(This article was written By Peter Huessy and Stephen Blank and appeared in the RealClearDefense. What the Arms Control Community Gets Wrong About Arms Control – RealClearDefense)

In an ideal world a binding arms control treaty governing numbers and types of deployed and stored nuclear weapons, proclaiming, and enforcing strictly agreed to mutual verification procedures would be a wonderful thing.  But we do not live in that world nor is it likely to appear anytime soon.  The New START Treaty expired on February 5 and there is not even a negotiation in sight let alone a viable treaty.  Predictably the arms control community blames the Administration for this.  Angela Kane, the former UN High Representative for Disarmament Affairs and Under-Secretary-General for Management in the United Nations, wrote that, civil society urged the Trump administration to accept Vladimir Putin’s proposal to continue observing the numerical limits of that treaty after expiration.

That may be true in Europe and among the arms control lobby here.  But they assuredly do not speak for whatever she means by the term civil society here and in Europe. Indeed, treaty extension is a bad idea, and the Administration rightly refused Putin’s offer. Washington got it right. Putin’s offer was a typical Russian ruse.  Notably it said nothing about verification, and it came from a government that has systematically broken every arms control treaty that it has ever signed.  It is an axion of successful arms control that unless both sides can verify a treaty’s observance that treaty is worthless.

In the meantime Russia has used chemical weapons in Ukraine, provided them to the Assad government, conducted biological warfare against opponents at home and abroad – most recently – Alexei Navalny – and probably against U.S. diplomats abroad, the notorious Havana Syndrome being a case in point.  Russia violated the Budapest accords on Ukrainian nuclear disarmament by seizing Crimea in 2014 and then invading again in 2022, actions that violated eight solemn international treaties.

As Dr. Blank wrote in 2023, Russia’s post-2014 aggression does not merely target Ukraine. Instead, it deliberately assaults the very idea of international order, particularly that of a European security order.  Indeed, Putin, Secretary of the Security Council of Russia Nikolai Patrushev and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov proclaim the collective West is at war with Russia.  Russian nationalist political scientist Sergei Karaganov openly says that “We are at war with the West. The European security order is illegitimate.”

As part of its assault on international order Russia violated the CTBT (Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty) by conducting nuclear weapons tests in 2019.  At the same time, Russia’s Oreshnik missile, a prototype of which appeared approximately 15 years ago, was developed in violation of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. Furthermore, the Oreshnik prototype, the Rubezh missile, was developed in violation of the New START Treaty, since, given its range, it can be classified as an intercontinental ballistic missile.

Russia is also seeking to deploy a nuclear weapon in space in violation of previous treaties.  Apart from all these treaty violations for which no penalty was exacted, Moscow regularly threatens Ukraine, Europe, and the U.S. with nuclear strikes for supporting Ukraine.  The latest such threat against. Estonia occurred on February 22.  Finally by moving nuclear weapons to Belarus, funding North Korean nuclear programs, and transferring missile, satellite, and nuclear submarine technology to Pyongyang Moscow has violated the Non-Proliferation treaty and a host of UN resolutions.

Neither is Russia alone, China’s breathtaking and utterly unconstrained nuclear buildup represents a growing threat to both the U.S. and Russia not to mention India, Japan, Australia, and virtually every other state in Asia.  China now has a nuclear triad but because no treaty constrains it, it is also apparently developing a new generation of low-yield “mini-nukes” to give it the future option of limited nuclear warfare.  It violated the CTBT in 2020 despite being a signatory to the treaty.  Thus, it too cannot be counted on to uphold a treaty without strict verification and enforcement mechanisms.

It is hard to imagine either American or European governments let alone civil society, however it is defined, resuming an unverifiable treaty with Russia and/or China under such conditions of intolerable disadvantage,  a phrase coined in 1999 by members of the Clinton Administration.  As Thomas Schelling and Morton Halperin wrote in 1960-61, “the aims of arms control and the aims of a national military strategy should be substantially the same.”  And a more recent commentary observes, “This principle established national security as the dominant goal of arms control, not the reduction of arms per se.”

Unfortunately, Ms. Kane and the arms control community have evidently forgotten this crucial distinction.  Arms control is not and cannot be a moral crusade for unilateral disarmament or global zero.  Experience shows that Moscow negotiates only when it fears a U.S. technology buildup or when one, as is now beginning, takes place.  Neither will China be moved by moralism and what amounts to American self-deterrence.  But it might be moved by a genuine American buildup to parry its threats.  Otherwise, nuclear proliferation will inevitably become a more realistic option as China pushed in a secret 1982 Politburo meeting.  Indeed, at the first sign of the fraying of our alliances in Asia and Europe those countries’ nuclearization  instantly returns to their agendas as is now happening. Regardless of claims made on behalf of a nebulous civil society, Western populations expect their governments to defend them against threats and history shows us that only when we build do our enemies negotiate.

A great deal of commentary on the U.S.-Israel-Iran confrontation suffers from a basic analytical defect: it treats formal alignment as if it were the same thing as strategic convergence. It is not. States can fight on the same side, strike the same targets, issue the same public language, and still be pursuing materially different wars in their own minds. That, in essence, is the core misunderstanding behind much of the discourse surrounding Donald Trump’s posture toward Iran during this phase of escalation. Too many observers saw operational cooperation and assumed deep unity of purpose. But the evidence, when viewed with greater strategic discipline, points to something more constrained, more conditional, and ultimately more revealing: Trump was never truly committed to the full strategic logic of the most maximalist Israeli view.

This does not mean he was passive. It does not mean he was indifferent. And it certainly does not mean he was unwilling to use force. On the contrary, Trump has always been comfortable with coercion, spectacle, intimidation, and the cultivation of unpredictability as political tools. But there is a decisive difference between being comfortable with coercion and being committed to an open-ended strategic project. There is also a difference between wanting to exert pressure and wanting to carry a war to its furthest logical conclusion. That distinction matters here, because Israel’s core logic toward Iran and Trump’s core logic toward Iran were never identical, even when tactically aligned.

Israel’s position was always anchored in a deeper and more existential framework. For Israel, Iran is not merely another adversarial file. It is not just a bargaining counterpart. It is not one dossier among many in a crowded global portfolio. It is a structural threat embedded in the region’s military, ideological, and proxy architecture. It is a regime whose missile program, nuclear trajectory, regional militia network, and eliminationist rhetoric are all understood in Jerusalem not as abstract challenges but as elements of a long-term strategic danger. That produces a very particular mentality: one that is less interested in cyclical bargaining than in degradation, rollback, deterrence restoration, and, where possible, systemic weakening of the adversary’s capacity to reconstitute power.

Trump’s posture, by contrast, appears to have been narrower from the outset. Even if he was persuaded whether by Israeli arguments, by advisers such as Kushner, or by his own reading of the failure of diplomacy that Iran was not going to yield a grand bargain on attractive terms, that still does not mean he internalized the Israeli end-state. What he seems to have accepted was not the full philosophical premise of a maximalist anti-Iran campaign, but rather a more limited proposition: that pressure had utility, that force could create leverage, and that leverage might produce a political opening that he could eventually convert into a sellable outcome. In other words, he appears to have approached the confrontation less as a civilizational or existential struggle and more as an escalatory bargaining instrument.

That distinction is not semantic. It goes to the heart of how he thinks. Trump’s strategic instinct has never been rooted in ideological patience or in the disciplined pursuit of a historic end-state at high cost. His instinct is transactional. He tends to view pressure as a means of manufacturing negotiating advantage, not as a sacred logic that must be followed regardless of downstream complications. He likes to sit at the top of an escalation ladder while preserving the freedom to climb higher, pause, descend, or suddenly declare victory. He is attracted to optionality far more than to doctrinal consistency. His ideal strategic environment is one in which he can credibly threaten destruction without becoming trapped inside the consequences of total commitment.

This is why the description of his posture as “half-hearted” is often misunderstood. Half-hearted does not mean weak. It does not mean fearful. It does not even necessarily mean restrained in the immediate tactical sense. It means conditional. It means instrumental. It means that his participation in coercive action is not evidence that he shares the full strategic appetite of the more committed partner. A man can authorize force and still be fundamentally uncommitted to where the pure logic of that force would lead if pursued without brakes. That, arguably, is precisely what we are seeing here.

Indeed, one of the clearest indicators of this difference lies in the persistent ambiguity surrounding the American end-state. If Washington had truly and fully embraced the most extreme version of the campaign, if it had fully internalized a logic of exhaustive dismantlement, uncompromising strategic closure, and the elimination of future political pathways with the existing Iranian system, its behavior would almost certainly look different. The rhetoric would be less elastic. The operational logic would be more totalizing. The tolerance for ambiguity would shrink. The preservation of backchannels, pauses, signaling ambiguity, and speculative off-ramps would make far less sense. The entire architecture would move toward finality rather than negotiable pressure.

But that is not what Trump instinctively prefers. Trump prefers pressure with reversibility. He prefers intimidation with personal discretion preserved. He prefers campaigns that can be narrated as strength and then repackaged as diplomacy the moment an opening appears. This is not incidental to his statecraft; it is the essence of it. He is far less interested in a morally purified or historically conclusive struggle than in a politically monetizable sequence of moves. He wants to be able to say: I hit them hard, I made them bend, and I got a deal. Whether that deal is structurally durable is, in many cases, secondary to whether it can be publicly sold as proof of dominance.

