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An Autarky Thought Experiment
In response to my post about refugee bonds, the Great Ghost of Gödel left this comment obiter dicta:
Not without trepidation or regret have I come around to the Fortress America position, but here I am. Bring all of our troops stationed overseas home. Defend our borders without mercy. If the rest of the world is hell bent for leather on destroying itself, whether rapidly with open war or slowly with insane economics and/or immigration policy, so what? We’re perfectly capable of being self-sufficient as a nation, and it never was a good idea to be the world’s police. …
In short: we need to quit acting like we need the rest of the world at all, let alone that we need the rest of the world’s governments to like us. We’re supposed to be different from everyone else. So let’s actually be different, keep attracting people because we’re better, and make no excuses for being better — and being loners.
What about trade, I asked? How would we ensure freedom of navigation without the US Navy? He proposed that if people want to trade with world beyond our territorial waters, they can hire their own navy:
The Navy is appropriate within our territorial waters, and of course there is extensive maritime law with respect to what that means.
Beyond that, I think a private security/defense model, presumably attached to some kind of insurance system, is appropriate. This is, of course, also historically precedented, by the security and defense approaches taken by the British East India Company, et al. I think it’s reasonable to imagine similar arrangements without the connection to colonization. It might look something like this. …
Keep in mind I’m suggesting this as a contingency upon international trade being “not worth it,” as measured by actuaries insuring international shipping, who in turn are paying security forces to protect them. In other words, if the fixed costs of security and insurance leave international trade profitable, great! If not, I’d call that a pretty good definition of “the world has gone to hell,” wouldn’t you?
So let’s take this idea seriously. Let’s imagine what would happen if tomorrow we brought all of our troops stationed overseas home. We bring back the subs and the aircraft carriers, and if anyone complains about the pirates, we tell them to go out and rent themselves some sepoys and find someone to insure their own aircraft carriers. Freedom of navigation’s their problem.
As of tomorrow, every one of these men and women shutters the bases, closes up shop, and sails back to CONUS:
They bring their gear back with them, of course. Especially the nukes and the missile interceptors. We’re not leaving that stuff in someone else’s hands.
What do you think would happen? What would the headlines look like in a month’s time, in your view? What about a year?
Would it be in our interests, overall?
Source: DoD Personnel, Workforce Reports & Publications, Active Duty Military Personnel by Service by Region/Country Total DoD – June 30, 2015 (DMDC Data)
Published in Foreign Policy, General, Military
I’m guessing His emails have gone unanswered.
Yes, but then plug in “autarchy” and get “absolute sovereignty” and “an autocratic government”, with no mention of the other meaning.
So I wonder if sealing it up would hasten the decay or not….
Me too.
My feeling here is admittedly conditional and reactionary: if the rest of the world insists on going to hell, we can be OK. I see it very much as a note-to-self not to throw that ability away. We should be prepared to grow more of our own food vs. importing. 3D printing should lead to a US manufacturing Renaissance, as should CNC milling. And so on. As I said, we should trade when it’s advantageous to do so. But we should not labor under the illusion that it will always be advantageous to do so, or that we have to.
Ultimately, I’m just asking for America not to be caught flat-footed if, say, our major trading partners find themselves in a nuclear-level conflagration tomorrow. I guess you can think of it as urging Prepping at national scale.
There is a psychology of isolationism that is so utterly understandable. We can’t control what goes on out there, so we’ll just batten down the hatches and worry about ourselves. Americans, from here on, will need to travel outside the country at their own risk.
But I think western civilization has evolved beyond that choice being even remotely possible. After World War II, the advanced nations of the world sought more connection, not less. The Internet is an accurate picture of the inter relationships among people and nations. We can’t shut it off.
The best we can hope for is the dominance of American ideals. And that is a difficult road given the level of ignorance in the developing world.
A good statement of where we need to be.
We have to do both–act as if tomorrow will look like today but be prepared for the good chance that it won’t.
If nature abhors a vacuum, world power politics abhors a vacuum even more. Someone will step in to rule the world if the United States pulls its head back into its shell. Most likely, the Chinese will assume hegemony over East Asia and the Pacific, and the Soviets (must we persist in pretending they are anything else?) will assume hegemony over Europe and the Middle East. Africa and South America would devolve into client states of these two military powers.
