A moral world requires moral violence

From the files of Jeff Jacoby at The Boston Globe

Pope Francis had harsh words for the arms industry on Sunday, condemning as "two-faced" those who claim to be Christian while manufacturing weapons or investing in companies that produce them. "It is hypocritical to talk about peace and make weapons," the pope told an audience of young people in Turin. "Doing one thing and saying another. What hypocrisy!"

It's not the first time Francis has blasted the defense industry. In May, he denounced the arms business as an "industry of death," run by people who "don't want peace" because "they make more money from war." In February, he labeled weapons dealers "merchants of death" and blamed them for "furthering a cycle of hate, fratricide, and violence."

So sweeping a calumny would be unworthy coming from anyone; from a moral teacher as prominent as the Bishop of Rome, it is inexcusable. Of course there are hypocrites and charlatans in the arms trade, just as there are hypocrites and charlatans in all professions. But to smear everyone in the weapons business as unethical and anti-peace is sheer demagoguery.

I wouldn't presume to instruct the pope in theology, but if Francis really means to execrate any commerce in weapons, he goes farther than even Jesus did. "Let him who has a purse take it and also a bag," Jesus instructs his apostles in the Gospel of Luke, "and let him who has no sword sell his garment and buy one." In both the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox traditions, Saint Adrian of Nicomedia has long been honored as the patron saint of arms dealers. There is room for good Christians, the church seems to believe, even in the weapons business.

And would the pope want it any other way? Would the world be better off if the industries that make weapons, ammunition, and military equipment didn't employ men and women who aspire to live ethically? The Vatican itself is defended by a military force — the Swiss Guard — that is well-supplied with sophisticated firepower, including assault rifles and submachine guns. When Francis slams weapons-makers and firearms-sellers as "hypocrites" and "merchants of death," does he include those who provide the guns that keep him and the papal offices safe?

In Isaiah's messianic vision of a world in which universal peace and goodness reigns, human beings will "beat their swords into plowshares / And their spears into pruning hooks." But until that utopia arrives, there is nothing moral about pacifism. In the here and now, evil exists and the decent must fight it. And unless they are to fight unarmed, they will need the tools of violence.

In both the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox
traditions, Saint Adrian of Nicomedia is revered
as the patron saint of arms dealers.

The pope knows only too well what happens when good people — or good nations — aren't willing to fight the world's monsters with every available weapon.

At the very same rally in Turin in which he excoriated those who make and sell munitions, Francis retroactively decried the failure of the Western democracies to do more to stop the Nazi genocide and Stalin's terror. "The great powers had photographs of the railway routes that brought the trains to the concentration camps like Auschwitz to kill Jews, Christians, Roma, homosexuals, everybody," he said. "Tell me, then: Why did they not bomb them?"

Does the pontiff hear his own words? He laments the failure to bomb the rail lines and save millions of lives. Who would have made those bombs? Who would have made the bombers to deliver them? Who made the guns and tanks and missiles that did, in the end, defeat Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan? Who supplied the arms that ended the slave trade and eradicated piracy? Were all of them conniving merchants of death?

No, Pope Francis, it is not hypocritical to talk about peace and make weapons. For if the peaceable cannot defend themselves, they will have no peace. "Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition," Americans sang during World War II. A moral world requires moral violence, and the wisdom to know when to use it.

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Hostages freedom should trump nuclear deal

From the files of Jeff Jacoby at The Boston Globe

The Washington Post's Tehran bureau chief, Jason Rezaian, is being tried in
Iran on bogus espionage charges.

In his remarks to the White House Correspondents' Dinner in April, President Obama pledged that his administration would work tirelessly for the freedom of Jason Rezaian, the Washington Post reporter who has been held hostage by Iran since last summer on spurious espionage charges.

"Jason has been in prison for nothing more than writing about the hopes and fears of the Iranian people," Obama said. "We will not rest until we bring him home to his family, safe and sound."

