It’s tempting to think the military budget is different from the rest of the government’s budget. Politics surely would not intrude on such an important matter. But we know better. The Pentagon is as much a part of the bureaucracy as any other department. We may hate to accept it, but weapons systems, military aircraft, and naval ships have been built solely because they created or maintained jobs in an important congressman’s district. If de Borchgrave is right, this is more popular than ever.

Classical liberals have long warned of this practice. Milton Friedman criticized it in his book from the 1980s The Tyranny of the Status Quo. Liberals further back have sounded the same tocsin. For example, John Bright, the great peace-and-free-trade activist and member of Par­liament, in 1858 condemned the British government’s “excessive love for the ‘balance of power’ [as] neither more nor less than a gigantic system of out-door relief for the aristocracy of Great Britain.”

A similar point was made in the twentieth century by the liberal journalist John T. Flynn in his 1944 book As We Go Marching, the classic study of the rise of fascism in Italy and Nazism in Germany. Long before Mussolini, Flynn wrote, Italian governments had increased expendi­tures, taxation, and debt through programs intended to please constituencies and keep the economy going. Even before Keynes published his General Theory in 1936, politicians feared that without big government spending, depression and destabilizing unemployment would be the rule. So they spent, taxed, and borrowed.

“But this policy does run into resistance—and resist­ance in very influential quarters,” Flynn wrote. “The large taxpayer is against it. He acquiesces reluctantly. And as the debt grows and he looks with growing fear on its future proportions he begins to exert his full influ­ence against it. In different countries the basis of resist­ance takes different forms, but it comes chiefly from the conservative groups. Hence it becomes increasingly dif­ficult to go on spending in the presence of persisting deficits and rising debt. Some form of spending must be found that will command the support of the conserva­tive groups. Political leaders, embarrassed by their subsi­dies to the poor, soon learned that one of the easiest ways to spend money is on military establishments and armaments, because it commands the support of the groups most opposed to spending….

“Thus it was because the government could get pub­lic agreement for loans for this purpose and because such loans were essential to the policy of spending which kept the floundering economic system going that the militaristic policy remained so vital and vigorous an institution in Italy—and in every other continental country….

“I must not leave this whole subject of spending and the means employed to spend, including militarism, with­out observing that there is nothing new in it. It is as old as civilized government. And what is more, the protago­nists of it have understood precisely what they are doing.”

We have learned from the Public Choice school of political economy that benefits from government spend­ing are concentrated on relatively small self-conscious interest groups, while the costs are spread thinly among the mass of taxpayers. Hence the beneficiaries have far more incentive to work the halls of government than do the preoccupied taxpayers. No wonder interest groups have the advantage. When the label “national security” is affixed to a spending bill, so much the better for the rel­evant group, and so much the worse for the taxpayers, who are in no position to verify the claim.

What’s the moral here? That anything called defense is bogus? Of course not. The moral is that given the coercive and expansive nature of the political process, the appropriate attitude of the taxpayer is skepticism, or as Jeffersonput it, “jealousy,” rather than confidence.

* * *

Any advocate of separating school and state is imme­diately hit with the challenge: “But what about the poor?” Up until now we could draw on theory and his­tory for an answer. But now we have contemporary examples from the poorest countries of the developing world. James Tooley reports on his path-breaking research.

Ludwig von Mises was arguably the greatest econo­mist and advocate of free markets in the twentieth cen­tury. In this first of two articles, Richard Ebeling details Mises’s contributions to sound economic thinking and the cause of liberty.

Elections in Germany and Japan could herald an end to their experiments with the Third Way. Norman Barry looks behind the headlines.

During his long career F. A. Hayek wrote volumes not just on economics, but on broader social philosophy as well. After a rare chance to examine Hayek’s private notes, Steven Horwitz discusses the great thinker’s worldview.

The standard bill of indictment against the free mar­ket has a curious feature: all the alleged offenses have their roots in government intervention. Joseph Stromberg has the particulars.

FEE is celebrating its 60th anniversary this year. Whom better to turn to for an early history than Henry Hazlitt. He provides this month’s Timely Classic.

