Cynic – I think you are talking about the rise in the military budget from 5% of G.D.P. to under 7% at the peak in the 1980s (as oppposed to 11% under J.F.K. before Vietnam).

Actually as government programs go (which, agreed, is wildly badly) the build up was well managed – and without the U.S. military would have decayed to nothing much (due to previous neglect).

As for the current wars.

Afghanistan was hardly optional – as even Ron Paul agreed at the time.

As for Iraq – in 2003 we agree, but a sunk cost is a sunk cost.

Defeat is not a good option now (and running away is defeat) – for reasons I, and others, have explained many times.

Paul, The entire USAF F-15 fleet (except the rather different F-15E strike version) is currently grounded with a very tricky structural problem. My solution: scrap ‘em and order another couple hundred Raptors.

Without them, an Republican candidate is doomed, as GWB’s father found out when he reneged on his no-new-taxes promise.

Even more than that, remember when Lee Atwater said, “Fuck the gun owners! Where else are they gonna go?”

Yep, we showed him. Oh, wait, we showed him and got Billy Jeff for our troubles.

If we’re going to fix anything about the Stupid Party, we need to get over our fear of meaningful primary challenges against incumbent presidents. Both Bushes should have been challenged.

I wonder if you are including military spending in your calculations of government spending as a percentage of G.D.P. Cynic (of course you are).

Military spending is still spending, and quite frankly, the massive buildup in the 1980s was mostly a colossal waste of cash. It isn’t really unreasonable to plea for some kind of fiscal sanity with regards to defence spending. The current defence spending under Bush, including the Iraq and Afghanistan budgets, is over $500 billion a year. That is downright robbery, and anybody who believes such exorbitant government spending is necessary is an enemy of the taxpayer.

Ronald Reagan did cut some domestic programs, and got rid of others entirely – and he restored some real Federalism by reducing the percentage of State government spending that was financed by Federal taxes.

On taxes, the top rate went down from was it 60% to 28% – and yet the amount and the percentage of total tax paid by the rich went UP.

However, it is true that Ronald Reagan did not tackle the “entitlement” programs – the really big programs Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and so on.

He did not like them (just as Ron Paul does not like them), but he did not present the detailed way of getting from where things are to where they ought to be (just as Ron Paul does not).

“Pete” Du Pont tried in 1988, but he crashed and burned in New Hampshire (who cares that you have a very good record as Governor of Deleware and have lots of good ideas – if you have a French sounding first name you are doomed).

And Fred Thompson is trying now – but the media mock him.

Actually in a general election campaign (where he would get the time he needs) he would be a very hard man to mock – as he tends to stand up for himself.

I briefly saw him on Fox today – and he played hard with the daytime interviews (he made them look like the lightweights they are).

He is not a small man with a weak voice.

1. “The next US president is going to be the Democratic nominee, unfortunately.”
– I don’t think so. Hillary Clinton has extraordinarily high negatives (the “broken glass” syndrome, as in: the number of people who would crawl over broken glass to vote against her is about 51% of voters). Forget the other Democrats: they don’t stand a chance.

2. Remember that when faced with the prospect of John Kerry or another “dead-heat” election, 60 million people turned out and voted for George W. Bush.

The key to this election will revolve not around the “middle”, but around conservatives, millions of whom may just not vote if faced with an unpalatable Republican candidate. Without them, an Republican candidate is doomed, as GWB’s father found out when he reneged on his no-new-taxes promise.

Why else do you think Romney and Giuliani have been pandering away like crazy to organizations like the Heritage Foundation and the NRA?

Ever wonder why not a single Democrat candidate has breathed a word about gun control during the campaign, for example?

We conservatives are not known as the “silent majority” for nothing. We don’t make a huge noise (well, apart from loudmoths like me); we dont send angry letters to the newspapers; and we certainly don’t tell pollsters what we think.

But we do vote — or not, if the Republican candidate is unbearable.

That’s why the Republican Establishment is clueless. They haven’t figured it out yet.

But they’d better.

A simple old-fashioned plan would not have attempted to win hearts and minds in Iraq, or help them set up a pro-western regime, or anything else. It would simply have been to, for instance, utterly smash Iraq’s offensive capability (and to hell with Iraqi casualties, the more the better) then leave again, or force them to pay tribute.

