So, what should the U.S. do about omnipresent asymmetric warfare?
Garry Kasparov is a former International Chess Grand Master from Russia. He is chairman of the Renew Democracy Initiative and a co-founder of the Russian Action Committee. He writes: “Oct. 7, 2023, wasn’t only the greatest intelligence failure in modern Israeli history; it was also a massive failure of American intelligence. As in Afghanistan and Ukraine, Central Intelligence Agency Director William Burns and national security adviser Jake Sullivan were shown to be clueless.
Yet not everyone was caught flatfooted by the Hamas assault. The anti-Zionist movement mobilized right away, and not only in the Arab world. As the first images of terrorism emerged, America’s activists began organizing on behalf of the attackers. Soon they were in the streets and on campuses across the country. They chanted the genocidal mantra “from the river to the sea.”
Many leftist organizations, college student groups and professors, and even some elected officials, hailed the terror attack as resistance, exposing their moral bankruptcy and horrifying the liberal American Jews who had considered them allies.
It was a painful realization, but one that was past due. The left’s anti-Semitism doesn’t get the headlines of neo-Nazis with torches, but is more dangerous because it take subtler forms.
Those who won’t go as far as endorsing Hamas’s terror attacks will tell you Hamas doesn’t represent Gaza. Then why are they protesting Israel, and not Hamas, which started this war? Why hasn’t the Palestinian Authority condemned the genocidal crimes of Hamas, its sworn enemy?
At a rally in Istanbul on Oct. 28, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan called Hamas “freedom fighters” and Israel a “war criminal.” Like many other autocrats, Mr. Erdogan sees conflict as a way to distract his people from economic hardship and his domestic failures. That’s especially easy when Israel is involved, which is why the last thing the region’s Muslim leaders want is a peaceful resolution to the Palestinian problem.
Moscow hosts Hamas delegations and boasts that Russians taken hostage in Gaza are getting favorable treatment. China’s Baidu web service erased Israel’s name from its online maps, an ominous echo of Islamist threats to wipe Israel from the map.
This synchronized surge of anti-Israel sentiment and Hamas’s ability to wage such a war are symptoms of a failure in American global leadership.
Over the past three years, the Biden administration has blundered from one geopolitical disaster to another. Messrs. Burns and Sullivan lost Afghanistan, bungled the withdrawal, and then abandoned Ukraine to Russia—saved only by Volodymyr Zelensky’s heroic stand in Kyiv.
Now, they have been outplayed by Iran as well. In September, the U.S. agreed to pay Iran more than $6 billion to release five American hostages. Smirking all the way to the bank, the ayatollah’s ministers finalized their plans for the biggest victory of all, one they never cease discussing: the destruction of the state of Israel.
Amid this new humiliation, Mr. Sullivan declared peace for our time in Foreign Affairs magazine. After Iran and its Hamas proxies refuted Mr. Sullivan’s ignorance with the blood of 1,400 Israelis, he edited his essay for the online edition, which had a later deadline.
The reason Messrs. Burns and Sullivan have been wrong so often is because they still fail to realize that we are at war—a single war against dictatorships and terrorists. Just as Russia’s armies began to lose ground in Ukraine, Hamas attacked Israel, and Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro prepared a referendum asserting territorial claims over a large part of neighboring Guyana.
I believe in coincidences, but I also believe in the KGB. Until we defeat Vladimir Putin, he will continue to open up more fronts in his war against America and the global world order it leads, siphoning attention and resources from Ukraine.
Already, Mr. Putin’s allies in the Republican Party, such as Reps. Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene, have declared their intent to undermine support for Ukraine, which would have disastrous consequences for Israel and other U.S. allies.
The Biden administration’s waiting game has had grave consequences. Had the U.S. provided Ukraine with ATACMS, F-16s, and tanks from day one, it could have destroyed Russia’s armies in the field and won the war before Russian forces became entrenched.
But Messrs. Burns and Sullivan feared the potential chaos of Russian defeat more than they feared Ukraine’s destruction. Now, two years and half a million casualties later, Russia has dug in deep, and every Ukrainian advance will come at a high price.
Decisive early intervention would also have warned every other dictator that the U.S. wasn’t a paper tiger. America’s hapless deal makers are getting what they most feared anyway: emboldened dictatorships and spreading chaos.
