March
16, 2015
Letter to the Editor, New York Times:
Is the U.S. Navy large enough? Large enough for what? Gregg Easterbrook (Op-ed, March 9) and House
Seapower Subcommittee Chair Randy Forbes (Letter, March 12) may disagree on the
first question, but on the second they clearly agree with the Navy’s recent
multi-media campaign justifying itself as a “global force for good.”
“Global trade has
flowered,” Easterbrook asserts, because of the Navy’s “dominance” of the oceans,
bringing “nearly all nations, including developing nations, higher living
standards and less poverty.” Not to be
outdone, Forbes cites the “international order that American naval predominance
has assured since 1945.”
As Max Paul Friedman argues
in his 2012 book, “Rethinking Anti-Americanism,” this sort of airy self-congratulation
has confounded our national debate almost from the founding of the Republic. He
cites Tocqueville noting that “the majority lives in perpetual adoration of
itself,” and Senator William Fulbright noting that “power tends to confuse
itself with virtue.”
Imperial navies from
the Athenians to the British have spun a tale similar to that of Easterbrook
and Forbes: we are here to protect you all. But it wasn’t true then, and it isn’t true
now. Great power navies have always existed
to provide freedom of action to their armed forces and commercial interests. Our Navy’s current supremacy in the sea-battle
space was purchased to allow our government to threaten, and if necessary carry
out, military action to force other nations to submit to our will. There is nothing humanitarian about it.
The Navy controls the seas for the transport of troops
and supplies, controls the air with aircraft based on aircraft carriers, and
aids in land-battles with observation, guns, missile attacks, and bombing. At the start of Easterbrook’s golden age the
Navy carried French troops back to re-conquer Indochina in 1945. For the next 30 years it bombed and bombarded
Viet Nam throughout its revolt against the French and the pro-American regimes they
left behind. More recently, the Navy has
been the hammer in every theater of the current “long war” to control the
Middle East and North Africa: Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Mali, and Somalia.
Unimpeded international
shipping would most likely have “flowered” after World War II with or without
the U.S. Navy, because it was in so many nations’ interest. Minor irritations would have been addressed
by the affected nations, as the Somali pirates were recently, with or without
U.S. intervention. By strengthening corrupt
or repressive regimes like Nigeria, Equatorial Guinea, Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi
Arabia, Egypt, the Emirates, and Angola through its exercises, equipment, and
training programs, the Navy makes their people poorer, not richer. With each bit of support to these governments
the Navy violates its own Sailor’s Creed: “to defend freedom and democracy
around the world.”
Caleb Rossiter
Director, American
Exceptionalism Media Project
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