“We’re going to war in the South China Sea in five to 10 years. There’s no doubt about that.”
Steve Bannon




Trump’s Military Ambition: Raw Power as a Means and an End




WASHINGTON — President Trump’s vision of American power, something of a mystery during the campaign, has come into new focus after a week of speeches and budget plans hinting at his ambitions for the military.

They reveal a president fascinated with raw military might, which he sees as synonymous with America’s standing in the world and as a tool to coerce powerful rivals, such as China and Iran, which appear to be his primary concern.

He also appears little-focused on the details of America’s continuing wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria and globally against Al Qaeda. None of those missions will be resolved by the new aircraft carriers Mr. Trump has promised, and generals warn that they will be set back by his proposals to slash funding for diplomacy and aid.

This may not necessarily be an oversight on Mr. Trump’s part, analysts suggest, but rather flow from a nationalistic worldview that is unfamiliar today but dominated the geopolitics of the 19th and early 20th centuries.

He has portrayed the military’s primary role as winning battles, and winning battles as sufficient for winning wars — two ideas out of favor since at least the Vietnam War. Ever since then, most generals have emphasized that war is driven by political conflicts that can rarely be resolved through force alone.

“We will give our military the tools you need to prevent war and, if required, to fight war and only do one thing. You know what that is? Win. Win,” Mr. Trump said this week.

It is perhaps early to say whether his views cohere into a single Trump doctrine. But they suggest a pursuit of policies that seem less suited to any particular strategy or conflict than to a view of military power as its own end.

An Older Way of War

Mr. Trump has mostly expressed his military thinking through calls to build up major weapons systems, such as aircraft carriers and nuclear weapons, designed to fight major wars.

Michael C. Horowitz, a University of Pennsylvania political scientist, said, “That does mean a military force more optimized for potential conflict with China, with Iran and, ironically, with Russia.”

Every president has worked to retain military superiority over major adversaries. But Mr. Trump is unusually single-minded in his focus on preparing for great power conflict, which the world has averted since World War II.

This echoes the beliefs of Stephen K. Bannon, a senior adviser whose nationalist ideology traditionally sees great power conflict as inevitable.

“We’re going to war in the South China Sea in five to 10 years,” Mr. Bannon said in a March 2016 radio broadcast. “There’s no doubt about that.”

When Mr. Trump said this week that he would equip the Navy to “win” a war, he probably sought only to demonstrate his faith in the military. But the comment has deepened the impression that Mr. Trump may consider modern great power conflict to be winnable, an idea that has been out of favor since the first years of the Cold War, when nuclear deterrence made it unthinkable.

Mr. Trump’s focus on great power conflict and military might may come quite literally at the expense of unconventional wars, which the United States is still fighting in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

To fund his military expansion, Mr. Trump has asked to cut billions that would probably come out of State Department and foreign aid programs. This would gut American strategy in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, which relies on diplomacy and political efforts such as building schools and training police forces.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/03/world/americas/donald-trump-us-military.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0

Last edited by Goose (3/04/2017 7:27 pm)