It is Not Too Late for America to Win But Time is Running Out

Amb. Robert C. O'Brien

The world we live in today looks very different than the one we knew just three short years ago when President Trump was in office. On October 7, we saw innocent Israelis face the worst imaginable kinds of barbarism. Now, Iran, through its terrorist proxies, is killing American troops and firing missiles on civilian ships and doing so with relative impunity. This year, we have lost valiant soldiers and SEALs unnecessarily because US deterrence has failed. The North Korean regime persists in threatening our Korean and Japanese allies and the wider Pacific. Russia’s war of conquest in Ukraine is unprecedented in four generations. For the past two years now, Ukrainians have fought bravely and relentlessly for their sovereignty, using grit and American and European weapons and ammunition to hold the invaders at bay. Russia was, no doubt, encouraged in its course by America’s humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Communist China, the most potent adversary the United States has faced in its history, is plotting and growing its military might. No one in the Trump administration understood the China threat better than Peter Navarro. As Pacific Ocean facing Californians, Peter and I saw what our East Coast friends missed – a rising China with malign intent toward America and its partners. Peter and I had been sounding the alarm in books and speeches for over a decade before we both ended up working for President Trump.

While America squandered its post-Cold War “peace dividend” and focused on the global war on terror and ill-fated nation-building over the past three decades, China built the world’s largest military, and the CCP spun a web of malign activities. All of her toil is designed to undermine free nations and to put China solely atop the international community. It will seek to take democratic Taiwan by force and coercion next. The threat we face from China is not only military in nature. This is a clash that involves the whole of our societies. To prevail, we must employ all instruments that make up national power - military, diplomatic, political, economic, trade, and industrial base. China is certainly doing so. At this moment, it is not clear that our nation’s industrial base is up to the challenge posed by our adversaries.

Our defense industrial base has shrunk to its lowest point since before World War II. The number of important defense players, large and small, that have vanished over the years is alarming. Washington has always assumed that as was the case in 1941, if a major conflict arose, our industrial base could refit and ramp up in short order, bringing war material to the front in a matter of weeks or months. As the difficulty we see now in simultaneously resupplying Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan shows, America lacks the ability to surge military hardware and ammunition in sufficient quantities in a major crisis. The infrastructure, workforce, manufacturing capability, and policies that made such a surge possible in the past simply no longer exist today.

In the 21st century, defense production is far more complex than just forging steel and producing explosive ordinance. To build the tools our warfighters need, our industries need jet engines, turbine engines, computers and chips, complex alloys, and countless other critical technologies and components. These items come from long and vulnerable supply chains. Too often, these supply chains run straight through China, our chief adversary and competitor. Thus, we have imperiled our ability to obtain key goods and products in wartime. A prime example is how Beijing has established itself as a dominant force controlling the world’s critical minerals and rare earth elements. Even when these elements are mined in California or elsewhere, the ore is shipped to China for processing because we no longer have the capacity to do it ourselves. These minerals are important in all aspects of civilian and military high-tech manufacturing.

The first step to solving this problem is acknowledging we face a big one. Washington is slowly waking up from years of inaction and is starting to craft a national defense industrial strategy. Much more on the policy and appropriations fronts must be done - quickly. Rebuilding a defense manufacturing industrial base will require both hard work at home and unprecedented cooperation from our allies and partners around the world. Reshoring, nearshoring, and friend-shoring will be required of a 21st-century industrial base that is prepared for a 21st-century conflict. China is simply too big for America to confront alone.

One example of how we can achieve this level of industrial cooperation is seen in the AUKUS agreement. Combining decades of know-how with the sharing of infrastructure by three Anglosphere allies is a winning strategy to reinvigorate the defense industrial bases of all three nations. To counter the threat China poses requires more than the US and its allies rebuilding their manufacturing supply chains. It means stopping the PRC’s intellectual property theft, cyber-attacks, and espionage, unfair trade practices, and currency manipulation, all of which have allowed Beijing to turbocharge its industrial growth while stunting ours.

America can meet these challenges. With strong leadership in Washington that is committed to American greatness and not satisfied with merely managing our decline, we can still win. But this is not just a government issue. America must have strong leadership in the private sector if the good men and women of the Free World are going to prevail over the tyrants, party bosses, ayatollahs, and thugs menacing our way of life.

Robert C. O’Brien served as the 27^th US National Security Advisor from 2019-2021, and is a guest columnist for Peter Navarro’s Taking Back Trump’s America

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