by Mitt Romney
Russia no longer makes any pretense about finding common interest with the democratic world. After ten years of negotiations to prepare for entry into the World Trade Organization, Russia put that membership in jeopardy with its invasion of Georgia. When Putin was asked whether he was concerned about Russia’s position among the G-8 nations, he responded, Should we agree to be killed in order to remain . . . in the G-8? And who will remain in the G-8 if all of us are killed? Killed? Just who is killing whom? Perhaps most chilling was President Medvedev’s boast, We are afraid of nothing, including another Cold War.
Of course, given the Russian leaders’ new agenda, rebuilding the nation’s military is a high priority. Under Yeltsin, it had suffered badly. Despite the fact that the military was responsible, in part, for his rise to power—and for saving his life—Yeltsin let the Russian military atrophy to the point that it barely resembled its former self. His official defense budget plummeted from 74 billion in 1993 to 42 billion just three years later. Aircraft, ships, and tanks fell into such disrepair that many were unusable. Russia’s defense minister shockingly concluded in 1998 that two thirds of all aircraft are incapable of flying and about one-third of the armed forces’ military hardware is not combat ready.
Troop strength had not only declined by more than half, the army that remained had become increasingly weakened by corruption, inadequate training, insufficient compensation, and lack of discipline. When Yeltsin ordered the invasion of Chechnya, the Russian army at his disposal was far from being a skilled fighting force. According to the U.S. Foreign Military Studies Office, More than 50 percent of the men sent to war had never fired live shells with their tank cannons, and had no idea how to do so. Military cooks, signalers, and mechanics were appointed to shoot anti-tank guns and missiles as well as machine guns.
Not long after Putin came to power, the world got a glimpse of Russia’s hobbled military when in 2000, the Kursk, one of its largest and most modern submarines, was lost at sea with all 118 of its crew. The Russian navy failed to execute a credible rescue effort, and it exacerbated the tragedy when it refused to allow rescue attempts by our navy. Twenty-four sailors had survived for an undetermined time in one of the sub’s airtight chambers, but their lives—and the lives of others perhaps—were sacrificed to protect Russian military secrets. It wasn’t surprising when the Russian media blamed a U.S. sub in the vicinity of the Kursk for the loss, but even with such scurrilous propaganda, the sinking of the Kursk became a symbol of Russia’s military disarray.
Putin’s effort to rebuild the Russian military began with the budget—he has increased annual defense spending by almost 600 percent. According to some accounts, however, unreported spending on classified projects is even larger than the official figures and has grown even more significantly.
Putin has done much more than spend rubles. He also went to work to transform the Russian army. He restructured the military draft by limiting deferments, attacked the practice of bribery within the draft office, increased soldier pay and housing allowances, and inaugurated an effort to build a professional volunteer army not unlike our own. At just over a million soldiers, Russia’s active-duty force is only a third smaller than our own, and its two-million-soldier reserve force is nearly twice the size of ours.
When it comes to rebuilding its conventional military hardware, Russia has a long way to go. The country has just under 2,000 combat-capable aircraft—about half our number—but the Russian air force doesn’t come close to matching our capabilities. The United States has nearly 100 fifth-generation fighters; Russia has none. We have 1,700 generation 4.5 fighters; Russia has 90. The United States’s lead in airpower is enormous. A similar picture exists in battlefield support capabilities, where, for example, America has four times as many combat-capable helicopters as Russia.
With all that said, there are two things to remember.
First, Russia doesn’t have to stand up to America on a neutral battlefield. Instead, it can choose to deploy its military power only where the geography compensates for our overwhelming advantages, such as in its backyard. The invasion of Georgia was certainly well planned and orchestrated, despite the Russians’ lack of satellite reconnaissance systems and high-tech weaponry. According to an analysis by the Heritage Foundation, some 25,000 troops and 1,000 armored vehicles attacked on two fronts simultaneously. Air support came from fighters and long-range bombers. The Russian navy attacked Georgia’s harbor, and ballistic missiles hit military and civilian targets. Even cyber-attacks were part of the coordinated assault. To countries such as Georgia, Ukraine, Moldova, and Belarus, Russia is still an overwhelming power. Even Western Europe’s militaries, standing alone, compare unfavorably to Russia’s reinvigorated conventional forces.
