Introduction: Abstract: As the election campaign enters the countdown, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton wrote an article in the US Foreign Affairs magazine proposing a "4D" top-level design of "strong troops and rich countries" on the US national security strategy in the post-Trump era, namely (defense), diplomacy, development and domestic renewal. Hevin's focus is on reducing the U.S. military's large and expensive weapons systems, taking the road of elite troops, reversing the militarization of diplomacy, and placing military strategy within the overall framework of diplomacy, alliance systems, and national security strategies for technological and industrial renewal. To this end, Hillary Clinton, contrary to her usual hawkish stance, repeated President Eisenhower's warning to the military-industrial complex 69 years ago. Regardless of whether Hillary Clinton's "new thinking" on national security can be implemented, Shivin has at least laid the foundation for her pivotal position in Biden's national security team, and the possibility that the political veteran who is expected to become the first female defense secretary of the United States will once again attack the White House in 2024 (78 years old).
【Article/Observer Network Columnist Yu Bin】
The US election campaign has entered the sprint stage, and although Biden is leading the polls, it is still undecided who will die. Still, there are already concerns about how the post-Trump America will "lead" the world. On October 9, the website of Foreign Affairs magazine published a long article by Hillary Clinton in the November/December issue of the magazine: "A National Security Reckoning: How Washington Should Think About Power."
The former secretary of state and first female presidential candidate argued that while the United States is hampered by the pandemic, ethnic unrest and economic downturn, its national security faces a range of external threats, including "multidimensional challenges" from China and Russia, which the United States is "dangerously unprepared." The reasons for this are not only the trump administration's faults, such as emphasizing military over diplomacy, rebirth threats, mild epidemic prevention and control, ignoring non-traditional security, and opening up the network behavior of China and Russia, etc.; however, the policies of successive US administrations have also caused important and strategic industrial chains to move out, and the entangled military industrial groups have made it difficult for the military to abandon expensive and outdated weapon systems, reluctantly shut down idle military facilities/bases, and wasted a lot of resources.
The road to a strong army and a rich country
To reverse the decline, Hillary proposed a comprehensive governance strategy that combines military modernization with domestic renewal. This includes massively reducing legacy weapons systems and replacing them with more advanced and efficient combat platforms against technologically advanced adversaries with anti-access/area-denial weapons. To this end, all branches of the US military must "break the old and build the new" to adapt to the "asymmetric conflict" in the future:
The Navy should focus on developing a new generation of submarines with long-range strike capabilities, while the United States' large, vulnerable carrier fleet must avoid Chinese anti-ship missiles.
The Air Force should reduce the purchase of expensive short-range F-35 fighters and replace them with a new generation of B-21 Raider long-range stealth bombers.
- Signed for future wars mainly in the form of sea, air and space, the Army should reduce active duty troops and heavy tanks to save tens of billions of dollars, while strengthening communications and detection capabilities.
- Strategic nuclear forces should be "newer and fewer," significantly reducing existing land-based strategic missiles; should not spend a trillion dollars over the next 30 years to update U.S. nuclear arsenals; and to avoid miscalculation and escalation of nuclear confrontation, the United States should not deploy submarine-launched low-yield nuclear warheads or cruise missiles with nuclear warheads, while advancing arms control negotiations with Russia and China.
However, the elite road of the US military not only means the large-scale redeployment of internal resources of the US military, the shutdown and transfer of the military industry, and it is also a painful transformation process for the US economy and society. Therefore, the US government must make a difference, a strong army must be a rich country, and the modern US military should and can only be supported by a strong industrial chain and scientific and technological forces. To that end, Mr. Shivon revisited the 3D principles of The Smart Power concept introduced by Mrs. Clinton when she was secretary of state in 2009, namely defense, diplomacy, and development, plus a fourth D, domestic renewal, which provides a strong material basis for America's military transformation.
To achieve this goal, Clinton believes that the United States must bring more industries and resources under national security control, not only in areas such as materials, technology and microelectronics related to weapons manufacturing, but also in areas such as medicine, clean energy, 5G and artificial intelligence, basic science and medicine. The federal government's investment in these areas of research and development will far exceed the equivalent military spending. To that end, she supported Biden's $7000 billion plan to revitalize U.S. manufacturing.
There are not many ingredients in the Greek text that directly refer to China. Although she opposes Pompeo's cold-war ideology of dealing with China, arguing that the move is "unhelpful," the strategic "new thinking" in The Greek text is basically tailor-made for China and reflects the high degree of recognition of the Us establishment's China policy.
Wu Sheng Wen decline?
