原创翻译——《外交事务》文章称预算削减将使美国收缩外 ...

《外交事务》链接：http://www.foreignaffairs.com/ar ... renchment?page=show

America's Coming Retrenchment 
How Budget Cuts Will Limit the United States’ Global Role

作者：MICHAEL MANDELBAUM is the Christian A. Herter Professor and Director of American Foreign Policy at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.
作者为约翰霍普金斯大学美国外交政策教授

The acrimonious negotiation that produced legislation to raise the American debt ceiling while cutting the federal budget deficit, which President Barack Obama signed on August 2, was an early skirmish in the battle to bring deficits under control. That battle is bound to be protracted, difficult, and contentious, and one of its casualties will be spending on foreign and security policy, which will decline in the years ahead. That will impose new limits on the projection of American power around the world.

八月二日，奥巴马总统签署了一项在尖锐争吵中产生的、旨在提高美国债务限额同时削减联邦开支的法律，这仅仅是控制赤字战役中的一个早期小冲突。这一战役注定是一场艰难的、激烈的持久战，它的牺牲品之一将是不断萎缩的外交和安全预算。这将限制美国的全球影响力投射。

What a difference a year makes. Only last year, in the May/June issue of Foreign Affairs, I published a review (“Overpowered?”) of three books whose common theme was that the United States was doing far too much beyond its borders. For its own sake and the sake of other countries, the three authors recommended, the country should pursue a more modest foreign policy. Now, as I forecast at the end of that essay, the fiscal condition of the United States will compel the fulfillment of that recommendation -- for better (the general sentiment of the books’ authors) or for worse (my own view).

一年之间沧桑巨变。就在去年，我还在五/六月期的《外交事务》发表题为《过于强盛？》的书评，所评的三本书均认为美国在海外投入的精力太多，它们建议为本国和其它国家着想，美国应采取更为低调的外交政策。正如我在书评结尾预测的那样，美国的财政状况将迫使其采用这三本书的建议——是福（三本书作者的共同观点）是祸（我的观点）？

The August 2 legislation calls for $1 trillion in spending cuts over a ten-year period, about $350 billion of which is likely to come from the defense budget. The legislation also mandates a further $1.5 trillion reduction in expenditures in the next decade. If a special Congressional panel cannot agree on the targets of those reductions, an automatic trigger will impose across-the-board budget savings that will lower the Defense Department’s budget by an estimated $600 billion. 

八月二日的法律要求美国在十年时间里削减一万亿美元开支，其中的约3500亿很可能来自国防预算。该法律还要求在再下一个十年里再度削减一万五千亿美元。如果国会特别委员会不能就具体削减项目达成一致，该法律将自动裁减约六千亿美元的国防预算。

Even if the triggering mechanism is avoided, spending on defense and on other aspects of U.S. foreign policy will decline over the next decade. The scale of deficit reduction required to put the country on solid fiscal footing is so large that it must involve both limits on Social Security and Medicare, despite the Democrats’ determination to preserve these programs intact, and increases in taxes in some form, despite the Republicans’ determination to prevent this. When Americans are paying more to their government and getting less from it, they will not be as generous in supporting the United States’ global role as they have been in recent decades.

即使该法律的自动裁减机制得以避免，国防和外交事务的开支在未来十年仍将缩减。为使美国财政恢复稳健，必须大规模削减赤字，这将必定触及民主党的宠儿社会福利与医疗保险，同时还得不顾共和党的反对以某种方式提高税收。当美国人民承担更重的税赋，而从政府处获得的回报更少，他们将不会象过去几十年那样慷慨地支持美国所扮演的全球角色。

Defense budgets will contract for two other reasons. First, the sense of external threat that the country felt throughout the Cold War and after 9/11 has ebbed. Americans’ support for defense spending depends on how threatened they feel. For the moment, at least, the world does not seem particularly threatening. Second, the politics of the federal budget do not favor the Department of Defense, which cannot count on either political party to protect its share of federal spending. No major part of the Democratic coalition makes foreign and security policy a high priority. The Republican coalition does include national security hawks, who are committed to a large military and a robust foreign policy. But there are two other parts of the Republican coalition. Social conservatives are indifferent in these matters, and proponents of small government and low taxes -- now the most influential members of the coalition because they express the views of the Tea Party movement -- are willing to sacrifice defense spending for the sake of their principal goals.

