The Cost of Military Primacy, with Peter Harris

KEVIN MALONEY: On this episode of the Values & Interests podcast I am speaking with Peter Harris, associate professor at Colorado State University, and author of the book, Why America Can’t Retrench (And How It Might). Together we discuss the costs of America’s pursuit of military primacy post-World War II, potential pathways to a less militarized future, and how the Trump administration has impacted America’s engagement around the world.

As always, be sure to subscribe to Carnegie Council on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts. I hope you enjoy today’s episode.

Welcome, Peter Harris. Thank you so much for joining the Values & Interests podcast.

PETER HARRIS: Thank you for having me on. I appreciate it.

KEVIN MALONEY: We have a lot to talk about. There is a deluge of news every time I turn on my phone in the morning. We also have to get to your book, which has been a great read, and we will dig into that, but what we like to do on the Values & Interests podcast to start is get a sense of our guest’s own value system. We feel very strongly about the relationship between your value system and your profession, and then going up the ladder in terms of the people who are doing the work within the institutions, all the way to the state or international level. Maybe we could start there and learn a little bit about your personal background, your own value system, and how that is informing your work right now.

PETER HARRIS: I think something that is important to me is where I come from. I come from the Northwest of England, a town called Wigan just outside of Manchester. I grew up there, and that is very important to me. I studied in the United Kingdom. My undergraduate degree was in Scotland and Master’s degree in London. I moved to the United States when I was 25 years old in 2010.

Drawing on my experience in the United Kingdom and now in the United States I would describe myself as a classical liberal in many ways. Individual freedom, human flourishing, and civil liberties are very important to me. I became a U.S. citizen in 2018, and I take that quite seriously. It sounds kind of cheesy to say this kind of stuff, but I think this country can be the best custodian of those classical liberal values.

The challenge in the United States frequently, the current moment being no exception, is that there are people, institutions, and political traditions in the United States that are great and that the world needs. I just did a Semester at Sea voyage this spring.

KEVIN MALONEY: I saw that on social media. Very interesting.

PETER HARRIS: It was fabulous. You visit ten countries, and they are all absolutely wonderful, but I think it is also okay to learn from a voyage like that how special America is, and it is, and Americans. The young people on that ship, mostly Americans, 550 young people traveling around the world to ten different countries, so respectful, so polite, and so intellectually curious. I came back energized and believing that America is great. It is great because of the classical liberal ideals that are quite important to me.

KEVIN MALONEY: It is good to return to that in the challenges of the current moment after we get a baseline in terms of what you have been working on for the past few years from an international relations (IR) perspective.

In 2024 you released the book, Why America Can’t Retrench (And How It Might). It would be great to hear your central thesis and argument for the book. I think my listeners will be very interested in this term “retrenchment,” defining that and what that means.

PETER HARRIS: To me retrenchment is a policy of pulling back militarily. I want to be clear about that. It is not about pulling back the policy domains—the economy, diplomatic engagement, political leadership, that kind of stuff. It is very specifically referring to military forward deployments and military engagements. Retrenchment is a policy of reducing those and pulling back militarily.

It is a companion to restraint, which is a broader grand strategy of many different policies packaged together, but retrenchment is a piece of that, and it specifically refers to the pulling back of American forces militarily. The thesis of the book is that America cannot do that programmatically today. You get the odd instance—Biden’s pullout from Afghanistan being one recent example—but there is no programmatic attempt to pull back American forces across the board even though I argue the reason for those forces being deployed overseas has evaporated. The context has changed dramatically over the past 80 years, and U.S. domestic politics has changed dramatically, but for some reason—and I try to explain this in the book—America can’t retrench anymore, and I wanted to figure out why that is the case.

KEVIN MALONEY: Very interesting. Looking back over the last 80 years you have the impetus for this militarization, which is World War II, and then you have various geopolitical moments and conflicts, whether it is the Cold War, Vietnam, or the War on Terror. What are you seeing right now driving that primacy, military-first status quo of this moment, and maybe a little bit about that in terms of current trends?