Leaving aside the Chinese factor, Hillary Clinton's top-level design for military reform and revitalization does have unique features and a strong sense of urgency. The relationship between the U.S. military and the civilian government after the end of World War II has always been a difficult problem in American politics. Not only did the various services and departments compete with each other for budgets, but the military also colluded with arms dealers and politicians to form an entangled military-industrial complex, wantonly exaggerating external threats, so much so that in his farewell speech on January 17, 1961, President Eisenhower, who was a military man, warned of the military-industrial complex's pervasive influence on American politics and society. 1
Eisenhower was the first and perhaps the last U.S. president to publicly fight with the military-industrial complex and retire completely. His successor, Kennedy, fought against the CIA and the military during the Bay of Pigs (1961) invasion of Cuba and the Cuban Missile Crisis (October 1962); after the Missile Crisis, he proposed a peaceful world with the Soviet Union,2 ordered the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam at the end of 1963,3 apparently offending the military-industrial complex that relied on war wealth. People are still debating who killed Kennedy, and over time more and more people are taking aim at the military-industrial complex and its proxies in politics, Vice President Johnson,4 including Jeffrey Sachs, an economics professor at Columbia University. 5 And the day after Kennedy's burial, the new President Johnson resumed sending troops to Vietnam. 6
After the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964, the United States was mired in the Vietnam War for 11 years (1964-1975). Although there was a brief strategic contraction during the Nixon era, Reagan began a massive rearmament after taking office. Since then, the two poles have disintegrated, the United States has dominated, and liberal interventionism has prevailed; at the same time, the US military-industrial group has not only been limited to the military and arms groups, but has multiplied into a ubiquitous and pervasive military-military-oil-political-Hollywood-academic-media huge complex, deeply embedded in the daily operation of American politics and society. 7
Even conservatives can't afford to look at such militarized diplomacy and internal affairs. As soon as Bush Jr. took office, he assigned Defense Secretary Rumsfeld to "rectify" the US military, which included streamlining the administration of the army, fighting corruption and corruption, and cutting down outdated and expensive weapons research and development projects, which directly affected the interests of all branches of the armed forces and the profits of countless weapons contractors. The day before the 9/11 incident in 2001, Rumsfeld, who was more than 70 years old and had served as defense secretary for the second time, said to the Pentagon employees:
Today's topic is an enemy that poses a serious threat to U.S. security. This enemy is one of the last bastions of the world's central planning system. It issued orders from the capital of a country in the form of a five-year plan, in an effort to make its orders cross time and space and reach all continents and seas. This enemy is inexhaustible in its suppression of free and novel thinking. It interferes with the defense of the United States and puts at risk the men and women who serve in the U.S. military. Maybe this enemy sounds like the Soviet Union, but the Soviet Union is no longer there. Today's enemy is rather cunning and cruel. You may think I am describing the few old and decaying dictators left in the world, but they are not much to come and cannot be compared with the strength and scale of this enemy. This enemy is at hand, and it is the bureaucracy of the Pentagon. 8
A week later, the US Congress authorized the US military to use force worldwide to "fight terrorism", 9 military spending soared in the next decade, and Bush's military reorganization plan was shelved for nearly 20 years.
Defense Secretary Hillary?
The final sprint of the 2020 election campaign followed by "October surprises": Trump's public refusal to obey the election results, publicly calling on white militants to "stand by"; Trump himself dramatically turned yang and yin, three days of hospital discharge; refused to participate in the second debate; declassified thousands of Clinton's emails, Biden's son's "computer door" "accidentally" exposed... So many unexpected storms, so much so that the Foreign Affairs website published more than 5,000 words of Hillary Clinton's long article on October 9, the mainstream media in the United States actually did not feel anything.
However, what Sherving reveals is not only the Democratic Party's path to rich countries and strong troops, but also important information about the future composition of Biden's cabinet, that is, Hillary Clinton is very likely to become the Biden administration's defense secretary. There are at least three reasons: First, Sylvan focuses on U.S. national security policy, the traditional military and diplomatic spheres, rather than the current campaign on hot issues such as epidemic prevention, race, health care, and employment. However, this is not just a matter of division of labor within and outside the Biden administration, but also an important link between the Biden campaign team and the huge national security system in the United States.
In the past few months, the United States has been abused by the epidemic, ethnic turmoil, economic collapse, "America first" has become the first in the United States, Trump also wants the US military to participate in "quelling chaos"; the international withdrawal of the group to break the treaty, "isolation" is not "glorious" (here compared with britain's 19th century so-called "glorious isolation" foreign policy, that is, "splendid isolation"), the international system painstakingly operated by the United States after the Cold War has been fragmented, and the establishment has long been intolerable. On September 24, more than 500 former senior national security officials signed an open letter in support of Biden. 10 It is clear that The Hindsight could not have been Hillary Clinton's own wishful thinking, but rather the consensus and declaration of the anti-Trump forces on the national security issue.
