The NY Times and the Threats We Face
Don Smith / ThinkerFeeler
(September 23, 2024) — The New York Times sends out a daily “Morning” email to subscribers and past subscribers such as me. This morning (Sept 23, 2024) the email contained the text below, with the title “The Threats We Face.”
The author is listed as David Leonhardt. It’s an unabashed, one-sided call for higher military spending and for cuts to Social Security and Medicare.
The first sentence of the report — released over the summer by a bipartisan, congressionally appointed commission — was blunt: “The threats the United States faces are the most serious and most challenging the nation has encountered since 1945 and include the potential for near-term major war.”
The nation, the report continued, “is not prepared today.”
The threats begin with China, which has grown more belligerent in Asia. In Europe, Russia started the first major war in almost 80 years. In the Middle East, Iran finances a network of extremist groups. Increasingly, these countries work together, too, sometimes with North Korea. The report described them as “an axis of growing malign partnerships.”
I want to devote today’s newsletter to the findings from the group (officially known as the Commission on the National Defense Strategy) because I found them jarring — and because I suspect many readers haven’t yet heard them. “In a healthy political climate,” Walter Russell Mead, a foreign affairs expert at the Hudson Institute, wrote in The Wall Street Journal, the report would be “the central topic in national conversation.”
An Anti-democracy Alliance
This anti-American alliance presents a threat because its members are not satisfied with the status quo. That’s why Russia invaded Ukraine and Iran’s proxies have been so aggressive in Israel, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen. It’s why China has rammed Philippine boats in the South China Sea and President Xi Jinping has directed China’s military to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. China, Russia and Iran all want more control over their regions than they now have.
One of the bipartisan group’s central arguments is that American weakness has contributed to the new instability. “This is not a report encouraging the US to go to war,” Jane Harman, the former Democratic congresswoman from California and the commission’s chair, told me. “It’s a report making sure the US can deter war.”
If the US doesn’t do more to deter aggression, living standards in this country could suffer, Harman and her colleagues argued. Iran-backed attacks in the Red Sea have already raised shipping costs, while Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has made energy more expensive. A war in Taiwan could cut off access to the semiconductors that power modern life.
Harman told me that she believed the warning signs today were similar to those in the run-up to both Pearl Harbor and 9/11 — serious and underestimated.
The report cited several major US weaknesses, including:
A failure to remain ahead of China in some aspects of military power. “China is outpacing the United States and has largely negated the US military advantage in the Western Pacific through two decades of focused military investment,” the report concluded.
One reason is the decline in the share of US resources devoted to the military…. The report recommended increasing military spending, partly by making changes to Medicare and Social Security (which is sure to upset many liberals) and partly by increasing taxes, including on corporations (which is sure to upset many conservatives). The report also called for more spending on diplomacy and praised the Biden administration for strengthening alliances in Europe and Asia.
A Pentagon bureaucracy that’s too deferential to military suppliers. The report criticized consolidation among defense contractors, which has raised costs and hampered innovation. The future increasingly lies with drones and A.I., not the decades-old equipment that the Pentagon now uses.
A US manufacturing sector that isn’t strong enough to produce what the military needs. A lack of production capacity has already hurt the country’s efforts to aid Ukraine, as The Times has documented. “Putin’s invasion has demonstrated how weak our industrial base is,” David Grannis, the commission’s executive director, said. If the Pentagon and the innovative US technology sector collaborated more, they could address this problem, Grannis added.
A polarized political atmosphere that undermines national unity. A lack of patriotism is one reason that the military has failed to meet its recent recruitment goals. Perhaps more worrisome, many Americans are angry at one another rather than paying attention to external threats.
The Bottom Line
A single commission won’t have all the answers to the hard strategic issues facing the country. How much money should the US spend on the military, given other priorities and the large federal debt? How much waste can be cut from the Pentagon budget? Which foreign conflicts are vital to the national interest — and which are a distraction?
All these questions are vexing. But Americans do face a more dangerous world than many realize. The unexpected global turmoil of the past decade makes that clear.
For more: I recommend this Times interactive, which has videos, photos and maps that document the Chinese coast guard’s aggression toward Philippine ships.
Defense News reports: ‘Not prepared’: Congressional panel calls for huge defense buildup.
The chair of the panel (Jane Harman) has ties to defense establishment and was lauded by the CIA for distinguished service. The co-chair (Eric Eldeman) is a neocon.
The 2022 NDAA authorized the creation of the panel, as reported in 2023:Congress announces commission to review National Defense Strategy. The article lists the panel members; all have ties to the defense industry and military establishment.
To chair the panel, Democrats chose former Rep. Jane Harman, who has strong connections to the CIA and the defense community. Harman “previously served as the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. After that, she went on to become the first female CEO of the Wilson Center, a security focused think tank in Washington, and currently chairs the board of Freedom House — a nonprofit dedicated to advancing democracy and human rights.” [Ibid]
Jane Harman
Wikipedia says Harman represented the aerospace industry of California, and: she received the Defense Distinguished Service Medal in 1998; the CIA Agency Seal Medal in 2007; the CIA Director’s Award; and the Director of National Intelligence Distinguished Public Service Medal in 2011……
Harman is a tenacious pro-Israeli, who used to have close ties to the US intelligence community. She resigned in February 2011, to head the Washington-based Woodrow Wilson Center, a foreign policy think tank.
In 2009, it was revealed NSA wiretaps reportedly intercepted a 2005 phone call between Harman and an agent of the Israeli government, in which Harman allegedly agreed to lobby the Justice Department to reduce or drop criminal charges against two employees of AIPAC in exchange for increased support for Harman’s campaign to chair the House Intelligence Committee.
Republicans chose former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Eric Edelman as vice-chair. Edleman “served as former Vice President Dick Cheney’s principal deputy assistant for national security affairs as well as US ambassador to Turkey in the Bush administration and ambassador to Finland in the Clinton administration.”
According to Militarist Monitor, “Eric S. Edelman, a former US diplomat and adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney, has supported a number of militarist policy initiatives. He is a founding board member of the Foreign Policy Initiative, an advocacy group founded in 2009 by neoconservative figures William Kristol, Robert Kagan, and Dan Senor widely regarded as a successor group to the Project for the New American Century. He also served as a key foreign policy adviser to Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign in 2012 and helped launch a new pressure group dedicated to pressing a hawkish GOP line in the 2016 presidential campaign.”
Militarist Monitor is an independent online publishing project that assesses the work of prominent organizations and individuals — both in and out of government — who promote militaristic US foreign and defense policies.
The Militarist Monitor replaced the Right Web project — which had been in operation since 2003 — in 2019 to help focus public attention on the resurgence of political forces in the United States that seek to place the country on a path towards war and overseas military adventurism.
Efforts to push interventionist US policies often cross party lines and can lead to unlikely alliances, thus The Militarist Monitor examines individuals and organizations across the political spectrum, as well as influential “nonpartisan” and “apolitical” actors who collaborate closely with groups that push a militaristic agenda.