PETER HARRIS: I argue it is a product of path dependence. As you rightly say, during the World War II era and Cold War era it was already determined that the United States would be militarily engaged abroad. Japan attacked the United States at Pearl Harbor and forced the hand of the United States to enter World War II, so it was already determined that we would send U.S. armed forces into the Asia-Pacific and into Europe and then stay there during the Cold War to contain the Soviet Union. Those policies were understandable. The Axis powers were defeated in 1945, and the Soviet Union ceased to exist in 1991, so why are we still there?

My argument is that that 50-year stretch from 1941 to 1991 changed the United States and required U.S. leaders to build an American state much different than what had existed before with a big, permanent standing military, a national security apparatus, and a strengthened Executive Branch. It rewired the political economy of the United States with the arms industry being distributed across the country. Over the course of that 50-year period America changed, and it had to change into a country that could support this massive, globe-spanning strategy of military primacy by necessity. The country had to change to support that.

We still have that, though. We still have the state that was built in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s all the way through the Reagan era. We still have that state today, and that state cannot retrench. It was not built to retrench. It was built to run the world, and you can put whoever you want in the White House and they will have a very difficult time retrenching because the state was not built to do that.

KEVIN MALONEY: We are thinking about trends in this moment or the expansion of the military-industrial complex to the techno-military-industrial complex. We are seeing a lot of trends right now in terms of that system basically being integrated in a very aggressive way into the new driver of the U.S. economy, which is tech, and you are seeing all this money flow from venture capital into artificial intelligence (AI) companies that then enter into a cyclical relationship with the U.S. government through massive defense contracts. That is something that I have talked a lot about on the podcast in terms of maybe the opposite of retrenchment but rather technologically “doubling down” in this new arms race.

Your argument in the book is this political status quo and potential ways forward to retrench responsibly. Is that a trend you are seeing that is throwing a wrench into the potential to do that right now, or do you have another view on it?

PETER HARRIS: There is just no political incentive to retrench. The military budget has become a way of doing all kinds of things in the United States, achieving all kinds of policy goals. Michael Brenes has got this great book on the military-industrial complex, For Might and Right: Cold War Defense Spending and the Remaking of American Democracy, and he shows how in the Cold War both political parties used it as a pseudo-welfare state, as a way to give to communities, and today it is being used as a way to drive industrial policy.

I am not against a smart industrial policy on semiconductors, AI, or whatever it might be. I think the federal government is reasonable to expect they would have a role in industrial policy, but I don’t think the defense budget is the best vessel for that, but that is one of the main tools that U.S. policymakers have at their disposal.

The Biden administration, when they were trying to sell to a skeptical public and skeptical Congress aid to Ukraine tried all kinds of reasons, and the public and the Senate were, “Uh, we might want to place a limit on this.” Eventually the mask slipped, and they said: “Look, we authorized this spending because it’s good for the states. It is going to create this many jobs in Texas and this many jobs in California.” That is not the basis upon which you should be making foreign policy—job creation in states—but it has become the reason we have this massive military establishment, to serve domestic priorities, and that is wrong. We should divorce this.

I think it is reasonable to go to the Senate and ask: “Do you want to fund a job creations package? Do you want to give AI and tech companies some kind of incentives so we can become a powerhouse?” That’s reasonable, but don’t do it through the defense budget because it confuses people and in fact is quite dangerous because all of that stuff goes into a forwardly deployed military posture that I think is actually getting quite dangerous for the United States in the current context.

KEVIN MALONEY: Historically there has been this tension between congressional authority and matters of foreign policy and the executive, but maybe you can talk—I won’t give my own opinion because you are the guest—a little bit about how you are seeing that relationship right now and what that is driving in terms of foreign policy decisions and also investments of budget into foreign policy and defense spaces.

PETER HARRIS: Washington, DC is very polarized obviously. We are in an era of hyperpartisanship, which is not unprecedented in America, but that is what we have at the moment. In that context Congress is not quite as jealous of its Constitutional prerogatives as I think it probably should be, and the party that controls the White House at the moment, the Republicans, are usually able to count on their co-partisans in Congress to get whatever they want through. That is a bad thing.

