Opinion: Defense after Bush

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Of the great purposes for which the Constitution was drafted — to establish justice, insure domestic tranquility and the like — the call for a “common defense” is perhaps the most readily acknowledged in modern life. No one disputes this nation’s right to defend itself or its allies.

And yet, our modern sense of defense is far different from the one the founders first struck. When “the common defense” first became an obligation of the government, the United States lacked and feared strong central authority, even as the states struggled without it. The Constitution supplied that authority, and gave the new nation the structural institutions that allowed it to grow.

Still, the development of a massive defense apparatus was slow. As America set out on the course that has brought us to the present, its early years were defined in significant measure by this nation’s physical isolation from Europe. Distance allowed the United States to mature without the same defense burdens shouldered by its allies, but as America’s remove from the world diminished, our sense of defense has altered as well.

Today’s defense is a gigantic obligation of the federal government and a singular preoccupation of many Americans. We are engaged in two wars at this writing, and there are those who want to fight a third, against Iran, before the sand runs from the glass of this administration. Meanwhile, the scale of our national defense would surely stagger any of those who drafted the nation’s founding language. As we noted in an editorial just last week, none other than Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates recently pointed out that the Pentagon’s healthcare budget alone is larger than the entire American investment in building alliances through the State Department.

But, as we argue in today’s installment of our series on American values and the national campaign, this administration has confused bellicosity with strength. The president has taken America’s exceptional history and place in the world to such an extreme that he and his administration have substituted bluster for leadership. The result is a more dangerous world and a more isolated America.

A final word on defense: It is tempting for every generation to see its challenges as singular to their time and place. But as we note in today’s Cold Copy, the last time the editorial board of The Times was contemplating a presidential endorsement, it did so in the shadow of the war in Vietnam. Despite their long appreciation for President Nixon — who received the last presidential endorsement by The Times — our predecessors took a firm and principled position in 1970 that the time had arrived for the United States to leave Vietnam. Earlier this year, we took a similar view of the war in Iraq. “Having invested so much in Iraq, Americans are likely to find disengagement almost as painful as war,” we wrote on May 6. “But the longer we delay planning for the inevitable, the worse the outcome is likely to be. The time has come to leave.”

That editorial made us the first very large American paper to call for such a withdrawal. As you consider our reflections on “the common defense,” I hope you’ll also take time to read the editorial from May and still another few moments to listen to the quiet call of history that comes through the Cold Copy pieces of the Vietnam era.