Once (no shit) I wrote a footnote that turned into a book.
This could happen again, although I hope not.
Among the other ten thousand projects I'd like to accomplish with this blog is the development of a rational Libertarian foreign policy proposal for the United States.
That hasn't existed up to now.
Ron Paul's foreign policy is a non-interventionist strategy based on the near-immediate return of our troops and our navy to the direct physical defense of our borders:
He's right about the bases, and I applaud in many ways the sentiment that we should shun military interventionism in favor of economic and diplomatic action, but his lack of apparent understanding of modern warfare is not re-assuring in a man who would be president.
Other prominent Libertarians are worse.
Former LP Presidential candidate Harry Browne (now a self-proclaimed Populist) has a four-point foreign policy strategy that is one of those proclamations that makes a decent sound-bite, but convinces any coherent person never to entrust you with national security.
Just for kicks and grins, here's point four:
Most of this rhetoric leaves me in the same place as a commentator with the handle "Lance" on A Secondhand Conjecture, who writes,
(Which damn-near makes Libertarians fellow travelers with Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Reagan's famous hard-line UN Ambassador (move over John Bolton) whose 1979 article in Commentary, "Dictators and Double Standards" not only brought her to Ron's attention, but cemented a particular cynical view of American foreign policy. In that seminal article, Kirkpatrick argued that propping up dictatorships was not only the pragmatic course if they were anti-Communist, but actually the most humanitarian policy the US could follow. Her particular examples to prove her point were Somoza in Nicaragua and the Shah of Iran; I won't excerpt this article--you have to read it for yourself.)
I want to propose two hopefully non-ideological propositions about the development of foreign policy and its conduct to start my real discussion.
(1) Foreign policy is the process through which a nation-state uses a wide array of powers (diplomatic, economic, military, cultural, etc.) to achieve its strategic goals in the larger world.
(2) In order to have a rational or even just a consistent foreign policy, the nation-state must have achieved some level of consensus regarding those strategic goals.
In other words, you can't have a foreign policy (beyond the physical defense of your borders) until you know what you are trying to accomplish.
We'll get to that point eventually.
But first, go back to that array of powers, and just chop out "military" for further consideration.
My premise today is that you have to think about that "wide array of powers" very carefully, because their strengths and limitations supply the parameters of your ability to achieve your goals in the international arena. It is my contention that most people discussing foreign policy have little or no understanding of what can and cannot be achieved through the modern application of military force (including many of our generals, unfortunately).
So before I can talk sensibly about a "Libertarian foreign policy," I feel the need to provide a primer on American military force, and why (while no one was looking) we slipped out of our former and short-lived position as "the world's only superpower."
That's right: we're NOT a world superpower any more. In fact, there currently aren't any.
Oh, yeah, I know we've got sufficient nukes to sterilize the planet, but nuclear weapons are a really large blunt instrument that, for us, almost never have situational justifications for use that would overcome the negative consequences of their use.
(Nuking a non-nuclear opponent is sort of like--sorry Robert Heinlein for the paraphrase--cutting off your dog's head to keep him from pissing on the kitchen floor. True, he won't pee on the tile anymore, but he's not much use thereafter as a dog, either. Nuking a nuclear power is the equivalent of asking to have one of our own cities vaporized. And that's what nukes primarily are for us: weapons of retaliation, not weapons that can be used to implement foreign policy.)
Leaving nuclear options out of it, on the global scale, there are really only two levels of power that matter: force (or power) projection and what I call continental mass.
Force projection has been formally defined by the US military thus:
What this means is that a nation with "Force Projection" power has the ability to deploy and sustain a significant military force far from its borders (generally at least 1,000 miles required to meet the definition), meeting all the necessary logistical (supply) considerations to keep that force operational.
Force projection is the ability of the US to move sufficient military forces into the Persian Gulf and sustain them to knock off Saddam Hussein. It's important to put a rough number to this process, even though most commentators don't want to do so, because if you can't deploy and sustain a mixed combat force of AT THE VERY LEAST 20,000-35,000 troops, you really can't do force projection.
By that definition, there are ONLY THREE nations in the world today with legitimate force projection capability: the United States, Great Britain, and France. None of the other would-be major powers--not Russia, China, India, Israel, Germany, or Japan--possesses the ability to project their direct, hard military force outside their own region.