That pattern makes the possibility of exploratory ceasefire signals, backchannel feelers, or indirect diplomatic probing entirely plausible at the level of strategic psychology, even if any given report about them is false, exaggerated, or planted. One does not need to authenticate every rumor to recognize that the broader behavioral pattern fits. Trump’s political method has long involved using pressure not as an end in itself, but as a prelude to a transaction he can narrate as a triumph. He wants to remain feared enough to negotiate from strength, but unconstrained enough to stop when the political price of continuation rises or when a face-saving agreement becomes available. In that sense, escalation and negotiation are not opposites in his worldview. Escalation is often the staging ground for negotiation.

This is also why he may be more open than many ideologically driven hawks would be to the prospect of engaging new Iranian leadership if political dislocation inside the system creates such an opening. For Trump, the emergence of a new power configuration in Tehran would not necessarily be assessed primarily through the lenses of revolutionary continuity, institutional ideology, or regime resilience. His instinct is markedly more transactional than doctrinal. If a figure emerging from within the IRGC were to present as pragmatic, disciplined, technocratic in method, and capable of delivering a stable strategic understanding with Washington, Trump would be entirely capable of engaging that figure on functional terms. He is far less concerned with ideological essence than with operational utility. He is not looking for philosophical convergence, moral conversion, or some deep conceptual reorientation of the Islamic Republic. He is looking for a counterpart who can make decisions, enforce outcomes, and sustain a bargain. Trump’s threshold for engagement is not ideological moderation in any meaningful substantive sense. It is functional reliability.

From there, the logic follows naturally: a post-shock reconfiguration in Tehran would be read less as a question of ideological continuity than as a possible opening for a deal reset. New faces, new pressures, new leverage, new signatures. But that is also where the analytical weakness enters. Trump’s recurring analytical error is to assume that sufficiently pressured actors will eventually behave as transactional counterparts in a marketplace of fear. But the Islamic Republic, whatever internal fractures it may contain, is not merely a frightened negotiating unit waiting to be priced correctly. It is an ideological security state with embedded doctrines, internal legitimacy logics, and strategic self-conceptions that do not always bend in proportion to material pain. Pressure matters, certainly. Shock matters. Elite fragmentation matters. But not every regime translates pressure into pliability on the timeline or in the manner a transactional American president may expect.

This, in turn, creates a profound divergence between Israeli and Trumpian horizons. Israel’s strategic class is not naive about negotiation, but its approach to Iran is shaped by a much harder proposition: that even periods of tactical calm can merely mask reconstitution; that ideological hostility is not a temporary bargaining posture; that partial agreements may freeze symptoms while preserving the regime’s deeper strategic drive; and that the costs of underestimating Iran’s adaptive persistence are potentially catastrophic. Trump, by contrast, seems more inclined to believe that if the pressure is sharp enough, the adversary or some successor formation will eventually produce a negotiable outcome that can be claimed as success. That difference is not just about tactics. It is about anthropology. It is about what each side thinks the adversary fundamentally is.

Netanyahu, from this perspective, appears to have understood the asymmetry clearly. Israel could carry much of the campaign logic itself, and had long prepared to do so if necessary, but it still needed the United States for the outer layers of state power that only Washington can provide: strategic deterrent cover, force multiplication, political legitimacy, diplomatic shielding, escalation management, and the psychological weight that comes from America’s participation. Yet acquiring American participation was never the same thing as converting the United States into an Israeli mirror image. It meant obtaining the umbrella, not eliminating the difference in strategic temperament underneath it. Trump could provide protection, credibility, and military mass without truly embracing Israel’s full theory of victory.

That is why one should be careful not to overread American involvement as proof of American maximalism. The United States may have joined, enabled, or underwritten key parts of the campaign, but Trump’s deeper instinct still seems to have been to preserve maneuverability rather than surrender himself to an irreversible war logic. He wanted enough force to shape the board, not necessarily enough commitment to see every implication through to the bitter end. He wanted to retain authorship over the political narrative, including the ability to pivot from bombardment to bargaining without appearing to retreat. He wanted the benefits of confrontation without becoming fully possessed by its strategic absolutism.

Seen from that angle, the apparent lukewarmness is not an inconsistency. It is the core reality. Trump’s posture was never best understood as that of a man marching with ideological conviction toward total strategic closure. It was better understood as that of a man wielding violence as leverage while keeping one eye on the negotiating table, one eye on domestic political presentation, and one hand permanently on the exit door. Israel may have viewed the confrontation as a deep strategic necessity with long historical roots. Trump appears to have viewed it as an intense but still ultimately instrumental pressure campaign; something to dominate, shape, and perhaps later convert into an agreement he could market as proof of his mastery.

That makes his posture neither trivial nor incoherent. It makes it profoundly limited in a very specific way. He was not fighting with the same psychology as Israel, even when fighting beside Israel. He was not animated by the same internal stakes, not governed by the same strategic memory, and not necessarily aiming at the same horizon. His approach was harder than diplomacy, but softer than total war; more coercive than conciliatory, but less committed than ideological hawks would prefer; more interested in leverage than in historical finality.

And that, in the end, is probably the clearest way to understand the entire issue. Trump is not absent from the campaign. He is not detached from its utility. He is not indifferent to its symbolism or to the benefits of demonstrating force. But he was never fully inside Israel’s war in the deepest strategic sense. He is inside a pressure architecture, not a complete end-state architecture. He is inside an escalatory instrument, not a civilizational doctrine. He is inside the logic of conditional coercion, not the logic of uncompromising resolution.

Once that is understood, much else becomes clearer: the ambiguity, the preserved room for negotiation, the possibility of ceasefire exploration, the attraction to a post-shock deal, and the unmistakable sense that America’s role, though formidable, remained fundamentally more reversible than Israel’s own. Trump did not need to be weak to be half-hearted. He only needed to be what he has always been most consistently: a coercive tactician in search of leverage, not a strategist of total commitment.

(This article was written by Peter Huessy and appeared in the Geostrategic Analysis.)

America’s fourth wave of neglect of its military since the end of World War II may have very serious negative geostrategic consequences.*

While Congress has passed a temporary slowdown in the decline in American defense spending with a two-year budget framework, the Ryan-Murray budget agreement, which restores $32 billion to the Department of Defense, the projected defense resources available for the next eight years will not allow the United States to protect its own security, let alone that of its allies.

Taken together, as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff warned,(1) [FN1: “Chairman Outlines Sequestration’s Dangers,” by Claudette Roulo, American Forces Press Service, Washington, Feb. 13, 2013], previous and projected cuts to military budgets from 2009-2023 threaten dangerously to undermine the stability required for both economic prosperity and relative peace among the world’s major military powers, as well as America’s global standing.

One of the nation’s top defense analysts sums it up: “The reality is, for all its promise, the Ryan-Murray budget agreement still only addresses less than 7 percent of the defense sequester. Much more work needs to be done to lift the specter of sequestration once and for all …” (2)[FN2: “Punting on the Pentagon Budget”, by Mackenzie Eaglen, US News and World Report, December 13, 2013].

THE FIRST WAVE OF NEGLECT, 1945-50

After World War II, U.S. security suffered. The decline in defense spending after 1945 was large, $90 billion down to $14 billion at the beginning of the first year after the war’s end (FY1947 or July 1, 1946). With the end of World War II, support for a strong US military was not a sure thing.

It is true the Marshall Plan, or European Economic Recovery Plan, did stop a significant portion of the planned expansion of the Soviets into Europe (3)[FN3: NY Times, April 1, 2010, “Harry S. Truman, Decisive President.”] These efforts, however, consisted primarily of significant American economic assistance and the transfer of surplus military equipment to designated countries, with some American personnel transferred for training purposes as well, but not the deployment of American soldiers. (4) [FN4: “Truman Acts to Save Nations From Red Rule”, by Felix Belair, Jr., New York Times, March 12, 1947].

But despite the success of the Marshall Plan, serious security threats remained in the post-WWII period. The communists threatened to come to power in Turkey and Greece and succeeded in taking power in Czechoslovakia in February 1948, imperiling it was feared the freedom of other states of Europe.

A few months later, on May 15, 1948, Egypt, Jordan, Iraq and Syria, after rejecting the UN supported partition plan, invaded Israel, an attack that set off what is now 75 years of continued attempts to destroy the Jewish state.

The next month, on June 24, 1948, the Soviets imposed a blockade on West Berlin. According to Lucius Clay, the military governor of the American zone of occupied Germany: “When the order of the Soviet Military Administration to close all rail traffic from the western zones went into effect at 6:00AM on the morning of June 24, 1948, the three western sectors of Berlin, with a civilian population of about 2,500,000 people, became dependent on reserve stocks and airlift replacements. It was one of the most ruthless efforts in modern times to use mass starvation for political coercion…” A top secret document at the time describe the Soviet action as the first act of the new Cold War (5)[FN5: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/bomb/peopleevents/].

Many observers believe the Soviet action actually backfired and speeded up the establishment of the new Federal Republic of Germany and helped spur the April 4, 1949 creation of NATO. A month later, in May, the Soviets lifted the Berlin blockade.

But elsewhere things did not improve. On August 29, 1949, the Soviet Union exploded its first nuclear weapon. A little more than a month later, on October 1, 1949, China fell to the communists under Mao Zedong.

Despite the creation of NATO, the emerging Cold War, and the Soviets explosion of a nuclear weapon, American defense spending continued to be neglected, dropping to $13.5 billion by July of 1950, — a full 7% cut from the year before. During 1947-49, the first Secretary of Defense, James Forrestal, continually fought the Truman administration’s interest in cutting defense to as low as $7 billion annually, a number supported by strong isolationist elements in Congress.

