The need to remedy our weakness!

David Goldman writes,

Henry Kissinger’s arms-control flummery and musings on limited nuclear war did not motivate America’s pursuit of détente. We had no choice after 1973, because Russia had the upper hand. But we did not leave it at that. We mobilized our technical and scientific resources on an enormous scale and created the digital revolution. That gave us war-winning technologies in conventional arms and opened the promise of an effective missile defense shield under Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative. It was a bipartisan commitment. Jimmy Carter’s Defense Department under the leadership of a prominent physicist, Dr. Harold Brown, developed most of the weapons systems that made America so formidable during the Reagan years.

A détente with Russia and China that accepts China’s dominance in global high-technology manufacturing and its corresponding rise as a dominant military power would be a surrender in slow-motion. It would mean the end of America’s aspirations, and a British-style decline into strategic irrelevance. But a détente that takes grim inventory of our own failings and buys us time to rebuild our technological edge is another matter. The idea will not be popular among American politicians who find it easier to denounce Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping than to remedy our weakness at home. But it is the only path between two unacceptable alternatives: A confrontation with Russia and/or China that we might lose, and which might escalate into nuclear war, or descent into national mediocrity.

The scale of the problem is daunting. To return federal R&D funding to the levels of the late 1970s or 1980s relative to GDP, we would have to spend another $200 billion a year. The great corporate laboratories, starting with Bell Labs, no longer exist; they would have to be reconstituted. Only 7% of our college students major in engineering, against 33% in both Russia and China; Russia alone graduates as many engineers each year as the United States. These are labors of Hercules. But we have the choice of accomplishing them or condemning future generations of Americans to mediocrity. We need inspirational leadership to persuade American taxpayers to fund investment on this scale, like John F. Kennedy in 1962 when he told the nation that we would go to the moon, or Ronald Reagan in 1984 when he proposed to protect America against missile attack.

Read more here:https://lawliberty.org/two-kinds-of-detente/