Second, Russia’s global power is, of course, based on its nuclear arsenal. Russia has over 5,000 operational nuclear warheads, including its tactical weapons. The United States has less than 3,000 operational warheads. When one includes nonoperational but potentially useful warheads, Russia boasts a stockpile of 14,000—an almost threefold nuclear lead over the United States.
Russia remains an important regional power, and given its energy wealth, by mid-century it could again be a world superpower capable of an equal say in any major global controversy. Every indication is that Putin intends to keep Russia on precisely that track.
Yet, Russia’s looming demographic crisis has the potential to prevent the realization of Putin’s vision. The average Russian male’s life expectancy is a shockingly low sixty-one years. Combined with low birth rates, that factor has produced a population decline of 7 million people in just fifteen years. The United Nations projects that the Russia population will fall by another 10 million by 2020. Some analysts predict that the Russian population will decline from a high of 148 million people in 1992 to approximately 110 million in 2050. The impact on the available population for economic growth and for military purposes is staggering. It’s arguable that this demographic calamity will stop the Russian march toward renewed superpower status.
But Vladimir Putin is far from foolish. He is tailoring his economic and military strategies to meet demographic reality. Energy production is not workforce intensive, and the reaggregation of some of Russia’s former republics would readily provide new citizens to meet its military and civilian needs.
There was a time when we simply and unwisely stopped worrying about Russia. The long Cold War had ended and we hoped the Russian people would join the ranks of those who live in freedom. There was every reason to believe that the majority of Russians wanted just that.
The chaos of freedom, the greed of elites, and the instability of the first generation of post–Soviet Russian leadership squandered that opportunity. Reactionaries have seized their own opportunity to take Russia backward even while rebuilding Russian military power. We are now obliged to be wary and vigilant once more, because by mid-century, our grandchildren may well view Russia with the same concern that we and our parents once did.
The Holy Warriors
Both China and Russia pose threats to the United States, but the likelihood of near-term head-to-head war with either is low. That is not the case with the radical, violent jihadists. They are at war with us at this very moment—not because we declared a war on terror, but because they have repeatedly attacked us and in 1998 even declared war on the United States. Their war planning continues even as their operational effectiveness waxes and wanes. Every IED that kills an American soldier or marine in Afghanistan or Iraq, every terror attack in London, Madrid, or Bali, is just another engagement in their war.
That war goes on whether or not the United States chooses to acknowledge it and no matter what our political leadership and media elite decide to call it. As the American Enterprise Institute’s Michael Landon wrote in The Wall Street Journal, The world is simmering in the familiar rhetoric and actions of movements and regimes—from Hezbollah and al Qaeda to the Iranian Khomeinists and the Saudi Wahhabis—who swear to destroy us
and others like us. Like their twentieth-century predecessors, they openly proclaim their intentions, and carry them out whenever and wherever they can.
I refer to these terrorists as jihadists because it’s the term they use to describe themselves—the men of jihad—and the word itself refers to what some call the sixth pillar of Islam. Classically, jihad was a call to action to serve the Islamic state or caliphate, either by defending it or conquering new lands and expanding its borders.
Contemporary Muslims look at militant jihad in different ways. Many millions of moderate Muslims reject it out of hand and work to keep their lands free of its scourge. Thousands of Muslims have been killed by the radical jihadists, and many of our allies in the Muslim world are working side by side with us to thwart their cause.
Other Muslims simply ignore the extremists as they attempt to lead productive lives. For some, this acquiescence is a choice of necessity, as it was for moderate Afghans when the Taliban ruled their country.
