Stephen Hadley, National Security Advisor for President George W. Bush, told us at the Council on Foreign Relations yesterday that while "China is rallying the rest of the world, we're not playing. We're not showing up."
His remarks came at a gathering of three former NSC directors at which Susan Rice, President Obama's National Security Advisor added that, "It's worse than that. We're accelerating China's influence." For 30 years, she added, successive Administrations have worked to create distance between China and India and between China and Russia. Now, we're bringing them together in a grasping of hands (literally) and, I might add, a middle-finger salute to a disengaged and befuddled United States. "We have left the field wide open for China and Russia and they're happily filling the void," she said, declaring that "This is superpower suicide.”
Rice and Thomas Donilon, also a National Security Advisor to President Obama, underscored the risks of the United States returning to 19th Century, regional-power status while China is flexing its global muscles and Russia continues to instigate military attacks in Eastern Europe. Just witness Moscow’s drone incursions into Poland and Romania in recent days. And watch with sadness as the U.S. disengages from the trillion-dollar green-energy market and forfeits hundreds-of-thousands of green jobs and countless revenue and products to China, Germany, Korea, and others.
We are witnessing one of the most significant reorderings of global alignments and opportunities since World War II. Through a combination of wrongheaded ideology, stupidity, and incompetence, however, the current Administration is retrenching, retreating, and cutting off its proverbial proboscis to spite its face by defunding or otherwise diminishing powerful, influence-wielding tools such as USAID and Voice of America. This is all a colossal blunder. It makes no sense whatsoever. History will be brutally unkind to this current era of U.S. softness and strategic inanity.
