Confronting major challenges around the world, the United States needs to strengthen its alliances and better counter its foes. Unfortunately, in the draft of its 2020 platform, the Democratic Party offers little of the hard-headed leadership that would be necessary to meet this crucial moment in our history.
When it comes to military spending, Democrats seem quite happy to allow allies to continue spending far less than they should toward our common defense. Although they correctly rebuke President Trump for questioning the Article Five mutual defense commitment under NATO, Democrats nevertheless adopt the easy and false European narrative that Trump poses the greatest threat to the alliance.
Lamenting Trump’s threat “to pull troops out of Germany” and “extort our South Korean allies to dramatically increase their share of alliance costs,” Joe Biden’s party ignores that both of these nations should be doing far more to counter our shared threats. South Korea should be spending far more on defense in the face of North Korea’s nuclear and massed military threat. And Germany, Europe’s wealthiest nation, has no excuse for failing to spend the NATO target of 2% of GDP on defense.
If Democrats fail to challenge allies to uphold their commitments, as President Barack Obama failed to do, the public will eventually lose faith in the alliances.
The Democrats’ platform also articulates a commitment to “make developing shared responses to non-military threats like disinformation, corruption, and economic coercion, priorities in our agenda.” But the platform itself shows how empty these words are. Not only is there no mention of Germany’s support for Vladimir Putin’s economic coercion via the Nord Stream II energy pipeline, but the Democrats’ additional commitment to abandon domestic energy extraction, including fracking, makes their policies as pro-Putin as those of the Germans.
Even as they speak out of one side of their mouths on the threats Putin poses, the Democrats cannot avoid contradicting themselves. “We can maintain a strong defense and protect our safety and security for less,” they say. This is a delusion. Not only is Putin constantly working to undermine the very NATO alliance to which Democrats pay lip service, but America is also in a new Cold War with a much more threatening Chinese empire. Xi Jinping is out to shred the liberal international order, and his ambitions require vigorous deterrence.
But it gets much more frightening when Democrats pledge to abandon “legacy platforms” — that is, the modernization of nuclear weapons programs. Considering the nuclear threats that Russia and China pose, this is utter foolishness. So is the Democrats’ claim that defense cuts are compatible with building military “modern transportation and logistics capabilities that can operate in more contested environments.” These are the very capabilities Obama damaged with defense cuts, and their planned cuts would damage them yet again.
Democrats say they will “end the forever wars” and promise “a durable and inclusive political settlement in Afghanistan that ensures that al-Qaeda isn’t allowed to reconstitute, the Islamic State isn’t allowed to grow, and the international community can help Afghans safeguard hard-fought gains, especially for women and girls.” This is absurd. As Obama and Trump have both found, these two goals are incompatible. The Taliban’s ideology, territorial ambition, and record of brutality indicate that any precipitous U.S. withdrawal will leave women and girls to lives of misery and oppression.
Finally, and most foolishly, Democrats recommit themselves to Obama’s disastrous nuclear deal, even though Iran has shredded its commitments to that deal. To think, just as Iran’s economic collapse is forcing Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to make concessions in order to ensure his regime’s survival, Democrats would throw him a lifeline by removing sanctions without getting anything of value in return. This static thinking appears to be a product of blind disgust toward Trump and the belief that anything the president has done deserves the opposite policy prescription, no matter how stupid or contrary to national interests.
The Democrats’ platform is not a draft for American leadership in the four years ahead. It is a fiction, designed to avoid answering the big questions.
