Rebuilding America First

It says much about the state of America that the fatal train derailment in Tacoma, Washington virtually overshadowed the unveiling of President Donald Trump’s “America First” national security strategy in Washington D.C. Trump opened his speech with condolences to the families of the three people killed and dozens wounded in the Amtrak crash. “It is all the more reason why we must first start by repairing the infrastructure of the United States,” Trump said, referring to the devastating crash.

Indeed, a “complete rebuilding of America’s infrastructure” is a key ingredient of one of his new strategy’s four pillars—“promoting American prosperity.” As Trump spoke, fire fighters in California were battling blazes in Ventura and Santa Barbara. In Atlanta at the world’s busiest airport, hundreds of stranded passengers were struggling to re-schedule flights after a total power outage grounded flights and plunged the airport into darkness for hours. Large sections of Puerto Rico remained without reliable power months after a deadly hurricane. And Federal officials from the National Transportation Safety Board were en route to Tacoma to investigate the cause of the crash of the train on its inaugural trip.

There were few specifics in President Trump’s remarks about how he intends to pay for his total infrastructure rebuilding, or to implement his other three national security pillars—protecting the American people and homeland (by building a wall and restricting immigration); preserving peace through strength (by rebuilding the military and building a missile defense system); and advancing American influence abroad (by economic growth and creative diplomacy using “all tools of statecraft.”)  But the president’s 55-page national strategy document, at least 10 pages longer than President Obama’s opus in 2010, reads in many ways like a document that most of his predecessors could have written.

That came as a relief to foreign policy guru Peter Feaver, among others. “One of the major concerns about President Trump is that he has at times seemed so bent on breaking with establishment precedent that he has failed to appreciate just how much of what has made American great has been the produce of these core establishment ideas and institutions,” wrote Feaver, a professor of political science and public policy at Duke and co-editor of Foreign Policy’s “Elephants in the Room” blog.

In some ways, Trump’s speech and especially the administration’s first strategy document seem to backpedal some of his earlier, more abrasive policies and utterances. For sure, the policy statement and especially his speech introducing it reflect Trump’s foreign policy’s inward, sometimes isolationist focus and the importance of projecting power by rebuilding economic strength at home and defending the nation’s physical, intellectual, and cyber property and borders. The document calls Russia and China “rival nations” that “seek to challenge American influence, values and wealth.” While neither Trump’s speech nor national security plan mentions alleged Russian meddling in America’s 2016 presidential election, the strategy document accuses Russia of “using information tools in an attempt to undermine the legitimacy of democracies.” This criticism was only partially undercut by Trump’s reference to a call he received Sunday from Russian President Vladimir Putin to thank him for having shared CIA intelligence that Trump said helped Russia foil a terrorist attack in St. Petersburg, which could have killed thousands. “That’s a great thing,” he said, “and the way it’s supposed to work.”

While neither the speech nor his strategy document mentions climate change as a strategic threat or challenge, unlike President Obama’s version, both address the importance of alliances and diplomacy as tools of statecraft to advance American national interests. As part of what Trump called “principled realism,” the speech and the strategy acknowledge “the invaluable advantages that our strong relationships with allies and partners deliver.” This is not what some critics expected in a strategy written by a president who criticized allies during the presidential campaign as economic shirkers unwilling to pay their fair share, and long-standing alliances as “outdated.” Both the document and his mission statement call Iran and North Korea “rogue nations” that must be aggressively countered. And the president harps repeatedly on his determination to end or renegotiate trade deals that he says have shipped American jobs abroad and undermined the economic standing of the American worker.

The speech and the official policy document also occasionally contradict not only each other, but Trump’s earlier statements. For instance, while the document salutes the importance of diplomacy in advancing American interests, it seems at odds with the administration’s lack of interest in filling key ambassador and senior policy slots and his proposed 30 percent State Department budget cut. Also of note is the absence of references to “radical Islamic terror.” The term never appears in the document or Trump’s speech. The closest reference is the document’s assertion that “radical Islamist ideology” must be part of America’s effort to defeat “jihadists,” the administration’s preferred new term, one less offensive to American Muslims and regional partners such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

But several aficionados of national strategy statements were struck more by the similarities with previous efforts than by the now-familiar Trumpian departures from foreign policy orthodoxy. Peter Feaver and other analysts attribute this first to the firing of former National Security adviser Michael Flynn (who pled guilty weeks ago to lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russia), a subsequent shakeup in the national security apparatus, and more recently, to the apparent victory of foreign policy traditionalists (National Security adviser H.R. McMaster, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson) over the foreign policy radicals (Trump advisors led by Steve Bannon, who left the White House in August.)

Of course, President Trump, a man given to swings of view and pronouncement, may not act in accordance with the strategy he has now personally endorsed. How a Republican president, in particular, will finance the ambitious military and foreign policy agenda his official national security strategy outlines is another challenge. Consider his pledge to rebuild completely America’s infrastructure. While the president has spoken of spending a trillion dollars, and proposed $200 billion, for rebuilding America’s bridges, tunnels, ports, roads, and water pipes, the American Society of Civil Engineers in a 2013 report estimated that replacing and repairing substandard infrastructure would cost at least $3.6 trillion. Just replacing water pipes, which suffer some 240,000 breaks a year, would cost $1 trillion, the ASCE estimates. The administration would like to see private-sector partnerships work with the public sector to make up the difference, but if infrastructure rebuilding is left entirely up to the government, that would not leave much money for rebuilding the military, ending the sequestration of Pentagon funds Congress imposed under President Obama, building an air defense system to counter a potential nuclear attack by North Korea, or the other lofty goals in the 45th president’s National Security Statement. Even a Republican-majority Congress might well balk at the price of “Making America Great Again.”  Bottom of Form