We Can No Longer Afford the Empire

Somebody is going to have to whisper in President-elect Obama’s ear that the unipolar moment has passed and that the United States can no longer afford its informal worldwide empire. Even though the looming economic meltdown will likely be serious—and maybe even cataclysmic—the foreign policy chattering classes of both parties are on autopilot and have not yet abandoned their interventionist consensus. A rude awakening awaits.

Even before the economic crisis hit, the United States was overextended abroad. One measure of that imperial overstretch was that the U.S. accounted for roughly 43 percent of the world’s military spending but only 20 percent of the world’s GDP. Another indication of that overextension was that even by thinning out troops in Europe and East Asia—where the threat has long gone but the U.S. continues to provide security for very wealthy nations that should be providing it entirely for themselves—the United States military strained to prosecute the two small wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. [ed.; emphasis added]

We cannot afford to police the world. Ivan Eland explains.