By Jim Talent
Monday, February 25, 2013
Recently, Neal Freeman wrote an article for NRO on Bill
Buckley’s famous maxim that, in election campaigns, conservatives should
support the “rightwardmost viable” candidate. Mr. Freeman focused on the
meaning of the word “viable” in that formulation. That was a useful exercise,
but it’s also helpful to consider what Mr. Buckley understood by the term
“rightwardmost,” especially as it relates to the national defense.
We can assume that Mr. Buckley used “rightwardmost” as a
synonym for “most conservative.” In a Townhall interview near the end of his
life, he described conservatism this way: “Conservatism aims to maintain in working
order the loyalties of the community to perceived truths and also to those
truths which in their judgment have earned universal recognition.”
One of those truths is the essential weakness of human
nature. Conservatives believe that human beings — while capable of great things
if sufficiently steeped in the values of an enlightened society — are by their
nature weak and corruptible. That’s the reason conservatives are suspicious of
government; government represents the harnessing of state power to the
weaknesses of human nature.
For the equal but opposite reason, conservatives also
believe that government is necessary as a restraint on the worst tendencies of
human beings. Government must therefore exercise a police power, properly
checked and balanced to prevent abuse. It must also provide for the national
defense by maintaining military forces that are effective but also
systematically constrained so that they do not become an agent of oppression.
The idea that government should be limited in its role
and constrained in the exercise of power, but vigorous in its proper functions,
is at the heart of conservatism, and of the Constitution as well. In Federalist
#51, James Madison wrote, “If men were angels, no government would be
necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls
on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be
administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first
enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it
to control itself.”
The Constitution, of which Madison was the primary
author, assigns the function of national defense to the central government. In
fact, the text of the Constitution makes clear that national defense is the
primary, exclusive, and mandatory function of the federal government.
• Of the 17 enumerated powers granted Congress in Article
I, more than a third relate to defense. Congress is granted the full range of
authority necessary to organize the defense of the United States as it was then
understood.
• Article II establishes the presidency and sets forth
the general executive powers of his office, such as the appointment power. The
only substantive functions of government specifically assigned to the president
relate to national security and foreign policy, and the first such
responsibility granted him is his authority as “Commander in Chief of the Army
and Navy of the United States.”
•Under the Constitution, national defense is exclusively
the function of the federal government. Article I, Section 10, specifically
prohibits the states, except with the consent of Congress, from keeping troops
or warships in time of peace, and from engaging in war, the only exception
being that a state may act on its own if actually invaded.
• National defense is the only mandatory function of the
federal government. Most of the powers granted to Congress are permissive in
nature. But the Constitution requires the federal government to protect the
nation. Article IV, Section 4, states that the “United States shall guarantee
to every state in this union a republican form of government and shall protect
each of them against invasion.” (Emphasis added.) In other words, even if the
federal government chose to exercise no other power, it must, under the
Constitution, provide for the common defense.
One of the ironies of modern times is that the bigger the
federal government has become, the less effectively it has exercised its
primary responsibility. Over the last two decades, the government has
systematically cut the size of the military and failed to recapitalize its
inventory, while increasing its missions. In 2011, with no consideration
whatsoever of the impact on national security, the government cut defense
spending by almost $500 billion and followed that with another $500 billion
sequester of funding. All this was done in defiance of the recommendations of
Secretary of Defense Bob Gates (who was no profligate when it came to defense
budgets; he ruthlessly cut a number of modernization programs in 2009–10) and
the bipartisan Perry-Hadley Commission on defense, which specifically warned in
2011 that the U.S. military was facing a “train wreck” unless the size of the
Navy was increased and all four of the services were recapitalized.
As a result, the military is becoming a hollow force. The
Navy has fewer ships than at any time since before World War I; the Air Force is
smaller, and its aircraft older, than at any time since the inception of the
service in 1947; the Army and Marines are stressed, badly in need of new
vehicles and helicopters, and — even if the sequester does not occur —
scheduled for a substantial reduction in their end strength. The Pentagon is so
broke that it recently had to delay deployment of a carrier to the Persian
Gulf.
There is currently an undercurrent of disagreement among
conservatives about the defense sequester and, more broadly, the importance of
funding the armed forces at a time of mounting federal debt. That disagreement
was reflected in the speeches given by Senator Marco Rubio and Senator Rand
Paul in response to the State of the Union address. Senator Rubio condemned the
defense sequester as “devastating” and assigned primary responsibility for it
to the president. He was right on both counts. The sequester is devastating —
the chairman of the Joint Chiefs compared it to “shooting ourselves in the
head” — and the president, as commander-in-chief, is primarily responsible for
it, whether he sponsored it or, as he claims, simply agreed to it.
Senator Paul did not condemn the defense sequester in his
speech. His sole comment regarding the defense budget was that “Republicans
[should] realize that military spending is not immune to waste and fraud.” He’s
right in the narrow sense. The Pentagon, like all agencies of government,
wastes money. But focusing on that now, given what is happening to America’s
armed forces, is like sending a letter to George Washington at Valley Forge
telling him to save money on pencils.
Moreover, talking about the budget crisis in terms of
defense funding simply helps the president avoid confronting the main challenge
to the government’s solvency. Anyone who looks at the federal budget can see
that the problem is the structural gap between the revenue collected for
entitlement programs and the cost of those programs. That gap is growing and is
crowding out everything in the discretionary budget, including funding for the
military. Cutting the defense budget is not the answer to the fiscal crisis
facing our nation; it is a symptom of it.
Conservatives in Congress are admittedly in a difficult
position regarding the defense sequester. They have to work to reform the
federal budget; they can’t do that unless the president actually presents a
comprehensive plan; and tolerating the sequester in the short term may be the
only way of inducing him to do that. But that doesn’t make the damage to
American security any less real, and it will increase the importance — if and
when a budget agreement is reached — of repealing not only the sequester but
also the cuts that preceded it, and returning at least to the level of military
funding that Secretary Gates recommended before he left office in 2011.
In that same Townhall interview, Bill Buckley freely
acknowledged that, like many conservatives, he had a strong libertarian streak.
The interviewer, Bill Steigerwald, followed up by asking why he had feuded so
often with libertarians. Here is his response:
I suppose the most important argument is the dogmatic
character of libertarian conservatism.
I once wrote an essay on the subject in which I said that
if I were at sea on my boat and saw a light flashing I would not worry deeply
whether the financing of that light had been done by the private or public
sector. This became a kind of playful debate with the [University of] Chicago
[economists]. By and large it has to do with the tenacity with which some
libertarians tend to hold on to their basic [principles].
To turn Buckley’s illustration into a metaphor, the
United States is now sailing in a sea of growing danger and seems to have lost
sight of the light on the shore. China is flexing its muscles in support of its
national ambitions. Iran and North Korea are advancing their nuclear and
missile programs. Al-Qaeda and its allies are expanding their bases of
operation. And in an age of nuclear and cyber and biological weapons, the
oceans no longer protect the United States.
The answer to these challenges is not to plan on sending
American troops into combat around the world. Senator Paul makes that point
often, and he’s right. The surest (and cheapest) way of protecting America is
to deter these threats before they ripen into war. That requires, first and
foremost, a robust military. Conservatives may disagree about a lot of things,
but they should agree on that. In fact, liberals should agree, as well.
President Kennedy was able to prevent the Soviets from putting missiles into
Cuba, without a shooting war, because the United States had a strong Navy. And
as Ronald Reagan used to say, “Of the four wars in my lifetime, none came about
because America was too strong.”
No comments:
Post a Comment