By Matthew Continetti
Saturday, September 09, 2017
‘Why did we lose this war?” asked James Burnham of
Vietnam in National Review in 1972.
One reason, he wrote, was that “We failed — that is, our leadership failed — to
comprehend this Indochina struggle as one campaign or subwar in the global
conflict. Since we did not set it within its global frame of reference, our
leaders could neither develop a comprehensive strategy to win it nor make it
comprehensible to the American people.”
That is a fair description of the geopolitical situation
more than four decades later. America faces diplomatic and security crises
along the rimland of the Eurasian supercontinent, from Lebanon and Syria and
Yemen and Iran to a recalcitrant Pakistan, a militarized South China Sea, and
nuclear brinkmanship in North Korea. We bomb ISIS, threaten to unwind the
Iranian nuclear agreement, demand that Pakistan assist us in our war against
the Afghan Taliban, and remind Kim Jong-un that U.S. forces are “locked and
loaded” if he crosses an ill-defined red line.
We treat these dilemmas as if they were isolated from one
another. We prefer to think the Shiite Corridor that Iran is establishing from
the Zagros Mountains to the Mediterranean has nothing to do with a North Korean
hydrogen bomb. We focus on Omar al-Baghdadi and Kim Jong-un and Bashar al-Assad
rather than the more powerful players who lurk behind them. We apply local
solutions to a global problem. The result is not only strategic incoherence.
It’s a diminished United States.
We know what the problem is. The –postCold War,
American-led world order of democratic capitalist nation-states tied to one
another by free-flowing capital, trade, labor, technology, and media is falling
apart. And this fragmentation is happening not only because of internal
division, feelings of historical guilt, and spiritual exhaustion, but also
because two external challengers are actively subverting American prestige and
influence around the globe. I doubt Burnham would be surprised to learn that
these challengers are exactly the same powers that thwarted the United States
in Vietnam: Russia and China.
None of the subsidiary national-security issues of war in
Ukraine, chaos in the Middle East, or nukes on the Korean peninsula can be
resolved without confronting Russian and Chinese malfeasance. As we are
consumed with White House intrigue, dopey clichés, and blistering Twitter
threads, Russia and China consolidate their positions by establishing facts on
the ground. Consider the following headlines:
• “Russia
and China agree sanctions against North Korea useless.”
• “U.S. Officials ‘Concerned’ as Iran, Russia
Plan $10 Billion Arms Deal.”
• “China’s navy expands reach: Ships in Baltic
for drills with Russia.”
• “Putin signs Syria base deal, cementing
Russia’s presence there for a half a century.”
• “Russia and Turkey Send Troops to Syria,
Build New Gas Pipeline at Home.”
• “China lodges stern protest with South Korea
over THAAD deployment.”
• “Russia joins Cuba to back Maduro’s power
grab in Venezuela.”
• “Videos suggest Russian government may be
arming Taliban.”
What we have, then, is the steady erosion of the American
position, with Russia acting in the western flank of the great continent
(Ukraine, the Middle East, and a trans-Atlantic salient in Cuba and Venezuela),
China in the east (North Korea, East and South China Seas), and both powers
active in cyberspace and the United Nations.
For eight years, America under President Obama did little
to counter these developments, and in some ways encouraged them. The response
from President Trump has been muddled. On the plus side, he talks tough and
defends the West from its critics. He has asked for more defense spending
(though it’s still not enough), modernized our nuclear armaments, closed ranks
with our traditional allies, accelerated the war against ISIS, punished Assad
for using chemical weapons, bashed the Iran deal, exported liquefied natural
gas to Lithuania, conducted freedom-of-navigation operations in the South China
Sea, deployed missile defenses to South Korea, and sanctioned ne’er-do-wells
from Latin America to East Asia.
On the negative side of the ledger, Trump’s belief that
he alone can fix our relationships with Putin and Xi Jinping is not only false
but also harmful, for it prevents him from seeing the nature of the conflict in
which he is engaged. His kind words for these autocrats negate the power of
U.S. countermeasures. Moreover, the contradiction between his America First
rhetoric and imperial policies sends mixed signals to both enemies and allies.
Will America abandon the field in Syria to Russia after ISIS is defeated? Will
Trump retaliate against Chinese mercantilism? They must laugh in Moscow and
Beijing when Trump clashes with U.S. allies and flirts with abandoning a trade
agreement with South Korea at the very moment the Pacific democracies need to
present a united front against nuclear terrorism.
Trump has spoken eloquently on the need for America and
the West to summon the will to confront our enemies and uphold the standard of
civilization. What he needs now is to align his words with his actions and
resist fully the Russian and Chinese attempt to remove America from the global
power equation. That is the way to solve our North Korean problem, our Syrian
problem, and many of our problems besides.
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