The Patriot Post® · In Brief: Our Fading Deterrence
Joe Biden has shown nothing but weakness on foreign policy — from fecklessly leaving Afghanistan and emboldening Vladimir Putin to his compromised status with China. Commentator Jed Babbin worries about the problems this will cause.
There is a lot to be said about the way President Joe Biden runs our military affairs and foreign policy, none of it good. A big part of the problem is how he is failing to maintain our deterrence of other nations’ aggression.
Deterrence — creating fear in an enemy of what we would do if attacked — has been our strategy since roughly the beginning of the Cold War. Our forces are supposed to be designed to deter, and if necessary defeat, any of the threats we face.
That means our deterrent assets have to evolve as the threat evolves. It also means that the president and his national security team have to be both aware of the threats and intend to meet them head-on. That is not what is going on.
Babbin notes that too many military leaders these days “believe that proper pronoun usage is more important than readiness.” Fortunately, that’s not true of all of them.
One of those people is Adm. Charles Richard, who is the commander of U.S. Strategic Command, a post from which he will soon retire. As STRATCOM’s boss, he is in charge of our most important deterrent, our nuclear weapons.
Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine began in February, Adm. Richard’s STRATCOM team has been on alert because of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s frequent threats to use nuclear weapons there.
On Nov. 3, Richard declared Ukraine to be “just a warmup.” He said “the big one is coming. And it isn’t going to be very long before we’re going to be tested.” The big one is China.
Richard also said, “As I assess our level of deterrence against China, the ship is slowly sinking.”
Biden’s new National Defense Strategy counts China as a “pacing challenge” and a “consequential strategic competitor,” but are we ready to deter the ChiComs? Babbin notes that the Chinese buy an awful lot of Middle Eastern oil, and the Arab League is starting to line up a bit more in the Chinese camp.
Adm. Richard is evidently right when he says our deterrence against China is a sinking ship. Our allies — and sometime-allies, such as the Arab nations — see Biden’s statements about deterring China as mere words.
That, itself, is important because one of the primary jobs of deterrence is psychological. If an enemy doesn’t fear our response to an attack more than it believes it can benefit from it, that is a decision point at which war becomes imminent.
Numerous other U.S. military moves actually project weakness rather than strength, which will become not just problematic but dangerous down the road. Babbin concludes:
Our allies and our enemies understand those ugly facts.
In the Cold War, our enemy was the Soviet Union. It was deterred from nuclear war with us by our adapted deterrent forces and will to use them. Our deterrent forces are depleted and Biden — to the extent that he is even conscious of the need to deter — shows no determination to use force.
Now we have to deter both China and Russia and, soon, Iran. In physics and mathematics, there is the ability to compute the interaction of two planetary masses to measure how the gravitational force of each will affect the path of the other through space. It’s called the “two-body” problem. But when a third body is introduced, astrophysics cannot compute their mutual influences.
Adm. Richard has reportedly compared deterring both China and Russia to the “three-body” insoluble problem. His comparison is entirely apt. We don’t know how to deter both Russia and China at the same time and apparently aren’t trying to determine how to do it.