两个原因迫使国防预算缩减。其一，冷战期间和911事件之后形成的外部威胁感逐渐消退。美国人民对军事开支的支持取决于他们所感受到的威胁程度。至少就目前而言，外部威胁不是特别明显。其二，国防部在联邦预算的政治角逐中并无优势，它无法依靠任何党派来保障其份额。民主党内没有重量级的派系将外交与安全政策列为重点。共和党内虽然有主张维持庞大军队和强势外交的国家安全鹰派人物，但党内还有其他两个不同派系：社会保守派，他们不关心国防外交事务；小型政府和低税收的支持者——目前是共和党内最有影响力的一派，因为他们代表茶党的观点——他们愿意牺牲国防开支以达到他们的原则性目标。

So the United States will be able to afford to do less in the world in the future than it has in the past. Which parts of U.S. foreign policy will be -- and which should be -- discontinued? As I argue in my 2010 book, The Frugal Superpower, the feature of twenty-first-century foreign policy likeliest to be eliminated, and the one with which the country can most easily do without, is the type of military intervention that the United States has conducted in the first two post–Cold War decades in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Different as these operations have been, they have all saddled the United States with the unwanted, protracted, expensive, and frustrating task of nation-building -- that is, restoring the institutions of government where they had collapsed or building them where they never existed. The policy of nation-building has three drawbacks. 

因为美国在世界事务上的行动必将比过去少。哪些外交政策将且应当被裁减呢？正如我在2010年新书《节约的超级大国》所述，最可能也最容易从美国21世纪外交政策中删除的是类似在冷战结束后美国在索马里、海地、波斯尼亚、科索沃、阿富汗、伊拉克等地进行的军事干预。这些行动虽各有不同，但共同点是，美国被一个不受欢迎的、持久的、昂贵的、令人沮丧的＂建国＂任务所拖累——重建已经崩溃的政府机构或者在本来无政府的地区扶植一个新政府。这一＂建国＂政策有三大缺陷。

First, it is not popular with the American people, who are willing to pay to defend themselves but not to govern others, or to help others govern themselves. Second, it has enjoyed modest success at best because neither the United States nor any other country knows how to create working, competent, democratic institutions quickly and cheaply. Third, however successful post–Cold War American nation-building has been, it has not contributed much to the well-being or security of the United States. Should Afghanistan be appreciably more peaceful and prosperous when American troops leave than it was when they arrived, it will certainly be of great benefit to the people of that country but it will do little for the people of the country from which the troops came. Together, these drawbacks make nation-building the leading candidate to disappear from the repertoire of U.S. foreign policy, which would make carrying out that foreign policy less expensive.

第一，美国人民不欢迎此类政策，他们愿意承担抵御外敌的费用而不愿承担统治他人或扶持当地人自治的费用。第二，该政策成绩平庸，无论美国或任何其它国家都不能快速廉价地建立有效的、称职的、民主的政府机构。第三，无论美国冷战后的＂建国＂战绩如何，对美国的福祉与安全均无助益。如果美军撤离时，阿富汗比过去更安定繁荣，对当地人来讲是莫大的好事，但对美国人民何益之有？
三大缺陷将使＂建国＂政策成为裁减首选，这将为美国外交节省大量开支。

The Obama administration inherited ongoing interventions and nation-building exercises in Afghanistan and Iraq and has begun to wind them down. Although it launched a similar intervention in Libya in March 2011, the way it has conducted that operation -- promising not to insert U.S. ground troops and emphasizing NATO’s role -- shows that it is determined to minimize its costs.

奥巴马政府接管在阿富汗和伊拉克的干预和建国行动之后，已开始逐步收手。尽管奥府在2011年对利比亚进行了类似的干预，但该其行动的方式——承诺不投入美军地面部队并强调北约的作用——说明了美国决心尽可能地减少开支。

Eliminating interventions for nation-building would still leave the United States with a major global role -- and an important one. Indeed, today the United States provides to other countries some, although by no means all, of the services that governments furnish to the societies that they govern. The United States functions, that is, as the world’s de facto government.