Neither of the two world powers would attack the U.S. Homeland militarily, but they will attempt to strangle our trade, eliminate any remnants of loyalty among our former allies, and eventually surpass us in technology and culture.
To me, the question is not what the world would look like if the U.S. withdraws. In the short term, that is pretty obvious. Rather, the question is how long before the world falls into another dark ages?
I agree with this scenario.
I am surprised at how friendly and supportive China and Russia are toward each other. Kissinger wasn’t completely off base in considering this relationship a strong threat. With Russia being handed Syria, we have really helped this along. It is not good.
I disagree. I think the US was the dominant world power with the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913, giving the US the means to channel its economic heft, if not before that when the treasury began to participate in open market operations at the turn of the twentieth century.
The US was the dominant power because it was economically dominant, which is equivalent to being dominant once the proper institutions are created. Japan attacked the US ultimately because of this dominance. Remember, the US embargo hurt the Japanese empire more than the entire Nationalist Chinese army could, and forced the Japanese to change their entire strategy in Asia.
The fact that we’ve failed before does not prove it would not be far worse if we stopped even trying. Besides I’m talking about what we theoretically should be doing, not our current policy. The Iran deal counts as something close to not trying.
Moreover, there’s the point that we’re better off fighting them over there than over here.
It’s not convincing that we’d be better off closing up shop, putting up our best (but inevitably fallible) defenses, and waiting for them to come throw everything they’ve got at us.
Excellent post, Claire — thanks. And thanks to the great Great Ghost of Gödel (Triple-G) for his “incitement.”
This whole idea does have appeal. BUT, I have these worries/thoughts:
Let’s remember what we are playing with here:
We have people depending on us.
But, our present engagement in the world has its costs of a similar nature. So, I understand the motives and the wisdom of those who want to disengage but I would prefer we do it piecemeal and do it slowly with a clear mission statement for the country. Obama’s approach is fundamentally flawed because he is unwilling to share his mission statement and get buy in from the rest of the country. We have a right to decide to buy into this and we have a right to do it slowly instead of “fundamentally transforming.”
Don’t let cat ladies get you into fights that you can’t win.
-Homer
The current mess was caused by the same people who are so confident in more wild interventionism. They are also incredibly confident that the latest batch of Middle East immigrants will be good if they just have access to opportunity. This totally ignores what we know about prior terrorists. Let’s keep our navy to protect trade, let’s stay out of Syria, and let’s just say no to Muslim immigrants from anywhere.
Well said. :)
How do you get your mind around such a question? We’re actually in a pretty good place to finally think through the post cold war foreign policy. We’ve learned again that we can’t nation build, foster representative governments or market economies in places that have never had them and for good reason. We’ve learned again that trying the fix the world with a fat check book corrupts both sides. And we’ve seen again that when we want to smash things up and squash foreign militaries we are unmatched. We’ve also seen what happens when we wash our hands of the world and indulge in sophomoric anti colonialism, or whatever in the world drives the current Washington crowd. There is very definitely a role for mature adults, professionals and political leadership that can ignore the mobs our shallow 24 hr media frenzies stir up and that can strike a balance between leading, forward deploying, building alliances which we must do, and getting directly involved fixing the world we can’t fix.
I should add that I’m not actually calling for autarky, unless actual free trade—that is, private actors willing to take all the risks inherent in international trade, minus subsidies, tariffs, “most favored trade status,” etc.—is autarky. I really am mostly talking about not subsidizing other nations’ defense, as well as not giving some bad actors’ (more of) an excuse to use us as an excuse for their own belligerence. To me, this implies being prepared to be “autarkic,” but it still feels like the wrong word when the rest of the world would be smoking ash, third-world hellholes, or smoking ash third-world hellholes.
The counter-concerns that resonate most with me are: continued civic decline at home in spite of attempts at renewed civic pride and an increasingly flaccid military due to lack of “practice” abroad.
The concerns about sneaky bombs etc. are certainly valid, but they’re valid today, and there’s no reason whatsoever to believe our engagement with the world reduces them—quite the contrary. Ditto proliferation in general: the primary limit to developing nuclear weapons is access to fissionable material. We can do little about this.
Concerns that resonate negatively with me: people are depending on us; we have so many people employed in the military overseas; the world will go to hell without us engaging as we do; etc. Right. We made a lot of mistakes in allowing things to get this way. Nothing is helped by perpetuating it.
