By Mark Helprin
Thursday, April 16, 2020
Fifteen years before the coronavirus pandemic, I wrote a
speech for a world-renowned physician who was coincidentally the majority
leader of the United States Senate, and thus not without influence. He went,
wholeheartedly, all-in, delivering it in the Senate, at Harvard Medical
School’s most important annual lecture, at Davos, at the Bohemian Grove (where
the only Bohemian to enthuse sufficiently to request a copy was Henry
Kissinger), and elsewhere.
And, of course, Senator Bill Frist took it to the White
House. He presented a strong — one might even say urgent — case for
establishing joint research and vaccine-and-curative manufacturing centers
judiciously spaced throughout the country; the doubling of medical- and
nursing-school outputs; incentives for commercial pharmaceutical and
medical-device research and production; increasing the number of hospital beds;
providing for the stocks, structures, and reserve personnel for large-scale
emergency field hospitals; and laying up stores of necessaries such as personal
protective equipment (PPE) and, specifically, ventilators. Given that the laws
of economics were not repealed, the ancillary effect of the supply surge in
some of these medical goods — such as doctors, nurses, and hospital capacity —
would have lowered their cost or at least slowed its rise. He asked for $100
billion per year. Had spending kept up at that level, which it need not have to
assure adequate preparation, it would have amounted to only one-quarter of the
monies shoveled into the furnace of COVID-19 in the last few weeks alone. He
got a total of $2.4 billion over four years for the Strategic National
Stockpile that of late has proved wholly inadequate.
This is the American way, a wing and a prayer. We count
on the forgiveness of the vast wilderness and its once-perceived infinite
resources. Fail, and you can pick up and go elsewhere, all the while enjoying
the protection of God and the two great oceans. But those days are over.
Perhaps we have learned the necessity of preparedness for
epidemics, but even in the midst of this emergency, and especially so, it is of
supreme importance to recognize that the same principle applies to defense and
America’s continuing sovereignty as we know it, something we cannot take for
granted given the threats to it both internally, as a result of many species of
decline, and externally, the subject below. It may seem strange to address the
question of war in a time of epidemics, but just as 15 years ago had the address
of epidemics been heeded we might not be in the position we are in now, we have
the opportunity to avoid a different kind of catastrophe 15 years hence.
In the three decades since the fall of the Soviet Union,
American foreign and defense policy under four Democratic and three Republican
administrations (one need not include the adult Bush and his adult presidency)
has been a primarily reactive, deadly incompetent, crazy mix of unilateral
disarmament, overextension, appeasement, misapprehension, and lack of prudent
preparation. Having lost the knack of winning wars and maintaining alliances,
politicians of both parties boast fulsomely about the military even as it has
become decisively weaker both absolutely and relative to its expanding tasks
and the growing strength of our adversaries.
As America reacts to one thing or another, each on its
own, isolated terms, and often unsuccessfully, the underlying forces gathering
to its disadvantage advance as if wholly unrecognized. Success usually requires
doing what is painful and difficult, but, individually and collectively,
Americans have developed consummate skill in shying from difficulty — from diet
to debt, to work, risk, sacrifice, and prudence. We readily fall victim to a
Scylla or a Charybdis rather than exercising the simple discipline that would
allow us the reward of safe passage between them. And in like fashion we suffer
failures, in order of ascending importance, in regard to the Middle East,
Europe, Russia, China, and the state of America’s alliances and military.
Sadly, in what follows, reference to roads not taken is born not of hindsight
but in recollection of policy publicly advocated at the time.
***
After 40 years of irrelevance in the Middle East, Russia
has reasserted itself to the detriment of all. It began with President Obama
and continues under President Trump. Following Turkey’s hundred-year sleep,
Recep Tayyip Erdogan in full megalomania bids to restore a supercharged Ottoman
Empire with Turkey as the leader of a confederation of 61 Muslim countries and
the first Islamic aircraft carrier. And for the first time in more than 2,000
years, Persia is once again facing the West from the shores of the Eastern
Mediterranean. These three malevolent forces are newly acting upon the
ever-volatile cockpit in which Africa, Europe, and Asia collide. Over
millennia, clashing empires shattered this battlefield into atomized tribes,
clans, sects, disappearing kingdoms, artificial states, and constantly shifting
alliances amid near-continuous warfare. As in the intricate mosaics of Islamic
art, which are never solid fields of color, tile after tile flashes in
alternating conflicts.