The Freeman‘s columnists have hit on another set of fascinating topics. Richard Ebeling revisits Keynes’s Gen­eral Theory. Lawrence Reed recounts his favorite free­dom-oriented movies. Thomas Szasz explores psychiatry’s concepts of mental illness and brain disor­der, and their relationship to freedom. Robert Higgs examines U.S. economic policy before Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. Charles Baird looks at a dispute between organized labor and the National Organization for Women. And David Henderson, reading a case for med­ical rationing, responds, “It Just Ain’t So!”

Books coming under review this issue scrutinize Russian conservatism, the miracle of electronic transac­tions, the “new new left,” and economic sense.

—Sheldon Richman(srichman@fee.org)

Reviewed by Richard Ebeling

In 1988 Robert Nisbet, one of America’s most prominent sociologists and conservative social philosophers, published The Present Age: Progress and Anarchy in Modern America. He critically evaluated how American society had come increasingly under the control of the central government in Washington, D.C. One of the main forces behind that trend, Nisbet argued, had been U.S. participation in the two world wars.

Before World War I, the American people had been predominantly local and regional in their loyalties and interests. Political decision-making was decentralized, and the federal government’s activities were still, for the most part, limited to the narrow responsibilities originally assigned under the Constitution. But both the Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt administrations expanded the power of the federal government over the states and the people. War played a crucial role in the process. Making the world safe for democracy in World War I, being the global arsenal of democracy in World War II, and acting as the policeman of the “free world” during the Cold War all required the sacrifice of liberty at home.

Taxation and regulation for the war efforts concentrated power, wealth, and decision-making in the federal government. The welfare state reinforced that trend as people grew increasingly dependent on largess from Washington. As a result, American society and culture became more and more “nationalized” in the twentieth century, Nisbet concluded. (See my review of The Present Age in The Freeman, January 1989, www.fee.org/vnews.php?nid=2019.)

In his new book, America the Virtuous, political scientist Claes G. Ryn explains why this trend has continued in the United States, in spite of the end of the Cold War following the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991. What has happened, Ryn argues, is that American foreign policy has been more or less captured by a group of policy analysts and policymakers he labels “the new Jacobins.”

The original Jacobins were the radical ideologists of the French Revolution who declared the necessity of remaking man and society for the purpose of creating not merely a better but a perfect world. They waged intellectual and political war against the notion of an invariant human nature and against the historically evolved institutions of society, as well as the cultural and moral foundations on which Western civilization had developed over the centuries. The Jacobins believed in rationalistic blueprints for redesigning the social order. Anything that resisted this cleansing revolutionary reform had to be destroyed in the name of the future utopia.

The new Jacobins, who Ryn explains are better known as “neoconservatives,” believe that America is called on to remake the world in the image of a particular conception of democracy and equality. In their view, “democracy” means the abstract god of a political institutional order that reflects the will of the majority, which is mistakenly taken to be synonymous with liberty. Equality means the reduction of all human distinctions to one standard of a national mass man, with all individual, local, and regional differences within the country submerged in a uniform pattern of life.

And just like the earlier Jacobins, the new American Jacobins believe that an intellectual and political elite is needed to educate and guide society to its egalitarian, democratic utopia. In addition, this means that many of the traditional constitutional restraints on the federal government must be set aside so the central government has the power and discretion to bring America to its domestic destiny.

The new Jacobins also insist that this model of a perfected America is the ideal that the rest of the world should follow. The United States is called on to bring this ideal to the ignorant, backward, and corrupt nations around the globe. And with the same revolutionary zeal of the older Jacobins, this goal is to be accomplished through the force of arms if necessary.

Ryn argues that the tragic events of September 11, 2001, have served as the rationale and catalyst to set this global crusade in motion. The invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq are the opening military campaigns to bring the “American way of life” to one part of the world not enlightened enough to achieve it on its own. In other words, America’s new Jacobins are determined to socially engineer entire peoples and cultures according to the ideal to which they would aspire if only they had the wisdom to see what was good for them. Social bliss is to be brought to them through American bombs and bayonets and U.S.-designed ballot boxes.

But what if millions around the world do not want this gift from America? What if they resent and resist the overthrow and destruction of their own histories, cultures, and institutions—no matter how unenlightened or barbaric they may seem to the new Jacobin elite? Then America is faced with a future of endless wars in the name of creating a global empire of democracy and equality, as defined and dictated by the neoconservatives.