As a result of opposition within the Truman administration to Forrestal’s support for a strong defense, he resigned March 1, 1949. The new Defense Secretary, Louis Johnson, was, unlike Forrestal, all for cutting defense. Under his watch, 80% of the “needed equipment” purchases for the Army were postponed — a delay which, as the administration [without evidence] testified to Congress, “would make the Army force levels…more effective.(6) [FN6: See LaFeber, Walter, America, Russia, and the Cold War, 1945-1980, 7th edition New York: McGraw-Hill 1993].

In an echo of subsequent American political debates over the next half century, the new Secretary of Defense and the Truman administration saw excessive government spending–including defense spending– as bad for the US economy. After all the 1945 recession caused GDP to drop a whopping 10.6% and even by 1949 another recession hit while that same year unemployment reached 7.9% and GDP fell 0.5%.

In December 1949 for example, in order to justify further defense budget cuts, then Defense Secretary Louis Johnson told the commander of the U.S. Atlantic and Mediterranean fleet, Admiral Richard Conolly: “Admiral, the Navy is on its way out. There’s no reason for having a Navy and a Marine Corps. General Bradley tells me amphibious operations are a thing of the past. We’ll never have any more amphibious operations. That does away with the Marine Corps. And the Air Force can do anything the Navy can do, so that does away with the Navy. (7) [FN7: See Vincent Davis, “The Post-Imperial Presidency”; “The Anti-Defense Secretary”, by Mackubin Thomas Owens, The Weekly Standard, January 28, 2013 and Krulak, Victor H. (Lt. Gen.), First to Fight: An Inside View of the U.S. Marine Corps, Naval Institute Press (1999)]

Unwilling to strengthen the U.S. military even in anticipation of the need to help its new NATO allies, the Truman administration tried a different tact. It asked Congress to provide economic security funding for its friends in Greece, Turkey and, early in 1950, South Korea, rather than to reinforce our own military forces to provide these allies a stronger security umbrella.

Although Greece and Turkey were successfully helped with approval of assistance by the Congress, passage of similar but much smaller legislation to help Korea failed in the House by one vote, leaving America’s Korean allies without U.S. help. (8) [FN8: SparkNotesEditors, The Korean War 1950-1953.]

This failed effort to secure help for the Republic of Korea was followed by remarks delivered by Secretary of State Dean Acheson in early 1950. He said that for American purposes, South Korea was beyond its security perimeter, what many later would interpret as a careless and implicit invitation for would be aggressors to invade South Korea. (9) [FN9: Speech by Secretary of State Dean Acheson, National Press Club, January 12, 1950].

To be fair, Acheson did add that the UN could be relied upon “to protect a nation’s security” but then compounded his original mistaken comments by asserting that whatever problems were faced by East Asia, “any guarantee against military attack is hardly sensible.” (10) [FN10: Ibid]

This assessment followed an intelligence report to the President that concluded North Korea might invade the Republic of Korea, but that it had no capability to invade its southern neighbor without the assistance of the Soviets. That assessment, in turn, led to the further conclusion among members of the intelligence community that no such threat existed for some number of years because Moscow was not going to sanction such aggression.(See Intelligence Memos #302-06 referenced below).

But America’s problems were not limited to just intelligence failures. By 1950, Defense Secretary Johnson “had established a policy of faithfully following President Truman’s defense economization policy, and had aggressively attempted to implement it even in the face of steadily increasing external threats posed by the Soviet Union and its allied Communist regimes. He consequently received much of the blame for the initial setbacks in Korea and the widespread reports of ill-equipped and inadequately trained U.S. forces.” 11) [FN11: Blair, Clay, The Forgotten War: America in Korea, 1950-1953, Naval Institute Press, 2003].

Further, Secretary Johnson’s “failure to adequately plan for U.S. conventional force commitments, to adequately train and equip current forces, or even to budget funds for storage of surplus Army and Navy war-fighting materiel for future use in the event of conflict would prove fateful after war broke out on the Korean Peninsula” (12) FN12: Ibid).

Compounding our problems was that the Truman administration assumed the US monopoly on atomic weaponry would preserve American and allied security and not require a major increase in conventional military investments.

What the U.S. intelligence community did not know was the Soviets had received critical help to build an atomic weapon because Julius Rosenberg had delivered American atomic secrets to Moscow.

Thus, long before our intelligence community thought possible, the Soviets successfully tested a nuclear weapon in August 1949, an accomplishment that was most certainly a factor in the decision of the Soviet Premier, Josef Stalin, to support the invasion of the Republic of Korea by the North which our intelligence community was convinced the Soviets would not do. (13) [FN13: “The Korea Times”, May 16, 2012, essay by Professor Andre Lankov, “Soviet Leader Approved Invasion Proposal”].

Apparently, as archival material implies, Stalin was also convinced the U.S. would not respond to help the Republic of Korea [ROK]. And, like the leader of North Korea, Stalin saw the “liberation” of China as simply a prelude to the “liberation of South Korea.” (14) [FN14: See for example “Mao, Stalin and the Korean War” by Shen Zhihua, June 12, 2012, which analyzes all these issues in some detail.]

In short, the U.S. intelligence community knew that Moscow had exploded an atomic device, but, even after the outbreak of the Korean war, did not seem to integrate the new circumstances into their intelligence assessments.

For example, on July 8, 1950, some two weeks after the North Korean invasion, (15) [FN15: See “Intelligence Memorandum, #302-06”, www.cia.org/library/center for the study of intelligence] the Truman White House received an intelligence brief which concluded that “Soviet intentions in supporting the Korean invasion were unknown.”

As for possible future Chinese involvement in the war, the memo concluded that, “…movements of large troop formations from South and Central China toward [North Korea] are largely discounted.”

It appears likely, therefore, that the post-World War II defense neglect, coupled with erroneous intelligence assessments, played a key role in the lack of readiness of U.S. forces as they came to the rescue of the ROK in 1950.

It is also likely that the excessive draw down U.S. military spending within the Truman administration in the immediate post World War II period sent the wrong signals to America’s adversaries, as well as harming U.S. military readiness.

Further, the less-than-stellar Truman administration’s verbal support for the Republic of Korea, as well as the failure of Congress to supply the ROK with even a small amount of economic assistance may also have led Stalin to conclude that an invasion of the ROK would not be contested by the United States.

Yet, despite massive shortages of equipment and serious readiness deficiencies, the US eventually saved the ROK from communist tyranny, but at a cost of 35,000 American lives and those of an estimated 5 million Koreans.

Ironically, parallel to this policy of neglect, pro-military forces within the Truman administration sought to put together for America’s role in the world a strategic vision and plan that would confront the threat of a nuclear armed Soviet Union. This objective became an imperative for these administration people, particularly after the Soviet test-explosion of a nuclear weapon in August, 1949.

Even then, the then Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson attempted to dismiss the nuclear radiation from the explosion as the result of an industrial accident not a real weapons test. (16) [FN16: See for example “Fulcrum of Power: Essays on the USAF and National Security: Part V” by Herman Wolk].

This vision was codified in a new national security defense directive (NSDD 28), which recognized the extraordinary threat to America and its allies from a nuclear armed Soviet Union — no longer the partner with which the allied forces had won World War II.

The primary author of the report was Paul Nitze, later the founder of the Committee on the Present Danger, which, in three separate instances (1950, 1976 and 2004) would warn Americans that the threats it then faced were deadly and could not continually be ignored.

Shortly after Nitze’s NSDD was formally adopted by the Truman administration in April 1950, President Harry S, Truman was told that such a national security policy would also require an estimated $41 billion a year in DOD spending for its implementation.

When contrasted to the then $13-14 billion defense budget, the implications were serious. How could the Truman administration support a security policy that implied the need for a defense budget 300% higher than its own supported defense program?

On June 25, 1950, North Korea’s invasion of the ROK ended the debate. By mid-1951, defense spending reached $24 billion a year, peaking at $44 billion in 1953. After the Korean War ended, the war effort spending-level was significantly cut and the defense budget fell from $44 billion to $36 billion.

Despite the defense budget gradually increasing to $43.1 billion by the end of the decade, (FY61 budget), President Dwight Eisenhower, (1953-61) was routinely criticized for shortchanging defense by both Democrats on Capitol Hill and the defense industry. However, the final defense budget passed under the Eisenhower administration at $43.1 billion was just $2 billion or 5% below the $41 billion budget (adjusted for inflation) recommended by the Truman administration’s NSDD28 for 1950.

The Eisenhower administration did rely on American nuclear weapons for a policy of nuclear massive retaliation in the event of Soviet aggression, a policy thought to be considerably cheaper to implement than an alternative emphasizing conventional capabilities.

So, to that extent the critics were right that US conventional military strength did not match that of the Soviets. But to increase American and allied conventional weapons and match the Soviet and Warsaw Pact conventional forces tank for tank, and artillery piece for artillery piece would have cost the United States and its allies tens of billions in additional annual defense expenditures which the Eisenhower administration and its allies were unwilling to support.

THE SECOND WAVE OF NEGLECT, 1970-1980

The communists in the Kremlin, evidently deciding that, given America’s and its allied forces’ commitment to “contain” Soviet-led aggression, cross-border wars such as Korea were not likely to succeed, adopted, instead, supporting smaller, more containable guerilla wars, popularly known as “wars of national liberation.”

According to William P. Bundy, the Assistant Secretary of State for the Far East, Cuba, Africa, Southeast Asia and Latin America became targets for subversion (17) [FN 17: Dallas Council on World Affairs, May 13, 1965, “Reality and Myth Concerning South Vietnam”].

