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Failure to Prioritize Will Accelerate National Decline

When individuals fail to budget, they often must triage critical needs. The same thing happens with countries. Hence the rolling black-outs and crumbling infrastructure in much of the third world. The United States has also failed to budget and prioritize, and it is now realizing, in spite of wishful thinking, that it can’t have it all.

The failure to prioritize and think strategically is particularly apparent in the area of foreign policy. Even after losing in Iraq and Afghanistan, our national security establishment quickly pivoted to supporting Ukraine and then, when the Israel-Palestinian conflict reignited, also set out to fully support Israel. There was little soul-searching about the cause of those earlier failures. And there was a simultaneous push to gear up for “great power” conflict with China. Our defense establishment has a lot on its plate.

Setting aside the wisdom of our Ukraine and Israel policies, conducting them simultaneously is a symptom of a bigger problem: a failure to set priorities and a failure to recognize practical limits in our defense policy. The signs of this are everywhere. Our national security strategy documents consist of meaningless word salad about multiple competing objectives, and there is almost never an intelligent effort to rank them or connect one to another.

We are spending a fortune on defense, yet our defense capabilities are at an all-time low. The numbers of planes, ships, and personnel available are a fraction of those at the time of the victory in the First Gulf War. The entire procurement system is optimized for producing small numbers of delicate and bespoke weapon systems but does not appear to be able to produce the mountains of artillery shells and missiles needed to prosecute a modern war of attrition.

Early on in the Ukraine War, the United States raided its own reserves of artillery ammunition to give to the Ukrainians. The ammo was located at a large storage facility in Israel. While it was technically an American arms depot, its location suggested an important secondary purpose: it functioned as an iron reserve of ammunition for Israel to use in the event of a hot war. There was some grumbling about diverting this ammo to Ukraine when it was first proposed in early 2023, but it appears the distribution went forward.

By the time Hamas conducted the October 7 attacks, most of this ammunition was long gone. News reports make it clear that it will take years to replace what has already been used because all of our artillery ammunition is now made at a single plant in Scranton, Pennsylvania.

This week, the Biden administration withheld some weapons earmarked for Israel, expressing concern over Israel’s proposed expansion of operations in light of the humanitarian catastrophe that has already occurred in Gaza.

But I believe this is what the kids call “cope.”

Existing promises of arms and ammunition to Ukraine and Israel, as well as the requirements of our own forces, are simply impossible to fulfill. Lacking the ability to achieve all of these goals, the Biden administration depleted our reserves while pretending this was just slack and dead weight. Thus, the recent debate on the Ukraine funding bill always had an air of unreality, as if the only thing holding back the provision of arms and munitions for Ukraine was money rather than finite and hard-to-replenish supplies. Rather than pausing, we have given Ukraine everything we had and never stopped doing so.

While I believe some within the Biden administration think that Israel has gone too far in its campaign in Gaza, it is also impossible at the moment to continue simultaneously arming Ukraine and Israel. So, the administration had to dress this up as a moral stand, lest American credibility be further degraded by our manifest weakness and exhaustion.

In other words, Biden’s withholding of arms from Israel is simply making a virtue of necessity. As between Israel and Ukraine, Israel’s needs are less critical. It does not presently face an existential threat, and the current war is an offensive campaign conducted almost entirely on enemy territory.

The Biden administration’s invocation of human rights abuses is somehow less provocative and less damaging than saying our ammunition depots are dangerously empty. After all, if the latter is true, it means that if China invaded Taiwan or something similarly serious happened, we couldn’t do much, even if we wanted too.

Lately, the Biden presidency seems more and more like a shambolic reprise of the Jimmy Carter years. Both administrations were characterized by weakness abroad and crippling inflation at home, which together contributed to a thorough demoralization of the American people.

Today, Biden presides over a period of great national pessimism, as evidenced by widespread mental illness, lack of social mobility, and plummeting marriage and birth rates, among other signs of decline. If the pessimism of the Carter years mostly stemmed from the economy and specific government policies, today such pessimism seems more visceral and wide-ranging and less amenable to political solutions.

After all, countries and empires have a life cycle, and there are many instances in which the struggles and virtues of earlier generations led to great prosperity, which contained the seeds of that same society’s own self-destruction through decadence and corruption.

We have to adapt to reality, and the deficiencies of our defense industrial base and military should be a wake-up call. Self-congratulation and soothing narratives will not substitute for hard-headed assessment and resistance to the current system.

As it stands, our country lacks hard and soft power, our military is weaker in relative terms than at any point since the end of the Cold War, our economy is unbalanced and ill-suited to national defense and independence, and the social conditions of the country are becoming more degraded and proletarian every day. We need a serious national renewal, including a revival of the old morality of restraint, thrift, and the like, or this will not end well.

The debate about whether Biden “abandoned Israel” is really quite beside the point. This framing rests on the obsolete notion peddled by the neoconservatives that the United States is the “sole superpower,” which can easily control events around the world and has a moral obligation to do so in order to further liberal ends.

The obsessions with the overseas empire and the affairs of others are luxuries that our country can no longer afford. Most of this activity has nothing to do with security or prosperity. And it costs a fortune to boot. We need a hard-headed assessment of national needs and capabilities, and we must radically reduce our obligations in order to restore domestic strength.

Otherwise, the pretense of ordering events around the world through an interventionist foreign policy will instead accelerate our collapse.

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About Christopher Roach

Christopher Roach is an adjunct fellow of the Center for American Greatness and an attorney in private practice based in Florida. He is a double graduate of the University of Chicago and has previously been published by The Federalist, Takimag, Chronicles, the Washington Legal Foundation, the Marine Corps Gazette, and the Orlando Sentinel. The views presented are solely his own.