In the book what I argue is that I don’t know how you can get to a more balanced executive and legislative relationship without changing the party system. When I discuss the book with people, this is where everybody says: “It’s ridiculous; that will never happen. The two-party system is here to stay.”

I don’t accept that. From a comparative politics perspective, it is not the case that our electoral system has to produce two parties. Where I come from in the United Kingdom we have a “first past the post” electoral system, but it is a multiparty system. The United States used to have a People’s Party, the populist party, that elected people to Congress and elected state governors. It is possible, and it is possible for voters in states like Colorado, where I am, and California to take control away from parties in state referendums and stuff like that to change voting laws without the parties agreeing to that.

I think you probably do need that, though. The Democrats and Republicans today have a broken system of electoral representation. I think the Constitution is great. The Constitution is set up in a way that should incentivize legislators to hold the Executive Branch to account, but the parties are broken, and that is where the focus really needs to be.

KEVIN MALONEY: We are not going to solve political polarization during this conversation, so we don’t need to go down that rabbit hole. There are more than enough podcasts on that. Just to comment on the possibility of a two-party shift and some change there, I think the biggest blind spot I have had, to take a step back, is growing up in the 1990s where you just assumed there was this system from a geopolitical perspective, from a U.S. values perspective, and from a political perspective. I think what the last few years and the last eight months has definitely shocked a lot of people and shown me is that norms change. That might have been a bit of a vacation for a while, and we are in a new world.

That creates a lot of issues potentially for liberal values, but it also creates a lot of opportunity for people who want to lean into the issue and not just be reactive and thinking about putting out fires but thinking about wanting to put a new vision forward. It has been an interesting awakening in the last few years, to say the least.

PETER HARRIS: I think we are living through a moment where political change is really possible. In political science they talk about these “punctuated equilibrium” moments, where things are kind of the same, but then, boom, they change rapidly. That has happened before in U.S. history. Usually you need some kind of external shock to catalyze that. I hope we don’t have one of those, like a war or some kind of international crisis, but I think the current moment is one where change is possible.

We shouldn’t fear change necessarily. I think the United States does need to change. It certainly needs to change its foreign policy, and it is good that there are people trying to change the conversation on that. Even inside the administration some people say things that are useful in terms of moving the United States in a better direction. There is definitely room for optimism.

KEVIN MALONEY: Just as an aside, I would have been disappointed if the IR scholarship term was anything less than “punctuated equilibrium.” We will add it to the list of longwinded terms.

PETER HARRIS: Nice and accessible.

KEVIN MALONEY: I want to take a step back. A big portion of the book thinks about these different ways of how the United States has engaged or not engaged with the world starting around the 1860s and going through the present day. You always hear this reference in terms of Eisenhower’s farewell speech, where he not so subtly talked about the dangers of the military-industrial complex.

Earlier in our conversation you talked about the necessity in responding to Japan and then having this near-peer adversary during the Cold War years. I know you don’t have a crystal ball, but can we talk a bit about this? If you go back in time and follow the advice then, what does that bring for America, and what new risks would that have created if we didn’t expand the military primacy system so much?

PETER HARRIS: That is a fascinating counterfactual to think through. I have not really done it myself, so I am thinking on my feet here.

Let’s think about it. Eisenhower gives his farewell address. He warns about this creepy military-industrial complex. Let’s say that President Kennedy comes in and is convinced by that, so you retrench a little bit.

What could have happened? Ten years later, Richard Nixon did adopt some of that thinking. Shift more onto the allies. You would say to the Western Europeans and Japanese: “You need to continue to spend on defense or maybe spend more and come up with some kind of credible way that you can promise to defend each other because you cannot count on the United States to intervene.” We could have relied more on nuclear weapons to deter the Soviet Union from attacking the United States. We were very secure during the Cold War. It was our allies who were vulnerable, so we could have relied on nuclear weapons to keep us safe. Eisenhower wanted to invest in nukes and reduce spending on conventional military forces.

KEVIN MALONEY: Interesting. I didn’t know that.

PETER HARRIS: Counterfactuals are always very difficult. A lot of people talk about military spending, and I am in this camp, as a drag on economic growth. You get some returns from investing in the military but not as much as if you would just let the private sector invest that.

