June 12^th

Pat Buchanan is most unhappy that America has fallen far from the international prominence it achieved under the Reagan and Nixon administrations. He claims that “With the exception of the Soviet Union, no nation not defeated in war has suffered so rapid decline in power as the United States.” Horse hockey! Consider our most likely opponents: Russia has had three crashes of its military planes just this week and has grounded all of its strategic bombers. While Russia can harass NATO they have cut back on military spending and they simply haven’t the money to maintain their air force. Chechnya is still in revolt and Putin will never subdue its Muslim population by force and he knows no other method. Buchanan says we are just behind Russia in our relative “decline.” A story is told about a footrace between a Russian and an American; the American won and the Russian was far behind. Russian newspapers reported the Russian came in second and the American was next to last; so much for “relative performance.”

Buchanan says, “China has emerged as the great power in Asia, entered claims to all seas around her and is building a navy and air force to bring an end to US dominance of the western Pacific dating to 1945.” Let’s look at China’s navy: How is she doing for nuclear submarines? China has four and with luck perhaps soon a fifth one. We have just forty, about ten times as many. Then there are aircraft carriers: China has one; we have eleven with two more under construction. The notion that China can project her power much beyond her own borders is, frankly, silly and it will be silly for many years to come.

Buchanan constantly yammers about our commitments overseas and complains about the rise of various Muslim insurgencies in the Middle East. But his answer at the end of his column is “retrenchment.” He claims that we face a serious threat from a resurgent Russia, that China’s expansionist navy is a menace, that various Islamist forces threatens us and the answer to all of these difficulties is to hide behind the sofa because we are over-extended! This is a remarkable prescription for our safety.

Mr. Buchanan presents us with a curious set of facts: many powerful forces menace us and the answer to this challenge is to withdraw. That will encourage these powerful forces to retreat also? Oh come now Mr. Buchanan, if we had not maintained bombers with atomic weapons on British airfields at the end of WW 2 Russia would have most likely overrun all of Europe. We are certainly overextended but retreat in the face of threat is not the credible. It wasn’t Chamberlin who had the answer to Hitler; it was Churchill. And this must gall Mr. Buchanan all to pieces.