Right from the start of his State of the Union address last week, President Biden positioned himself as a war president.
He presented himself as the champion of freedom and democracy threatened across the globe by autocrats on the march – a clear dividing line with his opponent Donald Trump, who Biden argued, with some justification, has been more likely to cozy up to these very same autocrats.
Stirring stuff, with much to commend it.
All the more remarkable that within days the Biden administration produced defense spending plans with all the hallmarks of a peace president who no longer believes the US military needs to be a priority.
The autocrats must be both confused and amused. The rest of us should be scared and angry.
The Biden administration has drawn up defense spending plans with all the hallmarks of a peace president who no longer believes the US military needs to be a priority. The autocrats must be both confused and amused. The rest of us should be scared and angry. (Pictured: Biden and China’s President Xi).
Biden is proposing that defense spending rise to $895 billion in the next (2025) fiscal year — an increase of just under 1 percent.
But even the paltry extra spending includes money that the Department of Energy can spend on issues related to national security. Remove that, and the military budget next year will be closer to $850 billion—a drop in defense spending in real terms after accounting for inflation.
Still, Biden said he saw himself in the same position as the great President Roosevelt, who addressed Congress in January 1941 after Hitler’s armies had conquered most of mainland Europe and Britain stood alone against the Nazi danger.
Quoting FDR, he said that March 2024 was also ‘no ordinary moment’ and that once again ‘Europe is in danger. The free world is in danger.’
How he combines such soaring rhetoric with a budget that briefly, the US military beats me.
I’m pretty sure Roosevelt didn’t go and cut the defense budget after his warnings about the danger to freedom and democracy all those years ago.
Of course, Congress will have its say on the president’s plans, which will not survive scrutiny on Capitol Hill.
And we shouldn’t forget that the debt ceiling deal the White House negotiated with former Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy put a cap on spending. For all their shouting this week, Republicans were complicit in this budget.
Still, it illustrates the president’s priorities and how he sees military spending for the rest of the decade. It’s not a pretty sight.
Under the Biden plan, defense spending would be just over 3 percent of GDP next year — the lowest share of GDP since the end of the Cold War more than 30 years ago.
According to official projections, this figure will continue to decline over the next 10 years, reaching a terrifying 2.4 percent of GDP in 2034.
Of course, Biden and his number crunchers have no more idea of what defense spending will actually be in a decade than Jimmy Kimmel has of what constitutes a decent joke on Oscar night. But the indicated direction of travel is worrying.
Do not doubt that the autocrats in Moscow, Beijing, Tehran and Pyongyang take it seriously.
They already see a president they see as senile and incompetent, who simply doesn’t see it as the ‘leader of the free world’.
Now they will also mark the gap between his tough rhetoric and his inability to put his money where his mouth is. They can only be encouraged. The prospects for democracy are bleaker than they have been in decades.
Defense has already been squeezed under Biden. His latest budget just offers more of the same.
The autocrats in Moscow, Beijing, Tehran and Pyongyang take it seriously. (Image: Putin).
They already see a president they see as senile and incompetent, who simply doesn’t see it as the ‘leader of the free world’.
Now they will also mark the gap between his tough rhetoric and his inability to put his money where his mouth is. They can only be encouraged. The prospects for democracy are bleaker than they have been in decades.
The US Navy, already half the size it was at the height of the Cold War, is set to shrink to 286 ships (from the current 296) next year.
The Chinese navy is already larger than that of the US and is on target to be over 400 strong before the decade is out – a formidable armada that will undoubtedly be used to intimidate Taiwan.
The US Air Force has lost 130 airframes in recent years, production of the F15EX fighter jet has ceased, and the modernization of the newer F-35s is underfunded.
The US Army is seriously short of manpower and supplies, including ammunition stores.
It’s not because there isn’t extra money around. The Biden budget will add over a trillion to federal spending, bringing it to a record peacetime, non-pandemic share of GDP (25 percent).
The budget deficit will remain massive as far as the eye can see and the national debt will continue to balloon.
There is a lot more money for new handouts and other federal spending. Just basically nothing for defense.
The Americans have rightly criticized the Europeans for putting welfare above military needs. But under Biden, America is doing the same – just another example of how he is ‘Europeanizing’ the United States.
Yet the Russian economy is now on full war footing, able to resupply its attackers in Ukraine on a larger scale than we supply Kiev, and as America struggles to find an extra 1 percent for its military, China has just announced an increase of over 7 percent for its armed forces.
China’s defense spending is regularly estimated at over $200 billion, a fraction of that of the United States.
But recent studies that attempt to compare like with like suggest that, in terms of domestic purchasing power, China already spends the equivalent of $700 billion on defense – not far behind the US’s $800-odd billion.
Based on current trends, China may spend more on defense before the decade is out. If that doesn’t focus minds on both sides of the aisle in Washington DC, I don’t know what will.
It is not just America that is failing.
Last week the British government published its budget for the new financial year. There was not a penny extra for defence, even though the British military is creaking at the edges on so many fronts.
The German government, which in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine promised a massive rearmament program, has since taken a leaf from the Biden playbook: talk tough, do very little.
In an eerie repeat of the 1930s, the world’s democracies are being let down by their leaders, who seem unable to rise to face the threats of a perilous time, one that grows more dangerous by the month.
But what’s particularly depressing about America is that Trump, the alternative to Biden, has said he doesn’t care if Moscow invades NATO members who don’t spend enough on defense and who, according to his new best friend Victor Orban — the Hungarian strongman who visited him at Mar-a-Lago this week — would cut off aid to Ukraine the day he entered the Oval Office.
His fellow Republicans in Congress are already doing everything they can to thwart Biden’s efforts to keep providing Ukraine with vital military aid.
No wonder the autocrats think their time has come.
I still have enough faith in democracy to believe that America and its allies will ultimately do the right thing. But we are running out of time – and the longer we delay, the more expensive it will be in terms of blood and treasure.