Wake up the West
WW3 unlike WW2 won't leave time for ideological clampdowns and rearmament..
Stanford historian of war now focused sharply on the present..
American fiction writer with a good grip on reality..
Mark Helprin Asks: Are Americans Ready for War?
As our enemies advance, a prescient author considers what it would take for the U.S. to avoid defeat. The answer is sobering.
By Barton Swaim, May 3, 2024
… I assume that he will get to Taiwan, and he does: “Our strategy there is based on a faulty premise. You know what that premise is?” he asks. I don’t. “If you read all the studies and military journals on defending Taiwan, they all talk about penetrating bombers and missiles and so on to strike Chinese bases. Really? China is a nuclear-armed state, and we’re going to attack Chinese bases on the country’s mainland? . . . That would set up a nuclear standoff. We’re not going to do that.”
Were China to attack Taiwan, Mr. Helprin says, it would present a situation in which China can hit Taiwan because it’s not the U.S., while the U.S. can’t hit China. So what’s the solution? Here Mr. Helprin launches into an explanation at once expansive and detailed, rather like one of his novels. The import: Since the area of operations would be disadvantageously confined to the sea and Taiwan itself, the U.S. will need to harden its Pacific bases against China’s missiles, bombers and special forces; swell its Pacific fleet with ships both large and small (aircraft carriers and attack submarines, but also motor-torpedo boats, mine-sweepers, escort vessels, etc.); boost production of long-range aircraft, manned and unmanned; upgrade its nuclear deterrent; and harden Taiwan to the extent possible.
“I don’t think that we will meet the challenge,” Mr. Helprin says after this catalog, “but with responsible leadership we could. That’s the tragedy. Take a strong horse and give him one weak and clueless rider after another, and pretty soon the horse is no longer strong.”
Perhaps the core of the problem is American policymakers’ fear of risk and attendant accountability. If a U.S. administration tried to mount the sort of defense posture Mr. Helprin counsels, something might go wrong, someone would have to pay a political price, and no one at the moment seems inclined to pay any sort of price for anything. As soon as I use the phrase “fear of risk” he points out that “in 1940 Churchill sent all the tanks in Britain to North Africa to fight the Germans. That denuded Britain of tanks, and at the time it was still possible that Sea Lion”—Hitler’s plan to invade the U.K.—“could have happened. The British would have had no tanks to use in defense. It was a risk. Churchill took it. War is about risk.”
Our technological superiority, Mr. Helprin thinks, has fooled us into believing that war is about neat, danger-free solutions. “We have been acclimated to situations in which we control everything,” he says. “We completely control the air. We completely control logistics. We have bases to which we can retreat, and on those bases we have McDonald’s.” Mr. Helprin stops himself: “This isn’t to say that individual units and soldiers haven’t fought like hell and suffered. But in terms of the larger picture of war, we haven’t fought for survival in a long time.”
A more fundamental problem than any matter of strategic confusion is the simple matter of recruitment. The country can’t find enough people willing to fight for it.
Here I quote from a passage in Mr. Helprin’s 1991 novel, “A Soldier of the Great War.” The story’s hero, Alessandro, on trial for desertion (he is innocent), correctly points out that although the Italian government can force young men into the field, it needs their “consent” if they’re going to fight. “That’s nonsense,” the judge says.
But of course it isn’t. The U.S., which did away with the draft in 1973, depends for its existence on men willing to fight for it, and recruitment has dropped precipitously in recent years.
Mr. Helprin feels this matter keenly, having, as he puts it, avoided the draft in 1969. He did so legally, having been declared ineligible—“4-F,” in military jargon—as a result of a long childhood sickness. “Something was wrong with my brain,” he says. “There’s a name for it, which I’ve forgotten—something convulsive disorder.” Later he felt he could have gotten around the 4-F designation if he’d wanted to.
Then, in May 1969, he happened to see a funeral for a young soldier who’d been killed in Vietnam. “He was about my age. . . . That’s when I understood that he may have died in my place.” Soon after that Mr. Helprin, who is Jewish and was born in Manhattan, took Israeli citizenship, becoming a dual national; he enlisted in the Jewish state’s military and served for two years. (Several years later he relinquished his Israeli citizenship.)
But back to the 2020s. Why is the number of men willing to fight and die for the United States decreasing? Mr. Helprin mentions an education system that trains young people to distrust their country and a military bureaucracy enthralled by woke ideology.
So what can we do about that in the short term? Without pausing Mr. Helprin says: “We can depoliticize the military completely.”
That won’t be easy, I say. “It might not be so hard,” he replies. “You don’t have to do anything. You just have to stop doing stupid things. The military is a million education programs meant to indoctrinate and train. Exclude, from all that indoctrination and training, anything having to do with ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’ ”—he signals quotation marks—“anything having to do with racism, anything about how bad America is, the ‘gender’ crap, all that. Just stop doing it.”
