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Ignoring Catastrophe

Russian and Chinese activities correspond precisely to those that would be undertaken in preparation for the initiation of a major war. The two nations have dramatically and rapidly upgraded their militaries, trained together, expanded their overseas bases, insured access to raw materials, and conducted probing operations to test the responses of their foes.

President Obama appears oblivious, as does his two Democrat would-be successors. All three advocate continuing the addiction to transferring funds from defense to vote-buying social welfare programs. They continue to alienate U.S. allies. They adhere to tax and environmental policies that deteriorate the U.S. defense industrial base, and refuse to acknowledge the dramatic increase in the armaments and aggressive actions of Moscow and Beijing.

The deterioration of both the current arsenal of the U.S. armed forces, as well as funding for future replacements, is not limited to weapons.  Oval Office policies which have encouraged the retirement or outright dismissal of experienced military personnel play a large role in the downward trajectory of America’s defense infrastructure.

Affordable and common-sense precautions, such as protecting key assets from electromagnetic pulse destruction, have not been taken. It has been estimated that it would cost just a few billion dollars to accomplish this, yet it was wholly excluded from Mr. Obama’s $800 billion “stimulus” package.

The mass media’s lack of interest in military matters combined with its ideological inclination to favor domestic programs over national security prevents the citizenry from getting a clear picture of how hazardous the current global situation truly is.

There are salient facts that rarely get discussed:

For the first time in history, Russia has a lead in strategic nuclear weapons, a result of the 2009 New Start Treaty. Moscow also possesses a ten-to-one lead in tactical atomic weapons. China’s known nuclear force is powerful, and intelligence sources believe that many more weapons may have been built, deployed, and hidden in a vast network of tunnels. Both are more modern than America’s increasingly obsolete deterrent. Added together, the U.S. is overmatched.

China already has more submarines than the United States, and by 2020, its navy will be larger than its American counterpart. The lead will not be merely quantitative.  The ships Beijing is building are every bit as capable as any in the world. With the loss of senior personnel, the American “experience advantage” is rapidly becoming ancient history. China has also developed an extraordinarily advanced shore to ship missile that dramatically changes the dynamic in sea power. Basing that missile both on mainland China and on the new island it has constructed in the South China Sea will establish regional dominance.

Russia, too, has engaged in a significant naval buildup, and has taken steps to provide its ready-for-war fleet with expanded basing infrastructure. Moscow’s actions in invading the Ukraine to insure control of its Black Sea naval base, its support of Syria’s Assad to protect its Tartus naval base, its extraordinary Arctic Sea buildup, and its return to Cuba are all clear examples.

The combined actions of the two nations along with the reduced size of the American Navy, which has shrunk from 600 ships to less than 274, present a potentially catastrophic challenge.
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The U.S. defense strategy is heavily invested in space, far more so than any potential adversary. However, China has developed and demonstrated the capability of destroying American satellites. If they are destroyed, replacement will not be easy.  Remember, the U.S. is dependent on Russian rocket engines to put many payloads in orbit.  In the conflict that may soon come, the Pentagon will rapidly become deaf and blind.

The 21st Century presents a far different world than that of the 1940’s.  The oceans that insulated the U.S. and gave it time to build an armed force sufficient to counter any foes no longer provide a barrier.

The once-mighty American industrial base has been reduced to a shadow of itself, and lacks the capability to rapidly build quantities of weapons as it did in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor.  Just one example: there is only one plant in the entire U.S. that can manufacture tanks—and President Obama has repeatedly attempted to put it out of business.  In what can only be described as an act of insanity, some U.S. weapons systems depend on China for key components.  The military Washington has on hand is the only force it will have to depend on in the event of hostilities.

While Russia and China have fielded advanced new weapons systems on land, air, and sea, many of the Pentagon’s advanced weapons programs have been cut back, delayed, or eliminated.

The United States no longer is secure within its own hemisphere.  The Russian Navy has started to return to Cuba, and its nuclear bombers are being refueled in Nicaragua. China has infrastructure on both sides of the Panama Canal. Both Moscow and Beijing have established military-to-military ties with several Latin American and Caribbean nations.

