Recently, a report was released by the Commission on National Defense Strategy. This was a panel of eight Washington defense and intelligence experts, what me might call senior staffers, assigned by the House of Representatives Armed Services Committee and its senior Republican (Mike Rogers and Joe Wilson) and Democratic (Adam Smith and Joe Courtney) members. This group made an exhaustive review of public and confidential documentation and conducted extensive interviews across government and non-government sectors and came out with a unanimous set of conclusions. To begin with, getting eight bipartisan staffers to agree unanimously on anything is quite amazing and that alone should raise some eyebrows. The conclusion of the report should raise even more eyebrows in that it says that the United States faces the most serious and most challenging defense threats it has faced since 1945, eighty years ago when WWII came to its grisly end. These challenging defense threats include the very real risk of “near-term major war.” In other words, the report suggests we are looking down the inevitable barrel of WWIII, something we all toss around as we make hyperbolic statements, but we generally don’t think is imminent.
The report makes a specific warning to the nation that it was last prepared for such a major conflagration back about 60 or so years ago during the Cold War, when the bogeyman of global thermonuclear war had us building back yard bomb shelters to protect us from nuclear winter. The report emphatically states that the nation is simply no longer adequately prepared for such an event, either in terms of military readiness or mass psychology. Perhaps the biggest shame is that the United States is too weak now to either prevent such a war or to perhaps be entirely confident of ultimate victory. The way a lot of the nation thinks about the need to isolate itself from the goings on in places like Ukraine, Gaza/Israel/Lebanon or Taiwan/Philippines and the internal fights over pennies of support for our allies and vehicles like NATO have had a lot to do with this state of unreadiness that exists. Our collective nation focus has turned almost entirely onto economics and our own insular lifestyles rather than the geopolitical landscape and protecting ourselves by staying vigilant against the mounting forces that feel we have overstayed our welcome as the world’s policeman or ethical standard bearer.
This report comes at a time and may have actually been driven by a time when the news from around the world is particularly bad. The main contrary actors to what has been called for eighty years the Pax Americana are clearly the authoritarian regimes of the world, Russia, China, Iran and perhaps even little North Korea. Note that we have wedged our economic sanction leverage against all four of these actors for varying numbers of years and they have all continued to move in the same anti-American direction, even if more slowly than they might have otherwise. Economic sanctions only work so well and they work even less well when they force bad actors to team up and help one other like a tag-team wrestling match. Iran gives arms to Lebanon (Hezbollah) and Gaza (Hamas) as well as Russia. North Korea gives Russia and China armaments. China gives Russia lots of munitions for its Ukraine efforts and has made a no-limits pact with them because as much as they may not truly trust Putin and Russia, they dislike and fear the continued dominance of the U.S. even more.
Russia is gaining ground on Ukraine despite united assistance from the U.S. and E.U. Ukraine’s vitality is draining away with the passage of time. Russia is being worn down as well, but its relative size advantage and the continued help from these axis friends have put that front into a tenuous position for the Pax. China has openly declared that it’s military is preparing for a 2027 advance on Taiwan and is busy testing its muscles in the South China Sea every day against petty and weak sparring bouts with the Philippines Navy. Meanwhile, North Korea has found lots of ways to hurl nuclear threats at the U.S. that simplify and multiply the task that once seemed far enough distant to allow us to sleep at night. Not so any more. Meanwhile Iran is doing its own sparring with the U.S. regional proxy, called Israel, on three fronts with Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthi’s in the Persian Gulf Straights of Hormuz. This is in addition to the very real prospect of Russia giving Iran the Bomb when they need Iranian weapons badly enough. These bees are all around the head of the Israelis and meanwhile the world is becoming less and less sanguine about the Palestinian civilian costs such that Israel has an entire additional front in its war being waged by the Progressive forces of Europe and the U.S. communities (not to mention all the emerging market countries that as busy adding Chinese and Iranian goods to their holiday wish lists as American goods are less and less provided in aid as during the heyday of the Pax). The battlegrounds are well identified and even the timing is becoming clearer and clearer. Modern warfare is also less and less predictable in conventional form with drones replacing planes and missiles and other technologies evolving at breakneck speed.
Meanwhile we are arguing about cumulative versus marginal inflation rates on our political stage and how many illegal aliens we are prepared to accept in a world that longs for the days of an American continent offering peace and prosperity to those willing to throw themselves into our mix. In other words, we are in a partisan state of affairs, focused less on national strategic defense and more on who’s in control and who is supposed to pay for what so that we can accumulate generational wealth for our own. We are worried about angels on the head of an economic pin when we should be focused on the real threat that is building a head of steam and hates everything we stand for and is prepared to demolish our lifestyle and any chance for a similar or better lifestyle for our children and their children. Republicans, Democrats, conservatives, liberals, progressives, libertarians, independents and everything in between have a lot of common ground on the issues of National Strategic Defense. Everything we know and love about the America we enjoy is a direct product of the Pax Americana that has been built and nurtured by several generations at great cost to themselves. Everyone in America and even those who wish to become Americans suffer greatly and equally if the world is allowed to progress on the current path towards the inevitability of global war. It may not be getting as much attention as global warming, but global war is likely to bite us in the ass sooner than fossil fuel burning will. And when war does break out, its clear that the vagueries of climate change will seem mild compared to the potentially much faster destruction of the world as we know it.
We have 39 days to go until our election. It’s too late to ring this alarm bell in favor of the globalist views of Democrats versus Republicans, so we will just have to see where the election comes out. We all know it will not be a November 5th answer and may take all of the ensuing 75 days until January 20th to get resolved, but I sure hope that as soon as the outcome is resolved sufficiently, our leaders, whoever they are, can turn immediately to this report and all that it warns about our biggest immediate threats as a nation.