To counter, in part, this Soviet campaign, American military spending increased from $43 billion when President John Kennedy was elected to $51 billion in the 1964 election year, to a peak of $83 billion in 1969 at the height of the Vietnam War. Tragically, the war was especially divisive, partly due to its length but primarily because of the high casualties the US sustained without any compensatory sense that the war was being won.

Although many experts believe the South Vietnamese and Americans had won the war by 1969, the American withdrawal — followed by the abandonment of our Saigon allies by Congress in 1975 — led to the fall of the South Vietnamese government and the imposition of communist rule there and throughout Indochina.

After the United States disengaged from the Vietnam War, and war costs came to an end, defense spending declined and remained relatively flat for half a decade. Fueled by an intense anti-military sentiment in Congress and among the public at large, so began the second major period of U.S. neglect of its armed services since the end of World War II.

Ironically, after 1975 defense budgets increased by nearly 60% over its 1969 peak. But in real terms, even these increasing defense budgets were still significantly underfunding the country’s defense needs.

There were three important reasons for this.

First was the cost of paying our soldiers. Although the U.S. moved to an all-volunteer military in 1973 under the assumption that absent a draft, future “unpopular” wars such as Vietnam would be impossible to fight, as few would volunteer for such wars, (thus reducing defense costs significantly), the proponents of an all volunteer force failed to anticipate the high personnel costs required to attract such recruits. (18) [FN18: “CSBA: “Military Manpower for the Long Haul”, 2008]

Thus, basic military pay doubled in real term costs between 1971-5 just as the country transitioned to an all volunteer military. In addition, there were significant costs associated with attracting sufficient soldier volunteers to join the military.

The second key reason was inflation. The Nixon, Ford and Carter administrations all sought to monetize the debt by first taking the country off the gold standard and then printing money to pay for our deficit spending. On top of that, the inflation, which hit 14% a year by 1980, required a nearly $20 billion increase in defense spending for that year alone to just keep pace with increased costs.

And the third reason was dramatically higher oil prices. The proximate cause was the 1983 oil embargo and then the fall of the Shah of Iran and subsequent downturn in Iran oil production. This caused two recessions (1974-5 and 1980-1), with retail gasoline prices climbing from $0.36 cents a gallon in 1973 to $0.62 cents in 1978 to $1.18 by 1981.

Thus, at the same time inflation accelerated, the country fell into two recessions, a combination that came to be known as “stagflation”. This had the effect of increasing the cost to our military for the fuel it used; increasing the cost of military hardware and personnel due to higher inflation; fueling international tensions particularly in the Middle East which further stretched U.S. military requirements; and finally, reducing U.S. economic growth and subsequent revenue to the Treasury, which in turn increased budget pressures on defense resources just as requirements for our defense capabilities was on the rise. (19) [FN19: WTPG Economics, 1996-2011 by James C. Williams, and “The Recessions of 1973 and 1980 Caused by High Oil Prices”, by Robert Lenzer, Forbes, September 1, 2013].

As a result, during the 1970s this combination of factors serially delayed major weapons system acquisition, including for example needed airlift, fighter aircraft, space, nuclear deterrent and army ground combat assets. Research and development funding also failed to keep pace with modernization needs. In short, just as costs to maintain the military were going up, (personnel, hardware and fuel), the surge in inflation wiped out any real purchasing power of the modest defense budget increases that finally were adopted in the last five years of the decade.

In addition to these cost pressures, the armed services were also suffering from expansive drug and alcohol abuse, desertions and bad morale. Former Secretary of State and retired General Alexander Haig told this author during his time as commander of all allied forces in Europe (SACEUR 1974-1979), as a result of these negative pressures, he had to struggle to keep the military from falling apart.

When added together, these factors all came to create within our armed services what came to be described as the “hollow army”.

The resultant cost to American security was high. Modernization was delayed, deferred or abandoned including tactical aircraft, airlift, nuclear forces and ground combat force technologies.

The current Army Chief of Staff, General Raymond Odierno, warned earlier this year we might be repeating the same mistake: “I know what is required to send soldiers into combat. And I’ve seen firsthand the consequences when they are sent unprepared…I began my career [referring to the 1970’s] in a hollow Army. I do not want to end my career in a hollow Army.”(20) [FN20: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/feb/12/army-faces-troop-reduction-amid-budget-cuts/#ixzz2nlQb30lP].

As United States military spending in the 1970’s failed to keep pace with our nation’s security needs, nation after nation fell to communism or totalitarianism, including South Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Grenada, Afghanistan, Nicaragua, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Angola, Bangladesh, Chile, and Iran.

Soviet sponsored terrorism grew rapidly as Moscow joined forces with Syria, Libya, Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam and other terrorism-sponsoring states, as well as their new terrorist creations such as the Palestinian Liberation Organization [PLO]; the communist guerillas in El Salvador, known as the FMLN, and terror groups such as Italy’s Red Brigades and Germany’s Baader-Meinhof Gang in Europe.

American military action in Cambodia to rescue the freighter Mayaguez (May 1975) and the loss of soldiers in Desert One during the attempted rescue of U.S. diplomats in Iran (April 1980) were less than exemplary bookends to the neglect of America’s military in the post-Vietnam era. According to the Soviets the “correlation of forces” (COF) in the decade of the 1970s had decidedly moved in their direction.

Explains Mackubin Owen: “Indeed, the Soviet military press during this decade was filled with numerous references to the COF. For instance, in 1975, General Yevdokim Yeogovich Mal’Tsev wrote that “the correlation of world forces has changed fundamentally in favor of socialism and to the detriment of capitalism.”(21) [FN21: February 2004, Mackubin Owens, “The Correlation of Forces”, Ashland University, Ashbrook Center]. An insight onto the thinking of the time is illustrated by former President James Carter’s boast that at the end of his Presidency (1981) his proudest accomplishment was never having used American military forces in combat. As the former President himself put it: “We never dropped a bomb. We never fired a bullet. We never went to war”.(22) [FN22: Carole Cadwalladr, “Jimmy Carter: ‘We Never Dropped A Bomb”, The Observer, September 10, 2011].

THE THIRD WAVE OF NEGLECT, 1991-2000

The third wave of neglect came at the end of the Cold War, and, ironically, after the success of the American military in Desert Storm. But the country and many of its leaders appeared to have decided that peace had broken out, threats were gone, and we could all safely go to the beach. Some described this period as “the end of history,” or, as Charles Krauthammer more accurately put it, “a holiday from history.”(23) [FN23: Charles Krauthammer, “Holiday From History”, The Washington Post, February 14, 2003]

In the National Interest, Summer 1989, “The End of History,” Francis Fukuyama wrote: “What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”(24) [FN24: Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History, The National Interest, Summer 1989].

It is not that such an outcome would certainly be preferable to the Cold War. What made Fukuyama’s essay terribly flawed was the assumption that even should “totalitarianism return,” as he noted, he assumed democracy would somehow still become more prevalent.

What was missing was an acknowledgment that each generation, if unwilling to protect its freedom, could in fact readily lose its freedom, as President Reagan warned us on January 11, 1989 in his farewell address to the nation:

“Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.”

Thus, after the end of the Cold War, and coincidentally right after the U.S. and coalition victory in Desert Storm, U.S. defense spending declined between 1989-2000 by a cumulative $1 trillion according to former Senator Sam Nunn, Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee,1987-95.

This decline after the end of the Cold War was most serious in the procurement accounts where the U.S. apparently decided to go on a holiday and “forget the farm,” so to speak.

According to remarks made in December 2000, former top Department of Defense official John Hamre, currently the highly regarded President of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the overall decline in the acquisition accounts meant that fully 40% of the equipment that the Clinton administration committed to buy during its two terms was never purchased.

Purchases were also deferred or cancelled for much of the nuclear deterrent accounts, in which the U.S. neglected key sustainment and modernization efforts across the board. One bright spot was that all 500 Minuteman missiles underwent a service life extension effort, which is now just concluding.

The serial delay in weapons purchases, however, pushed modernization efforts well into the future. This resulted in enormous cumulative modernization requirements coming due simultaneously, just at a time when the U.S. ended up fighting in both Afghanistan and Iraq, and as it pursued the “global war against terror” — while leaving to it to the future to determine if funds would be available to carry out all these tasks.

This second wave of neglect in the 1990s was somewhat ameliorated, starting in 1995, by defense supporters in Congress. Each year from 1995-2000, they added between $8-15 billion to the defense accounts beyond the administration’s budget requests which helped keep the defense acquisition accounts from cratering.

As a result, the defense budget was nominally at the same level of spending in 2001 as it was in 1991, thus avoiding a prolonged “defense trough” in which modernization would have been even more greatly affected. The very modest “mini-defense-buildup” from 1996-2000 was done, ironically, even while Congress also cut capital gains taxes, reformed welfare, balanced the budget and paid down the U.S. national debt by hundreds of billions of dollars.

Although the Cold War ended in 1991, dangers did not disappear: America was repeatedly attacked by terrorists throughout the 1990s, culminating in the attacks of September 2001.

As historians Donald and Frederick W. Kagan argued in their book, “While America Sleeps: Self-Delusion, Military Weakness, and the Threat to Peace Today,” the policies of the previous administrations had left the U.S. in a position “where we cannot avoid war and keep the peace in areas vital to our security.”

One excellent review put it this way:

“Neither have the post-Cold War policies sent clear signals to would-be aggressors that the U.S. can and will resist them. Tensions in the Middle East, instability in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, the nuclear confrontation between India and Pakistan, the development of nuclear weapons and missiles by North Korea, and the menacing threats and actions of China, with its immense population, resentful sense of grievance and years of military build-up, all hint that the current peaceful era will not last…are we prepared to face its collapse? 25 [FN25: McMillan Press Review, November 2001].

