WASHINGTON – The fall of the Berlin Wall presented the U.S. with a lot of different opportunities. It allowed the country to celebrate a long and arduous journey coming to a close, it allowed the country to reign supreme as a world power and it allowed the country to maintain the idea that nothing threatens us. For all of those benefits, however, there have been consequences.
After the Cold War ended, the U.S. acted like world police – a country whose job it was to protect everyone from everyone else. David Tretler, dean of faculty at the National War College, said that the protective attitude of the U.S. hurts it more than helps it.
“Our effort to run the world generates resentment and resistance,” Tretler said. “It also is very expensive.”
The National War College is a school in the National Defense University.
In fiscal 2013 the U.S. spent around $23 billion on foreign aid, or a total of $37 billion if it includes aid to foreign militaries, according to the National Priorities Project, an American non-governmental organization that makes federal budgets transparent and accessible so citizens can better understand how their tax dollars are spent.
While this large number seems like a huge amount of money, it is only around 1 percent of the total budget. The U.S. is spending more money overseas and not enough at home. In fact, while the U.S. gives Egypt $1 billion a year, roads and schools in the U.S. are falling into disrepair.
After Hurricane Katrina, Egypt went 2 C-130 planes loaded with blankets, medical equipment, and canned food. The U.S. gives $1 billion a year and Egypt sent over two planes. It doesn’t equate.
The National Priorities Project has a budget calculator that allows people to find out how much money their town or county gives to the Department of Defense, and what that money could go to instead of foreign aid. When I put in my hometown and county, the calculator figured that we could give 5,000 veterans health care for 10 years and still have $1.8 billion left to spend.
So when it is put into perspective how much better our funds could be allocated, why does the U.S. insist on maintaining an unparalleled altruistic persona? For example, the U.S. insists on keeping Israel safe from the rest of the Middle East instead of spending money on itself.
Tretler lays out three reasons for why the U.S. protects Israel:
1) Holocaust guilt
2) Admiration for what was once a western European society
3) Only middle eastern ally during the Cold War
After 9/11 many people would say national security was of the utmost importance. TSA ramped up security, cameras appeared on what seems like every traffic light and walking into any government building is like walking into the airport everyday. At the time, many welcomed it with wide-open arms because nothing was more important than keeping the U.S. safe. Twelve years later, one in four Americans opposes the full-body scanners, according to a Thomson Reuters-NPR health poll.
Tretler said that in the grand scheme of things, 9/11 was a blip, but to those not in the military who haven’t seen such “incidents” on a fairly regular basis, 9/11 was traumatic.
“We imagine there are dragons that will attack us,” Tretler said. “But there aren’t.”
I watched the Twin Towers fall from my school’s windows in real time, not on CNN’s loop. For all intents and purposes, that attack was the definition of dragons, but put into perspective, it really was small. The U.S. is in the Middle East trying to re-establish an effective government. To say that the mission might cause U.S. resentment would probably be putting it lightly, so an attack like 9/11 compared to what the U.S. has done abroad is small.
“There’s basically nothing that threatens us,” Tretler said.
Running the world doesn’t come cheap, though. Not only is it expensive to be the No. 1 super power, it also means that a lot of people are going to resent us.
“You can run the world for awhile,” Tretler said. “But not forever.”
