A Balance of Titans

Highlights

• The US must recognize and adapt to the new reality of our multipolar world. It’s time to face facts: the US is no longer the world’s only major power. The world stage has opened, and today the earth’s key powers include the US in North America, yes; but also the European Union and the United Kingdom in Western Europe; Russia in Central Asia; India in South Asia; China on mainland East Asia; and Japan in the islands of East Asia. In such a world, America’s role as world policeman is not only unsustainable—it’s dangerous. Rather than wait for a major, catastrophic war to break out between competing powers, Eland argues the US must get ahead of the wave and orchestrate a peaceful transition to a multipolar world.
• Eland calls for a revival of FDR’s “Four Policemen” concept and calls for the implementation of a regionally focused foreign policy. Eland calls this “Independent Internationalism.” FDR’s Four Policemen vision was a post–World War II security concept in which the United States, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and China would each act as regional enforcers to maintain global peace and prevent aggression within their spheres of influence. Updating FDR’s vision for our own time, Eland describes a world in which the great powers of today also provide security in their own regions, cooperating peacefully on transnational issues such as international air and sea lanes, transnational environmental pollution, jurisdiction over ocean mineral and oil deposits, and any boundary issues involving the previously defined spheres of influence. Gradually, Eland writes, the numerous entanglements and unnecessary alliances between the US and other countries will end, giving way to a more realistic and mutually beneficial era of international relations.
• Unfortunately, political and corporate interests have taken over the
  Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex (MICC), leading to enormous waste and corruption on the taxpayer’s dime. It must stop. Eland reveals how US forces and defense budgets are created not from reason and wisdom, but by backdoor politics and crony capitalism. Eland explains that because the military knows the government is the only buyer of its product, there is strong incentive to allocate contracts with arms dealers based on cynical political considerations. We must break from this broken system, Eland argues, and determine, through real competition, which arms dealers might offer the best value for taxpayer dollars. Rational analysis—not tied to the interests of the corrupt MICC, but to America’s true, vital security interests—will yield the best results for everyone.
• We can cut costs, make America safer, and transition to a peaceful multipolar world—but our leaders must be courageous, realistic, and honest with the public. Eland’s book is a treasure trove of recommendations, budget analyses, and sound calculations that policymakers everywhere should study. He proposes that the US employ a significantly smaller military force, even including an assessment of the number of weapons needed as well as a precise annual defense budget based on unit costing data from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO). Controversially—but unapologetically—Eland calls for cutting the Navy by half, the Marine Corps by three-fourths, and the Army and Air Force by two-thirds. If policymakers were to make all Eland’s recommended changes, the Department of Defense’s budget would be cut almost in half. This humbler, safer, and far less expensive foreign policy would be a win for America—a win that wouldn’t come at the cost of war. The only catch? We need courageous and honest leaders to make it happen.

Synopsis

What if America could be stronger, safer, and spend half as much on national defense?

Unfortunately, the Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex is working as designed. Corruption, waste, and catastrophic hubris are out of control, and the result has been a perilous and expensive defense strategy. If we don’t change course now, the cost won’t just be measured in dollars, but in lives and liberties.

Enter Ivan Eland, director of Independent Institute’s Center on Peace & Liberty and acclaimed foreign policy expert. A Balance of Titans: Peace and Liberty in the New Multipolar World lays out a much-needed, rational, strategy-first approach to national security, one that protects vital interests without bankrupting the nation or dragging America into endless wars.

Eland’s bold and pragmatic theory of  Independent Internationalism draws inspiration from FDR’s visionary Four Policemen concept. His updated version is both principled and pragmatic, perfectly tailored to the present day, and champions diplomacy and restraint over empire and endless war. The US, once the lone superpower, now shares the global stage with other major powers: the EU, UK, Russia, China, India, and Japan. Each great power, Eland urges, must secure its own region while collaborating on shared global concerns.

Far from being a pacifist retreat, Eland’s vision is the brilliant and strategic recalibration our rapidly changing world needs. Eland argues that instead of risking catastrophic conflict by policing the globe, America must lead the way in building a peaceful, regionally balanced international order—before it’s too late.

With a proposed budget that slashes military spending by more than 40 percent, A Balance of Titans is a must-read for all Americans who believe in a smarter, saner path to American security in a multipolar world.

A Multipolar World

Today’s leaders need a reality check. Militarily, the US still thinks of itself as the world’s lone superpower. That may be true, to an extent, but economists agree that the US, Canada, China, Russia, India, South Africa, Brazil, the EU, the UK, Saudi Arabia, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Australia are all major and mostly equal economic powers on the world stage. Each power depends on almost all of the other powers for its economic well-being. And military well-being, Eland argues, depends upon economic well-being.