Ryn reminds his readers that the older tradition of freedom and reform in America was based on the idea that social and economic change cannot be imposed from the outside. It must grow within the individuals of other societies and nations. If America follows the path of empire for the supposed good of mankind, the American people will find that their own freedoms and fortunes will have to be sacrificed on the altar of global social engineering.

Richard Ebeling is president of FEE.

Reviewed by Robert Batemarco

Libertarians and other consistent free-market advocates are often accused of being blinded by ideology. Maybe the shoe belongs on the other foot. According to my scorecard, John McMillan, author of Reinventing the Bazaar, cites over 80 cases either of markets solving problems or of governments thwarting consumers. This compares with roughly a dozen where government actions appear to have done more economic good than harm. Although a baseball game that one-sided would be called a laugher, McMillan, a professor of economics at Stanford, concludes with a straight face that we cannot make a general case for minimizing government’s role.

Despite this failure to draw conclusions consistent with his evidence, McMillan has written a book that contains much of value. He is a skilled writer who can take recent developments in economic theory and make them easily understandable, even for non-economists. He provides apt examples that bring these theories to life. There can be little argument with his central contention that how well markets are designed is of paramount importance in how well they work. His five conditions for making markets run properly—smooth information flows, well-protected property rights, trust, competition, and minimal third-party effects—are unexceptionable, although his understanding of them is distorted by a misperception all too prevalent in the economics profession, namely, that each condition calls for government action.

Reinventing the Bazaar is informative about the wide variety of auctions and how they work. Auctions are obviously an area of expertise for this author; he used his knowledge of economic theory to help design an auction selling off part of the electromagnetic spectrum. This makes chapter 7 one of the best in the book. In it he explains why some goods are sold by auction while others simply have posted prices. He also describes the differences between open auctions, Dutch auctions, sealed-bid auctions, second-price auctions, simultaneous ascending auctions, reverse auctions, and package bidding, elucidating the strong and weak points of each. In so doing, he shows how entrepreneurs themselves redesign markets.

Also strong are chapters 12 and 15, which show, respectively, the havoc wreaked by socialistic central planning and the ability of markets, even when partly unfettered, to restore health to moribund economies. Alas, Reinventing the Bazaar implies we can only see with hindsight the debacle that was socialism, ignoring Ludwig von Mises and others like him who, through rigorous application of economic theory, foresaw that failure was inherent in socialism’s nature. Nonetheless, this book’s comparison of the attempts of China and Russia to move toward markets both piques our interest and lends support to McMillan’s contention that the devil is in the details.

Toward the end of the book, the author tries to ensure that his qualified support of markets not be mistaken for libertarianism. He does this by holding up Ayn Rand as the apotheosis of market theorizing—as if no one else has grappled with these problems.

McMillan’s chief target is Rand’s philosophical rather than empirical approach. There are two things wrong with this line of attack. The implicit assumption that the facts would never support laissez faire is belied by much of the material in the book. The second error is the ready dismissal of the philosophical and ethical approach to policy questions. Although the author admits that principles can indeed trump costs and benefits, he never acts on that insight. Indeed, it appears to me that ignoring it leads him to struggle with issues like patents. The case-by-case, cost-benefit approach McMillan consistently employs permits him to arrive at no firmer conclusion on that issue than “whether . . . [intellectual property protection] . . . should be strong or weak varies with the circumstances.” This is because he never regards such fundamental questions as what constitutes theft of someone else’s ideas as having any bearing on the point at hand. Murray Rothbard successfully used this very question to attach clear but defensible limits on the legal protection for intellectual property. (He accepted copyrights but not patents.) This shortcoming pervades McMillan’s work, preventing him from drawing a sharp line between what government should and should not do.

Samuel Johnson called second marriages “the triumph of hope over experience.” Re-inventing the Bazaar shows an intimate acquaintance with the experience of government distortion of markets, yet clings to the hope that government can make markets function better. While the facts McMillan presents make this book well worth reading, I would advise readers to draw their own conclusions.

Robert Batemarco is a vice president of a marketing research firm in New York City and teaches economics at Pace University.

Reviewed by Gene Callahan

The wonderful thing about Hegelianism as a “theory” of history is that it can be shaped to suit almost any particular political agenda one wishes. If you can formulate a thesis and antithesis so that your political program emerges as the synthesis of the two, then you can read all of history backwards: a story inevitably leading to its stirring climax, the triumph of your ideology.