Radical, fundamentalist Muslims—Islamists—are estimated by Indonesia’s former president to number about 200 million people. Some believe that this is a very low estimate—that Islamists may be a substantial minority of the Muslim population. While most Islamists do not condone the tactics of the violent jihadists, they share the same vision for the course of the Islamic world. Every non-Muslim state is to be removed from any land that was once under Muslim control—including part of Western Europe, all of northern Africa, and the Persian and Arab lands of the Middle East. Within those lands, they seek to eliminate all governments and national boundaries in order to unify them under a religious caliphate. And ultimately, they subscribe to an Islamic quest to conquer the entire world.
All violent jihadists are Islamists, but not all Islamists are terrorist jihadists. And while the number of jihadists—including both those who carry out terrorist attacks and those that finance and enable those attacks—is unknown, it is certainly a very significant number.
The jihadists view America as the world power that stands in the way of their achieving their goals, and as a nation bent on denying the divine will of Allah. The United States is the primary target of the jihadists—not to negotiate with, but to destroy.
Even after the attacks of September 11, some Americans cannot bring themselves to recognize the scope and reality of the jihadist threat. Others have simply chosen to forget the horrors of that day, or have concluded that the burden of preventing future attacks is too great. At President Obama’s first press conference, media grande dame Helen Thomas referred to the jihadists as so-called terrorists. Her dismissive view is shared by millions of Americans, anxious to deny the reality of the jihadists’ ambitions and abilities. That so rudimentary a military force could expect to conquer vast territory and defeat the United States seems so fanciful that many Americans feel that jihadist threats must be simply rhetorical or political.
But jihadists see the world in starkly different ways from most Americans. Saudi oil revenues continue to fund the spread of Wahhabi Islamic fundamentalism throughout the Islamic world. Through the proliferation of children’s madrassas, mosques, and centers of higher learning, large segments of Islamic society have been indoctrinated with fundamentalist views—ideas that powerfully motivate their behavior, regardless of how illogical they may seem to us or how different they may be from our own. As the National Review’s Andrew McCarthy writes, Fundamentalist strains of Islam, including Salafism, have been developed by extraordinary minds. It is not that these Muslims fail to comprehend our principles; they reject them. They have an entirely different conception of the good life.
There fundamental differences between our respective worldviews are both striking and numerous. For example, while Western nations take care to separate church from state, for the Islamists, religion and government are to be one. The founding fathers of Islam proclaimed that Islam is a religion and a state. Rather than limiting itself to prescribing only spiritual laws, fundamentalist Islam seeks to dominate and control every aspect of society, from economic policies to social interactions, and from individual daily habits to the functioning of government. Thus, Islamists would replace secular systems of justice with sharia. From the viewpoint of the Islamist, the government of an Islamic nation that is not sufficiently fundamentalist is not just wrong, it is evil. According to Middle East authority Lawrence Wright, the Pulitzer Prize– winning author of the seminal work on the founding and spread of al Qaeda, The Looming Tower, the jihadists have adopted the concept of takfir to deal with these Muslim governments—in essence, it is a license to kill apostates. Jihadists believe that moderate Muslim officials and rulers have excommunicated themselves from the faith and that therefore the Qur’an sanctions the killing of these leaders. This doctrine motivates the plotters against moderate Muslim leaders today just as it emboldened the assassins of Anwar Sadat.
Another example of the difference in perspective between Islamists and the West: Rather than embracing discovery, the Islamic fundamentalists condemn it. For them, the Qur’an contains all information and learning that is needed, and everything that should be known. In this view, modernity itself is evil—contemporary law, business practices, social mores, tolerance, rationalism, and scientific inquiry are heresy. And as the world’s epicenter of innovation and intellectual discovery, America is emblematic of the world’s sinful pursuit of everything forbidden by Allah. When jihadists call America the Great Satan, it is not only because they believe we are evil, it is also because they believe America is the great tempter, drawing people to sin.
For an American, freedom is one of our highest values. We consider it an inalienable right, bestowed by God. For an Islamist, freedom is evil and it is contrary to the will of God. Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini decried freedom that will corrupt our youth, freedom that will pave the way for the Oppressor, freedom that will drag our nation to the bottom. For the jihadist, whether Sunni or Shia, there should be no freedom to disobey God’s will.