Yet just four days later, the president warned Congress that he would veto any bill making approval of a nuclear deal with Iran contingent on the release of Americans in Iranian captivity. Obama may want the mullahs to set their US hostages free. But he wants that nuclear deal more.

On Monday, Obama boasted to a gathering of young Southeast Asian leaders that as a result of his policies, "today, once again, the United States is the most respected country on earth." Could anyone swallow such a risible claim without, as Hillary Clinton might put it, the willing suspension of disbelief?

It's hard to think of any nation on the planet that holds America in higher esteem because of the Obama presidency. Iran surely doesn't. Time and again, the White House has bent over backward to "engage" the Islamist regime in Tehran. At every step its overtures have been greeted with scorn.

The seizure of innocent Americans like Rezaian — whose trial, in a closed courtroom, began last week — fits a pattern of hostility that seven years of outreach and indulgence by the Obama administration has failed to soften.

"We will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist," entreated the president in his first inaugural address. But Iran's theocratic leaders have not unclenched their fists, not even when it would appear to be in their interest to do so.

The nuclear accord being pushed so fervently by Obama and John Kerry would be a dream come true for the Islamic Republic's rulers — generating tens of billions of dollars in sanctions relief, legitimizing their eventual path to the bomb, and entrenching Iran's malignant regional hegemony.

Yet hungry as they are for this deal, they know that Obama is hungrier still. No provocation, no act of aggression, no insult by Iran has been enough to make the White House walk away from the negotiations.

Rezaian isn't the only US hostage in Iranian hands. Saeed Abedini, 35, is a Christian pastor from Idaho who was arrested in 2012 while on a humanitarian trip to Iran to help establish an orphanage. He was convicted in 2013 "undermining the national security of Iran" and sentenced to eight years in prison.

American pastor Saeed Abedini, seen here with his two young children, has been
held in Iran since 2012. He was sentenced to eight years imprisonment on
charges of undermining national security through worship gatherings
held in private Christian homes.

Amir Hekmati, a decorated U.S. Marine, was born in Arizona and raised in Michigan. He was seized in 2011 while visiting his grandmother in Iran, accused of spying, and sentenced to death (a sentence later commuted pending a retrial). Robert Levinson, a former FBI agent, vanished during a trip to Iran in 2007. Iran's state-run media reported at the time that he was in the hands of the security services, making him one of the longest-held US hostages ever.

The brazen detention of American citizens is an outrage. The refusal of the White House to call a halt to negotiations until the men are released is a humiliation. Iran has an odious history of abducting guiltless Americans, then using them as bargaining chips to trade for some concession from Washington.

You'd think Washington would have learned by now that ransoming hostages only reinforces the incentive to seize more hostages in the future.

It is mind-boggling that the president would threaten to veto a measure making the freedom of the four US citizens the price of any more nuclear talks. Can Obama truly believe that this is the way to make America "the most respected country on earth"?

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Patriot Act: Most controversial section fades

From the files of Jeff Jacoby at The Boston Globe

Headquarters of the National Security Agency in 

Fort Meade, Md. Relying on Section 215 of the 

Patriot Act, the NSA has amassed 'metadata' 

on tens of millions of Americans' phone calls.

Section 215 of the Patriot Act will not survive another month. The most controversial piece of the post 9/11 law that broadly expanded the federal government's surveillance powers is set to expire on June 1, as the House of Representatives gave its overwhelming approval to a far less sweeping replacement.

On a 338-to-88 vote, Republicans and Democrats registered broad support for the USA Freedom Act, which will end the National Security Agency's bulk collection of "metadata" from millions of Americans' phone records.

The legislation faces some opposition in the Senate, where Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is pushing to extend the Patriot Act with no changes. That won't happen. Other Republican senators, including at least two who are running for president, want Section 215 scrapped or curtailed, and the political tides are with them.

Some ardent civil libertarians opposed the Patriot Act from the outset, insisting, somewhat wildly, that it would leave the Bill of Rights in tatters and turn the president into a dictator. Most Americans knew better.

