The Biden administration has fallen into a dangerous trap. Some of the catastrophes and pits fallen into by the Biden administration have been self-made, but this particular trap has been intentionally laid by the United States’ primary geopolitical and economic adversary. This trap is hiding in plain sight, yet no one seems to acknowledge its seriousness.
First, a proposition: China is the United States’ greatest geostrategic challenge. No other country in the world has each of the key ingredients necessary to supplant the United States as the world’s leading military and economic power.
These ingredients include demographics, natural resources, industrial capability, military strength, and the expressed will of its political leadership to use them all in concert to become the dominant global superpower and thereby to substantially undermine those pesky American ideals such as democracy, unalienable God-given rights, and a liberty that includes freedom of speech and religion.
If you don’t appreciate this as a true reflection of the current geopolitical reality, the rest of the argument won’t make sense.
If it’s true, then every major commitment of the United States—other than facing this challenge—is a distraction and dissolution of the nation’s resources. In other words, vast military and economic support for Ukraine (and now potentially Israel) is delaying and diluting our ability to address the China challenge. This is a grave error.
Depletion of the U.S. stockpile of military armaments and related equipment is the obvious and practical illustration, as is draining the Strategic Petroleum Reserve for political purposes. The financial and economic resources of the United States, despite what Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen says to the contrary, are finite and limited by $34 trillion of debt growing by tens of billions every day. We have spent massively on Ukraine and are positioned to do the same for Israel. Less tangibly but no less important, the distraction includes the “mind and matter” of the U.S. government. If the brain trust of the administration, the permanent institutions, and the military are all focused on how to weaken and defeat Russia and Iran, who has time to think about China?
If that wasn’t enough, the Biden administration is further preoccupied with its radical commitment to the progressive social agenda represented by “woke-ism” and the Green New Deal, and in weaponizing its institutions against the perceived “MAGA” threat. Mass illegal immigration is day by day weakening the social fabric and economic vitality of the United States.
Within these ranks of undocumented millions surely lie members of a fifth column, waiting for instructions from adversarial powers to take violent action within the United States. The near boiling point of political and social tensions in the country formerly known as the United States suggests that our federal government is in no position to unify and mobilize the vast resources of the nation toward a common goal.
Without doubt, Europe and the Middle East/Persian Gulf are both core areas of U.S. strategic interest. Russia and Iran certainly menace the stability of those regions. Yet neither Russia nor Iran threatens the United States as a potential global superpower. At best, they’re regional powers. Outside of Europe and the Middle East/Persian Gulf, respectively, their influence and projection of power is limited.
Not so with China.
In the case of Russia, the European nations could have taken the lead in prosecuting whatever actions were deemed necessary in supporting Ukraine and ensuring the security of the broader region. This is essentially what the Trump administration was pushing for. Instead, the United States has rushed headlong into the conflict, without an endgame strategy. The Biden administration doesn’t appear to have the slightest idea of how it will all end.
Notably, China has stayed out of the fray. Other than some diplomatic overtures and limited economic support to Russia—along with indirect provision of arms from Iran—China has intentionally kept its hands clean and its mind clear. The leadership of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the People’s Liberation Army have kept their focus on preparing for the real conflict ahead. CCP leadership understand full well that the United States has a Siamese twin-like relationship with Israel.
The United States provides the heart and the blood of economic and military support and won’t abandon Jerusalem for a myriad of political, cultural, and religious reasons. China has practically concluded that ideologically driven Iran will bear the burden of grinding down Israel and, thus, the United States in a drawn-out regional conflict.
Over the past two years, I’ve been a broken record in asserting that the Biden administration made a gigantic strategic blunder in pushing Russia into the Chinese camp. By banishing the Russians from the West through economic sanctions and a proxy war on the Putin regime, and by aggressively pushing to bring Ukraine into NATO, a country not only on Russia’s border but also in its millennium-long sphere of influence, we have presented Putin and any future leader of Russia with no alternative. This never should have happened.
Russia—a historically and culturally Christian (before the Marxist revolution) and European nation, and enemy of China—could have been a U.S. ally or at least neutral in any conflict with China. But now, barring a new U.S. administration and a small miracle, this no longer appears possible. China isn’t Russia’s natural ally. The friendship will eventually be betrayed by the CCP. By then, it will be too late.
