I cringe when politically-motivated folks use the words “good” and “evil”. But the United States Navy is calling themselves “a global force for good” and I’m inclined to side with them. There is no organization better-prepared to bring relief across the globe. Plus it’s odd that in this day and age that piracy would be a threat to trade but there you have it, and the United States Navy is the only force in the world prepared to do something about it.
Almost every country on the planet benefits from the security we provide for world trade.
Which makes me wonder, if, perhaps, some of those other countries might be interested in picking up part of the tab. Keeping the sea lanes safe is frightfully expensive, and up to now at least a prosperous United States has been ready to pick up the bill.
Thing is, with our tax money we’re making products manufactured in Korea cheaper. Korea, Japan, England, Germany, pretty much any country you can name, we are providing their defense budget, so they can focus all their energy on kick-ass products. Every Camry, every Mercedes, every Kia, is subsidized by US tax dollars (or, these days, federal debt).
We like to be the good guys. It’s almost unhealthy how badly we United Statesians want to be the global force for good. Global security is a good thing, and I’m happy to pitch in. But you know when you get to the end of a good night of drinking with your international pals and Japan says, “thanks, dude, that was great! Thanks for demanding that you always cover me!”, and pats you on the shoulder on the way out, and then Europe pulls out their wallet, looks in sadly, and says, “I’ll get the next one” and then your friends in Asia say, “I’ll be happy to loan you the money you need to pay my tab,” that maybe it’s time to even things out.
Excellent point. Thanks for the observation!
Tsunami and earthquake relief? USN is there.
I’ve been in left-leaning gatherings, where there is agitation for the formation of a Dept. of Peace. Separate from the DoD. I think Dennis Kucinich is known for pushing for a DoP. It seems a little naive to me, because I envision the State department as already a dept f peace. Or at least supposed to be. If there was a DoP maybe it should be abl to “project benevolent force” ala the USN.
There’s a popular statistic that says that the United States pays (if memory serves) twenty times as much on arms as the rest of the world combined. Twenty times!
You can take that number a few different ways:
1) America is a bunch of war-mongering pigs.
2) Somebody’s got to keep the world safe, and I guess that’s the United States.
3) Suckers! Keep making those jet fighters while we make stuff to sell you.
By any of those interpretations, we can all agree that if some of our pals pitched in a little more, maybe we’d only have to spend five times the world total and we could still enjoy this period of unprecedented peace.
Here’s the part I left out of the post above: There’s damn little war going on right now. Ironically, the country most responsible for that condition is also the one who went picking a fight In Iraq. So I’m a little mixed on that one. But consider this: France, Germany, and England have not had a war with one another for more than 65 years. In my lifetime peace is the normal state, so it’s easy to take for granted, but Europe without a major war for fifty years is unusual, maybe unprecedented.
Now Europe’s economy is so integrated that even if the Euro blows up, it’s hard to imagine the situation leading to war. There’s just too much to lose.
We’ve done our job there, better than history suggests is even possible. Mission Accomplished! This is something we (and by ‘we’ I mean our armed services) can be incredibly proud of. Now that mission is over. Bring the boys home. Or, perhaps better (from our point of view), keep the boys there, funded by contributions from the EU. (That will never happen, of course; for some reason if they pay us to defend them, the Europeans will lose sovereignty.)