In the wake of the terrorist attacks, it seemed only prudent to expand the government's counterintelligence capabilities, and to change the rules that had prevented investigators from "connecting the dots" that could have alerted them to the jihadists' plans.

The hysterical alarms about dissenters being rounded up and America turning into a fascist police state gained little traction. For all the controversy they fueled, the law's key provisions — including Section 215 — were extended in 2005, 2010, and 2011.

But as September 11 recedes, the pendulum has shifted from the single-minded focus on counterterrorism and toward a heightened concern with civil liberties.

That shift has been accelerated by Edward Snowden's 2013 revelation of the NSA's metadata program: Until his leaks, almost no one knew that the government was amassing records of nearly every phone call made in the United States — date, time, duration, and number called.

The NSA claims its dragnet surveillance is allowed under Section 215. Yet no less an authority than the Patriot Act's principal author, Representative James Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin, has denounced the government's interpretation as abusive.

This month a federal appeals court agreed. The NSA's view of the law was "unprecedented and unwarranted," ruled a panel of the US Second Circuit Court in New York. It raises the "potential for invasions of privacy unimaginable in the past," and could not possibly have been what Congress intended.

It wasn't. And Congress isn't about to authorize such sweeps retroactively — one more reason that Section 215 and other parts of the law are being explicitly reined in.

Lawmakers made a point of building sunset clauses into the Patriot Act when they first enacted it a few weeks after 9/11. They knew they were moving quickly, that the enemy's tactics were apt to change over time, and that the war on terrorism, like all wars, would take a toll on truth and civil society.

To their credit, they understood that what might seem a wise and necessary enlargement of federal license in the early throes of a crisis might look like dangerous overreach just a few years down the road.

Despite the controversy generated by post-9/11 

surveillance under the Patriot Act, there has been 

nothing like the gross infringements on civil liberties 

during earlier crises, such as the roundup of Japanese 

Americans after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

"The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield, and government to gain ground," Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1788. It was true in the 18th century; it is even truer in the 21st, when the government has access to technology of mind-boggling scope and power.

By putting expiration dates on the Patriot Act's new surveillance and counterintelligence tools, Congress ensured that debate must continue, and that the balance between safety and freedom could always be recalibrated.

Finding that point of equilibrium is perhaps the thorniest challenge any free nation faces. The preamble to the Constitution juxtaposes the need to "insure domestic tranquility [and] provide for the common defense" with an obligation to "secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity." The tension between individual freedom and national security is as old as the American republic.

Yet over time, the pull of freedom has predominated. Even the harshest critics of the Patriot Act would have to agree that by historical standards, the law's infringements were minor.

Compared with the repressions of the Alien and Sedition Acts, the internment of Japanese-Americans after Pearl Harbor, the Palmer raids of 1920, or the suspension of habeas corpus during the Lincoln administration, the burdens of the Patriot Act have been relatively slight.

Now, even those slight burdens are deemed too costly. Americans may sometimes yield their freedoms, but they don't do so for long.

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When U.S. troops leave too soon

From the files of Jeff Jacoby at The Boston Globe

Desperate civilians try to board an American plane out of Saigon, April 1975.
Millions of victims would lose their lives or their freedom after South Vietnam
 and Cambodia fell to the communists.

Last month marked the 40th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, a moment vividly encapsulated by the frenzied scene of South Vietnamese desperately trying to reach the last helicopter on the roof of the American embassy. April was also the 150th anniversary of the surrender at Appomattox, when Robert E. Lee capitulated to Ulysses S. Grant, bringing the bloodiest fighting of the Civil War to an end.

The two episodes seemingly have little to do with each other. But each, in its way, illustrates one of the bleakly recurring themes of US military history: When America's armed forces prematurely abandon the field, the results are usually heartbreaking for the people they leave behind.

The Vietnam experience makes the point with aching sorrow. By 1972, the US war against the North Vietnamese communists was being won on the ground; it was lost in Congress and at the Paris peace talks under the political pressure of the antiwar movement.

