August 24, 2011 | Longitude - The Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs

As The West Lets Down Its Guard

The United States is now following Europe’s precedent of cutting military spending in the name of shoring up its economy.
August 24, 2011 | Longitude - The Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs

As The West Lets Down Its Guard

The United States is now following Europe’s precedent of cutting military spending in the name of shoring up its economy.

Is the West drawing the curtain on Ares’ toils? Will the 21st century witness an end to Western military engagement?

There is an argument to bemade for the end of war in the West. Western societies have by and large banished war among them, live in peace with each other, and enjoy unprecedented prosperity. That prosperity is now under challenge – and so is the readiness to underwrite costly conflicts in faraway places, the strategic significance of which escapes most Western citizens.

Commitment to distant militarymissions is fading as public support for lengthy, costly and bloody engagements in distant lands is at an all-time low. Mounting debts for Western governments and a global financial crisis that is about to enter its fourth year this coming September all point in the direction of further defence cuts to budgets that have already been curtailed significantly.

Even as new global players arise, who have an appetite for expansionist policies backed by military strength – China comes to mind – their prowess and their assertiveness is being met more by a readiness to engage in business and diplomacy than a willingness to draw lines in the sand and commit blood and treasure to their containment.

Yet, there is little, since 1991, to suggest that a drastic reduction in Western military engagement, globally, is desirable.

The 21st century has been around for barely a decade, but it has been a far bloodier business than the late 20th century exuberance caused by the end of communism had anticipated. Eric Hobsbawm called the 20th century a short century – in his Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991 he argued that the 20th century ended with the fall of communism. If the 20th century came to a close then in 1991 with the collapse of communismand the end of the ideological bipolarism of the Cold War, the early start of the 21st century was hardly a harbinger of peace and fraternity. The past 20 years, in so far as they can be considered a coherent historical transition from the end of the Cold War to the present, have been punctuated by conflict. The convulsions that triggered wars across the globe were partly the result of the lifting of the Iron Curtain, like the Balkan wars, the Chechen wars and the war for Nagorno-Karabakh; some were a continuation of pre-existing conflicts, like the struggle for South Sudan ; others may have been unrelated, like the Rwandan genocide and the many other African civil wars of the past 20 years.

Not that all conflicts continue to fester – the Balkan hatreds have been overcome in Slovenia and Croatia, sedated in Bosnia, forgotten in Montenegro and frustrated in Serbia. Chechnya was flattened out of existence. The Azeri-Armenian dispute has come to an uneasy truce. Sierra Leone and Liberia’s civil wars have been put to rest. South Sudan has just become independent after a six-year transition period stipulated in peace accords brokered by the international community in what looks, at least provisionally, like an exemplary case of peaceful conflict resolution.

Regardless, war still looms large on the horizon due to a number of potential triggers that only globally projected military prowess can control, contain, prevent and preempt.

Nuclear proliferation is the most terrifying prospect of our century. With North Korea exporting its nuclear technology to other rogue states in exchange for cash, Iran on the brink of nuclear weapons capability, emerging powers aspiring to their own nuclear option, and nuclear secrets becoming less and less a monopoly of a small exclusive club of nations, the next two decades could see a rapid spread of nuclear weapons in volatile theatres of the globe and the concomitant collapse of the nonproliferation regime. A nuclear arsenal could become the preferred symbol of prestige for emerging powers with aggressive foreign policies and ethnic or territorial grievances; nuclear bombs could become available through rogue states and failed states to non-state actors; the acquisition of nuclear weapons could spur a nuclear arms race among rival states and increase the level of escalation for their respective grievances to dangerous levels; and the tensions that nuclear proliferation will give rise to could have a dramatic impact on commodities prices, as they expose crucial trade routes and critical resource providers to nuclear annihilation.

