Democrats are wrong about defense spending

The increasing lethality of the Chinese and Russian militaries is not license for military spending to grow without limit. U.S. fiscal and human resources are limited, and the Pentagon won’t and shouldn’t be spared the making of hard choices. But if we intend to preserve our network of alliances and security guarantees in Europe and the Western Pacific—something that can’t be taken for granted in the Trump era, to be sure, but which Warren, Bernie Sanders, and other leading lights of the U.S. center-left maintain they favor—it is going to cost us, and any savings we’d realize from ending our presence in Syria or Afghanistan won’t make much of a dent.

And why is that? Isn’t it the case that U.S. military spending dwarfs that of China and Russia? Sanders often observes that, as he stated in an October address outlining his foreign-policy vision, the U.S. spends more on its military “than the next 10 nations combined,” China and Russia included. One can quibble with Sanders’s calculation, but his larger point is well taken. It really is true that the U.S. spends more than its potential rivals. It is also true, however, that the U.S. sets out to do much more than its potential rivals, too. Foreign militaries that focus exclusively on using force in a single theater are able to concentrate their resources, which might allow them to achieve local superiority over a U.S. military that, while far more capable in aggregate, must divide its attention across a number of different theaters. This wouldn’t be a problem if, say, the U.S. swore off exercising military force anywhere outside of the Western Hemisphere, but this would represent a revolutionary shift in U.S. foreign and defense policy that is roundly rejected by the Democratic mainstream.