The budget Obama will present to Congress next week will likely begin what the Pentagon is billing as $78 billion in cuts to its budget over five years. In fact these are cuts to their plans for expansion, i.e., slowing a proposed increase is being defined as a cut.
The two chairs of the Deficit Reduction Commission have floated their trial balloon. Here’s my good news/ bad news quick take on their proposals for military spending:
Good news:
Bad news:
Everyone wants America to be safe and secure. And our government has a wide array of tools for accomplishing that.
Thought the Bush years were over? Not so fast.
As the Bush administration’s mass exodus gets underway, President-elect Obama is hearing from a lot of quarters that his cabinet should include one key holdover. According to this thinking, he should leave the Pentagon in the hands of its current Secretary, Robert Gates. Fortunately, the new president will have in-hand an easy way to judge whether or not this is a good idea.
In their first debate, Barack Obama and John McCain will audition for the role of change agent. Here’s one thing the moderator needs to ask: how they would change the military-led foreign policy of the past eight years.
At a time when national consensus on anything is rare indeed, here’s one example: The balance between our spending on military forces and other security tools – like diplomacy, nonproliferation, foreign aid and homeland security – needs to change.
An economy slouching toward recession, or—depending on who you talk to—already there, has produced two seemingly contradictory effects. It has pushed the worst foreign policy disaster in U.S. history off the top of the list of citizen concerns. And it has simultaneously gotten those citizens, and even their members of Congress, talking much more about that disaster’s economic costs.
Voters — Republicans and Democrats alike — are telling pollsters they want, not a modest course correction, not a turned page, but a whole new book. The security budget President Bush proposed today is anything but.
As Congress works to balance the budget and find a solution to the Iraq crisis it must also focus on a different kind of budget balancing. Our country needs a rebalanced its security budget, one that strengthens a different kind of overall U.S. presence in the world. This budget would emphasize working with international partners to resolve conflicts and tackle looming human security problems like climate change; preventing the spread of nuclear materials by means other than regime change; and addressing the root causes of terrorism, while protecting the homeland against it. The rhetoric of these intentions must be underwritten by the resources to make them real. The overall priorities set by a Unified Security Budget must both symbolically and substantially guide the United States toward a new, more balanced foreign policy.