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Weekend Reads
Foreign policy and political reporter Barak Ravid interviews Michael Doran at Axios House on September 24, 2024. (Sam Popp on behalf of Axios)
In response to President Joe Biden’s final address to the United Nations General Assembly, Senior Fellow Michael Doran, at Axios House in New York City, discussed how although Biden “wanted to go down in history as a peacemaker,” the president’s ideas about how to bring about peace in the world are failing and have emboldened an axis of aggressors that includes Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea.
Watch the full conversation here.
Then, on Thursday, Hudson’s Rebeccah Heinrichs hosted a panel with Senator Tom Cotton (R-AK), Palantir’s Joe Lonsdale and Shyam Sankar, and Nadia Schadlow to discuss why the United States needs to invest in its military to deter this axis, and how the Pentagon can do so more intelligently.
“If you think it’s expensive to preserve the peace, you should take a look at what it costs to win a war—and, even worse, to lose a war.”
— Tom Cotton
Key Insights
1. The Biden administration has failed to combat the rise of the axis of aggressors.
“They’re on the rise. And we feel that especially in [the Middle East]. So President Biden wants Afghanistan to be the sign—you know, he said I wanted to bring these wars to an end. So he certainly brought Americans home, and he scaled back American military deployment in certain parts of the world. But there isn’t a sense that this has brought about a more peaceful world at all. So that’s a message that may resonate to some in domestic American politics. But if you’re sitting in Tokyo or you’re sitting in Seoul or in Jerusalem, none of America’s allies that are on the front line against Russia, China, and Iran . . . feel like they’re in a safer world now as a result.”
2. Attacks on America’s allies and partners are attacks on the US-led world order.
“Biden has defined the problem from day one as a Palestinian-Israeli conflict. And he says . . . he wants a two-state solution, two peoples living side by side in peace. . . . [But] it’s not a Palestinian-Israeli conflict. It’s an Iran-Israel conflict, and that’s an objective fact because the Houthis are involved. Hezbollah opened up, as he mentioned, unprovoked on October 8. So it’s Iran versus Israel—I actually think it’s Iran versus the United States. If you frame it that way, that leads to a totally different understanding of what the solutions are. The solution is to deter Iran, not to come up with a deal where we can get [Yahya] Sinwar to agree with [Benjamin] Netanyahu.”
3. To combat this axis, the US needs to rebuild its commercial defense industrial base while also harnessing the power of innovation.
“Before the fall of the Berlin Wall, 86 percent of defense spending went to companies that were both commercial and defense. Chrysler made cars, absolutely, but they also made missiles. And Ford made satellites until 1990. And we’ve somehow, having won the Cold War, rotated to this place where we have a coddled and relatively protected industrial base that is not participating in the broader innovation economy that entrepreneurs like Joe [Lonsdale] are building and funding. . . .When we look at Ukraine, we should wonder. Everyone cites that, Wow, isn’t it amazing that the Ukrainians took out half the Black Sea Fleet even though they don’t have a navy? And really, it’s, of course, because they don’t have a navy that they did that. And so how do we bring more of those concepts into what is otherwise a pretty uncompetitive and sclerotic series of institutions that need to challenge these concepts going forward?”
— Shyam Sankar
4. Investments in hard power are necessary to protect American citizens and troops alike.
“Too many of my colleagues in the Congress think that you can win wars with keyboard strokes or hashtags or lighting up your national symphony with another country’s flag colors. In the end, you win wars by killing the other side’s soldiers or destroying their stuff. . . . War may change in the technology that’s used, but ultimately the way wars have been fought and won forever is by closing with and destroying the enemy on the battlefield. And despite all the technological innovations you’ve seen in Israel and in Ukraine, it’s still Israeli soldiers and Ukrainian soldiers on the front line going door to door or fighting in the trenches. . . . Technology does change, and we need to change a lot faster in the United States like Israel has, like Ukraine increasingly is, to face the threats to America, especially the threat from Chinese communism.”
— Tom Cotton
Quotes may be edited for clarity and length.
Go Deeper
Mike Gallagher warns that allowing the Chinese Communist Party to control America’s technology base could allow China to launch devastating cyberattacks against the US homeland.
In a modern reworking of the Trojan Horse, Israel simultaneously detonated thousands of Hezbollah operatives’ pagers. Michael Doran explains why this is one of the most astonishing, precise, and successful intelligence feats ever in a Hudson memo.
As Russian and Chinese advancements in hypersonic missiles threaten to surpass America’s ability to respond, Rebeccah Heinrichs hosted congressional, government, and industry officials to discuss the future of American hypersonics.
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