The Biden administration faces challenges from China, the Middle East, and the need to increase the U.S. defense budget.
The new administration faces challenges from China, the Middle East, and the need to increase the U.S. defense budget.
I strongly supported Donald Trump’s reelection, largely on the basis of what he accomplished in national-security affairs. Whatever else Trump is, he’s a disruptive force, and American foreign policy needed disrupting in 2016.
In the two decades before Trump became president, the foreign-policy establishment produced a series of catastrophic mistakes that reduced the United States from a nation in an unparalleled position of security and strength to one beset by threats it was largely unprepared to meet. The American people were well aware of this fact, which was one of the reasons Trump got elected in the first place.
In my last column before the election, I included a list of the biggest blunders committed in the post–Cold War, pre-Trump years. The point is that in foreign policy Trump got a lot of things right that his predecessors had gotten wrong. The things he got right were consequential, and if President-elect Joe Biden wants his foreign policy to succeed, he’s going to have to find a way to continue the progress Trump has made in at least three areas.
China
For almost four decades, the United States facilitated the rise of China, without considering the downside consequences of allowing the Chinese Communist Party to embed its methods and objectives in the global economy and the international system. Our government not only opened the door to the henhouse; it actively empowered the fox who was waiting outside.
As a result, the United States is now confronted by a rising hegemon conducting a comprehensive campaign to steal the world’s wealth, dominate crucial sectors of technology, disrupt the established democracies, corrupt and control much of third-world governments, subvert international institutions, and assert sovereign control over important parts of the global commons.
The Trump administration responded by making great-power competition its strategic priority, energizing the tools of national power, and beginning to build a national-security apparatus that could manage and eventually win the contest with China.
As a matter of vital national interest, the Biden administration simply must sustain that strategy. It can and will adjust tactics and messaging, but the broad strategic direction and energy level must stay the same.
Fortunately, the new administration will have plenty of political space on this issue. Trump’s policy had broad bipartisan support, and most of the people Biden will appoint to national-security posts will come from think tanks and Washington networks that have finally gotten the joke where China is concerned.
My big concern is the president-elect himself. Biden’s comments on China during the campaign were not exactly a model of clarity or resolve, and at this stage of his life and career he may not be adaptable enough to abandon old ways of thinking. Unfortunately, we don’t have years to waste while a new president mounts the learning curve on China.
The Middle EastFor decades, presidents of both parties believed that the only way to make progress on the Israeli–Palestinian issue was direct negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians; as a practical matter, this amounted to pressuring Israel into concessions in order to lure the PLO to the bargaining table. Trump realized that an agreement was impossible because, fundamentally, the Palestinians didn’t want one. So Trump instead supported Israel, reduced its international isolation, and promoted negotiations between Israel and the Gulf states. The result was the historic Abraham Accords.
Biden’s team obviously should want to continue the progress on that front. The problem will be that the linchpin of Trump’s success was his reversal of the Obama policy toward Iran. The Obama administration wanted Iran as a partner; hence the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). The Trump administration recognized that Iran was the primary threat to peace in the region; hence Trump’s withdrawal from the JCPOA and imposition of sanctions against Baghdad that undermined the stability of the regime and constrained its regional ambitions.
It was Trump’s Iranian policy that created a common interest between the United States, Israel, and the Gulf states, and it was that common interest that made the Abraham Accords possible. Biden has promised to return to the JCPOA and the larger Obama-era policy toward Iran. His administration will either have to abandon that promise or find a way to square it with the new coalitions that Trump built and on the basis of which the prospects for Middle Eastern peace are higher than they have been since the end of the Clinton administration.
It won’t be an easy line to walk.
The Armed ForcesI have written often about the disastrous defense sequester, which in the four years before Trump took office cut over $300 billion from defense budgets. Jim Mattis summed up the effect in 2017 when he testified that “early in Trump’s term, he got the sequester lifted and the defense budget increased by $100 billion. As a result, the Pentagon has been able to restore some degree of current readiness while also beginning to recapitalize its inventories and increase the tempo of its advanced weapon programs.”
Both aspects of this agenda are vital. To use the Pentagon’s lexicon, we need both additional “capacity” — numbers of ships, aircraft, etc., and the service personnel to operate them — and better “capability,” the technological advances that when operationalized enhance the lethality and survivability of the forces we do have. If the government had recapitalized its existing inventories as it should have in prior decades, the Defense Department could focus now on capability. But it didn’t, and we must therefore now build both for the near term and the long term as well as sustain current readiness.
This program cannot be accomplished without substantial year-on-year, real-dollar increases in the Pentagon topline budget. Given the hole we have dug for ourselves, success will be difficult even with the money, but it will be impossible without it.
Unfortunately, there is already developing and spreading like a noxious mist through Washington the idea that the defense budget will have to be cut or frozen because the United States is in an “era of fiscal constraint.” Yes, you heard that correctly. Consider that this year a large bipartisan majority in Congress will borrow $3 trillion in response to the pandemic. Consider that in 2018 the Republicans passed a trillion-dollar tax cut. Consider that the last time the Democrats elected a new president, in 2009, they passed an $800 billion stimulus bill, and that this year the Democratic nominee supported a $2 trillion version of the Green New Deal, a public-option health-care plan that would cost $750 billion, and a package of higher-education proposals that would cost at least $750 billion. Yet evidently the plan now is for serious people to say, and expect us to accept without question, that it is impossible to add $60 billion to this year’s defense budget because we are in an “era of fiscal constraint.”
Actually, what we are in is an era of great-power competition, which requires, among other things, great power; and the first index of a nation’s strength is the strength of its armed forces. Right now, in the crucial theaters of competition, the United States is outmanned, outgunned, and outranged, and the situation will only get worse unless the Pentagon builds both capacity and capability as quickly as possible. I invite readers to study this graphic illustration of the balance of power in the Indo-Pacific region, which includes China.
I am confident that the new administration will appoint seasoned and steady professionals to run the Department of Defense. That is a good thing, but those seasoned and steady hands are going to have to scream bloody murder, both within the administration and in Congress, for the funding they need. If they do, they may well get enough money to make their task reasonably possible. If they don’t, they will be committing a blunder equal in its devastating consequences to anything that occurred in the years before Donald Trump brought his disruptive approach to American national security.