The new administration under President George W. Bush had been hopeful that new technologies could help enhance our defense capabilities and make them more effective but without necessitating a huge build-up in defense spending (26). [FN26: Professor Norman Imler, “How Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld Sought to Assert Civilian Control Over the Military, National Defense University Press, 2002].

But the previous decade of neglect was taking its toll: personnel costs were starting to balloon — as were operations and maintenance accounts — just when cumulative modernization costs were starting to escalate having accumulated from over a decade of delay and “kicking the can down the road”.

With the attack of 9/11 and the subsequent liberation of Afghanistan from the Taliban and Iraq from the Baathist Saddam regime, U.S. defense spending for these overseas deployments dramatically increased the overall defense budget just as average personnel costs climbed and modernization needs mounted. The defense budget did double from 2001-8, but so did personnel costs. And while much modernization did take place, the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the general toll on American forces deployed in the global war against terrorist threats, left the modernization job undone.

THE FOURTH WAVE OF NEGLECT 2009–?

With new administration in 2009, the paramount effort was directed at ending the war in Iraq as soon as possible, and to begin a drawdown of American forces in Afghanistan. But beyond these two top goals, the country did not really have an extended debate as to what the future size of the U.S. military should be.

The country did not have any serious debate about America’s proper role in the world. Nor what alliances needed strengthening. America’s focus turned almost entirely to getting American troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan — popularly termed “ending our wars” — and stopping “Al Qaeda and its affiliates” — again without debate as to what that meant beyond finding and killing Osama Bin Laden.

Once the current U.S. administration decided to withdraw from Iraq and Afghanistan, instead of simply cutting the funding from these “overseas contingency operations,” as the administration labels overseas military deployments, it made significant additional cuts in America’s defense spending. These cuts have been and are very large and have continually been described by the nation’s senior military and civilian leadership as inconsistent with maintaining America’s security.

Starting in 2009, the current administration cut hundreds of billions from future defense spending accounts known as five year defense plans, which every administration submits and updates annually. That number has now reached in excess of $2.5 trillion or fully 30% less than the projected spending laid out in the last defense plan of the previous administration and the initial 2009 plan of the current administration.

For example, not counting war costs, the administration cut $300 billion in its first budget compared to the plan it inherited from the previous administration. This was followed by an additional $175 billion in “efficiency” cuts from its own 2009 budget, cuts to be initiated in 2010-11. This was followed by another $487 billion in defense spending cuts as part of the ten year deficit reduction agreement of 2011.

Finally, the current sequestration law requires another $550 billion in cumulative defense spending reductions by 2022. Although that has now been slightly reduced by $32 billion over the next two years (by virtue of the Senator Patty Murray-Congressman Paul Ryan budget agreement of December 18, 2013 the President has now signed into law).(27) [FN27: All these budget numbers are from www.usgovernmentspending.com, a private website with the finest compilation of government budget, tax and spending data available anywhere.]

At the same time that these budget cuts were being implemented, the US was also withdrawing from Afghanistan and Iraq. The costs of these wars declined sharply (and are kept in a separate budget category known as “overseas contingency operations” or OCO’s.)

Many observers believe the budget cuts to which I am referencing refer to these reductions. Their reaction is often quite reasonable–the defense budget is going to be reduced as we withdraw from Afghanistan and Iraq. So, what is the problem?

When the administration came into office such OCO costs were $158 billion annually. They are now at $90 billion. That is a $68 billion annual cut. Over the next decade, the cuts are projected to reach another cumulative $550 billion as US military counter terrorism operations overseas greatly diminish. But all of the cuts discussed above are over and in addition to the reductions in the OCO war costs.

Thus, when taken together, the defense budget and OCO spending reductions since 2009 and projected through 2022 will reach $2.5 trillion, (including the interest saved by not otherwise borrowing the funds).

Why is this important?

This rather lengthy assessment of the defense budget is very important to better explain the full context of the changes made to the defense budget of the United States since 2009 and to fully understand the growing opposition to the ten-year automatic across-the-board sequestration of defense spending required by the 2011 budget agreement.

First, no other part of the Federal budget has undergone such reductions which in the case of defense will approach 30% since 2009. In fact, all other Federal budget areas have grown and often grown dramatically, especially means tested poverty programs and entitlements.

Second, the OCO spending reductions cannot be counted toward the required automatic sequestration defense cuts of $1 trillion agreed to in the 2011 budget agreement.

And third, most worrisome, there is no defense strategy document from the administration that connects the defense budget spending levels required by sequestration and our security needs. [The administration will be issuing a new defense strategy in the spring of 2014 that may make this connection].

Although wars are not won or crises averted by just throwing money at defense spending, our national security leaders have repeatedly underscored that these required cuts will undermine and dismantle key defense capabilities required for our security.

For example, the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Howard P. “Buck” McKeon, noted on February 14, 2012 in discussing the budget cuts with the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin Dempsey, “You concluded, General Dempsey, that this new strategy would, and I quote, ‘not meet the needs of the nation in 2020 because the world is not getting any more stable.’” (28) [FN28: Transcript of the February 14, 2012 House Armed Services Committee Hearing, “Impact of Sequestration on the Defense Department”].

The Department of Defense website contains dozens of articles detailing the same problems. For example, “Acquisitions chiefs from each of the military services described the devastation being wreaked upon their branches by [defense sequestration cuts]” while “The nation’s service chiefs have told Congress if budget sequestration extends into fiscal year 2014, forces, capabilities and readiness will all be slashed, reducing the security of Americans”(29). [FN29: “Service Chiefs Detail 2014 Sequestration Effects”, By Cheryl Pellerin, September 19, 2013, American Forces Press Service and “Acquisitions Chiefs Describe Effects of Budget Uncertainty”, by Claudette Roulo, American Forces Press Service, October 24, 2013.]

Defense experts have emphasized that when you calculate the numbers, should all the defense budget cuts materialize through 2022, the US will field at the end of this decade the smallest Navy since World War I, the smallest USAF in history and an Army smaller than that just before World War II.

According to very recent DOD testimony, only two Army brigades are combat ready at this time, flying hours for our Air Force are being dramatically reduced, and our ships are less combat ready than at any time in the past 40 years. (30)[FN30: “The Peril of Sequestration”, By Frederick W. Kagan, National Review Online, April 19, 2013]

In an echo of the 1970s, Frank Kendall, the acquisition chief of the US Department of Defense, warned on November 7, 2013 that the budget cuts imposed by the automatic sequestration of $550 billion in defense cuts over the next ten years will “leave the Defense Department with a hollow force and debilitating shortfalls”. (31) (FN31: Frank Kendall, “Sequestration Will Make Hollow Force Inevitable”, November 7, 2013, American Forces Press Service].

Specifically, key modernization elements such as nuclear missiles, tactical aircraft, strategic bombers, ship building, space reconnaissance, counter cyber warfare, and missile defense will be cancelled or seriously reduced in scope.

The budget deal as passed by Congress December 18, 2013 the House and now the Senate restores some $32 billion of roughly $100 billion in cuts over the next two years. Other spending and revenue reforms, including small cuts to mandatory entitlements, make up the difference. [Provisions to trim cost-of-living adjustments for veterans will be repealed I believe in the next Congress perhaps as part of a military and defense personnel reform package].

Whatever one may think of the admittedly very modest Murray-Ryan budget agreement, it avoided the $1 trillion in both new taxes and spending proposed by and approved by the Senate budget committee while keeping 70% of the sequester cuts. The agreement also traded some of the defense spending increases with cuts in other spending including a small portion of mandatory or entitlement spending.

True, there are of course major required additions such as tax and entitlement reform that need to be completed that were not included in the relatively modest budget agreement between Congressman Paul Ryan and Senator Patty Murray. Tax reform—like the 1986 tax reform agreement– that generates more federal revenue because of greater economic growth could offset defense cuts required by sequestration and generate revenue to bring the budget into balance.

The defense hawks in Congress have been clear that the projected defense spending cuts are seriously going to harm our security as we have noted in detail above. There is widespread but by no means unanimous agreement on both sides of the political aisle that defense will be seriously harmed by such continued budget cuts as outlined here.

Much of the argument on the other side is that tax revenue is simply not adequate to sustain defense spending at the level defense leaders want, especially in light of opposition in the House of Representatives to tax rate increases that are assumed to generate more revenue to help pay for national defense spending increases.

And so, the conclusion becomes that defense spending must continue to be sharply cut whether a wise idea or not because one, the deficit has to be narrowed and two, there is no agreement to reduce the bulk of government spending elsewhere which is in the entitlement and poverty program accounts.

However, I think a different perspective is in order. Tax revenue has been increasing very dramatically, and for the first time since the end of the previous Bush administration.

For example, tax revenue this year alone has risen dramatically by close to $300 billion, although some significant amount of this increase is due to “one time” elements such as the end of the payroll tax holiday, TARP repayments and mortgage related fees.

But with a growing economy, revenue growth can be very significant. Between 2003-7, annual revenue to the government grew from $1.7 trillion to $2.56 trillion, a total increase of $850 billion or $212 billion a year. This had never previously been achieved. And the 2004-7 increases were for an economy 10% smaller than today but with faster GDP growth (and lower tax rates).

So why can’t a larger economy with faster economic growth than today raise sufficient revenue to pay our bills, especially if entitlement and welfare reform significantly cut annual spending? To claim as many have that somehow Republicans are “against revenue increases” and thus unwilling to compromise on a budget deal misses by a wide mark that there is common ground.