The Ideas That Conquered the World is such a reading of the past, intended to support what Michael Mandelbaum, who teaches foreign policy at Johns Hopkins and is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, calls “the liberal theory of history.” However, it is not so much a “theory of history” as a riffling through the last century or two to discover events that lend support to Wilsonian social democracy. Mandelbaum presents a “triad” of policies fundamental to his vision of liberalism: democracy, free markets, and disarmament/collective security. However, he does not coherently articulate the meaning of any one of these elements.

For instance, Mandelbaum asserts that the “liberal” approach to international relations is the “configuration of all . . . military forces so that they are suitable for defense but not for attack.” Such a policy has been adopted fully, he says, “only [by] the countries of Europe and North America.”

Does Mandelbaum really believe that the military forces of the United States currently are configured only for defense? Since World War II no foreign government has attacked American territory, yet the United States has intervened militarily in other countries over 60 times. One might applaud those interventions as necessary for the good of the liberal world order, but to call them “defensive” seems so to stretch that word as to render it meaningless. If the U.S. invasion of Panama in 1989 can be called “defensive,” what war cannot?

Nor does Mandelbaum offer any argument as to why democracy is inherently liberal. He asserts that democracy involves “restraints on the exercise of power by governments,” but he does not explain how or why that is so. If democracy simply means that a government should perform only those actions that are approved by the majority of its citizens, as Mandelbaum implies, then democracy only limits government to doing whatever the majority approves, however illiberal that might be.

Mandelbaum’s version of “free markets” is a sadly attenuated version of the classical-liberal policy of laissez faire. Rather than recognizing that free markets are what occur when coercion and central planning are absent, he believes that free markets must be “constructed” and “maintained,” and that such construction and maintenance are “far more difficult than had been imagined for most of the modern era.” He holds that the “status and power” of the World Bank and the IMF are evidence of the triumph of “laissez faire capitalism,” despite the fact that their existence springs entirely from a perceived need for centrally planned intervention into the market economy.

Mandelbaum says “the rise of the welfare state . . . made popular sovereignty through universal suffrage compatible with the protection of private property by giving every citizen property in the form of an entitlement to benefits from the state.” In other words, “private property” is “protected” by being subject to arbitrary confiscation by the majority of voters. While Mandelbaum asserts that modern social democracies establish zones that are “off limits to the exercise of government power,” he gives no indication as to what the boundaries of such “zones” might be. He tries to calm the fears of classical liberals by contending: “In the twentieth century . . . liberty and political equality proved to be compatible in Britain and the United States and throughout the Western core.” However, many classical liberals might contend that mass democracy has led to precisely the diminution of liberty that they predicted it would.

While purportedly a supporter of free markets, Mandelbaum does not even seem to realize the fundamental flaw of socialism: the absence of any means by which to calculate economic success. He contends that while the command economy was “not necessarily superior to the market, [it] did work.” As evidence, he cites the facts that in socialist regimes “people migrated in large numbers from the countryside to the cities” and “governments built, owned, and managed huge industrial complexes.” It is hard to imagine why these are indicators that an economy is “working.”

The Ideas That Conquered the World is a salient example of the common tendency to herald whatever trends are currently ascendant, while ignoring any analysis of whether such trends are sustainable in the long run.

Gene Callahan is the author of Economics for Real People (Mises Institute, 2002).

Reviewed by Brian Doherty

Freeman columnist Thomas Szasz, emeritus professor of psychiatry at the State University of New York Health Science Center in Syracuse, has tirelessly agitated for over four decades—in over 20 books and hundreds of speeches and even in occasional courtroom testimony—in defense of the rights of our culture’s most abused group: the so-called mentally ill.

Szasz maintains that mental illness is in fact a metaphorical illness: the illegitimate rhetorical medicalization of behaviors we find disturbing in order to excuse inhuman treatment of the “patient.” Turning his opponents’ weapon back on them, he embraces—but honestly, not covertly—the extended metaphor as a rhetorical technique. His 1970 classic, The Manufacture of Madness, compared our culture’s treatment of the mentally ill with the historical treatment of witches (while debunking the popular “liberal” notion that the witches of old were “really” mentally ill).

