Many politicians seemed to think so in the early nineties, asserting that a "peace dividend" was at hand. Since the Gulf War, however, Americans have heard little more about it. Although it's true that some fat was trimmed from the defence budget, both economic and political pressures have tended to keep the basic military-industrial complex intact, insuring a state of global war-readiness and continuing production of ever more advanced weapons systems into the foreseeable future.

Since it's having more and more trouble dominating the world economically, America now claims superpower status largely on the basis of its military superiority. Therefore the US won't be likely to renounce this superiority willingly— especially since the prospect of recapturing world economic superiority appears to depend in part on her ability to bully other nations into granting economic concessions and privileges, as in the past. Hence the US public is being bombarded with propaganda designed to show that an ongoing US military presence is necessary in every corner of the planet.

For example, after the Gulf War the draft of a government White Paper was released in which it was argued that the US must maintain its status as the world's strongest military power and not hesitate to act unilaterally if UN approval for future military actions is not forthcoming. Although then President Bush, under election-year political pressures, denied that he personally held such views, the document reflected the thinking of powerful authoritarian forces in government — thinking that has a way of becoming public policy through secret National Security Directives (see section D.9.2, "Invisible government").

For these reasons it would not be wise to bet on a deep and sustained American demilitarisation. It is true that troop strength is being cut back in response to Soviet withdrawals from Eastern Europe; but these cutbacks are also prompted by the development of automated weapons systems which reduce the number of soldiers needed to win battles, as demonstrated in the Persian Gulf.

Although there may appear to be no urgent need for huge military budgets now that the Soviet threat is gone, the US has found it impossible to kick its forty-year addiction to militarism. As Noam Chomsky points out in many of his works, the "Pentagon System," in which the public is forced to subsidise research and development of high tech industry through subsidies to defence contractors, is a covert substitute in the US for the overt industrial planning policies of other "advanced" capitalist nations, like Germany and Japan. US defence businesses, which are among the biggest lobbyists, cannot afford to lose this "corporate welfare." Moreover, continued corporate downsizing and high levels of unemployment will produce strong pressure to maintain defence industries simply in order to keep people working.

Despite some recent modest trimming of defence budgets, the demands of US military capitalism still take priority over the needs of the people. For example, Holly Sklar points out that Washington, Detroit, and Philadelphia have higher infant death rates than Jamaica or Costa Rica and that Black America as a whole has a higher infant mortality rate than Nigeria; yet the US still spends less public funds on education than on the military, and more on military bands than on the National Endowment for the Arts ["Brave New World Order," in Cynthia Peters, ed., Collateral Damage, 1992, pp. 3-46]. But of course, politicians continue to maintain that education and social services must be cut back even further because there is "no money" to fund them.

A serious problem at this point, however, is that the collapse of the Soviet Union leaves the Pentagon in desperate need of a sufficiently dangerous and demonic enemy to justify continued military spending in the style to which it's accustomed. Saddam Hussein was temporarily helpful, but he's not enough of a menace to warrant the robust defence budgets of yore now that his military machine has been smashed. There are some indications, however, that the US government has its sights on Iran.

The main point in favour of targeting Iran is that the American public still craves revenge for the 1979 hostage humiliation, the Lebanon bombing, the Iran-Contra scandal, and other outrages, and can thus be relied on to support a war of retribution. Hence it would not be surprising to hear much more in the future about a possible Iranian nuclear threat and about the dangers of Iranian influence in the Moslem republics of the ex-Soviet empire.

In the wake of the Persian Gulf War, the United States has quietly been building a network of defence alliances reminiscent of the Eisenhower years after World War II, so that America may now be called upon to police disturbances all over the Arab World. Sending troops to Somalia appears to have been designed to help accustom Americans to such a role.

Besides Iran, unfriendly regimes in North Korea, Cuba, and Libya, as well as communist guerrilla groups in various South American nations, also hold great promise as future testing grounds for new weapons systems. And of course there is the recent troop deployments to Haiti and Bosnia, which provide the Pentagon with more arguments for continued high levels of defence spending. In a nutshell, then, the trend toward increasing militarism is not likely to be checked by the present military "downsizing," which will merely produce a leaner and more efficient fighting machine.