Walter Lippmann, call your office. Last week the Biden Pentagon submitted its budget request for fiscal year 2025. If executed as written, the request would shrink the U.S. armed forces at a time when grave dangers—and thus the demands on the armed forces—are surging around maritime Eurasia. In short, U.S. national purposes and power are on opposite trajectories. Commitments are proliferating and intensifying while the means to handle them wilt. If they don’t reverse the trendlines, officialdom and lawmakers could soon be guilty of what Lippmann, arguably America’s foremost pundit of the twentieth century, termed “monstrous imprudence” in foreign policy and strategy.
Such a verdict would be damning. But just.
By monstrous imprudence Lippmann meant that the United States had taken on colossal geopolitical commitments following the Spanish-American War of 1898 yet radically underfunded them. U.S. naval and ground forces had wrested an island empire from Spain. The war ensconced the United States in the Caribbean Sea, in the Philippine Islands, and on Pacific island steppingstones such as Guam. The latter were invaluable for refueling and reprovisioning steamships voyaging to or from East Asia.
From North America to the Philippines: that’s a lot of geographic space to guard. These were territorial holdings of inestimable worth, yet successive presidential administrations and Congresses funded too few ships of war and ground forces to protect them. According to Lippmann, every administration from 1898 to World War II—with the partial exception of Theodore Roosevelt’s—skimped on defense of the newfound empire. Neglect left the U.S. military ill prepared to cope with the rise of imperial Japan, which rampaged through Manchuria and China starting in 1931 before striking Pearl Harbor in 1941—and........