GORDAN CHANG
"We are closer today to World War III than we've been since the Second World War," said former President Donald Trump at the Believers' Summit in West Palm Beach on July 26.
Trump hyperbole? No.
The former president is not alone in thinking this way. "China and Russia's 'no-limits' partnership, formed in February 2022 just days before Russia's invasion of Ukraine, has only deepened and broadened to include a military and economic partnership with Iran and North Korea, each of which presents its own significant threat to U.S. interests," states the Commission on the National Defense Strategy in its 114-page report released three days after Trump spoke. "This new alignment of nations opposed to U.S. interests creates a real risk, if not likelihood, that conflict anywhere could become a multitheater or global war."
Not only is global conflict on the horizon, the Commission's report reveals America is woefully unprepared for what is coming.
Take the Department of Defense, for instance. "The Commission finds that DoD's business practices, byzantine research and development and procurement systems, reliance on decades-old military hardware, and culture of risk avoidance reflect an era of uncontested military dominance," the report states. "Such methods are not suited to today's strategic environment."
The Commission got that right. "The report is yet again a stark reminder of the U.S. government's failure to both anticipate the militaristic rise of Communist China as well as to prepare our nation to deter, let alone defeat such a threat, which the Commission rightly assesses that the U.S. military is not prepared to do," James Fanell, co-author of Embracing Communist China: America's Greatest Strategic Failure, told Gatestone. "The situation is dire."
Fanell, also a former U.S. Navy captain who served as Director of Intelligence and Information Operations at the U.S. Pacific Fleet, recommends Congress take "immediate and massive action" to rebuild the armed forces, especially the Navy.
The problems in the U.S. military go well beyond a shortage of modern ships, planes, and weapons, however. Blaine Holt, a former Air Force brigadier general, tells Gatestone that "the root of the Department of the Air Force's trouble is cultural." "The Department's usual laser focus on mission has been supplanted by Marxist-inspired instruction, an eradication of meritocracy in favor of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion promotion programs, with an extra emphasis placed on administration fetishes like climate change," he points out. "The Chinese, Russian, North Korean, and Iranian militaries are not burdened by such nonsense."
An overhaul of the magnitude Fanell and Holt recommend requires the support of the American people. "The U.S. public are largely unaware of the dangers the United States faces or the costs (financial and otherwise) required to adequately prepare," the Commission states.
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