exists at all given the long history of border
friction and hostility between the two countries. As has happened so often
in history, the common threat posed by a greater power has driven unnatural
partners to cooperate.
American activism has also generated harder forms of balancing. China has
worked assiduously to improve its military, and Russia has sold it modern
weapons, such as fighter aircraft, surface-to-air missiles, and diesel-
electric submarines. Iran and North Korea, meanwhile, have pursued nuclear
programs in part to neutralize the United States' overwhelming advantages in
conventional fighting power. Some of this pushback would have occurred no
matter what; in an anarchic global system, states acquire the allies and
military power that help them look after themselves. But a country as large
and as active as the United States intensifies these responses.
Such reactions will only grow stronger as emerging economies convert their
wealth into military power. Even though the economic and technological
capacities of China and India may never equal those of the United States,
the gap is destined to narrow. China already has the potential to be a
serious competitor. At the peak of the Cold War, in the mid-1970s, Soviet
GDP, in terms of purchasing power parity, amounted to 57 percent of U.S. GDP
. China reached 75 percent of the U.S. level in 2011, and according to the
International Monetary Fund, it is projected to match it by 2017. Of course,
Chinese output must support four times as many people, which limits what
the country can extract for military purposes, but it still provides enough
resources to hinder U.S. foreign policy. Meanwhile, Russia, although a
shadow of its former Soviet self, is no longer the hapless weakling it was
in the 1990s. Its economy is roughly the size of the United Kingdom's or
France's, it has plenty of energy resources to export, and it still produces
some impressive weapons systems.
FIGHTING IDENTITY
Just as emerging powers have gotten stronger, so, too, have the small states
and violent substate entities that the United States has attempted to
discipline, democratize, or eliminate. Whether in Somalia, Serbia,
Afghanistan, Iraq, or Libya, the U.S. military seems to find itself fighting
enemies that prove tougher than expected. (Consider the fact that
Washington spent as much in real terms on the war in Iraq as it did on the
war in Vietnam, even though the Iraqi insurgents enjoyed little external
support, whereas China and the Soviet Union lent major support to the
Vietcong and the North Vietnamese.) Yet Washington seems unable to stay out
of conflicts involving substate entities, in part because their elemental
nature assaults the internationalist values that U.S. grand strategy is
committed to preserving. Having trumpeted the United States' military
superiority, U.S. policymakers have a hard time saying no to those who argue
that the country's prestige will suffer gravely if the world's leader lets
wars great and small run their course.
The enduring strength of these substate groups should give American
policymakers pause, since the United States' current grand strategy entails
open-ended confrontation with nationalism and other forms of identity
politics that insurgents and terrorists feed off of. These forces provide
the organizing energy for groups competing for power within countries (as in
Bosnia, Afghanistan, and Iraq), for secessionist movements (as in Kosovo),
and for terrorists who oppose the liberal world order (mainly al Qaeda).
Officials in Washington, however, have acted as if they can easily undercut
the power of identity through democratic processes, freedom of information,
and economic development, helped along by the judicious application of
military power. In fact, identity is resilient, and foreign peoples react
with hostility to outsiders trying to control their lives.
The Iraq war has been a costly case in point. Officials in the Bush
administration convinced themselves that a quick application of overwhelming
military power would bring democracy to Iraq, produce a subsequent wave of
democratization across the Arab world, marginalize al Qaeda, and secure U.S.
influence in the region. Instead, Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds stoked the
violence that the United States labored to suppress, and Shiite and Sunni
factions fought not only each other but also the U.S. military. Today's
Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad has proved neither democratic nor
effective. Sunni terrorists have continued to carry out attacks. The Kurdish
parts of Iraq barely acknowledge their membership in the larger state.
By now, it is clear that the United States has worn out its welcome in
Afghanistan, too. The Taliban continue to resist the U.S. presence, drawing
their strength largely from Pashtun nationalism, and members of the Afghan
security forces have, in growing numbers, murdered U.S. and other NATO
soldiers who were there to assist them. Instead of simply punishing the
Taliban for their indirect role in 9/11 and hitting al Qaeda as hard as
possible, true to its global agenda, the Bush administration pursued a
costly and futile effort to transform Afghanistan, and the Obama
administration continued it.
FRIENDS WITHOUT BENEFITS
Another problematic response to the United States' grand strategy comes from
its friends: free-riding. The Cold War alliances that the country has
worked so hard to maintain -- namely, NATO and the U.S.-Japanese security
agreement -- have provided U.S. partners in Europe and Asia with such a high
level of insurance that they have been able to steadily shrink their
militaries and outsource their defense to Washington. European nations have
cut their military spending by roughly 15 percent in real terms since the
end of the Cold War, with the exception of the United Kingdom, which will
soon join the rest as it carries out its austerity policy. Depending on how
one counts, Japanese defense spending has been cut, or at best has remained
stable, over the past decade. The government has unwisely devoted too much
spending to ground forces, even as its leaders have expressed alarm at the
rise of Chinese military power -- an air, missile, and naval threat.
