World War III

While we are suitably absorbed in the current election cycle, and while we believe that we are electing people who will rule the world, word comes from the Washington Post, the New York Times and the bipartisan Commission on National Defense Strategy, that the world is no longer with us. 

These liberal media outlets tell us that we might be on the verge of World War III.

Worse yet, we are not prepared to fight it, and will likely not win. 

Walter Russell Mead reports the story in the Wall Street Journal and he gives special emphasis to the fact that the sources are more Democratic than Republican.

The words that appear most often in his article are “weakness” and “failure.” 

We imagine that we are fighting the good fight against Russia, using Ukrainian proxies, but, as of now, as the death toll approaches one million, we ought to ask ourselves what we have gained from this proxy war.

Of course, the Middle East is imploding or exploding-- depending on where you are sitting-- though it does seem that Israel has the upper hand, for now. If Iran enters the fray actively, the calculus will certainly change.

The world is on the brink of World War III, and we are led by senile Joe Biden and his satrap Kamala.

Mead surveys the landscape:

The news from abroad is chilling. Washington Post columnist David Ignatius reports from Kyiv that Ukraine is “bleeding out” as its weary soldiers struggle against a numerically superior Russia. The New York Times reports that China is expanding the geographical reach and escalating violence in its campaign to drive Philippine forces from islands and shoals that Beijing illegitimately claims. And Bloomberg reports that Washington officials are fearful that Russia will help Iran cross the finish line in its race for nuclear weapons.

Mead does not affix blame to one or the other parties, but it does not take any excessive perspicacity to see that the current administration has suffered from failure and weakness. Is it too much to see this as the consequence of Biden administration foreign policy bungling?

These stories, all from liberal news outlets generally favorable to the Biden administration, tell a tragic and terrifying tale of global failure on the part of the U.S. and its allies. China, Russia and Iran are stepping up their attacks on what remains of the Pax Americana and continue to make gains at the expense of Washington and its allies around the world.

The bipartisan report, by a Commission on National Defense Strategy, lays it out clearly:

The bipartisan report details a devastating picture of political failure, strategic inadequacy and growing American weakness in a time of rapidly increasing danger. The U.S. faces the “most serious and most challenging” threats since 1945, including the real risk of “near-term major war.” The report warns: “The nation was last prepared for such a fight during the Cold War, which ended 35 years ago. It is not prepared today.”

And yet, the Commission report has been largely ignored. Could this be because we are in a political season and, at the least, it would make the Biden administration look weak and derelict:

There has been no uproar in the press, no speechifying by presidential candidates, no storm on social media, no sign that the American political class takes the slightest interest in the increasing fragility of the peace on which everything we cherish depends.

Short on supplies, lacking personnel, stretched too thin around the world, short on equipment and weaponry, the American military might have met its diversity quotas, but it surely has lost the ability to fight and to win.

Mead explains that it’s all about American decadence:

If history teaches anything, it is that decadence this deep, carried on this long, entails enormous costs. Our adversaries’ conviction that the inattention of a flabby political class is bringing the Pax Americana to an inglorious end is a key reason why nations as suspicious of one another as China, Russia, Iran and North Korea have chosen this moment to make common cause against us.

Not since the 1930s have Americans been this profoundly indifferent as a great war assembles in the world outside, and not since Paul Revere traversed the dark country lanes of Massachusetts have Americans more urgently needed to rouse themselves from sleep.

In the spirit of bipartisan cooperation Mead does not offer any solutions to the problem.