Mitch McConnell at Foreign Affairs:
[For] years, congressional opponents of military spending absurdly insisted that there be parity between increases in defense spending and increases in nondefense discretionary spending, holding military power hostage to pet political projects. Meanwhile, domestic mandatory spending skyrocketed, and massive expenditures that circumvented the annual bipartisan appropriations process, such as the ironically named Inflation Reduction Act, included not a penny for defense.
Isolationists on both ends of the political spectrum unwittingly validate this artifice when they peddle the fiction that military superiority is cost-prohibitive or even provocative, that the United States must accept decline as inevitable, or even that the effects of waning influence won’t be that bad. Calls for “disentanglement,” “leading from behind,” and “hard prioritization”—amplified by historical amnesia—amount to defeatism. The United States’ security and prosperity are rooted in military primacy. Preserving that decisive superiority is costly, but neglecting it comes with far steeper costs.
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I am not naive about the downsides of international trade, but there is no question that free markets and free trade have been responsible for much of the United States’ prosperity. That’s why the United States and like-minded free-market economies must work together to reform the international trading system to protect U.S. interests from predatory trade practices—not abandon the system entirely. Without U.S. leadership in this area, there is little question that Beijing will be able to rewrite the rules of trade on its own terms.
Although flagging military primacy is the most glaring impediment to national security, the United States cannot neglect the role of foreign aid, either. As the former chair of the Senate appropriations subcommittee responsible for foreign assistance, I take seriously James Mattis’s admonition when he was head of U.S. Central Command that if Congress shortchanged diplomacy and foreign aid, he would “need to buy more ammunition.” Unfortunately, these important tools of American power are increasingly divorced from American strategic interests. It is past time to integrate foreign assistance more deliberately into great-power competition—for example, by working with allies to present credible alternatives to China’s Belt and Road Initiative.