Will General Joseph Dunford Stand up to Obama?On Friday, the Obama White House was denying the concerns of General Dunford regarding Russia and China. Reuters reported that John Kerry does not consider Russia or China to pose a current “existential threat” to the United States.
Kerry and the White House also disagreed with General Dunford that the United States should be providing military assistance and arms to Ukraine. Secretary of State Kerry seems to think economic sanctions against Russia will suffice.
Josh Earnest stated during a White House press conference on Thursday that General Dunford was stating his own opinion and Dunford’s comments gave "his own view and doesn't necessarily reflect the ... consensus analysis of the president's national security team." One must ask if it is Obama’s national security team or General Joseph Dunford who presently has the best grasp on the realities of the military dangers we face.
Hopeful General Joseph Dunford will put our country ahead of the ideologies of President Obama and will stand up to Obama’s ongoing destruction of our military capabilities and the integrity of our national security.
http://lubbockonline.com/interact/blog-post/donald-r-may/2015-07-11/will-general-joseph-dunford-stand-obama#.VaJuPPlVhBc
My view on all this:
I'm still on the side of erring for caution. Putin actually has not damaged relations / pushed around the USA directly, too much or over the line, as yet.
So I would not actually get onto a "Russia threat" bandwagon, unless that becomes the case.
Things like:
* If something happened to an American airline flight, let's say a Russian fighter or bomber collided with one, that's a fear out there right now because the Russian air force does not have transponders on and they do not report to air traffic control.
* If the US was massively cyberattcked, and that was linked to Moscow.
* If Russia started actually crossing OUR borders, with bombers and fighter jets, the way they have been in Europe.
So those are over the line kind of things, where one could say "ok now, Russia has pushed it too far, we're Americans we aren't Dutch or Belgians or Norwegians and we're not gonna let someone roll over OUR borders like this."
In fairness -- Putin HAS NOT done any of the above things. I suspect that he fully well knows that would be a mistake, he knows he can cross scandinavian and Dutch and even British borders, but he knows better that he's picking a big fight if he did that with the US directly. And -- the USA does not do this with Russia, either, our fighters and bombers don't cross Russia's borders.
In fairness -- if you look at all the news, Putin is doing careful escalation management. It's probably all some kind of Russian chess game, where Putin wins in the end, but anyhow he is careful to maintain some ties and relations with the US.
Okay, so other than Russia directly messing with us -- the only other thing we're doing here is protecting allies. Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, and keeping Ukraine from ever getting totally run over. We will do less for allies, than we will do for ourselves -- and our allies have to be sure they do want us there and if they aren't sure then screw it, we don't need to be taking the risk anyway.
So there you go, that's my view of the escalation management matrix -- the most serious thing Russia could do, is if they started treating AMERICA like it's Latvia and just start flying over OUR border. And directly taking us on, here at home. I don't think Russia will ever do that.
BUT IF THEY DO -- then it's a bit like the cold war, whatever Russia does to the USA, then the US will do right back to them. And this thing will just go however far the Russians take it. It is honestly all up to them, they have been in the driver's seat on all this from the start.
The US military is a defensive force, and is reactionary to whatever problems there happen to be out there.
Russia will not be "the #1 threat" if Russia keeps its actions under the radar and doesn't push it too far. It's really that simple. US has plenty of problems all over the place, nobody just wants a problem with Russia because we're bored -- it's just triage, whatever the top problems happen to be, and that's all that General Dunford said.