A year ago, the administration was adamant that Republicans must raise tax rates to raise revenue, rather than to expand the economy.(32) [FN32: Yahoo News, December 4, 2012, “Republicans Must Raise Rates”, by Rachel Rose Hartman]. In a hopeful sign, Democratic Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia acknowledged as much in a discussion on Fox News Bret Baier’s Special Report, December 17, 2013. Senator Manchin said one could raise revenue by expanding the economy and putting people to work, rather than by raising tax rates and that such a framework could be used to put together an agreement. Exactly!

CONCLUSION

This is the fifth year of the fourth wave of neglect since World War II. Extending it further risks significantly undermining American security, as a review of these recent headlines can attest:

Russia is deploying nuclear armed Iskander missiles near the Baltic’s and Poland.(33) [FN33: New York Times, “Deployment of Missiles Is Confirmed by Russia”, December 16, 2013].

China continues to expand its military presence in the South China Sea seeking to intimidate its neighbors as well as the United States. (34)[FN34: www.cfr.org/world/armed-clash-south-china-sea] while adding to its military capability long range nuclear capable bombers, ICBMs and SLBMs.

Egypt is now seeking billions in military equipment from Russia which would be the biggest arms sale since the 1970’s, part of an effort by Russia, in their words, to “Clearly exploit the waning power of the United States”,(35) [FN35: UPI, “Russia Offers Egypt MidG-29s in $2B arms deal”, November 15, 2013].

And, according to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Chairman, General Martin Dempsey “Iran is a threat to national security in many ways. We have been very clear as a nation we are determined to prevent them from acquiring a nuclear weapon because it would be so destabilizing to the region. But they are also active in cyber. They’ve got surrogates all over the region and all over the world. The proliferate arms.”(36)[FN34: The Tower Magazine, June 12, 2013, “Iran A Threat to National Security”].

These threats are increasingly serious. To counter them, the U.S. needs to reverse the sequester which threatens to cut an additional half trillion dollars from America’s security resources over the next decade. To do so would require finding $50 billion annually to offset annual defense spending cuts from an annual Federal Budget now close to $3.7 trillion and reaching $5.5 trillion in ten years.

We are talking about 0.0135% of all Federal spending or $1 out of every $74 the U.S. now spends each year.

Or the equivalent of 0.0094% of all Federal spending 10 years from now ($1 out of every $104 we would spend at that time).

Three previous waves of neglect ended first with the Korean war and 35,000 dead Americans; second with the Soviet Union on the march convinced the “correlation of forces” were moving their way; and the third, with the rise of Islamist state sponsored terrorism which culminated in 9/11, which in the future may be armed with nuclear weapons.

If an additional $50 billion a year still seems like a lot, how much will it cost the U.S., in a variety of circumstances, if adversarial nations continue to chip away at the free world until the U.S. finds itself either isolated or impotent to effect a reversal, facing rogue terrorist states armed with the deadliest of dangerous weapons?

*The mid-term elections may switch control of Congress which also would presage dramatic reductions in defense spending and support for missile defense, nuclear modernization, space, cyber and other critical defense requirements. Although not now an issue, defense spending and security requirements should be high on the list of important policy matters up for debate for the mid-terms. Defense spending may be expensive, but war costs a lot more. Although this assessment was written in early 2014, it contains many lessons of history.

(This article was written By Peter Huessy and appeared in the RealClearDefense. Do Nuclear Numbers Matter-realcleardefense)

Last year, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) concluded that both Russia and China are increasingly dependent on nuclear weapons to achieve their national interests. Combined, they are projected to exceed the U.S. strategic nuclear force in numbers, creating a multiple challenger problem for the U.S. and raising the possibility of a dangerous collaboration between adversaries.

In short, the nuclear landscape does not look good. For the 400 land-based ICBMs that DIA forecasts for Russia, 50 are Sarmats, each capable of carrying 20 high-yield warheads (WHs) (500 kilotons to 1 megaton each), for a total of 1,000 WHs. The remaining land-based 350 ICBMs will be the Yars, carrying 4 (tested with 6) medium-yield WHs (300-500 kt) for a total of 1,400 WHs, giving a grand total of 2,400 land-based ICBM WHs. The Bulava submarine-based sea launched ‘s ballistic missile (SLBM) carries 6 WHs each, or 1,152 WHs, for a total of 3,552 ICBM/SLBM warheads. Russian strategic bombers can carry another approximately 1,000 WHs on various air-launch missiles. This implies a total Russian long-range strategic force of up to 4,552 WHs, exceeding the 2010 New START treaty limitations by 300 percent.

For China, the newly projected 700 ICBM figure for 2035 was a shock, given DIA’s historical underestimation of the growth in Chinese nuclear forces. Hopefully, this means an end to the agency falling victim to China’s ongoing strategic deception. China is currently producing 50-75 ICBMs per year. China has 400 ICBMs, so another 300 ICBMs by 2035, at 30 ICBMs/year, is feasible. In terms of warheads, the Chinese DF-31A can carry 3 re-entry vehicles (RVs) and the DF-41 up to 10 WH’s. Simple calculations indicate that China has the potential to deploy 2,100 to 7,000 ICBM warheads. Regarding Chinese SLBMs, the DIA forecast is for 132 SLBMs — 72 JL-3 SLBMs, each with 3 WHs, and 60 new SLBMs for the 3 new Type 096 SSBNs. Assuming the JL-3 carries 3 WHs, that gives China 216 SLBM warheads. Assuming the new SLBM carries at least 6 WHs, that gives China another 360 WHs, bringing the grand total to 576 SLBM WHs, for a range of 2,616 to 7,616 nuclear warheads on 832 SLBMs and ICBMs.

The DIA also predicts that China will deploy 60 fractional-orbit bombardment systems (FOBS) by 2035, a force that grants China a new, more dangerous, and heightened capability. The FOBS are likely to attack the U.S. early warning, C3, and leadership nodes, whose survivability is required to execute any U.S. retaliatory response. Also, of great concern are the additional 4,000 Chinese hypersonic speed weapons, which can largely evade current defenses and attack from any direction or altitude. It is possible that some of these could be tipped with a nuclear warhead. Especially given that China has the materials and manufacturing processes to produce large numbers of M10-20 hypersonic vehicles and does so at far lower cost than the U.S..

North Korea, with some 50 DIA-predicted ICBMs, exacerbates the multiple challenger problem and increases the possible collaboration between Russia, China, and North Korea during a crisis or conflict.

Now let’s look at the USA. The strategic modernization program of record consists of 400 ICBM Sentinel missiles to be deployed in silos through an estimated time frame out to or through 2045, with 400 but possibly 800-1200 warheads. Add to that 12 Columbia-class submarines, each with 16 missiles, and each missile with a maximum of 8 warheads or 1,536 warheads. That gives the U.S. a grand total of 2,736 total fast-flying warheads if all systems are loaded at their maximum. America’s strategic nuclear bomber force of 60 B-52 and B-21 bombers, each with between 8-12 cruise missiles or gravity bombs are in the mix and together could add upwards of 720 warheads for a hypothetical total of 3,456 strategic long-range warheads—although this may exceed the number of warheads available in our entire available stockpile and the USAF planned cruise missile acquisition.

Deploying such an expanded or uploaded warhead force would require at least an additional four years, according to nuclear Triad experts. When compared to a potential and projected Russian and Chinese deployed force of over 11,000 long-range strategic warheads, the USA could be left with at least a 3-to-1 numerical disadvantage. Of critical importance is to note that the USA’s total deployed force described here is the maximum number the USA can build, as the Sentinel and D-5 missiles would be “maxed out” under the assumed numbers used in this hypothetical force.

While the USA could add additional strategic bombers to our planned nuclear force, those bombers would probably be necessary for other conventional purposes, as the USA is the only country in the free world with such capability, and current planning is for 100 new B-21 strategic bombers although there is growing support for upwards of 150-200 such aircraft. If additional ICBMs, submarines, or bombers are to be produced, current USA acquisition schedules would probably add such platforms, but at the end of the current build schedule or generally after 2040. The USA does have 50 additional ICBM silos (now empty) that could bolster its arsenal. Even so, this projected new window of vulnerability may not close for decades.

One could argue that relative levels of nuclear warheads don’t have a strategic impact. Such an assumption may apply to possible USA strategic assumptions, but not necessarily for our adversaries. Arms control deals from SALT in 1972 to New Start in 2010 began with the proposition that parties to these treaties would be operating under the same rules and warhead limits. That is the underlying basis for sound inspections and verifications, and for President Reagan laying down the key requirement— “Trust but verify.” If warhead levels don’t matter, why require verifiable limits in arms control deals? Why worry if no arms deals are in place?

History tells us that nuclear superiority may have significant value. President Kennedy believed superiority enabled the USA to stare down the Soviets during the Cuban missile crisis, declaring the newly deployed Minuteman ICBM force was “my ace in the hole.” Not dissimilar to his previous belief that the newly deployed Polaris submarine force enabled the USA not to yield to Soviet blackmail over Berlin in 1961.

Having such superior military capability doesn’t eliminate the need for sound diplomacy and strategy in the nuclear age. The USA must be mindful of Dr. Kissinger’s explanation that while military force without a sound diplomatic framework is but bluster, diplomacy without the threat of force is without effect.

If the 2023 Strategic Posture Commission is correct that Russia and China are in the nuclear blackmail and coercion business, then the USA cannot assume Russia and China have the same strategic assumptions or altruistic goals regarding nuclear weapons numbers and arms control as the United States.

