Matt Yglesias

Standing Back

This is days old, but important. Back on December 29, Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict:

I’ve never understood why anyone in their right mind would accept us as an honest broker, given our declared allegiances. But more than that, I wonder why it’s incumbent on us to broker at all. Lately, our judgment hasn’t exactly been the greatest either.

I think the idea that we should just step away from the whole thing and not see the United States as obligated to play an active role in pushing for a settlement has some logic to it. And of course it’s also a tempting idea for people who don’t want to spend their time in endless bitter arguments about the various Israeli-Arab conflicts. But it’s crucial to underscore that if you really want the United States to step away from the conflict, you would need to push us to genuinely step away. As long as Israel is the primary recipient of United States foreign assistance funds, it doesn’t make sense to say that we’re taking a hands off approach to the issue. When our hands are off, as they have been throughout this bombing campaign, it’s you and me who’s tax dollars are going to defray the costs of the operation.

Problem Solvers

Jonathan Zasloff offers the futility argument with regard to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict:

All those who insist that the United States should “solve” the problem should explain how. And if they can’t do that, then maybe they should take some quiet time.

I think that would be an appealing solution to a lot of people who have no real desire to try to sit in delicate judgment weighing the moral balance between a Hamas movement that seems indifferent to human life, and an Israeli government that’s lashing out brutally as part of a domestic political drama. But as long as Israel is by far the largest recipient of US foreign assistance funds and by an even larger margin the largest per capita recipient of US foreign assistance funds, then I don’t see how “quiet time” is a realistic option. Israel is not a poor country; our financial backing for them is not a humanitarian gesture the way that funds spent on Malawi or Guatemala might be. Our aid to Israel is a strategic commitment to an allied country in a troubled region of the world and a region where, among other things, the United States is concerned about the low esteem in which we are held by the local population.

Under the circumstances, throwing up our hands and saying “it’s too hard!” isn’t an option. We can decide we don’t want to be involved, which would mean unwinding the ties of collaboration and assistance between the US and Israel, or we can try to play a constructive role in bringing an end to the conflict. I’m not personally sure of how you do that. But I’m quite certain that the first step would be pressing Israel — hard — to stop expanding settlements in the West Bank and start dismantling them. To show to Palestinians interested in a two-state solution (perhaps including some Hamas people or perhaps not) that there’s credibility on the other side. I think Israelis wouldn’t welcome such action by us, but ultimately it would be in their own best interests. On the other hand, those who really do think the best thing for the United States is to just wash our hands of the whole mess have an obligation to really stand behind that belief and urge us to wash our hands of the situation. But just proclaiming a pox on both houses while in practice heavily subsidizing one side isn’t a viable option.

Persistent Conflict

Spencer Ackerman has a smart post up about General George Casey’s conceit that the American strategic environment is characterized by “an era of persistent conflict”. As Spencer says, the key thing here is that “one man’s Era Of Persistent Conflict is another man’s Era Of Persistent Peace.” In other words, far from “persistent” conflict what we’re actually looking at is a persistent absence of large-scale security threat to the United States and, thus, a US Army more oriented to selectively playing a constructive role in other people’s conflicts around the world. Spencer

It’s possible that the second definition prevails, and our Army becomes more like, say, Australia’s — primarily used for assistance in a regional conflict, rarely for centrality in major war-fighting. (Apologies to the Aussies if I’ve misunderstood your national posture, but this is how it appears from Washington D.C.) That, I suppose, wouldn’t be terrible, provided it wouldn’t invite attack from a superior adversary.

I think we can be pretty sure it wouldn’t invite an attack from a superior adversary. Among other things, it’s the Navy rather than the Army standing between us and the Chinese — I don’t think we need to worry about offensive military operations from Mexico. The real issue, to my mind, is if we’re going to have a military oriented around this sort of thing, how big does it really need to be?

The correct answer, I think, is “pretty big.” We’ve got the world’s largest GDP. We’ve got the world’s third-largest population. And we’re very close to the top in per capita GDP — way higher than the other large population countries. So it makes a ton of sense for us to have the biggest and most expensive military establishment in the world. But it doesn’t need to be the most expensive by such an absurdly large margin. A lot of the rhetoric around the military suggests the idea (”fighting for our freedom”) suggests they’re really poised on the border to fend off a Canadian onslaught or, at a minimum, holding the Soviets at bay in the Fulda Gap. In reality, they’re doing no such thing. Acting as a the main guarantor of the freedom of the seas, peacekeeping in Bosnia, training friendly security forces in the Philipines, and the like are useful things to do (occupying Iraq less so) but none of them are essential to the continued existence of the United States.

Which is fine. Tons of stuff the federal government does, from wage-indexing Social Security to fighting AIDS in Africa to the National Parks System is hardly essential to the continued existence of the country. By the same token, most of our individual expenditures are for things that aren’t required for subsistence. We’re a rich and powerful land, so we needed be guided in either our individual or a collective decisions by a strict necessity test. Being a 21st century American is cool like that.

But this perspective does mean that a US military facing a strategic environment of persistent peace needs to be able to justify its budgetary claims in perspective — is the marginal dollar of defense spending more useful than a marginal dollar of civilian development assistance, of a beef-ed up foreign service, of enhanced domestic infrastructure spending? There’s some quantity of defense spending such that the answer is “yes.” But one can’t help but suspect that the point of describing persistent peace as “persistent conflict” is to obscure these trade-offs. To try to put the military’s operations in the Horn of Africa on a whole different plane than USAID’s relief work in Pakistan when on the merits it all deserves to be considered comprehensively.