Tanks Still Matter When Drones Rule The Sky

Europe looks peaceful right up until you inventory what’s actually ready to fight. After spending months in Europe, Professor Andrew Michta joins us to lay out a sober strategic picture: a continent still disarmed, a defense industrial base that will take years to rebuild, and a NATO alliance split by radically different threat perceptions from the Baltic Sea to the Sahel.

We get specific about what modern war is teaching in Ukraine. Drones are changing everything, but Andrew explains why tanks and armor still matter because wars are ultimately decided by mobility and control of terrain. The real breakthrough, he argues, is not just more unmanned systems, but restoring maneuver through electronic warfare and spectrum dominance so soldiers can move without being hunted on a transparent battlefield. We also unpack the hard math behind “arrow vs arrow” economics and what that means for sustainable deterrence.

From there, we zoom out to NATO’s Eastern Flank Deterrence Initiative and the urgent need for allies to take ownership with concrete regional planning, exercises, and capabilities. Andrew connects that to a bigger US problem: a crisis of simultaneity across Europe, the Indo-Pacific, the Middle East, and Korea, at a time when force structure and supply chains are stretched thin. We close with a plainspoken answer to the question many Americans ask: why should anyone in a town far from Europe care about Poland, Finland, or the Baltics? Because Europe and Eurasia shape US prosperity, shipping lanes, and homeland security, and because strong alliances are how democracies avoid fighting alone.

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Transcript

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Summer Hiatus And Season Return

Michele McAloon 0:09

You're listening to Cross Word where where cultural clues lead to the truth of the word. And my name is Michele McAloon. Hi guys, I'm back from my summer hiatus. Took a couple weeks off to do what I need to do in the summertime. So hopefully you guys have had a great summer. Hopefully it's been a good reading summer, a lot of fun fiction. Now let's get back to some great nonfiction. We have some great books coming up this season, some really good books coming out. I'm starting this series off with Andrew Michta, Professor Andrew Michta from University of Florida, to talk about the Ukrainian war because it did not go away over the summer. All right, thanks for listening. And you can find me on my website at bookclues.com. Let me know if you want me to interview an author. I've had a couple people reach out, and a couple of those authors are coming forward now. All right. Thank you. God bless. Happy listening.

Introducing Strategist Andrew Mikta

Michele McAloon 1:05

Okay, folks, we have the rare opportunity to talk with a gentleman who really is a, I mean, he is an academic, but more importantly, he is probably one of the premier European strategists or world strategists in the U.S. today. And this is Andrew Michta. He's a professor of strategic studies at the Hamilton School, the wonderful new college in the University of Florida. Before joining Hamilton, Professor Mikta was a senior fellow with the Geostrategy Initiative in the Atlantic Council Scokrops Center, where I met Professor Michta. He was a dean of the College of International and Security Studies at the George C. Marshall's European Center for Security Studies. This was a couple years ago. He holds a PhD in international relations from the John Hopkins University. Although he is born in Poland, he is definitely an American by scholarship, choice, and citizenship. Dr. Andrew Michta, it is a real pleasure to have you on. If you will, give us what is, and you just came back from Europe after being there for I think two to three months. Give us the strategic picture of Europe right now.

