President George Bush and Colorado Gov. Roy Romer engaged in a rare and remarkable bit of political theater at the National Governors Conference the first week of February. Romer insisted that the press stay put after Bush's address to the governors, and proceeded to give the clearly irked president a lesson on what the administration's proposed budget means to folks back home.
While new White House Chief of Staff Sam Skinner watched in horror, biting his nails, Romer joined a member of Bush's own cabinet, housing secretary Jack Kemp, in criticizing the president's proposed tax cuts as "gimmicks," and called for deeper cuts in the military budget.
Bush responded heatedly, "What bases do you want to close? What weapon systems do you want to knock off right now? Or do you want to lay off the people?"
The exchange was remarkable not only in its unrehearsed spontaneity, a rarity in presidential politics, but also in its content: a governor from a highly militarized state calling for a significant step back in military spending. Bush's response was only remarkable in what it lacked: a vision of what a genuinely new, post-Cold War Pentagon should look like.
The U.S. military the president envisions for the future, despite a world that has been turned upside-down in the last few years, is only a slightly revised version of the behemoth constructed by Ronald Reagan to stand up to the now-deceased Evil Empire.
A few of the Bush revisions in the military's force structure are significant. His decision to eliminate the MX and stop producing Trident missile warheads means, for the first time since Hiroshima, the military-industrial complex is out of the bomb-making business, at least for the time being. If Bush carries through on his commitment to eliminate multiple warheads, he would be erasing a menace that has been perhaps the single greatest engine of the arms race since Henry Kissinger engineered their development in the early 1970s.
Bush's actions, however, weren't quite as bold or far reaching as they seem. Congress was getting ready to make even deeper cutbacks if the president didn't, and in this election year he can't afford to forfeit the political initiative. Research and development funding is on the increase, so plans for the next generation of weapons will continue apace. Bush continues to refuse to heed the Russian call for an end to nuclear testing. And, after years of bloated Pentagon budgets, "everybody has everything they wanted," in the words of nuclear weapons expert Stan Norris.
How times change. Thousands of peace activists spent much of the last decade on the streets and in the jails calling for an end to these first-strike weapons. What five years ago would have seemed a radical step toward ending the spiraling arms race now appears to be a too-cautious snipping at the edges of the problem. But there is something to be said for pausing a moment to celebrate, saying a soft prayer of gratitude for the world's stepping back from the nuclear precipice, before we turn our critical eyes toward the required next steps. Even those on a religious pilgrimage have need for rest stops.
Bush's "prudent" approach to Pentagon reform shows he's still locked in the old, anti-Soviet-based approach of days gone by, despite rhetoric to the contrary. For a telling example, the Pentagon budget still pours $150 billion a year down the drain of defending Western Europe; from whom it is unclear. Last I looked, neither Poland nor Ukraine is much of a threat to invade Germany.
While conflict between and within nations is inevitable, we've seen telling examples in the last few years of the power of a multilateral, non-military response. Cambodia, El Salvador, even the early months after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait: All have shown the potential of concerted, multinational conflict resolution. If the United Nations and other regional bodies (such as the Organization of American States and the Arab League) are truly empowered to deal with such conflicts in the future, U.S. bases abroad--and our self-proclaimed role as the world's police force--will be seen as increasingly superfluous in the days ahead.
Bush asked Romer which weapons systems the governor would eliminate. The B-2 Stealth bomber would be a good start. Bush wants to "cut back" the Pentagon's B-2 order to 20 planes; right now, only five are completed. Bush's plan for 15 more would keep the assembly lines going until 1998.
The force structure Bush has proposed was drawn up before last year's collapse of the Soviet Union, and his spending plans for the next five years are only incrementally lower than what was spent over the last five. His program still includes plans for a new aircraft carrier task force, new destroyers, the new F-22 fighter plane, and the most exorbitant weapon system of all, Star Wars. All of these reflect old ways of thinking about security, relying almost solely on military solutions.
Russia's Boris Yeltsin has proposed that a new international body be created to oversee all aspects of nuclear arms reduction, including non-proliferation of nuclear weapons, with the agency gradually assuming control over the entire nuclear cycle. His proposal, which has been virtually ignored by the U.S. government and the press, contains the kind of genuine new thinking that finally will be the only effective response to the greatest threat of the next decade, nuclear proliferation: a serious, internationally supervised process of nuclear disarmament.
Bush's final challenge to the governor--"Do you want to lay off the people?"--merely demonstrates Bush's myopia. The president puts forth a false polarity: We must either keep these high levels of military spending, he implies, or joblessness will soar even higher.
Conversion activists around the country have shown the way to an alternative, laying out plans for retraining dislocated workers and re-employing them in growth industries, as well as diversifying and strengthening local and regional economies inordinately dependent on military contracts.
There's some irony in the fact that in the former Soviet Union, with its economy in shambles and with a well-earned reputation for industrial inflexibility, conversion of Cold War factories is moving much faster than in the United States. In Ukraine, for example, a factory that has produced the deadly SS-18 missile is now building sausage-making machines and trolley buses. Lockheed and Rockwell, take note. Studies have shown that more jobs, not less, will be produced when we shift from a military economy to one based on the production of usable goods and services.
The public overwhelmingly supports a substantial shift in national priorities, not only in the token ways Bush proposes but to the profound extent warranted by the new realities of the post-Cold War world and the crying needs of our country's people and infrastructure. The money saved could be used to help repair the damage that is our society's sad legacy of decades of misguided policy.
Jim Rice is editor of Sojourners.
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