The United States focuses on one eruption or another
without coherent strategies for dealing with or authoring underlying shifts, as
once it did when it expelled Soviet influence and kept it at bay for
generations. What might have been some recent alternatives to our regional
approach? After invading Afghanistan we should have left within a few months,
accepting both the benefits and limitations of punitive action. Only after 20
years are we now about to do that, despite the Taliban conquests and massacres
that will follow. As in Vietnam, we will declare victory. And Hillary Clinton
is Cleopatra.
In Iraq, because only as it moves does the American
military go from strength to strength, we should have pivoted west and crushed
the Assad regime against the Israeli anvil. Leaving compliant generals in
Baghdad and Damascus, we could have seated our forces in Saudi Arabia’s highly
developed northern military infrastructure linked to the sea and two days
equidistant from Riyadh, Baghdad, and Damascus, with the explicit understanding
that trouble and terrorism would bring us back. Thus the center of gravity in
the Middle East could have been pacified and secured, our polity unshattered by
division over counterinsurgency’s toll in blood, our undegraded echelons
hermetically protected by the desert and ready for emergency deployment
elsewhere, and our defense budget devoted to the major-power competition
obviously on its way but foolishly dismissed as “next-war-itis.”
Though we continued to fail in Iraq and Afghanistan, by
the end of George W. Bush’s second term, when it was absolutely clear that Iran
would develop nuclear weapons come hell or high water, his parting gift should
have been the destruction of the means for their creation. Even in the unlikely
event that Iran would quickly choose to restart its nuclear program, a quarter
century’s work destroyed would take a quarter century to rebuild, at which
point it could receive another visit.
What should not have been done was to rescue the Iranian
economy from sanctions, release $150 billion to finance the subversion of at
least four regional states, allow ballistic-missile development, and assure
scheduled nuclear breakout. Even Neville Chamberlain was not so blind as
directly to subsidize German arms and aggression. For such an unprecedented
act, Barack Obama, John Kerry, and their fools-in-aid so willing to believe the
ever-smiling Iranian negotiators (why could they possibly have been so happy?)
will be indelibly enrolled in the annals of stupidity and betrayal.
But what prescription now for the Middle East, with the
patient, as so often before, dead yet again? Turkey is playing off the U.S.
against Russia as Egypt’s Nasser did in the Fifties. We should be decisive and
seize the initiative, moving both to expel Turkey from NATO and to transfer
American military bases there to Greece, Egypt, and Jordan. Then we will see
how delighted are the Turks to fall into the embrace of Russia, their near and
ancient enemy, and whether this might cause a change of heart, or, if not,
regime.
At present, Russia is based in the Middle East only in
the wreckage of Syria. Thus our object should be to check its overtures to
Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states, and Israel by providing them with the
military presence (inter alia, in a restored Sixth Fleet), aid, and support
that the U.S. (GDP $22 trillion) can, and Russia (GDP $1.6 trillion) cannot.
Iran will do and suffer anything to get nuclear weapons. Though appearing to
buckle after the American killing of Qasem Soleimani in early January, it succeeded
via misdirection in accomplishing its main objective, which was and is to buy
nuclear time. Even if it fails to develop a reliable ICBM, as the U.S. and the
USSR demonstrated in at least three separate programs, missiles can be launched
by dropping them in the sea and using the pressure of surrounding water to
steady them like a gantry. This way, Iran can loft lesser-range missiles from
freighters in the Atlantic relatively close to the U.S. Several high-altitude
nuclear detonations resulting in strong, widespread, electromagnetic pulses
would be sufficient to destroy the country, and, alternatively, two or three
major cities leveled by nuclear blasts would go a very long way toward doing
so. Especially given Shiite messianic conceptions, the Iranian nuclear question
is by far the most important matter in the Middle East, existential even for
the United States. Apparently we dare not definitively resolve it, as we must,
and soon.