The United States pulled its fighting troops from Vietnam in 1973, then refused to provide its South Vietnamese allies with the economic and military aid they needed to resist Hanoi's onslaught. As disaster loomed, President Ford implored Congress not to turn a blind eye to the "vast human tragedy" about to engulf "our friends in Vietnam and Cambodia."

But hostile lawmakers refused to heed Ford's pleas, and 40 years ago this spring the communists swept to power. What ensued was horrific. "Millions of people lost their lives and tens of millions lost any chance at freedom," Robert F. Turner, co-founder of the Center for National Security Law at the University of Virginia, recalled in a recent essay.

In Cambodia, the fanatical Khmer Rouge slaughtered an estimated 1.7 million men, women, and children. In neighboring South Vietnam, there were hundreds of thousands of additional victims — frantic "boat people" trying to escape by sea, inmates tortured in re-education camps, innumerable others summarily executed or "disappeared."

To the shock of at least some former antiwar activists, more people died in the first two years of Indochina's communist peace than had lost their lives in the 13 years of America's war. Even now Vietnam remains a communist dictatorship, one of the least free places on earth.

When US forces settle in for a long peace after fighting a difficult war — as in (West) Germany and Japan following World War II, or South Korea since the 1950s — their presence has generally nurtured stability, prosperity, and democratic freedoms. When they retreat precipitately — as in Lebanon or Iraq — renewed cruelty and violence predictably fill the vacuum.

And it isn't only overseas that the pattern has been manifested.

In a striking new book, After Appomattox, historian Gregory Downs chronicles the years of military occupation that followed Lee's surrender to Grant in 1865 — a military occupation that was indispensable to the uprooting of slavery and the political empowerment of freed slaves.

In the face of Southern white supremacist hostility, it was only the continuing presence of federal troops in the South that could break up remaining pockets of rebellion, establish the right of blacks to vote and seek election, void discriminatory laws, and unilaterally remove disloyal or racist sheriffs and judges from office.

But there were far too few troops to do the job properly. With the end of battlefield fighting, pressure to "bring the boys home" was intense. By the end of 1866, fewer than 25,000 troops remained in the South — down from nearly 1 million at the time Lee surrendered. Meanwhile, a violent white insurgency was spreading, led by a Democratic Party terror group called the Ku Klux Klan. These insurgents "spread across the South," Downs writes, "assassinating Republican leaders and intimidating black voters."

Contrary to popular belief, Gen. Lee's surrender at Appomattox Court House didn't end the
 Civil War. Though battlefield clashes ceased, several years of military
occupation were to follow.

Where the US military held sway, Reconstruction legislatures made remarkable gains — funding schools and hospitals, reforming property and marriage laws, making possible the election to office of more than 1,500 black candidates. But those gains were swept away as it became clear that Washington would not deploy the troops necessary to crush the Klan terror.

Public support for continuing the occupation evaporated. By the late 1870s, the troops were effectively gone. Southern Democrats moved ruthlessly to roll back the astonishing progress in black civil rights; in its place they imposed poll taxes, literacy tests, and racial segregation. "Without the fear of federal [military] power," recounts Downs, "a new and bleak era of Jim Crow was dawning."

Military occupation and the prolonged exercise of war powers go against the American grain. The urge to "declare peace and get out" is only too understandable. This season of anniversaries is a reminder that yielding to that urge can come at a terrible price, above all to those who remain after the US military is gone.

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Does Tehran mean what it says? Oh Yes

From the files of Jeff Jacoby at The Boston Globe

Who trusts Iran? Most Americans don't. According to two new polls, a majority of the public strongly doubts that the ruling theocrats in Tehran can be counted on to keep their end of any nuclear deal negotiated in the US-led "P5+1" talks in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Asked in a Fox News poll how much of Iran's claims on nuclear matters can be trusted, 55 percent of respondents replied that the United States "can't trust anything" the regime says, while 28 percent were willing to trust only "a little." Similarly, a survey by NBC News found that 68 percent of Americans consider Iran unlikely to abide by any nuclear agreement.