Europe’s Defense Reality Check

Dr Andrew Michta 2:22

Well, first of all, Michele, thank you for having me, and thank you to your audience for taking the time to listen to me. In a nutshell, you know, after these three months, and I've been going back and forth for the last 25 years, really since communism has ended. As you know, I was posted for the DOD in Germany for altogether 12 years. Europe is unprepared, disarmed, talking about rebuilding its defense industrial base, talking about resourcing the NATO alliance. Finally, as you recall for years, every president that I remember since the end of the Cold War would tell the Europeans to rearm, rearm, rearm. And it always fell on deaf ears. Finally, with Trump, there is a sense of urgency because I think he struck fear that the American security guarantees may actually dissolve. But that is too late. I fear it is too little in the sense that it will take Europe about a decade to rebuild the defense industrial base. I'll give you a couple of numbers here to give you a sense of where we are. Germany, you know, during the Cold War, the most important part of the conventional deterrence force in Europe is just a pale shadow of what the Bundeswehr used to represent. You know, they may have about, I don't know, 500 tanks. Half of them may be drivable. Their production capacity is extremely low. They're only now getting funded, but the contracting process in Germany is also so elaborate and so, quite frankly, convoluted that it takes for a long time for defense contractors to expand productions. Britain on paper has 70,000 soldiers in its army. In reality, it's probably 40,000 capable, plus you add to this 4,500 Gurkhas. The Dutch have no tanks, they're leasing 18 uh Leos from the Germans. The only countries that are armying are the flank countries, especially the Northeast Corridor, the Scandinavians, the Finns, the Bolts, and the Poles. But that's because they feel that threat to be very urgent. What happens with the countries farther away from the flank is that their sense of threat is very, very different. As you move east to west, it changes. When I'm in Berlin, Germany now has buffers in the east. It is talking in terms of trying to find a way to manage the relationship with Russia once again. They tried to do it for 16 years using political and economic tools, and it failed, all blew up in their faces with the second invasion of Ukraine. France is looking south very often. When I'm in Paris, I hear, you know, the border of Europe is in the south, not on the Met, but in the Sahel in Africa. And when I am in Spain and Portugal, look at the current crisis, all they talk about is migration. They have no sense of threat or readiness for any sort of conflict in Central Europe. So NATO has 32 members, including, you know, two in North America, but in reality, it really has in Europe those members that are on the flank focused. And the question is: can we develop a structure that within the NATO alliance would allow the United States to maintain its position in Europe, keep its influence in Europe, and lower the cost, because Europe is part of this larger theater, of this global theater that we have, with four theaters now fracturing and actually threatening to devolve into an all-out systemic conflict.

Tanks Drones And Mobility

Michele McAloon 5:43

Professor Miichta, let me ask you a question. I know they're doing a six-month review, and when I say they, the Department of War is doing a six-month review about troop, about how much involvement, how much they call it burden sharing. My husband calls it burden shedding at this point. Yeah. So not some attractive terms. Couple questions here. All right. Tanks, are they still necessary in a drone war?

Dr Andrew Michta 6:09

Yes, they are, but but we're at a stage in this conflict where military mobility has in effect become borderline impossible because A, you've got a near transparent battlefield that reaches over the entire territory, practically speaking, within the range of your long-range striking capability. That's number one. And number two, because on-man systems, especially swarming, can destroy, you know, armor and infantry and whatever installations you have at a relatively low cost. Let me make a historical comparison. In World War I, the invention of the Maxime gun, the heavy Maxime gun that was used in the trenches, basically ended mobility. I mean, you could set up a field of fire and a wall of lead would pulverize everything that was in front of it. So people dug trenches, the uniforms became tacky colored, dirt colored, you know, everybody was hiding. And this remained until the tank was invented and that restored mobility. What am I driving at? We're in a very similar situation where we need to find a way to restore mobility to combat. And armor will be essential, but you have to be able to protect that armor. What I mean by that, right now we're shooting arrows at arrows, right? Our arrows cost $3 million. Their arrows cost $10,000, so this is unsustainable. Sometimes we shoot at archers if we can locate the source of that. What we need to do is use electromagnetic spectrum, especially large chunks of data movements, to create, in effect, a, I call it a shield that will disable both the onboard communications of the drones and any connectivity they can they can have so that both AI enabled and even those that are operated through through cables become just chunks of metal, and that will restore mobility. Why am I saying this? I do not believe that we will end up in a situation where you can win a war without actually controlling the terrain moving forward, you know, establishes your domination over that domain. Look at the war in Iran. I mean, we we are bombing the daylights out of the Iranians, and yet, until and unless we can actually control terrain, which would be an incredibly costly proposition. We're very much unable to bring this to an end on our terms. So we are at it in a race when it comes to the real revolution in military affairs. Everybody's fascinated with the drones, and I think rightly so because it's a cheap effector. You can kill a lot of equipment and people using an unmanned device, but you still need a way to maneuver and while maneuvering, protect your soldiers because that's the most precious uh uh uh capability that we have. We will get there, and we have an advantage over the Russians and the Chinese. They're linear in a lot of what they do. We would probably work within the you know four to six gigahertz uh spectrum, but uh without going into detail, I think that will be the real breakthrough. Bottom line, you will need armor to reinforce mobility, cease terrain, and win conflict.

Michele McAloon 9:17

Actually, that makes complete sense because you know what, the principles of war don't change with equipment. They really don't. Ever since one tribe came against another tribe back in the Stone Age era, it was about who could hold the ground, who can, who could be the property owner of that ground. And it that doesn't change. Talk to us a little bit about the EFDI.