So, in the absence of unambiguous success in the
sanctions campaign, and sufficiently in advance of nuclear breakout, the United
States should covertly propose to Iran’s two other major targets — Saudi Arabia
and Israel — a massive, tripartite, short-duration, aerial campaign against
Iranian nuclear infrastructure. Such an action would establish a new,
unprecedented strong horse (the classic Middle Eastern term for the dominant
nation or force) in firm control of the Middle East’s center of gravity. The
strategic geography would make a ground war unnecessary on our part and virtually
impossible for Iran beyond activating sure-to-be-reluctant proxies. An
Iranian-initiated missile and naval war of injured pride would follow, but
despite the damage to Saudi oil production it would neither go well for Iran
nor last long. A major condition precedent for such a move, however, would be a
president who had not severely restricted his freedom of action by deliberately
alienating and inflaming his political opponents as the chief strategy for
rousing his base.
***
The steady decline in Russia’s “soft” powers has left it
increasingly dependent on raw military potential, especially nuclear. Despite
this, the conventional wisdom discounts the Russian threat to Europe, in that,
excluding Turkey, the combined NATO and EU population is roughly six times, and
their GDPs 27 times, Russia’s. According to this logic, the similar discrepancy
between Israel and what are commonly called the confrontation states should
mean that Israel does not exist. And yet it does. The military balance in
Europe is not what it seems. America’s attachment to its European partners is
increasingly tenuous, its presence in Europe approximately 60,000 troops and a
token number of aircraft in 2019, as opposed to a third of a million troops and
640 aircraft 30 years earlier. In the absence of adequate sea- and air-lift of
military echelons and logistics from the U.S. to Europe (76 percent of the
ships designated for this are so inadequately maintained that they cannot even
leave port), American forces have become nothing more than what is commonly
referred to by NATO strategists as a trip wire, for a nuclear response that
will not occur, for example, should Russia reclaim, as it can in a single day,
its three former colonies on the Baltic.
Since the Cold War, NATO has doubled the length of its
land borders contiguous to the Warsaw Pact then and Russia and Belarus now,
while reducing its continental military capacity to a fraction of what it was.
For example, in 1991, Britain, France, and Germany combined had, rounded,
1,250,000 regulars, 2,000 combat aircraft, and 10,000 tanks. Today, comparable
figures are 500,000 regulars, 800 aircraft, and 700 tanks. The reduction is
partially due to changes in tactics, to new weaponry, and to similar Russian
decreases, but also to an inaccurate assessment of Russian capabilities and
doctrine; the persistent delusion that diplomacy rather than deterrent force
kept the peace in Europe during the Cold War; and the military-technical
misjudgment that advances in precision-guided munitions (PGMs) justify Europe’s
stand-down.
If, for example, a single plane can reliably hit ten
times as many targets per sortie as its predecessor, the thinking goes, only a
tenth as many planes are necessary, as ten will do the work of a hundred. But
not only can a hundred planes operate in ten times as many places at once, the
loss of a single plane in the reduced force would diminish that force by a full
10 percent, as opposed to only 1 percent in the force of 100. Further, in
(relative to a major conflict in Europe) the far less taxing wars in the Middle
East, PGMs have often been in short supply. While the U.S. mainly sat out the
teensy war in Libya as it “led from behind,” NATO ran out after less than a
month. As the Maginot Line and the wars in Vietnam and Afghanistan illustrate,
technology does not always adequately substitute for strategy, or quality for
quantity.
The weakening of NATO in favor of diminished national
militaries subject to differing authorities and doctrines presents Russia with
a fragmented opposition supping on the poisons of modernism, self-abnegation,
and the rejection of virtue, and thereby unwilling properly to defend itself.
