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 start of his State of the Union address last week, President Biden positioned himself as a war president.

He posed as the champion of freedom and democracy which are threatened across the globe by autocrats on the march — a clear dividing line with his opponent Donald Trump who, Biden claimed with some justification, has been more inclined to cozy up to these very same autocrats.

Stirring stuff, with much to commend it.

All the more remarkable then that, within days, the Biden administration produced plans for defense spending with all the hallmarks of a peace president who no longer thinks the US military need be a priority.

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

The Biden administration has produced plans for defense spending with all the hallmarks of a peace president who no longer thinks the US military need be a priority. The autocrats must be both baffled and amused. The rest of us should be frightened and angry. (Pictured: Biden and China's President Xi).

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

But even that paltry extra spending includes money for the Energy Department to spend on matters related to national security. Strip that out and the military budget next year will be closer to $850 billion — a fall in defense spending in real terms after accounting for inflation.

Yet Biden said that 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 mainland Europe and Great Britain stood alone against the Nazi peril.

Quoting FDR he said that March 2024 was also 'no ordinary moment' and that once again 'Europe is at risk. The free world is at risk.'

How he squares such soaring rhetoric with a budget which short-changes the US military beats me.

I'm pretty sure Roosevelt didn't go and 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 with former Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy put a limit on spending. For all their shouting this week, the Republicans were complicit in this budget.

Even so, it illustrates the President's priorities and how he sees military spending in the rest of the decade. It is not a pretty sight.

Under the Biden plan, defense spending would be just over 3 percent of GDP next year — the lowest share of GDP since the end of the Cold War over 30 years ago.

On official projections, that figure would continue to fall for the next 10 years, reaching a scary 2.4 percent of GDP by 2034.

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

Be in no doubt that the autocrats in Moscow, Beijing, Tehran and Pyongyang are taking serious notice.

They already see a President who they regard as senile and incompetent, who simply doesn't cut it as 'leader of the free world'.

Now they will also mark the gulf between his tough rhetoric and his failure to put his money where is mouth. They can only be emboldened. The prospects for democracy are grimmer than they have been for decades.

Defense has already been squeezed under Biden. His latest budget just offers more of the same.

The autocrats in Moscow, Beijing, Tehran and Pyongyang are taking serious notice. (Pictured: Putin).

They already see a President who they regard as senile and incompetent, who simply doesn't cut it as 'leader of the free world'.

Now they will also mark the gulf between his tough rhetoric and his failure to put his money where is mouth. They can only be emboldened. The prospects for democracy are grimmer than they have been for decades.

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

The Chinese Naval fleet is already bigger than America's and is on target to be 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 been terminated and the modernisation of the newer F-35s is being underfunded.

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

It's not that there's no extra money around. The Biden budget will add over a trillion to federal spending and take it to a record peacetime, non-pandemic share of GDP (25 percent).

The budget deficit will remain massive for as far as the eye can see and the national debt will continue to balloon.

There's plenty more money for new handouts and other federal spending. Just virtually nothing for defense.

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

Yet the Russian economy is now on a total war footing, able to resupply its invaders in Ukraine at a greater scale than we are resupplying Kyiv and, as America struggles to find an extra 1 percent for its military, China has just announced an increase of over 7 percent for its armed forces.

China's defense spending is regularly put at over $200 billion, a fraction of America's.

But recent studies attempting to compare like with like suggest that, in terms of domestic spending power, China already spends the equivalent of $700 billion on defense — not far behind America's $800-odd billion.

On current trends, China could be spending more on defense before the decade is out. If that doesn't concentrate minds on both sides of the aisle in Washington DC then I don't know what will.

It is not just America which is failing to rise to the occasion.

Last week the British government unveiled its budget for the new financial year. There was not a penny extra for defense, even though the UK military is creaking at the edges on so many fronts.

The German government, which in the aftermath of Russia's invasion of Ukraine promised a massive rearmament program, has since taken a leaf from the Biden playbook: talk tough, do very little.

In an eerie repeat of the 1930s, the world's democracies are being failed by their leaders, who seem incapable of rising to meet the threats of a perilous time, one which gets more dangerous by the month.

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

His Republican acolytes in Congress are already doing all they can to thwart Biden's efforts to keep supplying Ukraine with essential 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, in the end, do the right thing. But we are running out of time — and the longer we delay the more costly it will be in terms of blood and treasure.