Beyond the threat of nuclear proliferation there is the challenge of radical Islamic fundamentalism, which is already responsible for two conventional wars – Afghanistan and Iraq – in the last ten years and which has wreaked havoc globally with the use of terrorism as a weapon of choice. The challenge here is two-fold. The first difficulty lies with the debate about the “rootcauses” of terrorism, namely the inability to recognize the ideological matrix of the phenomenon and the unwillingness to treat it accordingly, often preferring instead to address it as a law enforcement challenge caused by socio-economic injustice. The second difficulty lies in the simple arithmetic of costs – exemplified by the current clash between Israel and Hamas. The cost for the low-tech, inaccurate and short-range rockets that Hamas uses against Israeli civilian centers to terrorize Israel’s civilian population and undermine Israel’s long term deterrence is in the hundreds of US dollars apiece. Israel’s sophisticated response – the short-range anti-missile system Iron Dome – costs hundreds of millions of US dollars. Al-Qaeda’s expenses for the 9/11 terror attacks were an estimated $500,000. Estimates of the financial damage inflicted run from as little as $95 billion to as much as $2 trillion. The cost of waging war on al-Qaeda globally runs in the billions. The cost of preventing future terror attacks is similarly expensive – if harder to quantify – and it generates financial and social costs that have already fundamentally changed our daily lives.

Finally, nuclear proliferation and terrorism are two separate threats that can become interlocked.

Regional instability leading to local conflicts, the collapse of existing states and the possibility of a radical redrawing of maps along ethnic lines is also an ongoing phenomenon that has triggered and can continue to cause large scale humanitarian disasters, population transfers, and the attendant food shortages and environmental catastrophes. All these can be the cause of further conflict, whose repercussions will rarely be local alone.

All things considered, the likelihood that fundamental Western interests will be frequently threatened, damaged or jeopardized is high. The current crises in the Middle East – the popular challenges to the current regimes, the rise of Islamic fundamentalism and the possible nuclear arms race that a nuclear Iran could trigger – can all degenerate into conflicts with repercussions on oil prices, energy supplies, global shipping routes, immigration and terrorism. In many circumstances, the West could reduce risks, prevent significant damage and contain crises through military intervention – whether in the form of peacekeeping or actual combat operations. In other cases, as in that of South Asia, the ability to project powerwill continue to act as an effective deterrent that can avoid escalation and conflicts from breaking out.

But power projection and effective military intervention designed to prevent conflicts fromhappening, recurring or spinning out of control rest on two pillars, both of which are under considerable strain in the Western world.

The first is philosophical – the belief that military force can be put to the service of legitimate national interests. The second is financial and technological – the investment of the necessary resources to maintain a state-of-the-art military force capable of meeting the global challenges that threaten national interests and to retain the technological prowess and edge over adversaries that in the last century have made Western military technology virtually unbeatable in the conventional battlefield.

Though the second challenge appears less daunting than the first, the two aspects are intertwined, since the decision to reduce spending to maintain the edge over existing or potential adversaries was made out of a philosophical revulsion for war and a conscious decision to give domestic welfare priority over military spending. Europemade a conscious choice, in the aftermath of the Second World War, to devote much of its national resources to reconstruction first and social welfare later.The drastic reduction in European defense spending over the next six decadesmeant that no European country, with the partial exception of France and the United Kingdom, could wage war on its own, and most importantly, no European country could guarantee its own territorial integrity without the vital protection of the American nuclear umbrella and the deployment of American conventional forces. Having outsourced its own security to the US, Europe drastically cut its own defense spending and the size of its fighting forces, to  the point where even its ability to deploy limited forces for relatively low risk peacekeeping operations is in doubt today.

When in November 2007 the United Nations authorized the EUFOR Chad/CAR – a peacekeeping operation for Chad and the Central African Republic designed to offer relief and protection to civilians, humanitarian operations and UN personnel – it took five months for the European Union to pull together enough resources to initiate the mission and another seven months before the mission reached full operational capability (FOC). Regardless, the mission was plagued by mishaps and problems, including, most significantly, the inability of the combined 19 countries contributing troops to field enough personnel transport helicopters. The Irish contingent, which had the overall command for the mission, had chartered two helicopters for the purpose from a private contractor, but when it became manifest that the choppers were not licensed to carry troops, EUFOR Chad/CAR had to ask Russia to step in and save the day.

