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They're both priorities, but the U.S. is returning its strategic focus to geopolitical challenges

Pentagon: Countering China and Russia now higher priority than fighting Islamic terrorism



Pentagon: Countering China and Russia now higher priority than fighting Islamic terrorism Relax. This doesn't mean we're not going to fight terrorists. What it does mean is that we're not going to let geopolitical rivals walk all over us and gain strategic advantage while we use the excuse that we can't fight them because we're too busy with Al Qaeda. Remember when Mitt Romney said in a 2012 debate that Russia is America's number one strategic rival, and Barack Obama mocked him for it. "You said Russia. Not Al Qaeda, but Russia," Obama sneered. "The 1980s called. They want their foreign policy back."
Yeah. That's the man you elected president twice, America. A man so detached from global reality it can only be explained by willful ideological myopia. I'm only going to see what I want to see! This is not about going to war with China and/or Russia. It's about the realization that strategic capacity matters when you're positioning for all kinds of strategic advantage. And you can't gain that type of advantage if you're not even trying. Starting today, we're trying again:
“This strategy really represents a fundamental shift to say, look, we have to get back, in a sense, to the basics of the potential for war and this strategy says the focus will be on prioritizing preparedness for war, in particular major power war,” he added. The document also listed North Korea among the Pentagon’s top priorities, citing the need to focus U.S. missile defenses against the threat from Pyongyang, which beyond its nuclear weapons has also amassed an arsenal of biological, chemical, and conventional arms. It said that while state actors would have to be countered, non-state actors like Islamist militants would continue to pose a threat. The document said that international alliances would be critical for the U.S. military, by far the world’s best-resourced. But it also stressed a need for burden-sharing, an apparent nod to Trump’s public criticism of allies who he says unfairly take advantage of U.S. security guarantees..

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Mattis said that the U.S. military’s competitive edge has eroded “in every domain of warfare” and blamed that partly on spending caps and congressional budget dysfunction. “As hard as the last 16 years of war have been, no enemy in the field has done more to harm the readiness of the U.S. military than the combined impact” of the caps and short-term funding.
In other words, if we've lost the ability to face down threats from other nations, we've done it to ourselves. We made a decision not to be ready. First it was the Bush Administration putting almost all its focus on the fight against Islamic terrorism - quite rightly for the most part, I'd say - and then the Obama Administration refusing to invest any upgraded capabilities to keep the U.S. military competitive with its rivals. When the Russians launched their incursion into Crimea, Obama did not hing for two reasons. One was that he didn't want to. Another was that there was no strategy in place for what might be done or how. We weren't even preparing scenarios to counter Russian or Chinese imperialism. It simply wasn't our priority, not were we investing in the ability to execute such a strategy. There was a brief hopeful period after the collapse of the Soviet Union when Russia, under Boris Yeltsin's leadership, seemed to be open to a more pro-western stance in both economics and geopolitics. But Yeltsin proved too indisciplined to effectively lead Russia in that direction, and when Vladimir Putin succeeded him, he brought with him a renewed agenda to achieve Russian dominance as a rival to, not as an ally of, the United States. Bush seemed reluctant to recognize that, and Obama absolutely refused to because he simply didn't care and didn't want to be bothered by conflicts with Russia. The result is a weakened global position for the United States, and it's about time we make the decision to change our thinking and prioritize our global strength. If it took Donald Trump to understand this needed to happen, it's reminiscent of when Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union the evil empire and everyone said he was a bumpkin for it. Maybe it takes a bumpkin to do what all the geniuses can't bring themselves to do.


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Dan Calabrese’s column is distributed by HermanCain.com, which can be found at HermanCain

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