Dangers That Will Not Go Away and What To Do About Them
By Mac Thornberry
October 31, 2024
The report of the bipartisan Commission on the National Defense Strategy found that “[t]he threats the United States faces are the most serious and most challenging the nation has encountered since 1945 and include the potential for near-term major war.” Yet, we rarely, if ever, hear mention of these threats from those on the campaign trail, much less how they would deal with them. Whoever is elected in November will face a more complex and dangerous world than any faced by their predecessors in at least 80 years. Several factors contribute to this warning, but there are three that pose unprecedented and especially daunting challenges for the U.S.
First, our adversaries are working together as never before. For its war against Ukraine, Russia is receiving North Korean artillery shells and apparently troops, Iranian drones, and “very substantial help” from China according to the U.S. State Department. Presumably, they are all receiving something back from Russia. This willingness to cooperate and to shore up each other’s weaknesses complicates U.S. planning and presents a more formidable threat than we have faced before. It also makes clear that we cannot look at any region of the world in isolation. They are all connected.
A second unprecedented challenge arises from having two peer nuclear adversaries. Throughout the Cold War, deterrence calculations pitted the U.S. against the Soviet Union with no other nation anywhere close. In recent years, China has embarked upon a major expansion of its nuclear programs, and both Russia and China have warheads far more modern than ours. Decades of research, study, planning, and preparation to prevent a nuclear war against one adversary is of limited value against two, but we have not yet been willing to step up to what may be needed for deterrence in this new environment.
https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2024/10/31/dangers_that_will_not_go_away_and_what_to_do_about_them_1068895.html