In Liberation by Oppression Szasz uses another illuminating metaphor to revisit his favorite topic, “mental illness” as an excuse for oppression. We now assume the inferiority and practical inhumanity of the mental patient; and this, he posits, can be profitably analogized to the old assumptions about the inferiority and inhumanity of blacks that underlay slavery.

The key idea linking both evils (though our culture sees only one as evil now) is what Szasz calls coercive paternalism. This is the idea that it is acceptable—indeed, admir-able—to dominate a class of people because it is ultimately for their own good. Szasz traces the history of arguments for and against slavery and the oppression of the mentally ill and displays the analogous thinking that has justified both tyrannies.

He shows how neither slaves nor mental patients have the freedom to come and go as they please, or have courts respect their rights. He convincingly compares fugitive-slave laws and the Interstate Compact on Mental Health. Defenders of slavery—chattel or psychiatric—depend, as Szasz relates, on frightening myths of the inherent dangerousness of the Negro or the mental patient.

Szasz’s choice of central analogy is wickedly incisive. It takes something the modern liberals believe in fervently—the necessity to care for mental patients by force if necessary—and compares it to a racist institution they profess to hate more than anything. If Szasz can make such a person see the similarities he rigorously points out, it will be a rhetorical grand slam indeed.

He does not spend the whole book hammering home that analogy. He also explains in depth how legal changes in the relationship of doctors and psychiatric patients irreparably corrupt any hope of a genuine therapeutic relationship. Now doctors can be held liable for not reporting any potential “danger” they divine from their patients, and patients can sue doctors for not giving them this season’s most popular psychiatric “medicines.” These legal complications, Szasz writes, transform psychotherapy “from a helping situation into a sting operation.”

But perhaps most fascinating for followers of Szasz’s career is his addressing the deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill—a public policy for which Szasz is frequently blamed, and whose effects are taken to be self-evidently bad. Szasz thinks that kicking people out of mental institutions after they have had their ability to cope with the outside world stripped by being trapped within them merely compounds the original injustice.

Here, Szasz doesn’t take a strict libertarian anti-welfare stance, which would say that if mental patients can’t pay for their keep in an asylum, then they have no right to stay there. Szasz thinks that true asylum is a function a civilized society should provide, and that “politicians and philanthropists would have to support it with the appropriate legislation and necessary funds.”

“Our society,” he adds, “provides no place of refuge for the individual who wants to escape from the world. Instead of offering asylum, the modern mental hospital offers only coercions called ‘treatments,’ intended to force the patient back into a society in which he cannot, or does not want to, find a place for himself.” He examines the current system of forced drugging, outpatient therapy, hospitals, halfway houses, and prisons that now dominates mental health care, and considers “deinstitutionalization” nothing more than “indefinite psychiatric probation.”

The book is the product of a man who has passed 80, with a long, courageous, and doubtless somewhat frustrating career of advocacy for liberty and responsibility behind him. Its epilogue ends on a sadly valedictory note that will especially touch long-time fans of Szasz and what he stands for. He quotes Lord Acton, one of his favorite thinkers: “It takes a gentleman to live on terms of hearty friendship and kindness and intimacy with men whose ideas and conduct he abhors and when he well knows that they view with contempt and horror the principles on which he shapes his own character and life.”

Szasz then adds: “As I look back on my life, I pride myself on having been able to follow Acton’s example, at least in this regard.” This is as chilling a discussion of the social role of the advocate of unpopular ideas—such as libertarianism—as I’ve seen. Still, Szasz ultimately manages to cheer the liberty-loving reader with his sharp, witty polemic whose occasional acid cannot fully overwhelm the sweet love of humanity and freedom that motivates it.

Brian Doherty is a senior editor of Reason magazine.

The soldier’s mission, as soldiers often phrase it, is “killing people and breaking things,” and they’re trained accordingly. In contrast, police officers, ideally, are trained to operate in an environment where constitutional rights apply and to use force only as a last resort. Accordingly, Americans going back at least to the Boston Massacre of 1770 have understood the importance of keeping the military out of domestic law enforcement. That understanding is reflected in the Posse Comitatus Act (PCA) of 1878, which makes it a criminal offense to use U.S. military personnel as a police force.

