By JOHN RICHARD SCHROCK
One country totally lacks a military! The Central American country of Costa Rica has not had a military since 1948. Their early history had armies and wars. Battles went back to the eventual overthrow of the Spanish empire in 1821. But after World War II was over, Costa Rica’s Defense Minister Edgar Cardona proposed abolishing the military and only maintaining a police force. This plan was taken to their constitutional assembly by Jose Figueres Ferrer. It was approved and amended their constitution in 1949.
Since then, the money that would have been spent on a military went into education, health care, and social security, providing a social stability that contrasts with the rest of Central America. For defense, their police force monitors their border and controls drug trafficking. A civilian guard can also be called upon to help in law enforcement. The attitude of always needing to fight enemies, the “military spirit” often common in other countries is absent in Costa Rica.
Switzerland has a long reputation for staying away from war. It does have an army with every young man trained from age 18 to 20. It is claimed that they can call up one-tenth of their population in case of an attack. If the United States had such a system, we could call up over 30 million! Yet the money spent on military in Switzerland was about 0.78 percent of their gross domestic product (GDP) in 2020. In contrast, according to Statista, the U.S. spends 3.7 percent of our GDP on our military. Total U.S. expenditures on military are greater than the next twelve countries combined. And we are the major exporter of weaponry. We never listened to President Eisenhower when he warned us of the “military industrial complex.”
In trips to China universities, I often watch their noon news broadcasts. A decade ago they indicated that they were beginning to cut their army in half, from two to one million. In natural disasters, their Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) has functioned similar to our National Guard, rescuing citizens during floods, earthquakes and other disasters. However, discharging that many men could cause unemployment, so the drawdown has been gradual. New civilian fire and rescue teams have been built in part from ex-soldiers, while the remaining PLA is being modernized. Yet China only spends about 1.7 percent of its GDP on military, a figure that has remained constant for nearly three decades.
While China has one overseas base to equip their ships that help in the international patrols against piracy, the United States has well over 800 foreign military bases. And American attempts at nation building have been disastrous in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
But for the last decade, China has provided extensive aid to most countries in Africa as well as the array of central Asian countries extending from China to Europe (their “Belt and Road Initiative”) and has never interfered in those countries’ affairs. China’s formal policy of non-interference, written into treaties, recognizes that each country must evolve on its own from its prior history and culture.
Talk has begun again of a return to the “Cold War” or the possibility of a World War III. We are not Costa Rica or Switzerland. But we would be wise to remember that the former Cold War never became hot, thanks to a brilliant foreign service officer, George Keenan. He was the man behind the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, and Eisenhower's foreign policy.
Kennan explained how our foreign policy really depends on our national strength and not military spirit. “National strength is a question of our internal strength, of the health and sanity of our own society.” He felt that “America could not and should not attempt to tell other people how they should live their lives--Americans’ moral responsibility was for their own lives.” The only way we could influence others was by example, not by preaching or coercion. He found American “exceptionalism” to be dangerous and warned against going on crusades to save the non-democratic world.
When asked how best to counter the Soviet threat, he replied that we had to take care of “...our American failings, to the racial problem, to the conditions in our big cities, to the education and environment of our young people, to the growing gap between specialized knowledge and popular understanding.” In 1952, he wrote in the New York Times: “Let us not attempt to constitute ourselves the guardians of everyone else’s virtue; we have enough trouble to guard our own.”
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John Richard Schrock has trained biology teachers for more than 30 years in Kansas. He also has lectured at 27 universities during 20 trips to China. He holds the distinction of “Faculty Emeritus” at Emporia State University.