To the Islamist, democracy is a form of blasphemy; in democracies, immutable law proscribed by God may be changed by man. In the eyes of the Islamic fundamentalists, America as the author of liberty and champion of democracy is the most immoral of nations.
While we in the West see great value in the wide diversity of the world’s peoples, nations, regions, and continents, the Islamists see only a single dividing line, one between the state of Islam (dar al Islam) and the state without Islam (dar al Harb)—literally, the house of war. Once a territory has become part of the state of Islam, it must remain so forever, and all former Islamic lands are to be returned to Muslim control. Accordingly, Islamists have no interest in seeing an independent Palestinian state established alongside Israel—the so-called two-state solution. Their goal is to remove the Jews from land that they believe is an integral part of the state of Islam, land that will be claimed once more for Allah, land that once having been conquered for Allah belongs to Allah for all time. For jihadists, no peace is possible with the state of Israel, on any terms.
In America, we understand the concept of expanding the reach of one’s religion through evangelism and persuasion. But as the Islamic fundamentalists see history, the state of Islam has primarily expanded by divinely mandated conquest. Under the lead of the caliph, early Muslims were given authorization to conquer non-Muslim lands and peoples, a conquest known as fatah. Once a people were conquered, they had three options: convert to Islam, accept second-class citizenship and onerous taxes, or be subject to ethnic cleansing. The rate of conversion was brisk. In the words of Hassan al-Banna, the 1928 founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, a branch of jihad in Egypt—and what many consider to be the root of al Qaeda—It is the nature of Islam to dominate, not to be dominated, to impose its law on all nations, and to extend its power to the entire planet.
There is a saying among people of religious faith in the West, Pray as if it’s up to God, and act as if it’s up to you. To an Islamic fundamentalist, however, when it comes to everything in life—
and to a fatah war in particular—God calls the shots. Allah decides who will win a war and who will lose it. And most important, Allah will always grant victory to Muslims if they are sufficiently strict in their adherence to all aspects of Islamic law and custom. This conviction is deeply ingrained in indoctrinated Muslim youth, and it is promoted by reference to historical evidence. Fatah armies made up of inexperienced and poorly armed and clad Arab nomads defeated the Byzantine Roman army in the battle of Yarmuk in AD 636 and the Persian army in the battle of Qadisiya the following year. In a repeat performance in the eleventh century, Mameluk fatah armies defeated both the Mongols and the Crusaders. Modern history is also viewed as evidence that Allah will grant victory to fatah armies, even against seemingly insurmountable odds. This is how Ayatollah Khomeini’s defeat of the U.S.-backed Shah of Iran is viewed by Shia Islamists. Jihadists also claim that they caused the collapse of the Soviet Union as its dissolution occurred shortly after their victory in expelling the Soviets from Afghanistan.
Americans may smile at the suggestion that jihadists are responsible for the demise of the Soviet Union, as we recall the decades of Cold War that preceded the fall of the Wall, but that only demonstrates again how differently we see the world. Jihadists are entirely convinced that Allah grants them victory against any foe if they are worthy. And to the jihadist, there is nothing at all irrational about aiming to win a war against the United States, causing the collapse of the West, and establishing a worldwide caliphate. If Allah is with them, they reason, no one can stand against them.
The intellectual roots of jihadism extend at least to the thirteenth century. Ibn Taymiya, a Syrian scholar, taught that any deviation or variation from the original teachings of Islam’s Prophet and his earliest followers was apostasy and would alienate the hand of Allah in promoting the nation of Islam. These teachings and codes of conduct had been established by the predecessors, or the Salaf. From there derives the doctrine of Salafism, that is, a return to the ways of the early founders of the caliphate. Mohammed Wahhab, a Salafist from the Arabian Peninsula resurrected Ibn Taymiya’s strict fundamentalist teachings in the late eighteenth century, and his followers formed an alliance with the Saudi federation of tribes who established a state founded on Wahhabism, one of Salafism’s major branches, that has been expanding ever since.
