Peace Through Strength Requires Actual Strength

There are enormous threats on the world stage. Those threats can be mitigated by President Trump. Or, through lack of clarity, they can grow worse. 

Just before the Memorial Day Weekend, Vice President JD Vance spoke at the Naval Academy. He suggested that President Trump’s visit to the Middle East, in which he visited Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE, was designed to recapitulate an American foreign policy that is based on a realistic assessment of what the world looks like.

He explained, “I actually think the most significant part of that trip is that it signified the end of a decades-long approach in foreign policy, that, I think, was a break from the precedent set by our founding fathers. We had a long experiment in our foreign policy that traded national defense and the maintenance of our alliances for nation-building and meddling in foreign countries’ affairs, even when those foreign countries had very little to do with core American interests.”

The Vice President was presumably arguing against the war in Iraq. The war in Afghanistan is a bit of a different story, since originally the war in Afghanistan was launched on the back of 9/11, so it was, in fact, a core American national interest to defenestrate the regime that had protected Osama bin Laden in the aftermath of the murder of 3,000 Americans.

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Vance suggested that American foreign policy has to be focused on countering our peer adversaries: “Our government took its eye off the ball of great power competition and preparing to take on a peer adversary, and instead we devoted ourselves to sprawling, amorphous tasks like searching for new terrorists to take out while building up faraway regimes. Now, I want to be clear. The Trump administration has reversed course. No more undefined missions, no more open-ended conflicts. We’re returning to a strategy grounded in realism and protecting our core national interests. Now, this doesn’t mean that we ignore threats, but it means that we approach them with discipline and that when we send you to war, we do it with a very specific set of goals in mind. And consider how this played out in just the last major conflict we engaged in, with the Houthis over in the Middle East. We went in with a clear diplomatic goal not to enmesh our service members in a prolonged conflict with a non-state actor, but to secure American freedom of navigation by forcing the Houthis to stop attacking American ships. And that’s exactly what we did.”

The Houthi example is a very interesting one for him to use, because the reality is that the Houthis have not ceased their activities in the Red Sea. Originally, we did not define our battle against the Houthis as simply restoring deterrence with regard to Houthi attacks on American ships; the goal was to restore freedom of navigation in the Red Sea. The goal was to ensure that people could use the Red Sea through the Suez Canal in order to ship things, including oil and LNG, from the region.

That has not been restored. The Houthis are still shooting a couple of missiles a day over Saudi Arabian airspace at Israel. And shipping has still not been restored in the Red Sea.

Now, I don’t disagree with anything that Vance is saying on the surface. But the use of the Houthis is a telling example, because one of the things that is an open battle in this administration, which we all need to keep our eye on, is what this sort of language obscures.

What is the actual policy of the Trump administration? Is it a policy that makes sure to actually set red lines that are keepable? The Vice President suggests that every mission has to have an exit strategy with an end in sight, saying, “Past leaders sent our service members on mission after mission with no exit strategy, no end in sight, and with little articulation for the American people or for the warfighters about what we were doing.”

All of that sounds really nice. The reality is that foreign policy is a lot messier than that. So, for example, the United States currently has troops stationed in South Korea. Why? That is an open-ended conflict. There’s an armistice with North Korea, and the United States is, in fact, maintaining the peace in the region between South Korea and North Korea by having a trigger force there.

The United States still has military bases in Japan. Why? Presumably to deter a Chinese takeover of the South China Sea. The United States still has overflight and overwatch power over the Middle East. Why? To ensure the free flow of oil, for example, and to prevent, I assume, the nuclearization of Iran.

This kind of easy notion that the United States can simply, in pinpoint fashion, define our conflicts and get in and get out is not the way actual foreign policy really works.

If you believe that we are now living in a much more dangerous world than we were previously, that’s going to require a larger commitment to military spending. A safer world, a world in which free trade actually applies, in which you do have freedom of navigation, in which economic growth is the norm, in which the United States has trade capacity and commerce; in which global growth is the norm — all of that is maintained, in the end, by the credible threat of the use of the American military.

That’s the reality of the situation. That’s always been the reality of the situation. The notion promoted by some on the more isolationist side of the Republican aisle — that if the United States basically defines in pinpoint fashion its own military engagement, the rest of the world will simply comply — is not the way the rest of the world works.

That’s been true all along. There’s a very famous story about George Washington at the Constitutional Convention. There was a constitutional delegate who suggested that the standing army of the United States should be limited to 5,000 men. The reason was that there were a lot of members of the founding generation who didn’t like the idea of a standing army on the national level. And George Washington would have to fend off the British with an army of essentially irregular soldiers, militiamen, whom he had to cobble together throughout the Revolutionary War.

The constitutional delegate proposed a 5,000-man cap on the army in the actual Constitution. George Washington agreed. And then he sarcastically said that there had to be a stipulation added to the Constitution that no invading army could number more than 3,000.

Of course, the joke he was making is that, when it comes to foreign policy, necessity is the mother of policy.

So you can have all of these principles that we all hope to have about “no open-ended missions,” “no long-term commitments.” The reality is that in a world in which the United States refrains from any long-term commitment and refrains from flexible policy, what you end up with is more red lines crossed.

And so the question becomes, for the administration, how strong are the administration’s red lines, and what happens when those red lines are crossed? When it came to the Houthis, the United States drew a red line. Originally, it was about freedom of navigation.

That freedom of navigation has not, in fact, been restored.

You can make the case that shouldn’t have been the mission in the first place in the Red Sea. Fine. But that was not actually the mission. The ends were shifted in order to achieve some sort of titular end to a conflict so the United States could then go and pick up checks in Qatar.

Again, you can make the argument that that’s a good policy or that it’s not a good policy, but let’s be clear about what happened there.

Right now, America’s enemies are perceiving, at the very least, that there’s some play in the joints.

If President Trump had the foreign policy team from his first term in place, it wouldn’t be happening. Trump 1.0 was extremely predictable on foreign policy: If you crossed a red line, you would get punched in the face. If you did not cross a red line, we would negotiate with you. That was the foreign policy of the United States. 

There’s been debate inside the administration over whether Trump 1.0 was too hawkish.

But what America’s enemies see is that now might be a good time to push. That is certainly clear from Russia, from China, and from Iran. Russia. China and Iran are sensing weakness in the Trump administration’s approach. Russia has been stringing President Trump along while it ramps up its attacks on Ukraine. According to reports, China has now strengthened its ability to rapidly attack Taiwan. Iran, which has been weakened by Israel to its weakest point in decades, is stiffening its negotiating stance with the United States.

President Trump is a peace through strength president.

But that needs to be conveyed not just in words, but in actual forward posture, in military spending, in public statements.

Because the United States has spent the last 20 years being non-credible in its threats. And that needs to stop, as it did during President Trump’s first term.