Officials Upset by Book Saying U.S. Is Courting Decline

Reagan Administration foreign policy-makers are mobilizing their forces--not against enemy troops but against a best-selling book.

In a debate with significance for the global U.S. military presence, leading Defense and State department officials are attacking “The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers,” a book suggesting that the United States is stuck with more strategic interests and military commitments overseas than it can defend.

The book, written by Yale historian Paul Kennedy, argues that, over the last 500 years, nations have gained power by developing the military strength to protect their expanding economic resources and have subsequently declined as the costs of maintaining military power abroad become so high as to weaken their economies.

‘Imperial Overstretch’

Kennedy says that the United States runs the risk of following along the path of earlier “great powers” such as Spain, the Netherlands, France and, most recently, Great Britain, which have suffered from “imperial overstretch.”

The book, which has been on the New York Times best-selling fiction list for 17 weeks, has provoked a surprisingly strong reaction from U.S. officials.

In a congressional appearance, Assistant Defense Secretary Richard L. Armitage complained that Kennedy’s book was “being used by many who want to roll back our defense commitments around the world.”

Armitage, who is responsible for overseeing Defense Department policy in such areas as the Persian Gulf, Japan, the Philippines and Panama, has responded to Kennedy’s book in at least three speeches. “Paul Kennedy is wrong about the United States,” he said in one.

Assistant Secretary of State Gaston J. Sigur volunteered his own negative review in a public address in Tokyo.

‘Responsible Outreach’

“I disagree with the contention that the United States is stretched hopelessly too thin in its commitments abroad,” Sigur said. “Our policy role today, in Asia and elsewhere, is not one of ‘imperial overstretch,’ but one of responsible outreach.”

The book has struck a raw nerve primarily because it appears to lend support to one side of a debate in Washington over the concept of “burden-sharing” and, especially, over U.S. policy toward Japan.

Those who advocate “burden-sharing” maintain that the United States should ask its North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies, Japan and South Korea to pay more for their defense. It is unfair, they insist, for the United States to pay so heavily for the costs of stationing American troops in countries that have large trade surpluses with the United States. The United States pays more than 6% of its gross national product for defense, they argue, but Japan spends barely more than 1%.

“The United States has roughly the same massive array of military obligations across the globe as it had a quarter-century ago, when its share of world (gross national product), manufacturing production, military spending and armed forces personnel were so much larger than they are now,” Kennedy writes in his book.

The United States, he says, “is the inheritor of a vast array of strategical commitments which had been made decades earlier, when the nation’s political, economic and military capacity to influence world affairs seemed so much more assured.”

At one recent hearing, Sen. Jim Sasser (D-Tenn.), chairman of the Senate Appropriations subcommittee on military construction, told Defense Department officials that he thought Kennedy’s book “makes a powerful argument for burden-sharing.”

In reply, Defense Department officials led by Armitage insisted that Kennedy’s book overlooks the fact that Japan, NATO allies and South Korea are already making large contributions toward their joint defense commitments with the United States.

“Our major bases and more than 100 other military facilities in Japan are provided to us totally rent-free and our nuclear-powered and nuclear-capable forces visit Japan frequently without restriction,” Armitage told Sasser’s subcommittee. “In 1988, the government of Japan will spend over $2.5 billion on behalf of 55,000 U.S. service personnel on duty there, or more than $45,000 per person.”

Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) bluntly responded that Japan’s contribution is not even close to adequate.

“We’ve got to make them realize that they are not paying their fair share,” he said. “Why should my children and my grandchildren pay the costs of keeping our troops there for their national defense?”

A few former Reagan Administration officials have endorsed at least some of Kennedy’s arguments.

“There is no reason why Japan could not devote an additional 1% of (gross national product) to security assistance to the Western democracies who need help,” former Assistant Defense Secretary Richard N. Perle told Rep. Patricia Schroeder (D-Colo.) at a hearing early this year.

But former U.N. Ambassador Jeane J. Kirkpatrick recently challenged the assumptions underlying Kennedy’s theory about the fall of empires.

“Kennedy seeks to explain too much by economic factors,” she wrote. “In so doing, he ignores or understates too many other dimensions in the rise and fall of nations--particularly including such political factors as will, skill and conquest and such moral factors as human purpose and human nature.”