Nothing unusual there. Given Iran's long history of deceit, it would be strange if Americans and their allies didn't regard as worthless any nuclear promises the mullahs make.

Iran was an early signatory to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in 1970 and it signed a detailed safeguards agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency in 1974. But after the Ayatollah Khomeini and his followers seized power in 1979, Iran began lying about its nuclear activities.

Virtually everything we know about Iran's nuclear program was uncovered only after years of stonewalling, concealment, and outright denial. The construction of a vast uranium enrichment installation near Natanz and a heavy-water reactor in Arak, for example, didn't come to light until 2002, when an Iranian exile group exposed their existence in a press conference in Washington.

Iran has repeatedly flouted UN Security Council resolutions ordering it to suspend all enrichment-related activities. Even now, reports the IAEA, Tehran refuses to answer questions about the "possible military dimensions" of its nuclear activities.

With such a track record, it stands to reason that Iran's commitments are so widely regarded as worthless. No piece of paper signed in Switzerland will take the ayatollahs' eyes off the nuclear prize they have pursued, by means mostly foul, for so long. And of what value is any agreement if one of the signatories can't be trusted not to cheat?

Yet what makes the framework nuclear deal so grotesque and dangerous isn't Iran's trail of deception. The real reason to block any nuclear accord with Tehran's rulers isn't that they always lie. It's that they don't.

Maybe Iran would cheat on the loophole-ridden deal being promoted the Obama administration. But it wouldn't have to. Even President Obama admits that Iran could abide by the terms agreed to and wait for them to run out in a little more than a decade.

"At that point, the breakout times [to nuclear weapons capability] would have shrunk almost down to zero," the president told NPR. Cheat or don't cheat, the end is the same: The Lausanne deal paves Iran's path to the bomb either way.

And then it will be clear — apocalyptically clear — that the ayatollahs were telling the truth.

They were telling the truth last November, when the Iranian Revolutionary Guards proclaimed that "the US is still the great Satan and the number one enemy of the [Islamic] revolution and the Islamic Republic."

They were telling the truth in February, when Ali Shirazi, a senior Iranian cleric and aide to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, declared that his troops are in a global war that will one day bring "the banner of Islam over the White House."

They were telling the truth a decade ago when Hassan Abassi, a high-ranking intelligence operative, warned that Iranian agents had identified "29 sensitive sites in the West, with the aim of bombing them. . . . Our intention is that 6,000 nuclear warheads will explode" as part of a "strategy . . . for the destruction of Anglo-Saxon civilization."

They were telling the truth when a commander of Iranian forces insisted that "America has no other choice but to leave the Middle East region beaten and humiliated." And when Iran's supreme leader raged that "there is only one solution to the Middle East problem, namely the annihilation and destruction of the Jewish state."

And when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad asserted that "a world without America is not only desirable, it is achievable."

And when, over and over and over, they have incited crowds in chants of "Death to America."

Tehran's rulers may have lied for years about their nuclear activities; their negotiated commitments to suspend enrichment and submit to inspections may not be worth the ink they sign them with.

But the mullahs don't lie about what matters to them most: death to America, the extermination of Israel, unrelenting global jiihad. They say they are deadly serious.

Believe them.

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Ukraine needs U.S. weapons not blankets

Weapons, not blankets, are what Ukraine needs now by Jeff Jacoby at the Boston Globe

A Ukrainian soldier fights Kremlin-backed separatists in Pesky village, near Donetsk,
January 21, 2015. Russia has sent thousands of troops, along with tanks, heavy
artillery and armored vehicles, to support the rebels in eastern Ukraine.

Four months after Ukraine's president traveled to Washington to plead for lethal military aid in its fight against Russian-sponsored violence and treachery, the US government is finally taking his entreaty seriously.

The New York Times reports that "an array of administration and military officials" are leaning toward providing defensive weapons to Kiev's struggling armed forces, a step the White House has so far rejected.

According to the Times, those in favor of arming Ukraine now include Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and NATO's military commander, US Air Force General Philip Breedlove. Secretary of State John Kerry and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff are reportedly "open" to the idea. Even National Security Adviser Susan Rice, long opposed to supplying lethal assistance, is now prepared to reconsider.

