Trump just put America on thin ice. And gave our enemies a sledgehammer.
The United States is more vulnerable than ever to surprise attack.
Nine years ago, I helped write Donald Trump’s first National Security Strategy. This weekend, he shredded what was left of it, and he may have invited the next Pearl Harbor in the process.
Writing that document back in 2017 was an awkward assignment from the beginning. For one thing, the president never actually read it. It was ostensibly the master plan for how his administration would conduct itself in the world, and Donald Trump didn’t so much as edit the first page. So since he was incapable of offering up a strategic vision, the strategy document itself described how we hoped Trump would operate, not necessarily how he intended to. His aides couldn’t know his intentions if he didn’t appear to have any — at least not beyond the grievances of a given week.
Still, the strategy said the right things. It pledged that America would remain a champion of liberty, deepen our alliances, and confront the ambitions of rival powers in the most strategically vital places on earth, especially where China, Russia, and North Korea had nefarious plans.
On Taiwan, we committed “to provide for Taiwan’s legitimate defense needs and deter coercion.” On Eastern Europe, we warned that “Russia is using subversive measures to weaken the credibility of America’s commitment” to the continent. On the Korean Peninsula, we vowed to “remain ready to respond with overwhelming force to North Korean aggression.” Those are the words you’d expect from the White House. They were also, at best, the wishful thinking of nervous aides trying to paper over a president who seemed impulsive at beast and, at worst, ready to forsake America’s global responsibilities and cast our lot with a small band of autocratic thugs instead of our fellow democracies.
That’s part of why I quit and wrote A Warning. I wanted Americans to see where Trump was headed, especially on foreign policy and especially in a second term, when all the adults would be gone. I cautioned that a Trump unbound would treat our friends as enemies and our enemies as friends. What’s more, I warned that flipping the script would put the United States in unnecessary mortal peril by exposing us to surprise attack and stripping us of our greatest legacy and strongest protection: leadership of the free world.
It’s happening now. If you want a yardstick to measure how bad it is, just look at each of those same strategic crossroads named in the original Trump national security strategy (again, the one that we wrote and he merely rubber-stamped). The president is abandoning our friends in all the places where we are needed most, and he is leaving behind vacuums to be filled by his dictator buddies.
Start with Korea. On Sunday, Trump ordered the Pentagon to “substantially reduce” our joint military exercises with South Korea, complaining that our ally wouldn’t join his war with Iran and insisting the drills send a signal that is “inappropriate and hostile” to our friends in North Korea, which he called “unthreatening and respectful.” Ah yes, Mr. President, they are so “unthreatening” that during your first term we had to urgently plan for the possibility that the hermit kingdom might launch a nuclear attack on the continental United States because Kim Jong Un was so “respectful.” By the way, Trump announced America’s pull-back from its longtime ally days after North Korea launched a ballistic missile in a show of force against the South.
Then look at what else is happening in the Pacific. This weekend, the Navy pulled the USS George Washington out of Asia to relieve the exhausted USS Abraham Lincoln in the Middle East, leaving the western Pacific without a single American aircraft carrier, while China grows more aggressive toward Taiwan by the month. In fact, Taiwan has been holding emergency drills practicing what to do if Beijing orders an invasion. So why is America pulling back vital resources? Because Trump has no real interest in deterring China, where he has marveled enviously at Xi Jinping’s power and toyed with the idea of a “grand bargain.”
Instead, his ego has America mired in an open-ended war with Iran that is grinding down our ships, draining our missile stockpiles, and running our sailors ragged. So he’s sending more ships into that quagmire. (And Tehran, according to the Wall Street Journal, spent the recent “ceasefire” preparing a wider war, with one regime adviser boasting that “the main war has not yet begun.”)
Finally, take a look at what’s happening in Europe. Satellite imagery revealed this weekend that Russia is building a network of secret drone bases within striking distance of NATO, with storage for a thousand attack drones at a single site. German authorities just found a suspected Russian drone rigged with explosives at the Leipzig airport. And Western planners are quietly admitting they have no real plan for NATO’s nightmare scenario, a coordinated Russian and Chinese strike on two fronts, at the very moment Trump has hollowed out the alliance that exists to prevent such a surprise attack. The response from the White House to these provocations has been near-total silence.
Our enemies are gobsmacked by what’s happening. Under Donald Trump, we’ve walked out onto thin ice and handed our foes a sledgehammer. They must be fist-pumping in foreign briefing rooms.
Strategically, I believe we are in the most perilous hour of the modern era, and it is peril of our own president’s making. Donald Trump’s real National Security Strategy has been to get revenge against countries that criticize him, to advance his own self interests, and to build bridges to dictators with whom he can work once he leaves office. The great dealmaker has sold us out to the most dangerous nations on earth.
Before America entered the Second World War, Winston Churchill wrote something that would come to be viewed as prophecy:
“How heavily do the destinies of this generation hang upon the government and people of the United States… Will the United States throw their weight into the scales of peace and law and freedom while time remains, or will they remain spectators until the disaster has occurred; and then, with infinite cost and labor, build up what need not have been cast down?”
We know the answer our grandparents gave. The question has come around again.
Your friend, in defiance,
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