At moments in the 1960s at the height of Vietnam we were spending 10 percent of gross domestic product or close to that on the military, and the economy was probably being held back. We could have been racing ahead technologically and racing ahead economically if we had been doing less overseas, and who knows? Maybe you see the Cold War ending earlier because the American model of free enterprise would have been allowed to do its thing.

What you would have also seen is less of this state building that I talk about in the book. The country would have been less hardwired toward military primacy, so when the Cold War did end, when the Soviet Union did collapse, the country could have conceivably been in a position to return to normalcy like it did after World War I. We never did that after the Cold War. We never became a normal country again. Maybe if we had followed Eisenhower’s advice we would have, and me and you, growing up in the 1990s, would have had a different experience where the system we witnessed would be totally different. I don’t know.

KEVIN MALONEY: It is interesting to think about. That is why we have these conversations, so we can think about them.

There is a short chapter in the book, and I would be very remiss not to bring this up from the Carnegie Council perspective, where you talk about “moral movements.” It is an area I have been very interested in post-World War II in the United States. I think about it from this Reinhold Niebuhr, Hans Morgenthau, or Joe Nye perspective, and this spectrum between naïve idealism and amoral realism and the opinion that the good statesperson has to understand those two poles exist and attempt to operate within them in a pragmatic way, especially from a liberal society perspective.

Maybe you could talk about the waves post-World II of these moral movements and how they influenced this primacy—different morals, different value sets, but they were still all going in a similar direction, which is a need to be underpinned by this military primacy.

PETER HARRIS: In that part of the book what I am trying to make clear is that this grand strategy of primacy, this addiction as I think of it, to military spending is not just because of the economics of this: We raise a trillion dollars a year in taxes or borrow it and then give it out. It is not just that. An intellectual set of edifices has been constructed around it.

As you say, moral movements, idealists, people who want the world to be a better place from their view have latched onto American primacy and tried to use it to further their own agendas. So you had the anti-communists during the Cold War, liberal internationalists who want to globalize universal human rights, they make a bargain with the U.S. state. There is a great book on this by Stephen Hopgood called The Endtimes of Human Rights. It is about ten years old now. It chronicles the 1970s when the human rights movement made a bargain with the U.S. government as a way to spread liberal ideals and the idea of universal human rights. Look, I believe in universal human rights. I believe in the dignity of the individual all across the planet, but I think when the U.S. government is using the military to advance those kinds of ideals you can get counterproductive outcomes.

We found ourselves in a place, let’s say in the 1990s and probably still today, when faced with this kind of implicit choice U.S. politicians continue this well-being path of primacy or try something different and retrench, they have to think: Well, if I do this, who will I offend and who will punish me? What sticks am I going to be beaten with? Some of this will be the economic stuff, but a lot of it is people saying: “Well, you’re selling out human rights. You’re selling out American ideals. This is anti-American of you. This is nationalistic, Little America”—there is a way you get beaten with these idealist sticks that people don’t want to go there.

The withdrawal from Afghanistan was like that. Even before the fall of Kabul, when it was announced that we were going to pull people out, there was an avalanche of op-eds, that you are just consigning Afghan women and girls to a life of torture, this is an abomination, an abandonment of American ideals, and you shouldn’t be doing this from the left and from the right.

I believe in gender equality. Of course I do. Of course we want Afghan women and girls to have equal rights, but I don’t know if the war could have continued for much longer. I don’t think the U.S. presence could have stayed there for much longer, and Biden was just hammered. He was hammered because he seemed to have violated this ideal, these sets of values. It is just another stumbling block to retrenchment because there are these ideational or ideological camps in the United States that have this kind of association now with primacy.

KEVIN MALONEY: A lot of times the great part about focusing on applied ethics here at the Council is that it gives a framework to interrogate those difficult tradeoffs that you just talked about. You can do that from a non-political, non-economic position and talk about it from an individual’s values perspective and also an institution or state perspective. It is very helpful in our own work here to have that toolkit.

