Clicking on banner ads enables JWR to constantly improve
Jewish World Review Feb. 12, 2003 / 10 Adat I, 5763

George Will

George Will
JWR's Pundits
World Editorial
Cartoon Showcase

Mallard Fillmore

Michael Barone
Mona Charen
Linda Chavez
Ann Coulter
Greg Crosby
Larry Elder
Don Feder
Suzanne Fields
Paul Greenberg
Bob Greene
Betsy Hart
Nat Hentoff
David Horowitz
Marianne Jennings
Michael Kelly
Mort Kondracke
Ch. Krauthammer
Lawrence Kudlow
Dr. Laura
John Leo
David Limbaugh
Michelle Malkin
Chris Matthews
Michael Medved
MUGGER
Kathleen Parker
Wes Pruden
Sam Schulman
Amity Shlaes
Tony Snow
Thomas Sowell
Cal Thomas
Jonathan S. Tobin
Ben Wattenberg
George Will
Bruce Williams
Walter Williams
Mort Zuckerman

Consumer Reports

A Big and Bold 2004


http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com | For America's enemies, and for some semi-allies, a just-published U.S. document should be mandatory reading.

President Bush's fiscal 2004 budget has little foreign policy content but, properly understood, has immense foreign policy implications. If Baghdad, Paris, Berlin, Brussels and Seoul understand this administration's comprehensive boldness, they will understand not only that regime change is coming to Iraq but also that the end of NATO as we have known it, and the removal of U.S. troops from the Korean Peninsula, are not unthinkable.

The budget evokes 1862. In that annus mirabilis, with the national government's writ severely restricted and the entire American project in doubt, Lincoln and Congress nevertheless enacted the Homestead Act, which sped the settlement of the Great Plains; the Morrill Act, which begot the land grant college system; and the law that ignited construction of the transcontinental railroad.

Today, with the nation in a war against terrorism and on the brink of a related war against Iraq, the president's budget calls for a dash for economic growth through another round of tax cuts, a tax-cutting pace President Reagan did not attempt; a prescription drug entitlement linked to reform of Medicare; and reform of the way Americans save. And in a budget-related document, the administration floats the idea of scrapping individual and corporate income taxes in favor of a consumption tax.

The lesson is that America has a president unusually comfortable contemplating, and pushing, change. Perhaps the foreign and defense policy improvisations that 9/11 forced him to embrace whetted his appetite for domestic boldness, too. In any case, his administration may be casting an increasingly jaundiced eye on international arrangements long taken for granted, such as NATO.

In the famous formulation of one of NATO's founders, the alliance's purpose was to keep the Germans down, the Russians out and the Americans in. Well. The Germans are firmly held down by their own enervating attitudes and welfare state policies (unemployment is 10.3 percent and rising). Which is to say Germany has its boot on its own neck for a change. The Russians are out of the great-power business. And Americans are increasingly wondering why they are in Europe.

Last week in Munich, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld spoke of NATO's being "stronger" because "the center of Europe has indeed shifted eastward." He also said: "NATO member nations have an Article 5 commitment to defend Turkey, should it come under attack by Iraq. Those preventing the alliance from taking even minimum measures to prepare to do so risk undermining the credibility" of NATO.

Those threatening to prevent it include Belgium, France and Germany. The last two are continually called "key allies." But "key" to what? Nothing military. And NATO is a military organization. With France fomenting worldwide opposition to a U.S. military action deemed by the U.S. government to be vital to national security, and with Germany drawing France into the embrace of semi-pacifism, NATO is becoming what Rumsfeld warns the United Nations is becoming -- a thing of ridicule.

In Munich last week, German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer impertinently lectured Rumsfeld that America might have to stay in postwar Iraq for several years and wondered whether America has the staying power. Someone should tell Fischer that U.S. troops have been in Fischer's country 58 years -- not quite as long as Rome's legions were, but long enough to prove staying power.

However many U.S. troops should stay in Europe -- surely fewer than are there now -- the Bush administration may be in a mood to wonder why any should be in an unsympathetic country such as Germany. Support for U.S. aims, like the center of Europe, has shifted eastward. So, perhaps, should the U.S. presence.

Elsewhere, the U.S. presence might be better on aircraft carriers, built with money saved by reducing some permanent overseas deployments. Such as in South Korea.

Increasingly virulent anti-Americanism there -- in a nation that would not exist had not 33,667 Americans died to preserve it -- raises this question: Why are 37,000 American military personnel still stationed there? They are far too few if North Korea's army, the world's third largest, attacks, and they are far more than necessary to serve as a "trip wire."

Actually, no U.S. boots need be on the peninsula to guarantee a U.S. commitment to defend South Korea. But the anti-Americanism, as well as South Korea's prosperity and North Korea's penury, may cause reconsideration of that commitment.

Anyone who believes all this is unthinkable should read the administration's budget to see how boldly it thinks.


Enjoy this writer's work? Why not sign-up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.


Comment on JWR contributor George Will's column by clicking here.

Up

George Will Archives

© 2002, Washington Post Writer's Group