The View From 1776

The Strategic Debate We Need To Have
By Jeff Lukens

The U.S. federal debt is our nation’s greatest strategic weakness.  As the debt continues to grow, our military posture around the globe is threatened.  Defense cuts are coming, and with that reduction must come a reduced mission.  In this environment, what our nation’s strategic mission should be, and what the corresponding defense funding should be to meet that need, are open questions.  They are questions that need to be openly explored by politicians and the American people alike.

In a recent speech to the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), Defense Secretary Robert Gates said, “A smaller military, no matter how superb, will be able to go fewer places and do fewer things.” Ever the public servant, Gates seeks to kindle a debate the country seems reluctant, but needs, to have.  It would be an invitation to disaster if we kept the same mission with reduced funding, or a reduced force.  By bringing the issue to the public forum, Gates apparently seeks to avoid that calamity.

The core Pentagon budget is now about $530 billion, and accounts for roughly 20 percent of federal spending, and roughly half of discretionary spending.  Defense cuts are coming, that much we know for sure, and the easiest of them have already been made.  Gates acknowledged that over the past two years, “more than 30 programs (weapon systems, etc.) were canceled, capped, or ended that, if pursued to completion, would have cost more than $300 billion.”

After a comprehensive review, the Pentagon hopes to find additional savings.  Whatever those might be, however, they will not be enough to meet their goal of saving $400 billion over 10 years.  The pressure on the Pentagon’s budget is part of the GOP’s larger effort to cut the overall budget deficit by $4 trillion over the same time period.  To meet that goal, the Pentagon is already suggesting that military missions and troop levels be reduced.

For a historical perspective, our defense budget hit a postwar high of 14.2% of GDP in 1953 during the Korean War.  At the height of Vietnam in 1968, it was 9.5%, and it was 6.8% in 1986 at the height of the Reagan buildup.  In 2000, military funding reached the lowest point on 3.0%.  Today, 10 years into the Global War on Terror, we are spending 4.7% of GDP on defense.

In the 1980s, the Army had 18 combat divisions.  Today they have ten.  Many of the Army’s weapons have already missed several rounds of modernization.  Many of its soldiers are on their fourth or fifth tour of duty in Iraq or Afghanistan.  And the Army Reserves have been on repeated deployments overseas since 9/11 as well.

The Navy has been reduced from 600 ships in the 1980s to fewer than 300 today.  They now have fewer ships than at any time since the First World War.  In that same time, the number of tactical air wings in the Air Force has fallen from 37 to 20.  And their planes are the smallest in number and the oldest in age, ever.  The useful life of the tanks, artillery, planes, ships, and missiles that date to the Reagan buildup is ending, and the cost of replacing them is now far greater than it was back then.

Going forward, the challenge for Washington is to reach a political consensus that transitions our military capability and alliances, and meets the realities of the decades ahead.  As a nation, perhaps the first question we must ask ourselves is what is so critical to our security that we are willing to go to war to defend it?  Upon the answer to that question lie answers to how much military strength we need, and at what amount of funding will be needed to achieve it.

Once the Afghan War is over, we would hope to see U.S. troop levels reduced in the Middle East.  In Korea, the South has twice the people, and many times the economy of the North.  Moreover, Pyongyang has no Soviet Union or Maoist China backing them as in the past.  We may also have an opportunity to reduce our commitment there.

And what is the necessity for a U.S. troop presence in Europe?  The Red Army withdrew from Germany and the rest of Central Europe long ago.  Our European allies are as wealthy as we are.  And while they would rather push their defense responsibilities off on us, perhaps it is time for us to step back from there too.  Should we really have U.S. troops stationed in places like Kosovo?  Maybe we should let the Europeans handle these places on their own.

Our military footprint is shrinking because we are broke, and we must make hard choices about what is important to our nation’s security.  Some have said we should not partake in any more wars where we must endlessly explain our reasons for being there to the American people.  In this time of austerity, perhaps that is the right approach.