You talked about the pressures against retrenchment. In the book—please correct me if I am misstating here—you make a very clear demarcation between retrenchment and isolationism, and one of the prescriptions you offer is less military but more of this multilateral, good-faith, honest engagement. From the Council’s perspective we think about that as civic forums, safe forums, and multilateral forums to deal with these differences in values and not have the end result be another world war in the most basic way possible.

My question to you is: In the last eight months we have seen the pulling out and defunding of multilateral institutions as well as soft power institutions at home. What is your analysis of the health of that potential prescription right now and leaning in. What are your thoughts on that?

PETER HARRIS: The administration is doing about as perfectly the opposite of what I recommended as it would be possible to do. I wrote in the first Trump administration that he was the wrong sort of anti-internationalist, and I think that is still the case. I think what America needs to do for its own security and so it can pursue domestic renewal and for the benefit of others overseas is to militarily retrench. We have the opposite. There may be some signs, but over the past eight months there has been no real discernible move toward retrenchment. Quite the opposite with bombing Iran and whatnot.

As you say, at the same time we are pulling away from free trade and pulling away from multilateral institutions. It is inviting some pushback domestically, but I don’t know if it is enough for the pendulum to swing in the other direction when Trump is replaced by somebody else, either another Republican or a Democrat, but from my perspective it is the wrong recipe. The United States will flourish, prosper, and be secure if it engages in the world in a confident way economically, politically, and diplomatically.

We have talked about soft power. I still think it is the case that this country has got quite rightly the biggest reserve of soft power of any country in the world. A lot of people around the world want to be like the United States. They want to be Americans. They want to swim across oceans to come to the United States. No one is doing that to get to Russia, China, or to our geopolitical adversaries. It is very shortsighted to be chipping away at the institutions that give us that soft power.

KEVIN MALONEY: It will be very interesting to watch over the next year or two public opinion polls. Obviously as we know in the IR space soft power is almost a joke. It is very hard to measure, and everyone has an opinion when someone tries to measure it, but I think in the basic favorability polls especially in Western European countries it will be very interesting from traditional transatlantic allies to see what comes out of that data in the coming months and years.

PETER HARRIS: It is true in IR, in the academy, especially among self-described “realists,” many of whom are close friends of mine, the idea of soft power is often ridiculed. I am not in that camp. I think soft power is real. It is hard to measure; of course it is, but I think we know it when we see it, political and cultural attractiveness. Of course countries vary along that dimension. Some are more culturally attractive than others.

To me it is manifestly obvious that the United States’ cultural and political soft power is enormous, no matter who is in the White House. Again, just to refer to my recent experience on Semester at Sea, I don’t know how many other countries in the world where you could load up a cruise ship with 550 18-to-22-year-olds and send them around the world and they would be well-received to the degree that I saw.

People love America around the world; they really do. They love what it stands for. Of course they have issues with the U.S. government of the day, whoever is in charge, but American cultural power and the attractiveness of its Constitution and institutions I think is stronger than ever. We can lean into that. We could harness that to change the world for the better. I don’t think we are doing that, but we could harness that stuff better than we currently do.

KEVIN MALONEY: One of the things I am interested in, which is relational to soft power that you talk about in the book, are the narratives and the power of narratives that are being projected. Before we jumped on here, we talked a little bit about what is going on in the ecosystem, the narrative power that is going on right now versus policy and how people prioritize decision-making on narratives versus policy. I think that dynamic has changed significantly and is going to change I would say a lot more as we get more silo-ed and people pick their large language model universes and the web browser goes the way of the dodo to a certain extent. It will be interesting to watch.

Again, going back to your prescription for primacy, there has been a literal narrative occurrence in the past few weeks in terms of the Trump administration turning the Department of Defense into the Department of War. Secretary Hegseth was in the Oval Office and gave a justification for doing so. The line he gave was: “The department is going to focus on maximum lethality and not tepid legality and violent effect, not politically correct.”

There has been a lot that has come out in the last eight months, but those few words I thought captured the view of the administration on multilateral institutions, the moral shackles they see around things like international law. I want to get your reaction to that in terms of the visceral change of Defense to War and how that impacts your view moving forward and this primacy point.

