This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, October 22nd, 2010.

I'm Kila Brown.

Why did so much of American foreign policy not represent the values of restraint and limited government.

Doug Bendau, senior fellow at the Cato Institute, addressed that and other questions in his talk

at the Cato Club 200 retreat held last month. This is a portion of his speech.

It's very hard to have a liberty at home of what you're doing is practicing big

government abroad. I think we see that in terms of American foreign policy.

If you look at those horrid budget numbers,

you know, part of that is military spending.

The US today accounts for roughly half of all military spending on Earth.

If you adjust American military spending in real terms,

we spend more today than we did at any point during the Vietnam War, the Cold War, or the Korean War.

It's an extraordinary amount of money at a time where the traditional

threats that we faced aren't there. I mean the Soviet Union is gone, Maoist, China

is gone. You know we're no longer living kind of this fear of nuclear holocaust.

So this matters. You, in essence foreign policy is the

military spending is the price of your foreign policy. If you want to be very active abroad,

you have to have a large military.

Out of fairness, and if nothing else, to our service personnel,

you can't draw a lot of lines around the world

and then not have the force to back those up.

Randolph-born, a social historian of the 20th century, called War the Health of the State.

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