An Empire Without Benefits

The United States should continue to support Ukraine, but insist that Europe carry its own share of the load as many countries are already doing.

We should have learned from the Munich Agreement that one does not reward a dictator with territorial gains or anything else, because behavior that gets rewarded gets repeated, and Vladimir Putin is a dictator.

The United States is however $36 trillion in debt and counting because, at the end of the Second World War, we had to assume the cost of keeping the Soviet Union from overrunning a weakened Europe.

Instead of “friends with benefits,” we have become an empire without benefits.

This means we have all the costs related to the protection of an empire, but few if any of the revenues.

Harrington Emerson’s Twelve Principles of Efficiency pointed out this issue in 1912.

Our fifth great proposed expenditure is for an American Navy. If there had been no “Maine” there would have been no Spanish war, no war expenditure of one thousand million dollars, no Philippine problem making us an Eastern Asiatic power when we have not yet solved a dozen simple elementary problems at home, such as living wages for sweat-shop workers, lack of employment, civic honesty and cleanliness.

The Mexican War gained us what is now the Western United States; the Spanish-American War gained us a few non-profitable islands unless one counts Cuban cigars and Puerto Rican sugar.

This required us to build and maintain a two-ocean Navy, and our Pacific possessions would bring us into conflict with Japan in 1941.

England’s need to defend its own vaster empire including India, Australia, and New Zealand compelled it similarly to divert resources to the Pacific and away from the conflict in Europe, including protection of its homeland.

Unlike the United States, England had an empire with benefits, namely one whose enormous resources could pay for the most powerful navy on earth along with Sepoys, Sikhs, Gurkhas, and other native troops whom the Roman Empire would have called auxiliaries.

Questions arise nonetheless as to whether empires are worth the cost. Even in the nineteenth century, when England was on top of the world, the influx of colonial wealth benefited primarily the land-owning nobles who supplied the army’s officers as opposed to poor men who often enlisted because they could find no other paying work.

The ordinary Briton was little if any better off than the ordinary German of that era even though Germany had but a few colonies and those primarily for prestige.

The Price of Empire

Rudyard Kipling, who may well have been the best friend the ordinary British soldier, Tommy Atkins, ever had recognized the problem in the nineteenth century.

Walk wide o’ the Widow at Windsor,
For ’alf o’ Creation she owns:
We ’ave bought ’er the same with the sword an’ the flame,
An’ we’ve salted it down with our bones.
(Poor beggars!—it’s blue with our bones!)

…Then ’ere’s to the Lodge o’ the Widow,
From the Pole to the Tropics it runs—
To the Lodge that we tile with the rank an’ the file,
An’ open in form with the guns.
(Poor beggars!—it’s always they guns!)

Now it’s the American Empire, but one without benefits, that runs from the Pole to the Tropics, and our men and women in uniform have salted it down with their bones. I recently saw Blackhawk Down, which depicts the Battle of Mogadishu in which 18 Americans died, and far more were wounded, in a United Nations peacekeeping operation.

“After the battle, dead US troops were dragged through the streets by enraged Somalis.”

Kipling’s “Shillin’ a Day” goes on to describe how a Sergeant-Major, the veteran of countless battles, must practically beg in the streets to supplement his measly pension while “The Last of the Light Brigade” depicts the similar fate of the heroes of Tennyson’s poem. “And we leave to the streets and the workhouse the charge of the Light Brigade!” The same goes for our own veterans who often can’t get what they need.

If we go beyond the human costs, we have to pay for military bases and naval bases around the world, along with the operating costs of numerous carrier battle groups. This is not to say we should not keep the aircraft carriers because, as Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke told us long ago, “Gentlemen, all nations are equally in need of peace, and I am convinced that all nations will maintain peace as long as they are strong enough to command it.”

He added elsewhere that it is only the sheathed sword that keeps other swords in their scabbards.

The wisdom of dispersing our military establishment all over the world, and fighting wars like Vietnam with no clear objectives for victory, should however be open to serious question. Let us not forget that George Washington warned us against foreign entanglements because he “knew first hand how costly wars could be and wanted the young nation to maintain a goal of neutrality with all foreign governments as much as possible.”

What We Should Do

Western Europe was weakened severely by the Second World War, and thus unable to stand up to the menace of Soviet invasion. Now, however, the European Union’s gross domestic product is upward of $20 trillion a year which is about ten times that of the Russian Federation.

Russia is, in fact, a Third World outhouse country with nuclear weapons, without which it would be nothing. Europe is quite capable of standing on its own feet today without American support, but it needs to be weaned from this support rather than being disconnected precipitously with a headlong withdrawal.

We should therefore continue to support Ukraine but insist that the EU and U.K. do as well, and they are now stepping up to the plate to do exactly that.

We should also announce long-range plans to reduce our presence there, but with enough of a horizon for other NATO forces to replace us.

As the Russian Federation and communist China are both in violation of the United Nations Charter, which proscribes threats or use of force for territorial expansion, the Non-Proliferation Treaty, which is contingent on the U.N. Charter, is essentially null and void.

Poland, Germany, Ukraine, the Baltic states, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, and all other countries against which Russia, China, and North Korea have made threats are well within their rights to build nuclear weapons and delivery systems. To paraphrase von Moltke, it is only nuclear weapons in their silos that keep other nuclear weapons in their silos.

If Ukraine had kept its own nukes, Putin would have not dared to have invaded in 2022.

If however the influx of money and weapons to Ukraine results in the economic collapse of the Russian Federation, we may well see a repetition of the 1917 revolution.

Then we and the Europeans can cut our defense expenditures enormously. The Russian people should be informed that, if they de-Putinize their own country and become a democratic nation the same way Germany did after the Second World War, they will be welcomed into the European Union and all the economic opportunities this implies.

The bottom line is however that we are accumulating more debt every year, and we have been an empire without benefits for far too long. We should absolutely continue to help the free world stand on its own feet, but we cannot afford to carry it on our backs.

Civis Americanus is the pen name of a contributor who remembers the lessons of history, and wants to ensure that our country never needs to learn those lessons again the hard way. He or she is remaining anonymous due to being subjected to “cancel culture” for denouncing Black Lives Matter’s incitement of civil disorder.

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