While the USA and Russia curbed nuclear warheads by some cuts of 4,500 each under the Moscow and New START agreements (down from 10,000 actual allowed warheads under START I), the decline under both deals was down to the neighborhood of as low as 1,700-1,800 deployed strategic warheads. This may indicate Russia wanted to limit USA-deployed nuclear forces to fewer than 2,000 warheads for about 24 years (2002-2026), while Russian nuclear modernization was eventually completed, and the post-Cold War economic decline in Russia could be overcome.

Superior nuclear weapons numbers for China and Russia could translate into tangible strategic leverage and altered international behavior. Meanwhile, recent proposals from nuclear abolition advocates urge the United States to unilaterally abandon its long-standing deterrence strategy, including extended deterrence and leave the U.S. with markedly lower strategic nuclear forces than our adversaries. Such a move could signal a weakened U.S. commitment to its NATO and Indo-Pacific allies, undermining confidence in existing deterrence arrangements and potentially compelling allies to seriously consider developing their own nuclear capabilities.

This is highly ironic, as this very outcome was what many critics of the Trump administration assumed would happen when the administration pushed for more defense spending for non-U.S. NATO nations. A stronger NATO, including the U.S. as a NATO anchor, is better for everyone’s security, especially a conventional buildup that encompasses all NATO members rather than most defense spending being primarily centered in the USA.

There is an adage that says the enemy always gets a vote. While the USA may wish for our adversaries to see nuclear forces as a deterrent against the use of force, the reality is starkly different. The enemy has voted. Escalate to win it is. For our enemies, nuclear force is an adjunct of military blackmail and aggression as well as serving as a handmaiden to the unrestricted warfare the U.S. now faces.

Because nuclear weapons underpin America’s overall deterrent strength and provide the umbrella under which U.S. military and diplomatic power operates, it is urgent that the United States complete its planned nuclear deterrent modernization programs which now goes beyond the previous program of record and adds important theater/tactical nuclear capability. These forces now and will serve as a critical firewall against the use of force directed at this nation. There is no substitute for this capability, regardless of how strongly abolition advocates may wish otherwise.

Developments in Iran can no longer be treated as a domestic political issue. What is unfolding there is already reshaping the security environment confronting Europe, the United States, Israel, and the broader region. Whether the Islamic Republic survives through force or whether a political transition takes shape will have direct external consequences. Suppression is unlikely to restore calm. It is far more likely to deepen existing military, political, and security threats. A managed transition would remove the primary sources of these threats and substantially strengthen the international order.

The current revolution is not comparable to earlier rounds of unrest. Protests have spread across 400 cities, with more than 100 protest points in Tehran alone. This is not a single social group or political faction mobilizing temporarily. Workers, students, middle-class professionals, political activists, and even athletes have taken part. What is striking is not only the scale of this mobilization, but the consistency of its message across cities and social groups. Protesters are demanding a complete break with the Islamic Republic and the establishment of a transitional government with recognized leadership. These demands have been reinforced by Iranian expatriate communities and international civil-society networks. The result is a movement that challenges the regime itself rather than its policies.

The state’s response has been uncompromising. More than 40,000 people have reportedly been killed, over 50,000 arrested, and tens of thousands injured. Domestic legitimacy, already limited, has collapsed to its lowest point in 47 years. The regime now survives primarily through coercion. Historically, even its base of support extended little beyond a narrow circle of loyalists. Widespread repression has weakened that circle as well. Under these conditions, internal weakness does not produce caution. It pushes the leadership outward, toward military force, external pressure, and proxy warfare.

This shift is visible in Iran’s foreign behavior. Deterrence has given way to destabilizing assertiveness. When under strain, Tehran has repeatedly exported crises, activating proxy networks in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen and escalating indirect attacks on Western interests. These actions threaten global energy routes and trade flows. They also have consequences closer to home for Europe, from migration pressures to energy exposure and the risk of covert operations. Iran-backed proxies, including the Fatemiyoun Brigade, have become visible on European soil. In the February 2025 attack in Munich, Germany, the perpetrator, an Afghan national, shared a speech by Khamenei online, prompting questions about possible links to the Fatemiyoun. Members of these networks often maintain direct ties to Tehran while presenting themselves as refugees, extending Iran’s threat into Europe’s security space.

Missile and military capabilities remain central to the regime’s calculations. Investment in medium-range missiles and drones continues, while long-range missile claims serve a psychological function. According to MEMRI, Iranian expert Mehdi Seif Tabrizi reported that Iran tested an intercontinental ballistic missile with a range of approximately 10,000 kilometers, reportedly launched toward Siberia with Russian approval. Confirmation of such a test would mark a significant expansion of Iran’s strategic reach and raise serious questions about coordination between Tehran and Moscow. Even without fully operational ICBMs, approaching this threshold complicates U.S. defense planning, strains European and NATO systems, and increases the risk of miscalculation. Domestic repression, in this context, amplifies Iran’s external threat rather than containing it.

Israel faces particularly acute risks. The Islamic Republic has long treated Israel’s destruction as a legitimate objective and has justified the development of its proxy infrastructure on that basis. Continued suppression at home would likely harden this posture, strengthening Hezbollah and other aligned groups and reinforcing a cycle of escalation that undermines regional stability. This hostile framing also extends internally: during the Iranian revolution, authorities labeled protesters as agents of Israel, portraying them as legitimate targets, even those wounded in the streets, who were later executed in hospitals. Many of those arrested were subsequently executed en masse under the same accusation of being Israeli agents, yet the regime counted them among those shot in the streets to conceal the killings. Protesters awaiting execution have likewise been charged with cooperating with Israel and espionage.

Europe is not insulated. Following the designation of the IRGC as a terrorist organization, Tehran warned that retaliation against European policymakers was possible, arguing that such measures would harm European interests and further strain relations. In a retaliatory and ironic move, the Islamic Republic’s parliament subsequently designated all European military forces as terrorists, effectively framing them as legitimate targets. Even before these developments, Germany’s Ministry of the Interior reportedly warned that Iranian dissidents faced serious and aggressive intelligence operations on German soil. What began as domestic repression in Tehran has thus evolved into a tangible European security challenge, affecting political freedoms and placing sustained pressure on security services.

While the West faces these immediate security challenges, concerns about state collapse in Iran are often overstated. Iran retains a strong national identity, lacks the deep ethnic and sectarian fractures seen elsewhere, and possesses a substantial middle class alongside an active civil society. Its history as a centralized modern state matters. The destabilizing role played by the IRGC in Syria and Iraq, where it helped sustain conflict and enable terrorist groups, reflects conditions absent inside Iran itself. The revolution underscores this distinction. Protesters have increasingly rallied around a single alternative leader, Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, chanting his name in the streets and expressing support for his 100-day transitional plan.

A successful transition would carry clear security benefits. Missile and military threats would recede. Proxy networks funded by the IRGC would weaken. Migration pressures and regional instability would diminish, while security and economic cooperation with Western states would replace the previous threats. Supporting such an outcome aligns directly with Western strategic interests.

Western governments now face a strategic choice. Managing recurring crises is no longer sufficient. Supporting structured transition planning, protecting Iranian dissidents in Europe, and strengthening coordination among the United States, Europe, and Israel on intelligence, military, and threat assessment are necessary steps. Beyond the IRGC designation, measures such as closing Iranian embassies across the EU, expelling regime diplomats and their families, recalling European diplomats from Iran, and recognizing a transitional authority should be considered as part of a coherent strategy.

Iran’s trajectory will shape more than its own future. It will influence European security, U.S. deterrence credibility, and stability across the region. Continued suppression is unlikely to resolve the crisis. It is more likely to produce a longer and more dangerous phase. A controlled transition, by contrast, represents one of the few realistic opportunities for lasting threat reduction. Ignoring that possibility would carry costs far higher than the deliberate management of change.

Sheina Vohoudi is a associate Fellow at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C. based foreign policy and defense think tank.

(This article was written By Peter Huessy appeared in the RealClearDefense. Restraint or Escalation: America’s Nuclear Future? – RealClearDefense

Some analysts argue that a new international arms-control framework is the best path forward, contending that the only alternative to contrived restraint is escalation and global instability. But does this paradigm actually make sense?

Consider first the U.S. Program of Record (POR)—the congressionally approved and funded modernization of America’s land-based, sea-based, and cruise missile forces, along with new ballistic missile submarines and strategic bombers. Under the assumptions of some arms-control advocates, this modernization effort would constitute an arms race and therefore represent an unnecessary escalation that should be avoided.

This is a peculiar conclusion. When both the New START (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty) and the POR were adopted in December 2010, it was widely understood that New START fully accommodated—and, in practice, endorsed—the forthcoming U.S. nuclear deterrent modernization program. Even supporters of arms control described the POR as consistent with New START. That treaty with Russia reduced deployed strategic nuclear warheads to roughly 1,700–1,800, down from the 1,700–2,200 levels established under the 2002 Moscow Treaty.

How can the retiring New START framework—now under a new administration yet retaining the same modernization elements—or any future treaty be characterized simultaneously as arms control and as an arms race? Such a conclusion requires a deft sleight of hand, one that conveniently discards or forgets much of the history of arms control itself.

First, arms control with Moscow has not necessarily been beneficial. During the 1972-77 SALT I (Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty) agreement and the subsequent 1979 SALT II framework with the Soviet Union, Moscow could increase its long-range strategic nuclear weapons by 600-1,200%, according to a 1983 Net Assessment of Soviet nuclear strategy. This included deploying over 3,000 high-yield, accurate warheads specifically designed to preemptively attack America’s key nuclear triad assets. This “window of vulnerability” widened dramatically during this period, leading to a sharply deteriorating strategic balance between the USA and the Soviet Union, as described by General Richard Ellis, Commander of the Strategic Air Command, in striking testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee in early 1981.

