“America is straying toward monstrous imprudence,” writes Naval War College strategy professor James Holmes in analyzing the Biden administration’s defense budget request for fiscal year 2025 in an important article in the National Interest. That is because, Holmes explains, “U.S. national purposes and power are on opposite trajectories.” Commitments are outstripping our power to deal with them. The Lippmann Gap has returned.

During World War II, the journalist Walter Lippmann in U.S. Foreign Policy: Shield of the Republic wrote that a successful foreign policy “consists in bringing into balance, with a comfortable surplus of power in reserve, the nation’s commitments and the nation’s power.” Statesmen, Lippmann wrote, must preoccupy themselves with bringing the nation’s “ends and means into balance.” That means looking at both sides of the equation. It also means getting the most out of your means to fit the most crucial ends of policy. Holmes believes that the Biden administration is failing on both sides of the equation. 

First, the means side of the equation. Holmes writes that the budget submitted by the Biden Pentagon would actually cut defense spending when adjusted for inflation. The proposed budget would cut the purchase of F-35 stealth fighters by 18 percent. Even more worrisome, the budget places six warships on order even though 19 warships will be retired. The Biden budget, Holmes explains, “would reduce the U.S. Navy fleet by thirteen hulls at a time when China’s People’s Liberation Army Navy is growing bigger and badder by the day.” And Holmes points out that this would add to China’s numerical lead in warships, which currently stands at about 80 ships (370 for China and 292 for the U.S.). But, as Holmes notes, those total numbers underplay China’s advantage of geographical proximity to the South China Sea and western Pacific, where PLA shore-based weapons (air and rocket forces) can wreak havoc on the portion of the U.S. fleet committed to that region. Under these circumstances, Holmes concludes, the Biden administration’s proposal to reduce U.S. sea power “courts disaster.” 

Holmes also looks at the ends side of the equation. We are currently suffering from deficits as far as the eye can see, yet we are pouring in resources to the Middle East and Ukraine when China and the western Pacific constitutes the greatest threat to American security interests. The Biden administration is not prioritizing the use of limited resources. “Wishful thinking,” Holmes writes, “is strategic malpractice. If a nation has too few resources to achieve goals entertained by the political leadership, it’s best off scaling back the leadership’s goals to something the nation can afford.” Some call this “defeatism.” Lippmann called it prudence. 

Holmes is quick to note that this does not mean we cannot wage what the historian Julian Corbett called “war by contingent,” by which he meant “mounting secondary operations around a foe’s periphery to shape the outcome of a larger armed struggle.” Holmes provides the example, noted by Corbett, of the Duke of Wellington’s efforts against France on the Iberian Peninsula, which helped drain Napoleon’s resources to fight in the principal theater of war. But our strategists and political leaders must always remember that “war by contingent” is not where our main effort must be made. And our main effort is to contain China. Ukraine and the Middle East are peripheral to the main effort. The more resources we commit to those peripheral conflicts, the fewer resources we can devote to the western Pacific. Holmes puts it this way: “Washington needs to get serious about matching ends with means—and turn the politico-military world right-side up again.”