The United States' Secretary of State, Tony Blinken - again the Secretary of State - is so out of his lane right here it is hard to tell if he even knows what his lane is as our chief diplomat.
This opinion of his - which in this venue is now American policy because he said it - is so firmly in the Secretary of Defense's lane that it almost defines it.
Once again, where is Secretary of Defense Austin? His ongoing silence and supine posture as the Secretary of State and National Security Advisor continue to steal his lunch money and girlfriends out in the open is not just professionally embarrassing - it endangers the nation and our allies.
Give it a listen. In essence he states the United States wouldn’t be able to support Ukraine if we were still in Afghanistan and that we cannot support two allies at once.
Either Blinken is speaking with authority on something he knows nothing about, he is simply lying in order to cover yet another policy disaster, or the American public has been fooled in to supporting a military industrial complex that exists for fun and profit - and ready for not much more than imperial policing.
I'll let you decide.
Our footprint in AFG, before our negotiated surrender on par with the Confederate surrender of Vicksburg to the Union Army, was incredibly small. We did not need to expend Javelin nor Stinger nor Harpoon missiles nor tens of thousands of 105mm and 155mm artillery rounds a month in Afghanistan.
Nope.
We have the largest defense budget in the world. AFG was an economy of force operation at the extreme and almost none of what UKR needs - besides a few helicopters - was needed by the ANSF to keep the Taliban at bay.
We have global alliances where we have obliged our nation to go to war to defend dozens of nations.
So, we finally admit to imperial overreach? We are admitting that our defense budget is laden with waste, fraud, and bloated workforce not ready to do the absolute minimum?
Is that what he is admitting?
If we are unable to support two allies in small to medium wars, then how in the hell will we be prepared to fight against the People's Republic of China in the Western Pacific?
When this news broke on FOX on Monday, I literally shouted at the TV and exclaimed: “We just screwed Taiwan and any other nation that had any hope of our intervention on their behalf and…..China, Iran and N. Korea just got the message….. “go for it””
Under the proverbial bus and rolled over the body of allies multiple times.
AFG was just the warmup to our declaration of a failed DoD and Dept of State and the Biden administration.
Blithering idiot is basically killing any deterrence against China and telling them, "yep, we're stretched too thin, so go ahead and take Taiwan". Or at least, when you decide to take Taiwan, start up some mess elsewhere and we won' be able to respond.
We can't build ships fast enough. But we do have enough ships, planes, and bombers to get it done at range if we need to...provided we have the missiles. First priority has to be building LOTS AND LOTS of missiles to put on the shelf - all maritime and air launched versions of LRASM-ER/JASM-ER, AIM 260, etc. Next is make sure we can deliver them with whatever aircraft we can bring on the front line immediately, supplemented by what we can build before THE DATE, and then do the same with shipbuilding - and that means getting Japan, Australia, South Korea, the Philippines, and British/European shipbuilders involved in a joint effort to turn out a bunch of hulls on short notice.
Contracts be damned. China is waging war by any other means to prep the battlefield and we need to go on at least a pre-War preparation development push. We have time, maybe, but it is short - shorter than Reagan had - to rescue things.