(B) National Defense and Foreign Policy

By Kate Bachelder Odell – Russia has invaded Ukraine and threatens nuclear war, China is eyeing Taiwan, Iran holds regular military exercises with China and Russia, and North Korea just launched a missile over Japan. If that doesn’t sound ominous enough, Mike Gallagher has worse news: The U.S. is increasingly vulnerable to losing a war, “either by sitting the conflict out or through defeat in combat.”

Taiwan is a particular preoccupation. What interest do Americans have in protecting this distant island? If the Chinese subdued it, it would heighten their threat to Japan and the Philippines, which the U.S. is bound by treaty to defend. America’s friends would hedge their bets by cozying up to Beijing. More important, by seizing Taiwan’s semiconductor-manufacturing capability, Xi Jinping would “hold the rest of the world economically hostage,” Mr. Gallagher says. “All this stuff that drives people in the Midwest crazy, when Hollywood or Wall Street bows down” to the Chinese Communist Party, “you can 10-X that if Xi takes Taiwan.”
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By Roger Zakheim – Today’s challenges are no doubt more complex, in part because China poses economic and security risks. Still, the solutions Reagan offered should be no less compelling. Yet 42 years later, leaders in both parties seem eager to make common cause with the detente-pushing realists, assuming that an aggressive Russia and a rising China are merely the facts of life in the 21st century. Even with a bipartisan consensus that China is America’s pre-eminent security challenge and that Russia is a dangerous adversary, many in both parties wonder whether the U.S. has the economic and political strength to prevail against China while sustaining its security leadership in Europe and the Middle East. Read More

By Hal Brands and Michael Beckley – The U.S. is running out of time to prevent a cataclysmic war in the Western Pacific. While the world has been focused on Vladimir Putin’s aggression in Ukraine, Xi Jinping appears to be preparing for an even more consequential onslaught against Taiwan. Mr. Xi’s China is fueled by a dangerous mix of strength and weakness: Faced with profound economic, demographic and strategic problems, it will be tempted to use its burgeoning military power to transform the existing order while it still has the opportunity. Read More

By Franklin C. Miller – U.S. policy makers have lost sight of the crucial link between arms control and deterrence. U.S. nuclear deterrence policy and U.S. nuclear arms-control policy have become dangerously disconnected.

Longstanding deterrence policy requires that the U.S. have sufficient capacity to target what potential enemy leaders value most. Arms control is supposed to augment deterrence by limiting, and if possible reducing, the threats while allowing the U.S. to deploy a force that deters an attack on America or our allies. The policies were tightly linked throughout the closing decades of the Cold War, providing the U.S. and its allies with a credible deterrent … Read More