Photo: 155 mm caliber shells are pictured after the manufacturing process at the Scranton Army Ammunition Plant (SCAAP) in Scranton, Pennsylvania on April 16, 2024. In brick buildings that are more than a century old, nearly in the heart of Joe Biden's Rust Belt hometown of Scranton, Pennsylvania, dated machinery churns artillery for modern conflicts, especially the war in Ukraine. The Scranton Army Ammunition Plant (SCAAP) is making steel tubes for 155 mm caliber shells, which are crucial to Kyiv's efforts to face down Moscow's invasion. (Photo by Charly TRIBALLEAU / AFP) (Photo by CHARLY TRIBALLEAU/AFP via Getty Images)

Notable Replies

  1. Avatar for task task says:

    The following explains why socialism always fails and, more importantly, why people still vote for politicians that campaign on promoting more of it. We are on the same page when it comes to seeing failure. However people are not on the same page when it comes to understanding failure. The root causes need to be understood, then taught and dealt with outside of politics.

    The laws of economics are no different than the laws of physics. You cannot create gold from lead and you cannot create wealth by printing money. More money equals less value and less purchasability. Hard assets remain immune while soft assets, such as currency and stagnant salaries, will tank.

    Bidenomics is about printing money and giving it to potential voters. It is about buying votes with money that has lost value but if you have nothing you would likely vote for such policies. The number of voters at the bottom, the youngest, the new illegal immigrants, and those already in debt, will always vote for polices based on a “Robin Hood” deception.

    The only way out is to default or to inflate the cost of goods and services. Increasing interest rates slows down the acceleration of inflation till it reaches its maximum velocity but the velocity will always eventually be reached unless the money supply is reduced. No politician plans to run on taking money out of the economy. Such a policy is achieved by paying down the debt with taxes or snatching (stealing) assets from the private sector. And even when that is done it will more likely be used to increase spending and not pay down any existing debt. It will simply make those who worked, and saved, poorer while those who have inherited the debt burden feel that the money, or government services, they are being given, for free, they were entitled to. That is what DEI, the 1619 project and digital currency is all about.

    Joe Biden is looking to increase, not just the money supply, but also the number of voters that can be bought with inflated dollars they never worked for. It is all about perception. The masses of voters will always vote for the pleasure associated with spending today along with the hope that they will easily pay off the debt with money they earn tomorrow. The problem they face is that they are not just obligated to pay off their debt. They are obligated to pay off the debt on goods and services, provided by past governments, which they never enjoyed that was spent by people who are no longer living.

  2. It’s more than just military stockpiles of ammunition, it is also the shrinking of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. In trying to keep gas prices down, Joe tapped the reserve a few times more than was beneficial, and now it is dangerously low. Worse still, the cost of refilling is growing out of reach.

    And if that were our only problems, we might be able to overcome them. But it isn’t. It is far, far worse. Tomorrow the CPI Report for April will be published. And the Biden Administration is playing games to hide the real damage. The CPI measures a basket of goods—from the price of food and fuel, to the cost of rents and mortgages. Our lyin’ eyes tell us every day that the increasing cost of groceries is far higher than the Biden Administration will admit. AND for April, to further hide the truth, the CPI Report will leave out coffee as a measure of inflationary price increases. Why do this? Easy—because the cost of coffee is rising much faster than the cost of other grocery items. Telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth would show just how bad things are. So, to hide the truth, the Biden Administration is fudging the facts and hoping the general public will miss it.

    Sorry Joe, no such luck. Each day, we see it with our own eyes.

    Then there are the vulnerabilities in the banking industry. Between banks being underwater due to holding low yielding government treasury bonds, there also is the great exposure of worthless commercial real estate assets.

    All of this is coming to a swift head. It seems the top policy priority of this administration is to import the greatest number of people in the shortest amount of time. When one couples that with the second apparent priority of releasing the greatest number of criminals back onto the street in the shortest possible time, we’ve got a problem. And when the top fiscal priority is keeping money flowing to Ukraine while squeezing the amount of money available to assist the Country’s citizenry, well----one can see the direction—it’s all down hill from here.

  3. I vigorously dispute Mr. Roach’s false equivalence of support between the corrupt, non-democratic state of Ukraine, and the thriving, democratic state of Israel. Moreover, the amount of support between the two is not close to equal.

    Mr. Roach knows well the dollar amount going to Israel is much less than Ukraine, and that prospects for Ukrainian survival–let alone victory–is questionable. Whereas, Israel will prevail regardless of US support. The difference is that the weapons and support provided to Israel will allow for a quicker victory with a potentially smaller civilian casualty rate–a “concern” of the Biden Administration and terrorist supporters on college campuses.

    Although Mr. Roach’s overall point is valid and timely, his oh so disingenuous lumping together of Ukraine and Israel is again, quite disappointing. Yes, the US must prioritize its national defense and foreign policy goals and abilities, and yes, that prioritization must include some coping that may disappoint allies. But in the calculus of deciding between who and how much, placing Israel and Ukraine into the same basket is akin to the decision between whether to pay the light bill or take a trip to a luxurious five star resort.

    False equivalence is a hallmark of leftist sophistry, and it is so disappointing that Mr. Roach dabbles in such intellectual rubbish.

  4. Recognizing the causes for the current state of affairs is crucial to amending what ails us. In a republic, not every person, not every citizen gets the vote. This not a democracy. As others note here, allowing those without any stake in the future of the country to have any say over its governance is insanity and leads to the impending collapse we now face. Persuading those dispossessed, without any allegiance to this country to have any say over its future is insanity. Permitting those with divided loyalties to have any say over national priorities is insanity.

    Rather than debate the priorities, debate the legitimacy of interested parties who have a stake in the future of this country and the only rightful say in determining them.

Continue the discussion at community.amgreatness.com

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