May 21, 2009
The Left's Tone Deafness On Global Risk
National Review: How Ideology Has Distorted The Left's Perception Of Global Risk
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U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates speaking with troops (AP Photo/Jason Reed, Pool)
In an editorial on Sunday, May 10, the New York Times took the Obama administration to task for not cutting defense spending more deeply. Now, one wonders whether the Times is serious, or whether it is sending some kind of intramural signal intelligible only within the political Left. The administration is already making deep cuts in the defense budget and will undoubtedly cut even more in the future, despite the need for substantial increases in the modernization budget, which the Heritage Foundation, among others, has documented and about which I have written previously for National Review Online.
Yet the Times editorial is worth some consideration, because it is so typical of what passes on the Left for “analysis” of defense spending. The editorial does not actually discuss the programs it wants to cut, much less the general condition of America’s military or the risks America currently faces. Rather, its recommendations spring from a deeply ideological aversion to military power that is increasingly out of date and dangerous in the post-Cold War world.
First, the Times mischaracterizes the programs it criticizes. For example, it calls the F-22 air-superiority fighter “redundant.” Whatever else can be said about the F-22, it is not redundant. It’s the only fighter in the Air Force that can match the modern aircraft America’s competitors are acquiring in increasing quantities. Certainly the Russians and the Chinese will not shut down their Sukhoi and other advanced-fighter lines on the grounds that they are “redundant.” Numbers matter; without adequate numbers of 21st-century fighters, the United States cannot achieve air superiority, and without air superiority, military operations in places like the Straits of Taiwan become impossible.
Similarly, the Times calls the Virginia-class submarine program “wholly unnecessary” and wants to eliminate it. Yet the Virginia class is the only active submarine line the United States currently operates, which means that, were the line to close, the United States would eventually have no submarine fleet. Without submarines, the Navy cannot protect its aircraft carriers or control sea lanes, and we would lose a valuable intelligence-gathering asset.
Have submarines suddenly become “wholly unnecessary”? The Chinese don’t think so. They have constructed a huge new submarine base and are building four or five new advanced submarines every year. Even if the United States continues acquiring the Virginia-class boats at the current rate, the Chinese submarine fleet will surpass ours by the middle of the next decade.
Second, the Times simply ignores the threat environment in which the military must operate and the United States must protect itself. Every category of risk that America faces is undeniably growing. China has been acquiring Russian-built carrier-killer missiles for years and is now developing its own long-range variants. Russia invaded Georgia last August, Iran gets closer to a nuclear military capability every day, North Korea is developing a longer-range missile, the terrorists are fighting for control of nuclear Pakistan, the bipartisan Commission on Weapons of Mass Destruction unanimously found last December that the terrorists would have a nuclear or biological weapon within five years, northern Mexico is coming close to anarchy because of drug cartels, and piracy has become a major concern.
The Pentagon doesn’t determine its requirements by pulling weapons systems out of a hat. It develops force-structure and modernization requirements by analyzing the capabilities it must possess to deal with the threats America faces. Even the Obama administration concedes that the threats are real and that it has not conducted a thorough review of the international situation or the national military strategy. How can the Times - without even discussing the demonstrably growing risks, much less the capabilities necessary to meet them - now claim that programs the last three administrations have insisted were vital to American security have suddenly become “redundant” or “unnecessary”?
The Times says that it wants to cut defense more deeply to deal with the growing deficit. But the Times never evidenced concern about frugality when the administration was calling for and Congress was passing the “stimulus” package and other measures that guarantee a doubling of the national debt over the next ten years. If the purpose of that spending was to stimulate the economy, why should the government now cut the defense budget? How can it be right to double the size of the Department of Energy, supposedly in order to create jobs, but wrong to build the ships and planes that America needs to protects its security and that really do support hundreds of thousands of high-paying American jobs? The Times doesn’t answer these questions or even treat them as relevant.
That is because the Times has allowed its ideology to distort its perception of global risk. President Obama and his allies are fond of referring to the need to end Cold War strategies and programs. For his own sake, the president should consider whether it is the opposition or the movement he leads that is trapped in the assumptions of the Cold War. Ever since Vietnam, the Left has distrusted American military power. That attitude was never valid, but in today’s world - a world of rapidly developing and potentially aggressive peer competitors, rogue regimes with nuclear weapons, and well organized, ruthless terrorist groups - it is positively dissociated from reality.
No one is arguing that America should view the world only - or even primarily - through a military lens. I have urged, as have many others, the importance of what Bob Gates calls the tools of “soft” power: public diplomacy, effective communication of American ideals and intentions, assistance in building the institutions of democracy and free markets that are a bulwark against radicalism.