Think about it for a moment.
Russia as the Soviet Union could only sustain operations in Afghanistan for many years because that country shared a border with the USSR. At the height of Soviet power, the Russians COULD NOT have sustained a military-logistical effort like the US did in Vietnam or Korea; the French did in Vietnam and Algeria (a borderline case); the British did in Malaysia of the Falklands.
China has trouble even mounting a credible military invasion threat against Taiwan. How big are the Formosa Straits, again?
Of the three force projection powers we are undoubtedly the most powerful. The French have fairly routinely managed to push 15,000-25,000 troops around the world for the past several decades; the British since the Falklands have become a poor third, but still retain the power at least in theory.
In military terms, any nation that cannot engage in meaningful force projection is at best a continental or regional power--not a global power.
Hold that thought.
Then there is continental mass: the ability to mobilize and deploy a mass army to conduct major operations on a sustained scale. Here we are talking numbers above 250,000 troops (and really more like 500,000). World War Two is a good barometer for this: Germany mobilized between 7-9 MILLION men; the United States over 12.5 MILLION; the USSR nearly 22 MILLION; Great Britain about 5-6 MILLION; and China nearly 5 MILLION.
What was unique about the United States is that we ended World War Two with BOTH the power of force projection AND continental mass AND (almost completely unique in the world) the ability to PROJECT CONTINENTAL MASS to the other side of the planet.
That was how we could put tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of troops in Vietnam, Korea, or Kuwait when our allies could not.
Ironically, it was our commitment to defend Western Europe (and the creation of NATO) that caused us to retain this continental mass force projection capability after 1945. We left an army of several hundred thousand in Europe, and had to be prepared to sustain it through both air and sea power in the midst of World War Three. But we were already scaling back this capacity (it could not have been maintained forever, even for us the economic cost was too high) throughout the late 1980s, and the First Gulf War was the swansong of our ability in this regard.
Important to note that what you can do at least partly defines your foreign policy goals.
Under Reagan, the official military stance of the United States was that, in addition to being prepared to fight an all-out war in central Europe, we had to have enough military to fight and win TWO SIMULTANEOUS REGIONAL WARS. We quietly dropped that commitment to an all-out war in Europe in the late 1980s as the Soviet Union started to implode.
Then our doctrine was that we should have enough military to fight and win those two regional wars.
In the early 1990s, sometime between Bush and Clinton, the Pentagon changed our stance to the ability to fight and win one regional conflict while deterring another. And at that point (post 1991) we were out of the continental mass force projection business.
That's why the 2003 invasion of Iraq was fought with fewer divisions: we no longer had the ability to place the same size force that we used in Desert Storm into Iraq.
Not to worry: Pentagon planners had become enamored with the idea that the Revolution in Military Affairs had so changed the nature of war that we didn't need that ability any more.
(Briefly stated, it was the argument that technological means that only the US possessed, gave us such a strong advantage that the normal rules of warfare no longer applied to us; we were actually approaching "push-button war" and didn't need lots of ground troops to kick the shit out of our enemies. Even more briefly stated, this conceit turned out to be utter horseshit.)
But the upshot of the RMA is that lots and lots of military pundits told politicians of both wings of the Demopublican party that we still had all the same military power we'd always had (and without interrupting civilian life) with fewer than half the troops and less than half the costs.
Talk about an excuse to launch a lot of "little wars." You get to kick their butt and they can't kick back.
The problem for our politicians now is that the reality (with Iraq and Afghanistan as prime examples) is setting in: we no longer have the same military ability we used to have, and we're NOT LIKELY to convince our population to pay the taxes necessary and send the number of young people forward necessary to regain that strength.
Because there really is not any justification for such strength if we don't intend to create an American Empire and a Pax Americana. And at some level American voters know that.
So, our Demopublican leaders see three options:
(1) Ignore this limitation and employ all sorts of surrogate forces (like mercenaries and undependable coalitions) to be our continental mass. (This didn't work out all too well for Rome, China, or Great Britain.) This could be considered a fundamental illusion of the Bush Doctrine.
(2) Place our trust in international organizations and alliances, believing that somehow the rest of the world will come together and cooperate to establish a lasting peace. (How's that working out for you?) This is your basic "Turn our foreign policy over to the UN" mantra.
