I am usually disconcerted when asked which of several things is “the single best.” I can think of no reason to rate any section of the financial reform bill as the “most significant,” nor to choose among opportunities for immodesty by describing “my proudest” legislative moment. But I am eager to volunteer that the single most important issue now facing the country is determining the appropriate level for our national defense budget.

There are two reasons for this choice. Most obvious is protecting our national security against those who would harm us is a clear responsibility. But equally important, resisting the pressure to overspend in this area is the prerequisite for our being able to take constructive action to deal with all of the other problems that challenge America today.

Given the economic, social and political context in which we are likely to live for the foreseeable future, we must come to a more balanced assessment of the global problems that actually confront us, of what we must do to respond to those who genuinely threaten us and of what we choose to do to fulfill whatever obligations we decide we have to come to the aid of others in the world – by helping them combat disease, by diminishing poverty, by liberating them from tyranny and by acting as the guarantor of regional stability.

My differences with Michael Smith, whose guest editorial in the June 28 Maine Sunday Telegram argues that my views endanger our national security, center on this crucial distinction. Specifically, I believe that he – like many others, most prominently Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham – conflates the two sets of issues. When the question is protecting ourselves against those who are both eager to do us significant harm and – a point too often glossed over – capable of doing so, we must spend whatever is necessary, building in a considerable margin of error.

That is not at issue in today’s debate over how large a military establishment we need or how we should deploy it around the world. Neither I nor my ideological allies advocate losing the large qualitative and quantitative advantage the United States enjoys against any conceivable combination of enemies. No one I know of in Congress supports cutting our defense budget to anywhere near the level of any other nation. Indeed, I have argued for the indefinite continuation of a figure larger than China and Russia combined.

Similarly, the decision to go to war in Afghanistan to put an end to Osama bin Laden’s use of that country as a base from which to attack us received every vote in the Senate and all but one in the House, including mine. And I support the use of targeted force – including drones, properly deployed – to kill terrorists.

What I specifically objected to in the article to which Mr. Smith responds is spending well over $100 billion as a year – far beyond what is necessary for these purposes – so that we can maintain armed forces capable of intervening physically across the globe, not for self-defense even in the broadest definition, but to fulfill a vaguely defined role as the protector of order virtually everywhere.

Mr. Smith correctly describes Winston Churchill’s heroic insistence that England arm itself against the existential threat it faced from Adolf Hitler. But he engages in bait-and-switch history to invoke Churchill’s efforts in an implicit argument for using American troops to end fighting between Shia and Sunni in Iraq, to bring order to the chaos in Syria or to create a stable society in Afghanistan. Even less is Churchill’s example relevant to the commitment of our armed forces to every other place in the world where fighting breaks out between regional rivals.

There are two reasons to restrain ourselves from this self-imposed task. First, it is enormously expensive. Second, even at great cost in money and manpower, most of these goals are beyond our capacity to achieve. We have the best military the world has ever seen, and it is very good at war. Neither that military nor any other outside force can intervene in deeply troubled societies, fractured by mutual hatreds, and bring about peace.

There is an excellent historical example to inform this debate, and it is far closer in time and relevance than England in 1938: the war in Iraq, undertaken in pursuit of our mission to enforce order in the absence of any threat to our legitimate interests. We have not yet recovered from it.

If we forget this terrible error and its severely negative consequences and continue to pay for the level of military force necessary to try something like this again, on the same rationale, we will pay an even greater price. With the American people opposed to any significant increase in federal taxation, our national budget cannot support this level of Pentagon spending without painful reductions in every other expenditure category.

We can as a country decide that our national duty requires constituting our military as the global maintainer of order and stability. But we should understand that if we do, we will lack the resources to improve the quality of our health care, diminish excessive inequality, build and maintain an infrastructure adequate for us to realize our full productive potential, decouple access to higher education from economic status, put decent, affordable housing within the reach and in other ways improve the quality of our lives.

Barney Frank is a retired congressman and the author of landmark legislation. He divides his time between Maine and Massachusetts.

Twitter: BarneyFrank

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