Читать книгу America's Betrayal Confirmed - Elias Davidsson - Страница 11

John Lewis Gaddis, an American conservative historian, noted in 1991 what the loss of the Soviet threat meant for American global involvement:

For the first time in over half a century, no single great power, or coalition of powers, poses a “clear and present danger” to the national security of the United States… The passing of the Cold War world by no means implies an end to American involvement in whatever world is to follow; it only means that the nature and the extent of that involvement are not yet clear.{19}

Even before the formal dissolution of the Soviet Union, Gregory F. Treverton, later Director at the RAND Center for Global Risk and Security and formerly vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council, expressed his awareness that a new foreign policy paradigm was necessary: “America must now address the awkward question of how to organize its defense if deprived of the Soviet threat that has driven it for forty years.”{20}

Robert W. Tucker, pointed out in Foreign Affairs, flagship publication of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), that to maintain the Western alliance, “a new adversary must be assumed.”{21}

Paul Wolfowitz, at the time Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, warned in 1991 that slashing military expenditures would require to send home people “who had planned to make a career in the military, [thereby throwing] away that strategic asset that’s represented by the quality of our officer corps and the quality of our enlisted people.”{22}

U.S. Representative Les Aspin elaborated as follows:

The way we design weapon systems are with the Soviet threat in mind, or use against the Soviet Union in mind. It drives everything. It drives not only the budgets, it drives the force structure, it drives the kinds of forces you have, it drives the kinds of equipment, it drives the whole business. Take away the Soviet threat and how do you design it? How do you decide what you need? How do you decide how to focus on that? [...] How do you build down the United States military and not destroy the industrial base at the heart of the United States’ military capability?{23}

Senator Sam Nunn was more explicit:

A study by the Defense Budget Project last August predicted the private sector defense industry employment would decline by over 800,000 jobs from 1990 to ’96 as a result of the defense spending reductions in the Budget Summit Agreement, which was entered into last year. The largest single year of decline, almost 300,000 jobs, will be eliminated in the fiscal year ’93, beginning October the 1st.{24}

None of these authors openly expressed the real reasons for the United States to maintain a powerful global military machinery. These reasons were spelled by others.