Eastern Flank Deterrence Initiative

Michele McAloon 9:37

I know it's kind of a wall that they're putting up on, trying to put up on the eastern flank. If you could tell us what those initials stand for and what that is and why that is important for going forward.

Dr Andrew Michta 9:48

It's Eastern Flank Deterrence Initiative. It is an initiative that's largely focusing on the eastern flank. I talked a lot about the Northeast Corridor because I think it it has more purchase with the U.S. administration. If you look at the high north and the northeast, that's part of our hemispheric defense in an extended sense. It's a harder sell when you look south towards the Black Sea. Of course, from the point of view of European security, Romania, Ukraine, these are all critical areas to deter and indeed defeat a Russian invasion. What we're trying to do here is we're trying to create a kind of a three-phase, without going into too much detail, three-phase approach where the alliance on the flank would be able to absorb, then use unmanned systems, network sensors, coordination, systems of systems, if you will, and create conditions limiting the damage to our manpower, create conditions that would allow us then to operate in a counter-offensive measure. What's important here is that this was to be supported largely by U.S. Army, Europe, Africa, but that the Allies were going to take, I said supported, but the Allies were to take ownership of that. And we're in a kind of interesting political moment because what this requires is a lot of activity to create regional security structures underneath the NATO umbrella that we can mesh with the overall operational planning. That requires that the Europeans do something they're not used to doing, which is to take the initiative, start planning, build exercises, go to us with specific proposals, take ownership of their defense. I think that would sell with the Trump administration, and that kind of build into this larger concept of NATO defenses of what needs to happen on the flank. What's the worst case scenario for these countries? If you look at countries like the Baltic states, which are extremely exposed right now, people like Gary Kosparov are actually saying that the Russians will likely try to trigger a breach of their territory sometime soon to create a crisis within NATO. Not just the Baltic states, Finns, Poles, Swedes, Norwegians, the biggest tragedy for them would be if they're left fighting alone in the event the alliance fractures. I don't believe NATO will disintegrate. I think NATO is in the process of rebuilding, what Wes Mitchell calls reconsolidation. But in the event, you always have to have the worst-case scenario, in the event something doesn't work, in the event this differentiated threat perception triggers the lack of consensus within the alliance, then you will have the regional security and defense structures, military capabilities to fight. Otherwise, those countries would be alone. This is one of the most important initiatives that NATO has come up with. It is truly the first practical approach. It's not just talking numbers on defense, percentages. You know, Ukrainians don't shoot, you know, Euros. They shoot missiles. They need ammunition goes for the rest of the Europeans. So this is practical. We're finally moving from the political to the practical.

Michele McAloon 12:56

Okay. So you're talking about the EFDI is actually, so this is a positive point that the Europeans really are kind of leaning forward into this, correct? Absolutely. What you know what has been kind of amazing to me, and something that happened even this past week at Leipzig Airport, they found a Ukrainian, I'm sorry, a Russian drone, Russian armed drone next to a Ukrainian plane. And we've heard of incidents like this in Romania, in Lithuania, in, I believe, Estonia, these incursions of Russia into NATO airspace, and there hasn't been more of a sense of alarm. Has that been surprising to you?

