By Daniel DePetris
While a $740.5 billion defense budget worked its way through Congress, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley delivered a succinct and refreshing message that appeared to go against the spirit of this bloated spending: The Defense Department must “take a hard look at what we do, where we do it,” Milley told the Brookings Institution Dec. 2. “There’s a considerable amount that the United States expends on overseas deployments, on overseas bases and locations, etc. Is every one of those absolutely, positively necessary for the defense of the United States?”
The U.S. national security community should work from the same, basic premise. Because despite the United States continuing to field the most capable, modern, professional military on the planet, the country doesn’t have the capacity, money, or interest in anchoring its foreign policy on a platform of liberal hegemony. The world in 2020 looks quite different from the world in 1992, when the dissolution of the Soviet Union provided the U.S. with the status of unrivaled superpower. In the time since, Washington has made numerous mistakes—three wars of choice (Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya); a war on terrorism that has spread to dozens of countries in three continents; strategically shortsighted interventions into tertiary conflicts; getting stuck in an unimportant Middle East—which have served as the genesis of the many challenges and excessive security burdens the U.S. now carries.
This piece was originally published in Defense News on December 10, 2020. Read more HERE.