The Real Crisis is Closer to Home – The American Conservative
The test showed that China had made astounding progress on hypersonic weapons and was far more advanced than U.S. officials realized, noted the Financial Times, which broke the story over the weekend. Hypersonic missiles of this kind whiz through the air at five times the speed of sound, or about 3,850 miles per hour. Their lower altitudes and cruising capabilities pose a different sort of challenge to missile-defense systems than do traditional ballistic missiles, which by definition follow a more predictable path from launch to target.
It was yet another warning, if one were needed, that the People s Republic is a very serious power, indeed.
Our own national-security apparatus is downright farcical by comparison. Its leaders guided the United States into a strategic ditch, squandering blood and treasure on pointless nation-building wars whose sum effect was to further destabilize an already-volatile Middle East and North Africa. What with Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, blabbering about white rage, and another general, Jo Clyborne, griping on Twitter recently about the Army s policy against French manicures, our military brass and nat-sec elites deserve all the ridicule they get, and then some.
But on the right, especially the so-called new right, the mockery can often go hand-in-hand with a perilous temptation: a mindless China hawkishness that would do little to reverse the underlying trends driving American decline (both relative and absolute). If anything, such hawkishness could allow GOP foreign-policy elites to derail any hope of a populist-led domestic revival. Instead, they would channel popular anger over Covid, industrial offshoring, elite entanglement with Beijing, and so on into another generation of dumb conflicts. China could thus serve as a great red herring (pun intended).