For over half a century, the West had been secure in the knowledge that the U.S.-NATO alliance was the strongest military force on the planet.  That is no longer the case. The U.S. has decreased its conventional military strength and has failed to modernize its nuclear weapons, but Europe continues to act as if nothing has changed.  Since the end of the Second World War, it has largely depended on America for the bulk of its defense, and still does so. Freed of the burden of defense spending, it developed politically popular but extraordinarily expensive entitlement programs. European politicians lack the will to divert funds to their national security needs.

The increasingly close-knit Russian, Chinese, and Iranian axis has a real advantage over the U.S., NATO, and Pacific allies.  The three nations are in close proximity (Russia and China share an extensive border) and need not worry about their lines of supply and communication being interrupted. Geographically, Russia has a dominant position in Eastern Europe, China is rapidly becoming a hegemon in Asia, and Iran, with Russia’s assistance, has become the force to be reckoned with in the strategically vital Middle East. With their vastly increased navies, Russia and China can wreak havoc with U.S. attempts to reinforce bases and allies spread across the planet.

Unlike Germany and Japan in the Second World War, the new axis of Russia and China will not be at a disadvantage when it comes to raw materials.  Russia has vast reserves of energy, and China has worked diligently to corner the market in vital minerals, particularly in Africa. Indeed, when it comes to those raw materials, it will be America and its allies that face a severe challenge.

Too many politicians on both sides of the Atlantic have apparently decided that it is far more personally profitable to pretend that this imminent crisis does not exist than to take the necessary and expensive steps to address it. But whether the bill comes due in the form of an actual attack or the threat of an attack to obtain a massive strategic goal, it will come.

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NY Analysis

Understanding Putin, Understanding Obama

Putin follows a classic pattern

The deployment of Russian military power to the Middle East, in alliance with both Iran and the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad, (who has committed massive human rights offenses and has violated international accords through his use of banned weaponry) provides conclusory evidence of Vladimir Putin’s worldview.

Simply put, it is unquestionably evident that the Russian President, who invaded Ukraine, dramatically ramped up his nation’s military spending, violated nuclear arms agreements, resumed nuclear bomber patrols along American coastlines, and is establishing bases in Cuba and Nicaragua, seeks to make his nation the world’s preeminent military power.

In his determined quest to attain his goal, Putin has ignored international opinion, arms treaties, and even the objections of several public figures within his own homeland.

He has succeeded. Despite the increasingly hollow sounding claims from the White House and politicians of both parties that America is the world’s strongest nation, the fact is that the Russian-Chinese-Iranian axis has supplanted the U.S.-NATO alliance as the globe’s most significant military.

That status is based both on the power of Putin’s armed forces and on his own steely determination. Unconstrained by public opinion, he has displayed no qualms about partnering with pariah states such as Iran and Syria.  He pays no political price for telling outrights lies, such as he told when he claimed he was going into Syria to fight ISIS, or that some of his new missiles do not defy treaty prohibitions, or that his claims to expanded Arctic territories are legal.  Indeed, he has unabashedly stifled dissent within Russia through physical, financial, and extralegal intimidation.

One of the key links in America’s victory in the first Cold War was the shared interest of Washington and Beijing in taming the Kremlin.  Putin has reversed all that, and the Chinese, with their booming economy and greatly expanded military, now are allied with Russia against the U.S.

In essence, Putin is the classic expansionist leader, not dissimilar from those that preceded him in Germany and Japan in World War II.  Indeed, it must be remembered that Russia began the Second World War in an alliance with the Nazis. Moscow only changed sides after Hitler invaded the USSR.

President Obama’s fundamental transformation

Putin, then, is not hard to understand. He is almost a stereotype.  But what about President Obama?

In the short span of his seven years in office, the United States has descended from the “world’s only superpower, the indispensable nation” to an increasingly irrelevant entity. This did not occur by accident, bad luck, inadvertence, or incompetence.

