Why do we militarily help other nations?

When their is a huge disparity between our percentage of GDP spent on defense and the country receiving aid, I see no problem with asking them to put a little more skin in the game. Commonsense will have to determine if third world countries can put more skin in the game or not. But it is hard to justify supporting developed nations if they aren't matching percent of GDP, particularly if they have large social welfare spending.

The bottom line is that we help other nations militarily because we have decided it is OUR national interest to do so. While usually it turns out is in their national interest also, that's not the driving reason. A lot of this developed from the strategic decisions after WWII, when it was decided that we would confront the spread of communism by engaging the nonaligned nations in a competition with the USSR. Pretty much the world was like the game Risk, where the more countries you had in your color the better off you were.

So the US and the Soviet Union sought to get countries to their color by offering economic aid and military aid. It was thought that it was a zero sum game. If they didn't buy arms from us, they would buy it from the Soviets. If we didn't give them economic aid, the other side would. That's why we were willing to overlook all sorts of human rights violations and give support to some screwed up dictators. It was the "well at least it's OUR dictator" theory. It led to some strange bedfellows, such as us arming Iraq against Iran, and then selling arms to Iran as well. Sometimes we didn't want either side to win.

As for costs, the truth is that, for example, whatever our cost is to maintain our presence in Europe, it is a fraction of the cost of another war in Europe with Russia. So it is in OUR national interest to maintain that even when others don't pay their fair share. Because free capitalist countries trade with other free capitalist countries, so it is ultimately in our economic interests to deter war in Europe.

There are lots of other examples, like why we want to maintain forces in Korea and Japan and other places. Not because we are so concerned about the threat to those countries, but the threat to our own national interests should those countries fall.

MAJ Bryan Zeski
We help others because we think helping those nations and groups furthers our interests. We do not do it just because we are a nice people.