Defense spending and the deficit
In an October 2010 episode, Gary Johnson told Bob Zadek that 43 cents out of every dollar the government was spending was borrowed, and that government would have to be cut by 43% merely to balance revenues with expenditures. Johnson said he believed in a strong national defense and called it an obligation of government, and he argued that the country could provide one without cutting defense — by cutting what he described as defense for the rest of the world. He said the United States was spending more on the military than all other countries in the world combined, and that in Iraq and Afghanistan it was building roads, schools, bridges, highways and hospitals while American men and women were dying in Afghanistan. A Better America (2010)
Johnson put the number of troops in Europe at 100,000 and said he did not understand it; he also said there were, by his recollection, 50,000 troops in Japan, and noted that Japan’s Prime Minister had run for office wanting the United States out of Japan. Zadek characterized the arrangement as welfare payments to Western Europe and Asia. Johnson distinguished foreign aid, which he opposed, from military alliances, which he said serve American interests, security and safety, while arguing that in 2010 there was a new world reality: the country could not pay to defend the rest of the world. A Better America (2010)
Zadek invoked Thomas Jefferson’s view that it was immoral for one generation to bind another to any law or any debt, and his proposal that every law sunset after 20 years. Applying that to the troops, Zadek asked whether a Secretary of Defense would recommend sending 100,000 troops to Germany in October 2010; answering his own question, he said of course not, and concluded that if the troops would not be sent ab initio, they should be brought home. He said NATO was formed as a defense against the USSR, which had gone, and that even NATO could not be defended because the enemy it was formed against no longer existed. He also noted that the cabinet position was originally called the Department of War and was changed, he thought in the ’50s, to Department of Defense, and argued that the department was being used to declare war rather than for defense. A Better America (2010)
Asked how much could be saved by withdrawing from Afghanistan and Iraq and by pulling out what Zadek called the stealth troops in Germany, Italy and Japan, Johnson said the low-hanging fruit amounted to hundreds of billions of dollars, and that against an $800 billion budget that was potentially 25% of it. He said that still would not go far enough, repeating that without a 43% cut the country would not balance revenues with expenditures. He listed Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security and defense as the big four, with interest on the debt at number five, and warned that if interest rates rose by a couple of percentage points, the interest expenditure would double to half a trillion dollars from its current $250 billion. A Better America (2010)
Afghanistan and the nation-building budget
Jonathan Bydlak, in a January 2020 episode, said that in the last 18 to 19 years the United States had spent nearly two and a half trillion dollars in Afghanistan. He said that figure included not just the direct costs of fighting but disability and healthcare for veterans, which continue after a conflict ends, and the replacement of worn-out or destroyed equipment, costs he said had made it more difficult to have a strong national defense. He argued that what was being discussed was not really the defense budget but the nation-building budget or the offensive budget. Rethinking Afghanistan with Jonathan Bydlak (2020)
Bydlak said the initial objective in Afghanistan — striking back at those who struck the United States on 9/11 — had been accomplished, but that the mission had morphed into something completely different, and that supporters of the 2001 conflict would not have supported what Afghanistan turned into. He cited the National Defense Strategy, which he said identifies interstate competition rather than terrorism as the biggest concern in the current geopolitical world, and said Afghanistan does not fit the challenges the military itself identifies. On those fiscal and strategic grounds he favored rethinking the American role and working toward drawing down and ultimately leaving. Rethinking Afghanistan with Jonathan Bydlak (2020)
Asked for the real-dollar cost, Bydlak said that of all overseas spending since 2001, roughly 47% had been in Afghanistan and a little in Pakistan associated with that conflict. He listed the components: the direct cost of fighting, an increased base budget, interest on borrowing, increased Homeland Security spending, and medical and disability costs for veterans that grow the longer the United States stays. He put the direct costs in Afghanistan at roughly two trillion dollars, and when he began to add the other obligations, Zadek interrupted to ask him to say the figure again slowly, with emphasis on the “T,” and to give a sense of what else in the budget the money could have purchased over the 18-plus years. Rethinking Afghanistan with Jonathan Bydlak (2020)
