World junks ‘American solution’
Military-framed response to issues exposed as flawed view, expert says
As the world evolves, the “American solution” will not be the only way or even the mainstream approach to solving global issues, according to a professor at Georgetown University.
In an interview with China Daily, Jack Midgley, the principal of global consultancy Midgley & Co and an adjunct associate professor in the Security Studies Program at Georgetown, said that since the end of World War II, the US has looked to build institutions that reflect its ideals about the rule of law as well as an assumption about US power. However, the world has changed.
“Europe has developed; Europe is now very rich. China has developed enormously since 1949 and is rich,” Midgley said. “So, now we expect that these rules are going to have to evolve over the next decades to reflect a different balance of power, to reflect the different degrees of wealth and the different interests that countries have in the world.”
He warned about the challenges brought about by a changing world.
“The perception inside the United States of what’s in America’s interest may be very different from a Russian or Japanese or Chinese or Indian idea of what’s best for the world,” Midgley said. “Our challenge in the future will be to bring these different points of view together and to avoid resolving the conflicts that will happen with force.”
Midgley pointed out that institutions such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the World Bank and the United Nations were set up seven decades ago.
“So, we should expect that those institutions are going to evolve, and we should expect that the solutions which were mainly American solutions in the past will not be American solutions in the future. They will be European, they will be Indian, they will be Chinese, they will be Japanese, because these economies are now rich and influential, just as America is,” said Midgley.
Midgley also said that the US has continued to outspend the world on defense and military operations.
On March 28, President Joe Biden submitted his administration’s budget for the 2023 financial year — a total of $5.8 trillion with $813 billion for defense, a 4 percent increase in military spending. Midgley did not view the increase as “unusual”, considering that US military spending has always represented a sizable percentage of total global military expenditures.
“The American defense spending is about 40 percent of the entire global budget for defense,” he noted.
The US has been the country most involved in military conflicts since the end of World War II. Since 1945, the US has been involved in or led at least 19 regional wars or military operations.
Midgley spoke of how president Dwight Eisenhower coined the term “military-industrial complex” in a January 1961 farewell address and warned that it could have too much influence over US policy and budgets.
“We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex,” Eisenhower said at the end of his second term. “The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”
Midgley said: “We do live in a world where there are very large, very powerful military and defense contractors.… It is in their own interests for them to want to grow. In the case of the American military-industrial complex, that means selling more weapons to the Americans but also selling more weapons around the world.”
He added: “No one wants to keep spending endlessly on defense. People want other things. They want healthcare; they want education; they want a clean environment.”
On the current Russia-Ukraine conflict, Midgley said “a big part of the solution should involve NATO.”
“NATO has been allowed to expand since 1991 really without much rationale. If you look at that expansion from a Russian point of view, it could be perceived as very threatening. After all, we now have NATO soldiers stationed in places that were formerly republics of the Soviet Union: Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and so forth,” he noted.