Disbelief And A Four Theater World

Dr Andrew Michta 13:37

Not at all. I actually wrote a piece for the Wall Street Journal about four years ago where I argued that when it comes to Russia and China, because China is also a power in Europe, is it geographically removed, but it is a power in Europe by virtue of its economic and political influence. There's a crisis of disbelief among the European elites. Most of the people in government still kind of cannot wrap their brains around the simple notion of how the world has changed, how dangerous it's become. They're not directly speaking to their citizens to mobilize them, to unify them around defending our democracies. Quite frankly, quite a bit of that is also true about our own country. Oh, six eight, right. I mean, in the United States, we also operate on this la la land when we talk about, you know, yeah, we are the strongest, we're the best. Well, the truth is, look at the size of our joint force. You have the axis of dictatorship, as I call them, which is Iran, North Korea, Russia, and China, right? You have four critical theaters: Europe, Indo-Pacific, the Middle East, which is a subset of the European theater, and then the Korean peninsula, right? Two of those theaters are fracturing. The balances are barely holding. You have a full-scale war in Europe, and now you have a full-scale war in the Middle East, which will, which can expand horizontally at any minute. It actually is really pulling in some Arab participants where we never expected that to happen. If the Chinese decides decide to move and they're building their capabilities at speed and scale, People's Liberation Army alone is 2.5 million. Our joint force altogether is 1.3 million on paper, roughly. We've been spending about 3% of our GDP 3 plus 1, 2, over the course of the post-Cold War era. That's half of what we spent during the Cold War. And at that time, we were ready with the military about twice what we have today in terms of the size to fight two simultaneous conflicts in two major theaters. And from the 1970s on, we were kind of fudging this saying, well, nearly simultaneous. Today we can fight only in one theater and one secondary. We got away with it because we've been sequencing our conflicts during the post-Cold War era. Now we're doing Iraq, then we're doing Libya, then and we were able to control it because the peer adverse adversaries were not really ready. They're not ready. We have a crisis of simultaneity staring us in the face. If you have two simultaneous crises, oh God forbid, four, if the North Koreans move in addition to what's going on in the Middle East and in Europe, and if the Chinese move, we do not have the resources without allies to deal with that. That's why pushing the Europeans to build the core of conventional capabilities in Europe is a 100% number one requirement. This is about the survival of the democratic world.

Michele McAloon 16:29

Well, what's going to get them to do that? Because as you said, they're not doing that yet. You bring up real interesting, you know, folks, go to uh at Andrew Michta to his X site. And you know what? And he's also plugged into a lot of different people, a lot of different thought leaders in the United States right now. Really interesting excite. Why haven't the Europeans stepped up to this yet? And again, this is probably a follow-on to my last question. Again, is it that crisis of disbelief, as you said? Also, our US policy, it's clear they don't understand Europe. It's so clear they don't know, they don't understand Central Europe, they don't understand Eastern Europe. Maybe they go on vacation in France a couple weeks of the year or whatever, but they don't get Europe at all. I've been living in Europe for 30 years. I know Europe. I speak two of Europe's language, I know Europe. They do not get Europe. I can say that. But the other thing is that tension between are we going to do business with Germany or are we going to do business with Poland? Who is going to be the focus of the influence? Because you know what? The Germany or Poland question against Russia is not just a 60-year-old, this is a 200-year-old question. Yeah. I mean, if you really go back to it, this is, I mean, we're talking Napoleonic. We're talking Seven Years' War. So it's been with us a long time. But there's again that tension of is it going to be Germany or Poland that fights against that actually do the powers of Europe coalesce around?

How Washington Misreads Europe

Dr Andrew Michta 17:57

Yeah, look, the reality is that most of our policy elites, especially people who work in in government right now, simply do not understand the countries that they build strategies or operational plans around. But as you've described, somebody goes to Paris and says, I understand Europe. Or they go to Moscow and Petersburg and they say, I've been to Russia. It's the same way if somebody would go to Washington, New York, and San Francisco from Europe and say, United States, because I've been to Washington. No, you don't know the United States. You don't know the culture, you don't know the civilization, the value systems, the nature of our national identity, and the rest. Notice how irrelevant universities have become in this fight, our universities. Because we killed area studies as a pathway to tenure in American universities. During the Cold War, you could become a tenured professor. We had a strain called Soviet East European Studies, which meant you spoke one or two languages from the region. You actually traveled in the Soviet bloc. You learned about the history, the culture. So if some idiot at the State Department would say, Sir, we're going to do this in Bulgaria, and then this Bulgarian democracy will come in Bulgaria. There was always somebody in this room who said, Sir, very fascinating, ain't gonna happen. Let me tell you how things work in Bulgaria. This is their political culture. This is their civilization. Well, people who gave us global war and terror couldn't put a coherent sentence in Arabic together, but we're going to nation build in Afghanistan. There was a 14th-century civilization, 97% illiterate. I mean, what were we smoking? So what I'm driving at is that that we have a situation where most of the American planners operate on legacy assumptions. Go to Rammstein, you're like walking into a shopping mall, launch tool, hospitals. Every colonel who reported to me to work for me in Garmisch, you know, the next day he bought himself a Bavaria Njake, a little hat, went to drink Hellis. You know, there's a connectivity there. They date German women, they marry, they retire, they, you know, there's almost 80 years of that history. Right. The problem is the fact that we have legacy installations in Germany, in Germany, because that was the point of contact. That was where we needed them to make sure the system was relatively stable and deterrence would work. Well, newsflash, NATO in large, the point of contact now is the eastern flank. And Poland today is what West Germany used to be. I had a very funny conversation with a German ambassador when I was in Warsaw who was saying these bases, American bases, are in Germany because we wanted them to be far away from the line of contact. I said, are you joking? They were there. It's interesting. Yeah. Wow. What kind of a historical revisionism is this? I have written, and again, if your audience would like to Google me, I did a piece for the Wall Street Journal several years ago also arguing we need to have our force posture reflect the actual threat line, which means we need at least one heavy brigade either in one of the Baltic states or in Finland, preferably in the Baltic states because they're more vulnerable.

