Military spending: Unequal costs, unequal benefits

IT'S no wonder that when Donald Trump was campaigning for office, his call for the United States' allies to bear more of the cost of their own defence drew cheers from his audiences. After all, military spending consumes a huge part of the US budget: In 2015, at US$598 billion, it accounted for 54 per cent of federal discretionary spending and is now set to rise further under the present administration. Anything that could trim that spending would seem to be welcome to taxpayers.

It sounds fair: Shouldn't allied countries pay for their own defence, and not rely on the US to shield them? This is a theme that plays at one and the same time to popular perceptions in the US of the country acting idealistically to preserve the freedom of others, and also to isolationist sentiments: Why should the US sacrifice wealth and lives in foreign wars from which it gets no benefit?

Ungrateful as it may sound to Americans who espouse these views, that's not quite how it is. The US's overseas armed forces commitments over the past 100 years and more have pretty consistently been in furtherance of US interests. The fact that others may have benefited from US military deployments does not change that. In World War I, the US declared war in 1917 following a series of provocative acts by Germany, including the unleashing of an unrestricted submarine warfare that resulted in US ships sunken and US seamen killed, and a covert attempt to stir up conflict on the border with Mexico to keep the (then small) US army busy.