Continuing
my examination of Trumps positions, since, like it or not, he may be our next
president, let’s look at his views on the military and the Middle East mess.
Hillary,
we know, is a Cold War hawk and an internationalist interventionist. That is, she believes in using American power
to intervene and “right the wrongs” elsewhere in the world, a noble, if
expensive, aspiration. During her time
as Secretary of State she was constantly pushing president Obama to intervene
more in the Middle East. There is no
reason to think that if she were president she would not continue this trend.
Trump
has made it clear that he thinks we ought to cut our losses and get out of the
Middle East entirely, and use the money thus saved to do useful things at home
like repair our crumbling roads and bridges and fix our lagging education system.
Is
this unreasonable? The Watson Institute
at Brown University says this:
The United States federal government has spent or obligated 4.4 trillion dollars on the wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq. This figure includes: direct Congressional war appropriations; war-related increases to the Pentagon base budget; veterans care and disability; increases in the homeland security budget; interest payments on direct war borrowing; foreign assistance spending; and estimated future obligations for veterans’ care.
This total omits many other expenses, such as the macroeconomic costs to the US economy; the opportunity costs of not investing war dollars in alternative sectors; future interest on war borrowing; and local government and private war costs.
The current wars have been paid for almost entirely by borrowing. This borrowing has raised the US budget deficit, increased the national debt, and had other macroeconomic effects, such as raising consumer interest rates. Unless the US immediately repays the money borrowed for war, there will also be future interest payments. We estimate that interest payments could total over $7 trillion by 2053.
A trillion dollars is a thousand billion - an
awful lot of money! According to the
American Society of Civil Engineers $4.4 trillion is enough to completely
rebuild the crumbling US infrastructure with a trillion left over for something
else. They also estimate that a repaired infrastructure might add something
like $3.1 trillion to the nation’s gross domestic product, and something like $3,100
in additional annual disposable income to the average household.
And what has 15 years of American involvement
(meddling) in the Middle East produced? The Middle East is in far worse shape
than when we started, Iraq no longer acts as a counterweight to Iran’s
ambitions. Our Middle Eastern allies no longer trust us. Russia has found a way
to insert itself into the chaos. ISIS has come into being to fill the political
and power vacuum left when we unseated the (admittedly despicable) authoritarian
leaders. What evidence is there to support the argument that continued or
increased American involvement would help the situation?
There is a legitimate debate about America’s
role in the world – about whether we ought to just mind our own business or
whether we have a moral obligation to act as the world’s policeman. There are
valid arguments for both views. One
might certainly reasonably disagree with the side Trump has taken in this
debate, but I don’t find his views outlandish or unreasonable.
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