Arms dispersion boosts discursion on US vulnerability to China, Russia incursion
(Originally published Apr. 24 in “What in the World“) Iran flaunted its conquest of the Strait of Hormuz Thursday by releasing a video showing “mosquito fleet” commandos seizing a cargo ship.
The video shows commandos storming the Panama-registered MSC Francesca, which Iran seized on Wednesday along with the Liberian-registered container ship Epaminondas.
Trump dismissed the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ “little wise-guy ships.” But Trump has squandered so many of America’s weapons on his failed excursion to subdue Iran that his own officials now worry the U.S. couldn’t defend Taiwan or Europe if Beijing and Russia decided to invade tomorrow.
The U.S. has so far popped off as much as $35 billion in weapons, including more than 1,000 Tomahawk cruise missiles, 1,100 Air-to-Surface cruise missiles called JASSM-ERs, at least 1,500 Patriot and other air-defense missiles, and more than 1,000 long-range, ground-based missiles since the war began. Replacing them would take up to six years.
Anyway, it’s not as if no one saw this problem coming. Trump’s decision to ship all but one of the U.S. aircraft carriers from Asia to the Middle East and his “Secretary of War’s” assertion that shortages of missiles in the region could be filled by “crossloading” them from elsewhere, have long raised concerns that he was leaving U.S. interests vulnerable elsewhere.
Luckily, after warning that China was preparing to invade Taiwan, the Pentagon has now conveniently reassessed that appraisal and, ahem, says there’s no sign China wants to do so. (To be fair: it’s a nuanced appraisal: China fears Taiwan will declare independence, or that the U.S. will make that a defacto reality; China’s military has been ordered to develop the capability to take Taiwan by force, even if Beijing has no intention of doing so.)
Yet Trump continues to shift more U.S. military assets into the Middle East:
“The U.S. is sending a third aircraft carrier group to the Middle East: the USS George H.W. Bush is now off the coast of Madagascar, steaming north to join the USS Abraham Lincoln outside the Strait of Hormuz in the Indian Ocean and the USS Gerald R. Ford, which was reportedly leaving the Mediterranean after a nearly record-long deployment, but instead got patched up in Croatia and then sailed through the Suez Canal into the Red Sea. A fourth carrier group, led by the amphibious assault ship USS Boxer, is headed across the Pacific to join the USS Tripoli and add 2,500 U.S. Marines to the troops already in the region. Both groups are due to arrive by the end of the month.”
Even if they don’t launch offensives on defenseless U.S. allies, China and Russia are still reaping benefits from Trump’s diversion into Iran. Just as former President Joe Biden goaded Russia into invading Ukraine to bog it down in a quagmire, so Beijing and Moscow “have every interest in miring the United States in a simmering, low-intensity war that consumes U.S. resources and undermines its international standing,” write the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ Jon B. Alterman and International Crisis Group’s Ali Vaez in Foreign Affairs.