United States security and the strategic landscape.

Zubrod, Gordon A.D.

Newt Gingrich began his May 15, 2008 lecture to the Business Executives for National Security with brutal clarity: The United States is facing the greatest crisis in its efforts to preserve government of the people, by the people and for the people since the decades of the 1850's and 1860's. The looming crisis rests upon three pillars: the rise of strong and implacable enemies abroad; the steady erosion of American intellectual, economic, military, and institutional strength at home; and the unwillingness of American leaders to strategically prepare for the new global reality.

- Acknowledging that the road to fundamental reform is a hard one, Gingrich cautioned that, "the road of self-deception ... leading to strategic defeat is much harder." Make no mistake, he warned, America is "decaying toward a decisive defeat comparable to the British in 1941."

The watchword of the lecture was "strategic planning," which, according to Gingrich, should encompass a 15 to 25 year "time horizon." The absence of a grand strategy has left the United States signally unprepared for the rising tide of global confrontation it will be facing in the coming years. Neither the Clinton nor the latest Bush presidency was willing to confront the scope and difficulty of the challenges to American security. Gingrich characterized the current American efforts as "too small, too unimaginative, and too timid."

The first threat facing the American future consists of five autocratic and implacable foes: China, Russia, the "Irreconcilable wing of Islam," rogue regimes eager to acquire weapons of mass destruction, and a corrupted "bureaucratic international elite which weakens the democracies, protects the vicious and the evil, and absorbs the energy of decent countries into endless maneuvers of utter impotence and dishonesty." Each group poses a specific kind of risk that the United States must, but to date has failed to, coherently address:

The Chinese are more scientifically advanced, more bureaucratically effective, and more economically successful than the United States.

Russia's growing autocracy is so focused on eroding American influence that it is forming alliances against American power and supplying advanced weapons to every nation that has similar aspirations.

Shia and Sunni fanaticism, the former funded by Iran and the latter funded by Saudi Arabia, has gained "strategic momentum" politically and militarily.

Rogue states/movements will inevitably acquire weapons of mass destruction and will be capable of inflicting enormous damage on America and her allies.

The international bureaucracy (read: the United Nations) is "impenetrable, unaccountable and often corrupt." This has made it more difficult to address, let alone solve, problems such as Rwanda, Sudan, Zimbabwe and "other zones of terror, murder, kleptocracy, and brutality."

The former House Speaker stated that the failure of math and science education and the failure to invest in science pose a greater threat to American security than conventional warfare. He also cited the nation's steadily declining economic strength in the face of "litigation, regulation, taxation, bureaucracy and health costs."

In the area of national security, political correctness has made an honest conversation about the nature of the threat posed by militant Islam impossible. The agencies charged with confronting terrorism have banished Islamic terms from discussions about terrorism, concealing or ignoring the radical religious underpinning the present conflict. This sort of thinking has led to spectacular failures in the American intelligence and diplomatic communities, including the failure to detect the North Korean nuclear alliance with Syria and the failure to effectively counter Hezbollah in Lebanon or Hamas in Gaza. Moreover, the Department of Homeland Security is out of touch and unprepared to handle multiple, simultaneous nuclear events in separate cities and has made no preparation for such an eventuality.

Finally, Gingrich warned that the absence of a long-term energy strategy has created the current spiraling fuel costs and its attendant damage to the American economy, and is a strategic failure second only to the collapse of education.

Gingrich was silent on the intellectual and spiritual impoverishment that has led America into this dark passage, but he appropriately warned that the United States is facing its greatest crisis since the Civil War and is even less prepared to overcome it than it was in the nineteenth century ... with potentially catastrophic results.

United States Security and the Strategic Landscape

By Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the House

Reviewed by Gordon A.D. Zubrod, Assistant U.S. Attorney, Middle District of Pennsylvania

Text of speech: http://www.aei.org/publications/pubID.28007/pub_detail.asp