PETER HARRIS: That kind of hawkish, internationalistic take will appeal to a lot of Americans. There is a constituency for that kind of narrative that will lap it up, but for people like me on the restrained side of things I think it also presents an opportunity. Let’s call it what it is, war, right? The Department of Defense in fact does not spend the trillion dollars a year that it now gets on strict national defense. That is not what is taking place. It is war; let’s call it that.

There are going to be constituencies in the United States that could be activated, or this could be explained to them: “Well, do you want to spend a trillion dollars on war? Do you want to spend a trillion dollars on maximum lethality?”

The Democrats, because they are the party out of power, but also people within the Republican Party and people in this wider civil society restraint movement should take this as an opportunity to say: “Thank you, you are calling it what it is. We are funding a war machine, and maybe we should spend less on that.”

In the book I cite an analysis by Ben Friedman and Justin Logan from about a decade ago. They were looking at how much money we would save if we retrenched from overseas military bases in a significant way. I updated their figures for inflation, and it is something $130 billion a year you could save just by cutting back on the overseas stuff, and that is enough to extend the child tax credits that we had during the COVID-19 pandemic and basically lifted almost every American child out of poverty.

If you are a politician worth your salt, I think you can ask, “Do you want to fund war or do you want to lift children out of poverty?” That is a starker contrast than between defense and child poverty. We could probably all agree that national defense is important, but war? Rhetorically I think this could end up being a kind of own goal.

KEVIN MALONEY: Very interesting point. It gives moral clarity to something that might have been seen originally as a tactical, stick-your-chest-out moment.

This has been a great discussion. I want to end with the opportunity, especially in the current moment, to look back at the book and maybe some of your future work. What was the one thing I didn’t touch on but you wish maybe I had asked, and we can close on that.

PETER HARRIS: I wrote the book under the Biden administration, and I did not expect that Trump would be reelected, to be totally honest, but he was reelected, and some things he is doing are inconsistent with what I argued for, and we talked about those, but some things are consistent in a way, things that I have to grapple with, like the defunding of the Wilson Center and the United States Institute for Peace (USIP). I called for not a defunding of those institutions but a more pluralistic kind of landscape in the think tank world.

I would have preferred for them to not be defunded, but maybe for their instruction to become more pluralistic or whatever, but there has definitely been a move toward changing the conversation on national security and foreign policy away from “How do we run the world,” which I think it has been for about 80 years, to “How do we serve our national interests?” I think the way the administration talks about some of these things is very crass and kind of blunt, but it is not wrong. There is some justification for it. The idea that overseas conflicts are not our fight is the kind of thing that sounds crass and sounds like, “Oh, you’re abandoning our allies and it doesn’t sound very American,” but for decades there has not been a limiting principle on what America’s fights are. Where does America’s national interest end?

I say this in the book. It has been almost entirely conflated with international stability. Madeleine Albright had “the indispensible nation” because we see farther than others, and it is almost like we have seen so far America’s national interest in every single corner of the world and every conflict to do with U.S. national security, and at least the administration is starting a conversation on what is a limiting principle: Where does America’s national security end? Where does the defensive perimeter end?

You can disagree with them on the language they use and we can all have different answers to that question, but we do have to have that conversation, and I am glad they are having it. I am glad that domestically, again, I think they handled the Wilson Center and the USIP very badly, I want to be clear about that, but we do need a more pluralistic conversation in Washington, DC. I am not sure the administration is moving in that direction, but what comes next is that we all need to think about how we can do that more responsibly. That’s what I would say.

KEVIN MALONEY: Very helpful. It is important to push on these things where multiple things can be true at once. There is value in systems changing or they die. There is value in having more of a pluralistic conversation around foreign policy, but that can be done in one manner or it can be done as a bull in a china shop. It is important to hold multiple truths at once, and I will go back to the old selfish plug that ethics is very helpful in removing it from a political frame and thinking about it and applying it in that way.

You have given me a lot to think about based on this conversation. I appreciate it, and thank you so much for joining us.

PETER HARRIS: Thank you. The pleasure is mine, and I am thrilled to be invited on.