While America Slept. Robert C. O'Brien
has surveyed a world transformed by President Obama’s policies and called it “a mess.” Robert Kagan looks at the “world America made” and fears that we may be watching it “drift away.” Less than four years ago Mitt Romney was mocked for warning of the rise of Islamic extremism in the Middle East and Africa and the resurgence of our long time geopolitical foe, Russia. Now even progressive publications ask, “Was Mitt right about everything?” Albright, Kagan, and Romney are all correct in their analysis. Frighteningly, at the same time that the world becomes ever more dangerous, this administration is decimating America’s unparalleled armed forces.
I have embarked with our courageous young sailors and aviators on the aircraft carrier USS John C. Stennis and visited our cutting-edge Virginia-class submarines and Arleigh Burke-class destroyers. I walked the floors of one of the last subcontractors with the capacity to manufacture key components for those destroyers. Although our sailors and their equipment are still the best in the world, the United States Navy is in crisis. It is too small already and, under the Obama administration’s sequestration program, will shrink further. Given the demands with which we have tasked them, our sailors and their ships are stressed and stretched to the readiness breaking point. Some of our newer warships would be out-gunned by those of our competitors. Unless sequestration ends soon, our shipbuilding industrial base may wither to the extent that the next president will be unable to rebuild the fleet without purchasing warships from foreign contractors.
Unfortunately, it is not just the Navy that is suffering. President Obama’s hand-picked Undersecretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness recently said that the Army is at its smallest size since before World War II. If the cuts go any deeper, he stated, “they will become a matter of grave worry to us all.” The Marine Corps faces similar personnel cuts and is short of amphibious ships and landing craft to deliver them to the littoral battlefields. The Air Force is stretched so thin that America can no longer take air superiority for granted. If the mainstay of our bomber force, the B-52, were a person, it would qualify for Social Security. The service claims it can no longer afford the critical close air support provided by the A-10. It is unlikely that the service will ever receive enough of the over-budget F-35 Joint Strike Fighters to replace its current squadrons of F-15 and F-16 jet fighters.
In the 1930s, Winston Churchill, out of cabinet office and exiled to the political wilderness, saw the rising menace of the totalitarian regimes that would eventually form the axis powers. With little influence within the Conservative Party or Parliament, he went to the British people directly, through articles and speeches, to warn of the gathering storm. His prescient speeches were published in book form in 1938. The United States edition was aptly titled, While England Slept. His anthology of articles published the next year was chillingly called, Step by Step.
While it would be entirely immodest to compare this book or any of my writings to those of Sir Winston, he has long been a hero of mine in an Anglo-American pantheon that includes Washington, Lincoln, Reagan, and Thatcher. Churchill’s writings and speeches were what first inspired me to enter the editorial fray and write short pieces about the challenges I saw in my international travels and in my political work. This book is a compilation of those articles. Like this preface, the essays warn of the dangers that America faces, and how we should respond to them.
The United States must resume its role as the leader of the free world. Only in such a leadership role can America, as John F. Kennedy stated, “assure the survival and the success of liberty.”
To effectively lead and preserve peace, America must rebuild its defenses. Ronald Reagan believed, as did our ancient Roman forebears, that “we maintain the peace through our strength; weakness only invites aggression.” He was right, and his policy of “peace through strength” led to a decisive American victory in the Cold War. In the face of rising challenges around the world, it is time to return to a national security policy based on “peace through strength.” A strong America will be a nation that our allies will trust and our adversaries will not dare test. Only under those conditions will the United States lead the world in assuring the survival and success of liberty.
President Obama has indeed transformed America during his term in office. The country and the world have paid a heavy price for his approach to domestic and foreign policy. I remain, however, optimistic about our future. I am grateful to live in the United States at this time. I grew up in small-town America where the Fourth of July was celebrated with almost the same enthusiasm as Christmas. It was marked by block parties, bottle rockets, and parades. My friends and I had fathers and grandfathers and great-grandfathers who had worn the uniforms of our nation’s armed forces.
We knew that America was a winning nation. We also knew that when America won, free people around the world won. Although we grew up in the shadow of Vietnam, Watergate, and the Carter years—including the humiliating Iranian hostage crisis—we knew that America would come back. In 1980, Ronald Reagan was elected president and our country and the world witnessed a rebirth of freedom that many believed they would never see. I am certain that that American people still believe in winning; that they still see our land as the “shining city upon a hill.” I am confident that the United States of America will make another such comeback—and that it will be soon.
ROBERT C. O’BRIEN
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA
MAY 10, 2016
When Russia annexed Crimea and invaded Ukraine in February and March of 2014, I immediately thought back to Christmas Eve 1979, when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. This was the first direct use of Soviet troops outside the Eastern Bloc since World War II, “a watershed event of the Cold War.”11 Much like the Obama administration today, the Carter administration was already reeling from a series of foreign policy failures. As historian John Lewis Gaddis wrote, the invasion was “only the most dramatic of a series of humiliations for the United States.”22 The Soviets had deployed nuclear missiles to Europe in 1977 and Soviet-backed Cuban troops had intervened in Angola in 1975 and Ethiopia and Zaire in 1977. The Iranian revolution and subsequent hostage crisis, the rise of the Soviet-backed Sandinistas in Nicaragua, and the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia added to the general sense of crisis.
US Department of State, Office of the Historian, “Milestones: 1977–1980” (Washington, DC: US Department of State, October 31, 2013), https://history.state.gov/milestones/1977-1980/soviet-invasion-afghanistan.
John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of American National Security Policy during the Cold War (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1982), http://www.amazon.com/Strategies-Containment-Critical-Appraisal-American/dp/019517447X.
In a preview of President Obama’s wishful-thinking foreign policy approach, President Carter initially refused to confront Soviet aggression. Just a year before the invasion, a communist coup in Kabul had ended hopes of a more constructive relationship between the United States and Afghanistan. Carter’s National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, recommended cutting diplomatic ties, but Carter rejected his advice and, siding with the State Department, recognized the new pro-Soviet government. Shortly thereafter, the new US ambassador to Afghanistan was assassinated in February 1979. (The next United States ambassador to be assassinated would be J. Christopher Stevens in Benghazi, Libya on September 11, 2012.) Yet President Carter was still holding on to the hopes of détente. He was determined, as he had earlier told Leonid Brezhnev, “to improve relations with the Soviet Union on the basis of reciprocity, mutual respect, and advantage.”33
“Carter-Brezhnev Letters, January–February 1977,” http://astro.temple.edu/~rimmerma/Carter_Brezhnev_letters.htm.
Portions of this introduction appeared in the