Shifting NATO Posture To The Flank

Dr Andrew Michta 21:13

They're questions of geographic depth. That's a different conversation. Two in Poland, one in Romania. Then you can start building sustainment and support using those legacy installations in Germany, moving munitions and fuel and all of that closer in the eastern parts of Germany. Poland needs to build this central communication airport that they've been debating now for 10 years, not because they need to develop economically. That's very important, I agree. But they need north south mobility, which is nonexistent. Most of the infrastructure in Europe ran east west, not north south. We only have Via Baltica and via Krapatia. I'll give an example. Finland alone is 830 miles of new border that NATO has to defend. Incredible. Right. It's had all of this. So we need to have a force posture that's focusing on Poland, that puts permanent installations on the flank in the countries that I mentioned. If we need to reduce, we need to move some of our troops there. We need to end this rotational stuff that, you know, permanent present rotational system, whatever. It's more costly. It hurts military families who, you know, they want to serve with their families, have their children at the normal existence that they get in Germany and other places. And, you know, all of this requires understanding one fundamental thing, and this is the most important point. Alliances are built around shared threats, which generate then shared interests. Shared values reinforce them, but they're not the sine qua non of the whole thing. We were allies with the Soviet Union in the Second World War. I would submit to you, we had very little in common with the Russians of the Soviet era, and we still had very little in common, if anything, with them today. So the reason why you have this crisis of disbelief is that the security optics in Europe is regionalized. During the Cold War, if you were in Spain or in France or even in neutral Sweden, if the balloon went up and the Warsaw Pact attacked NATO, you were in the same boat. It didn't matter. This would be nuclear wasteland war on a massive scale like you haven't imagined. Today, because of the relative weakness of Russia, so to speak, the Soviet Union is over 300 million. This is, you know, 140 million people. The threat is existential for the countries on the flank, but it is not existential for Germany. Germany is negotiating with the Russians, trying to reach some sort of emotus vivendi. I actually wrote a piece two weeks before the invasion in 2022, the second attack on Ukraine from Putin, that in fact we always misunderstand Russian-German relations because we have only the vision of the 20th century competition for empire in Eastern Europe. Whereas if you go back to the unification of Germany under the Prussians, Germany always leaned on Russia to compete against France and England. And what I would submit to you is that what Putin was offering was at Bismarck in reverse, a spheres of influence deal. He wanted to go, Lavra was talking about going back to 1997, which means pre-NATO enlargement, which means Americans out of Central Europe, and then Berlin and Moscow would cut a deal about how, you know, this whole system would work. It doesn't mean that these countries outside of Ukraine and Belarus, because Russia controls Belarus already. They've integrated their military for all practical purposes with their own command and control system. Lukashenko is struggling, you know, traveling to Beijing, trying to get some wiggle room, but Lukashenko knows that he's basically inside the Russian sphere. Ukraine is the decisive one. That's the core of the Eastern Empire of the Russians. And then the question would be: to what extent the countries on the flank that are now in NATO would lose their sovereignty? How much of their sovereignty would they lose? Would the Russians then dictate, say, to the Finns or the Poles or the Swedes or the Romanians, this is your energy policy, you're going to buy energy from us. This is going to be a military and defense policy. It's basically the loss of sovereignty, the loss of democracy, loss of freedom. The reason it didn't work is because the Ukrainians stood up and fought. And because she didn't get on that plane and didn't leave, as those geniuses at the State Department were trying to, you know, convince him to do. Had he left Kiev, everything would have imploded. So Ukraine has forced the Europeans to start coming to terms with the nature of the Russian threat. And that threat is existential. It is not about this or that region. President Trump, when he talks about, well, you know, we have to negotiate a deal. How much of Donbass are he going to give? How much Putin is not fighting a war over territory. He's fighting a civilizational war against the West. I am watching a lot of Russian media. It's damaging my health, but I do this professionally. And I can tell you he's fighting NATO. He's fighting the United States. He knows that if he cuts a deal and his soldiers come back, he's going to develop a nine millimeter headache from his own goons. He knows that he's fighting for his own political survival and for the survival of this top-down form of governance that he restored in Russia. And that had Ukraine defeated them in 2022 during that first offensive, I will say it, even though it's painful to say, cowardice in our cards, because we didn't give the Ukrainians the weapons that they needed. Had we given them the weapons in that first offensive, they would have broken the Russian military. The Russians had no leadership, no logistics, and most of all, they didn't have any defenses. And when we gave them the time to build those up, they had traded that first army that I worked with for seven years. You know, General Dayton was an advisor to the nation.

