A Recession Won't Stop America's Reckless Military Spending

Peter Harris

Security, Americas

The gap between what is affordable and what Washington is doing just keeps growing.

Is a recession coming? Most economists—and most ordinary Americans—seem to think so. If they’re right, it will spell tumultuous times for U.S. politics, with unpredictable consequences for next year’s elections and beyond. One thing that a recession would not do, however, is catalyze major cuts to U.S. overseas commitments. While a recession would surely widen the already significant gap between America’s international ambitions and its domestic capacity to pay for an expansive foreign-policy agenda, it would not by itself compel a resolution to the problem. This is true no matter who wins the White House in 2020.

In theory, presidents are meant to devise foreign policy according to the available means. The most effective foreign policies are supposed to be those that keep international commitments in balance with national power. Even if leaders can cobble together the funding for an overly ambitious foreign policy—through higher taxes or borrowing, for example—they will not be thanked for their efforts. Instead, domestic actors will fight hard to undo a foreign-policy agenda that they view as a waste of scarce national resources. This, at least, was the argument put forward by Walter Lippmann seventy-six years ago: that outsized foreign policies are destined to be politically unsustainable even if they are fiscally manageable in the short-term.

There is no question that the United States today is living beyond its means. The current year’s budget deficit is predicted to exceed $1.1 trillion. The national debt is $22 trillion and counting, saddling the country with close to $400 billion of interest payments each year. These are whopping figures, especially considering they are being chalked up during a period of relative economic prosperity. The orthodox approach would be to trim the national debt in preparation for the next economic downturn. The United States is doing the opposite.