Does America really need projection power in this day and age?

Not the topic, people.

I mean, really, if we'd get our heads out of our asses and get energy dependence, there wouldn't be much in the way of direct military threats from the rest of the world. What is the Middle East going to do if we don't need their oil anymore? And once we do it, Europe will be fast behind—if they don't do it before we do anyhow.

Russia isn't going to invade the EU, China is too keen on economic warfare for that kind of nonsense, and nobody else matters.

There is no model of that. The Nordic countries don't really tax corporations (and they have petroeconomies to boot), the UK is practically bankrupt and France and Germany don't exactly have all assets and no liabilities. (With the current struggles in Greece, Spain, Italy and Portugal, they are the ones going to end up the losers saddled with the costs.)

^ You forgot about India and Brazil. India is shaping up to overtake the Chinese in well everything economically and Brazil is the powerhouse of the entire South American continent.

edited 10th Nov '11 8:44:50 AM by MajorTom

I expect to make friends with Brazil via leaving South America alone, ending the embargo with Cuba (because they're not a threat and we could undercut their economy rather easily, methinks), and other things similar to the Good Neighbor policy.

India... is a gray area. I can't decide if I want them to be our friends or not. Direct military conflict with them is incredibly unlikely, however, and a Pakistan-India War is not our problem.

An argument can be made that the entire western world has been spending more than it has for a long time (not just governments, or bankers, or anyone, it's the whole system). The US can't afford its military, and Europe is going to have trouble affording its welfare state. I imagine that the people in the US will have an easier time living with half the military we do now than the people in Europe will have living with half the welfare state they have.

Isn't that the wonderful truth?

The US can afford to skewer our pork. Most of Europe can't really do that, and they didn't take the time to shift economic policy so that they could afford what they're doing (like France and Germany), and instead ended up like the PIGS or Britain (though the encouragement of service economies in those countries sure didn't help much).

Europe can afford it's lifestyle, they probably just need to downgrade it somewhat. The socialist economies all have around half the debt to gdp ratio compared to European capitalist economies, so they're really not in any trouble. Only one of the Scandinavian countries is even oil-rich, so saying that as some kind of excuse to their success compared to America, the most resource rich in the west, is silly.

America has lots of stuff it can chop but one thing to consider is that America is running into the same problem as Greece/Italy. You've a 15 trillion economy, with a federal budget that is now at 3.7 trillion. There's no reason for a deficit. Certainly you can cost cut, that's always good if it can be feasible and not hurt the economy, but otherwise, 3.7 trillion out of 15 trillion is 24.7% of the GDP. That's the usual middle income tax rate. If we consider state-spending, then that starts to push it over the top, so okay, you can cut spending.

And so what are the first things to breakdown? Projection power really.

• Major conflicts don't stop because the US "might intervene". Don't be silly. US doesn't randomly shove its face into other people's affairs. If the conflict has nothing to do with the super power (like most African conflicts) the US won't be there. You can sit there and say "Well I think Team America does lots...", except Team America completely ignored 4 million deaths in an African world war in the 90s. Heck most Americans don't even know it happened. This is about as logical as saying that USSR prevented conflicts outside its sphere of influence.
• Is it even worth the oppression? Millions died under oppressive regimes propped up by the USSR/USA, USA mostly killed foreigners and USSR mostly killed domestic people. What's the point? It doesn't even ingratiate the world to the US or anything, quite the opposite really. Over the long term, it's a huge negative benefit.
• If you end projection power, something you didn't have before WW 2 (and if someone raises Pearl Harbour, I up you a 9/11 to show you how utterly worthless all that spending was), you immediately save around 200 billion USD a year. That's a 5.4% federal spending decrease immediately without a single job loss to America.

India is a grey area? I mean yeah, they won't lockstep behind the US because they actually have quite the independant streak, but they can be good friend to have. And an Indo-Pak war would be bad for the US, since that raises the possibility of Pakistani nukes getting stolen as they are being transported to the battlefield.

As for poopooing the Europeans for having welfare states Tom, its not welfare thats the problem, its the fact that the US designed post-war Europe to be dependant on America for everything else, which essentially made the rest of the European economy geared only toward what they were, in essence, allowed to do and that was welfare for their people. Part of their troubles is the fact that they're now moving out from America's shadow and the US keeps treating them like its still the Cold War.

The US needs to leave Europe, not bother with Africa, and keep their nose out of South America (best way to subvert the likes of Chavez by making him worry more about Brazil). If the US can make itself self-sustaining in clean energy, they need to get out of the middle east. They won't care, India and China are taking more and more of the market anyway. They also need to let Israel do its own thing and leave it alone.

As for Asia, since thats where three of the five emerging poles of power in this world will be, they should keep engaged for now, but perhaps go about it a different way. How different, I don't know.

edited 10th Nov '11 9:25:49 AM by FFShinra

They're an economic threat.

Otherwise, Shinra and breadloaf are right. We'd save a fortune if we left other people alone. We'd also make another fortune if we sold them the stuff to do their own shit.

Pity they won't leave us alone. One way or another.

What are they going to do? Energy security and a move towards a high-quality, high-taxes, high-wages, and high-profit mixed market economy would render economic threats from China and India moot. Our military could flatten both of them at once before they even saw our shores. Russia doesn't give two shits about us as long as we don't do anything to them.

Where is the threat?

Oh Tom is referring to the yearly foreign invaders on US soil that the projection power stops.

We all know North Korea, Iran, China, and the Rooskies are chomping at the bit to attack us for no good reason, they are just waiting for their moment to strike!