Michele McAloon 26:56

Well, I tell you, I, you know, Ukraine is brilliant. And this is the first time that I thought maybe this is uh bombing wildberries. I mean, can you imagine we're sitting in the United States and you bomb out Amazon centers? Can you imagine the dis you know what people will pay whatever it is for gas, but if you can't get your next day delivery from Amazon, and folks, if you don't know what wildberries are, wildberries are their, it's their Amazon-like distribution center. As a matter of fact, they're bombing them so bad that they're trying to move into Kazakhstan, I think, and to Ostanach, Kazakhstan, which is in the middle of Siberia to try to rebuild. And I think two more were just hit last night. So Ukraine has just been absolutely brilliant. I'm gonna ask you the old tired question, Professor.

Why Americans Should Care

Michele McAloon 27:40

My hometown's Fairhope, Alabama, and I'm worried about my trash, and I'm worried about my post office and my school board. Why do I care what happens on the eastern flank of Europe?

Dr Andrew Michta 27:51

Well, because it is about the future of our country. It is about our prosperity, our homeland security. Tragedy of the last 30 years is that our policy elites have become so disconnected from the electorate, like you're just describing. We use normative, values-based language. We're defending the rules-based international order. If I went to your high school friends in Alabama and I said, pay your taxes because you're defending the rules-based international order, what do you think they would say to me? You know, are you drunk? What are you smoking? Do you want to bullet? That's what they'd say to you. Absolutely. But the reality is, if you look at the map of the United States, every nation lives in a neighborhood, and that the size of that neighborhood and how secure this neighborhood is, I'm talking geopolitical terms, depends on your economic power, population resources, the military you can generate. Certain attributes of warfare are constant. They have not changed. We used to throw spears, now we throw a missile. It's the same kinetic principle. We used to, you know, march to, the Romans would march to hold terrain. We now drive or use different airplanes to get to places, but it's still about the constants of warfare. The United States lives in a truly blessed geopolitical, geostrategic environment. Look at our map. Look at the map of the hemisphere, the kind of map you remember from high school, before it became politically incorrect. Right. We're in the middle because we're the most important. And you look at where American deployments are in Europe and in Asia, and you draw circles around the North Pacific, North Atlantic and the Pacific, these are the internal waterways of the United States controlled by the U.S. Navy. This is what gives us access to the world's resources. This is what insulates our homeland, allows us to fight our wars out there, not on our territory. Since the British burned the White House, you know, we did it to ourselves with the Civil War, but that's a different conversation altogether. Foreign aggression, we deter and fight elsewhere. We protect the homeland. That's why what's happening in Europe and what's happening in Eurasia overall means the future of American power, American prosperity, and American security. We talk about Woodrow Wilson. I just taught a seminar on statecraft last semester, and I told my students, look, what's your image of Woodrow Wilson? Oh, mate, world safe for democracy, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah. So I said, you have this image of the idealist, you know, par excellence. Why did he join the First World War? For the same geopolitical reason, you could not allow one country to dominate Europe and the Eurasian mass because it would lock us into our hemisphere, it would make us into a once again regional power. It would undo everything that generations of Americans achieved in terms of our ability to grow, our ability to explore, to trade, to prosper. The same reason why FDR said Europe first, even though it was the Japanese in Asia who attacked us. And it was why we stayed in Europe during the Cold War when we realized that we fought one power that was trying to dominate Europe and Eurasia. And then our ally from that war, the Soviets, were poised to do exactly the same thing in 1945. So we stay. All of a sudden, since 2011, when Barack Obama, for the first time started talking about pivot to Asia, right, which to me is the complete lack of understanding of the fundamentals of geostrategy, the Pacific and the Atlantic are not an either-or proposition. They're part of the same problem set. It's not either-or. But what's been happening is that since 2011, in DC, inside the belt where you have a cohort of people who have built their creds and their careers on basically arguing we can come up with a political sleight of hand and we can spend half of what we should be spending on defense and have half the size of the military that we should have. And, you know, we will pivot to Asia and leave Europe to the fat Europeans, and then we'll have to deal with it. Well, you know, the enemy gets a vote. We may be trying to talk 15 times about pivoting. Look at the national security strategy that the administration just published. Four priorities: hemisphere, Indo-Pacific, Europe, the Middle East. Where are we fighting? In the priority number four? Right, yeah, yeah, no kidding. Yeah. So building all these strategies. I believe if the United States loses Europe, it will lose Asia. But if it loses Asia, it retains Europe, it will regain Asia because we have six allies in the Indo-Pacific. We've got 30 allies in Europe. We've got an overlaying bureaucratic institutionalized structure in place. We have bases that allow us to project power into the Middle East. President Trump would not be able to run the Epic Fury campaign if he didn't have NATO bases, American bases in Europe from which we can fly, refuel, and whatnot.