The old axiom that peace comes through strength has not changed.  When a crisis comes, we could be forced to pay in blood and treasure many times over what we save today in downsizing our military.  Clearly, we must be smart about downsizing our military and optimizing its strength while undergoing this process.  Our decisions today will be consequential to when that day of crisis inevitably comes.

In his AEI speech, Gates said:

I am determined that we not repeat the mistakes of the past, where the budget targets were met mostly by taking a percentage off the top of everything, the simplest and most politically expedient approach both inside the Pentagon and outside of it. That kind of “salami-slicing” approach preserves overhead and maintains force structure on paper, but results in a hollowing-out of the force from a lack of proper training, maintenance and equipment - and manpower. That’s what happened in the 1970s - a disastrous period for our military - and to a lesser extent during the late 1990s.

The biggest items in the federal budget are Social Security, Medicare, and Defense.  It is unlikely we will reach any long-term bipartisan budget deal without cuts to all three.  So Defense cuts are coming, and the 2012 campaign season is as good a time as any to air this issue publicly.  As Gates said, “Part of this analysis will entail going places that have been avoided by politicians in the past.”

The President, the Congress, and the American people should openly decide which commitments and capabilities America should maintain, reduce, or abandon.  It is a debate we need to have.  Typically, most pols would kick this thorny issue down the road.  In one of his final acts as Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates has brought this vital issue to the forefront of the public attention.  His service to the nation is commendable.  Let the debate begin.

Jeff Lukens is a staff writer for the New Media Alliance, a non-profit (501c3) national coalition of writers, journalists and grass-roots media outlets. He can be contacted at http://www.jefflukens.com

President Obama is dangerously misguided.  The inherent superficiality of liberal-progressivism, its instinctive expectation that everyone sees the world as liberal-progressives see it, leads the president to a foreign policy that is the equivalent of attempting to deflect a great white shark’s attack by singing a soft lullaby.

For a thousand years after Mohammed’s 622 hegira, there was never a decade when Muslim marauders were not overrunning Christian cities around the Mediterranean and throughout the Middle East, slaughtering the men, and enslaving the women and children.  It is this history that Islamic Jihad strives to revive. 

Make no mistake about it: Islam is dedicated to death.  Islam commands its followers to beguile non-Muslims with appearances of friendship, awaiting an opportunity to attack and destroy.  Make no mistake about it: there is no milk of human kindness in Islamic Jihad.  Muslim warriors and suicide bombers long for death, yours and theirs.

Pat Buchanan’s Error
By Steve Kellmeyer

skellmeyer@bridegroompress.com

Over at Human Events, Pat Buchanan writes an essay that looks good on the surface, but doesn’t really hold up to a deeper analysis:

Buchanan begins by asking a salient question:
Why would people, who must believe themselves righteous and moral, keen and wail at the death of a monster who did what bin Laden had done?...

In one man’s judgment, Osama was admired because he alone in the Arab world had the astonishing audacity to stand up and smash a fist into the face of the world’s last superpower, which had become one of the most resented powers in the Middle East.
Buchanan then goes on to make a series of comparisons to other genocidal maniacs, men like Mao tse Tung, Ho Chi Minh and Fidel Castro. He argues that each of these men is held in honor within their own countries because they were seen as men who fought against imperialist powers like the British, the French, the Japanese and the Americans.

Like Mao, Ho and Castro, Osama tapped into the most powerful current of the age: ethnic nationalism, the desire of peoples to be rid of foreign rule and any oppressive foreign presence, and to put up against a wall all indigenous traitors who do the foreigners’ will.

This thesis plays well into the meme that Buchanan promotes - the idea that America should remove itself from most of the internal affairs of other nations.

Of course, that very idea is a contradiction in terms.

He wants America to be the last superpower, but he doesn’t want America meddling in the affairs of other nations.