(3) Withdraw into our usual (pre-1941) cocoon of isolationism, broken only by the occasional threat to nuke anybody who bothers Israel or Taiwan.
Frankly, all three of those options suck.
To go back: before anyone (Demopublican, Anarchist, or Libertarian) can develop a foreign policy, they've got to have strategic goals and a firm handle on the tools available to achieve those goals.
In military terms this is the current state of our tool:
We have the world's best force projection power, but its limitations have now been demonstrated to our friends and enemies alike. We no longer have the ability to raise (quickly) a military with Continental Mass, must less send it anywhere. We are likely to see a significant (say about 30%) in our existing military capability over the next ten years, despite the War on Terror. (In part because of the War on Terror, with domestic homeland security needs now directly competing with the military for funding.)
The only really good news here is that aside from the occasional errant nuclear missile, none of our potential enemies (and not Russia or China, either, if you don't think of them as potential enemies) has the capability to develop force projection in less than 20 years. Moreover, the force projection ability of Great Britain has been and continues to be in decline; that of France has been static for about 2 decades and is unlikely to change (unless there is an active Franco-German alliance).
So, that having been said, the question now is: what should be our foreign policy goals?
But that's an issue for another evening.
This could happen again, although I hope not.
Among the other ten thousand projects I'd like to accomplish with this blog is the development of a rational Libertarian foreign policy proposal for the United States.
That hasn't existed up to now.
Ron Paul's foreign policy is a non-interventionist strategy based on the near-immediate return of our troops and our navy to the direct physical defense of our borders:
Today, we have troops in 130 countries. We are spread so thin that we have too few troops defending America.
He's right about the bases, and I applaud in many ways the sentiment that we should shun military interventionism in favor of economic and diplomatic action, but his lack of apparent understanding of modern warfare is not re-assuring in a man who would be president.
Other prominent Libertarians are worse.
Former LP Presidential candidate Harry Browne (now a self-proclaimed Populist) has a four-point foreign policy strategy that is one of those proclamations that makes a decent sound-bite, but convinces any coherent person never to entrust you with national security.
Just for kicks and grins, here's point four:
4. Target the Aggressors, Not the Innocent
Suppose that, even with a missile defense, America truly were threatened by a foreign ruler.
A Libertarian President would target the ruler himself. He wouldn't order bombers to kill the ruler's innocent subjects.
A Libertarian President would warn the ruler that any actual attack would be met by the offer of a mega-reward to anyone who could kill the ruler. Everyone would be eligible to collect the reward, including the ruler's guards and wives. And the reward would be very big - perhaps $100 million or more.
Would this prompt the foreign ruler to respond by putting a price on the head of the Libertarian President? Possibly.
But anything the U.S. President does to interfere with the ruler's plans could provoke an assassination attempt. Posting a reward for the dictator's death wouldn't add to the risk.
In addition to sparing innocent people in foreign countries, the assassination response would spare innocent Americans. Only those who want to try for the reward would be at risk. Americans wouldn't be drafted to fight and die invading a foreign country. And Americans wouldn't be taxed to pay for volunteers.
Please understand the limits of this proposal. It isn't a way to force dictators to change their spots or accommodate the U.S. It is only a means to prevent a direct attack on America. If the dictator withdraws his threat, the U.S. would withdraw the reward.
If our government followed a libertarian foreign policy, it's unlikely that any foreign ruler would want to threaten us. So it's unlikely that any such reward would ever be posted. But if a foreign ruler were tempted to threaten us, the fear of assassination would be more likely to deter him than the fear of losing some of his civilian subjects to U.S. bombs.
If you don't believe that's true, if you think assassination isn't nice, what is the alternative? Is it to kill thousands of innocent foreigners and to assure the deaths of innocent Americans?
That to me is the cruelest, most reckless approach.
Most of this rhetoric leaves me in the same place as a commentator with the handle "Lance" on A Secondhand Conjecture, who writes,
There is no coherent foreign policy amongst libertarians, except the isolationists. In the case of Lewellen Rockwell and friends we have a group much like the Left that Nick Cohen and Hitchens complains about. They not only oppose US interventions, they actually fawn over dictators, apologize for them, and act is if the people of these nations have a right to their choices which assumes the people really have much say.