裁减建国式干预不会影响美国的另一个重要的全球角色。诚然，如今的美国为其它国家提供部分的（而非全部）政府服务。美国是全球的事实上的政府。

It supplies the world’s leading currency, the dollar. It has the world’s richest and most open market. Its navy safeguards the world’s two most important trade routes, the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans. U.S. military power helps assure the free flow of oil from the Persian Gulf, which is vital for the global economy. The U.S. military presence in East Asia and Europe reassures the countries of those regions, which are not formal adversaries but in many cases do not fully trust one another, that the United States will be on hand to deal with any serious threat to peace.

美国供应着世界上最重要的货币——美元。它拥有最富有最开放的市场。它的海军保卫着世上两大贸易通道：大西洋和太平洋。美军确保世界经济的命脉：中东石油畅通无阻。美军在东亚和欧洲的存在，给当地虽不公开为敌却时常互相猜忌的各国政府提供保障：如有威胁地区和平，美国自会出手主持公道。

Most of the U.S. defense budget goes to support these beneficial missions. As the country comes to spend less on defense, some of them will be in jeopardy. Just how endangered the American role as the world’s government will be in the coming era of economic constraint will depend on how deeply the relevant spending is reduced. That, in turn, will depend on how much deficit reduction the U.S. political system is able to deliver from other sources, above all by reining in the cost of entitlements and raising taxes. What is certain is that, because U.S. foreign policy is so important for the whole world, the consequences of the inevitable budget-cutting in Washington will reverberate far beyond the United States.

美国大部分的国防预算都投入这些有益的行动。当国防开支缩减，某些项目将会受到威胁。在今后的经济压力下，美国作为全球政府的地位将受到多大的影响取决于国防预算的削减力度。国防预算的削减又取决于美国政府在其它领域的赤字削减行动，特别地，如何减少福利开支和增加税收。
但有一点非常明确，即美国外交政策事关全球大局，华盛顿的预算削减将对世界产生深远影响。《外交事务》链接：http://www.foreignaffairs.com/ar ... renchment?page=show

America's Coming Retrenchment 
How Budget Cuts Will Limit the United States’ Global Role

作者：MICHAEL MANDELBAUM is the Christian A. Herter Professor and Director of American Foreign Policy at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.
作者为约翰霍普金斯大学美国外交政策教授

The acrimonious negotiation that produced legislation to raise the American debt ceiling while cutting the federal budget deficit, which President Barack Obama signed on August 2, was an early skirmish in the battle to bring deficits under control. That battle is bound to be protracted, difficult, and contentious, and one of its casualties will be spending on foreign and security policy, which will decline in the years ahead. That will impose new limits on the projection of American power around the world.

八月二日，奥巴马总统签署了一项在尖锐争吵中产生的、旨在提高美国债务限额同时削减联邦开支的法律，这仅仅是控制赤字战役中的一个早期小冲突。这一战役注定是一场艰难的、激烈的持久战，它的牺牲品之一将是不断萎缩的外交和安全预算。这将限制美国的全球影响力投射。

What a difference a year makes. Only last year, in the May/June issue of Foreign Affairs, I published a review (“Overpowered?”) of three books whose common theme was that the United States was doing far too much beyond its borders. For its own sake and the sake of other countries, the three authors recommended, the country should pursue a more modest foreign policy. Now, as I forecast at the end of that essay, the fiscal condition of the United States will compel the fulfillment of that recommendation -- for better (the general sentiment of the books’ authors) or for worse (my own view).

一年之间沧桑巨变。就在去年，我还在五/六月期的《外交事务》发表题为《过于强盛？》的书评，所评的三本书均认为美国在海外投入的精力太多，它们建议为本国和其它国家着想，美国应采取更为低调的外交政策。正如我在书评结尾预测的那样，美国的财政状况将迫使其采用这三本书的建议——是福（三本书作者的共同观点）是祸（我的观点）？

The August 2 legislation calls for $1 trillion in spending cuts over a ten-year period, about $350 billion of which is likely to come from the defense budget. The legislation also mandates a further $1.5 trillion reduction in expenditures in the next decade. If a special Congressional panel cannot agree on the targets of those reductions, an automatic trigger will impose across-the-board budget savings that will lower the Defense Department’s budget by an estimated $600 billion. 