In the not-so-distant future, it is hardly impossible that totalitarian Russia,
with a honed conventional force and a long-time, hyper-permissive nuclear
doctrine that often blends nuclear with conventional war and flirts with
concepts such as nuclear “escalation to de-escalate,” will succeed in
separating Europe from the United States and edging it into its orbit one step
at a time.
NATO never should have stood down to the extent that it
did at the close of the Cold War, never should have expanded its area of
responsibility, never should embark upon remote operations, and never should
relinquish its centrality of command. The Trump administration’s unnecessary
and promiscuous trade fights with Europe, public goading of its leaders, and
denigration of NATO are purely negative. Rather, achieving adequate European
defense expenditures — always and forever difficult — requires from the U.S.
persuasive argument, incentives, disincentives, public appeal (propaganda if
you wish), and diplomacy, not negotiating techniques disguised as infantile
tantrums, which may actually be infantile tantrums disguised as negotiating
techniques.
And one would think that the Europeans, noticing China’s
octopus embrace such as they themselves once imposed on the rest of the world,
feeling once again and in no small way the aggressive expansion of Islam, and
facing the direct threat of Russian arms, would understand the deep and
historically proven necessity of both the American alliance and attending to
their own strengths. But, in an invitation to tragedy, they don’t. As Russia
threatens to dominate an emasculated NATO and EU, Europe cannot be taken
lightly or for granted, especially if China masters East Asia and makes vassals
of our Pacific allies, and Iran continues to destabilize the Middle East. While
the modern Democrats, “citizens of the world,” display affection for surrender
on every front, President Trump thinks America can go it alone in geopolitical
isolation. The results of both approaches promise to be very much the same. To
wit, Atlanticism must be restored.
***
Twenty years ago in these pages I explained in detail why
China would achieve rough military parity with the U.S. by this date. It seemed
clearly in the offing if one took into account ancient Chinese principles
adapted by the Meiji and, subsequently and amazingly, Israel; extrapolations of
Chinese economic growth; and Deng Xiaoping’s stated reform and military
policies. (See my “East Wind,” in the March 20, 2000, issue.) Though we are not
quite there yet, we are close. Among many other indications, the Chinese navy
is now larger than, if not yet superior to, our own; China is ahead in quantum
computing and communications; we are unaware of the details of its nuclear
arsenal and have failed to bring it into an arms-control regime that would
provide at least some transparency and temporary restraint; and it is expanding
its military reach and basing abroad as America’s contracts.
Although the economic growth making all this possible has
been at least temporarily eliminated by the current world health and economic
crises, it is generally three times that of the United States and applied to a
hardly insignificant base: that is, a GDP two-thirds the size of our own.
Though the United States has focused on economic relations with China while the
far more threatening military dimension remains virtually unrecognized, the
difficulties and imbalances are indeed a problem of national security and must
be addressed. But the trade problem is the consequence of our own negligence
and greed. Beginning in the Seventies, we knew that isolating ourselves from
rapidly intensifying world trade, due to the revolutions in shipping technology
and communications and the emergence of developing countries, would degrade the
quality of our manufactures and exclude us from wider markets.
And we knew that the costs of labor at home and abroad
would take decades or perhaps a century to equalize. At that time, the American
tradition of innovation and mechanization unsurpassed, we were by far the world
leaders in computers, communications, research, robotics, and investment
capital. But rather than spurred by cheap foreign labor to automate and
mechanize, we raced offshore to harvest short-term gains, something terribly
destructive not only of the economy but of the character of the American
experiment. The only solution now is to stimulate research, innovation, and
mechanization on a grand scale while accepting the material sacrifices it will
take to do so, for such things come at a cost. But, character unrestored, we
now seek remedy not in competition and the free market but in fiat trade, by
regulation, tariff, and decree, that has all the excessively supervisory
presumptions of affirmative action or planned economies and, like them, is
bound to fail.
