Iran: A Russian general already warned U.S. aircraft to keep out of his bombers’ way; now Tehran tells a U.S. warship to move away from its naval exercises. We’re getting used to being pushed around.
President Obama, surprising some, didn’t spend much time at all during his State of the Union address to Congress earlier this month touting last year’s big, bad nuclear deal with Iran. But he did say that thanks to it “the world has avoided another war.”
“Avoid another war” is apparently the administration’s new motto for the U.S. military, superseding famed rallying cries like the Air Force 7th Bomb Wing’s “Death From Above” and the 2nd Battalion 9th Marines’ “Hell in a Helmet.”
The Iran nuclear deal means, under this legacy-conscious president, a U.S. that tiptoes on eggshells to avoid confrontation with the world’s foremost terrorist state. Otherwise you risk the nuke pact unraveling.
What could be more emblematic of the new military timidity than the video, disseminated by Tehran, of blindfolded U.S. sailors kneeling at gunpoint while in Iranian custody earlier this month? Such an image is worth a thousand suicide bombs in demonstrating American decline to friend and foe alike around the world.
In September, like Tommy Lee Jones in the movies telling the local police to get out of the way because the Feds were now in charge, a Russian three-star general came to the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad with a written instruction that American aircraft leave northern Syrian airspace, just an hour before Russian bombers assaulted anti-Assad rebels.
The general’s visit reportedly ignited a war of words between U.S. diplomats and Russian brass. In the past, America’s military muscle, and our obvious will to use it, made words unnecessary.
In November, Communist China warned the U.S. after two of our B-52 bombers flew in international waters over the Spratly Archipelago in the South China Sea, in spite of our aircraft not going anywhere near territory claimed by Beijing.
China’s establishment in the area for more than a year now of artificial islands with airstrips and seaports, to project its military strength, is another indicator of our adversaries detecting and exploiting America’s military impotence.
The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences’s Zhang Jie pointed out a year and a half ago, “We had the ability to build artificial islands years ago, but we had refrained because we didn’t want to cause too much controversy.” No doubt, President Obama’s withdrawals from Iraq and Afghanistan have shown China -- and our other military rivals in the world -- that there is now little to fear from America, in China’s case in a region of the seas that the U.S. Navy has, for all practical purposes, ruled since the end of World War II.
Decline begets further decline, and as cases of bullying of the U.S. continue and increase around the world, both terrorist entities like the Islamic State and aggressor nations like Russia and China will become more convinced that America is a weakened superpower that fears to inflict the “death” and “hell” for which our brave warriors are famous.