(Which damn-near makes Libertarians fellow travelers with Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Reagan's famous hard-line UN Ambassador (move over John Bolton) whose 1979 article in Commentary, "Dictators and Double Standards" not only brought her to Ron's attention, but cemented a particular cynical view of American foreign policy. In that seminal article, Kirkpatrick argued that propping up dictatorships was not only the pragmatic course if they were anti-Communist, but actually the most humanitarian policy the US could follow. Her particular examples to prove her point were Somoza in Nicaragua and the Shah of Iran; I won't excerpt this article--you have to read it for yourself.)
I want to propose two hopefully non-ideological propositions about the development of foreign policy and its conduct to start my real discussion.
(1) Foreign policy is the process through which a nation-state uses a wide array of powers (diplomatic, economic, military, cultural, etc.) to achieve its strategic goals in the larger world.
(2) In order to have a rational or even just a consistent foreign policy, the nation-state must have achieved some level of consensus regarding those strategic goals.
In other words, you can't have a foreign policy (beyond the physical defense of your borders) until you know what you are trying to accomplish.
We'll get to that point eventually.
But first, go back to that array of powers, and just chop out "military" for further consideration.
My premise today is that you have to think about that "wide array of powers" very carefully, because their strengths and limitations supply the parameters of your ability to achieve your goals in the international arena. It is my contention that most people discussing foreign policy have little or no understanding of what can and cannot be achieved through the modern application of military force (including many of our generals, unfortunately).
So before I can talk sensibly about a "Libertarian foreign policy," I feel the need to provide a primer on American military force, and why (while no one was looking) we slipped out of our former and short-lived position as "the world's only superpower."
That's right: we're NOT a world superpower any more. In fact, there currently aren't any.
Oh, yeah, I know we've got sufficient nukes to sterilize the planet, but nuclear weapons are a really large blunt instrument that, for us, almost never have situational justifications for use that would overcome the negative consequences of their use.
(Nuking a non-nuclear opponent is sort of like--sorry Robert Heinlein for the paraphrase--cutting off your dog's head to keep him from pissing on the kitchen floor. True, he won't pee on the tile anymore, but he's not much use thereafter as a dog, either. Nuking a nuclear power is the equivalent of asking to have one of our own cities vaporized. And that's what nukes primarily are for us: weapons of retaliation, not weapons that can be used to implement foreign policy.)
Leaving nuclear options out of it, on the global scale, there are really only two levels of power that matter: force (or power) projection and what I call continental mass.
Force projection has been formally defined by the US military thus:
FORCE PROJECTION OPERATIONS
3-38. Force projection is the military component of power projection. It is a central element of the national military strategy. Projecting the force anywhere in the world involves AC and RC units, the mobilization base, DA civilians, and industry. Army organizations and installations, linked with joint forces and industry, form a strategic platform to maintain, project, and sustain Army forces, wherever they deploy.
3-39. Force projection encompasses a range of processes: mobilization, deployment, employment, sustainment, and redeployment (see Figure 3-4). These processes occur in a continuous, overlapping and repeating sequence throughout an operation. Force projection operations are in inherently joint and require detailed planning and synchronization. Decisions made early in the process may determine the success of the campaign.
What this means is that a nation with "Force Projection" power has the ability to deploy and sustain a significant military force far from its borders (generally at least 1,000 miles required to meet the definition), meeting all the necessary logistical (supply) considerations to keep that force operational.
Force projection is the ability of the US to move sufficient military forces into the Persian Gulf and sustain them to knock off Saddam Hussein. It's important to put a rough number to this process, even though most commentators don't want to do so, because if you can't deploy and sustain a mixed combat force of AT THE VERY LEAST 20,000-35,000 troops, you really can't do force projection.
By that definition, there are ONLY THREE nations in the world today with legitimate force projection capability: the United States, Great Britain, and France. None of the other would-be major powers--not Russia, China, India, Israel, Germany, or Japan--possesses the ability to project their direct, hard military force outside their own region.
Think about it for a moment.
Russia as the Soviet Union could only sustain operations in Afghanistan for many years because that country shared a border with the USSR. At the height of Soviet power, the Russians COULD NOT have sustained a military-logistical effort like the US did in Vietnam or Korea; the French did in Vietnam and Algeria (a borderline case); the British did in Malaysia of the Falklands.
China has trouble even mounting a credible military invasion threat against Taiwan. How big are the Formosa Straits, again?