And as I pointed out, the consequences of actions are rarely foreseeable, even simple ones as I’ve suggested. Consider the Roman’s determination to bring Judah to heel, by various political meddling and 3 uses of overwheming force, the third of which entirely destroyed the little country. Who then could have predicted that the resultant Jewish diaspora would lead a splinter sect of their religion to rise up and overwhelm the entire Roman Empire? In terms of political hindsight, the best Roman strategy would have been to leave the Jews alone with their god in their little country. Non intervention would have been a better long term Roman strategy than the interventionist strategy they pursued, which ultimately bore such strange fruit.

“we’ll depose Saddam and then Iraq will become a shining beacon of democracy in the region”, for instance

The problem with that bit was not that it was some grand long-term plan, the problem was that there was no plan, only a grand long-term goal. If anyone has bothered to sit down and conceive a plan, they would have very quickly come to the inevitable conclusion that the goal was totally unrealistic. And, that bit about Iraq was in fact of the “he is a threat, lets crash him” variety. The grand long-term goal of the new shiny Arab Democracy was seen as a side benefit, and also as a means of not having to go on crashing the rest of them (by “them” I mean the entire Iraqi population).

On international agreements: I see nothing wrong with those, as long as they are well thought out and not blindly relied on (Chamberlain does not qualify on either count), and we still have a big stick in our arsenal just in case.

“Strait of Malacca.”

I do however question the assertion that America is keeping the world’s trade routes open, or that that is the primary purpose of most of the US military bases, since most are in places where trade routes are not conceivably threatened. Are the US navy really policing the seas, or is it more a case that most nations either have no desire to interfere with trade, or are well aware that if they did they’d suffer reprisals (especially in our modern politically joined-up world)?

I don’t agree with libertarian isolationism either. I think it’s just plain naive. But to be fair to Paul, he isn’t an isolationist. He simply doesn’t want America to “world police” nor get involved in entanglements. He’d still use the armed forces where necessary, ISTM.

It may be however (and I’m not saying that the following is my POV, but it’s something I’m idly musing about) that perhaps we need to question the issue of what use foreign policy is. Most libertarians/small governmentists recognise that state planning of society is fundamentally impossible. The government cannot collect enough information to base a good plan on; the information itself is too complex, and the consequences of any plan can never be adequately forecast; the “Law Of Unintended Consequences”. The basis of planning is “if we do this, then they (the people) will react thusly…” but it never works out that way.

Well doesn’t the same flaw apply to foreign policy? A state makes some choice or plan, attempting to predict what other states will do. But again, there are too many unknowns. Nobody negotiating the Treaty Of Versaille could have conceived that a new ideology called fascism would arise, for instance. The best laid plans of mice and me gang agley, and the same is true for the plans of states. Whatever interventions are undertaken, the result will almost always be different (“we’ll depose Saddam and then Iraq will become a shining beacon of democracy in the region”, for instance).

That suggests that on the foreign policy front, any plans should be very simple and short term, rather than the hopelessness of trying to plan on a grander scale. One can argue that that is how nations and empires used to behave, with simple basic objectives such as “that neighbouring land is a threat. We’ll invade them and totally crush their military capability, kill the men, rape the livestock, then leave” or “We’ll invade, get a surrender, then order them to pay tribute. If they stop paying, we invade and crush them” rather than all this stuff about international agreements and trying to slyly reform other bits of the world into what we want them to be and trying to guess that if we do this, they’ll do that, then we do this, they do that… when 99% of the time it all turns out completely different anyway.

I know I’m waffling, but I think what I’m trying to get at here is that all the complex negotiations and zillions of hours spent on international diplomacy might be just as much a waste of time as internal state planning. Instead, interactions between nations should be kept as simple as possible. That leads one to a somewhat Paulist point of view.

They seem pretty vital to me. Try halving the number of carrier groups and submarines if the military needs more money. You may have noticed the Cold War is over.

Come again? The United States Navy is the branch of the military that needs to be at Cold War strength above the rest, in order to hopefully ensure a future where no European or Asian hostile power can get to the Americas and establish a foothold. If there is any branch due for a budget cut, it is the Air Force.