“Third Way,” a Democrat think tank that currently attempts to soft-pedal the extreme leftist perspective on national security brought about by the Obama/Clinton wing of their party, views the national security challenges facing the United States not in terms of the very real threat facing the safety of the American people but as a political issue that has arisen due to a psychological attitude of the citizenry.
Its recently published a report entitled the National Security Debate Book, opens with this analysis:
“In the 2016 election cycle, Democrats are facing a challenge they haven’t seen since the Vietnam War. National security, specifically terrorism, is now among voters’ most important public policy concerns, and they overwhelmingly trust Republicans more than Democrats to keep them safe. If handled ineffectively, this yawning gap between the parties on security poses a serious political risk to Democrats and continues to undermine public faith in government.”
Rather than discuss the reality that, during the past eight years, terrorist forces have reached an unprecedented level of strength and influence, Russia has become the most powerful nuclear force on Earth, and China has risen to military superpower status, the report notes:
“Following a terrorist attack on the West, the acute symptoms of fear may fade quickly, but there is evidence that heightened levels of anxiety in the general population can linger for years. Now, in the wake of the terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, the public is going through this psychological response to terrorism to a degree not seen since 9/11. For example, a Gallup poll from December 8-9, 2015, found that 51% of Americans are worried that they or a family member will be the victim of a terrorist attack,7 a higher percentage than at any time since 2001. Moreover, the survey found a widespread sense of hopelessness: confidence in the government’s ability to protect citizens from terrorism was at an all-time low of 55%. By comparison, immediately after 9/11, [when Republicans controlled the White House] 88% said the government could protect them…Beyond public opinion data, there are deep psychological reasons that security has such an outsized effect on voters. Research on the psychology of terrorism shows that, unsurprisingly, populations experience heightened levels of fear following terrorist attacks…The problem with this extremely heightened level of concern for terrorism is that, all too often, Democrats seek to minimize the threat of terrorism. Instead of empathizing with voter fears, Democrats frequently dismiss them…”
Perhaps the authors of the Report need to discuss among themselves or with their psychologists the inability of the elected officials they support to deal with the reality of the dangers that have arisen from their refusal to acknowledge reality. Nothing illustrates this blindness more than President Obama’s State of the Union comment that “The shadow of the crisis of terrorism has passed,” unless, of course, one counts Hillary Clinton’s opposition to at least maintaining America’s diminished and rapidly obsolescing nuclear arsenal.
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“Russia maintains the world’s largest nuclear arsenal … Its …military has undergone significant modernization, outmatching U.S. forces in some areas.” The Report’s short term strategy to deal with this? “…in the short-term, we must avoid giving Russia a pretext to escalate tensions.”
China not only has a rapidly growing advantage in numbers of submarines and, within less than three years, ships, it has closed the overall military gap in quality and technological sophistication as well. It’s modern, capable military received a major upgrade in quality following President Bill Clinton’s sale of a Cray supercomputer to them in the 1990’s. The report recognizes Beijing’s superpower status:
“China is in many respects the second most powerful country in the world. A nuclear power with the second largest military… The Chinese military wants to be able to win a potential conflict with the United States in the western Pacific Ocean, and is modernizing to meet that goal. Together with China’s aggressive territorial claims, its military expansion has alarmed its smaller neighbors, such as Japan, South Korea, and Australia, who look to the United States for protection.”
The Report suggests that America “Maintain a strong U.S. military presence in Asia and strengthen the capabilities of regional allies;” but fails to endorse the necessary steps to allow that to happen. For example, the U.S. defense industrial base is a mere shadow of what it once was. A prime example: there is only one plant in America capable of building tanks, and the President has repeatedly attempted to close it down.
There was a time following the Second World War when, all sides, liberal and conservative, Democrat and Republican, believed that insuring America’s role as the world’s strongest military power was absolutely essential. That philosophy prevented a third world war from starting. It’s time to stop thinking of national security as a political or psychological problem and return to viewing it for what it truly is: national survival.