{"id":15535,"date":"2018-01-30T09:42:06","date_gmt":"2018-01-30T04:42:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/jwt2015\/?p=15535"},"modified":"2018-01-30T09:42:06","modified_gmt":"2018-01-30T04:42:06","slug":"trump-security-strategy-a-study-in-contrasts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/studykit\/currentaffairs\/daily-articles\/trump-security-strategy-a-study-in-contrasts\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump Security Strategy a Study in Contrasts"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Trump<\/a><\/p>\n

To the extent that the National Security Strategy (NSS) matters\u2014and it is not clear that it matters much\u2014it is not because it constrains the choices that policymakers can make in the future. No senior decision-maker has ever confronted a crisis by looking at a copy of the NSS to find out what to do. NSSs are not even important in guiding spending and procurement decisions; they make no attempt, as real strategy documents should, to reconcile ends and means\u2014to suggest which programs should be funded and which defunded to achieve the results desired. NSSs are really wish lists of capabilities and laundry lists of threats. They are worth paying attention to mainly because they represent an attempt by an administration to bring some intellectual coherence to the day-to-day press of decisions on myriad matters.<\/span><\/p>\n

What, then, does Donald J. Trump\u2019s NSS\u2014the first ever delivered in a president\u2019s first year\u2014say about the Trump administration? It reveals an administration in conflict between the isolationist, protectionist impulses of the president and the more traditional, internationalist beliefs of his senior aides.<\/p>\n

The principal authors of this NSS are the national security advisor, Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster, and senior National Security Council staffer Nadia Schadlow\u2014both conservatives who could easily have staffed a Jeb Bush administration. They have tried to smuggle as much of their own foreign policy thinking into the NSS as possible while still paying ritual obeisance to Trump\u2019s America First rhetoric. Remarkably, given that this is the administration of a president at odds with decades of foreign policy thinking, much of the NSS reads as if it could have been issued by any of Trump\u2019s immediate predecessors. There is nothing novel about a president pledging to combat the spread of weapons of mass destruction, defeat terrorists, dismantle transnational criminal organizations, strengthen cyber capabilities, or promote \u201cAmerican prosperity.\u201d<\/p>\n

There are four principal differences between the Trump NSS and those of Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama:<\/p>\n

The 2017 NSS makes no mention of global warming as a national security threat; Obama\u2019s 2015 NSS emphasized it as a \u201ctop strategic risk.\u201d Instead of calling for U.S. leadership to fight global warming, Trump\u2019s NSS says, \u201cU.S. leadership is indispensable to countering an anti-growth energy agenda that is detrimental to U.S. economic and energy security interests.\u201d This is the rationale for Trump pulling out of the Paris climate accords.<\/p>\n

The 2017 NSS makes no pledge to expand free trade, unlike Bush\u2019s 2006 NSS, which promised to \u201cignite a new era of global economic growth through free markets and free trade\u201d or Obama\u2019s 2015 NSS, which pledged to \u201cadvance high-standard trade deals.\u201d The discussion of trade in Trump\u2019s NSS is wholly negative, with its authors complaining that other countries have \u201cexploited the international institutions we helped to build.\u201d It continues: \u201cThey subsidized their industries, forced technology transfers, and distorted markets. These and other actions challenged America\u2019s economic security.\u201d Although the Trump NSS does make a tenuous commitment, deep in the document, to \u201cpursue bilateral trade and investment agreements with countries that commit to fair and reciprocal trade,\u201d its main thrust is to \u201ccounter unfair trade practices\u201d through retaliatory mechanisms.<\/p>\n

The 2017 NSS makes no mention of democracy promotion, unlike Bush\u2019s 2006 NSS, whose first pledge was to \u201cchampion aspirations for human dignity,\u201d or Obama\u2019s 2015 version, which stated upfront that \u201cdefending democracy and human rights is related to every enduring national interest,\u201d this one relegates language about \u201cAmerican values\u201d (which could actually be seen as universal values) to a small subsection near the end. It suggests that the United States will promote those values by example rather than by action: \u201cAmerica\u2019s commitment to liberty, democracy, and the rule of law serves as an inspiration for those living under tyranny,\u201d the NSS says, while making clear that \u201cwe are not going to impose our values on others.\u201d This echoes John Quincy Adam\u2019s famous quote, beloved by generations of isolationists, about the United State: \u201cShe is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.\u201d<\/p>\n

This NSS places scant importance on international cooperation. Instead, it emphasizes protecting \u201cAmerican sovereignty\u201d from supposed threats. As the introduction states, \u201cWe will pursue this beautiful vision\u2014a world of strong, sovereign, and independent nations, each with its own cultures and dreams, thriving side-by-side in prosperity, freedom, and peace\u2014throughout the upcoming year.\u201d This may be a \u201cbeautiful vision,\u201d but it is a very different vision from the one propounded in Obama\u2019s 2015 NSS, which pledged \u201ca rules-based international order advanced by U.S. leadership that promotes peace, security, and opportunity through stronger cooperation to meet global challenges.\u201d Trump favors competition, not cooperation, and the NSS reflects that preference.<\/p>\n