They don't leave you alone because you won't leave them alone. The MENA region loved us until 1967, because we were truely neutral up until that point in the Israeli Arab conflict. Only after getting involved did attacks start happening. Likewise with South and Central America. Backing psychotic despots only ensured we'd get more threats.

The security dilemma is one that should call for vigilance, not meddling.

@USAF - The Indians are friendly with the US in every other way though. And economics wouldn't be such a threat if the American system wasn't so broken. That ain't New Delhi's fault.

edited 10th Nov '11 9:48:55 AM by FFShinra

Yeah lord knows we Canadians would be all up in your grill soon as you cut defence spending.

Seriously, once we leave Saudi Arabia and Israel out to dry the only people who'd want to come over our border with weapons would be Mexican cartels. And we'll deal with their asses one way or another.

If we legalized most drugs (while taxing and regulating them etc), the cartel's would fall apart. Cheapest way to end a threat ever.

Naturally, but I consider any country with large amounts of cheap labor that the corporations can and will exploit to be a long-term economic threat, voluntarily on their part or not.

You don't solve that particular problem with aircraft carriers and troop transport ships, however.

That would be one way, and a way I'd prefer.

edited 10th Nov '11 9:57:22 AM by RadicalTaoist

You're right about taxation - we have high taxes in general, but they're designed to be (relatively) easy on corporations. All 5 Nordic countries are in the top-15 of the Ease of Doing Business Index.

But that "petroeconomy" claim again... I've refuted it something like 3 times already.

Out of the Nordic countries, only Norway has a significant oil industry, and it isn't using the income to run the state; instead, the money is invested in a huge pension fund, of which about 40% is invested in the international stock market (under the direction of a board that tries to pick only profitable investments in ethically acceptable businesses, so nothing that has anything to do with WMDs or things like that.) The rest is basically saved and accumulating interest.

Repeat: Norway is not using its oil money to run the state; instead, the rest of its economy is enough to guarantee the highest standard of living for the average person in any country in the world (though the competition at the top is tough.)

I know this is off-topic and that others already picked up on this claim (once again,) but I feel it necessary to give the actual facts here so that there would be less confusion about these things.

@ Oscredwin

Well I'm trying to think about conflicts here that were prevented and conflicts that were started because of a super power.

• Iran-Iraq war was due to super power competition to project into the mideast
• No conflicts in Africa prevented
• America has invaded Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan
• We didn't prevent Gadaffi from turning the Libyan Arab Spring into a full blown civil war
• Syria/Bahrain/Yemen/Saudi Arabia doesn't seem to care what the west thinks and goes ahead and kills protesters, then again only Syria faces a threat from the West, whereas the others get support

But this is somewhat tangential to why US needs projection power anyway. The cost of maintaining such power versus just getting it when needed is quite a large budgetary difference.

edited 10th Nov '11 11:10:06 AM by breadloaf

Conflicts prevented are very hard to see. You're looking at lots of inaction, and trying to figure out where there would have been action. Wars that are started are easy to see, wars that aren't started are harder. That's why I want to compare incidence of war from a period without a superpower to now.

If you want to play the counterfactual game, I'll give it a shot. There is no way to settle any of these definitively one way or the other, which is why I was looking for another part of reality for evidence. Assume that the US slashes military spending after the fall of the USSR (don't want to play cold war games) and no other country (or the EU) increase military spending to be able to fight two wars anywhere in the world at a moment's notice. I would say that since the fall of the soviet union, there would have been more wars in eastern Europe (think Yugoslavia), more frequent wars in the mid east (Iran/Iraq would have gotten much worse, with Iraq expanding into other countries). China may have been a bit more aggressive. Japan may have militarized to confront them. India/Pakistan would have been more likely to really explode. Possibly added nastiness in SE Asia.

And absolutely none of that is our problem.

What is our problem? South America, if they want our help. As of recently, I may be willing to expand the field of "places that are our business" to the Pacific Rim (Japan, [South] Korea, Australia, and New Zealand), and obviously Britain.

All of that assumes that they ask for our help. If not, we go on our merry way, because it's not our problem.

Though if anybody invades/attacks one of what I call "the Big Four," (Britain, Canada, and the ANZAC countries), I'd advocate getting involved either way...

edited 10th Nov '11 11:59:09 AM by USAF713

@ USAF/Oscredwin

Well USAF, though you'd be correct in saying it's not your problem, increased conflicts will damage the global economy and eventually hurt the USA. So at some point the USA would intervene because it would become your problem. But that'd require wars of a massive scale.

However, let's go with the hypothetical world of USA not being a super power.

• Iran-Iraq war would be... worse? You started it in the first place. It wouldn't have happened. Iraq and Iran would both still be democracies. Remember it was the USA that toppled the democratically elected regime in both countries.

• Eastern Europe (Yugoslavia) was largely resolved by European forces. While Americans helped significantly, it didn't require any of the projection power we're discussing currently. Even Canada was able to deploy a lot of equipment there because Europe is an ally, it's not like we couldn't use their bases. And most of the military work was done by Europe, so they're quite capable (I mean are you picturing that they have NO military whatsoever or something?)

Uh I got to go, I'd write more later.

And for that you need power projection. You can't just stick troops on ferries, you need a protected fleet and airforce to transport them, and bases to support them. Carriers help.

@breadloaf,

Well, of course. But containing that kind of thing is what the UN and NATO are for. See: Libya.

That assumes we want to go in unilaterally in the first place. If the UN and NATO aren't backing a mission, it's not something we should be touching with a fifty-foot pole.