The phrase “posse comitatus,” Latin for “the power or force of the county,” refers to the sheriff’s common-law power to call on the male population of a county for assistance in enforcing the laws. The PCA forbids law-enforcement officials from employing the U.S. military for that purpose. Congress passed the act in response to perceived abuses associated with the practice of using U.S. Army troops to police the Reconstruction-era southern states. But the PCA has a policy rationale that transcends its particular origins; as one federal court explained: “It is the nature of their primary mission that military personnel must be trained to operate under circumstances where the protection of constitutional freedoms cannot receive the consideration needed in order to assure their preservation. The posse comitatus statute is intended to meet that danger.”

In the year since the terror attacks of September 11, however, we’ve heard a slowly building chorus of calls to amend or weaken the act and to give the U.S. military a hands-on role in domestic security. In October 2001, Senator John Warner, ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, told Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz that the posse comitatus principle may have outlived its usefulness; Wolfowitz agreed. Though Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had insisted that there was no plan to seek changes in the law, in July 2002 the White House released its National Strategy for Homeland Security, which called for a “thorough review of the laws permitting the military to act within the United States.” Perhaps most troubling were the comments of General Ralph E. Eberhardt, head of the newly designated Northern Command, which directs all military forces within the United States: “We should always be reviewing things like Posse Comitatus and other laws if we think it ties our hands in protecting the American people.”

Of course, where appropriate, we want constitutional and statutory constraints to “tie the hands” of the authorities in their pursuit of domestic security. Safety and security are not the only ends of government—as Lord Acton reminds us, liberty is our highest political end. The Posse Comitatus Act is, alas, a weak and porous barrier to military involvement in domestic law enforcement, but it’s designed to protect both our liberty and our safety. Changed circumstances after September 11 provide no compelling reason to weaken it further.

To understand just how implausible it is to suggest that the PCA ties the military’s hands domestically, it’s necessary to understand how the PCA works. The statute makes it a criminal offense for anyone to use U.S. armed forces to “execut[e] the laws.” But this does not bar any and all uses of armed soldiers for domestic law enforcement. First, the courts have held that “executing the laws” consists of hands-on policing: searching, arresting, and coercing citizens. Thus, the act does not prohibit the military from providing equipment, advice, and training to civilian authorities—even though such civil-military cooperation often works to inculcate a dangerous warrior ethos among domestic peace officers.

Second, the PCA applies only to federal troops: army regulars and federalized National Guardsmen. If Guard units remain under the command of state governors, the PCA is unoffended—even if injudicious use of troops leads to events like the killing of four students at Kent State in 1970.

Third, the act does not bar the use of federal troops even for hands-on policing, so long as Congress has passed a statutory exception to the PCA—and there are statutory exceptions in place that permit the military to operate domestically where an attack with weapons of mass destruction threatens imminent loss of human life. Finally, even though the act has clearly been violated any number of times since its passage, no one has ever been prosecuted for violating it.

How Would the Military Be Used?

To date, none of the prominent public figures calling for a revision of PCA have explained what sorts of operations they want the military to carry out in the domestic fight against terrorism. Putting aside fears about collateral damage to civilians from the deployment on the home front of troops trained to fight wars—where would it make sense from a security standpoint? No one—not Warner, not Wolfowitz, not Eberhardt—has come forward with a specific example of a situation in which soldiers should be given arrest authority.

Nor should that be surprising: it’s difficult to think of a domestic situation where military deployment would be useful in corralling terrorists. How can U.S. troops be effectively employed at home to prevent a shoe-bomber, a hijacker, or the release of nerve gas in a subway system? The cruel genius of asymmetric warfare is that it operates to neutralize the advantages the U.S. army enjoys against any conventional foe.

The U.S. military is the most effective in the world, but it’s nonetheless a blunt instrument—devastating in set-piece battles, but ill-suited to a home-front fight against al Qaeda saboteurs and assassins. That point was perhaps best illustrated on Thanksgiving weekend in 2001, when authorities in Florida stationed a tank outside Miami International Airport, as if the next terror attack would come in the form of an al Qaeda mechanized column.

And the very bluntness of the military instrument makes it a dangerous tool to employ on American soil. The legacy of American military involvement in domestic affairs is not a proud one. As constitutional scholar David Kopel has noted, the U.S. army has been used repeatedly to suppress unionization and break up strikes, as in 1899 at Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, when military forces imposed martial law on the area for two years. President Truman’s unconstitutional seizure of U.S. steel mills during the Korean War was carried out by the U.S. Army. More recently, in 1981, Congress passed legislation designed to increase military involvement in the war on drugs.

