Political Observer asks the question ‘In what political world does this ring true’?

stephenkmacksd.com/

Jan 02, 2025

Editor : Mitch McConnell is a Historian of Note, a small selection from his History Made To Measure:

When he begins his second term as president, Donald Trump will inherit a world far more hostile to U.S. interests than the one he left behind four years ago. China has intensified its efforts to expand its military, political, and economic influence worldwide. Russia is fighting a brutal and unjustified war in Ukraine. Iran remains undeterred in its campaign to destroy Israel, dominate the Middle East, and develop a nuclear weapons capability. And these three U.S. adversaries, along with North Korea, are now working together more closely than ever to undermine the U.S.-led order that has underpinned Western peace and prosperity for nearly a century.

The Biden administration sought to manage these threats through engagement and accommodation. But today’s revanchist powers do not seek deeper integration with the existing international order; they reject its very basis. They draw strength from American weakness, and their appetite for hegemony has only grown with the eating.

Many in Washington acknowledge the threat but use it to justify existing domestic policy priorities that have little to do with the systemic competition underway. They pay lip service to the reality of great-power competition but shirk from investing in the hard power on which such competition is actually based. The costs of these mistaken assumptions have become evident. But the response to four years of weakness must not be four years of isolation.

Even though the competition with China and Russia is a global challenge, Trump will no doubt hear from some that he should prioritize a single theater and downgrade U.S. interests and commitments elsewhere. Most of these voices will argue for focusing on Asia at the expense of interests in Europe or the Middle East. Such thinking is commonplace among both isolationist conservatives who indulge the fantasy of “Fortress America” and progressive liberals who mistake internationalism for an end in itself. The right has retrenched in the face of Russian aggression in Europe, while the left has demonstrated a chronic allergy to deterring Iran and supporting Israel. Neither camp has committed to maintaining the military superiority or sustaining the alliances needed to contest revisionist powers. If the United States continues to retreat, its enemies will be only too happy to fill the void.

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In January 1934, William Borah, a Republican senator from Idaho and an outspoken isolationist, addressed a meeting of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. Because peace had prevailed for 15 years following the end of World War I, Borah argued, global military spending was excessive. Tensions between European powers, he insisted, could not be solved by outsiders: “It will be a long time, I venture to believe, before there will be any necessity or any justification for the United States engaging in a foreign war.”

Of course, by the end of the 1930s, the Nazi conquest of Europe had driven a dramatic swing in U.S. public opinion away from Borah’s isolationist daydream. By May 1940, as German forces invaded France, 94 percent of Americans supported any and all necessary investments in national defense. By June, more than 70 percent favored the draft.

The United States saw the light during World War II. But must it take another conquest of a close ally before the country turns its belated attention to the requirements of national defense? Isolation is no better a strategy today than it was on the eve of World War II. Today, in fact, in the face of linked threats even more potent than the Axis powers, a failure to uphold U.S. primacy would be even more catastrophically absurd than was the refusal to assume that responsibility 85 years ago. The last time around, the naive abdication of the requirements of national defense made reviving the arsenal of democracy on a short timeline unnecessarily difficult. As Admiral Harold Stark, then the chief of naval operations, observed in 1940, “Dollars cannot buy yesterday.”

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Editor : Senator Mitch McConnell does not sound the notes of a Walter Lippmann nor a George Kennan, but of the long forgotten voice of Joseph Alsop!

Political Observer