President Bush is finding the demise of the Cold War a blessing and a challenge.
Without the threat from Moscow as the driving force behind defense policy, the U.S. is now free for the first time in more than four decades to make some genuine choices about its role in the world.
That presents a remarkable opportunity for this president to take the lead in shaping the structure of American defenses into the next century. But Bush learned last week that he had perhaps misjudged the degree to which his role as successful commander-in-chief in the Persian Gulf war would carry over on Capitol Hill as Congress takes up the nuts and bolts of defense spending.
Though supporters sought to make the issue into a vote of confidence in the president and his Pentagon leadership, House Democrats soundly defeated Bush`s top defense priorities by voting to kill production of the B-2 stealth bomber (after the 15 planes previously ordered were delivered) and to sharply curtail spending for the so-called Star Wars missile defense.
”In time of war, there is unity. In victory, we experience great euphoria. After the war, amnesia sets in,” groused House Minority Leader Bob Michel (R-Ill.).
The vote reflects a determination by Democratic lawmakers to assert their influence on the crucial decisions being made about how to transform a vast military structure that has become outdated by fast-changing political developments. While the Soviets retain a dangerous nuclear arsenal, their political ideology is discredited around the world and their military is in some disarray after the demise of the Warsaw Pact alliance.
The Defense Intelligence Agency told Congress earlier this month that Moscow is no longer capable even of staging a quick conventional invasion of Western Europe-a fear that dominated defense planning for a generation-and that what Moscow now is seeking in the West is not conquest but credit to finance its wrenching economic reforms. Indeed, the U.S. may be able to do more to ensure stability in Europe by selling grain to the Soviet Union than by lining up tanks to defend against it.
”We are locked into this time warp from 1945,” said Rep. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.). ”We have 395 overseas military bases in 35 countries.
For what? To stop the onslaught of communism?”
To answer that question, and to sustain public support for a continuing American presence abroad, Bush needs to convey a new sense of mission that provides an underlying reason for a $300 billion annual defense budget.
”He has not been able to articulate a very clear sense of what he really means by the `new world order`-and what are the specific implications it would have for the American military posture,” remarked John Steinbruner, director of foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution in Washington.
The U.S., for instance, spends $30 billion a year to collect and analyze intelligence, much of that effort directed at clandestinely gathering information about the Soviet Union and its former Warsaw Pact allies. Now, the nation`s spy agencies, like the military services, face questions about how to adapt to the changing world, in which intercepting telephone calls may be less important than understanding the political dynamics of the society.
”The incredible changes around the globe, most notably the democratic revolutions in Eastern Europe, have given us good reason to seriously reassess our defense needs and capabilities,” said Rep. Robert Lagomarsino of California, the ranking Republican on the Western Hemisphere subcommittee of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
At one level, that job falls to people like Gen. Colin Powell, nominated last week by the president for a second term as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Robert M. Gates, who is awaiting confirmation as the new director of central intelligence.
But it is Bush who must convey to the American people a broad vision of their nation`s role in the world-a task he did successfully during the Persian Gulf crisis. In a commencement address Wednesday at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, the president plans to focus his remarks on building a smaller, more agile and less costly military to deal with the kinds of sudden threats and regional turmoil that the U.S. is likely to face in the future.
”It`s obvious we`re not going to be the world`s cop. Nobody intends for us to fulfill that kind of a role,” a Bush aide said. ”At the same time, the United States does have the unique and distinctive leadership role. It is a difficult question to find exactly what that role should be.”
The irony is that a president who so relishes foreign policy-he told a group of schoolchildren last week that ”I love coping with problems in foreign affairs”-finds it so difficult to explain to Americans their nation`s role in the world today.
”He`s talked about the new world order, but that term alone doesn`t have any content,” said Michael Mandelbaum, a professor at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies of Johns Hopkins University. ”We can hardly decide how to plan our defenses unless we know what we`re planning for.”
The danger is that unless the U.S. knows what it wants to do, defense spending will become a numbers exercise in meeting spending limits and the kind of political logrolling that long has been part of defense budgets. For instance, the defense authorization bill passed by the House last week rejected the administration`s proposed cuts in the politically popular funding for reserve units and support personnel in scores of home districts even though, under the Pentagon`s manpower reductions, the troops they support will be deactivated.
”If there is no guiding rationale, then it is all done by politics and parochial interests and takes place in a strategic vacuum,” Mandelbaum said. In the administration`s budget, the Pentagon envisions a scaled down military that will have fewer planes and ships and cost fewer dollars. Under last year`s budget accord, defense spending was capped about $290 billion for the next two fiscal years, declining in the next two years at an after-inflation rate of about 3 percent annually.
To live within those financial limitations, the administration`s defense budget calls for cutting the number of active duty military personnel, now about 2 million, by 521,000 over the next five years-roughly the number of troops sent to the Persian Gulf. The deepest manpower cuts are planned for the Army and Air Force, along with base closings here and abroad, with smaller reductions for the Navy and Marines, which have the lead role in projecting force over the horizon.
But the decline of the Soviet Union as a world power and military rival has shaken political support for some of the costly strategic programs that the administration favors, such as the $1 billion-a-copy B-2 bomber, that formerly were justified as necessary to meet the Soviet threat.
Since 1945, Americans have understood the need to contain a threatening Soviet Union, sacrificing many domestic needs to build defenses against a feared World War III. A new national consensus about the American role in the world may take time yet to take shape.
”The corpse of the Cold War is not yet cold,” Mandelbaum said. ”It takes a while for government, bureaucracies, pundits to catch up with things, and it also takes some time for the debate among ourselves about what this new world is going to look like.”
