By Steve Hynd
Democracy Arsenal's Michael Cohen:
the growing predisposition to view all security challenges through the prism of the military portends even more reliance on America�s fighting men and women. For progressives, the ever-expanding military-industrial complex presents grave dangers to the hopes of a renewed period of activist government. The United States can maintain a huge army with the most up-to-date weapons system or it can better provide for the needs of its citizens. It can�t do both. Although it is essential that the country begin to rebuild its civilian agencies and rein in the defense budget, it can�t do so without larger structural changes. What is needed is a fundamental reconceptualization of U.S. security interests�a recognition that discussions about military tactics and the structure of forces should be closely aligned with strategic considerations as well as a dispassionate view of the country�s national interests. The growing U.S. military footprint around the world risks undermining not only America�s foreign policy agenda but its democratic ethos.
This really echoes Andrew Bacevich's recent observations and is the basis for arguing that a drawdown of all current U.S. interventionism abroad - including and especially in Afghanistan - is necessary. It depresses me that several of the progressive spectrum's best national security thinkers still don't seem to get that.
The dynamic was never going to change during the Bush administration, which meant that a lot of progressive national security writers focussed on what could be salvaged in Iraq and Afghanistan. That's where the love affair with COIN among progressive foreign policy pundits began. But it put them in common cause with both neoliberal and neoconservative interventionists and I think a good many have come to feel more and more uncomfortable with that alliance as time goes on. What those pundits forgot to do was look up from their study of different types of trees to realise they were wandering in the military-industrial complex's forest. That's changing.
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