Interesting observations but I think Carroll poses a false choice. Ask yourself this: Would Carroll support a defense budget as it is accompanied by whatever he considers to be an appropriate increase in the budget for the foreign service? This is doable. Or, is his bigger concern the size of the defense budget. Notice too that he understates the numbers in the US foreign service by counting only "foreign service officers" - a specific category in the US foreign service. With all due respect to foreign service officers, I believe that there is more to the US foreign service than those so classified.

Defense budgets have waxed and waned over many successive administrations, Democrat and Republican. But they have been large in the same relative terms you describe throughout that time. They, like the budgets for the foreign service, are a result of a political process, as you know. If it were politically popular to have a 700 billion dollar budget for the State Department and 35 billion dollar defense budget you can bet that this would be the case. If the American public, on average, views the function of State and Defense as protection of American interests generally or just "protection" specifically, then is the gap Carroll describes any surprise at all given the arc of history, from the American perspective, of the 20th century? And yes, of course I am well familiar with Eisenhower's warnings about the "military-industrial complex". The point is that the desire to slash defense budgets has always been temporary and increases when they've come have generally been popular. With the next Administration the defense budget may well again wane - but it will still be large in a relative terms.

Joerg, you've raised the issue of American expectations of others, but Europe specifically, vis a vis relative contributions to mutual defense. I think, but don't know, that this has been with the underlying assumption of Americans "expecting" more. But I've always wondered about that. The American public has generally, not always, but generally, continued to support large defense budgets despite all the treaties and all the international organizations to which the US subscribes. If the American public, on average, views of the function of Defense and State as outlined in the paragraph above, then what does that tell you about the public's expectations?

John,
Yes, that's partly the point of my comment about budgets being subject to a political process. State has no local or state constituency that it benefits, to be sure. But I suspect a smaller percentage of the public sees the DoD budget as a matter of pork directly affecting themselves than say the budgets of the Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Health and Human Services, Transportation, etc.. It's true that the domestic spending on defense industries is deliberately spread around quite a bit of the country, but . . . I'm pretty sure that there's a state agricultural agent in every county of the country. And if you want an education, just get a contractor working on civil projects supported by public funding to speak candidly about "how things work": a rare and entertaining pleasure I once had many years ago with a contractor working in and around Chicago.

No, the general public's support of large budgets for DoD seems to me based on value it sees apart from the distribution of local pork. To me, support for large DoD budgets looks like a vote of no confidence in the efficacy of soft power for the purpose of defending the US or its interests. Perhaps the advocates of soft power have a bit of public diplomacy to attend to themselves.