Of the three force projection powers we are undoubtedly the most powerful. The French have fairly routinely managed to push 15,000-25,000 troops around the world for the past several decades; the British since the Falklands have become a poor third, but still retain the power at least in theory.
In military terms, any nation that cannot engage in meaningful force projection is at best a continental or regional power--not a global power.
Hold that thought.
Then there is continental mass: the ability to mobilize and deploy a mass army to conduct major operations on a sustained scale. Here we are talking numbers above 250,000 troops (and really more like 500,000). World War Two is a good barometer for this: Germany mobilized between 7-9 MILLION men; the United States over 12.5 MILLION; the USSR nearly 22 MILLION; Great Britain about 5-6 MILLION; and China nearly 5 MILLION.
What was unique about the United States is that we ended World War Two with BOTH the power of force projection AND continental mass AND (almost completely unique in the world) the ability to PROJECT CONTINENTAL MASS to the other side of the planet.
That was how we could put tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of troops in Vietnam, Korea, or Kuwait when our allies could not.
Ironically, it was our commitment to defend Western Europe (and the creation of NATO) that caused us to retain this continental mass force projection capability after 1945. We left an army of several hundred thousand in Europe, and had to be prepared to sustain it through both air and sea power in the midst of World War Three. But we were already scaling back this capacity (it could not have been maintained forever, even for us the economic cost was too high) throughout the late 1980s, and the First Gulf War was the swansong of our ability in this regard.
Important to note that what you can do at least partly defines your foreign policy goals.
Under Reagan, the official military stance of the United States was that, in addition to being prepared to fight an all-out war in central Europe, we had to have enough military to fight and win TWO SIMULTANEOUS REGIONAL WARS. We quietly dropped that commitment to an all-out war in Europe in the late 1980s as the Soviet Union started to implode.
Then our doctrine was that we should have enough military to fight and win those two regional wars.
In the early 1990s, sometime between Bush and Clinton, the Pentagon changed our stance to the ability to fight and win one regional conflict while deterring another. And at that point (post 1991) we were out of the continental mass force projection business.
That's why the 2003 invasion of Iraq was fought with fewer divisions: we no longer had the ability to place the same size force that we used in Desert Storm into Iraq.
Not to worry: Pentagon planners had become enamored with the idea that the Revolution in Military Affairs had so changed the nature of war that we didn't need that ability any more.
(Briefly stated, it was the argument that technological means that only the US possessed, gave us such a strong advantage that the normal rules of warfare no longer applied to us; we were actually approaching "push-button war" and didn't need lots of ground troops to kick the shit out of our enemies. Even more briefly stated, this conceit turned out to be utter horseshit.)
But the upshot of the RMA is that lots and lots of military pundits told politicians of both wings of the Demopublican party that we still had all the same military power we'd always had (and without interrupting civilian life) with fewer than half the troops and less than half the costs.
Talk about an excuse to launch a lot of "little wars." You get to kick their butt and they can't kick back.
The problem for our politicians now is that the reality (with Iraq and Afghanistan as prime examples) is setting in: we no longer have the same military ability we used to have, and we're NOT LIKELY to convince our population to pay the taxes necessary and send the number of young people forward necessary to regain that strength.
Because there really is not any justification for such strength if we don't intend to create an American Empire and a Pax Americana. And at some level American voters know that.
So, our Demopublican leaders see three options:
(1) Ignore this limitation and employ all sorts of surrogate forces (like mercenaries and undependable coalitions) to be our continental mass. (This didn't work out all too well for Rome, China, or Great Britain.) This could be considered a fundamental illusion of the Bush Doctrine.
(2) Place our trust in international organizations and alliances, believing that somehow the rest of the world will come together and cooperate to establish a lasting peace. (How's that working out for you?) This is your basic "Turn our foreign policy over to the UN" mantra.
(3) Withdraw into our usual (pre-1941) cocoon of isolationism, broken only by the occasional threat to nuke anybody who bothers Israel or Taiwan.
Frankly, all three of those options suck.
To go back: before anyone (Demopublican, Anarchist, or Libertarian) can develop a foreign policy, they've got to have strategic goals and a firm handle on the tools available to achieve those goals.
