Guided Missiles and Misguided Leaders

One of the likely reasons that Kamala Harris’s overperformance of expectations in last week’s debate didn’t move the polling needles much is that, no matter how smooth she was in reciting her little speeches full of the greatest hits of bland statements of empathy for Americans and dishonest anti-Trumpery, Americans who paid attention to the substance knew she didn’t have any. Even lefty fact-checker Snopes has long admitted the “very fine people” business is false. And all that insistence about how dangerous Trump was? Absurd is probably too gentle.

To say, as Harris did, that “It is very well known that Donald Trump is weak and wrong on national security and foreign policy” doesn’t connect to anything we know. To say, “It is absolutely well known that these dictators and autocrats are rooting for you to be president again because they’re so clear, they can manipulate you with flattery and favors,” was funny in an extremely dark way since Putin had just endorsed her. Trump pointed this out, observing: “I think he meant it. Because what he’s gotten away with is absolutely incredible.” Indeed, Harris’s accusation that Trump supposedly “said of Putin that he can do whatever the hell he wants and go into Ukraine” is laughable since Donald Trump is the only president this millennium who did not see Putin invade anything: under Bush, Putin invaded Georgia; under Obama, Putin invaded Crimea; and under Biden, Putin invaded Ukraine.

The war that followed that 2022 invasion under Putin has been one of the bloodiest in Europe since the Second World War. And the danger this week has been ramping up such that Trump’s Tuesday comments about how the Biden Administration has handled it don’t seem hyperbolic at all. Biden, Trump said, “had no idea how to stop it. And now you have millions of people dead and it’s only getting worse and it could lead to World War 3. Don’t kid yourself…. We’re playing with World War 3.”

Indeed, this is the problem facing our country. As destructive as government policy has been within our own borders during the Biden-Harris Administration, what it has done to the world within our influence has been worse. And it may well get worse in these last weeks before the election. “We have guided missiles,” observed Martin Luther King, Jr., who might as well have been commenting on this week’s news, “and misguided men.”

What was that news? Well, since that Tuesday debate, we have found out that the U. S. is considering authorizing the launch of long-range (190 miles) supersonic missiles known as Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMs) by Ukraine deep into Russian territory. Doesn’t sound much different than before when Ukraine has fought so valiantly with our arms, right? The problem with this framing, as Christopher Caldwell noted in a perceptive essay at Compact titled “The Imminent Russia-US War,” is that when we talk about the use of such systems, “It would be more accurate to put ‘Ukraine’ in quotation marks.” For much of the attack, precision strikes were used. “And Ukraine doesn’t do precision. It cannot.”

Caldwell quotes senior Biden officials who spoke to The New Yorker saying, “There are lines we drew,” one said, “in order not to be perceived as being in a direct conflict with Russia.” Caldwell draws attention to the word “perceived.” “It has served Russia, too, to pretend not to notice what is going on in the interest of avoiding direct conflict with the United States.” The danger of using ATACMs is that “It would make such dissembling impossible. It’s a reckless crossing into flagrant war-making.”

Indeed, it is. Putin himself commented on the eve of talks in Washington over the matter that the use of such weapons—or the similar Storm Shadow system British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s government wants to use with Washington’s blessing—“Will mean that NATO countries, the U.S. and European countries are at war with Russia. And if this is so, then, bearing in mind the change in the very essence of this conflict, we will make appropriate decisions based on the threats that will be created for us.”

What does “appropriate decisions” mean? It certainly could mean a nuclear strike on some target within NATO. Caldwell observes that much of the foreign policy world believes Putin is “bluffing.” “But,” he observes, “a nuclear exchange isn’t the only bad outcome that could result from such a reckless military adventure.” He might have noted that CIA Director William Burns admitted this week that there was a very real threat of Russian use of tactical nukes right from the beginning of the Ukraine invasion in 2022. While Caldwell does not expand on the possible bad outcomes available, he notes that the path we are taking probably isn’t being guided by Biden anyway. What happens if things do get bad? “Who is his regent? Who in this administration is escalating the Russia-Ukraine war by drawing the United States closer to active participation in it?” The Interagency is a mysterious thing.