But the problems with this NSS go far beyond the incremental differences between this document and preceding ones. Those tensions are actually less significant than the tensions between what this NSS states and what the president says and does. A far-from-comprehensive list of the clashes between Trump and his own NSS would include the following:<\/p>\n

The NSS praises international institutions built by the United States: \u201cAmerican political, business, and military leaders worked together with their counterparts in Europe and Asia to shape the post-war order through the United Nations, the Marshall Plan, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and other institutions designed to advance our shared interests of security, freedom, and peace. We recognize the invaluable advantages that our strong relationships with allies and partners deliver.\u201d Trump, by contrast, incessantly denigrates the World Trade Organization, United Nations, NATO, and other international bodies. As recently as December 9, in Pensacola, Trump sideswiped NATO allies\u2014Germany in particular\u2014that, he claims, do not pay the United States enough for their protection. He suggested that unless they \u201csend a little of that cash flow our way,\u201d the United States may not protect them.<\/p>\n

The NSS speaks of Russia as a dangerous adversary that must be countered: \u201cThe combination of Russian ambition and growing military capabilities creates an unstable frontier in Eurasia, where the risk of conflict due to Russian miscalculation is growing.\u201d The NSS even calls out Russia for meddling in other countries\u2019 politics through \u201cmodernized forms of subversive tactics.\u201d Trump, by contrast, refuses to say a single negative thing about Vladimir Putin or acknowledge that Putin used \u201csubversive tactics\u201d to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Indeed, in the days before the NSS was released, Trump had two friendly phone calls with Putin in which the two men, judging by the readouts issued by their respective governments, showered each other with praise.<\/p>\n

The NSS says: \u201cDiplomacy is indispensable to identify and implement solutions to conflicts in unstable regions of the world short of military involvement.\u201d It adds: \u201cWe must upgrade our diplomatic capabilities to compete in the current environment and to embrace a competitive mindset.\u201d Trump\u2019 secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, by contrast, plans to cut the State Department budget by a third, and his attempts to negotiate with North Korea have been slapped down by Trump himself.<\/p>\n

The NSS includes a coded call for nation-building, though it does not use that neuralgic term. It says that \u201csome of the greatest triumphs of American statecraft resulted from helping fragile and developing countries become successful societies,\u201d and it pledges to \u201cassist fragile states to prevent threats to the U.S. homeland.\u201d Trump, by contrast, invariably bashes foreign aid and nation-building as boondoggles. In fact, just minutes after the NSS was released, he tweeted his umpteenth repudiation of nation-building: \u201cThe train accident that just occurred in DuPont, WA shows more than ever why our soon to be submitted infrastructure plan must be approved quickly. Seven trillion dollars spent in the Middle East while our roads, bridges, tunnels, railways (and more) crumble! Not for long!\u201d<\/p>\n

The NSS says, \u201cThe national debt, now over $20 trillion, presents a grave threat to America\u2019s long-term prosperity and, by extension, our national security.\u201d By contrast, Trump has eagerly endorsed a tax bill that will add at least $1 trillion to the debt, and he has opposed cuts to entitlement programs, the bigger drivers of the deficit.<\/p>\n

The NSS, as written, is mostly fine. In many places it is better than fine, an eloquent summation of the United States\u2019 role in the world and a principled exposition of what should be done to defend it. But it suffers from a debilitating credibility gap insofar as much of what it says is at odds with what the president himself believes. It might best be understood as a cri du coeur from inside the Deep State signaling to the outside world that Trumpian thinking has not entirely taken over the U.S. government, and that some influential public servants remain dedicated to the vision of U.S. global leadership enunciated after World War II.<\/p>\n

In fairness, the actual policies of the administration have often been closer to those propounded in the NSS than the ones that Trump seems to believe in. That is a tribute to the success that McMaster and other officials have had in preventing the president from acting on some of his most extreme instincts. But the very tension between the president and his advisors adds an element of unpredictability to U.S. decision-making, because on every issue it remains unclear if the president will act in accordance with his America First impulses or defer to the internationalist vision of his aides. It is good to have that vision laid out and at least ostensibly endorsed by the president, but it is doubtful that, at the end of the day, such fine statements will prevent Trump from doing what he wants to do.<\/p>\n

By: Max Boot
\nSource: https:\/\/www.cfr.org<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

To the extent that the National Security Strategy (NSS) matters\u2014and it is not clear that it matters much\u2014it is not because it constrains the choices that policymakers can make in the future. No senior decision-maker has ever confronted a crisis by looking at a copy of the NSS to find out what to do. NSSs …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":149,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5285],"tags":[257,8438,469,4445,9482,203],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15535"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/149"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15535"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15535\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15535"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15535"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15535"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}