By Fareed Zakaria
On the eve of his visit this week to Asia, (click here) Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin outlined his key concern. “China is our pacing threat,” he said. He explained that for the past 20 years, the United States had been focused on the Middle East while China had been modernizing its military. “We still maintain the edge,” he noted, “and we’re going to increase the edge going forward.” Welcome to the new age of bloated Pentagon budgets, all to be justified by the great Chinese threat.
What Austin calls America’s “edge” over China is more like a chasm. The United States has about 20 times the number of nuclear warheads as China. It has twice the tonnage of warships at sea, including 11 nuclear-powered aircraft carriers compared with China’s two carriers (which are much less advanced). Washington has more than 2,000 modern fighter jets compared with Beijing’s roughly 600, according to national security analyst Sebastien Roblin. And the United States deploys this power using a vast network of some 800 overseas bases. China has three. China spends around $250 billion on its military, a third as much as the United States. Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institution notes that, “if China were in NATO, we would berate it for inadequate burden-sharing, since its military outlays fall well below NATO’s 2 percent minimum.”
At the height of its imperial might in the late 19th century, when it ruled a quarter of the world’s population, Britain adopted a “two-power standard” — its navy had to be larger than the next two put together. U.S. military spending remains larger than the defense budgets of the next 10 countries put together, most of which are Washington’s close allies. The United States’ intelligence budget alone — around $85 billion — is larger than Russia’s total defense spending....
On the other hand Jim Inhofe uses stunts and gimmicks to make arguments that so long as their are snowballs no one has to worry about the climate crisis. He is a bunch of hooey.
Jim Inhoge's affection for the USA military budget is nothing but fear mongering to defame President Biden. Does anyone actually believe President Biden would do anything to compromise the USA's national security?
Well, President Biden came forward with the US military budget and Mr. Snowball is crying yet again for his own political purposes. Mr. Snowball also won't admit that the USA's GDP has fallen over the past year. I would fully expect the USA miltary budget to follow suit.
To make it perfectly clear that Mr. Snowball has no idea what the climate is doing or that the crisis is valid, the USA military has prioritized climate for nearly a decade and dare I say almost an entire generation. Perhaps Mr. Snowball needs to take a ride in a USA military jet fighter powered by alternative fuels. He might even come to understand that the mliitary is among the first to carry the burden for such issues as the climate crisis as part of it's perparedness.
Below is Mr. Snowball taking to the US Senate floor for more grandstanding about how China is more militarily advanced than the USA. Perhaps, Fahreed Zakaria is right about the problem with the USA military attempting to justify a swollen budget considering the country's GDP.