China is aggressively reordering the world via an
opportunistic alliance with Russia aimed at dominating Eurasia. Whereas a
weaker Russia depends upon the decline of Europe and openings created by the
endemic madness of the Middle East, China is powerful enough to bully the
successful nations that surround it, bringing them into its habitual tributary
system of suzerainty, thousands of years older than the Pax Americana.
Distressingly but not surprisingly, Secretary of Defense Mark Esper’s attempt
in November 2019 to elicit even symbolic unity vis-à-vis China from an audience
of nervous Asian defense ministers fell completely flat. Blatantly asserting
control over the South China Sea, China builds island military bases and sends
fishing fleets and oil-exploration platforms into the waters of sovereign
nations to its south, while, incredibly, harassing the rightful owners in their
own waters. At one time, these depredations would have been deterred by the
U.S. Navy. Now, however, quite apart from the risk of open military
confrontation with a nuclear power, the U.S. Navy would not prevail.
With China in de facto control of and able to spike the
Panama Canal, 40 percent of the Navy would be unable to reach the Pacific other
than by running a persistent blockade off the southern capes should China
choose to deploy its nine nuclear attack submarines in those inhospitable waters.
American ships that got through, and the two Pacific fleets, would then have to
steam vast distances and pass many choke points before even reaching the area
of operations. On the way and in tight passages, warships, auxiliaries, and
convoys would be the targets of China’s 48 other attack submarines, blue-water
combatants, land-based aircraft, and swarms of missiles specifically designed
to kill ships. Only then would our insufficiently supported vessels, greatly
reduced in number and within range of thousands of China’s fighter planes and
bombers, attempt to exercise their powers. America has lost the South China
Sea, only for lack of immediate and resolute countermeasures. Now the only
remedy is not the stated aim of keeping it open but rather to close it by
blockade.
For China, Japan is obviously a much harder case than
Southeast Asia, but the same process has begun in the East China Sea. Now
rapidly catching up to the most advanced U.S. naval technology, once its
systems are matured, China, with 100 major shipyards, will have the option of
the kind of surge that allowed U.S. naval superiority in World War II, and we,
with six, will not. Our few Western Pacific bases, more or less unhardened, are
vulnerable to Chinese missiles, bombers, and special operations. Nothing would
have better stimulated China to cooperate in denuclearizing North Korea than if
we had properly fortified existing bases, established others in the same mold,
and embarked upon a naval and air buildup. Instead, we threatened to tariff
iPhones and strained to make Xi Jinping buy more soybeans.
Further, underlying every geostrategic calculation
involving China is its known, stated, and sufficient nuclear deterrent.
However, it manufactures, stores, and deploys nuclear armaments in an astounding
3,000 miles of tunnels opaque to Western intelligence services. Given that all
nuclear states subscribe to varying nuclear doctrines, China may not share the
American conception of nuclear sufficiency. Crediting a different calculus
involving absorption of greater damage, overwhelming retaliatory capacity,
bluff, risk, and psychological manipulation, China may someday unveil, courtesy
of its hidden infrastructure, a massive nuclear arsenal that would shock and
intimidate the rest of the world. Which is why the Trump administration, having
been advised to bring China into a verifiable arms-control regime, should not
treat such an initiative, as it has, offhandedly.
***
Though the oceans cannot provide absolute security, and
never have, they can be leveraged to great advantage. In the Cold War, despite
intercontinental bombers and ICBMs, American naval superiority was immensely
advantageous in fighting and deterring conventional war, and during the world
wars it was our chief guarantor. Great utility still inheres in the oceans if
it is understood in light of what soon may come.
Given China’s rise, its expedient alliance with Russia,
and its reach across Asia into a senescent, enervated Europe, the United States
— while retreating neither from Asia nor from the Old World — would do well to
assure the possibility of retrenchment into the Western Hemisphere and the
transformation of this resource-rich half of the world, with combined
populations of a billion and GNPs recently and perhaps restorably of $28
trillion, into a fortified, unassailable base.
