There is a lot to be said about the way President Joe Biden runs our military affairs and foreign policy, none of it good. A big part of the problem is how he is failing to maintain our deterrence of other nations’ aggression.
Deterrence — creating fear in an enemy of what we would do if attacked — has been our strategy since roughly the beginning of the Cold War. Our forces are supposed to be designed to deter, and if necessary defeat, any of the threats we face.
That means our deterrent assets have to evolve as the threat evolves. It also means that the president and his national security team have to be both aware of the threats and intend to meet them head-on. That is not what is going on.
Last Friday, during a visit by Chinese President Xi Jinping to Saudi Arabia, the Arab League endorsed China’s threat to Taiwan.
Of our military leaders, there are too many, perhaps a majority, who believe that proper pronoun usage is more important than readiness. There are, however, some who are serious about their responsibilities. One of those people is Adm. Charles Richard, who is the commander of U.S. Strategic Command, a post from which he will soon retire. As STRATCOM‘s boss, he is in charge of our most important deterrent, our nuclear weapons.
Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine began in February, Adm. Richard’s STRATCOM team has been on alert because of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s frequent threats to use nuclear weapons there.
On Nov. 3, Richard declared Ukraine to be “just a warmup.” He said “the big one is coming. And it isn’t going to be very long before we’re going to be tested.” The big one is China.
Richard also said, “As I assess our level of deterrence against China, the ship is slowly sinking.”
Think about that in the context of Biden’s new National Defense Strategy and Nuclear Posture policy documents. Each has labeled China as the “pacing challenge,” and the “most consequential strategic competitor for the coming decades.” The National Defense Strategy supposedly provides a policy that ensures an integrated deterrent against China, using diplomacy, economic statecraft, and military power together.
How is that working out?
Oil-hungry China is, naturally, worried that when — not if — it attacks Taiwan, its Middle Eastern oil supplies could be interrupted. China buys a lot of Iranian oil in defiance of our embargo on Iran, but it’s not nearly enough.
Last Friday, during a visit by Chinese President Xi Jinping to Saudi Arabia, the Arab League endorsed China’s threat to attack Taiwan. In a joint statement issued after their meetings, China and the Arab League said, “We have agreed on … the firm commitment of the Arab countries to the principle of one China, their support for the People’s Republic of China’s efforts to preserve its sovereignty and territorial integrity, reaffirming that Taiwan is an integral part of Chinese territory.”
The statement went on to say the parties “… rejecting Taiwan’s ‘independence’ in all its forms, and supporting the Chinese position in the Hong Kong file and supporting the People’s Republic of China’s efforts to maintain national security and develop and perfect democracy in Hong Kong within the framework of one country, two systems.”
The Arab League is betting on China, not on us.
Adm. Richard is evidently right when he says our deterrence against China is a sinking ship. Our allies — and sometime-allies, such as the Arab nations — see Biden’s statements about deterring China as mere words.
That, itself, is important because one of the primary jobs of deterrence is psychological. If an enemy doesn’t fear our response to an attack more than it believes it can benefit from it, that is a decision point at which war becomes imminent.
Biden’s military leaders have performed terribly since he became president. The 2021 Afghanistan withdrawal debacle should have been a point at which the most senior generals and admirals went to Biden and said, “We can’t do it this way and if you continue we will resign.” But they didn’t.
Biden — earlier in 2021 — gave Putin a gift of a five-year extension in Obama’s “New START” treaty, which limits our nuclear weapons and launch platforms. China isn’t a party to that treaty and, according to the latest Pentagon report on Chinese military power, is expanding its nuclear arsenal in a way that will soon match ours (though we will still have an advantage in tactical nuclear warheads but not the means of delivering them).
The Biden military budget cut the submarine-launched nuclear cruise missile designed to carry a tactical nuke. There was not a hint of an objection from any of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Congress has reportedly added funding for submarine-launched nuclear cruise missiles back into the budget, but because the annual military authorization bill hasn’t yet passed Congress, it’s far from a sure thing.
Meanwhile, Biden’s military “leaders” have agreed to his withdrawal of dozens of F-15 fighters from Japan. They were a key part of our deterrent force. They will supposedly be replaced by rotating squadrons of other aircraft to Japan. But, as this column has pointed out before, and according to a study authored by Lt. Gen. David Deptula (USAF, Ret.), dean of the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace power, our Air Force is smaller, equipped with the oldest aircraft, and less ready to fight and to meet our global commitments than it has ever been. The Army and Navy aren’t in better shape.
Our allies and our enemies understand those ugly facts.
In the Cold War, our enemy was the Soviet Union. It was deterred from nuclear war with us by our adapted deterrent forces and will to use them. Our deterrent forces are depleted and Biden — to the extent that he is even conscious of the need to deter — shows no determination to use force.
Now we have to deter both China and Russia and, soon, Iran. In physics and mathematics, there is the ability to compute the interaction of two planetary masses to measure how the gravitational force of each will affect the path of the other through space. It’s called the “two-body” problem. But when a third body is introduced, astrophysics cannot compute their mutual influences.
Adm. Richard has reportedly compared deterring both China and Russia to the “three-body” insoluble problem. His comparison is entirely apt. We don’t know how to deter both Russia and China at the same time and apparently aren’t trying to determine how to do it.
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