For the New York Times, the US is always lagging behind the Russian menace. Previously, the Times has told us how America was losing the “scramble for the Arctic” (8/30/15) and falling behind in election-meddling (3/4/18). Now it’s in the realms of cyber and nuclear war that the Times sees dangerous gaps.
“Russia has ramped up its arsenals,” and “US has done little in response”—except ramp up its own arsenal by more than the size of the entire Russian arsenal (New York Times, 3/5/18).
In “A Russian Threat on Two Fronts Meets an American Strategic Void” (3/5/18), reporters David Sanger and William Broad passed along the worries of Washington elites—as expressed by a few military higher-ups, some guy from the arms industry mouthpiece known as the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and a disembodied “The United States”—that Trump didn’t have a coherent strategy for dealing with cyber and nuclear threats from Russia. The front-page subhead warned, “Russia has ramped up its arsenal, US has done little in response.”
So what does a “little” response look like? Since taking office, the Trump administration and Congress—citing the Russian challenge as one of their major rationales—have increased the military budget by about $80 billion, or roughly 13 percent, the largest increase since the aftermath of 9/11, and 70 percent greater than the entire Russian military budget of $47 billion. (Note that in the late 1970s and early ’80s, the Soviet military budget was bigger in real terms than that of the United States—and yet the USSR still managed to lose the Cold War.)
Additionally, Trump has reportedly asked for a “black budget” of over $80 billion for covert operations ($30 billion more than previous estimates), and pledged more than $1.2 trillion to building up the United States’ nuclear arsenal over the next 30 years, $200 billion more than Obama asked Congress for when he announced the plan two years ago.
And Trump has, again, asked to increase the military budget by even more—to $716 billion—for 2019. All this is omitted from Sanger and Broad’s piece, which largely paints the United States as bumbling around without any idea how to combat the always-one-step-ahead-of-us Russians.
While the framing paints an image of the US doing nothing at all, the article’s text is a little less daft, focusing primarily on a “strategic void,” or what some “experts” believe is a lack of “strategy.” Although there’s no indication the US military has ceased to carry out strategic objectives laid out before Trump took office, one can grant this vague premise (it’s difficult to know what degree of “strategic” PowerPoint presentations would satisfy Sanger and Broad), but ignoring the unprecedented amounts of money and resources Trump has spent on the military under the guise of combating Russia—to say nothing of his sending “lethal aid” to Ukraine (something Obama long declined to do)—is a massive omission.
As usual, the United States, when it’s not being painted as bumbling, is presented as simply responding to threats in a defensive manner:
And in the nuclear sphere, the Trump administration has yet to offer a strategy to contain or deter Russia beyond simply matching the weapons buildup.
Here again, the US only responds to threats, it never instigates them; the US is only “matching [Russia’s] weapons buildup,” not inciting one. The fact that the US’s most recent nuclear “revamp” began in earnest in 2014—long before Trump announced his campaign, much less moved into the White House—is not mentioned.
The effect of the article—by accident or intent—is to justify even more military spending, as Trump and Congress plan yet another massive military increase for 2019. Around paragraph 16, the piece quotes a report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, described as a “Washington think tank”:
We must no longer think in terms of building just “limited” missile defense capabilities…. The United States should begin the journey to develop a next-generation missile defense.
Who would possibly build such a system? By sheer coincidence, five of CSIS’s top 10 corporate funders—Lockheed Martin, Leonardo Finmeccanica, Boeing, General Dynamics and Northrop Grumman—are positioned to do just that. Maybe when the Times handwrings about the “void” of influence of the country with the largest military in the history of the world, it could cite a group that isn’t paid millions of dollars to call for making that military ever larger (FAIR.org, 8/12/16).
