A mere decade ago, President
Barack Obama
ridiculed his Republican opponent
Mitt Romney
for suggesting
Russia
posed a threat to world peace. “The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because the
Cold War
’s been over for 20 years,” Obama quipped to laughter.
No one laughs now.
Russia has invaded Ukraine
twice since Obama belittled the threat. Ukraine’s resistance has been heroic, but the war is not over. What Russian President
Vladimir Putin
believed would be an easy victory is now a protracted conflict. Russia has lost more soldiers in less than a year than the U.S. Army did in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan combined.
WHITHER ROBUST, REAGAN-STYLE DEFENSE BUDGETS?
The price to Russia might be high, but Putin still believes he can outlast Ukraine — and the West. The long-term strategic threat is that the war becomes a frozen conflict and Washington’s commitment fades, leaving Ukraine isolated. That possibility exposes a larger weakness in American grand strategy.
National security
professionals historically conceive strategy through the lens of the DIME paradigm, with separate diplomatic, informational, military, and economic components. This underlined John Quincy Adams’s 1826 State of the Union. A century and a quarter later, Harry S. Truman spoke about the need for “military, economic, and psychological weapons if we are to prevent a third world war.” By the Vietnam War, academics were writing about “the diplomatic, economic, military, and political policies through which nations conventionally relate themselves to the international system.”
As the United States once again faces sustained competition from powerful adversaries, is America prepared? A quick consideration of the DIME strategy suggests not.
Take diplomacy: The State Department often conflates funding and effectiveness, but priorities matter. Which are more important: consulates in Alberta or Artsakh? Toronto or Tigray? San Marino or Somaliland? President Joe Biden sent an ambassador to Kyiv after a 15-month delay, but why no diplomats in Lviv? Odesa? Mariupol? Why is it more important to maintain five consulates in France, especially at a time when an agile department could handle so many citizen services online?
Then there is the “informational” angle. Education matters. Thirty years ago, Sen. David Boren (R-OK) created the National Security Education Program to incentivize the study of key languages: Arabic, Chinese, Korean, Persian, Portuguese, Russian, and Turkish. Times change. Where is Azeri? Armenian? Amharic? Somali? Tigrinya? Ukrainian? Urdu? If the U.S. will compete globally, then universities should produce a cadre of experts geared to 21st century conflict, not treat language funding as a cash cow to divert into amorphous cultural programming.
The crisis in Europe has renewed an appreciation of the importance of America’s international broadcasting, but appreciation does not equal capacity. Voice of America’s Ukrainian service only broadcasts Ukrainian-language television 5.4 hours per week. VOA’s Russian service provides only a little more than twice that. To win the information battle requires engaging in it rather than preemptively surrendering to Putin’s propaganda. Both should be 24/7. This should be part of a wide-ranging economic strategy that also includes aggressive sanctions against enemies, coercive measures against fence-sitters such as Turkey, and ample aid to allies such as Poland and Ukraine.
Defending the liberal order also requires a robust military strategy. The post-Vietnam War end of conscription has driven a wedge between veterans and many political and media elites who do not understand the military. Rhetoric of “forever wars,” a favorite of critics of military spending on both sides of the aisle, reflects this. And our enemies notice when our patience flags.
Congressional pandering makes matters worse. Democrats may depict the
House Freedom Caucus
as a crew of dangerous right-wing extremists, but when it comes to the defense budget, their own party’s progressive wing reads from the same page. “I think the Pentagon’s budget is so big and overblown even Dr. Strangelove would be impressed,” Rep. Jim McGovern (D-MA) quipped. Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) argued that
defense spending
came at the expense of Democratic priorities such as child care and healthcare. Such talking points are false but find traction among the base.
The problem is not just the political fringe. For four years running, Congress has failed to pass a
defense budget
. Continuing resolutions are not the same. They force the Pentagon into autopilot and undermine proactive planning, notwithstanding the occasional supplemental. Even a modest increase means a loss of capability given high inflation.
Biden cannot shrug off his decisions as the politics of polling or the will of the people. He consistently puts little skin in the game. The White House has given Congress just three briefings on the war in Ukraine over the past year. The Iraq War was unpopular when President George W. Bush pushed for the surge, but he made his case. He chose leadership over polls.
To use Russia’s aggression both to remind Congress and the public of the importance of US leadership should be an easy lift. Numerous surveys show that despite some slippage, public opinion remains overwhelmingly on Ukraine’s side. And while a few voices among the new Republican House majority confuse “America first” sentiments with isolationism, most simply ask for greater oversight on how Ukraine spends the aid.
Despite this, the perception of American impatience is high, etched into a generation by the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan followed by a trial balloon about a peace treaty in Korea that would lead to a similar U.S. exit. Can Biden restore respect abroad for America’s strategic patience and its willingness to fight the long war?
It would be unfair to suggest the problem started with Biden. Less than a year into his presidency, Obama announced “a new way forward” for Afghanistan. Bush had defined his goal as victory but omitted a timeline for its achievement. Obama did the opposite, assigning a timeline to the U.S. presence but making no mention of victory as the overarching goal. Donald Trump put the Obama precedent into overdrive.
That Ukraine is not yet a frozen conflict helps. Every day, Ukrainians seize back more territory, even if too many in Washington forget that Russia’s land grab began not in 2022 but in 2014 with Crimea. Still, Biden can show bang for the buck. Momentum matters not only for Ukraine but also farther afield as revisionists challenge the liberal order. What Biden does now will affect China’s designs on Taiwan, India, and Japan, North Korea’s efforts to unify Korea by force, Azerbaijan’s aggression against Armenia, Iran’s sponsorship of insurgency in Iraq, Lebanon, and Yemen, and Turkey’s territorial designs on Syrian and Iraqi Kurdistan, Cyprus, and Greece.
The solution must reach beyond the
White House
. Diplomacy starts at home. The U.S. won the Cold War because leaders in both the White House and Congress put country above party, at least on national security, and worked across the aisle. President Ronald Reagan could never have brought about the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, for example, if it were not for the quiet cooperation of House Speaker Tip O’Neill (D-MA).
FOR MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER MAGAZINE
There is no reason that Biden and House Speaker
Kevin McCarthy
(R-CA) cannot repeat the dynamic. Both can agree that, whatever party holds the Oval Office, America always loses when it treats national security as a partisan football that can be reset every four or eight years. The McCarthy speakership fight and surrounding bargaining highlighted the speaker’s importance in the composition of committees. The way for the U.S. to restore strategic focus is for both party leaders to treat the intelligence, armed services, and foreign affairs committees as distinct from the domestic political battleground. They should appoint only those with vision to work across the aisle in pursuit of bipartisan strategy. This does not mean burying debates, just prioritizing membership to those who seek solutions over stunts.
Throughout the Cold War, what aided stability if not peace was an understanding among Washington’s adversaries that Americans had both the will and the way to fight. Speaking to the National War College in 1952, Truman declared, “Our national policy is not simply our foreign policy or our military policy or our domestic policy. It is a combination of all three.” He was right. The greatest danger of today’s political antics is that they cause adversaries to doubt American resolve. Such doubt always manifests itself violently. History will not be kind to either Biden or McCarthy if they fail to see the forest through the political trees.
Michael Rubin is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
