All Things To All Nations

"The reality is that the United States military alone cannot be all things to all nations. We will sharpen the application of our resources. Better deploy our forces in the world. And share our burdens more and more effectively with our partners. And frankly, all our allies need to do the same." U.S. Defence Secretary Leon Panetta

The Halifax conference on international security has drawn a veritable who's who of international military and security officials representing 39 countries, to discuss a range of topics revolving around international security. Conventionally, traditionally, since the Second World War, the United States pulled itself out of its isolationist state to become what many consider to be the global policeman.

America was both fulsomely praised and depended upon for what it represented through its ongoing military interventions throughout the world. And it was also, in many of the same quarters, derided and mocked for its choices of military missions, for many of them appeared to lack integrity and seemed to be pursued for no fundamentally sound reason other than to carry that big stick.

U.S. troops were sent to the far corners of the world on military missions that struck their commander-chief at the time as needful of American intervention to solve various crises. Most of these perceived crises in one way or another directly impacted on American self-interests. Many of the interventions had a distinctly humanitarian flavour, some did not, and were clearly taken out of a self-interested-bully perspective.

But the world did become a more secure place as a result of that big stick that the American military with its large standing army and advanced military machine was possessed of.

Just as the United States struck the final winning blows in the Second World War conflict, so too did it in many other conflicts, most of them seen as 'just' wars, though not all were. At a time when the world was divided into the Western sphere of influence and the Soviet Union's the U.S. became involved in places far from home in an effort to halt the tide of global communism.

With the fall of the Soviet Union, the attention has turned from political ideologies to securing global energy stocks, and the security of international trade and finance.

And then, another type of conflict, one that combined religious-political ideologies with energy security took over the landscape of global conflict. Whatever the reason and the season, the United States stood first and foremost with its presence, giving the rest of the world an implied assurance they need not unduly trouble themselves.

And that state of affairs more or less remained a constant until the last decade.

When the U.S. through its NATO and UN membership began to look around at its friends and allies to realize that they were pulling proportionately too much weight and treasury. All the more so when the state of its economy became ever more frail as a result of its prosecution of wars, some explicable, some not, that also included allies whose co-operation was moderate-to-negligible.

In the most recent conflict, where NATO allies under the aegis of a UN resolution and sanctions saw the U.S. withdraw its active missions after its initially effective interventions, leaving the mission to France, Britain and Canada to mostly pursue, it was a deliberate action to hand over the bulk of the mission responsibility elsewhere, by a tired and financially strained administration.

"The reality is that the United States military alone cannot be all things to all nations. As we in the United States confront the fiscal realities of limited resources, we believe that we have the opportunity to establish a force for the future that, while smaller, is agile, flexible, deployable and technologically equipped to confront the threats of the future..

"We will sharpen the application of our resources. Better deploy our forces in the world. And share our burdens more and more effectively with our partners. And frankly, all our allies need to do the same." Leon Panetta