Mr. Putin still wages war and his cronies attack the global order from Niger to the Nile and from Belarus to Venezuela. Iran’s foreign minister comes to New York City and threatens the lives of American citizens. China prepares to invade Taiwan, waiting for the right moment to strike.
Enough is enough. President Biden must fire Messrs. Burns and Sullivan and select a new foreign-policy team that understands the concept of deterrence. Then leaders like Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin— who acknowledges that we are at war—can finally give our allies the support they need.
It’s war, stupid. And like Israel, Ukraine deserves to win, not merely survive.
For Mr. Putin, Xi Jinping, Mr. Maduro and the ayatollah, this war isn’t optional. The only way these men can cling to power is by blaming their failures on the free world. There can be no de-escalation that doesn’t include defeating them, because for them, the conflict itself is the point.
Whether fighting anti-Semitism at home or standing up to terror and invasion abroad, America’s leaders and the American people must realize their way of life is under attack. You can lose a war you refuse to acknowledge exists. In fact, you are sure to.”
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Daniel Henninger is an award winning American commentator. He serves as the deputy editorial page director of The Wall Street Journal, and is a Fox News contributor. He also writes a column named “Wonder Land”, which appears in the Journal every Thursday. He is a graduate of Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service. He writes:
“The world is on fire, and the U.S. should be having an election- year debate about foreign policy. Instead, one of the presumed candidates, Donald Trump, is unwilling to talk about anything other than his years-ago first term, and the other, Joe Biden, is barely able to talk about the subject at all. It falls to everyone else to fill in the blanks of a hostile world.
History will record two dates as defining the final stretch of President Biden’s first term: Oct. 7, 2023, the day Hamas entered Israel and butchered 1,200 people, including Americans, and Jan. 29, 2024, when an Iran-allied militia killed three U.S. service members at Tower 22 in Jordan.
The first event was an Israeli intelligence failure. The second was also a failure of intelligence, though not in the military sense. The Jan. 29 deaths followed more than 150 attacks on U.S. forces in the region. The deaths of those U.S. service members weren’t predictable. They were inevitable.
After several U.S. counterstrikes against the militias, the Biden national-security team this week is pursuing the one strategy it believes in—diplomacy, which means having conversations.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken has made numerous post-Oct. 7 trips to the Mideast. His goal, is to negotiate an end to the war in Gaza that ensures Israel’s security and establishes a path toward the creation of a Palestinian state. And in the next half-minute, I will solve Rubik’s Cube.
Running alongside this mess are the two dysfunctional U.S. political parties that compose Congress, now in the process of failing to pass funding support for Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan.
There is a limit to the amount of global risk the U.S. can incur without suffering consequences. Put plainly—a big war.
We need to admit that avoiding a war is understandably what Team Biden is trying to do, notwithstanding its compulsion to euphemize it as an “expansion of hostilities.” In this, the Biden administration surely has the support of the American people. As well, Mr. Biden can’t go anywhere in the U.S. without being taunted by anti-Israel agitators. The antisemitic vote is on the brink of making itself part of the Democratic coalition.
We have heard a lot recently, including in this space, about the importance of deterrence. Less examined is whether these commitments to deterrence on paper will match the ideological forces driving the U.S.’s three primary adversaries— Iran, Russia and China.
Not one of these countries is a conventional opponent, subject—as the Biden national-security team believes—to incentives offered through diplomatic overtures to reduce their aggressive behavior. Iran, Russia and China aren’t just military threats. None of them operate inside the West’s traditional understanding of power relationships governed by a balance of interests. Instead, all three under their current leadership have become messianic political movements.
Political messianism has three characteristics: It is relentless in its pursuit of its goals, outward-moving and virtually unappeasable. We read daily about Iran’s “proxies” in the Middle East, but that bland word undervalues the fanatic energy driving Iran’s goals. At this late date it would require extraordinary myopia not to recognize that the Islamic Republic of Iran was, and always will be, a messianic movement.
Like Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping are seeking the restoration of centuries-old cross-border empires. These goals aren’t propagated merely for internal consumption. Each of these men believes it.
At the 2021 centennial of the Chinese Communist Party, Mr. Xi described China’s “national rejuvenation” as a “historical inevitability.” Mr. Putin has likened his invasion of Ukraine to Peter the Great’s 18th Century expansions into northern Europe. A year ago he called Ukraine a “watershed moment for our country” and said the West’s opposition is an attack on the Russian Orthodox Church.
