Inside the Ring

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Threats to America

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich warned in a major speech yesterday that the United States is facing the danger of defeat today similar to Britain in the early days of World War II.

U.S. military, economic and intellectual power is eroding as threats are growing and both Republican and Democrat leaders are deficient, Mr. Gingrich said. The five "greatest strategic threats" to the country, he said, are China's rise, a resurgent autocratic Russia, radical Islam, rogue regimes seeking weapons of mass murder, and the growth of an anti-democratic system led by a "bureaucratic international elite."

The U.S. needs a grand strategy to confront and outmatch all five threats, but noted that "current American efforts are too small, too unimaginative, and too timid."

"Faced with these large, systemic challenges, the current generation of leaders in both parties are refusing to deal with the scale and the urgency required for continued American prosperity, safety, and freedom," Mr. Gingrich told the Business Executives for National Security.

Ideologically, "we find ourselves crippled by political correctness and incapable of having honest conversations about meeting the threats around the world," Mr. Gingrich said.

Recent guidelines by the Department of Homeland Security and National Counterterrorism Center instructing government officials not to use "Islamic terms" to describe terrorists is "enormously self-destructive," he said.

"If we cannot have an honest discussion about the nature of the threats against us, we cannot develop strategies to meet those threats," he said. "It is simply suicidal to treat the al Qaeda network as simply 'an illegitimate political organization, both terrorist and criminal' while ignoring the radical religious foundation underpinning this and other groups that constitute an Irreconcilable Wing of Islam. Anyone blind to this should be dismissed from working in national security."

Gates on Iran

Former generals and specialists on Iran reacted harshly yesterday to comments by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates who said the United States should adopt more conciliatory policies toward Iran, including unofficial contacts and talks with the regime led by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — at a time when U.S. troops are dying in Iraq from Iranian-supplied bombs.