However, experience has shown that those tools can work only in an atmosphere of security, where the world is confident that the United States, as the animating force in a free-world consensus, can swiftly and effectively defeat any violent threat to freedom and democracy. For this reason, the Left’s own goals require a strong American military with robust technological superiority. Otherwise, the president’s faith in conciliation and international agreements is sure to be seen as weakness - a danger that is already evident after his recent meetings with world leaders.
The irony of the Times editorial is that it advocates a position that, if adopted, would seriously undermine the foreign policy of the administration the newspaper wanted so desperately to elect. Mr. Obama campaigned on a platform of changing America. But on defense policy, it is he and his followers who will have to change, if America is to successfully negotiate the challenges of the 21st century - challenges that are now Mr. Obama’s responsibility, and for the management of which he will be held accountable.
Jim Talent is a distinguished fellow at the Heritage Foundation. He has served in the U.S. House of Representatives (1993-2001) and the U.S. Senate (2002-07). He was a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee and, for four years, chairman of the committee’s Seapower Subcommittee.
By Jim Talent
Reprinted with permission from National Review Online.
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Michelle Obama tells how her role as the First Lady has changed her perspective.
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See all 28 CommentsOne insightful reviewer:
The overall idea of the book is excellent; that is, decisions of the past must be judged in the light of the times. We cannot judge past civilizations and their decisions by our standards. While the idea of how we should view history is excellent the execution of the concept in this book is horribly flawed. The author allows her bias to overflow into every passage. Nowhere is this retelling of history accomplished from a neutral point of view. This destroys the good premise behind the book. Anyone reading this book and agreeing with it will simply be agreeing with the liberal point of view of the author who adopts modern liberal western thought in reviewing the decisions of the past and condemns those who did not think like modern western liberals. The author fails to follow the basic premise of the book and thus destroys her credibility.
And another:
In her work The March of Folley, Barbara Tuchman pursues several well known examples of misgovernment through folly in order to prove that governments purse "policies contrary to their own self-interests". In the first chapter she defines folly; "To qualify as folly for this inquiry, the policy adopted must meet three criteria: it must have been perceived as counter-productive in it's own time, not merely by hindsight... A feasible alternative course of action must have been available... The policy in question should be that of a group, not an individual ruler, and should persist beyond any one political lifetime". These criteria would have served primarily as self-imposed constraints on Tuchman to ensure the historical validity of her work. Unfortunately, Tuchman has no problems bending her own rules in order to identify herself with her readers and their paychecks.
I gave it 2 stars because of the detail that Tuchman goes to to get her point across and because she is obviously a talented literary writer, but her motivation to hammer every event that she has listed as catastrophic folly into the mind of the reader often leads her to rash conclusions (such as an awkard analogy to the American Civil war on p. 323) and a disregard for anything that might change the readers' opinions from her focus: folly. Therefore the book is closeminded and biased, but in a decievingly 'open-minded' manner.
The process of self-hypnosis
You are so off the mark, no one knows where to begin with your rants. First of all, no one is getting rid of the military. The rest of your babble I will leave to someone else that might actually give a darn about what you spew.
Finally have you even been to a patriot meeting lately? They are not selling baked beans and videos of Bill Clinton anymore on the back table anymore. Your was probably busted up and you stopped going. I won't tell you their secrets but its no longer about politics, its almost all about making money. Patriots by and large don't have money. Their queer ways sometimes land them in jail, but for the most part Judges put up with them if they don't go too far. See you in the future!
Under the Bush adminastration a lot of money wound up in the black hole of miltary actions that were not well thought out conducted by a civilian leadership that was willfully blind. The conquences will be less money for many worthwhile projects, including but not limited too building submarines.
That would be the money from filling all those SUV gas tanks, the same vehicles with the "Support the Troops" bumper stickers.
As to the substance of his arguments, his Vietnam and Cold-war era hawkish extremism is out of line with the sentiment on both right and left that the end of the Cold War was a suitable place to end our practice of being the world's policeman. The idea that we would always be able to fund the largest and most advanced military in the world is no longer valid in the face of the demographic realities taking place in China and India. Failing to withdraw sufficiently from that role is arguably the cause of the 9/11 attacks. Which lessons do we learn and which are men like Talent incapable of learning?
WE are as tone deaf as the repubs and the "what war crime?" dems,,
AND the news sites are tone deaf to the present bombings in
BAGHDAD that has killed over 40 and wounded 80 and the Kerkuk
bomings that killed eight American Sunni employees standing around
waiting for and chatting about what they will do with their salary when
in a few minutes they will get it from the payment window,,,
,,,they got but not from he payment window.
A bomb blast takes a bit more deafness to miss hearing than the
shuffling of finance priorities,,,dont you think?
Stop all media articles written by AIPAC members and see how much coverage the Neocons get!
NRO take your duel passport holding staff and ship them back to the country of origin?
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