These are enemies who can’t be deterred with the standard mix of carrots and sticks. They are looking not just for regional dominance but active obeisance to their rule. In the case of Iran and Russia, that means literally erasing opponents such as Israel and Ukraine.
Today, elements in both the Democratic and Republican parties want to believe that the water’s edge somehow protects the U.S. Refusing to ignore external realities was the point of Ronald Reagan’s decision to raise U.S. defense capacity against the Soviet Union to the level of an unmistakable deterrent.
Reagan summarized the strategy five months before the 1980 election in his “Peace Through Strength” speech at the GOP convention: “We know only too well that war comes not when the forces of freedom are strong, but when they are weak. It is then that tyrants are tempted.”
Iran isn’t backing down to the U.S.’s retaliatory bombing of its proxies, because it knows the Biden Democrats’ long-term commitments lie with domestic spending, not rebuilding military infrastructure. Mr. Trump, an off-and-on public admirer of Messrs. Putin and Xi, seems to think the answer to their messianism is him talking to them, guy to guy.
On the available evidence, neither candidate looks up to the task of stopping these three determined threats.”
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So, what now? Here’s a suggestion By Yulia Latynina, was former journalist with Echo of Moscow and Novaya Gazeta, Russian press outlets that have been shut down during Russia’s war with Ukraine. She writes; “Rich, sedentary civilizations have always been vulnerable.
Plato wrote that the gods destroyed Atlantis because it had grown wealthy and debauched. The more a civilization produces, the more alluring a target it becomes: Bronze Age kingdoms fell to the sea peoples; Germanic barbarians took apart the Roman Empire; the Mongols conquered China’s empires. In the Islamic world the succession of Umayyads, Abbasids, Mamluks and Ghaznavids reflected Ibn Khaldun’s cyclical theory of history—bloated sedentary economies get dismantled and consumed by predatory barbarians.
This cycle was broken by the development of firearms. Technological advance became an instrument for successful conquest. The Vikings left North America because of the ferocity of the natives, but the next wave of invaders conquered the Indians with ease. The difference? Guns.
No zealot or rogue king selling his followers on the certainty of victory in war can stand against superior technology. When the Mahdi tried to build an Islamic state in Sudan in the late 19th century, the machine guns of Maj. Gen. Horatio Herbert Kitchener ensured British victory at the Battle of Omdurman. A similar fate befell rebels in Matabeleland in 1896-97 in modern-day Zimbabwe. The leaders of the 1899 Boxer Rebel-lion in China promised their followers invulnerability against the bullets of foreign devils. This turned out to be an exaggeration.
For much of recent history, technological progress was the only route to success for a nation. Even the Soviet Union understood. The Vietnam War, the Iranian revolution and Sept. 11 each turned the wheel again. The barbarians had the advantage because their adversary had grown flabby and satisfied. It was impossible to fight Osama bin Laden the way Kitchener fought the Mahdi’s followers, not because al Qaeda had advanced weapons, but because a civilized nation couldn’t fight an uncivilized war.
The only war a modern, prosperous, open society is willing to fight is a comfortable one.
This has been noticed by the world’s rogue dictators. Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine is a challenge to the prevailing international order, presided over by a sedentary, prosperous U.S. hegemon. Unless this challenge is met by superior technology, it will likely succeed.
A new arms race is the only option for the West. The Russian offensive flounders in the face of superior firepower. On battlefields where there are no modern weapons, the barbarian Russian army, with its tactics of cannon fodder and indiscriminate shelling, slowly prevails. Where the Ukrainian defenders have been equipped with Western artillery, Russia’s stockpiles explode into fireworks and its fodder troops are burnt like chaff.
A world without a war is only a dream. When the strong and just refuse to fight with the weapons they have, thugs and bullies can do what they want.
The West must build precision weapons that can take out Russia’s nuclear silos—and let Mr. Putin know that they aren’t afraid to use them. Develop drones that can hunt and kill terrorists. An open society can’t dictate to rogue states how to live. But it should be able to prevent aggression like the invasion of Ukraine.”
Ronald Reagan took down the Soviet Union without firing a shot because he initiated an arms race that the Soviets couldn’t match. America still has the ability to be the arsenal of democracy. It should use it!
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So, what do America’s esteemed leaders think about this issue? Apparently, not much.
