President Barack Obama’s first budget request, which marks a fundamental reordering of national priorities, has been described as the largest ideological swing in federal policy since the dawn of the Reagan administration.

The president must now tackle another ideological shibboleth of the Reagan era, the militarization of American nation security policy.  Over the past three decades, despite the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and the end of the Cold War, we have seen the increased militarization of American foreign policy as well as increased spending on defense that can no longer be justified.

 

All of our presidents since 1981 have contributed to the militarization of U.S. national security policy.  President Ronald Reagan was responsible for the unprecedented peacetime increases in defense spending at a time when the Soviet Union was in decay and decline; he also endorsed the Goldwater-Nichols Act in 1986 that created a new class of military viceroys by enhancing the role of the commanders-in-chief (CINCs) in the making of regional foreign policy and marginalizing the role of the State Department and assistant secretaries of state.

President George H.W. Bush’s deployment of 26,000 troops (Operation Just Cause) only one month after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, indicated that the use of force would not play a lesser role in the new international environment. President Bill Clinton weakened the role of the State Department in implementing foreign policy, when he abolished the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency and the United States Information Agency and substantially reduced funding for the Agency for International Development.  He became the first president to fail to stand up to the Pentagon on an arms control treaty, when he was unwilling to challenge the military’s opposition to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

President George W. Bush ushered in the militarization of the intelligence community and, by declaring a “war on terror” or a “long war,” assured that the Pentagon would be the leading policy agency in combating terrorism around the world.  His policies of unilateralism and preemptive attack, which were proclaimed in his speech at West Point in 2002, marked a radical revolution in American foreign policy. President Bush, for the most part, ineffectually relied on saber-rattling against the nuclear programs of Iran and North Korea, instead of resorting to traditional diplomatic tools.  He abrogated the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the cornerstone of deterrence since 1972, and funded a national missile defense system that has not been established as workable but remains the largest line item for a weapons system in the current defense budget.

Throughout this entire period, military spending continued to increase so that the United States outspends the rest of the world on weapons systems, without any palpable increase in American security. Indeed, wireless wiretapping, the abrogation of habeas corpus, torture and abuse, and an atmosphere of fear and anxiety have combined to make us less secure.  All of these presidents shared a belief in the necessity of American hegemony and none was prepared to take on the power of the Pentagon.  As a result, until the election of Barack Obama, the United States was becoming increasingly alienated from the rest of the world.

Unfortunately, it is still not certain that President Obama is prepared to tackle the increased civilian-military dysfunction that has marked the making of American national security and foreign policy in recent years.  In the past month, Obama has selected retired flag officers to key policy positions as national security adviser, director of national intelligence, and ambassador to Afghanistan, where the United States appears to have committed itself to a doubling of the American military presence without any strategic review of the failure of American policy thus far.

The appointment of retired admiral Dennis Blair to be the intelligence tsar provides an interesting case in point.  In 1998, when the Indonesian army was committing serious human rights abuses in East Timor, the State Department ordered the CINC for the Pacific, Dennis Blair, to sever contacts with the Indonesian military, he simply ignored the U.S. ambassador in Jakarta, who is of course the representative of the president and not merely the State Department.

The danger is that Obama’s withdrawal timeline for Iraq will prevent any genuine debate on the need for demilitarization of American national security and foreign policy.  Too many spokesmen for American policy, including outgoing ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker, General David Petraeus, and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, favor a long-term “occupation” of Iraq and are part of the imperial myopia that supports American hegemony in the Middle East.  Obama’s willingness to increase military forces in Afghanistan demonstrates an unwillingness to recognize that violence is dysfunctional as a political instrument in Southwest Asia and that Afghanistan and Iraq have already demonstrated that overwhelming military power has serious limits.

In part two, I will address the policies that are required in order for President Obama to restore American values to an international agenda and to demilitarize American national security and foreign policy.

Melvin A. Goodman, a regular contributor to The Public Record, is senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and adjunct professor of government at Johns Hopkins University. He was a senior analyst at the CIA for 24 years and his most recent book is “Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA.”