Almost immediately upon taking office, Mr. Obama began alienating America’s allies.  He gave up British nuclear secrets to Russia during arms negotiations. He backed away from agreements with Poland to base defensive missiles within its borders. He prematurely withdrew American forces from Iraq, which created the vacuum that gave rise to ISIS. He gave a departure date for the drawdown of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, and opened negotiations with the Taliban in violation of a long-standing policy against speaking with terrorists.  He failed to lodge even a diplomatic protest when China stole offshore territory from the Philippines, and when Beijing intimidated Japan.  He utterly abandoned and even assisted in the elimination of the pro-western regime of Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak and the anti-al-Qaeda regime of Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi. He engaged in a unilateral withdrawal of American tanks from Europe.

In complete violation of U.S. treaty obligations to the Ukraine, the White House failed to take any serious steps, other than minor sanctions, against the Kremlin in response to its Ukrainian invasion.

President Obama’s alienation of Israel has become so complete that, following Iran’s call for the elimination of the Jewish state, he ordered Secretary of State John Kerry and Ambassador Samantha Power to be absent when Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu spoke at the U.N. to condemn that despicable statement.

It wasn’t just nation-states that were abandoned. He failed to take into consideration the plight of Cuban dissidents when he opened relations with Cuba (a month after Havana agreed to let the Russian navy back in!) He failed to dwell on the oppression of dissidents in Iran and China in his discussions with the governments of those nations.
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Mr. Obama complemented his diplomatic withdrawal from the world and alienation of allies with his demoralization and defunding of the U.S. military. He signed an agreement with Moscow allowing it to gain, for the first time in history, superiority in strategic nuclear weapons. He has even floated a trial balloon about unilateral cuts in the already diminished American atomic deterrent.

The dire results of Mr. Obama’s actions are indisputably evident in the replacement of U.S. influence and power throughout the world with those who are antagonistic towards western interests. While there has always been a segment of the American political leadership and the general public that has sought to reduce defense spending and decrease overseas entanglements, the extreme degree of the current White House’s actions are far beyond any prior leanings in that direction.

The question that remains is why the President chose this course, particularly at a time when the expansionist actions of Russia, China, Iran, and Islamic terrorists render it a dangerous and clearly mistaken plan.

The answer lies in not in foreign policy, but in domestic spending programs. Mr. Obama’s desire to “fundamentally transform America” (which he stated explicitly in his October 2008 campaign stop in Columbia, Missouri, and implicitly in many other forums) requires vast funding. During his tenure in office, extraordinary increases in new and expanded entitlement programs have occurred as part of his transformation, and he seeks to do even more.

The U.S. already imposes the highest corporate taxes in the developed world, and individual income taxes are equally excessive. Increasing either is politically untenable.  Deficit spending has reached its limit with the U.S. already in an $18 trillion hole, and already threatens to institute a Greek-style meltdown even without further increases.

Defense spending, which accounts for about 18% of the U.S. budget, is seen by the current White House as a piggy bank to finance its goal of turning America into a European-style social welfare state.

There are two problems with that course of action. The first is purely economic.

In every instance where a social welfare-concentrated government has been attempted, the results have ranged from disappointing to absolutely disastrous.  Whether tried in the extreme, as in communist nations, or in moderation, such as the social democrat states of Europe, the concept has not produced a robust economy.  As Margaret Thatcher once said, “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.”

Two factors have allowed Europe’s social –spending oriented states to survive as long as they have: the defense of the continent was provided by the United States, virtually eliminating the lion’s share of that burden (the United Kingdom, for example, spends only 2% of its budget on defense) and the comparatively unfettered American economy continued to be the economic engine of the planet.

European populations and governments have not shown the political will to replace the American defense umbrella, and their social welfare economies do not possess the ability to do so, particularly with the weakened U.S. economy incapable of being a driving force for financial growth.

President Obama apparently recognizes this. He made a reckless calculation that the only means to finance his domestic spending programs was to retreat from the U.S. post-World War II role as the bulwark of the defense of what used to be called the “free world.”  His apparent hope was that if America retreated from international activities and slashed defense spending, Russia, China, and other forces would do the same.

Obviously, that hasn’t happened. The exact opposite occurred. A militarily and diplomatically weakened America encouraged aggression on the part of expansionist forces. However, despite the abundant and overwhelming evidence that his gamble has completely failed, Mr. Obama refuses to change course.

That leaves the world at a precipice last seen in the 1930’s.