But not, it seems, President Obama.

Judging from a CNN interview broadcast on Sunday, the president still insists that diplomatic and economic support for Ukraine is as far as he's prepared to go. He acknowledges that sanctions and diplomacy have not deterred Vladimir Putin from inflicting a bloody separatist war on Ukraine. But "to those who would suggest that we need to do more,"

Obama said, "I don't think that it would be wise … to see actual military conflict between the United States and Russia."

Does the president really believe that sending defensive military aid to Kiev is tantamount to military conflict with Russia? He has repeatedly said he would consider all options for putting pressure on Moscow "short of military confrontation."

But Ukrainians are not asking the Americans or NATO to fight their battles; they are asking only for the means to lawfully protect their territory against an enemy that will stop at nothing in its bid to destroy Ukraine's territorial integrity.

Washington's refusal to furnish Ukraine with anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons hasn't encouraged Russia to stand down, but to press forward, escalating the fight against its democratic neighbor with increasingly deadly results: more than 5,000 people dead, more than 500,000 made homeless.

"The aggression against Ukraine has become one of the worst setbacks for the cause of democracy in the world in years," Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, told a joint session of Congress in September.

The Moscow-backed assault on Ukraine's stability and sovereignty threatened global security everywhere, he warned, and the Ukrainian army — "underequipped, and often unappreciated" — was desperately trying to forestall the nightmare that a Russian victory would mean for all of Europe.

To do so, it needed weaponry, Poroshenko stressed. While Ukraine appreciated nonlethal assistance, such as blankets and night-vision goggles, "one cannot win a war with blankets."

At the time it was possible — just barely, but possible — to believe that Vladimir Putin and his proxies in eastern Ukraine might adhere to the terms of the cease-fire agreement signed in Minsk a few days earlier, or that Western sanctions would bite hard enough to restrain further Russian belligerence.

But Moscow and the rebels it sponsors have violated every significant term of that cease-fire. The devastation in Donetsk and Luhansk, the murder of innocents in the port of Mariupol, and now the siege of Debaltsave — to say nothing of the horrific shoot-down of the Malaysian airliner last summer — this is what comes of allowing a brutal aggressor to brazenly attack a weaker nation, and expecting the victim to fight back with blankets.

"Give us the tools, and we will finish the job" — Winston
Churchill implored America in 1941 to send England
the weapons it needed for its defense.

Everyone understands what Russia is aiming at. "We have seen this playbook before," Samantha Power, the US ambassador to the UN, said in the Security Council last month. "Before eastern Ukraine, we saw it in Crimea.

And before Crimea, we saw it in the Georgian regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Before Georgia, in Transnistria. The endgame in all of these Moscow-manufactured crises has been identical: to gobble up parts of neighboring countries."

Putin's goal is not in doubt. There should be no doubt about our response. In a speech broadcast from London 74 years ago this month, Winston Churchill implored the United States to supply the weapons that England needed to defend itself from Nazi Germany.

"Give us the tools, and we will finish the job," Churchill asked. Ukraine is asking for no more — only the tools to defend itself. Already we have delayed too long, and too many victims have died.

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Good results from U.S. boots on the ground

The good that results from US 'boots on the ground' from the files of Jeff Jacoby at the Boston Globe

Read the Jacoby Files at the Boston Globe

It has always made Americans uncomfortable to think of their nation as the world's policeman.

John Quincy Adams avowed nearly two centuries ago that the United States "goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy"; today, Barack Obama declares that America's focus must be on "nation-building here at home."

A broad swath of public opinion shares that view — 52 percent of Americans in a Pew survey last winter agreed that the US should "mind its own business internationally and let other countries get along the best they can on their own."

Influential Americans regularly argue that US intervention abroad does more harm than good. "Every time the US touches the Middle East, it makes things worse," insists Harvard's Stephen Walt in a recent essay. The same has been said about America's military involvement everywhere from Latin America to Indochina.

