The Crisis of American Military Primacy and the Search for Strategic Solvency

Abstract

ABSTRACT: The authors discuss the erosion of US military primacy and the corresponding dangers for American grand strategy and international security. They analyze three options for restoring strategic solvency and recommend a significant expansion of US defense resources to capabilities back into alignment with US global commitments. America is hurtling toward strategic insolvency. (1) For two decades after the Cold War, Washington enjoyed essentially uncontested military dominance and a historically favorable global environment--all at a comparatively low military and financial price. Now, however, America confronts military and geopolitical challenges more numerous and severe than at any time in at least a quarter century--precisely as disinvestment in defense has left US military resources far scarcer than before. The result is a creeping crisis of American military primacy, as Washington's margin of superiority is diminished, and the gap between US commitments and capabilities grows. Superpowers don't bluff, went a common Obama-era refrain--but today, America is being left with a strategy of bluff as its preeminence wanes and its military means come out of alignment with its geopolitical ends. Foreign policy, Walter Lippmann wrote, entails bringing into with a comfortable surplus of power in reserve, the nation's commitments and the nation's power. If a statesman fails to preserve strategic solvency, if fails to bring his ends and means into balance, Lippmann added, he will follow a course that leads to disaster. (2) America's current state of strategic insolvency is indeed fraught with peril. It will undermine US alliances by raising doubts about the credibility of American guarantees. It will weaken deterrence by tempting adversaries to think aggression may be successful or go unopposed. Should conflict actually erupt in key areas, the United States may be unable to uphold existing commitments or only be able to do so at prohibitive cost. Finally, as the shadows cast by US military power grow shorter, American diplomacy is likely to become less availing, and the global system less responsive, to US influence. The US military remains far superior to any single competitor, but its power is becoming dangerously insufficient for the grand strategy and international order it supports. Great powers facing strategic insolvency have three basic options. First, they can decrease commitments thereby restoring equilibrium with diminished resources. Second, they can live with greater risk by gambling that their enemies will not test vulnerable commitments or by employing riskier approaches--such as nuclear escalation--to sustain commitments on the cheap. Third, they can expand capabilities, thereby restoring strategic solvency. Today, this approach would probably require a concerted, long-term defense buildup comparable to the efforts of Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan near the end of the Cold War. (3) Much contemporary commentary favors the first option--reducing commitments--and denounces the third as financially ruinous and perhaps impossible. (4) Yet significantly expanding American capabilities would not be nearly as economically onerous as it may seem. Compared to the alternatives, in fact, this approach represents the best option for sustaining American primacy and preventing a slide into strategic bankruptcy which will eventually be punished. I Since the Cold War, America has been committed to maintaining overwhelming military primacy. The idea, as George W. Bush declared, that America must possess strengths beyond challenge has been featured in every major US strategy document and reflected in concrete terms. (5) Since the early 1990s, for example, the United States has accounted for 35-45 percent of world defense spending and maintained peerless global power-projection capabilities. (6) Perhaps more important, US primacy was unrivaled in key strategic regions such as Europe, East Asia, and the Middle East. …