Russia is beating us in Ukraine. China’s Navy outnumbers the US. The Army is collapsing – and the Air Force is falling from the sky. So, as Biden inexplicably CUTS defense budgets, ANDREW NEIL blasts: Does he have a death wish?

From the very beginning of his State of the Union address last week, President Biden positioned himself as a wartime president.

He presented himself as the champion of freedom and democracy threatened around the world by autocrats on the march — a clear dividing line from his opponent Donald Trump, who, Biden claimed with some justification, was more likely to align himself with these same autocrats to reconcile. .

A turbulent affair, about which there is much to say.

It is all the more remarkable that within days the Biden administration drew up defense spending plans with all the hallmarks of a peace president who no longer believes that the US military needs to be a priority.

The autocrats must be both baffled and amused. The rest of us should be scared and angry.

Biden proposes that defense spending should increase to $895 billion in the next financial year (2025) – an increase of just 1 percent.

But even that meager additional spending includes money that the Energy Department can spend on matters related to national security. Take that away and next year’s military budget will be closer to $850 billion – a decline in defense spending in real terms, taking inflation into account.

Yet Biden said he saw himself in the same position as the great President Roosevelt who addressed Congress in January 1941, after Hitler’s armies had conquered most of continental Europe and Britain stood alone against the Nazi menace.

Quoting FDR, he said that March 2024 was also “no ordinary moment” and that “Europe is once again in danger.” The free world is in danger.’

How he combines such rousing rhetoric with a budget that shortchanges the US military is beyond me.

I’m pretty sure Roosevelt didn’t cut the defense budget after his warnings about the danger to freedom and democracy all those years ago.

Of course, Congress will have its say on the president’s plans, which will not survive scrutiny on Capitol Hill.

And we shouldn’t forget that the debt-limit deal the White House agreed to with former Republican Chairman Kevin McCarthy put a cap on spending. For all their shouting this week, Republicans were complicit in this budget.

Still, it illustrates the president’s priorities and how he sees military spending over the rest of the decade. It’s not a pretty sight.

Under the Biden plan, defense spending would amount to just over 3 percent of GDP next year – the lowest share of GDP since the end of the Cold War more than three decades ago.

According to official forecasts, that figure would continue to fall over the next decade, reaching a terrifying 2.4 percent of GDP in 2034.

Of course, Biden and his number crunchers have no more idea of ​​what defense spending will actually be in ten years than Jimmy Kimmel has of what a decent joke is on Oscar night. But the indicated direction of travel is worrying.

There is no doubt that the autocrats in Moscow, Beijing, Tehran and Pyongyang are paying serious attention to this.

They already see a president they consider senile and incompetent, who simply does not label him as “leader of the free world.”

Now they will also mark the gap between his harsh rhetoric and his inability to put his money where his mouth is. They can only be encouraged. The prospects for democracy are grimmer than they have been for decades.

The defense is already under pressure under Biden. His latest budget simply offers more of the same.

The US Navy, already half the size it was at the height of the Cold War, is expected to shrink to 286 ships next year (from the current 296).

China’s naval fleet is already larger than America’s and is expected to be well over 400 strong before the decade is out – a formidable armada that will undoubtedly be used to intimidate Taiwan.

The US Air Force has lost 130 airframes in recent years, production of the F15EX fighter jet has ceased and modernization of the newer F-35s is underfunded.

The US military is woefully short of manpower and supplies, including ammunition supplies.

It’s not like there isn’t extra money around. The Biden budget will add more than a trillion to federal spending and take it to a record, non-pandemic share of peacetime GDP (25 percent).

The budget deficit will remain enormous as far as the eye can see and the national debt will continue to rise.

There is a lot more money for new grants and other federal spending. Just virtually nothing for defense.

Americans have rightly criticized Europeans for putting welfare above military needs. But under Biden, America is doing the same – just another example of how he is “Europeanizing” the US.

Yet the Russian economy is now on a total war footing, able to supply its invaders in Ukraine on a greater scale than we do Kiev, and while America is struggling to find an extra 1 percent for its military, China has just increased more than 7 percent for its armed forces.

Chinese defense spending is regularly estimated at more than $200 billion, a fraction of America’s.

But recent studies attempting to compare one with the other suggest that, in terms of domestic purchasing power, China is already spending the equivalent of $700 billion on defense – not far behind the US $800 billion.

On current trends, China could spend more on defense before the end of the decade. If that doesn’t focus the minds on both sides of the aisle in Washington DC, I don’t know what will.

It is not just America that is failing to take advantage of this situation.

Last week the British government announced its budget for the new financial year. There was not a penny extra for defence, even though the British army was creaking around the edges on so many fronts.

The German government, which promised a massive rearmament program in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, has since adopted the Biden playbook: talk tough, do very little.

In an eerie replay of the 1930s, the world’s democracies are being failed by their leaders, who seem unable to rise to meet the threats of a dangerous time, a time that is growing more dangerous by the month .

But what is especially depressing about America is that Trump, the alternative to Biden, has said he does not care if Moscow invades NATO members who do not spend enough on defense and who, according to his new best friend Victor Orban – the Hungarian man who visited him at Mar-a-Lago this week reportedly cut off aid to Ukraine the day he entered the Oval Office.

His Republican acolytes in Congress are already doing everything they can to thwart Biden’s efforts to continue supplying Ukraine with vital military aid.

No wonder the autocrats think their time has come.

I still have enough faith in democracy to believe that America and its allies will ultimately do the right thing. But we’re running out of time – and the longer we delay, the more expensive it will become in terms of blood and treasure.