Plenty Of Enemies

The primary foreign policy objective of the United States for most of my lifetime was to prevent and contain the spread of communism around the world.

This was based on the fundamental principle that people should have as much freedom to conduct their lives as they wished and government should have a limited role in the ownership of property and controlling the means of production.

Hindering the growth of collectivism around the world where the government determined the needs of each citizen and redistributed income and wealth as it saw fit.

In a communist society the people are subservient to the government and dependent on it for all things in order to meet the goal of being a classless society in which there is no economic inequality. Collectivism is seen as the ideal state in that the government determines the needs of each citizen and redistributes income and wealth as it sees fit.

Communism was viewed as in direct contravention of the foundational principles of the United States---both democracy and capitalism---which was seen as not only a threat to the United States but also to the world at large.

Preventing the spread of communism from the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc of Europe was the major reason for the creation of NATO.

Over the 75 years of NATO's existence the United States spent trillions of dollars on Europe's defense to deter the further the spread of communist ideology westward from the Soviet Union.

In the Cold War era, as many as 500,000 U.S, military personnel were based in Europe as part of the NATO force. Recently, those numbers have been in the range of 100,000 to provide for the defense against aggression from Russia.

The United States entered the Vietnam War to defend South Vietnam from the communists from North Vietnam and to prevent the spread of communism to other Asian countries.

That conflict cost the lives of 58,220 Americans which are now memorialized on a wall in Washington, D.C.

In recent years we have had to increase defense spending to meet the emergence of the global ambitions of Chinese communists and their provocative actions in the South China Sea and elsewhere.

Source: https://saisreview.sais.jhu.edu/a-calm-before-the-storm-south-china-sea-powder-keg/

I recount this history as context for the following graphic that I recently came across that compares the amount of public spending as a % of total GDP for various countries.

Here is a broader look at the data as compiled by a Dutch site.

Notice that most of the Western European countries have public spending approaching or exceeding 50% of GDP.

Credit: https://x.com/RubenWizard88/status/2053203110298833305

What is incredible about the data is that the so-called Communist countries have lower percentages of public spending than what are supposed to be those nations dedicated to freedom, democracy and capitalism.

Vietnam, who we lost much blood and treasure to save from communism, is spending only about half as much on public spending as the United States.

Communist China also spends a lower percentage on government spending than the United States does.

France spends more on public spending today than the Soviet Union did  at the height of the communist Soviet Union in 1990 before it collapsed in 1991 along with its Eastern bloc countries such as Poland

Today the United States share of public spending as a % of the GDP is actually higher than Russia.

Russia's public spending was at 36.9% of GDP in 2024 compared to 37.6% in the United States.

At the same time, Europe's share of public spending as a % of GDP averages 10 points higher than Russia today.

This all occurred while we were supposedly defending Europe from the evils of collectivism.

We didn't want them to be taken over by the Soviet Union.

Instead, they largely did it to themselves.

The further irony in all of this is that while United States foreign policy was opposing communism around the world, its own domestic policy moved further and further to the left.

The United States has suffered far less from communist aggression than it has from self-inflicted wounds from socialist and leftist policies within our own body politic.

There is almost no sphere of life that government interference, spending and control has not become more entrenched in the United States than it was 75 years ago.

We did to ourselves what no foreign adversary could so to us.

You would think that there has never been a real life example of taking a country with the same people and dividing them into two parts to see which system works better---one dedicated to democracy, free enterprise and capitalism and another to central governmental control and collectivism.

Has anyone heard about Korea and Germany?

Same people. Same language. Same historical culture. 

They chose different economic and political systems from what once was a single country.

Korea.

Germany.

Could it be any clearer?

All of this also shows that the biggest dangers we face are almost always greater within our gates than on outside.

This was observation that Cicero also made over 2,000 years ago in speaking about what was then the Roman republic.

"The enemy is within the gates; it is with our own luxury, our own folly, our own criminality that we have to contend." ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

Some lessons seems to be particularly hard to learn and remember.