What this means, writes Eland, is that the world is entering an incipient multipolar era. In this new reality, the longstanding US strategy of unilateral global policing is outdated and unsustainable. The US must get ahead of the curve and lead the world toward a peaceful transition to this multipolar framework.

Eland warns that in doing so, American leaders must emphasize that realist principles, not idealistic rhetoric, drive this shift. For too long, he writes, military interventions have been justified with inflated, moralistic rhetoric, thinly masking self-serving political agendas and shamelessly leading the American public into wasteful, costly, and bloody conflicts. No more. The time to change course is now.

What Drives Foreign
Policy Today?

What is the point of national security policy? Quite simply, Eland writes that a nation’s policy should “safeguard the country’s territory, people, system of governance, economy, and way of life.” Unfortunately, the MICC’s activities extend far beyond this simple but vital mandate. Unnecessary, costly, and dangerous adventures abroad that have little to nothing to do with American security are the norm. Domestic economic and political interests determine everything the military does, from the excursions it takes around the world to which weapons it researches, develops, and builds. The incentives are all wrong.

That said, Eland acknowledges that the incentives in this system are intelligible, if not honorable. Many regions in the US rely on military contracts for their economic well-being. For decades, the livelihoods and careers of politicians and ordinary people alike have depended upon the production and distribution of weapons—even obsolete, unneeded, or wildly expensive ones. Besides the obvious financial expense, this represents a high opportunity cost for the public, as it takes resources away from private consumer and investment spending.

We have to stop the madness. Strategic necessity—not domestic pork—must drive the US military posture. With America’s yawning national debt and a hostile China and Russia looming on the world stage, the best time to change course would have been decades ago. The second-best time, writes Eland, is today.

Independent
Internationalism

Eland’s book calls for a modernized version of FDR’s Four Policemen concept. FDR envisioned a post–World War II order in which the US, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and China would act as primary enforcers of peace, each responsible for maintaining stability within their respective spheres of influence. Unfortunately, the idea was scrapped by FDR’s successor, the far more hawkish and interventionist President Truman. But Eland argues that if only Truman had adopted the Four Policemen concept, the Cold War may have been avoided.

Independent Internationalism—Eland’s proposed strategy—updates FDR’s Four Policemen concept for the multipolar world. Now including India, Japan, the EU, and others, he argues that the major powers of the world’s respective regions should take primary responsibility for securing their own regions, leaving the security of other regions to the other great powers.

Independent Internationalism improves on FDR’s Four Policemen concept, isolationism, and even interventionism. It is more realistic than isolationism because it honestly considers the spheres of influence, balances of power, and connected national interests of today’s interconnected world; it is much less naïve than the neoconservative/liberal interventionist idea of going to war to spread democracy; and it is more grounded than FDR’s original “vague and ultimate dream” of creating “an international organization to co-police the entire planet,” writes Eland.

In Eland’s framework, the US need not maintain a dominant global military presence. Instead, it can focus on strategic cooperation and selective engagement only where its interests are truly at stake. This is the clear-eyed, pragmatic, interest-based foreign policy America needs.

Urgent Reform

It’s one thing to say the US needs a more modest internationalist strategy, one that requires fewer forces. But how much fewer? How many forces do we use now, exactly? Can we really get away with doing less?

The short answer is yes.

Eland’s book is no pie-in-the-sky dream based on vague intuitions and abstract principles. He backs every one of his proposals with verifiable data. He offers precise calculations of the number of weapons used by current armed forces and the number that would be required under his prescription of Independent Internationalism. Chapters 5 and 6 lay out the details while Chapter 7 breaks down how much money taxpayers would save—a whopping 46 percent off the projected Department of Defense budget.

And yet, even without Eland’s rigorous data analysis, the moral and philosophical weight of his argument is urgently compelling on its own. When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail; when you have more weapons than you need, every conflict looks like a war. There is no incentive to be prudent, realistic, or peaceful. That has to change.

It is not enough, Eland explains, to elect a president who simply prefers less intervention but still increases military spending. Future chief executives will still possess the tools to intervene irresponsibly. The only course of action that will produce real change is cutting the forces and weapons programs of the MICC.

Reforming the defense budget is the final step in a larger transformation. No more empire-building, no more dishonesty, no more delusion. We need a foreign policy of principled internationalism. If the US is to thrive in a multipolar world, we must trade our costly illusions for realism and strength—before a crisis forces its
hand.