Obama's America 2016 (Non-Fiction)(2012) by Dinesh D'Souza Read Free Book Online

in Alaska and California. More recently, Obama seems to have signaled to Russia’s former president Dmitry Medvedev that, upon re-election, he will grant further concessions on America’s missile defenses. Nor does Obama want America’s allies to have such defenses. A couple years earlier, Obama canceled an anti-missile system planned for Poland, as well as a missile-detecting radar system planned for the Czech Republic.
    Now admittedly nuclear arsenals and missile defenses are only one aspect, although an important aspect, of a nation’s defense program. America also has a Defense Department that manages an army, a navy, an air force, and the Marines. In fact, the bulk of military spending goes toward conventional forces. America has these forces deployed around the world, but especially in trouble spots: in the Middle East, to maintain stability and secure access to oil supplies; in Europe, to protect our strongest allies; in Asia, to protect South Korea from North Korea and Taiwan from China. Recognizing that more than one war can break out at a time, America’s defense strategy has long been to prepare to fight two wars simultaneously: this way, for example, we can deal with a Middle East conflict while also protecting Taiwan from a Chinese invasion. If Obama wanted to reduce America’s nuclear dependency but maintain America’s strong defenses, we would expect him to push for a substantial increase in conventional force readiness and also in overall defense spending.
    Actually, Obama has moved in the opposite direction. In 2009, Obama ordered $330 billion in defense cuts. The next year, he convinced Defense Secretary Robert Gates to pare an additional $100 billion. In 2011, Obama chopped an additional $487 billion from the Pentagon, thus bringing his total cuts to nearly a trillion dollars. The cumulative effect, according to General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is that the United States can no longer expect to be a global power . 7
    Obama usually announces his defense cuts with a practiced long face, and he says the cuts are necessary to reduce deficit spending. We have to, says our frugal man in the White House, put “our fiscal house in order.” And of course Obama is right that our fiscal house is not in order. I quite agree that in dire economic times, government programs that we now have may prove unaffordable, and defense is no exception. Obama’s Benihana defense policy could perhaps be justified in terms of a tough economy and national belt-tightening. But that is not Obama’s scenario. He has been cutting the military while pushing for huge increases in domestic spending. While the defense department is being cut to the bone, other programs like health care and “green” technologies are bloated with money. Obama shows no evident interest in reducing overall spending, only in reducing military spending.
    The consequences are already being felt on America’s role in the world. Even with his rhetorical legerdemain, Obama has to acknowledge this. Given all that has happened in the Middle East and across the Muslim world—the subject of the next two chapters—Obama cannot deny that American power has greatly waned in those regions. Consequently he has sought to deflect the public’s attention with a much-publicized “pivot” to Asia. By itself this may seem far-sighted, a sound recognition of the growing power of China. But in Obama’s case, things are rarely as they seem. Obama has not actually redeployed America’s defense forces to the Pacific. He has not increased the targeting of Chinese military assets. In fact, his “pivot” seems to be mostly a rhetorical move, unaccompanied by any change in strategy or measurable increase in force levels.
    So America’s military is in a bad way in 2012; what can we expect in 2016? If Obama is re-elected, we can expect further weakening. In my view, Obama’s goal is to introduce fear in the United States—fear of an Iranian