College Professors Want to Cut the Defense Budget

Academics are upset that they don’t get as many chances as they would like to contribute to U. S. foreign policy. Maybe that’s a good thing.

On the one hand, most of them opposed the Iraq War, at least after the fact, Benjamin H. Friedman and Justin Logan show in an essay which appeared in the Winter 2016 issue of Strategic Studies Quarterly.

On the other, “A 2004-2005 survey of international relations scholars asked, ‘Do you think that the United States should increase its spending on national defense, keep it about the same, or cut it back?’ Just short of half—49 percent—answered, ‘Cut,’ while 41 percent chose, ‘Keep same.’ Only 10 percent answered, ‘Increase.’”

“When the researchers asked the question again in 2008-2009, 64 percent said, ‘Cut’ and 30 percent chose, ‘Keep the same’; this time, only 6 percent called for an increase.”

Logan is the former director of Foreign Policy Studies at the Cato Institute. Friedman, a research fellow in defense and homeland security studies at Cato, also serves as an adjunct lecturer at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs.

He also takes a rather jaundiced view of U. S. military alliances. At a panel discussion at Cato on March 21, 2017, Friedman questioned whether the European Union would be more popular if NATO did not exist.

The question seems to presume that the EU has some merit in and of itself. Last year, Great Britain decided that it didn’t.

Photo by sjrankin

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