In military terms this is the current state of our tool:
We have the world's best force projection power, but its limitations have now been demonstrated to our friends and enemies alike. We no longer have the ability to raise (quickly) a military with Continental Mass, must less send it anywhere. We are likely to see a significant (say about 30%) in our existing military capability over the next ten years, despite the War on Terror. (In part because of the War on Terror, with domestic homeland security needs now directly competing with the military for funding.)
The only really good news here is that aside from the occasional errant nuclear missile, none of our potential enemies (and not Russia or China, either, if you don't think of them as potential enemies) has the capability to develop force projection in less than 20 years. Moreover, the force projection ability of Great Britain has been and continues to be in decline; that of France has been static for about 2 decades and is unlikely to change (unless there is an active Franco-German alliance).
So, that having been said, the question now is: what should be our foreign policy goals?
But that's an issue for another evening.
Comments
The only reason I said it was because you started the train of thought.
Brian makes some good points, though the devil is in the details. Respect for the rest of the world as some posit it doesn't easily square with a philosophy of freedom or minimal government interference. If the state of Washington were to descend into dictatorship, certainly most would feel we had a right to save our fellow citizens. Consistency would require we show the same concern for those not within our borders. Squaring that circle is where the realists come in, who put the stress on the state, rather than individuals.
One tension in libertarian circles is located right there. To justify a policy of non intervention the focus is put squarely on the needs of us, a realist notion, and "us" is defined in terms of the state, not as individual human beings. Thus in foreign policy the right being violated by intervention is the rights of other peoples as represented by the state, not their individual lives.
Of course, that may be justifiable, but it leads to real contradictions in rhetoric. I have no claim to have solved this dilemma, where we need to draw the lines, or even if the tensions and contradictions of any philosophy of foreign policy can be or should be resolved. Moral and practical ambiguity may be inherent. However, I would appreciate your response to a couple of posts I wrote exploring the historical and ethical underpinnings of this debate. I think the observations and questions might yield a fruitful discussion. They are old posts, but please feel free to leave comments and renew the discussion.
Libertarianism, George Washington and War
http://asecondhandconjecture.com/?p=9
Libertarians and War part II
http://asecondhandconjecture.com/?p=15
There is no way either France or the UK has the lift capacity for sustained force projection operations. In fact, when the EU rapid response teams need to get somewhere they hitch a ride with NATO (read: US) C-141's, C-5's etc.
I also take issue with the very definition of force projection. Whenever a show of force is needed, the first thing the President asks is "Where are the carriers?" Any carrier group deployed off the coast of any nation can get the point across very quickly.
Next, if you don't think China is capable of continental mass you may want to ask Tibet.
Also the RMA also known as "Transformation" hasn't, IMNHO, been shown to be horseshit. In fact Transformation worked very well in Iraq it's the after-action nation building stuff that requires lots of people. If we're going to be in the business of "more rubble, less trouble" we can do that on the cheap. In reality we need two different groups of people in the army. A smaller fighting force with the ability to deliver large amounts of ordinance very precisely and a much much larger group of civil affairs guys if we're going to help them rebuild as in Iraq.
just my $0.02
Our foreign policy should be: Safeguard free trade between nations (i.e. fight piracy), force open closed markets for reciprocal trade, enforce contracts, protect our national interests, defense of the realm.
I don't think I said China can't do continental mass; if I did it was an error; what I meant to say was that China isn't equipped to do force projection.
I agree that the RMA has been a success in tactical and operational terms; that's not the problem.
What comes after is precisely the problem for foreign policy and for force projection.
I am moving toward agreement that the UK's force projection capability is a thing of the past, but I disagree about France. I think it would be a major strategic effort, but France still has that capability.
At any rate, both UK and France are minor players at best in terms of force projection, which is your point and I agree.
I didn't mean to leave out naval force projection, but I was writing and thinking about projecting force for a ground war, and trying to cover a lot of ground in a very short space.
I will be talking about naval force in the next segment.
Already done, but thanks!
Funny, we were talking past each other. When I think force projection I think naval power. Land forces can project force (or even continental mass) but not really on a global level.
I'd rule out naval force projection completely from France as their one carrier has been plagued with problems from the word "allez". Britain, once the mightiest navy in the world is now a shadow of it's former self.
As for land projection Britain is an island with too few naval troop transports to effectively cross and hold the channel.
Additionally, neither France nor Britain has the lift capacity for significant force projection beyond their immediate neighbors (Luxembourg trembles!).