Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, March 27, 1992 TAG: 9203270465
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-9 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: PAXTON DAVIS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Every American who believes that, since the cold war is over, the time has come for their country to take a more modest role in policing the globe ought to shake in his boots at the news.
The plan calls for the United States to maintain, at all costs, its position as the world's sole superpower. But there are many details equally alarming.
The plan, circulating within the Department of Defense for months, was not originally to become public, now or perhaps ever. But someone at the Pentagon leaked it, and we should all be gratified he or she did.
Called the Defense Planning Guidance, the document lays out the strategic rationale Pentagon planners should use in drafting five-year budget plans.
Observers note that there's a long way between the plan and actual procurement and spending. Congress is unlikely to approve plans to make the United States the world's official superpower anytime soon.
But the debate is as revealing for what it says as for what it doesn't.
Critics who favor continued reduction in military forces in Europe cite the plan as evidence that the Pentagon simply doesn't understand that there is a new world order.
Defenders, on the other hand, aren't bothering to mention that among the nations the plan calls for the United States to deter from greater military power are today's allies as well as yesterday's enemies.
The call is implicit. "They aren't saying it's Germany and Japan they're worried about," said one Pentagon consultant. "They aren't saying it isn't, either."
United States officials deny, meanwhile, that the plan - which embarrasses the Bush administration with its unusually candid admission of American designs on the future - automatically rejects the policy of internationalism and collective action through the United Nations that worked so effectively in arousing world opinion and action against Iraq a year ago.
But that the thinking closely reflects Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney's views is clear from what Cheney and his minions have been saying for a long\ time.
The draft planning document calls for the United States to:
Ensure that no rival superpower arises in the former Soviet Union.
Discourage advanced industrial nations (Germany? Japan?) from challenging American leadership.
Use military force if necessary to prevent the proliferation of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction.
Threaten retaliation in kind against any country that uses such weapons.
Form coalitions with other nations where possible, but to act independently when such coalitions are not forthcoming.
This is, to those who have read even the most minimal amount of history, an explicit formula for national self-destruction. Rome, Britain, Nazi Germany and even more immediately the Soviet Union fell from empire because they refused to control their megalomania. The Pentagon, evidently ignorant of the past, would have the United States follow the same downward path to doom.
Paxton Davis is a Roanoke Times & World-News columnist.
by CNB