I think everyone agrees that wealthy nations should pay for their own defense. But what about poor and middle income countries? Japan, Germany, and South Korea all became wealthy under our protection, and many other nations rely on us today.
Frankly, I think the world would plunge into global war if we pulled our troops out. I realized this after watching the eurozone crisis for a few years: the level of ethnic vitriol, condescension and hatred in Europe is astonishing to me, and these are countries that are all democratic and either wealthy or middle income.
How many countries are deterred from attacking their neighbors only by American power? Sometimes I think we can’t even trust the Europeans in that regard.
The one thing we most certainly could still do and should have done already is stop the Iranian nuclear program. We (and everyone else) are far more at risk in a world where that particular regime has the bomb. We would not be better off if the Iraqis had achieved it years ago, either.
The closer Iran gets the closer we are to a nuclear arms race in that dangerous part of the world. And that greatly increases the opportunities for terrorist groups to get their hands on them. And American lack of involvement increases the strength of the terrorist groups who would try and sacrifices our chance of stopping them over there rather than here. (That our current clumsy involvement may have something of the same effect is irrelevant to this point.)
I agree with the concerns you find legitimate, and I agree that there are places we should step back. But I’ll also hold to the point that we do have a moral obligation to certain vulnerable allies, and a shared interest in self-preservation with others.
What if, instead of withdrawing from the entire world, we restored the Monroe Doctrine and withdrew from the Eastern Hemisphere? Fortress America would extend to the continental Americas, our Navy would patrol the Atlantic and Pacific, and we’d still have access to the markets and raw materials of two continents.
We should certainly stop defending Europe, except for Britain. Let them see how well they get along without all our NATO spending. Bring home the military members from all European countries, and see what happens to their economies without the spending of all our military members. I’m guessing that all the “social democracies” would soon collapse if they actually had to defend themselves on their own dime. We should stop cooperating with all Arab nations, and any other majority-Muslim nations, knowing how Islam sees us as the Great Satan. The money freed up could be used to support Israel as the last outpost of real democracy and freedom in that part of the world.
But, we haven’t done any thing close to resembling serious intervention in Syria, and we de-intervened in Iraq and those are the places that now host the Islamic State.
I think the view that our interventions only make things worse has been completely destroyed by the fact that things have now gotten much worse without us being at all involved. In fact I would argue that our refusal to do anything and insistence on pulling out has precipitated these events.
As for the pretense of fortress of America, nice diversion.
anonymous seems to get it.
To grasp foreign policy one has to begin by determining what is an existential threat, a threat to vital American interests, and a serious threat. There are few existential threats. The U.S. has many options to disrupt mischief and keep things in check so they do not become a threat to vital American interests. The U.S. possesses many means to keep serious threats in check.
The U.S. is self-sufficient, for the most part, like we were self-sufficient in 1941. It is disconcerting how unaware people are of how powerful America was right before WWII. The U.S. economy was 10 times larger than Japan’s. We remain very strong and frankly could create havoc in many ways to keep things in check.
The question was a nice hypothetical inquiry – but not very down to earth. The proposition that there some believe there is logic to a “duck and cover” strategy does not make sense given the many options at our disposal.
We need to accept the Cold War has been replaced by diverse threats (China, N. Korea, Iran, Russia, Venezuela) requiring innovation to keep serous threats from evolving. Espionage, Humint, Disruption remain viable tools – along with forward presence to permit projection of aid, propaganda, subversion, intelligence and force.
Let us though explore the proposition at hand. What will happen if we pull out, and concede our authority and position as the great regulating hegemon of the world. Well, assuming that everyone believes us, that this is not a ploy, we will see the world start dividing back up into spheres of influence, where as now we really have one sphere of influence with some outsiders trying to push in on us. I think you will see the EU or at least certain members of it (France and Germany) all of a sudden get very serious about military spending. Japan will tare up its pacifistic constitution and begin to rearm. China will try to make vassals out of South East Asia. Russia will make vassals out of Eastern Europe. In the middle east Israel will probably end up going to war with at least one actual Arab nation, on top of their perennial fights with the Palestinians. Africa, well I don’t know much about Africa to imagine what will happen to them. South America might be far enough removed from Russia and China to not become an area of conflict, but I imagine that bad actors on that continent will try to expand their influence. Maybe the drug cartels will feel more liberated knowing that if they actually conquer a country US marines will not come and kill them, so maybe that will happen.
continued…
GGofG & Claire,
I find GGofG’s ideas are a breath of fresh air. A real live honest isolationist damning the rest of the world to its own devices. Now that is so much more interesting than just your average whining libertarian who continues on and on about the cost of everything as if one can consult a spreadsheet and foreign policy will just fall right out.