Second, the U.S. must always keep in mind that Moscow has routinely cheated on every arms control agreement that it ever signed, including the SALT agreements of the 1970s.

Third, many assume that restraint works. But history is not on their side. President Reagan, not Presidents Nixon, Ford, and Carter, acquired and deployed Pershing II and Ground-Launched Cruise Missile missiles in Europe, which the arms control community widely opposed. Only with these deployments did the US gain the leverage to secure the elimination of all Soviet SS-20 missiles deployed in Europe and in Asia.

In December 1987, the United States and the USSR signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, which eliminated thousands of SS-20 warheads. The agreement was historic in that it abolished an entire class of nuclear-armed ballistic missiles. Yet even at the time, opponents of the treaty continued to advocate a nuclear freeze, opposed U.S. counter-deployments of regional nuclear weapons, and lobbied for American restraint and retrenchment—restraint that was not reciprocated by the Soviet Union.

Fourth, the START I reduction proposals, officially announced by the Reagan administration in a November 1981 address at the National Press Club, called for the first 50 percent reduction in U.S. long-range strategic nuclear forces. Ironically, when President Reagan first advanced these proposals, they were widely ridiculed by arms-control specialists, who insisted that Moscow would inevitably reject such deep cuts. Instead, the Soviet Union favored agreements like the 1972 and 1979 SALT accords, which permitted substantial growth in Soviet nuclear forces—particularly heavy, first-strike warheads—while relying on U.S. restraint.

President Reagan’s strategy of “peace through strength” ultimately turned the tables on Moscow, particularly after it was fully endorsed by the bipartisan Scowcroft Commission in its 1983 report. Moreover, Reagan’s March 1983 missile defense initiative—known as the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI)—further pressured the Soviet leadership to enter negotiations. This approach was reinforced by Reagan’s clear-eyed understanding of the nature of the regime he confronted, articulated in his March 1983 address to the National Association of Evangelicals, in which he famously described the Soviet Union as an “evil empire.”

President Reagan—and later President George H. W. Bush—proved highly successful, with the first arms-reduction treaties, START I, adopted in January 1991 and START II in January 1993. In particular, START II represented a major breakthrough by banning multiple-warhead land-based missiles—the very Soviet force elements that had created the destabilizing “window of vulnerability” identified more than a decade earlier. By that point, after engaging in sustained economic and strategic competition with the USSR, the United States had made the continuation of the Soviet empire—and the massive military forces required to sustain it—untenable.

Years later, while the arms control community was actively working to dismantle the American-proposed missile defenses, Moscow’s Duma in 1996 rejected the START II treaty despite a plea from US Secretary of Defense Perry to ratify it. Moscow claimed ratification was “problematic” and suggested it should be “set aside.”

Members of the Duma criticized START II as favoring the United States and weakening Russia’s nuclear deterrent by requiring the elimination of MIRVed ICBMs, which they viewed as essential to maintaining parity. Supporters of ratification acknowledged these concerns but argued that Russia lacked the resources to sustain such forces. Many in the Duma also raised broader economic concerns and linked START II to U.S. missile defense plans, warning that missile defenses would further erode Russia’s deterrent once MIRVed ICBMs were eliminated.

Today, the alternative being offered to nuclear modernization—a congressionally mandated effort tied directly to the 2010 ratification of New START—is effectively unilateral disarmament. Under this approach, arms control constraints on adversaries such as Russia and China are ignored or rejected, while unilateral U.S. restraint is enthusiastically embraced.

The clearest example is a proposal advanced by Senators Sanders, Warren, and Markey, which would unilaterally reduce U.S. nuclear forces from the 800 missiles and bombers permitted under New START to just 182—a reduction of more than 77 percent. One is left to ask: where are the corresponding proposals from Beijing or Moscow? Were any such commitments even sought before advancing this plan?

Arms control requires deploying measures that the reluctant party opposes. The brothers mayhem—North Korea, Iran, China, and Russia—have no interest in nuclear restraint. They believe in the coercive use of nuclear weapons—to blackmail their geopolitical adversaries into inaction—as aptly described by the 2023 Strategic Posture Commission of the United States.

Restraint does not work. In 1991, for example, President George H. W. Bush unilaterally withdrew tens of thousands of U.S. regional, or theater, nuclear weapons. Russia did not reciprocate, despite promises to do so. Today, Russia is assessed to possess between roughly 1,900 and 4,000 such theater warheads, while the United States maintains only a few hundred gravity bombs, deployed in limited numbers in certain NATO countries—and none in the Middle East or the Indo-Pacific. Moreover, China fields hundreds of theater-range missiles capable of carrying low-yield nuclear warheads. The 2025 report to Congress on China noted that Beijing has shown little willingness to engage in nuclear risk-reduction discussions, whether bilaterally or multilaterally.

Given the minimal deterrent being proposed by Congressionally based abolitionists, there is no possibility of securing any kind of arms limits with China and Russia. With the USA having such a reduced force, these autocratic nations have no reason to pause their own massive force modernization, and it would actually embolden them to serially threaten the use of conventional or nuclear force, free from being challenged by any countervailing US nuclear military capability.

(This article was written by Adelle Nazarian, and appeared in NEWSMAX. Saudi Arabia a Fluent Capital, Logistics, and Economic Force | Newsmax.com)

There is a moment in every serious relationship when both parties stop performing for the crowd and begin speaking honestly to each other. The posturing fades, grudges lose their power. What remains is a clear recognition of interests, limits, and long-term intent.

That’s where the relationship between the United States and Saudi Arabia now stands.

The emerging $1 trillion economic framework between Washington and Riyadh is neither a romantic gesture nor an attempt to rehabilitate reputations or rewrite history. It’s far more durable and consequential. It reflects two systems which have grown tired of caricature and chosen instead to deal in leverage, capital, and reality.

In geopolitics, as in markets, maturity reveals itself not through rhetoric but through aligned incentives.

For Washington, the logic is straightforward. Supply chains are fragile, energy markets remain volatile, and strategic competition with China demands partners that possess not only capital, but scale and long-term ambition.

Saudi Arabia is no longer content to be flattened into a single storyline or reduced to legacy labels. It’s asserting itself as a global capital allocator, a logistics hub, and an economic force fluent in the language of the modern world.

This is not a return to old habits; it’s a recalibration. And it is unfolding in plain sight — on balance sheets, in infrastructure, and increasingly in public life.

The current U.S.-Saudi economic deepening is not about ideological conformity or symbolic alignment. It’s about interdependence. American innovation and institutional depth are converging with Saudi capital, infrastructure, and long-term planning. The result is not dependency, but durability.

If the trade framework represents the architecture of this new phase, then Riyadh Season represents its proof of execution.

Often dismissed as spectacle, Riyadh Season — which began in October and will go through March 2026 — is better understood as a live demonstration; an operational stress test of openness, investability, and global integration. The festival draws millions of visitors, hosts international concerts, sporting events, and cultural exhibitions, and transforms the Saudi capital into a functioning crossroads of commerce and culture.

This is not window dressing. It’s signaling.

That signal is inseparable from its leadership. His Excellency Turki Al-Sheikh transformed Riyadh Season from an idea into a global benchmark, proving that Saudi ambition paired with execution can reshape an entire industry. With instinct for scale and precision for delivery, he has made entertainment not just a spectacle, but a strategic language through which Saudi Arabia speaks confidently to the world.

Saudi Arabia welcomed more than 27 million international tourists in 2023, a sharp increase from pre-pandemic levels. The expatriate population now exceeds 13 million, including a growing cohort of Western professionals who are not merely visiting, but relocating.

Tourism is projected to contribute 10% of GDP by 2030, while the entertainment sector alone is expected to surpass $23 billion annually within the decade. These are not abstract ambitions; they are measurable shifts backed by capital, regulatory reform, and execution.

Crucially, Riyadh Season is not about Westernization. It’s about global legibility.

Saudi Arabia is not abandoning its identity; it’s translating it into a language that global investors, talent, and institutions can understand. This is something the United States can certainly appreciate. Mixed-gender public spaces, global brands, English as a working business language, and reforms improving foreign ownership and dispute resolution are not ideological concessions. They are economic enablers.

This evolution did not occur in a vacuum, nor is it naïve about global scrutiny. Saudi Arabia understands that headlines linger, particularly those shaped by moments that once dominated international discourse. But the Kingdom has chosen not to remain trapped in a single narrative frame. Instead, it’s moving forward through performance rather than protest, delivery rather than defensiveness. In geopolitics, relevance is earned through outcomes.

Riyadh Season also serves as the cultural gateway to a broader transformation embodied by projects such as NEOM — a large-scale experiment in urban design, clean energy, advanced manufacturing, and logistics. Together, they form a continuum under Vision 2030, which has already seen hundreds of billions committed across infrastructure, technology, and human capital.

For the United States, this matters. The partnership offers access to capital at scale, a stable anchor in a volatile region, and a counterpart willing to engage without illusions.

Saudi Arabia is not asking to be understood as a Western democracy; it’s asking to be recognized as a serious actor operating in the world as it exists.

Riyadh Season is not a party. It’s a message. And the message is that Saudi Arabia is no longer asking the world to imagine its future. It’s inviting the world to participate.

Adelle Nazarian is a Senior Fellow at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C. based foreign policy and defense think tank.