Misuse of this authority helped lead to the 1993 tragedy in Waco, Texas. Federal law enforcement authorities used false allegations of methamphetamine trafficking by the Branch Davidians to obtain military hardware and personnel. Indeed, it was U.S. Army Delta Force commanders who advised federal agents to launch a tank assault against the Branch Davidians’ dwellings. The result was more than 80 dead, including 27 children. And in 1997, a Marine anti-drug patrol shot and killed high-school student Esquiel Hernandez, who was shooting a .22 caliber rifle while tending goats on his own farm in Texas near the Mexican border. The Justice Department paid out $1.9 million to the Hernandez family as settlement of a wrongful death lawsuit.

Despite the dangers that inevitably accompany the use of soldiers as police forces, civil-military separation continues to erode. Because the U.S. military is so devastatingly effective in the fights it’s designed for, public officials have increasingly sought to employ it for fights it’s not. Most recently, during the month-long hunt for the Washington, D.C.-area sniper, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld approved the use of Army RC-7 surveillance aircraft to find the killer terrorizing greater Washington. The low-flying planes, crammed with $17 million worth of infrared sensors and other surveillance technologies, are typically used for tasks like monitoring troop movements around the DMZ on the Korean Peninsula. Federal officials argued that they could help pinpoint the sniper’s location.

Old-Fashioned Police Work

At the time, however, constitutional scholar and criminal-justice expert Stephen Halbrook predicted that when the sniper was caught, it would not be through use of high-tech military hardware, but through old-fashioned police work. Halbrook was right. In the end, the killers’ greed, a credit-card number, a fingerprint, ballistics work, and a witness identification of the car at a rest stop in Maryland led to the arrest of John Allen Muhammad and John Lee Malvo.

What should we make of federal officials’ readiness to use the military to solve a domestic murder spree with no solid connection to international terrorism? First, it should be noted that use of the Army planes did not violate the PCA. If the Army had employed Delta Force counter-snipers on the ground, hunting Muhammad and Malvo, that would have been a clear violation of the Act and a serious threat to civil-military separation. But as noted, the courts define “executing the laws” as arresting, shooting, searching, and laying hands on or coercing citizens; they have not held that provision of advice or equipment constitutes execution of the laws in violation of the PCA.

That does not mean that Pentagon involvement in the sniper hunt is no cause for concern, however. Federal officials’ eagerness to seek military help in this case suggests that we’ll see more military involvement in high-profile investigations in the future. As former U.S. Representative Bob Barr put it, “If you use this as a precedent, where do you then draw the line? The next time you have a sniper, do you bring the military in after two deaths?” And even where the military’s role is limited to advice, training, and provision of equipment, the erosion of the civilian-military line is troubling. After all, to the best of our knowledge, Army personnel at Waco limited themselves to provision of equipment and advice. Even that limited involvement helped lead to the greatest disaster in U.S. law-enforcement history.

Increasingly, public officials are coming to view militarization of law enforcement not as a last resort for situations in which civil order breaks down entirely, but as a panacea to be used whenever public safety is threatened. In the midst of the sniper ordeal, then-Maryland Governor Parris Glendening announced he was considering using the National Guard to provide security at polling stations on election day. Put aside concerns about effectiveness (the snipers shot one victim who was standing less than 50 yards from a Virginia state trooper) and collateral damage to innocents (what, after all, are soldiers trained to do when they come under fire by a sniper?): consider the ominous image of armed soldiers surrounding polling places. It’s an image one normally associates with a banana republic, not a free, democratic one.

The Cold War ended a decade ago, but America’s defense posture has changed little, especially in East Asia. Washington policymakers seem determined to keep at least 100,000 military personnel in the region, apparently forever. Indeed, the administration is presently expanding America’s military presence in East Asia.

It’s time for a change. Rather than enhancing security ties when threats against the United States have dramatically diminished, Washington should initiate a phased withdrawal of American forces from the region.

U.S. taxpayers spent roughly $13 trillion (in current dollars) and sacrificed 113,000 lives (mostly in East Asian wars) to win the Cold War. For five decades Washington provided a defense shield behind which noncommunist countries throughout East Asia grew economically and democratically.

