God’s Cops?

by Joel Fluker

In the 2002 State of the Union speech, the president used the word "evil" 11 times in 15 minutes and then called for annual increases in military spending which will lead to a doubling of the defense budget within five years.

From $300 billion to $600 billion. For the pursuit and eradication of evil in the world. As the late Sen. Dirksen once remarked, a billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money.

A scan of the Magellan’s Log masthead reveals that we are short on economic expertise around here. (Some readers have pointed out that the only real expertise we appear to have is in the area of tasteless jokes, but we’ll leave that critique for another day.)

Even given the president’s repeated promise that we are going to remove Evil from the world—surely a bargain at almost any price, the size of those future military expenditures gives us pause. Lacking economic expertise, all we can do is ask a few simple and probably simplistic questions, hoping that maybe those with economic expertise will answer:

Question No. 1:
Is it possible that the unprecedented boom of the 1990s was, to a significant degree, fueled by the DECLINE in defense spending following the collapse of the Soviet Union?

Question No. 2:
Is it possible that that boom also benefited mightily from the psychological impact of that decline in defense spending, as planners and forecasters assumed that future monies and resources would be freed for other uses?

Question No. 3:
Is it possible that the Tulip Mania/Ponzi scheme inflation of the NASDAQ fed, to a large degree, off the monies thus freed from defense spending as unregulated doves flocked to the feed bin from which hawks had been excluded?

Question No. 4:
Is it possible that Sept. 11 provided not only a divinely ordained blessing in disguise for a figurehead president but also gave an easily promulgated reason for vastly increased, no-questions-asked military spending?

Question No. 5:
Is it possible that the technological finesse and easy (if dangerous and expensive) prowess demonstrated by the U.S. military in Afghanistan has basically scared the shit out of everybody, from tinhorn dictators to big-power bureaucracies?

Question No. 6:
Is it not possible that all these smaller possibilities are building into one gigantic American tsunami of unprecedented global military dominance?

If so, then events have played into the hands and darker motives of an administration that was, even before Sept. 11, deeply bent toward extreme unilateralism.

Before Sept. 11 the power-hungries in Washington had the motive. The pursuit of terrorists following Sept. 11 provided the opportunity. Now all that’s lacking is the means, which will come from the immodest enormity of the proposed defense budgets for the next five years.

Often enough in the last half century there’s been talk of and complaints about the United States as global policeman. Clearly the world ain’t seen nuthin yet. With $500 billion to throw around every year, no corner of the geopolitical map is out of reach, and with no one to match us technologically, what "we" (actually "they", meaning the suits in D.C.) say, goes.

A new world order indeed.

There’s just one catch, which we might call the Ultimate Question—and this gets us back to our lack of economic expertise:

Question No. 7:
Even given a gross domestic product in the trillions, is it not dangerously, even fatally possible that the massive drain represented by these gargantuan defense budgets could simply do us in? That even the wealth of this country cannot sustain a global police force on such a scale over an extended period of time?