Trump was not the first President to make such a declaration. All three of his predecessors made similar claims about reining in the global policeman, a term that usually refers to the US propensity to deploy its naval armadas, spy satellites, infantry battalions, and supersonic jets to regulate distant disputes. Trump further claimed, during his visit to the air base, that other countries were “going to have to start paying for it,” meaning for US protection. If Trump didn’t want to entirely defund the global policeman, he at least wanted others to foot the bill. But this wish betrayed a misunderstanding of the way that the United States projects force overseas. The US global policeman functions in four primary ways. Three are relatively well known: first and most obvious, there are direct military operations launched from the approximately eight hundred US bases around the world, such as Trump’s drone strike on the Iranian military commander Qasem Soleimani; second, there are joint operations and advisory missions, which President Obama expanded dramatically in Africa and the Middle East; and third, there are arms exports, highlighted by the Trump-Ukraine scandal. The fourth and perhaps least-discussed method is “security assistance,” which the US offers to dozens of countries, and which consists of training and technical upgrades for other nations’ military and police forces.
If US security assistance is turning soldiers around the globe into cops, it is also sending US police experts around the globe to work with uniformed police in dozens of countries. The global policeman relies on local policemen. In addition to the troops Clinton, Bush II, and Obama placed on the ground and the air strikes they ordered, each committed to deploying police experts to other countries. Such commitments are diffuse and open-ended. As a result, the global policeman seems to run autonomously. No single agency controls the numerous programs that compose the colossus. Each day the global policeman assembles itself anew through the work of hundreds of global policemen (and policewomen): current and former US police officers who train, equip, and advise other countries’ police. Cops have become frontline US diplomats. Policing today is a triumph of globalization.
As many hope for a post-Trump future, reenvisioning US foreign policy seems possible, even if Senator Bernie Sanders — the Democratic candidate who was most critical of the way the United States acts as global policeman — is no longer in the running for the White House. Figuring out how to disassemble the global policeman, a common goal among many on the left, will require understanding what it is, how it evolved, and why it remains so intractable. Yet most existing critiques of the global policeman by liberal or centrist Democrats focus on its disorganization, hoping that US foreign policy can be rationalized to better align means and ends, accepting rather than transforming or rejecting the imperative of US primacy. This technocratic critique of the messy bureaucracy of security assistance amounts only to an attempt to apply a finer chisel, not a hammer, to the policing colossus.
The most widespread political uprising in the United States in decades, spurred by Floyd’s killing, provides guidance for a different approach. Calls to defund the police reject incrementalism in changing how police operate because they repudiate police primacy on city streets. These calls often issue from an abolitionist framework that would divest from coercive state violence and invest in new institutions to promote human flourishing within a new social covenant based on racial and social justice. The problem with US foreign policy — represented in the figure of the global policeman — is that it is like a fully resourced police department in a time of dwindling fears of crime: robustly equipped with sophisticated tools to answer any exigency with force, even as the strategic and political value of using such lethal force recedes. Just as the uprisings urged cities to find ways to resolve conflicts without bullets or batons, they also show it is time for the country to relinquish its status as global policeman. Whether at home or abroad, doing so will require forfeiting a reliance on cops as the universal solvent for social problems. (...)
The Globalization of US policing both extends outward and reverberates inward. Today’s global policeman may be the world’s largest organism with no brain or nervous system. The operations of this acephalous being exceed enumeration, in part because reporting requirements are thin and often ignored. But it has several identifiable tentacles.
by Stuart Schrader, N+1 | Read more:
Image: Yarisal & Kublitz, Another Peel Another Deal. 2014[ed. See also: Demilitarizing Our Democracy (Tom Dispatch). Excerpt:]
This month’s insurrection at the Capitol revealed the dismal failure of the Capitol Police and the Department of Defense to use their expertise and resources to thwart a clear and present danger to our democracy. As the government reform group Public Citizen tweeted, “If you’re spending $740,000,000,000 annually on ‘defense’ but fascists dressed for the renaissance fair can still storm the Capitol as they please, maybe it’s time to rethink national security?”
At a time of acute concern about the health of our democracy, any such rethinking must, among other things, focus on strengthening the authority of civilians and civilian institutions over the military in an American world where almost the only subject the two parties in Congress can agree on is putting up ever more money for the Pentagon. This means so many in our political system need to wean themselves from the counterproductive habit of reflexively seeking out military or retired military voices to validate them on issues ranging from public health to border security that should be quite outside the military’s purview.
It’s certainly one of the stranger phenomena of our era: after 20 years of endless war in which trillions of dollars were spent and hundreds of thousands died on all sides without the U.S. military achieving anything approaching victory, the Pentagon continues to be funded at staggering levels, while funding to deal with the greatest threats to our safety and “national security” — from the pandemic to climate change to white supremacy — proves woefully inadequate. In good times and bad, the U.S. military and the “industrial complex” that surrounds it, which President Dwight D. Eisenhower first warned us about in 1961, continue to maintain a central role in Washington, even though they’re remarkably irrelevant to the biggest challenges facing our democracy.
This month’s insurrection at the Capitol revealed the dismal failure of the Capitol Police and the Department of Defense to use their expertise and resources to thwart a clear and present danger to our democracy. As the government reform group Public Citizen tweeted, “If you’re spending $740,000,000,000 annually on ‘defense’ but fascists dressed for the renaissance fair can still storm the Capitol as they please, maybe it’s time to rethink national security?”
At a time of acute concern about the health of our democracy, any such rethinking must, among other things, focus on strengthening the authority of civilians and civilian institutions over the military in an American world where almost the only subject the two parties in Congress can agree on is putting up ever more money for the Pentagon. This means so many in our political system need to wean themselves from the counterproductive habit of reflexively seeking out military or retired military voices to validate them on issues ranging from public health to border security that should be quite outside the military’s purview.
It’s certainly one of the stranger phenomena of our era: after 20 years of endless war in which trillions of dollars were spent and hundreds of thousands died on all sides without the U.S. military achieving anything approaching victory, the Pentagon continues to be funded at staggering levels, while funding to deal with the greatest threats to our safety and “national security” — from the pandemic to climate change to white supremacy — proves woefully inadequate. In good times and bad, the U.S. military and the “industrial complex” that surrounds it, which President Dwight D. Eisenhower first warned us about in 1961, continue to maintain a central role in Washington, even though they’re remarkably irrelevant to the biggest challenges facing our democracy.