Certainly a common sense approach. No complaints here.
However, I think BDB has a good suggestion.
I like it. What was that again.
Boy that takes me back. I made a sales call on Ford’s Glass Manufacturing facility at the old Rouge Plant. They had enough molten glass to replace 1,000,000 windshields per year. They decided to have a little fun with me and asked me to quote a thermocouple to measure temperature. Even though we had the best in the world they all would melt if used. Hah! I pulled out my infra-red temperature gun. Aim it, squeeze the trigger, and you could measure up to 5000 deg F.
Mess with me will you.
Regards,
Jim
…Resumed
In America we will find that it is actually very easy to not give a damn. Maybe our newspapers will tell us that FARK now controls Columbia, or that China has invaded Vietnam, and that Japan just tested a nuclear weapon. Hey, the world is a bad place and we are lucky not to have anything to do with it.
The average person will not make a connection to these thing and the fact that you can’t find fruits like oranges and strawberries year round. That everything costs more. Heck they may even be glad that all these job killing free trade agreements we had in Asia, Europe, and South America are gone, replaced by Chinese and Russian economic exclusion zones. They will be happy that their mediocre cars are now made in the US. They can’t see what they don’t have and never will have. If things are bad at home economically because China and Russia are imposing extra costs on trade by restricting sea lanes, or using their military power to force countries to favor trade with them over us, the average American will not notice. They will blame Republicans for not carrying about them, or Democrats for not taxing the rich enough.
I think we will be content over all. We will see that the world does not end if we are not there to manage it, and we will assume that anything bad that happens was going to happen anyway.
Agree with this, I think our very deliberate post-WWII strategy was to pay for the defense of Germany and Japan ourselves because we didn’t entirely trust either power to rearm, given their militaristic and nationalistic histories. I think those tendencies are more suppressed than cured, I recently listened to Claire’s Menace in Europe: Why the Continent’s Crisis is America’s, Too and there’s a fascinating chapter on the popularity of German metal band Rammstein and what this reveals about German culture.
In any case I think prior comments overestimate the strength of China and particularly Russia, a nation with a serious looming demographic crisis, a corrupt kleptocracy, and an economy entirely dependent on oil prices. Russia is certainly dangerous, but if forced to defend themselves I think Germany would be up to the task.
I meant intervention as Tony Blair confessed. The original invasion of Iraq required a generational occupation that was rejected by the American voter and really all Western voters. After that ISIS had a place in the world in vacuum we created. The second intervention was based on the idea that actors operating in Iraq are terrorists and the same actors in Syria are freedom fighters. We foolishly funneled weapons to ISIS. Now we find ourselves with no side to back and some kind of yearning to apply American military power. I can’t see how that ends well. A new balance of power will make itself in the Middle East to replace what we destroyed. You can’t treat that as a random event that happened in our absence. We caused it.
Yes but the vacuum was in Syria, ISIS was incubated in Syria and then spread to Iraq.
I think the real mistake was our half-hearted backing of supposedly “moderate” rebels in Syria against the Assad regime. We should have either:
With Russian intervention it looks like we’re likely to end up with #2 anyway, i.e. eventually Assad will remain in power and regain control of Syria.
It’s probably not a good idea to allow enemies that have sworn to destroy us, or who want to destroy us but are too smart to announce it weekly, to become so powerful that they might start to believe that they could do it.
Even if they can’t it would be costly for us to prove it to them.
If we went with my restored Monroe Doctrine thought experiment (see #52) we could still import fresh fruit in winter from South America, not to mention two items I couldn’t live without: coffee and chocolate!
And American corporations could still outsource their factories to exploit cheaper labor in Latin America, so it’s not clear the price of goods would rise dramatically, it’s just that everything in Walmart would be made in Brazil rather than China.