Michele McAloon 32:49

Yeah, Ramstein, an hour away from here. Yeah.

Dr Andrew Michta 32:52

You know, this whole conversation that I hear in Washington, quite frankly, this is to me lacking reality check if you look at what's happening. We are in an existential struggle with the Chinese. We are faced with a quintessentially revisionist power in the form of the Russian Federation. And we have two of their allies who are doing everything to support them. Russia and China are on polar opposites when it comes to their cultures and the extent of racism vis-a-vis the Chinese I saw in Russia. All of that is true. But this is an alliance built on shared threat perceptions and interests. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. They want to destroy the US-led international order and replace it with their own.

Supply Chains Reshoring And Power

Dr Andrew Michta 33:37

We should shed some of the old concepts about, oh, neoliberal market economy, free trade. There is no such thing as free trade if there is no enforcement mechanism when the Chinese government puts a thumb on the scale, radically concentrates, you know, the supply chain networks, and we now become dependent on China for 80% of our medicines. You want to go to war with a country. This is unreal. We need to reshore, restore our ability to make steel, make products, make machines, and then we will be able to defend ourselves and our allies. Otherwise, this is all, you know, pipe dream.

Michele McAloon 34:15

Absolutely. And since you're sitting in the classical school at the at Hamilton College, I would encourage people, if you understand Putin, then you need to go back to the Treaty of Versailles in 1815. You need to go to 1871 and understand the German Franco War. You need to go to 1917, Woodrow Wilson and the coming out of World War I. Then, you know what? You might understand Putin. You might understand where we are today. It's reading and study to understand these bigger pictures and much of what you are talking about. Professor Mikta, I know you are a busy man. I won't take any more of your time. Do you have any final thoughts or anything for the audience?

Mobilizing Democracies Final Charge

Dr Andrew Michta 34:58

Yes, the most important thing is to talk to your family, talk to your friends, talk to your representatives, anybody that you know, and ask questions about what this world really looks like. How much time do we have while our adversaries are getting ready to go to war against us? Quite frankly, we are not in a hybrid conflict, which you described as the drones that show up. Rocket just flew into Poland, landed in the middle of nowhere. Russian missile, right? Cruise missile that came in. We're in a phase zero of this conflict. Our adversaries are shaping the terrain. They're using propaganda, social media, internet, elite capture, money, bribery, everything they can get in order to create advantageous conditions to them. I believe democracies are unbeatable, Michele, but they have to be mobilized. Free people have to understand, and that's the leader's role. Level with the American public, level with the Europeans, tell them what the situation looks like, and then we will step up. And I will put my money on free people any day.

Michele McAloon 36:03

Absolutely. Free, you know what, free people, free markets, free property. Yeah, I really believe that. I really do. You know what? And that's where human dignity lies. It's not in socialism, it's not in communism, it's not in all the other garbage out there. It is actually in a liberal democracy. Professor Michta. Guys, go on his ex account. It's well worth your time. It's well worth looking at some of the thought leaders of what they are talking about, and it's really important. So, Andrew Mikta, thank you.

Dr Andrew Michta 36:31

Thank you, Michele. Thank you. All of you next to the body.