In a recent article, former National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster commented that:

The longer the United States operates under the delusion that restraint will appease authoritarian regimes that have made their hostile intentions abundantly clear, Russia and China will become bolder and the risk of a catastrophic war—which Ukraine was the prelude for—will only grow. In a world created by U.S. restraint, democracy, prosperity, and peace are on the decline. As Putin’s brutal war has reminded the world, weakness is provocative. Strength is the best way to preserve peace and secure a better future for generations to come.

Yes, but that’s not enough. I agree with what he’s said, but the US has a more fundamental issue; we need to recognize that those who brought us to this- and by ‘us’ I mean the US and the West – are still in the real positions of power.

Academics, leaders of news media, many leaders of industry (particularly high-tech industries) have argued for years that if we just wait a little while longer all these bad guys are going to come around and be fine, upstanding members of the international community. If pushed into a corner they sometimes will demur and answer that we “just need to wait, Putin (fill in other dictators as you choose) will be gone and then we can fix the situation.”

If only that were so.

Many moons ago I had a professor at Georgetown who took a different line. He was, in a world where the word is so misused as to be almost meaningless, a brilliant guy. But he had also seen the inside of the beast. His name was Jan Karski and he had been in the Polish underground during WWII, had been held by the Soviets for a while, had a Cyrillic prisoner tattoo on one arm, and had been held by the Gestapo for a while, and had a Gestapo tattoo on the other arm.

He understood something that we seem to have forgotten, and which much of modern academia and many in media and politics seem to deny: people don’t change. The dictator of today is little different from the dictators of a century ago, or a millennia ago. There may be differences in the world view of Xi Jinping, Joseph Stalin and Ramses II, but it’s mainly on the margins. For each, and for a thousand other dictators, the concern is power, and nothing else really matters beyond power. They may use different means at times, but my guess is that if you put the three of them in the same room in hell, they would understand each other perfectly.

More importantly, what happens when Putin dies or Xi dies? Will all our problems be solved? Karski had that answer. One day he was asked who would replace some dictator. His answer was simple: the toughest, nastiest one of the bunch. He went on to explain that in the end, unless you dramatically change the political system – a true revolution and a dissolution of power away from the capital – the political atmosphere of a given country will not produce change on its own. Said differently, when Putin dies, assuming the basic power structure and parties remain in place, we should expect no substantive change in behavior. When Xi dies, assuming the same, assuming the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) remains, the new guy will act a lot like Xi.

True, there may be differences in their day-to-day competence, but their goals will look remarkably similar.

The leadership in Moscow doesn’t want to be friends with the West. For more than a century the leadership of Russia has been at best resentful of the US, and except for the 1990s, have had a desire to see the West collapse, and one suspects, they’ve harbored desire to precipitate that collapse. They want their lands back – their lands being everywhere Russians have ever been (we should assume it includes Alaska), and they want to be recognized as the dominant, as the premier, great power.

The leadership in Beijing is, if anything, more extreme. In the end, they want China to not only rule the world but to be the world. In the CCP dream, they have, in a fashion analogous to what they are trying to do in Tibet, replaced the population of the world with Chinese. Cultural and ethnic diversity need not apply.

Meanwhile, academia in the West, with gleeful collusion of the entertainment industry, paint a picture of a new type of people, changed, with altruistic motivations. And then make money off Reality TV that shows just the opposite.

But people haven’t changed; in particular, those who seek power haven’t changed.

Assume, though, that you don’t think the CCP really is that nasty a bunch. Consider this past week the government-run Global Times, which often acts as a mouthpiece for Beijing, warned that the US could “spark World War III” if it tried to separate – the word they used was “decouple” – too far from Chinese economy.

But don’t worry, they don’t want to tell us what to do.

McMaster says that we must:

1) Re-arm, spending more than 3% of our GDP on defense;
2) End our diplomatic restraint with China and Russia; and
3) End our economic restraint.

Will academia or the Foreign Policy elite agree?

In fact, before we even begin to discuss what McMaster wants to do, we must first recognize that there are those in the US, in academia, in entertainment, in news media, and in government, who resolutely refuse to see what China is doing as a threat. Further, they don’t seem to regard the US, our Constitution, or the essence of Western Civilization as something worth defending against the Chinese Communist Party, against communism in general, or against the pernicious rise of an intrusive, all-powerful government.

We have a host of threats facing us, but unless we can resolve, as a nation, to defend the foundations of liberty and justice themselves, our real threat will remain one of internal decay, not external assault.

Copyright 2022 Arrias
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