Please watch, if you haven’t already, this recent 60 Minutes report (below) on the CCP’s PLA Navy. It’s eye-opening . . . or should be.
How did we get to this juncture of potentially losing a war against a rising hyper-power, Red China? If you look closely, an answer becomes apparent in the mediocrity that lies at all levels of our society, modern culture, and in our institutions. We are riddled with corrosive ideologies that sap our determination and abilities to respond to the threat. Mediocrities have filled the ranks of our political leadership from Obama to Biden. The predicament is frightening.
How frightening? Defense experts constantly war-game the likely outcomes of military conflict, like the emerging one between the US and Red China that culminated in a report released last December. In 18 of the 22 rounds of the war game, the US lost 500 aircraft, 20 surface ships, and two aircraft carriers. Our capabilities have stagnated as the CCP’s has grown by leaps and bounds. Everybody in the know knows it. The 5,000 sailors on the USS Nimitz should be nervous about being cooped up on a huge target beset by a swarm of anti-ship hypersonics. They should realize that military service has the potential of being a commitment that involves much more than seeing the world or the GI Bill.
At the same time as we allow our military capabilities to degrade, we plunge a dagger into the ranks’ morale with DEI and anti-racism crusades. These ideological jihads descending on the ranks on orders from the Pentagon dispirit them in charges that America, and all that it stands for, is a through-and-through oppressor. If you buy into it, what happens to your loyalty as your finger sets ready at the trigger of some of the most lethal weaponry in the world? If not, you might be driven to insubordination. What a way to run the nation’s defense.
Our multi-decade of mediocrities in the White House, Congress, and the Pentagon, including the present and previous occupants sitting behind the Resolute desk, have played Tiddlywinks as the Red Chinese are occupied with chess. The linkages between international actions seem to be beyond their mental capacity.
First, Trump. As the rest of the Indo-Pacific, particularly the first island chain and beyond, became abundantly aware of Red China’s encirclement of them in military and Belt-and-Road initiatives, and as they sought closer alignment with the US, Donald Trump attacked their economies with good old-fashioned American protectionism. Remember TPP, the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement? Not only did he quash it, he bragged about it (see “Read more here”).
Soon, in May 2018, Trump is pasting tariffs on imported steel from allies like Canada and Australia. The so-called shift to face Red China was blunted by efforts to make enemies of allies. The logic is straight out of the sandbox. In a tweet from May 2, 2018, he announced in a shallow display of economic reasoning,
“When a country (USA) is losing many billions of dollars on trade with virtually every country it does business with, trade wars are good, and easy to win. Example, when we are down $100 billion with a certain country and they get cute, don’t trade anymore-we win big. It’s easy!”
Trade wars are good? Did anyone attempt to remind him of Smoot-Hawley, even if it wouldn’t have had any effect? And good for whom? Certainly, appliance manufacturers, and anyone else using steel, and consumers wouldn’t be better off. Plus, it’s a charade that ignores the causes for the evolution of the Rust Belt. Bluntly put, we did it to ourselves in falling into the grip of militant unionism, the snake pit of eco-red tape, and a mounting tax burden. Business goes elsewhere once you become hostile to it. As we speak, California is learning that lesson all over again. Dah!
Until we clean up our own act, slapping tariffs on competitive products only puts lipstick on a pig. It’s a loser for most of the country. Consumers and steel users get shafted; allies seek solace from our enemies; and all of it just to pander to a few union bosses and a few thousand dues-payers at a cost to hundreds of thousands of other American workers. It’s a classic one step forward and six steps back. Donald Trump can’t count steps.
Then, the man from Mar-A-Lago got it in his craw that the Bushes should be slapped with “establishment” and “forever wars”. Of course, the “forever wars” rhetoric, if applied to the Cold War, a classic “forever war”, would have meant a surrender to the USSR and the world turning into a Soviet playground. Some “forever wars” are worth fighting, because “forever” can turn into collapse of an adversary ill-equipped to keep up.
But Donald Trump got his way in the sordid Doha Accords which established the predicate for a withdrawal from the Middle East, only to be additionally botched by his successor who, according to Robert Gates, has “been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades” (see below). Now, Trump, in his third bite at the apple, has decided to pander to the isolationistic wing of the Republican Party by favoring a weakening of our resolve on Ukraine. A bugout from Afghanistan will be followed by another one from Ukraine.
Donald Trump and his senescent successor seem incapable of playing chess. If the grotesquerie of a Kabul bugout is condemnable for its encouragement to aggressors, what do you think an evisceration of Ukraine on the heels of Kabul would mean? And while we’re floundering in this self-defeating wrangle over isolationism, we assault our own troops with charges of racism and other bigotries. Shortly after Biden takes office, a standdown was issued throughout our national defense to expose the ranks to anti-American indoctrination predicated on American being a hateful country. Mediocrities running the country may be a greater threat than a decaying national defense.
A disaster awaits, and it will be plaid in blood, the blood of those who volunteered to defend the country. The scene of charred bodies going down with the ship and many of our injured sailors swimming in seas ablaze may be the real cost for choosing mediocrities to control the ship of state.
Will we idly wait till it happens? Will we continue to turn to mediocrities? Please watch the video.
RogerG
Read more here:
* “Trump’s Exit From Asian Trade Pact Damaged America, Boosted China”, Stuart Anderson, Forbes, 10/4/2021, at https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2021/10/04/trumps-exit-from-asian-trade-pact-damaged-america-boosted-china/?sh=5145ad4d5e80
* “Trade wars, Trump tariffs and protectionism explained”, BBC News, 10/19/2019, at https://www.bbc.com/news/world-43512098
* “Biden has been wrong on every major foreign policy decision in last 4 decades”, Cal Thomas, Washington Times, 8/16/2021, at https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/aug/16/biden-has-been-wrong-on-every-major-foreign-policy/