Second, Shiwen's military reorganization plan can be described as a drastic one, which not only involves technical issues such as the research and development, procurement, and deployment of weapon systems of various services, but at a higher strategic level, in view of the capabilities and characteristics of rising powers, the overall allocation of the US national security policy and domestic rejuvenation, and the hard power of the US military must be part of the "smart strength", that is, it will be combined with diplomacy and development, rather than replacing diplomacy. Compared with Rumsfeld's army consolidation plan 20 years ago, Hillary Clinton's comprehensive proposal is more comprehensive and in-depth. In contrast, Rumsfeld only played a small game inside the US military.
Reform always offends people, especially the huge military-industrial complex. In the first decade of the 21st century, the United States increased significantly due to the sharp increase in counterterrorism military spending as a proportion of total federal spending, and began to decline under The Obama era, and the Trump era rose again. However, during the epidemic, the economy has fallen sharply, the national debt has soared, the fiscal outlook is worrying (see Figure 1), the huge expenditure of the US military is unsustainable, and the US military must also make a trade-off. As a local interest group, the US military must also obey the overall overall arrangement. After 9/11, the US military's conquest in the world has cost a lot, whether it is the US military or American society, the anti-terrorism "fatigue" is becoming more and more obvious, and the United States wants to return to great power competition, and the transformation of the US military is imperative.
Figure 1: U.S. Military Spending and Future Directions in the 21st Century (2000-2030, as a % of the GDP)
Sources: Statista, https://www.statista.com/statistics/217581/outlays-for-defense-and-forecast-in-the-us-as-a-percentage-of-the-gdp/
Nevertheless, the US military reform is extremely difficult. Since Trump took office, the balance of civil-military relations in the United States has shifted significantly toward the military: on the one hand, Trump has placed a large number of active and retired senior officials in the national security system in order to please the military, while important programmatic documents of US national security and diplomacy, such as the National Security Strategy of December 2017 and the National Defense Strategy of 2018, reflect more of the military's narrow, technical zero-sum view. In this way, it defines the complex relations with major powers such as China and Russia. On the other hand, Trump's decentralization at the operational level allows the military to flexibly grasp the scope and intensity of the use of force according to actual needs at the theater and tactical level, and the White House does not have to command remotely in every detail. 11 In response, Hillary Clinton quoted Eisenhower's famous 1961 warning about the "military-industrial bloc" in a long article in Foreign Affairs magazine, as if to revise her years of hawkish stance and work to correct the imbalanced political-military relationship.
Third, Hillary Clinton's greatest asset as defense secretary is her unique way of surviving in the American political ecology. From first lady to senator and secretary of state to her first female presidential contender, Clinton has amassed political resources far beyond the Obama team and Democrats she once worked for. For years, Hillary clinton has been a favorite of the U.S. military-industrial complex, and when she was a senator in New York State, she was already one of the ten most funded senators by the U.S. military-industrial group. 12 On issues such as the War in Iraq, the increase in troops in Afghanistan, interference in Libya, Syria, the North Korean nuclear issue, the South China Sea, and the Diaoyu Islands, Hillary Clinton holds a hawkish view, and his tough foreign policy has even been approved by Gingrich, a conservative giant in the United States and former Speaker of the House of Representatives. When the Obama administration was looking for a successor to then-Secretary of Defense Gates a decade ago, Gentritch championed Hillary Clinton, then Secretary of State, arguing that as defense secretary, she would be a very aggressive defender of the military's interests. 13
The Obama administration at the time was actively meddling in the Arab world's color revolutions, regime change in Libya, and syria, and the outgoing Gates was blunt in his speech at West Point: "If any future secretary of defense dares to speak to the president and ask for another huge ground force to be sent to Asia, the Middle East, or Africa, then as MacArthur said, 'This man's brain must be sick.'" 14 Whether Gates is warning Hillary, who may succeed him, I am afraid that only he understands in his own heart.
In short, whether or not Hillary Clinton eventually enters the cabinet or holds other positions in the cabinet, her qualifications, abilities and flexibility are unmatched. Biden himself has been in politics for nearly 50 years, and Hillary Clinton was elected to the New York State Senate in 2001. However, the latter takes all-out, black and white, maneuvers between domestic and foreign affairs, military and political circles, has close contacts with the military industrial group, and is in charge of half of the US government's expenditure (see Figure 2) at the critical moment of the national strategic transformation and internal chaos in the United States, and the Department of Defense, which has been indulged by Trump trump, May be the only candidate who can be alone.