Former National Security Administration analyst and historian John Schindler wrote in a similar vein this week in an essay titled “Who’s Ready for World War Three?” He’s certainly not kidding about the threat, noting that most Americans are paying too much attention to trivial matters “while the Biden-Harris administration, whoever is actually running it, is eager to distract the public from the geopolitical catastrophe they’ve sleepwalked America into, while allowing our military to further degrade.” He summarizes the very real dangers in a paragraph worth quoting in full:

“Americans broadly remain blissfully oblivious regarding how close to World War Three we are and have been since early 2022. Repeated warnings from U.S. military and intelligence leaders about this dire state of affairs, which this newsletter reported in detail, with looming war against Russia, or China, or Iran – or worst of all, Russia, China , and Iran – have fallen on deaf ears. Not to mention that, given the parlous state of America’s military, amid recruiting and retention problems, shortages of weapons and munitions, plus the anemic condition of our defense industrial base, the Pentagon would be hard-pressed to prevail in even one major theater war, while it would almost certainly lose, probably fast, when confronted by three of them at once.”

While the American military has been focusing on wokeness, our enemies have been conspiring together. Indeed, the strong likelihood is that Russia may well have shared nuclear secrets with Iran for the price of missiles. And in June, Putin warned that, if pushed, Russia could supply missiles to other foes to hit Western countries. These wouldn’t have to be nuclear missiles to exact a very steep price for escalation. Escalation and widening of the war in Eastern Europe into the West, even if only slightly, is a pressing danger.

The perceptive journalist Richard Fernandez, writing on X (Twitter), got to the heart of what’s wrong with the bad outcomes. They may not be mutually exclusive: “Perhaps the way to think about Putin’s warning is not that it will uncontrollably lead to nuclear war but to a new level of international conventional war escalation that could lead to nuclear conflict.”  

That is the problem with all such attempts at limited wars. The limits often shift, leading nations and governments with clear objectives to shift them in the blind hope that something, anything, will work—with too little consideration that others might do the same. Schindler’s problem with the Ukraine and NATO plan is that it doesn’t take into account Russia’s advantages in materials and people (military personnel and otherwise): “To cite an esteemed cliché, hope is not a strategy, yet nebulous hope in eventual Russian collapse seems to be NATO’s plan.” 

He doesn’t cite all the numbers, but an article in The Euromaidan Press paints a stark demographic picture: Ukraine’s death rate is 18.6 per 1000 people, while Russia’s is only 14. And Ukraine’s birth rate has been dropping precipitously over the last decade, particularly since this war started. Its current rate of 6 per 1000 people is the lowest in the world. There’s nothing nebulous about the collapse that is happening here. 

And yet, the U.S. and NATO leadership has been marching ahead in this strategy of a false hope for two-and-a-half years, blithely raising the stakes. Schindler famously wrote a book debunking The Guns of August (1962), Barbara Tuchman’s famous depiction of Western powers sleepwalking into the catastrophe of World War I. He observes that the volume has long been the Bible for midwit analysts of the Russia-Ukraine War. Though Tuchman was wrong about 1914, Schindler worries that the analysis better fits our present situation: “One of these days, I fear, the midwits will be right. That day may be approaching fast.”

Democrats have been hammering Donald Trump for not saying in that debate that he wanted Ukraine’s victory. Perhaps that’s because he has a much more realistic vision. He may be a brash, hyperbolic New Yorker. But he’s no midwit. He understands much better than Kamala Harris that guided missiles need clear eyes and tough minds, not misguided leaders. He would like Ukraine to survive—and the rest of us in the West, too.

David P. Deavel teaches at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, Texas. A past Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute, he is a Senior Contributor at The Imaginative Conservative. Follow him on X @davidpdeavel.