Butter or Cannon?: America’s “Europeanization”

Before going to Norwegian capital Oslo to collect his prize, Obama himself admitted that it was ironic for a president during wartime to be accepting a Nobel Peace Prize. What is more ironic is that, after Obama had decided to increase 30,000 troops in Afghanistan, New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof pointed out that the expenses needed to post an American soldier in Afghanistan for one year is enough to build 20 schools there.

Obama had stressed earlier that, while the internal government’s spending is strained, spending such huge amounts of money to increase troops in faraway Afghanistan is meant to satisfy the U.S.’s need for its own security. To put it bluntly, this is the price Washington has to pay for the U.S. to maintain its status as an international empire.

From another angle, the American magazine Newsweek published a commentary on December 7 by Harvard University’s heavyweight economic historian Niall Ferguson, who warned that the American government’s increasing debts will imperil America’s incomparable global military power, thereby causing the fall of the “American Empire.” The commentary has received a great deal of attention.

Ferguson is British, and this article can be seen as the British Empire’s elegy. Ferguson can be said to be opposing Keynesian’s comeback after the financial tsunami had caused a great global recession on Anglo-Saxon cultural grounds.

Ferguson, however, missed a point, which is that the future decline of American military power is not solely due to Washington’s inability to extricate itself from its heavy debt; there is also a deeper social trend factor – America’s internal government reforms, especially the healthcare reform, that Obama pushed for when he took office. It represented a certain trend toward America’s “Europeanization.”

Specifically, the so-called “Obama Revolution” was an opposition of the Republicans’ “Conservative Revolution” in the past 20 years and a return to the social philosophy of a “soft America” since the Roosevelt administration.

Increasing Butter will Naturally Reduce the Cannons

The Conservatives deeply resent Obama’s healthcare reform. Most people explained it as an instinctive response by Conservatives to “Big Government,” especially to the government’s involvement in the medical and healthcare industries, both of which play an increasingly important role in the national economy. However, the Wall Street Journal’s recent commentary directly pointed out the inverse relationship between a “welfare state” and military spending, disclosing another of the American right wing’s important motives for opposing Obama’s internal government reform.

The Wall Street Journal pointed out that the result of a “Europeanized” society will be a change in the emphasis fiscal expenditure. When social welfare becomes entitlement, “butter” will overcome the “cannon.” An illustration: the U.S.’s military spending exceeded the GDP by 4%. In Europe, only the U.K. and France’s military spending barely exceeded the GDP by 2%, while the biggest economy in Europe, Germany, spent only 1.3% of its GDP on military. In addition, only 31% of the U.S.’s military spending is used as the soldiers’ wages, while the amount that Belgium used as their soldiers’ wages was 74%.

What the Wall Street Journal failed to see was another social factor in Europe, the dilution and polarization of the welfare policy which shrunk society’s risk-taking lower-class, thereby reducing the source of “gunpowder” for foreign warfare. This is an important reason for widespread anti-war sentiments in European society, and this made it difficult for the government to increase military spending to become involved in foreign military operations.

A survey of contemporary societies shows that 71% of Europeans are against “justice by force,” while 71% of Americans are for it. An important reason for the difference in attitude between Europe and the U.S. is that the Americans, especially the Republican hawks, are mostly “armchair warmongers.” They only need to spend money to fight a war, and any casualties will be of no immediate concern to them. The Wall Street Journal pointed out recently that even though the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have depleted the U.S. of nearly $1 trillion, those who risked death by fighting in the war were of the lower-class that did not even make up 1% of the American population. In contrast, the German parliament legislated that German troops posted to Afghanistan could only take on non-combat missions, thereby gaining them a reputation in Afghanistan as beer-drinking merry-makers. There were even “secret rumors” that the Italian troops in Afghanistan had bribed the Taliban to not attack.

Therefore, from the dual viewpoints of military spending and “gunpowder” sources, Obama’s “Europeanization” through internal government reform represented a significant “hidden danger” for the U.S.’s future military power. The American right wing’s full objection can be summarized as “taking preventive measures.” In addition, since there remains a huge difference in the social cultures between Europe and America, it is needless to say that Obama’s “Europeanization” policy is facing an enormous obstacle.

On the other side of the story, there are currently two obvious trends in American society: 1) a rapid increase in immigrants, especially the Catholic Latin Americans and 2) the continual decline in economic status of the conservative white population with low education levels. These two developments will help to reduce the political resistance to “Europeanization”.

Whatever the case, it is hard to say, for now, how far Obama’s “Europeanization” reform can go. Ferguson’s citation regarding the precedence of the fall of empires – the Spanish empire, the British empire and the Ottoman empire, all of which were built their foundations in Europe (the Ottoman empire inherited the Eastern Roman Byzantine empire’s capital of Constantinople), is still an interesting foreshadow.