The Wall Street Journal editorial board writes: “President Biden opened his 2024 State of the Union address invoking Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1941. This week he rolled out a military budget fit for 1991, the twilight of the Cold War. Will Congress step up to defend the country amid compounding threats?
The President’s $850 billion request for the Pentagon in 2025 is a mere 1% increase over 2024. That’s a cut after inflation, the fourth in a row Mr. Biden has proposed. What’s happened in the past year? Israel was brutally attacked and is now fighting a war for survival. Iranian proxies have fired drones and rockets at U.S. troops in the region more than 100 times, and its terrorists in Yemen have taken a global shipping lane hostage.
Iran itself fired more than 300 ballistic and cruise missiles, and armed drones, at Israel on a single night in mid-April 2024. Miraculously, 99% of them were destroyed in the air!
Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine is a bloody slog that he could still win. North Korea is ratcheting up its belligerence toward South Korea, which the U.S. is bound to defend. China announced recently a 7.2% increase in defense spending. One recent think-tank report estimates Beijing is fielding high-end equipment five to six times faster than the U.S.
Mr. Biden thinks this is an acceptable moment to put American defenses on a diet, and the Administration says it’s merely complying with budget caps negotiated last year with Congress. Yet few priorities escaped the axe.
The U.S. Army will contract, and not because America is relying less on land forces, which are in high demand in Europe and the Middle East. The Army is asking for 442,300 troops, though the Biden Administration requested 485,000 as recently as 2022. The healthier number for the missions required is 500,000. Shrinking the force is no substitute for fixing the underlying problem, which is a struggle to find recruits [who are apparently smart enough to not want to be part of a Defense Department witch hunt for “white racists’ in the military].
The U.S. Navy will purchase only six ships and retire 10 early, which would shrink the fleet to 287 ships in 2025 from 296 today. Perhaps the most egregious choice is the Administration’s decision to purchase only one Virginia-class attack submarine, instead of a planned two.
U.S. submarine technology is a crown jewel of American military power and a true advantage over a rapidly expanding Chinese naval fleet. The industrial base is struggling to produce two boats a year, and the Administration presents its decision as a concession to this incapacity.
Yet buying only one boat is a terrible signal for capital investment, and it tells adversaries that the U.S. isn’t serious about rearming. The U.S. needs to build 2.3 subs a year to meet the Navy’s needs while also supplying subs to Australia under the Aukus pact. A serious Commander in Chief would seek to expand that industrial base, not meekly succumb to it.”
As this author has previously shown, the Navy could build about nine air-independent, fully as capable attack submarines like Sweeden, Germany, the Netherlands, India, Japan, and Taiwan are building, for the same price as one nuclear fast attack. Only institutional prejudice and myopia prevents this program from solving much of the Navy’s “shrinkage” problem.
“Remember the recent news that Russia is fielding anti-satellite weapons that threaten the U.S. homeland? The U.S. needs to diversify and harden its satellites in space, yet the Biden budget would cut the Space Force by $600 million over last year’s request. That is 2% of the force’s budget, even as the services will have to finance a proposed 4.5% pay increase for troops.
The larger picture presented by this budget is that the U.S. military is in a state of managed decline. U.S. defense spending falls to a projected 2.4% of the economy in 2034, down from an estimated 3.1% this year, which is half the nearly 6% spent during the 1980s when the U.S. was rearming to win the Cold War.
Interest on the national debt will cost more than the U.S. spends on defense this year, and the gap will continue to widen. The federal government gives more cash to state and local governments (e.g., Medicaid money) than it spends on its own defense. These are the priorities of a peacetime welfare state, not a nation serious about defending itself in a world of determined enemies and new technology that will put the U.S. at increasing risk.
Congress will have to deal with the budget deficiencies, perhaps in a supplemental bill later this year. Yet Congress has been mired in so much dysfunction that both chambers haven’t been able to pass an appropriation even for fiscal 2024 for the Pentagon. The political class in Washington is failing at its most important obligation, which is providing for the nation’s defense.”
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First, we might want to stop shooting ourselves in the foot. Here’s something for the “Capitalism at Any Cost” crowd to consider..
Gordon G. Chang is a distinguished senior fellow at the Gatestone Institute, a member of its advisory board, and the author of “The Coming Collapse of China.” He writes: “They certainly can’t be happy in Beijing. An exceedingly technical administrative decision in Washington will soon result in investors pulling tens of billions of dollars in investments from a cash-strapped China.
The Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board recently changed the benchmark for the Thrift Savings Plan’s International Stock Index Investment Fund, better known as the I Fund. Previously, the I Fund tracked the MSCI Europe, Australasia, and Far East Index. The Thrift Board decided on Nov. 14 to instead track the MSCI All Country World ex USA ex China ex Hong Kong Investible Market Index.
The new index doesn’t include Chinese and Hong Kong stocks, so to match the assets of the I Fund to the new index, the Thrift Board will have to sell Chinese and Hong Kong stocks and not buy them in the future. The switch in indices of the Thrift Savings Plan, essentially the 401(k) plan for federal employees, will take place next year.
Sound unimportant? The Thrift Board made one of the most consequential investment decisions of the year, and it will undoubtedly affect allocations of other investment managers, in the United States and perhaps elsewhere. In short, this move will be a blow to China’s failing equity markets, delivered at the worst possible moment for Beijing.
Participants had invested $68 billion in the I Fund as of the end of October 2023.
The Thrift Board’s decision is a “major victory” for those, such as Roger Robinson, who had been campaigning for years to get the Thrift Savings Plan, known as the TSP, to divest from China.
“The new MSCI ex China ex Hong Kong index employed for the I Fund sets a precedent for the exclusion of all Chinese companies,” Mr. Robinson, the National Security Council’s senior director for international economic affairs under President Ronald Reagan and now chairman of the Prague Security Studies Institute, told Gatestone. “This precedent should be adopted by other U.S. index providers and associated exchange-traded and other index funds.”
“There remain hundreds, if not thousands, of Chinese enterprises littering the investment products of the TSP-sponsored Mutual Fund Window,” he said. “The TSP Act of 2023 would accomplish this urgent undertaking.”
Wall Street for years has been in love with Chinese companies even though they had clearly earned failing grades across the board for, among other things, fiduciary responsibility, labor practices, and human rights. While prices were rising, the Street ignored concerns. Now, they’re weighing heavily on investment managers.
We can see why. Chinese stocks have taken a hit over the last year or so. The widely followed CSI 300 Index, which tracks stocks listed in Shanghai and Shenzhen, has dropped by about ten percent since the last trading day of 2022. Chinese stocks listed in Shanghai, Shenzhen, Hong Kong, and New York have lost about $955 billion of market capitalization. Stocks would have dropped even more were it not for sustained Chinese government intervention.
Investors have noticed. More than three-quarters of the foreign cash invested in Chinese has already been withdrawn from China. In excess of $50 billion has exited the country. Moreover, during recent quarters, foreign investors took out more money than they put in, the first such drop since statistics were first reported in 1998.
Chinese economic news has become downright scary, and, unfortunately for China, there’s no such thing as a brave money manager. China’s leader Xi Jinping, therefore, came to San Francisco in 2023 to reassure investors. On the day following the Thrift Board’s historic decision, he delivered a speech to obsequious U.S. executives but failed to address the concerns that triggered this year’s outflow of cash.
As a result of what The Wall Street Journal termed Xi’s “tone deaf” remarks, investment managers are bound to follow the Thrift Board’s decision and change their benchmarks as well.
There’s another side to the investment coin: China’s companies have been raising cash in U.S. public markets. The number of listings of Chinese companies in the United States increased 10 times during the past two decades. As of January, there were hundreds of Chinese companies, with a total market capitalization of more than $1 trillion, listed on the NYSE, Nasdaq, and NYSE U.S. stock exchanges.
China’s companies for decades essentially had a free ride: As a practical matter, they didn’t have to meet U.S. disclosure requirements, which applied to companies from all other countries. This unjustified preferential treatment was reduced somewhat in August 2022, when the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board surprisingly clinched an agreement with Chinese regulators to give the United States access in Hong Kong to the audit papers of Chinese companies.
So why should companies continue to get special access to U.S. equity markets just because they come from China? Or why should they have any access at all?
“If you understand that we are already in an economic war with China, it seems foolish to grant access to our markets,” Kevin Freeman, host of BlazeTV’s “Economic War Room,” told Gatestone. “Imagine funding the Nazi war machine in the late 1930s. Delisting military-related companies should be obvious. Under Communist Party dictates, any Chinese company can be made to serve military interests at any time.”
The Chinese economy and financial markets are fragile. It’s time to cut off all the blood supply to the Nazis of the 21st Century.”
Next time: The most asymmetric of wars: Nuclear war.