八月二日的法律要求美国在十年时间里削减一万亿美元开支，其中的约3500亿很可能来自国防预算。该法律还要求在再下一个十年里再度削减一万五千亿美元。如果国会特别委员会不能就具体削减项目达成一致，该法律将自动裁减约六千亿美元的国防预算。

Even if the triggering mechanism is avoided, spending on defense and on other aspects of U.S. foreign policy will decline over the next decade. The scale of deficit reduction required to put the country on solid fiscal footing is so large that it must involve both limits on Social Security and Medicare, despite the Democrats’ determination to preserve these programs intact, and increases in taxes in some form, despite the Republicans’ determination to prevent this. When Americans are paying more to their government and getting less from it, they will not be as generous in supporting the United States’ global role as they have been in recent decades.

即使该法律的自动裁减机制得以避免，国防和外交事务的开支在未来十年仍将缩减。为使美国财政恢复稳健，必须大规模削减赤字，这将必定触及民主党的宠儿社会福利与医疗保险，同时还得不顾共和党的反对以某种方式提高税收。当美国人民承担更重的税赋，而从政府处获得的回报更少，他们将不会象过去几十年那样慷慨地支持美国所扮演的全球角色。

Defense budgets will contract for two other reasons. First, the sense of external threat that the country felt throughout the Cold War and after 9/11 has ebbed. Americans’ support for defense spending depends on how threatened they feel. For the moment, at least, the world does not seem particularly threatening. Second, the politics of the federal budget do not favor the Department of Defense, which cannot count on either political party to protect its share of federal spending. No major part of the Democratic coalition makes foreign and security policy a high priority. The Republican coalition does include national security hawks, who are committed to a large military and a robust foreign policy. But there are two other parts of the Republican coalition. Social conservatives are indifferent in these matters, and proponents of small government and low taxes -- now the most influential members of the coalition because they express the views of the Tea Party movement -- are willing to sacrifice defense spending for the sake of their principal goals.

两个原因迫使国防预算缩减。其一，冷战期间和911事件之后形成的外部威胁感逐渐消退。美国人民对军事开支的支持取决于他们所感受到的威胁程度。至少就目前而言，外部威胁不是特别明显。其二，国防部在联邦预算的政治角逐中并无优势，它无法依靠任何党派来保障其份额。民主党内没有重量级的派系将外交与安全政策列为重点。共和党内虽然有主张维持庞大军队和强势外交的国家安全鹰派人物，但党内还有其他两个不同派系：社会保守派，他们不关心国防外交事务；小型政府和低税收的支持者——目前是共和党内最有影响力的一派，因为他们代表茶党的观点——他们愿意牺牲国防开支以达到他们的原则性目标。

So the United States will be able to afford to do less in the world in the future than it has in the past. Which parts of U.S. foreign policy will be -- and which should be -- discontinued? As I argue in my 2010 book, The Frugal Superpower, the feature of twenty-first-century foreign policy likeliest to be eliminated, and the one with which the country can most easily do without, is the type of military intervention that the United States has conducted in the first two post–Cold War decades in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Different as these operations have been, they have all saddled the United States with the unwanted, protracted, expensive, and frustrating task of nation-building -- that is, restoring the institutions of government where they had collapsed or building them where they never existed. The policy of nation-building has three drawbacks. 