Japan is now the world’s second-ranking economic power. Taiwan’s dramatic jump from poverty to prosperity encouraged the leaders of the communist mainland to undertake fundamental economic reforms. South Korea dramatically outstrips communist North Korea on virtually every measure of national power. After years of failure, countries like Thailand have grown significantly (despite their recent setbacks).

At the same time, the environment has become more benign. The Soviet Union has disappeared, and a much weaker Russia has neither the capability nor the will for East Asian adventurism. In China, tough-minded communism has dissolved into a cynical excuse for incumbent officeholders to maintain power. So far Beijing’s military renewal has been modest; its posture has been assertive rather than aggressive—although its saber-rattling toward Taiwan remains of concern.

Southeast Asia suffers from economic and political instability, but such problems threaten no one outside the immediate neighborhood. Only North Korea constitutes a genuine security threat, but that totalitarian state, though odious, is no replacement for the threat once posed by the Soviet Union.

Alas, so far neither the Clinton administration nor Congress seems to have noticed these changes. U.S. policy looks very much as it did during the Cold War. Washington’s motto appears to be “what has ever been, must ever be.”

The Pentagon’s 1995 assessment of U.S. security policy in East Asia (the Nye Report) made the astonishing assertion that “the end of the Cold War has not diminished” the importance of any of America’s regional security commitments. In November 1998 the Department of Defense (DOD) released an updated report that advanced the same outdated arguments. More than a year later U.S. policy remains the same. The administration’s watchword, and that of the leading Republican presidential contenders, is simply more of everything.

The administration’s formal commitment to permanent, promiscuous intervention was preordained. Secretary of Defense William Cohen admitted: “When I first took over, I said everything is on the table for review, except we are going to keep 100,000 people in the Asia-Pacific region—that is off the table.” In short, the Pentagon conducted a supposedly searching review that ignored the most important issue.

The Pentagon’s 1998 report envisions an American security interest in virtually every East Asian country. Naturally, DOD lauds such traditional alliances as those with Japan and South Korea. It also endorses military ties with Laos and Mongolia, countries with no conceivable relevance to U.S. security.

The administration says the presence of U.S. troops is necessary only for “the foreseeable future.” But if the end of the Cold War, the collapse of hegemonic communism, and the dramatic growth in the strength of friendly democratic and quasi-democratic states throughout the region aren’t enough to warrant meaningful change, what would be enough?

The vague specter of instability has replaced the demon of communism as America’s enemy. Even in the midst of economic crisis, however, Asia is not ready to plunge in the abyss. And if it were, there is little a few thousand U.S. troops in Okinawa or South Korea could do about it. The internal struggles that pose the most serious threat to regional stability are beyond the reach of America, unless Washington is prepared to repeat its Vietnam experience several times over.

As for the threats of real conflict—the two Koreas and China/Taiwan—America’s allies are capable of maintaining military forces necessary to deter war. If that is a slightly less certain guarantee of stability, it is a far better one from America’s standpoint. If deterrence failed, the United States would not find itself automatically involved.

Some analysts privately, and a few publicly, believe that Japan poses a potential threat to regional peace. But Tokyo has gained all the influence and wealth through peace that it had hoped to attain 60 years ago through war. Moreover, the lesson of World War II remains vivid there.

The weakness of the administration’s case is evident from its bottom-scraping, kitchen-sink arguments that can best be characterized as silly. For instance, the Pentagon contends: “The presence of U.S. military personnel in the region multiplies our diplomatic impact through engagement with counterparts and the demonstration of professional military ethics and conduct in a democratic society.” However, U.S. training programs did not prevent abuses by the Indonesian military in support of the brutal Suharto regime, and the American military worked closely with a series of ugly, military-dominated regimes in South Korea.

Instead of enshrining the status quo, the administration and Congress should phase out U.S. commitments and deployments. To start, Washington should tell Japan and South Korea that it is time for them to defend them selves. Moreover, Washington should make clear that it will not intervene in a war between Taipei and Beijing. America does not have sufficient interests at stake to risk conflict with nuclear-armed China.

Rather than attempting to upgrade defense relationships with nations like Australia and the Philippines, the United States should rely on informal consultations and intelligence sharing. In cases like Laos and Mongolia, Washington should leave private individuals to build cultural and economic links.

In short, Washington should step back as local parties take on responsibility for their own security. Real leadership entails refusing to take on problems that belong to someone else.