Troops Must Come Home to Win the Economic War : Defense: The next battle is an economic conflict. America must rebuild its home base--a decaying infrastructure--not defend overseas outposts.

Over the next few years, as potentially hundreds of thousands of U.S. soldiers, sailors and airmen leave West Germany, Japan, South Korea and other places, more than just U.S. military personnel will be coming home. U.S. priorities may be coming home, too--with enormous implications.

What’s involved goes far beyond U.S.-Soviet diplomacy or dry Washington fiscal calculations. America could be moving into a once-in-50 years opportunity to redirect its involvement away from the military competition of the postwar era to a new economic superpower contest. This would put less emphasis on protecting foreign nations and devote more attention to rebuilding commerce, competitiveness, cities and countryside here at home. The challenge for the Republican White House, however, is quietly excruciating: How to shift from a global military competition that has been a great GOP political tactic and national success, to an economic contest that is a growing GOP embarrassment and an incipient cause for jeopardy.

For now, the coming military withdrawals remain vague: a large but indeterminate number of soldiers to return from West Germany, 5,000 or 6,000 troops from Japan and certainly several thousand--but possibly many more--of the 40,000 stationed in South Korea. Other major U.S. departures are possible from the Philippines, Greece and elsewhere.

Yet there are real grounds for excitement. Loose talk about a “peace dividend” can be exaggerated--history is littered with failed swords-into-plowshares predictions--but the potential of a “new global priorities dividend” could be massive. When events of the 1990s are analyzed, marked and graded by chroniclers 50 years hence, there’s a chance that the pullback the United States is about to undertake will be dismissed as an unsuccessful late-20th-Century version of the decline of Rome or the dismantling of the British Empire. But as of 1990, there’s also a chance to confound that analogy.

The current predicament is clear. Since World War II, U.S. policy-makers, rightly fearful of Moscow, committed huge resources to protect Europe and the North Atlantic (some set the U.S. taxpayer burden as high as $150 billion a year) as well as the North Pacific environs around Japan and South Korea (this may cost $50 billion a year). But with the 1990 ebb of the Soviet threat coupled with diminishing resources, the time has come to shift two-thirds of these dollars to America’s decaying cities, inadequate housing, pockmarked highways, crumbling bridges, deficient electrical grid, boarded-up small towns, neglected children, semiliterate work force and failing schools.

This is a mobilization needed to maintain America’s strength in an economic Third World War that the Japanese, South Koreans and West Germans are winning. A further debate over the sense of spending U.S. tax dollars to protect U.S. competitors at the expense of America’s domestic priorities seems inevitable.

Majorities of Americans are already ready--if we can trust the polls--to spend large additional sums on education, homelessness, drug prevention, infrastructure needs and the like. The logical caveat is that working-class and middle-class Americans don’t want to pay for it with a tax increase--thus the importance of getting money by folding the expensive U.S. military umbrella over countries such as Japan and West Germany. They have become rich creditor nations and Goliath-scale exporters in part by avoiding major defense outlays.

A central fiscal weakness of the 1980s was that Uncle Sam picked up a grossly excessive share of the Western defense tab. Let Washington redirect that money to needs at home, and West German and Japanese budget planners will have to divert money of their own from commerce to defense, potentially undercutting their economic competitiveness--two birds with one fiscal stone.

There are problems, of course--and not just fear of what West Germany and Japan might become. Powerful opponents of realigned priorities range from Pentagon and State Department bureaucracies to a bipartisan foreign-policy Establishment mired in well-catered conferences from Aspen to Switzerland and shibboleths recycled by a half-dozen learned quarterlies. Proposals to define U.S. interests more parochially draw criticism as “isolationist” or “protectionist”--to cite two favorite condemnations.

It’s worth remembering that the last time the United States was able to turn its back on globalist theses and “come home”--after World War I, in 1919-21--skepticism of overseas involvement was still the nation’s dominant tradition. This was true even though the country was poised on the threshold of global power.

Two decades later, “America First” arguments before World War II were smashed at Pearl Harbor, and the war itself left the United States as the dominant international power--with military bases girdling the globe and an economy accounting for nearly 50% of world industrial production. Such nations must dominate world affairs and, as a result, late 1940s attempts by right-wing elements of the GOP to reassert a neo-isolationist approach to Europe failed. Twenty years later, liberal Democrats, angered by U.S. military intervention in Vietnam, again found neo-isolationism a loser. Sen. George McGovern of South Dakota, the 1972 Democratic presidential nominee, called for America to “come home”--and got 38% of the vote.

By contrast, with the Soviet Union still an armed-to-the-teeth superpower enemy, Republicans turned a strong defense into a red badge of electoral success.

Since then, GOP presidential candidates have invariably led Democratic opponents, in public trust, to deal more effectively with the Soviet Union and to better protect U.S. national security. At the same time, public frustration with liberal-linked U.S. retreats and embarrassments--from Vietnam to the 1979 Iranian seizure of U.S. Embassy personnel--worked to create a growing pattern of 1980s gunboat-style involvement overseas. The 1983 invasion of Grenada, the 1986 air strike against Tripoli and December’s invasion of Panama all drew applause from a public frustrated with 1970s U.S. military weaknesses.

But after this last cycle of jingoism, a major change may be under way. Beneath the facade of support for U.S. overseas intervention, voters have been displaying a strong new realism. First, public sensitivity to the unmet needs at home--from decaying infrastructure to a poorly trained work force. Second, the indications in poll after poll that Japan’s economic challenge is now a bigger threat than Soviet military rivalry. So while polls continue to show that pluralities do not want to take U.S. troops out of Europe and Asia, important contrary psychologies are also growing.

Another warning signal is the decline of America’s share of the world gross national product. Chicago economist David Hale recently noted that the U.S. share of global GNP is expected to drop below 25% for the first time since 1914, returning us to the circumstances when Woodrow Wilson-era Americans rejected the first attempt to push this country into a major world role.

The conclusions jump off the page. The United States can no longer afford its global role of the Truman and Eisenhower eras.

It is especially disastrous to maintain that role by borrowing. The United States is not--like the America of 50 or 60 years ago--a nation at work building the highways, housing, airports, schools, factories and power plants to fashion its era of international leadership. Rather, we are a nation where huge percentages in all these categories are outdated--first for reasons of complacency but then, in the 1980s, because of federal budget constraints. Arguably, the huge Reagan-era defense budgets did play a role in ending the Cold War. Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s Moscow simply couldn’t match U.S. resources; Ronald Reagan spent him under the table.

But as a result of that success--and the price paid for it--the 1990s may well be a decade when the U.S. electorate begins finding yesteryear’s global role counterproductive. The task for the ‘90s is in large measure the rebuilding of the United States-- not Nicaragua, not Eastern Europe, not Cambodia, but the “forgotten America” of Brooklyn slums, Idaho mining towns, Appalachian factories, Dakota farms and endangered California semi-conductor facilities.

When McGovern called on America to “come home,” 18 years ago, he was naive. Today, however, the idea of refocusing U.S. attentions homeward may be an idea--and a politics--whose time has come.