因为美国在世界事务上的行动必将比过去少。哪些外交政策将且应当被裁减呢？正如我在2010年新书《节约的超级大国》所述，最可能也最容易从美国21世纪外交政策中删除的是类似在冷战结束后美国在索马里、海地、波斯尼亚、科索沃、阿富汗、伊拉克等地进行的军事干预。这些行动虽各有不同，但共同点是，美国被一个不受欢迎的、持久的、昂贵的、令人沮丧的＂建国＂任务所拖累——重建已经崩溃的政府机构或者在本来无政府的地区扶植一个新政府。这一＂建国＂政策有三大缺陷。

First, it is not popular with the American people, who are willing to pay to defend themselves but not to govern others, or to help others govern themselves. Second, it has enjoyed modest success at best because neither the United States nor any other country knows how to create working, competent, democratic institutions quickly and cheaply. Third, however successful post–Cold War American nation-building has been, it has not contributed much to the well-being or security of the United States. Should Afghanistan be appreciably more peaceful and prosperous when American troops leave than it was when they arrived, it will certainly be of great benefit to the people of that country but it will do little for the people of the country from which the troops came. Together, these drawbacks make nation-building the leading candidate to disappear from the repertoire of U.S. foreign policy, which would make carrying out that foreign policy less expensive.

第一，美国人民不欢迎此类政策，他们愿意承担抵御外敌的费用而不愿承担统治他人或扶持当地人自治的费用。第二，该政策成绩平庸，无论美国或任何其它国家都不能快速廉价地建立有效的、称职的、民主的政府机构。第三，无论美国冷战后的＂建国＂战绩如何，对美国的福祉与安全均无助益。如果美军撤离时，阿富汗比过去更安定繁荣，对当地人来讲是莫大的好事，但对美国人民何益之有？
三大缺陷将使＂建国＂政策成为裁减首选，这将为美国外交节省大量开支。

The Obama administration inherited ongoing interventions and nation-building exercises in Afghanistan and Iraq and has begun to wind them down. Although it launched a similar intervention in Libya in March 2011, the way it has conducted that operation -- promising not to insert U.S. ground troops and emphasizing NATO’s role -- shows that it is determined to minimize its costs.

奥巴马政府接管在阿富汗和伊拉克的干预和建国行动之后，已开始逐步收手。尽管奥府在2011年对利比亚进行了类似的干预，但该其行动的方式——承诺不投入美军地面部队并强调北约的作用——说明了美国决心尽可能地减少开支。

Eliminating interventions for nation-building would still leave the United States with a major global role -- and an important one. Indeed, today the United States provides to other countries some, although by no means all, of the services that governments furnish to the societies that they govern. The United States functions, that is, as the world’s de facto government.

裁减建国式干预不会影响美国的另一个重要的全球角色。诚然，如今的美国为其它国家提供部分的（而非全部）政府服务。美国是全球的事实上的政府。

It supplies the world’s leading currency, the dollar. It has the world’s richest and most open market. Its navy safeguards the world’s two most important trade routes, the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans. U.S. military power helps assure the free flow of oil from the Persian Gulf, which is vital for the global economy. The U.S. military presence in East Asia and Europe reassures the countries of those regions, which are not formal adversaries but in many cases do not fully trust one another, that the United States will be on hand to deal with any serious threat to peace.

美国供应着世界上最重要的货币——美元。它拥有最富有最开放的市场。它的海军保卫着世上两大贸易通道：大西洋和太平洋。美军确保世界经济的命脉：中东石油畅通无阻。美军在东亚和欧洲的存在，给当地虽不公开为敌却时常互相猜忌的各国政府提供保障：如有威胁地区和平，美国自会出手主持公道。

Most of the U.S. defense budget goes to support these beneficial missions. As the country comes to spend less on defense, some of them will be in jeopardy. Just how endangered the American role as the world’s government will be in the coming era of economic constraint will depend on how deeply the relevant spending is reduced. That, in turn, will depend on how much deficit reduction the U.S. political system is able to deliver from other sources, above all by reining in the cost of entitlements and raising taxes. What is certain is that, because U.S. foreign policy is so important for the whole world, the consequences of the inevitable budget-cutting in Washington will reverberate far beyond the United States.

美国大部分的国防预算都投入这些有益的行动。当国防开支缩减，某些项目将会受到威胁。在今后的经济压力下，美国作为全球政府的地位将受到多大的影响取决于国防预算的削减力度。国防预算的削减又取决于美国政府在其它领域的赤字削减行动，特别地，如何减少福利开支和增加税收。
但有一点非常明确，即美国外交政策事关全球大局，华盛顿的预算削减将对世界产生深远影响。