But America is the last superpower precisely because she is the last nation capable of meddling in the internal affairs of other nations without provoking declarations of war from the nations whose affairs she re-arranges. Indeed, that is pretty much the definition and measure of a superpower.

The old Roman empire became the superpower in the Mediterranean because she could dictate terms to anyone who bordered that Roman lake, including her major rival, Carthage itself.

Britain was a superpower because her armies enforced British law and British whims throughout the world. The Hindus had to stop burning widows on the pyre, the Chinese had to permit opium dens in their capital, the Muslims had to cease their jihad, for no one could stand up to the might of British arms.

America is now a superpower in no small part because we can inflict unacceptable levels of military mayhem on any nation foolish enough to oppose us in a course of action we have decided to take.

It is impossible to be a superpower and not meddle with others.
Superpowers remake the world in their own image, or try to.
And they get close enough to succeeding to worry their opponents.
That’s what makes them superpowers - they can overwhelm any other opponent, militarily, culturally, or in any other way you care to name.

Which takes us to our second point.

It is true that the men named by Buchanan have been honored by their respective governments. But do the great mass of citizens they ruled really have any love for these men? That is a much more difficult question.

It is true that a tyrant stays in power only because enough of the people in the tyrant’s country agree with his policies to keep him in power. This is, after all, how we got, and still keep, Barack Obama. But how many Chinese really honor Mao tse Tung? How many Vietnamese hold fond memories of Ho Chi Minh? How many Cubans really love Fidel Castro. How many Americans love the Oreo?

If these were the only errors in Buchanan’s essay, I wouldn’t bother to write this one. These are common errors and relatively harmless.

It is his final sentence, the summation of his essay, which must be contested.

Osama is dead and gone. But the ideas he tapped into—the desire of Arab peoples to break free, to reclaim their sovereignty, to restore their past greatness, to be rid of the foreigner and his lackeys—are also the motivating ideas of the Arab Spring.

And there is the fatal flaw.

This is not a fight to be rid of the foreigner and his lackeys.
There is no Arab Spring.

The Egyptians are not Arabs.
The Libyans are not Arabs.
The Tunisians are not Arabs.
The Syrians are not Arabs.
The Iraqis are not Arabs.
The Iranians are not Arabs.

All of these countries, all of these peoples, have long and glorious histories of their own.
Histories that are not Arab.
Histories that are not Muslim.

These nations may have a largely Muslim population today, but before their countries were raped by Arab Muslims centuries ago, these people were each their own people.

The Arabs know this.
The Muslims know this.

The Arab Muslims have worked hard to destroy these many, varied and rich histories.
It is no accident that the Egyptian museums were ransacked by Muslim crowds, artifacts destroyed by Muslim savages. The Coptic Christians are attacked not just because they are Christians and not Muslims, but also because they are Egyptians, and not Arabs.

If the British, French and Americans were foreign intruders in the nations Buchanan recalls, the Arab Muslims are no less foreign intruders in the lands Buchanan mis-characterizes. As far as the Persians, the Egyptians or the Tunisians are concerned, Mohammed and his Arabs are just another set of foreign rulers complete with sword-wielding lackeys.

Thus, we are not witnessing the rise of ethnic nationalism.
Quite the contrary.
We are witnessing the defeat of ethnic nationalism.
The ethnic nationals who led these countries are being deposed and replaced by a foreign power.

Buchanan has not only failed to answer his question, he failed to ask the real question: why do so many non-Arab nations laud and honor a foreigner who imposed a foreign way of life upon their nations? 

By failing to ask that question of Osama bin Laden, he demonstrates his complete failure to grasp the situation in the Middle East.

You see, Buchanan’s basic premise is flawed: America is not yet the last superpower.

Her military might is being very successfully challenged, her ability to project her culture is being very successfully combated, her ability to project her laws, project her vision for the world onto other lands is being very successfully fought. There is another power which wishes to project its culture (or lack thereof),its perverse laws, its unwholesome vision onto the world.

