AT LARGE
With Biden, the Lippmann Gap Returns
Commitments are outstripping our power to deal with them.
by FRANCIS P. SEMPA
March 25, 2024, 3:48 PM
Joe Biden in Iowa in 2019 (Michael F. Hiatt/Shutterstock)
“America is straying toward monstrous imprudence,” writes Naval War College strategy professor James Holmes in analyzing the Biden administration’s defense budget request for fiscal year 2025 in an important article in the National Interest. That is because, Holmes explains, “U.S. national purposes and power are on opposite trajectories.” Commitments are outstripping our power to deal with them. The Lippmann Gap has returned.
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During World War II, the journalist Walter Lippmann in U.S. Foreign Policy: Shield of the Republic wrote that a successful foreign policy “consists in bringing into balance, with a comfortable surplus of power in reserve, the nation’s commitments and the nation’s power.” Statesmen, Lippmann wrote, must preoccupy themselves with bringing the nation’s “ends and means into balance.” That means looking at both sides of the equation. It also means getting the most out of your means to fit the most crucial ends of policy. Holmes believes that the Biden administration is failing on both sides of the equation.
First, the means side of the equation. Holmes writes that the budget submitted by the Biden Pentagon would actually cut defense spending when adjusted for inflation. The proposed budget would cut the purchase of F-35 stealth fighters by 18 percent. Even more worrisome, the budget places six warships on order even though 19 warships will be retired. The Biden budget, Holmes explains, “would reduce the U.S. Navy fleet by thirteen hulls at a time when China’s People’s Liberation Army Navy is growing bigger and badder by the day.” And Holmes points out that this would add to China’s numerical lead in warships, which currently stands at about 80 ships (370 for China and 292 for the U.S.). But, as Holmes notes, those total numbers underplay China’s advantage of geographical proximity to the South China Sea and western Pacific, where PLA shore-based weapons (air and rocket forces) can wreak havoc on the portion of the U.S. fleet committed to that region. Under these circumstances, Holmes concludes, the Biden administration’s proposal to reduce U.S. sea power “courts disaster.”
https://spectator.org/with-biden-the-lippmann-gap-returns/
