Monday, September 23, 2024
According to the Pew Research Center, the top issue for all voters in 2024 is the economy (81 percent of registered voters). Other top concerns include health care and immigration. Although foreign policy has, in recent years, not been a decisive voter concern, it is still in the top five issues (62 percent of all registered voters; 54 percent of Harris voters; 70 percent of Trump voters). But a recent report (29 July) from the bipartisan special Commission on the National Defense Strategy suggests that voters might not be concerned enough about defense and foreign policy, because the world is on fire.
In the words of the Commission—which was tasked with reviewing the Biden Administration’s National Defense Strategy (NDS) and conducting an independent assessment of the threats and requirements of our common defense—“the threats the United States faces are the most serious and most challenging the nation has encountered since 1945 and include the potential for near-term major war.”
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Of special concern is the likelihood of coordinated actions by a hostile and aggressive China-Russia alignment. From the report: the growing partnership and collaboration between our adversaries “increases the likelihood that a conflict with one would expand to multiple fronts, causing simultaneous demands on U.S. and allied resources.” The report also addresses threats from Iran, North Korea, and Islamist terrorists, among others. The report concludes that currently, the US military lacks both the capabilities and the capacity required to be confident it can deal with emerging threats and challenges.
The Biden-Harris administration has not exactly covered itself in glory when it comes to national defense and foreign policy. For example, under Biden-Harris, freedom of navigation—a traditional cornerstone of US foreign policy—is threatened in the Red Sea, the Black Sea, the Strait of Hormuz, and the Eastern Mediterranean. Of special concern is China’s attempt to “annex” the South China Sea, the region that the insightful geopolitical writer, Robert Kaplan, calls “Asia’s Cauldron.” From the report: “China is outpacing the United States and has largely negated the U.S. military advantage in the Western Pacific through two decades of focused military investment.”
In the Middle East, Biden-Harris has violated a cardinal principle of foreign policy: treat your friends and allies better than you treat your enemies. In this volatile region, Biden-Harris has continued the Obama policy of favoring Iran over the Sunni states and Israel, undermining one of the great accomplishments of the Trump administration: the Abraham Accords. Meanwhile, the current administration does all it can to undermine Israel’s ability to defeat Hamas, Hezbollah, and other Iranian proxies.
Regarding Russia and Ukraine, Biden-Harris has failed to develop anything resembling a coherent strategy, preferring instead to do just enough to prevent a Ukrainian defeat but at the risk of possibly triggering a wider theater war. Of course, the Biden-Harris administration was also responsible for the disgraceful retreat from Afghanistan, a debacle in violation of sound military advice. Harris’ claim to have been “the last one in the room” when the decision to abandon Afghanistan is not exactly something she should be proud of.
Meanwhile, the US military has suffered under Biden-Harris. While China’s military spending, especially at sea, has risen, posing a high risk to commerce and stability in the Pacific, the U.S. fleet, the main deterrent to such aggression, continues to shrink, to the point that the US Navy is only half of what it was as the Cold War was ending.
At the same time, overall military manpower has shrunk as recruiting has fallen on hard times. The recruiting crisis has occurred at a time when the percentage of Americans expressing a great deal of trust and confidence in the military has declined precipitously. What accounts for that decline? Could it be the perception that the military has become less focused on its “functional imperative”—developing the virtues and capabilities to fight and win wars—in favor of the identity politics associated with DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) and such diversions as “climate change?”
The Commission claims that the US military is seriously underfunded, noting that after the Vietnam War, Cold War defense spending never dropped below 4.9% of gross domestic product, rising to as much as 6.8% in the Reagan years. It now stands at an anemic 3%. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that much of the defense budget is frittered away on “business practices, byzantine research and development … and culture of risk avoidance.” The Commission recommends removing the Democrats’ military budget caps and putting defense spending on a “glide path … commensurate with the U.S. national effort seen during the Cold War.”
Together, Congress and the Executive have a constitutional duty to provide for the common defense: to align resources with strategic requirements, to provide funding adequate to ensure American military superiority. But as the report notes, the U.S. public are largely unaware of the dangers the United States faces or the costs (financial and otherwise) required to adequately prepare.
The question facing the electorate in November is this: which candidate is best equipped to address the most challenging global environment since the end of the Cold War, in which the trends are worsening, not improving? To only slightly paraphrase Leon Trotsky, “You may not be interested in foreign affairs, but foreign affairs are interested in you.”
Mackubin Owens is a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He previously served as editor of Orbis: FPRI’s Journal of World Affairs (2008-2020). From 2015 until March of 2018, he was Dean of Academic Affairs and Professor at the Institute of World Politics in Washington, D.C. From 1987 until 2014, he was Professor of National Security Affairs at the US Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island.
He is also a Marine Corps veteran of Vietnam, where as an infantry platoon and company commander in 1968-1969, he was wounded twice and awarded the Silver Star medal. He retired from the Marine Corps Reserve as a Colonel in 1994.
Owens is the author of the FPRI monograph Abraham Lincoln: Leadership and Democratic Statesmanship in Wartime (2009) and US Civil-Military Relations after 9/11: Renegotiating the Civil-Military Bargain (Continuum Press, January 2011) and coauthor of US Foreign Policy and Defense Strategy: The Rise of an Incidental Superpower (Georgetown University Press, spring 2015). He is also completing a book on the theory and practice of US civil-military relations for Lynne-Rienner. He was co-editor of the textbook, Strategy and Force Planning, for which he also wrote several chapters, including “The Political Economy of National Security,” “Thinking About Strategy,” and “The Logic of Strategy and Force Planning.”
Owens’s articles on national security issues and American politics have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, International Security, Orbis, Joint Force Quarterly, The Public Interest, The Weekly Standard, The Washington Examiner, Defence Analysis, US Naval Institute Proceedings, Marine Corps Gazette, Comparative Strategy, National Review, The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor; The Los Angeles Times, the Jerusalem Post, The Washington Times, and The New York Post. And, he formerly wrote for the Providence Journal.
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