We are locked in a war more terrible than the Cold War if only because the vision this superpower projects has risen ascendant over nations not for a mere handful of decades, but for over one-and-a-half millennia. It has sucked billions into its alternative vision for mankind. We have fought this vision from our very founding as a nation, if only because it pre-existed our nation by twelve hundred years.

The Cold War was a 70-year training camp, a blip, a short Hell Week in a long military struggle against this much more insidious, much more evil, much more vicious foe. We know our enemy can survive because ithas survived despite everything the ancient and modern world has thrown at it. We have no similar assurance about our own survival abilities.

Today, we fight a foe that has terrorized Europe since 632 AD, a foe that has torn whole areas, indeed, has torn the entire southern half of the Mediterranean, from the embrace of Western civilization. It has suborned and decimated nations and peoples throughout the world.

America is not the last superpower.

Until we recognize, name and fight the real enemy, we will not be the last superpower.

During the Carter administration, the New York Times expressed editorial approval of pulling back from projection of American military power around the globe.  President Reagan’s forthright denunciation of the Soviet Union as an evil power, coupled with extensive rebuilding of our military capabilities, brought the USSR to its knees and ended the Cold War.  President Clinton happily rode the liberal-progressive train supposedly laden with a big “peace dividend” to expand the socialistic welfare state.

Now Obama has gone further, bowing and scraping to Muslim dictators around the world, freighting the nation with unsupportable debt, strangling the economy with regulatory red tape, and debasing the dollar in order to fund an expansion of federal power comparable to FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society.

Knowing something of the socialistic and materialistic academic ethos in which Obama’s world view was shaped, it’s difficult not to believe that he consciously wants to punish the United States for the crimes against humanity attributed to it by liberal-progressive academics.

Columnist Charles Krauthammer looks at Obama’s amorphous foreign policy as a poisonous fruit of that mindset.

‘Leading From Behind’ Is Not A Real Doctrine

Could China’s Instability Threaten America?
By Jeff Lukens

China’s double-digit economic growth over the past thirty years has been breathtaking. Growth has limits, however, and China may soon be reaching them. With worldwide recession, and inflation coming to the yuan, a slowdown in China’s growth is increasingly probable. If China experiences any let up in growth, the nation’s internal stability becomes a concern. The modern western trait of rising expectations has set in with the populace. By their sheer numbers, any setback in the standard of living could ominously jeopardize the nation’s political and economic structure—and affect us as well.

Beijing has established, over the years, an integrated economy with surrounding Asian nations equal in size to that of the United States. They have the technological and financial advantages of a modern economy, and with their huge population, the cost advantages of a developing one.

But China has problems too. Part of their insecurity stems from a dependence on foreign sources for raw materials. China imports about half its oil, for example, and the vast majority of that comes from tankers that pass through the strategic chokepoint at Strait of Malacca near Singapore. And to reach Africa or the Persian Gulf, they must cross a vast Indian Ocean heavily patrolled by the U.S. and Indian warships.

And then there is the one-child policy adopted in the 1970s. The policy has resulted in an inherently unstable demographic of 125 men for every 100 women of childbearing age. Moreover, China is aging faster than almost any country on Earth. By 2030, about the time China’s economy is projected to surpass the U.S., their population will begin to decline.

A massive wealth disparity also exists between China’s coastal populations and its poorer interior regions. With the vast majority of China’s population living in the eastern-third of the country near the coast, the other two-thirds of the country is relatively unpopulated.

About 17 million people annually migrate from the country to the cities. Beijing is hoping to limit that flow by taxing and shifting resources away from wealthier coastal regions and giving it to the interior regions without meeting great resistance from either.

When economic growth inevitably slows, however, conflicts will arise and competing factions could emerge with some calling for a strong central government that imposes a heavy-handed order, and others calling for a more free decentralized government. How this struggle will play out is uncertain. In the end, China may remain formally united, but its power could be distributed among its regions much as it was before Mao.

