The Russia-China Axis. Douglas E. Schoen

in which he dared Americans to retaliate. Any American force, even a small team of Marines, would make quick work of these Islamist fanatics. But like Vladimir Putin—and like Xi Jinping and Bashar al-Assad and Hassan Rouhani and Kim Jong Un—Abubakar Shekau knows that the Americans aren’t coming for him.

      In short, President Obama has manifestly failed to provide effective foreign-policy leadership—and this failure is due in large part to the president’s own inclinations to de-emphasize American primacy and then expect the world to follow his vision for it.

      “Obama’s surprisability about history, which is why he is always (as almost everyone now recognizes) ‘playing catch-up,’ is owed to certain sanguine and unknowledgeable expectations that he brought with him to the presidency,” Leon Wieseltier wrote in the New Republic.³³ Indeed, Obama seemed to crave a world in which American power is no longer essential, but the world doesn’t share that wish. “There are many places in the world where we are despised not for taking action but for not taking action,” Wieseltier observed. “Our allies do not trust us. Our enemies do not fear us. What if American preeminence is good for the world and good for America? Let’s talk about that.”³⁴

      General Wanquan’s warning to Chuck Hagel about American inability to “contain” China was unfortunately correct—especially because, even as the international situation becomes less stable, America is slashing its defense budget. The Army is projected to shrink to its smallest size since before World War II. As the Brookings Institute’s Robert Kagan argued at a recent Council on Foreign Relations meeting, our budgetary challenges don’t require such extreme cuts.³⁵ “For diplomacy to succeed, it must be supported by a strong and credible defense,” former Secretary of Defense and CIA Director Leon Panetta wrote in the Wall Street Journal. “Now is not the time to weaken our military, but that is exactly what’s happening.”³⁶ Indeed, we will always need enough troops to fight wars; it’s absurd to argue otherwise and fall back on Predator drones and our expertise in cyber warfare.

      This military retrenchment is all the more baffling in light of what Russia and China are doing militarily (explored at length in Chapter 4). Russian defense spending is set to rise 44 percent over the next three years,³⁷ and its naval budget, barely 10 percent of America’s just a few years ago, is now approaching 50 percent of the American outlay.³⁸ In June 2014, four Russian strategic bombers conducted practice runs near Alaska; two of the bombers triggered U.S. air-defense-system warnings after they came within 50 miles of the California coast. A retired American Air Force general, Thomas McInerney, who served as Alaska commander for the North American Aerospace Defense Command, said that he couldn’t remember a time when Russian strategic bombers had come that close to the American coast, and he blamed the episode on America’s “unilateral disarmament, inviting adventurism by the Russians.”³⁹

      China, meanwhile, will spend more on defense by the end of 2015 than Britain, France, and Germany combined,⁴⁰ and Beijing is set to overtake the U.S. in its number of naval “major combatant vessels” by 2020.⁴¹ Hawkish officers in the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) call for “short, sharp wars” to assert Chinese interests.⁴² The hawks seem to be winning the policy debate: Whereas in the past, China’s policies in the South China Sea have been erratic, leaving neighbors guessing as to when the next provocation would come, more recently, as we’ve seen, China has pursued an unyielding approach to its territorial claims, provoking high-profile clashes with Vietnam, the Philippines, and others. Beijing appears determined to pursue a strategy of hardline aggression in the Asia Pacific.⁴³

      The Chinese buildup comes in the context of Beijing’s efforts to redefine the alliance system in Asia—loosening the grip of the U.S. on its Asian neighbors and asserting its primacy over the region. Xi Jinping made this explicit in May 2014 in a speech in Shanghai, in which he outlined a “new regional security cooperation architecture” that excluded the U.S. Admiral Sun Jianguo, the PLA general staff’s deputy chief, was more blunt: According to the New York Times, he described the American alliance system in the region as “an antiquated relic of the Cold War.”⁴⁴ And at the Shangri La security dialogue in Singapore, Major General Zhu Chengdu openly criticized American hegemony in the Pacific, warning ominously: “If you take China as an enemy, China will absolutely become the enemy of the U.S.”⁴⁵ The simple conclusion is inescapable: Asia is for Asians—and Russians. American defense cutbacks aren’t confined to conventional armed forces. We are also rolling back our nuclear armaments under the leadership of a president who has made no secret of his goal of someday reaching nuclear zero. That’s a goal not shared, needless to say, by adversaries of America and the West.

      Obama’s high-minded yet strangely aloof and out-of-touch approach is evident in his reaction to Vladimir Putin, as it is in his foreign policy generally. Obama regards Putin’s behavior with a combination of condescension and naiveté: “Mr. Putin’s decisions aren’t just bad for Ukraine,” he says. “Over the long term, they’re going to be bad for Russia.”⁴⁶ He fails to consider that from Putin’s perspective, aggression in Ukraine makes good strategic sense. In seizing Crimea, Putin has “acquired not just the Crimean landmass but also a maritime zone more than three times its size with the rights to underwater resources potentially worth trillions of dollars,” William J. Broad detailed in the New York Times.⁴⁷ Obama also conveniently overlooks Russian success in turning more nations in Eurasia against the open, democratic Western model. According to a new report from Freedom House: “Ten years ago, one in five people in Eurasia lived under Consolidated Authoritarian rule, as defined in the report. Today, it’s nearly four in five, and the trend is accelerating.”⁴⁸

      Set against those real-world gains, why would Putin lose any sleep over Obama’s haughty disapproval? Indeed, as Putin himself said of Obama recently: “Who is he to judge, seriously?”⁴⁹

      Obama’s detachment has long distressed champions of American power, who often reside right of center on the political spectrum. The president’s supporters dismiss those critiques, but it’s not so easy to shrug off the criticism coming from two former Obama defense secretaries: Panetta (who also served as CIA chief) and Robert Gates.

      “When the president of the United States draws a red line, the credibility of this country is dependent on him backing up his word,” Panetta said last year, after Obama had backed down from confronting Syria at the 11th hour.⁵⁰ In his memoir, published early in 2014, Gates harshly criticized the commander in chief, particularly for what he saw as Obama’s failed leadership and commitment to the war in Afghanistan. Obama, “doesn’t believe in his own strategy, and doesn’t consider the war to be his,” Gates wrote. “For him, it’s all about getting out.”⁵¹

      As Obama’s international failures become more manifest and more consequential, it isn’t just the Right or the neocons who are speaking out. Critics on the Left are worried, too. “What’s frustrating to me sometimes about Obama is that the world seems to disappoint him,” said New Yorker editor David Remnick—an Obama biographer and admirer—on the MSNBC program Morning Joe.⁵² “Under Obama, the United States has suffered some real reputational damage,” David Ignatius wrote at the Washington Post. “I say that as someone who sympathizes with many of Obama’s foreign-policy goals. This damage, unfortunately, has largely been self-inflicted by an administration that focuses too much on short-term messaging.”⁵³ And Foreign Policy editor David Rothkopf wrote in September 2013: “Even the most charitable of interpretations by the president’s most loyal supporters (and I voted for him twice, so I count myself in that group) would have to rank the past couple of months as among the worst of his administration in terms of national-security policy mismanagement.”⁵⁴

      It’s no wonder that the United States has been outflanked at every turn by strong leaders such as Putin and Xi. They believe in what they’re doing, and they have clear strategies and specific initiatives in the military, political, economic, and international realms that they purse with vigor and principle. At the present time, nothing like this can be said for the United States. Our paralysis and weakness have broad-ranging