In view of modern conditions, how could a new version of
the Monroe Doctrine be possible? Although in 1823 the Atlantic helped to
insulate America from the European powers, the field of maneuver in, for
example, Brazil was equally inaccessible to both our tiny navy and the large
fleets of our rivals. It took a lot of chutzpah to come up with such a policy,
and yet, granted British support, we stood by it.
China penetrates Latin America via diplomacy writ small
and capital writ large. In absolute terms our economy has before the
disruptions been 150 percent of China’s, in per capita terms more than six
times larger (thus allowing a greater margin of resources to be diverted).
Weak, Russian-sponsored Latin dictatorships are infected splinters that should
have been attended to previously and now cry out for it. If Russia is able to
muscle us aside in its near-abroad, we should certainly be capable of returning
the favor. We have the advantage not only of geography. Our Latin population
can be an asset in forging benevolent and respectful alliances in this
hemisphere, and the general correlation of forces makes it entirely possible to
crowd out China and Russia by means of fair and mutually advantageous trade,
economic aid and development, a free and democratic model of governance, and
restoration of the naval and air supremacy that we are in the process of
sacrificing because of muddled thinking and self-doubt. A new Monroe Doctrine
would not entail a young nation in the age of imperialism paradoxically
flirting with the system in defiance of which it was born. We don’t anymore
need cheap bananas, but a bastion against swelling totalitarianism could be a
saving grace in things to come.
The U.S. will fail to meet accumulating challenges abroad
unless it repairs its alliances, restores its military strength, and newly
secures the Western Hemisphere, none of which is at present a concern of the
political parties except to oppose, tepidly endorse, or let die. If one aspires
to build a skyscraper in New York and it doesn’t work out, the problem vanishes
as, in the context of a stable legal and economic system, one moves on to the
next thing. But whether enemies or friends, countries hang around, and among
nations there is no protection other than in strength and maneuver. President
Trump took office schooled in commercial real estate and unaware of the
balances of power that determine international latitude of action. He promptly
took to whirling about, pressuring and attacking allies, rivals, and enemies
alike. Rather than alienating Europe, Canada, Mexico, and every free nation in
the Pacific, he might have assembled them in a united front to address China’s
rogue behaviors. Instead, he embarked upon a blind lashing-out that, among
other things, sabotaged the increase in economic growth he had achieved through
tax and regulatory reforms. The U.S. has experienced its greatest successes in
winning and deterring wars when substantively allied with other powers, and its
greatest failures otherwise, which is not to deny that at times we must stand
alone.
As it has with Southeast Asia, China is set to Finlandize
South Korea and Japan. Abandoning national loyalties (pace valiant
little Britain) for a defenseless, supranational bureaucracy, Europe is set to
fall to demographic suicide, Russian expansion, and uncontrolled immigration.
Only with the reinvigoration of NATO and our Pacific alliances will it be
otherwise, and this we cannot bring about without reversing our steep military
decline.
The average peacetime military expenditure from 1940 to
2000 was 5.7 percent of GDP. In the past 20 years, the comparable average in
the base military budget — i.e., not including emergency overseas contingency
funding — has been 3.03 percent. There is only one outcome rationally to expect
after cutting that budget by nearly half. Delusions in all quarters
notwithstanding, worn by two decades of low-intensity war, the American
military has fallen behind in nuclear deterrence, critical technologies,
readiness, manning, training, and morale. Our personnel are overburdened, our
ships rusty, arsenals depleted, bases poorly protected, air force contracting,
defense-industrial base disappearing, and funding insufficient. It is all a
matter of record. Is correction politically impossible? If so, survival as the
kind of sovereign nation we have been since the beginning is impossible. For,
unaddressed and as always, extortion from without will stimulate the rise of
collaborators from within.
To depart from myopic and solely reactive foreign and
defense policies so as to look ahead proactively will require rare
statesmanship, the defeat of the radically drifting Democrats as constituted at
present, and the restoration of informed, intelligent, and adult Republican
leadership. Though at the moment we have only Scylla and Charybdis, the wide,
calm waters between them beckon and abide.
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