China’s immediate problem, however, is inflation. A succession of wage increases has occurred this past year for factory workers. That, along with a rise in commodity prices, could bring a spiraling inflation where higher wages and prices feed off each other. The threat of inflation is forcing their central bank to begin cooling the economy. Beijing is already contemplating price controls for some consumer staples, and particularly for food items. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that China’s “consumer price index’s spike to 4.4% on-year in October was mostly due to a 10.1% on-year rise in food prices.”

By keeping the yuan artificially weak against other currencies, Beijing may have allowed its economy to overheat, and has contributed to trade imbalances and global recession. The fading value of the euro has compounded the problem. In preventing the yuan from fully appreciating, China has accumulated $2.6 trillion in foreign-currency reserves, mostly in dollar-denominated assets.

Although Beijing has recently decided to allow the yuan to strengthen, it has much further to go to reach fair value with the dollar. Ending trade and monetary imbalances, and the global recession, is unlikely unless the yuan is allowed to rise freely. Allowing the yuan to rise, however, would slow China’s economy still further. Such a policy would be mostly for the benefit of other nations, and is therefore very improbable.

History suggests that China will continue to act in its own best interest by maintaining trade advantages. This, in turn, allows them to keep their people employed, and to grow their economy and their military. They have little room for error. With 1.3 billion mouths to feed, and food prices rising, no one knows when some chance incident might trigger another Tiananmen Square type bloodletting, a Chinese selloff in the U.S. Bond market, or a showdown over Taiwan.

We cannot assume Chinese and American interests are the same. For policy makers in Washington, China’s ravenous appetite for raw materials and our growing indebtedness to them are worrisome. We must be open to the possibility that our current approach is not working, and is strengthening a regime that represses its people and threatens other nations.

In a world of sovereign debt defaults, currency devaluations and quantitative easing, China’s goal is to protect its economy. In doing so, however, they could be destabilizing the world economy, and causing an aggressive competition for resources. We too will feel the economic effects of their actions. It is inescapable.

The United States must undoubtedly begin the difficult process of reducing its budget and foreign trade deficits. So far, few in Washington have shown a genuine will to address these issues. That must change. With China’s inherent instability, a wise and measured policy approach by Washington will be required for the good of both nations. No easy answers exist for either country.

Jeff Lukens is a staff writer for the New Media Alliance, a non-profit (501c3) national coalition of writers, journalists and grass-roots media outlets. He can be through his website: http://www.jefflukens.com

Obama’s unilateral, “cowboy” foreign policy not only angers our allies.  It damages their economies.  One wonders if Obama even understands the implications of Helicopter Ben Bernanke’s recklessness.

The Wall Street Journal, in its November 8, 2010, edition, reports:

Quote:

German officials, concerned that Washington could be pushing the global economy into a downward spiral, have launched an unusually open critique of U.S. economic policy and vowed to make their frustration known at this week’s Group of 20 summit.

Leading the attack is Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble, who said the U.S. Federal Reserve’s decision last week to pump an additional $600 billion into government securities won’t help the U.S. economy or its global partners.

The Fed’s decisions are “undermining the credibility of U.S. financial policy,” Mr. Schäuble said in an interview with Der Spiegel magazine published over the weekend, referring to the Fed’s move, known as “quantitative easing” and designed to spur demand and keep interest rates low. “It doesn’t add up when the Americans accuse the Chinese of currency manipulation and then, with the help of their central bank’s printing presses, artificially lower the value of the dollar.”

At an economics conference in Berlin Friday, Mr. Schäuble said the Fed’s action shows U.S. policy makers are “at a loss about what to do.”

Mr. Schäuble hit back at critics in the Der Spiegel interview. “Germany’s exporting success is based on the increased competitiveness of our companies, not on some sort of currency sleight-of-hand. The American growth model, by comparison, is stuck in a deep crisis,” he said. “The USA lived off credit for too long, inflated its financial sector massively and neglected its industrial base. There are many reasons for America’s problems—German export surpluses aren’t one of them."