In the winter of 1940, with war raging across Europe, former President Franklin D. Roosevelt gave what would become his most famous public address. In one of his signature fireside chats, the president made the case to the American people for a massive industrial mobilization to counter the threat of Hitler’s Third Reich. Only in that way, FDR argued, could the U.S. become a “great arsenal of democracy” capable of sustaining the frontline states of the West.
A view of an American flag is seen.
Scott Boehm/AP Images
The American public listened. Within half-a-decade, our factories and industries had managed to produce nearly 100,000 bomber aircraft, almost 90,000 tanks, and more than 2 million trucks in what became a truly national effort.
Fast forward some eight decades, and all this seems like a distant memory. Today’s hyper-partisan political environment has fostered overheated debates on everything from gun control to abortion, making the type of national unity engendered by FDR’s call to action hard to imagine.
That represents a massive problem, because America’s once-unassailable strategic position—which underpinned global security throughout the decades of the Cold War—is steadily eroding. “Our Army is shrinking, our Navy is decommissioning warships faster than new ones can be built, our Air Force has stagnated in size, and only a fraction of the force is available for combat on any given day,” former Defense Secretary Robert Gates recently wrote in The Washington Post.
Just as significantly, the U.S. defense-industrial base that laid the groundwork for Allied victory in World War II is now only a shadow of its former self. “After decades of neglect, [it] cannot produce major weapons systems in the numbers we need in a timely way nor—as we have seen in Ukraine—can it produce the vast quantities of munitions required for a great-power conflict,” Gates noted.
Global threats, meanwhile, are mounting. Today, the United States faces the most fraught international environment in nearly a century in the form of three separate revisionist powers that each seek to expand their geopolitical influence—and do so at the expense of the West.
The first is China. Over the past decade, under the guidance of General Secretary Xi Jinping, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has adopted an increasingly aggressive, adventurist foreign policy. That new approach has seen China infringe on the sovereignty of its neighbors, make massive economic and political inroads into the Global South, and seek to reshape the Indo-Pacific in its favor.
The second is Russia. Given its current difficulties in Ukraine, it might be tempting to dismiss the Kremlin as a largely spent force. Yet that would be a mistake, because the government of Russian President Vladimir Putin has made its imperial designs on other neighboring countries perfectly clear. As a result, scholars Michael Kofman and Andrea Kendall-Taylor have counseled, it’s far more prudent to think of Russia as a “persistent power” that will continue to challenge the West.
Finally, there is Iran. Just a year ago, the Islamic Republic was on the back foot, facing growing protests at home, diminished regional relevance as a result of the Abraham Accords, and mounting international pressure on account of its nuclear advances. Today, Iran’s strategic situation is markedly better, thanks to lackluster American Mideast policy as well as widening regional disorder. And as Iran’s strategic fortunes have risen, so too have its geopolitical ambitions, which now extend as far afield as Antarctica.
And increasingly, all three (together with fellow rogue North Korea) are coordinating more and more closely on everything from joint military exercises to information warfare to next-generation technologies.
The scope of the challenge is daunting. Whoever ends up winning the White House next month will need to reframe the way America thinks about Great Power Competition in order to adequately respond to the collective threat now posed by Moscow, Beijing, and Tehran. Doing so will begin by answering a fateful question—Is the United States still prepared to serve as the “arsenal of democracy”?
Looking at our current political divisions, the autocrats in Moscow, Beijing, and Tehran are clearly betting that the answer is “no.” It’s up to us to prove them wrong.
Ilan Berman is senior vice president of the American Foreign Policy Council in Washington, D.C.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
