OPINION:
In the Eisenhower-Khrushchev era, the West, Russia and China lived in rigidly separated economic spheres. Nuclear weapons posed a limited threat because neither the United States nor Russia could strike the other without risking annihilation.
American forces were capable of fighting across two oceans. These days America is underarmed, overcommitted and too reliant on diplomacy that is not backed up by military power.
Sanctions are great virtue-signaling but won’t push Russia out of Ukraine. Those can’t be complete enough because Europe can’t quit Russian natural gas fast enough. And the West appears unlikely to be politically able to bear the inflation imposed by the loss of Russian and Ukrainian agricultural fertilizer ingredients and other commodities.
Russia will replace MasterCard and Visa with a domestic payments system or by piggyback on China’s Union Pay. Unless the West cuts off all trade and financial dealings with Russia and penalizes financial institutions in China and elsewhere that help Moscow circumvent those sanctions, the Russian people may face hard times, but the Russian army will get what it needs.
We are terribly dependent on China for rare earth minerals, components for the build-out of wind and solar energy and lithium and lithium battery technology. Our Asian allies are too hamstrung by their trade dependence on China to cooperate in meaningful secondary sanctions against the Middle Kingdom.
It all goes back to the flawed foreign and defense policies of former Presidents Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama and now President Biden.
The notion that we could compete and cooperate with autocrats. Policies that both Bush presidents and former President Donald Trump failed to reverse.
Cooperation must be premised on confidence that negotiating partners will keep their word. Beijing’s broken promise to coexist with democracy in Hong Kong and Moscow’s violation of security assurances that the U.K., the U.S. and Russia gave Ukraine to relinquish nuclear weapons bare indisputable evidence that China and Russia can’t be trusted.
The U.S. and U.K. should have moved troops, aircraft and ships into Ukraine as Russia threatened but had good reason to be shy. Fighting a war in Europe would leave the Pacific flank unguarded.
China’s capture of the Taiwan semiconductor fabs would shut down a good deal of the U.S., U.K. and other Western semiconductor industries and smother our economies.
U.S. defense spending at $768 billion dwarfs Russia and China at $154 and about $250 billion.
Yet, Russia and China possess hypersonic missiles and antisatellite and cyber weapons that we don’t have. Those could take out the Golden Gate Bridge, disable the navigation systems of the U.S. fleet and wreak havoc on U.S. infrastructure.
And the Chinese can deny American forces access to Taiwan by air and sea.
The Pentagon is very “woke,” but it’s terribly fat, slow-moving and inefficient.
In Europe, NATO nations quaked in their boats at Russian President Vladimir Putin brandishing his nuclear weapons and were too slow to give the Ukrainians the support they needed — fighter jets and lethal offensive weapons. From the first days, Ukraine has been outnumbered and outgunned.
If Ukraine had not given up its nuclear weapons, the history of the last few months would be radically different. Now, no national leader can depend its security on American promises — nuclear nonproliferation may not be dead, but it is critically wounded.
Germany, Poland and others will be foolish to continue foreswearing nuclear weapons.
America’s foreign policy and defense establishments need a root canal.
The United States simply can’t champion democracy and free markets while pandering to Organized Labor’s protectionism. We must rejoin the Trans-Pacific Partnership to provide Asian nations with the opportunity to build an economic community and prosperity less dependent on China.
We need to ask how our military became so ill-prepared for a conflict in the Pacific, why it lacks the weapons the Russians and Chinese have and why it can’t fight a two-front war. Radical reform, not more money will supply the answers.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken sold the president the idea that we could negotiate with Mr. Putin even after the Afghanistan debacle because at the department he heads, diplomacy is the answer to everything.
Appeasing Russia caused Ukraine to have neither adequate weapons to defend itself nor some U.S. and British combat troops present with the clear understanding we would sink Russia’s fleet if Russia’s army engaged with those troops.
We simply can’t permit Russia or China to freeze American conventional military aid and forces by threatening nuclear weapons or through our sole reliance on diplomacy.
We need to address the world as we find it, not as we think it should be.
• Peter Morici is an economist, emeritus business professor at the University of Maryland and national columnist.
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