He has a point. An executive order from the commander in chief would likely accomplish for the U.S. military what Gov. Ron DeSantis did by signing legislation banning DEI in Florida public universities. If the military were to scrap every last shred of DEI training tomorrow, nobody but activist busybodies would regret it, and the benefits would reverberate for a decade.
What about the long term? Very little about today’s cultural landscape suggests that America’s political class and citizenry understand the threats or are prepared to counter them with force. What’s going to get us ready? “A strong leader on a white horse isn’t going to do it,” Mr. Helprin says. “The only way that can happen, I think, unfortunately, is distress and defeat. A depression, a big loss in a war, invasion, Gotterdammerung.”
He trails off. It’s a solemn thought. “Still,” he says, “there is so much good in this country, so much courage that we may yet summon well steeled resolve.”
Mr. Swaim is a Journal editorial page writer.
English military historian living in France
Gavin Mortimer, 3 May 2024
No, the war in Gaza is not like Vietnam
… There are no American troops fighting in Gaza. Nor back then were campuses infected by anti-Semitism, as so many are today.
Neither, crucially, was there any self-loathing. That is the essential difference between the student demonstrators of today and half a century ago. In 1968, the students wanted an end to what they regarded as an unjust war; in 2024, indoctrinated by ‘decolonisation’, students want an end to what they regard as an unjust West.
At George Washington University in D.C, for example, the statue of the first president has been vandalised with the words ‘genocidal war mongering’. Yesterday, at Goldsmiths in London, protestors occupied two floors and hung banners proclaiming ‘Decolonisation is not a metaphor’.
A feature of these protests is the number of people who have culturally appropriated the Palestine keffiyeh. It is the 21st century equivalent of the Mao suit in the 1970s, which, according to the BBC, ‘became fashionable for left-wing intellectuals…before the full horrors of Mao’s reign came to light’.
Some of the 1960s protestors supported communism ideologically as well as sartorially, among them a handful of celebrities. …
… Fonda and Redgrave were outliers half a century ago, but in today’s West these apologists proliferate in every walk of life: the arts, academia, journalism, the judiciary and even the police – an officer in the West Yorkshire constabulary was this week charged with terror offences after sharing pro-Hamas image online.
The Iranian government has been crowing this week about the student protests in America. President Ebrahim Raisi praised ‘the uprising of Western students, professors and elites in support of the oppressed people of Gaza’, describing it as ‘a big event with vast dimensions’. The key word is ‘oppressed’: it explains why so many gullible Western left-wingers indulge Islamism, whether it’s Hamas, Hezbollah or even Iran itself, whose misogyny has been exported to Europe and embraced by bien pensants who believe that wearing the hijab is liberating.
The West’s working-class rejected communism in the second half of the 20th century so instead the left-wing political parties began to champion another ‘oppressed’ – in their eyes at least: Muslims. As the number of Muslims in Europe began to increase dramatically at the start of the century, these parties saw how they could prosper electorally – what the French call ‘clientélisme’.
This explains the dramatic transformation in Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the veteran far-left politician up until recently best known for wearing suits with Mao collars and expressing admiration for Latin American Marxists. Mélenchon gave the eulogy at the funeral of his friend Charb, one of the Charlie Hebdo journalists shot dead by Islamist extremists in 2015. ‘You have been murdered as you knew you would be by our oldest, cruellest, most constant and most narrow-minded enemies: the religious fanatics,’ said Mélenchon.
Now Mélenchon courts those same fanatics. Having lost the white working-class vote to Marine Le Pen’s National Rally, Mélenchon has turned instead to France’s six million plus Muslims. His strategy appears to be working: a poll last month found that 38 per cent of French Muslims are ready to vote for his La France Insoumise (LFI) party in next month’s European elections. Their second preferred candidate is the Socialist Raphaël Glucksmann on 14 per cent. Incidentally, Mélenchon has dropped the Mao collar and now wears an ordinary suit. …
… [In the 1970s] Iranian Marxist groups revolted with the support of Ayatollah Khomeini. Once in power, Khomeini executed most of his communist allies. One who survived, Chahla Chafiq, reflected in 2022: ‘Nobody had the slightest idea of what an Islamist power structure could be, using fascism and killing people to keep its power.’ Among that number was the French communist philosopher Michel Foucault, ‘the founding father of wokeness’, who visited Iran extensively in the late 1970s and believed the revolution would be utopian.
Decades later, left-wing politicians and protestors still don’t understand the Islamist power structure. Then again, many are so ignorant that they sing about the river and the sea without even knowing which river and which sea. The centuries change, the ideologies change, but what is immutable is the absurdity of the West’s useful idiots.
[END]
If you have a subscription (you should if you—above cartoon—wish to know more) you can read the article that landed in my email while I was preparing this post:
America’s War Machine Runs on Rare-Earth Magnets. China Owns That Market — U.S. defense needs are pushing revival effort after decades of deindustrialization, By Jon Emont
My thanks to the Wall Street Journal and the Spectator … and Condorito
Dr Michael G. Heller
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