America is at war—an undeclared war Washington is trying to conduct as if it were yesterday’s Cold War. The Biden administration needs to understand the changed nature of our adversaries. Their new belligerency is not being deterred—the belligerents aggressively prod and poke just up to the line of US retaliation without crossing it. In the Cold War, the Soviet Union and the United States were wary of a chain reaction from a spark leading to a nuclear conflagration. Hence, both superpowers usually stayed deterred. The great near-miss, the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, chastened Washington and Moscow. The nature of confrontations today departs from the old deterrence.
The current hostilities in Ukraine and the Middle East point to major conflicts, surpassing anything similar during the Cold War. Yes, the Pentagon waged large-scale wars in Korea and Vietnam during the containment age, but both were fought on the global periphery, waged largely against local opponents, and without direct Soviet involvement. Today, Moscow is engaged against Kyiv in the heart of Europe. Despite the gravity of Washington’s military commitments, it treats these and other battlefronts as if it doesn’t understand deterrence.
Deterrence has failed against Russia and shows signs of doing the same against China, North Korea, and especially Iran.
Shattered complacency
Seeing the contemporary struggle through Cold War lenses is not only wrong but also dangerous. The eras are different. In the immediate post–World War II period, the Kremlin was checked, in part, by US development of nuclear arms, the formation of NATO, and Soviet internal problems. The Red Army settled in as a preserver of the status quo. The USSR’s tank-led interventions into 1956 Hungary and 1968 Czechoslovakia focused on preserving the communist order, not a fresh imperial conquest, as in Moscow’s intervention into Ukraine.
Moreover, Vladimir Putin’s war against Ukraine is being actively supported and supplied by the non-European nations of North Korea and Iran, both deeply hostile to the United States. Little like this occurred in the bipolar standoff with Moscow; it was the Kremlin doing the backing up of its surrogates. Now, former satellites do the reciprocating with Iranian drones and North Korean weapons dispatched to hard-pressed Russian ground forces in Ukraine.
The People’s Republic of China and the Russian Federation make no bones about their diplomatic solidarity and strategic animus toward the United States. This transforming geopolitical realignment of the two anti-American superpowers represents a sea change in the international order, which has been unfolding by fits and starts over the past half-decade. The two titans, in fact, opposed each other from the early 1960s on. Since the Cold War that they have grown closer in outright opposition to United States and its allied democratic governments around the world.
Never has America faced such an array of adversaries since it burst onto the international stage in the late nineteenth century’s Spanish-American War. Conflicts came and went, but the United States remained protected behind its ocean moats. It won two global wars and prevailed during the bipolar standoff with the Soviet Union, enjoying a hegemony among world powers until the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 shattered its complacency. Aligned with Moscow is China, ranked as having the second-largest economy in the world. Beijing is, if anything, even more politically aggressive than Russia to have its day in the sun.
Inexplicably, even as the Biden administration furnishes arms to our hard-pressed partners in Ukraine and Israel, it seems to be in selective denial. As valuable as this support is, Washington’s largesse depletes American armories at a time when the Department of Defense should be contracting to restock missiles, rockets, and the sought-after 155-milimeter artillery rounds expended in defense of Ukraine and Israel. Why hasn’t the White House grasped the nettle? Not dealing with shortages means the Pentagon may face a multifront war with empty guns. Imagine a Chinese full-court invasion of Taiwan or an island-wide embargo to seal it off from outside contact. Does the United States have the wherewithal to forestall a Chinese invasion and to sustain a resistance to it for a lengthy period? Of course not.
Politicians have raised their voices for increased weapons deliveries. For their part, defense industries want assurances that government demand for arms will not drop after the crises pass.
Beyond Washington, supply-chain snarls need unclogging and new pipelines opened.
The seductions of neutrality
Not long before this current phase of denial, America unwisely adopted neutrality while our enemies built tanks, warships, and goose-stepping battalions for a looming war. During the 1930s, rather than re-arming against the emerging threats from Nazi Germany and imperial Japan, the US Congress veered down the path of neutrality, passing a series of laws designed to stay clear of another European war.
The legislative branch passed the first Neutrality Act in mid-1935, prohibiting the export of weapons, munitions, and other military implements to warlike nations in conflicts. Other such legislation passed in Congress over the next four years and included the prohibition of loans to belligerent powers. The isolationist mood persisted as war broke out in Asia with the Japanese invasion of China in 1937 and in Europe with the German attack against Poland in 1939. US public opinion did not shift until the Pearl Harbor attack two years later. But even after the initial rally-around-the-flag surge of patriotism, the United States had to fill its military ranks by conscripting recruits to fight.
While the 1930s saw American isolationist feelings cloud strategic thinking about an impending war, the early 2020s witnessed a reluctance to understand the gravity of the threats confronting the United States.
America, in fact, is in shooting wars. The Russian invasion of Ukraine taxes US war-fighting equipment as the Pentagon sends a variety of artillery, missiles, and planes to combat the Kremlin’s intrusion. Instructors from the American armed forces train Ukrainian soldiers, pilots, and special forces in neighboring countries.
Washington’s Ukrainian “front” became more complex and more difficult with the October 7 Hamas terrorist offensive into Israel. American military commitment to Israel has increased along with the raising of tensions in the region. Iran, the decades-old adversary of both the United States and Israel (the “big and little Satan”), has resorted to Iranian-affiliated groups in Syria and Iraq to target US ground troops with drones and rockets in both countries. Rather than relying on its local proxy forces, the Pentagon has retaliated by conducting airstrikes against the Iranian-backed groups in Syria. This represents an escalation of US military actions against Iran.
More and more, the proxy wars resemble one-on-one wars between the two superpowers as Washington’s Ukrainian allies battle Russian forces with greater participation from American military assistance. In the Syria and Iraq theater, the Pentagon is also more directly intervening by striking Ian’s allied groups from the air. The US arm’s-length strategy is giving way to unilateral action.
Iran, an implacable adversary since the late 1970s, also actively pursues nuclear bombs and intercontinental missiles capable of hitting targets in Israel and Western Europe. The Iranian march to nuclear arms remains undeterred by either the West’s warnings and an array of economic sanctions or its offers of better relations in return for arms-control agreements.
The list of America enemies doesn’t end here. It includes North Korea, a recent supplier of weapons to Russia; Pyongyang also taunts the Pentagon with provocations along its border with the Republic of Korea. North Korea’s nuclear-weapons tests and ballistic missile firings set the East Asian region on edge. Additionally, terrorist bands linked to Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria marauder through the African Sahel region. These two violent predators and their offshoots still pose threats to Americans and their interests.
Strong and well-armed
Washington no longer understands the strategy of deterrence to hold the West’s enemies at bay. America also looks overextended and unable to meet its commitments. At a minimum, Washington seems incapable of backstopping the anti-Russian forces in Ukraine and leading NATO’s defensive posture. The Department of Defense’s expenditure of bombs and bullets has outstripped its stockpiles. There can be no deterrence without adequate munitions and projectiles.
At the least, the Biden administration should launch a concerted re-armament campaign, perhaps headed by a weapons czar, empowered to cut through the red tape and mobilize the arms industry to open more production lines. It ought to enlist the services of someone like Robert Gates, who was George W. Bush’s secretary of defense during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. US soldiers and Marines were being killed by roadside bombs, but the Defense Department lacked adequate vehicles to reduce casualties. After Gates assumed his duties, he sprang into action, stepped on toes, pushed, and bullied until the United States had shipped twenty-seven thousand Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles to Iraq, saving countless American lives.
It is high time to take cognizance of our new security threats and defend ourselves.