While America Slept. Robert C. O'Brien

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СКАЧАТЬ When General Sisi was elected President of Egypt on a platform of rooting out Islamic extremism, Washington was indifferent at best and hostile at worst. The Gulf Arabs were truly taken aback by such an approach to the clear and present danger of radical Islamists controlling the Arab world’s largest country and its cultural hub.

      In Southeast Asia and Africa, the biggest untold story of the new century is the rise of China. For example, in one small Southeast Asian country, a land that owes its very existence to Western humanitarian intervention, China built the nation’s new Ministry of Defense building. It also seeks to install powerful radar systems to track the movement of American and allied shipping in the South Pacific. Throughout Africa, from Cape Town to Addis Ababa, China is building roads and government buildings and laying fiber-optic cables. It will soon control the continent’s infrastructure, mining, and agricultural sectors and even maintain military bases in harbors that were once famous ports of call for Western navies. Over two million Chinese nationals live in Africa and some argue that Africa is undergoing a stealth recolonization, this time directed from Beijing.

      I have negotiated in Beijing with senior Chinese government officials. They appear entirely confident that America and the West are in decline, and that the twenty-first century will be theirs. Whether it is in the economic, cyber, military, or political arenas, China no longer bides its time. It creates artificial islands in the South China Sea that the White House orders the US Navy to avoid. It establishes an Air Identification Zone over Japanese-administered islands in the East China Sea that foreign—including American—airlines respect. It hacks the most personal data of every American that has served in the military or government without any repercussions. And it vetoes American-led human rights initiatives in international organizations without consequence.

      Bill Clinton’s former Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, has surveyed a world transformed by President Obama’s policies and called it “a mess.” Robert Kagan looks at the “world America made” and fears that we may be watching it “drift away.” Less than four years ago Mitt Romney was mocked for warning of the rise of Islamic extremism in the Middle East and Africa and the resurgence of our long time geopolitical foe, Russia. Now even progressive publications ask, “Was Mitt right about everything?” Albright, Kagan, and Romney are all correct in their analysis. Frighteningly, at the same time that the world becomes ever more dangerous, this administration is decimating America’s unparalleled armed forces.

      I have embarked with our courageous young sailors and aviators on the aircraft carrier USS John C. Stennis and visited our cutting-edge Virginia-class submarines and Arleigh Burke-class destroyers. I walked the floors of one of the last subcontractors with the capacity to manufacture key components for those destroyers. Although our sailors and their equipment are still the best in the world, the United States Navy is in crisis. It is too small already and, under the Obama administration’s sequestration program, will shrink further. Given the demands with which we have tasked them, our sailors and their ships are stressed and stretched to the readiness breaking point. Some of our newer warships would be out-gunned by those of our competitors. Unless sequestration ends soon, our shipbuilding industrial base may wither to the extent that the next president will be unable to rebuild the fleet without purchasing warships from foreign contractors.

      Unfortunately, it is not just the Navy that is suffering. President Obama’s hand-picked Undersecretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness recently said that the Army is at its smallest size since before World War II. If the cuts go any deeper, he stated, “they will become a matter of grave worry to us all.” The Marine Corps faces similar personnel cuts and is short of amphibious ships and landing craft to deliver them to the littoral battlefields. The Air Force is stretched so thin that America can no longer take air superiority for granted. If the mainstay of our bomber force, the B-52, were a person, it would qualify for Social Security. The service claims it can no longer afford the critical close air support provided by the A-10. It is unlikely that the service will ever receive enough of the over-budget F-35 Joint Strike Fighters to replace its current squadrons of F-15 and F-16 jet fighters.

      In the 1930s, Winston Churchill, out of cabinet office and exiled to the political wilderness, saw the rising menace of the totalitarian regimes that would eventually form the axis powers. With little influence within the Conservative Party or Parliament, he went to the British people directly, through articles and speeches, to warn of the gathering storm. His prescient speeches were published in book form in 1938. The United States edition was aptly titled, While England Slept. His anthology of articles published the next year was chillingly called, Step by Step.

      While it would be entirely immodest to compare this book or any of my writings to those of Sir Winston, he has long been a hero of mine in an Anglo-American pantheon that includes Washington, Lincoln, Reagan, and Thatcher. Churchill’s writings and speeches were what first inspired me to enter the editorial fray and write short pieces about the challenges I saw in my international travels and in my political work. This book is a compilation of those articles. Like this preface, the essays warn of the dangers that America faces, and how we should respond to them.

      The United States must resume its role as the leader of the free world. Only in such a leadership role can America, as John F. Kennedy stated, “assure the survival and the success of liberty.”

      To effectively lead and preserve peace, America must rebuild its defenses. Ronald Reagan believed, as did our ancient Roman forebears, that “we maintain the peace through our strength; weakness only invites aggression.” He was right, and his policy of “peace through strength” led to a decisive American victory in the Cold War. In the face of rising challenges around the world, it is time to return to a national security policy based on “peace through strength.” A strong America will be a nation that our allies will trust and our adversaries will not dare test. Only under those conditions will the United States lead the world in assuring the survival and success of liberty.

      President Obama has indeed transformed America during his term in office. The country and the world have paid a heavy price for his approach to domestic and foreign policy. I remain, however, optimistic about our future. I am grateful to live in the United States at this time. I grew up in small-town America where the Fourth of July was celebrated with almost the same enthusiasm as Christmas. It was marked by block parties, bottle rockets, and parades. My friends and I had fathers and grandfathers and great-grandfathers who had worn the uniforms of our nation’s armed forces.

      We knew that America was a winning nation. We also knew that when America won, free people around the world won. Although we grew up in the shadow of Vietnam, Watergate, and the Carter years—including the humiliating Iranian hostage crisis—we knew that America would come back. In 1980, Ronald Reagan was elected president and our country and the world witnessed a rebirth of freedom that many believed they would never see. I am certain that that American people still believe in winning; that they still see our land as the “shining city upon a hill.” I am confident that the United States of America will make another such comeback—and that it will be soon.

      ROBERT C. O’BRIEN

      LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA

      MAY 10, 2016

       INTRODUCTION

      When Russia annexed Crimea and invaded Ukraine in February and March of 2014, I immediately thought back to Christmas Eve 1979, when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. This was the first direct use of Soviet troops outside the Eastern Bloc since World War II, “a watershed event of the Cold War.”¹¹ Much like the Obama administration today, the Carter administration was already reeling from a series of foreign policy failures. As historian John Lewis Gaddis wrote, the invasion was “only the most dramatic of a series of humiliations for the United States.”²² The Soviets had deployed nuclear missiles СКАЧАТЬ