National security as cover for industrial policy
In a May 2022 episode, Zadek described a principle of industrial policy — one he associated with Donald Trump — under which dependence on potential enemies is said to make the country vulnerable from a national defense standpoint, whether the dependence is on steel from China or third-world countries or on oil from Saudi Arabia. He called this political cover for what he called the “Buy American” policy, which he said Trump advocated strenuously and Biden also embraced, and asked Scott Lincicome to address the fallacy of “Buy American” as a cornerstone of industrial policy. Rethinking Industrial Policy (2022)
Lincicome said “Buy American” laws have been around for about a century or more, giving the example that building a highway with federal dollars requires American steel. He acknowledged that even Milton Friedman and Adam Smith allowed exceptions to free trade principles for national security, in times of war or when it comes to national defense, but said that in practice the government’s national security excuse turns out to be bogus. In the steel industry, he said, the industry sought tariffs when it had about 70% market share in the United States and solid financials, with a downturn attributable to the global market and the collapse of oil prices around 2015. He said Trump’s own Secretary of Defense, Jim Mattis, wrote a letter stating that the Defense Department needed only 3% of all US steel production for national defense and did not need global tariffs, and that Trump ignored it and imposed them. Rethinking Industrial Policy (2022)
Lincicome argued that trade bolsters national security rather than undermining it, beyond very narrow exceptions such as not buying all of the country’s tanks from China. He said studies show countries that trade together typically do not go to war with each other, and that nations able to trade peacefully do not have to invade to obtain natural resources or wealth. He also argued that diversity of supply increases national security during economic shocks, citing the baby formula market: a tariff and regulatory wall leaves US manufacturers with about 98% of sales in the United States, so a recall at a manufacturing facility in Michigan left store shelves empty with no alternative suppliers. Rethinking Industrial Policy (2022)
On prices, Lincicome said tariffs raise prices in the United States and harm consumers, and that the steel tariffs imposed major costs on American manufacturers and downstream consumers. Beyond the direct cost, he described unseen costs and deadweight loss: money that would have been saved on a Chinese t-shirt or European steel and spent on services, saved for college or invested instead goes to paying more for the same goods, slowing economic dynamism, innovation and living standards. He said protected industries do not become lean, innovative competitors but costly, bloated and uncompetitive entities that lobby for more tariffs when tariffs or subsidies go away, and he contrasted American automobiles of the late 1970s and early 1980s with those of the present, crediting Japanese, German and Korean competition with forcing the Big Three to improve. Rethinking Industrial Policy (2022)
Zadek framed the issue as one of economic freedom: he said he wanted to buy a Chinese t-shirt and should not be prohibited from doing so, that he is capable of deciding the best use of his dollar, and that “Buy American” is a wealth transfer from all consumers, a little from each, to a union member or a favored industry. Lincicome agreed, and Zadek closed the hour by saying industrial policy deprives people of their economic right to vote. Rethinking Industrial Policy (2022)
Across episodes: what changed
The three episodes approach national defense from different directions rather than developing one argument. In 2010 Johnson and Zadek argued for cutting standing forces in Europe and Japan and questioned NATO’s purpose after the disappearance of the USSR; in 2020 Bydlak argued for leaving Afghanistan on fiscal and strategic grounds, citing the National Defense Strategy’s focus on interstate competition; in 2022 Lincicome argued that national security justifications for tariffs and “Buy American” are bogus and that trade and diverse supply bolster security. The later treatments shift from alliances and occupations to trade policy, and each is advanced by a different guest, with no excerpt showing one guest responding to another.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state the size of any country’s defense budget beyond the $800 billion figure Johnson cited, nor the current number of troops stationed anywhere. They do not give the text or holding of any statute or case, the name of any bill, or the amendment any measure turned on. They do not say when NATO was founded, when the Department of War was renamed, or whether the renaming date Zadek offered is correct. Where Bydlak’s sentence about adding other obligations to the two trillion dollars breaks off, the total he would have given is not stated.