Grrr....

I am always sort of amazed by the implicit hegemonic tone in the work of otherwise great national security writers. The US not only spends more on their military - from troops to procurement to R&D to war gaming to military aid to non democratic states - then the rest of the world put together. We also are far and away the biggest arms dealer. We have traded nuclear secrets, supported coups, armed drug-peddling rebels, and backed death squads. And we are the only nation to drop a nuke or launch a sustained carpet bombing campaign against the civilian centers of another country (Japan, Germany, Vietnam, Serbia twice, and Iraq).

So forgive me if our criticism of countries like Iran rings a little hollow. People in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. Today I read that Iran claims they have launched a satellite into orbit and am told it is a "troubling development". First, people need to stop calling every technological leap by a non allied country "troubling". The funny thing about science is that you just need smart people and a few bucks (relative to the size of most economies) and you can indigenously replicate anything I can do. The US keeps spending massively to upgrade the effectiveness and breadth of our weapon systems, which means unless other countries want to have to worry about becoming the next Iraq they have no choice but to invest and try to at least prevent the technology gap from continuing to grow.

I think Iraq was a mistake for a lot of reasons. But the biggest from a long term perspective has to be the introduction of preemptive war into the IR equation. This adds a whole new level of instability because it does show that people are willing to go straight from bad mouthing you to bombing you in an instant. It is this paradigm that we are now applying to everyone else for the benefit of the defense establishment. There is good reason to worry about things blowing up around Iran, but it is less that they are driven by cowboys and more that you have the possible next Israeli PM saying they may have to nuke Iran if the US doesn't sell them even more advanced weapons.

The saddest part is that there is a pretty simple solution (conceptually, not to actually build) to all of this. Like trade, you just have to move to a rules based system of security. Then again, that means we wouldn't be able to back death squads and invade countries willy nilly, so guess it won't happen any time soon.