Although these regions have avoided major wars, the United States has had to
bear more and more of the burden of keeping the peace. It now spends 4.6
percent of its GDP on defense, whereas its European NATO allies collectively
spend 1.6 percent and Japan spends 1.0 percent. With their high per capita
GDPs, these allies can afford to devote more money to their militaries, yet
they have no incentive to do so. And so while the U.S. government considers
draconian cuts in social spending to restore the United States' fiscal
health, it continues to subsidize the security of Germany and Japan. This is
welfare for the rich.
U.S. security guarantees also encourage plucky allies to challenge more
powerful states, confident that Washington will save them in the end -- a
classic case of moral hazard. This phenomenon has caused the United States
to incur political costs, antagonizing powers great and small for no gain
and encouraging them to seek opportunities to provoke the United States in
return. So far, the United States has escaped getting sucked into
unnecessary wars, although Washington dodged a bullet in Taiwan when the
Democratic Progressive Party of Chen Shui-bian governed the island, from
2000 to 2008. His frequent allusions to independence, which ran counter to U
.S. policy but which some Bush administration officials reportedly
encouraged, unnecessarily provoked the Chinese government; had he proceeded,
he would have surely triggered a dangerous crisis. Chen would never have
entertained such reckless rhetoric absent the long-standing backing of the U
.S. government.
The Philippines and Vietnam (the latter of which has no formal defense
treaty with Washington) also seem to have figured out that they can needle
China over maritime boundary disputes and then seek shelter under the U.S.
umbrella when China inevitably reacts. Not only do these disputes make it
harder for Washington to cooperate with Beijing on issues of global
importance; they also risk roping the United States into conflicts over
strategically marginal territory.
Georgia is another state that has played this game to the United States'
detriment. Overly confident of Washington's affection for it, the tiny
republic deliberately challenged Russia over control of the disputed region
of South Ossetia in August 2008. Regardless of how exactly the fighting
began, Georgia acted far too adventurously given its size, proximity to
Russia, and distance from any plausible source of military help. This
needless war ironically made Russia look tough and the United States
unreliable.
This dynamic is at play in the Middle East, too. Although U.S. officials
have communicated time and again to leaders in Jerusalem their discomfort
with Israeli settlements on the territory occupied during the 1967 war,
Israel regularly increases the population and dimensions of those
settlements. The United States' military largess and regular affirmations of
support for Israel have convinced Israeli hawks that they will suffer no
consequences for ignoring U.S. advice. It takes two to make peace in the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but the creation of humiliating facts on the
ground will not bring a negotiated settlement any closer. And Israel's
policies toward the Palestinians are a serious impediment to improved U.S.
relations with the Arab world.
A NIMBLER STRATEGY
The United States should replace its unnecessary, ineffective, and expensive
hegemonic quest with a more restrained grand strategy. Washington should
not retreat into isolationism but refocus its efforts on its three biggest
security challenges: preventing a powerful rival from upending the global
balance of power, fighting terrorists, and limiting nuclear proliferation.
These challenges are not new, but the United States must develop more
carefully calculated and discriminating policies to address them.
For roughly a century, American strategists have striven to ensure that no
single state dominated the giant landmass of Eurasia, since such a power
could then muster the resources to threaten the United States directly. To
prevent this outcome, the United States rightly went to war against Germany
and Japan and contained the Soviet Union. Although China may ultimately try
to assume the mantle of Eurasian hegemon, this outcome is neither imminent
nor inevitable. China's economy still faces many pitfalls, and the country
is surrounded by powerful states that could and would check its expansion,
including India and Russia, both of which have nuclear weapons. Japan,
although it underspends on defense today, is rich and technologically
advanced enough to contribute to a coalition of states that could balance
against China. Other maritime Asian countries, even without the United
States as a backstop, could also make common cause against China. The United
States should maintain the capability to assist them if need be. But it
should proceed cautiously in order to ensure that its efforts do not
unnecessarily threaten China and thus encourage the very ambitions
Washington hopes to deter or prompt a new round of free-riding or reckless
driving by others in Asia.
The United States must also defend itself against al Qaeda and any similar
successor groups. Since such terrorists can threaten Americans' lives, the U
.S. government should keep in place the prudent defensive measures that have
helped lower the risk of attacks, such as more energetic intelligence
efforts and better airport security. (A less interventionist foreign policy
will help, too: it was partly the U.S. military's presence in Saudi Arabia
that radicalized Osama bin Laden and his followers in the first place.) When
it comes to offense, the United States must still pursue terrorists
operating abroad, so that they spend their scarce resources trying to stay
alive rather than plotting new attacks. It will need to continue cooperating
with other vulnerable governments and help them develop their own police
and military forces. Occasionally, the U.S. military will have to supplement
these efforts with air strikes, drone attacks, and special operations raids
.
