“Thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting,” said Winston Churchill on October 5, 1938, in assessing the diplomacy of Neville Chamberlain’s government. Chamberlain’s greatest failure was his unwillingness to cooperate with Soviet dictator Josef Stalin to geopolitically balance the greater and more menacing power of Nazi Germany. “I must confess to the most profound distrust of Russia,” Chamberlain admitted. “I distrust her motives, which seem to me to have little connection with our ideals,” he wrote in March 1939. Five months later, the Nazi-Soviet Pact made war in Europe inevitable. Chamberlain’s failed diplomacy pushed Stalin into the arms of his fellow autocrat Hitler and plunged the world into its most destructive war. The Biden administration is making the same mistake today by focusing on trying to help Ukraine defeat Russia instead of urging a negotiated resolution of the war.
Retired U.S. Army LTC Alexander Vindman, who gained fame for helping Democrats impeach President Donald Trump for a phone call Trump had with Ukrainian officials in July 2019, is urging the Biden administration and its Western allies to swiftly and dramatically increase military aid and supplies to Ukraine to help the Ukrainian armed forces credibly threaten to take back Crimea, which Russian forces seized in 2014. He lays out a Ukrainian military campaign armed and funded by the United States and its NATO allies that he claims will cause Russian President Vladimir Putin to negotiate a Russian withdrawal from Crimea and reduce the risk of a wider war. Vindman is reminiscent of those European statesmen and generals before and during World War I who thought that mobilizing for war would somehow prevent it and, if not, would result in a swift victory.
It has been clear for some time that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) seeks to displace the United States as the leading power within the global order. China has sought to do so in a number of mutually reinforcing ways by employing all available tools
Key congressional leaders have floated the idea of trimming the number of generals and admirals in the armed forces. They say the ratio of high-ranking officers to enlisted personnel has ballooned out of control and might impede the readiness of the fighting force.