Even in a limited operation with low risks, Europe had to scramble and eventually rely on Russia to have enough resources to carry out themission successfully.

European spending has gone up significantly in domestic welfare and foreign aid – but the current financial crisis made it obvious that for too long Western of its national resources to reconstruction first and social welfare later. The drastic reduction in European defense spending over the next six decadesmeant that no European country, with the partial exception of France and the United Kingdom, could wage war on its own, and most importantly, no European country could guarantee its own territorial integrity without the vital protection of the American nuclear umbrella and the deployment of American conventional forces. Having outsourced its own security to the US, Europe drastically cut its own defense spending and the size of its fighting forces, to the pointwhere even its ability to deploy limited forces for relatively lowrisk peacekeeping operations is in doubt today. When in November 2007 the United Nations authorized the EUFOR Chad/CAR – a peacekeeping operation for Chad and the Central African Republic designed to offer relief and protection to civilians, humanitarian operations and UN personnel – it took five societies have financed their growing affluence through public debt and require a drastic, long-term reduction of spending to avoid bankruptcy. The attendant social tensions of spending cuts, economic stagnation, increased taxes and decreased privileges will only be compounded by an increase in military spending and the funding of foreign adventures, the desirability and necessity of which few among Western audiences fully understand, let alone approve. The fact is, Western audiences – but European audiences first and foremost – have banished war from their value system and consider conflict to be wrong even when the interests and the values it is supposed to protect or advance are by and large their own.

The examples of the Balkan wars and now the Libyan war, where Western intervention is limited to air operations conducted from afar is evidence of this reluctance – wars we are reluctantly prepared to fight but for which we are certainly not prepared to have casualties to account for. So are the instances where genocide prevention either failed to materialize – think of Sudan and Rwanda – or happened too late – as in the Balkans.

If Western reluctance to fight is rooted in a philosophical reticence and is compounded in a chronic lack of resources, the Western world is likely to lose something else in coming decades – namely the technological edge that enabled the US and its allies to win all the conventional wars they entered in the last 20 years. Although in recent years a significant portion of global innovation has come from private industry’s exponentially growing investments, it is still true that one of the largest initiators of technological innovation is the military. Wars, their needs and their challenges have always spurred innovation – from the longbow to the internet, it all began on the fields of battle. The military has commissioned research and initiated innovation in the process, whose civilian applications have, later on, raised considerably the quality of life and brought prosperity through commercial spinoffs. Reducing military spending considerably has already meant the axing of costly projects involving the production of new, advanced systems with revolutionary technology. Further reductions will drain the military industry of the needed funds to pursue new discoveries that can give victory to Western armies today in the battlefield and offer great improvement to civilian life tomorrow, through their civilian applications.

Western budgets’ decreasing allocation of resources to their military will only weaken their ability to defend the national interest in an increasingly unstable, volatile and dangerous world. Weakened militaries, in turn, will project less force and consequently will be less effective in deterring adversaries. Their challenges may come from near or from afar, but Western inability to quickly deploy lethal military power will expose the West as a paper tiger and turn our hard-earned prosperity into a fragile house of cards. The choice made by some Western leaders and their publics not to fight will not rid humankind of conflict.

There is a case to be made that Western countries need to think long and hard about their defense budgets as well as their fighting ethos.

TheWesternworld has been by and large the victor in military conflicts throughout recent history. It has also been at the cutting edge of technology as a consequence of its considerable investment in innovation initiated for the sake of winning wars.

As we look ahead to a century of new threats and dangers, there is a distinct possibility that Western societies may turn their back on this long chapter of history and seek to disengage from the world by refusing to fight and by denying resources to those formerly tasked with the art of war. But those who believe that 21st century international affairs can be successfully guided by the adage of a John Lennon song – “Make Love not War” – and, in the pursuit of such goal, have consistently advocated a reduction in defense spending and an increase in restrictions on troop deployments in theatres of conflict may soon discover that Western military weakness will invite more carnage, not less. And that our unpreparedness for conflict, when it comes to our shores, will cost us dearly.

Dr. Emanuele Ottolenghi is Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Washington DC.

Issues:

Afghanistan