But Washington should keep the threat in perspective. Terrorists are too
weak to threaten the country's sovereignty, territorial integrity, or power
position. Because the threat is modest, and because trying to reform other
societies by force is too costly, the United States must fight terrorism
with carefully applied force, rather than through wholesale nation-building
efforts such as that in Afghanistan.
Finally, a restrained grand strategy would also pay close attention to the
spread of nuclear weapons, while relying less on the threat of military
force to stop it. Thanks to the deterrence provided by its own massive
nuclear forces, the United States faces little risk of a direct nuclear
attack by another state. But Washington does need to keep nonstate actors
from obtaining nuclear weapons or material. To prevent them from taking
advantage of lax safeguards at nuclear facilities, the U.S. government
should share best practices regarding nuclear security with other countries,
even ones that it would prefer did not possess nuclear weapons in the first
place. The United States does already cooperate somewhat with Pakistan on
this issue, but it must stand ready to do more and ultimately to undertake
such efforts with others.
The loss of a government's control over its nuclear weapons during a coup,
revolution, or civil war is a far harder problem to forestall. It may be
possible for U.S. forces to secure weapons in a period of instability, with
the help of local actors who see the dangers for their own country if the
weapons get loose. Conditions may lend themselves to a preventive military
attack, to seize or disable the weapons. In some cases, however, the United
States might have to make do with less sure-fire responses. It could warn
those who seized the nuclear weapons in a period of upheaval that they would
make themselves targets for retaliation if the weapons were ever used by
terrorists. And it could better surveil international sea and air routes and
more intensively monitor both its own borders for nuclear smuggling and
those of the potential source countries.
These measures may seem incommensurate with the terrible toll of a nuclear
blast. But the alternative strategy -- fighting preventive conventional wars
against nascent nuclear powers -- is an expensive and uncertain solution to
proliferation. The Obama administration's oft-repeated warning that
deterrence and containment of a nuclear Iran is unacceptable makes little
sense given the many ways a preventive war could go wrong and in light of
the redundant deterrent capability the United States already possesses.
Indeed, the more Washington relies on military force to halt proliferation,
the more likely it is that countries will decide to acquire the ultimate
deterrent.
A more restrained America would also have to head off nuclear arms races. In
retrospect, the size, composition, doctrine, and highly alert posture of U.
S. and Soviet nuclear forces during the Cold War seem unduly risky relative
to the strategic problem those weapons were supposed to solve. Nuclear
weapons act as potent deterrents to aggression, but significantly smaller
forces than those the United States now possesses, carefully managed, should
do the job. To avoid a replay of Cold War-style nuclear competition, the
United States should pursue a new multilateral arms control regime that
places ceilings on nuclear inventories and avoids hair-trigger force
postures.
RESTRAINT IN PRACTICE
A grand strategy of restraint would narrow U.S. foreign policy to focus on
those three larger objectives. What would it look like in practice? First,
the United States would recast its alliances so that other countries shared
actual responsibility for their own defense. NATO is the easiest case; the
United States should withdraw from the military command structure and return
the alliance to the primarily political organization it once was. The
Europeans can decide for themselves whether they want to retain the military
command structure under the auspices of the European Union or dismantle it
altogether. Most U.S. troops should come home from Europe, although by
mutual agreement, the United States could keep a small number of naval and
air bases on the continent.
The security treaty with Japan is a more difficult problem; it needs to be
renegotiated but not abandoned. As the treaty stands now, the United States
shoulders most of the burden of defending Japan, and the Japanese government
agrees to help. The roles should be reversed, so that Japan assumes
responsibility for its own defense, with Washington offering backup. Given
concerns about China's rising power, not all U.S. forces should leave the
region. But the Pentagon should pare down its presence in Japan to those
relevant to the most immediate military problems. All U.S. marines could be
withdrawn from the country, bringing to an end the thorny negotiations about
their future on the island of Okinawa. The U.S. Navy and the U.S. Air Force
should keep the bulk of their forces stationed in and around Japan in place
, but with appropriate reductions. Elsewhere in Asia, the U.S. military can
cooperate with other states to ensure access to the region should future
crises arise, but it should not seek new permanent bases.
