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International Scrooge - UN Finance - Global Policy Forum International Scrooge
Singapore Straits Times
August 21, 2000In the fiscal year 2001, the United States will spend about US$310 billion on its military, more than the defence expenditures of all of its North Atlantic Treaty Organisation allies combined. By contrast, Russia, America's erstwhile Cold War enemy, will spend a paltry US$40 billion - one reason why one of its ill-serviced nuclear submarines is now at the bottom of the Barents Sea - and China, America's putative rival in the 21st century, will spend a meagre US$37 billion. Never in history has any nation outspent its rivals (or friends) on defence to the extent that America does today. The contrast is all the more remarkable when one considers that US defence expenditure amounts to only 3 per cent of its GDP, and 16 per cent of its annual Budget. Such is the country's economic strength that it can afford to be a "superpower lite", as one defence analyst put it, and yet overwhelm its potential adversaries.
Given these facts, it is surprising that defence has become an issue in this year's presidential campaign. The Republicans claim that American military readiness is at a historic low, and the Democrats moan about the extravagant sums spent on armaments more than a decade after the Cold War. Neither position makes sense. If spending more than all the rest of Nato combined cannot buy readiness, what will? And if spending only 3 per cent of GDP on defence is not prudent enough, how much less can the US spend on defence and yet remain a superpower? What the parties should ask themselves is how much the country should spend on foreign development and humanitarian aid to fulfil its international obligations. America now spends only US$10.4 billion on such aid, or just 0.11 per cent of its GDP, compared to US$18.5 billion in current dollars in 1962, or 0.58 per cent of GDP. On a per capita basis, each American contributes about US$29 to foreign aid, compared to a median of US$70 in other OECD countries.
US contributions to multilateral institutions - including the United Nations, UN-affiliated institutions, and the World Trade Organisation - are similarly niggardly. Indeed, US dues to the UN have been in arrears for years and, to rub salt into the wound, Congress recently passed legislation making the payment of the debt conditional upon the rest of the world agreeing to reduce the US assessed share of the UN's budget from the current 25 per cent to 22 per cent. No other country would dare issue such an ultimatum - which is precisely what it is - and pretend that it is doing so for the good of the world.
The wonder is why the US should behave in such a fashion. It gains nothing by it. On the contrary, it loses a great deal. Its failure to support the UN adequately, for instance, undermines the international body's operations, including peacekeeping missions that the US wishes it to undertake. Many of these missions are in fact humanitarian in nature, and would not have been undertaken in the first place if Western governments and media had not made human rights a pressing international issue. US critics of the UN will, of course, argue that their country is neither the world's policeman nor nanny, and should not be expected to intervene in every one of the world's trouble spots or solve every one of its socio-economic problems. But that is not the point. The point is, the US is the world's sole remaining superpower. It can either use its power and wealth to strengthen multilateral institutions, in which case it may never need to use its military power, or go it alone, in which case it may have to.
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