Samantha Power, currently the US ambassador to the United Nations, wrote in 2003 that America is justifiably seen as "the very runaway state international law needs to contain," resented for its "sins" and "crimes" in using its power to harm others.

Tim Kane, an economist at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, begs to differ.

In an eye-opening essay in the current issue of Commentary, Kane refutes the notion that American military deployments have been a force for ill. That view isn't just wrong, he emphasizes, "it is tragically wrong." He backs up his claim with data:

"Having compared growth and development indicators across all countries of the world against a database of US 'boots on the ground' since 1950, I've discovered a stunning truth: In country after country, prosperity — in the form of economic growth and human development — has emerged where American boots have trod."

America's war record has certainly been mixed, acknowledges Kane, an Air Force veteran who has written — sometimes controversially and at book length — about the military's stifling personnel policies and its strategic shortcomings in Iraq and Afghanistan. Troop deployments haven't always ended well. US forces haven't always lived up to our highest standards.

But American military engagement worldwide goes far beyond battlefields. Between 1950 and 2010, more than 30 million US troops were stationed overseas, Kane writes, and except for four years at the height of the fighting in Vietnam, most troop deployments were not to nations at war.

The great majority have typically been in "allied countries, stationed in permanent bases, and cooperating in peace." Some host countries are well known: Japan, Korea, Germany. But Americans in uniform have been based in many other countries, too, from Bahrain to Kyrgyzstan to Panama to the Philippines.

And when the data is crunched, what emerges is extraordinary: US boots on the ground are a startlingly robust predictor of higher growth rates and longer lives.

Since the 1950s, research by Kane and economist Garett Jones of George Mason University has shown, "countries hosting more American forces experienced much faster economic growth than their peers" — an increase in per-capita growth of about 1 percentage point per year, after controlling for other numerous other factors linked to economic growth.

The statistical correlation between US military presence and economic growth is found even when "high-growth outliers," such as South Korea or Germany, are excluded.

Just as dramatic is the rise in life expectancy and reduction in child mortality in countries where US service personnel are based. The effect shows up, Kane says, even for countries growing at the same rate. To be sure, life expectancy has increased almost everywhere over the past two generations. "But it improved more quickly in countries that hosted American troops, and more slowly elsewhere."

What Kane dubs the "good country effect" isn't entirely understood. Why, for example, should a tenfold increase of US troops over 20 years in a typical host country lead to a reduction in children's mortality by 2.2 percentage points and a 1 percentage point gain in life expectancy?

Access to more US dollars isn't a sufficient explanation:

The improvements remain statistically significant even after accounting for economic aid. And plainly the United States doesn't undertake military deployments in pursuit of an imperial growth scheme aimed at creating wealth.

"There was no material advantage to saving South Korea, a bloody and costly war that ended well," Kane observes. "And there was nothing to be exploited in Vietnam, an even bloodier and more costly war that ended badly."

Recent history is replete with examples of allies, such as South Korea, Kuwait, and Japan, that 
welcomed the deployment of US troops on their soil. Such countries have experienced faster 
economic growth and greater increases in life expectancy than their peers. Above: Seoul, the 
capital of South Korea, where tens of thousands of US troops have long been stationed, and 
where per capita income has increased 18-fold.

The empirical advances in human welfare spurred by the presence of US forces can be linked to factors as specific and tangible as the proliferation of telephone lines, which — besides being necessary for military communications — helps connect remote rural communities with medical workers and emergency assistance.

They may also be linked to the proliferation of cultural ideas and civic institutions. With American military engagement come American ways of doing business, of training police forces, of resolving local disputes, of strengthening democracy and the rule of law.

Economic analysis won't end the debates over America-as-Globe-o-cop, nor should it. Foreign and national-security policy making is complex, and every deployment of troops must be justified on its own terms.

Nevertheless, the data underscore a reality we ought not lose sight of: The projection of US power has been a remarkable force for good in the world. Where American boots tread, prosperity and better lives generally result.

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