The military should also reassess its commitments in the Persian Gulf: the
United States should help protect states in the region against external
attacks, but it cannot take responsibility for defending them against
internal dissent. Washington still needs to reassure those governments that
fear that a regional power such as Iran will attack them and hijack their
oil wealth, since a single oil-rich hegemon in the region would no doubt be
a source of mischief. The U.S. military has proved adept at preventing such
an outcome in the past, as it did when it defended Saudi Arabia and repelled
Saddam's forces from Kuwait in 1991. Ground forces bent on invasion make
easy targets for air attacks. The aircraft and cruise missiles aboard U.S.
naval forces stationed in the region could provide immediate assistance.
With a little advance notice, U.S. Air Force aircraft could quickly
reinforce land bases maintained by the Arab states of the Gulf, as they did
during the Gulf War when the regional powers opposed to Saddam's aggression
prepared the way for reinforcement from the U.S. military by maintaining
extra base capacity and fuel.
But U.S. soldiers no longer need to live onshore in Gulf countries, where
they incite anti-Americanism and tie the U.S. government to autocratic
regimes of dubious legitimacy. For example, Bahrain is suffering
considerable internal unrest, which raises questions about the future
viability of the United States' growing military presence there. The Iraq
war proved that trying to install new regimes in Arab countries is a fool's
errand; defending existing regimes facing internal rebellion will be no
easier.
Under a restrained grand strategy, U.S. military forces could shrink
significantly, both to save money and to send allies the message that it's
time they did more for themselves. Because the Pentagon would, under this
new strategy, swear off counterinsurgency, it could cut the number of ground
forces in half. The navy and the air force, meanwhile, should be cut by
only a quarter to a third, since their assets take a long time to produce
and would still be needed for any effort to maintain the global balance of
power. Naval and air forces are also well suited to solving the security
problems of Asia and the Persian Gulf. Because these forces are highly
mobile, only some need be present in key regions. The rest can be kept at
home, as a powerful strategic reserve.
The overall size and quality of U.S. military forces should be determined by
the critical contingency that they must address: the defense of key
resources and allies against direct attack. Too often in the past,
Washington has overused its expensive military to send messages that ought
to be left to diplomats. That must change. Although the Pentagon should
continue leading joint exercises with the militaries of other countries in
key regions, it should stop overloading the calendar with pointless
exercises the world over. Making that change would save wear and tear on
troops and equipment and avoid creating the impression that the United
States will solve all the world's security problems.
LETTING GO
Shifting to a more restrained global stance would yield meaningful benefits
for the United States, saving lives and resources and preventing pushback,
provided Washington makes deliberate and prudent moves now to prepare its
allies to take on the responsibility for their own defense. Scaling down the
U.S. military's presence over a decade would give partners plenty of time
to fortify their own militaries and develop the political and diplomatic
machinery to look after their own affairs. Gradual disengagement would also
reduce the chances of creating security vacuums, which opportunistic
regional powers might try to fill.
U.S. allies, of course, will do everything they can to persuade Washington
to keep its current policies in place. Some will promise improvements to
their military forces that they will then abandon when it is convenient.
Some will claim there is nothing more they can contribute, that their
domestic political and economic constraints matter more than America's.
Others will try to divert the discussion to shared values and principles.
Still others will hint that they will bandwagon with strong neighbors rather
than balance against them. A few may even threaten to turn belligerent.
U.S. policymakers will need to remain cool in the face of such tactics and
keep in mind that these wealthy allies are unlikely to surrender their
sovereignty to regional powers. Indeed, history has shown that states more
often balance against the powerful than bandwagon with them. As for
potential adversaries, the United States can continue to deter actions that
threaten its vital interests by defining those interests narrowly, stating
them clearly, and maintaining enough military power to protect them.
Of course, the United States could do none of these things and instead
continue on its present track, wasting resources and earning the enmity of
some states and peoples while infantilizing others. Perhaps current economic
and geopolitical trends will reverse themselves, and the existing strategy
will leave Washington comfortably in the driver's seat, with others eager to
live according to its rules. But if the U.S. debt keeps growing and power
continues to shift to other countries, some future economic or political
crisis could force Washington to switch course abruptly, compelling friendly
and not-so-friendly countries to adapt suddenly. That seems like the more
dangerous path.
## | H*********S
发帖数: 22772 | 2 硬撑着扩张,美国国力很快会被烧完,接下来就是崩塌;有策略地收缩,抓住要点,低投入
高收益地保持威慑和影响,美国还能维持长一些时间,甚至实现软着陆 | R****a
发帖数: 6858 | 3
没错。
【在 H*********S 的大作中提到】
: 硬撑着扩张,美国国力很快会被烧完,接下来就是崩塌;有策略地收缩,抓住要点,低投入
: 高收益地保持威慑和影响,美国还能维持长一些时间,甚至实现软着陆
| H*********S
发帖数: 22772 | 4 按中华文化给美国号脉的话，美国过于注重法墨，失之老庄 |
|