Figure 2: Share of military spending in U.S. federal government discretionary spending in 2019 (dark blue portion)
Sources: National Priorities Project, June 22, 2020, https://www.nationalpriorities.org/analysis/2020/militarized-budget-2020/
Conclusion: 2020 to 2024
If Biden wins, Hillary clinton is expected to be the first female defense secretary in U.S. history. No matter how the seventy-four-year-old man reorganizes the army, the Global Strategy of the United States will be stronger and sharper. Hillary knows China very well, and as defense minister, she must be a difficult opponent, especially when the overall national strength of the United States is declining and there are many internal contradictions.
Hillary Clinton's political horizons, however, may not stop at the Pentagon. At the operational level, Biden, who entered the White House at the age of 78, will certainly decentralize national security affairs, and Susan Rice, who is expected to become secretary of state, although young and promising, is still young compared with Hillary Clinton, who has been a eunuch and has been ups and downs several times. In the Biden team, Hillary Clinton is both the elder and easy to become the de facto second-in-command. Four years later (2024), Biden gave up re-election, and the 78-year-old Hillary Clinton once again stormed the presidency, which is not a completely outrageous option.
Of course, all this speculation depends on the showdown between the decent Biden and the unreliable incumbent president in the last few days.
exegesis:
1.Walter LaFeber, America, Russia, and the Cold War, 1945-2006, 10th ed. (McGraw-Hill, 2008), 202-4.
2.John F. Kennedy, “Commencement Address at American University,” Washington, D.C., June 10, 1963, https://www.jfklibrary.org/archives/other-resources/john-f-kennedy-speeches/american-university-19630610.
3.James K. Galbraith，“JFK’s Vietnam Withdrawal Plan Is a Fact, Not Speculation,” The Nation, November 22, 2013, https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/jfks-vietnam-withdrawal-plan-fact-not-speculation/.
4.William Pepper, An Act of State: The Execution of Martin Luther King (New York: Verso, 2003), 127.
5. Sachs was the founder of Shock Theory after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Writing in the Boston Globe on February 15, 2017, criticizing Trump's China policy, it referred to the "deep reasons" for Kennedy's assassination, which read: "Probably the best opportunity to end the Cold War came with John F. Kennedy's peace initiative in 1963 that led to the signing of the." Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. Some think that right-wingers took such offense to JFK’s peace initiative that Kennedy was assassinated as a result; There is real plausibility to that view" (Kennedy's 1963 peace initiative was perhaps the best opportunity to end the Cold War, when the two sides signed the Partial Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty. Some argue that the right-wing forces regard Kennedy's peace initiative as a major rebellion, and ken's assassination is inevitable. Now it seems that this does make sense).) Jeffrey Sachs, “Donald Trump’s dangerous China illusions,” Boston Globe, February 5, 2017, https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2017/02/05/trump-dangerous-china-illusions/51H7yrI9vTE3PSmXDJDl3M/story.html.
6.Pepper, An Act of State, 126-7; Kevin Ruane, War and Revolution in Vietnam (UCL Press, 1998), 60.
7.Nick Turse, The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2009).
8.Donald Rumsfeld, “DOD Acquisition and Logistics Excellence Week Kickoff—Bureaucracy to Battlefield,” September 10, 2001, https://www.hsdl.org/?view&did=2423.
9.US Congress Joint Resolution Pub. L. 107-40: “Authorization for Use of Military Force,” September 18, 2001, https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/PLAW-107publ40/pdf/PLAW-107publ40.pdf.
10.Melissa Quinn, “Nearly 500 ex-military, national security officials throw support behind Biden,” CBS News, September 24, 2020, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/joe-biden-500-ex-military-national-security-officials-support-election/.
11.Jeremy Diamond, “How Trump is empowering the military -- and raising some eyebrows,” CNN, June 26, 2017, https://www.cnn.com/2017/06/24/politics/trump-pentagon-shift-war-power-military/index.html.
12.Turse, The Complex, p. 30.
13.见Alex Eichler, “Gingrich: Hillary Clinton Would Be ‘Terrific’ Defense Secretary,” November 9, 2010, ABCNews, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2010/11/gingrich-hillary-clinton-would-be-terrific-defense-secretary/339653/.
14.原话为：“… any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should have his head examined,” as General MacArthur so delicately put it.” Thom Shanker, “Warning Against Wars Like Iraq and Afghanistan,” The New York Times, February 25, 2011, https://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/26/world/26gates.html.
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