Trump’s National Security Advisers Fall Flat Defending Him
Ross Douthat’s interview with two Trump administration alumni is revealing for what it conceals.
THE LATEST EFFORT TO GIVE SHAPE, form, intellectual coherence, and respectability to Trump’s bluster and impulsiveness on matters of national security is New York Times columnist Ross Douthat’s conversation with Robert O’Brien and Elbridge Colby.
Douthat describes his interlocutors as “Republican foreign policy professionals [who] believe that Trump 2.0 would be a continuation of his first term, showcasing a grand strategy forged with both Trumpian and traditional Republican elements.” They could just as easily be described as, in O’Brien’s case, Trump’s national security advisor during the former president’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election, and in Colby’s case, one of the authors of the 2018 National Defense Strategy led by Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis—though Colby has come to a very different conclusion from Mattis about Trump’s fitness for office and the prospects for a second Trump term.
The interview could give the unsuspecting reader the idea that the foreign policy choice between Republicans and Democrats in this election is fundamentally the same as in, say, the 2012 election: The Republicans favor a more muscular foreign policy focusing on military strength, while the Democrats favor a softer, gentler, diplomacy-first approach. In other words, it is misleading—if not outright untrue—almost from beginning to end.
O’Brien’s overall argument is that Trump’s administration operated along the Reaganite lines of “peace through strength” and asserts that the world was more peaceful under Trump because, for example, he provided lethal assistance to Ukraine in the form of Javelin anti-tank missiles and sanctioned Russia. Now the world is barreling toward World War III, which in his telling is obviously Joe Biden’s fault.
Far from serious policy analysis, O’Brien’s argument is a jumble of partisan talking points. The Trump administration was marked by lots of bluster—and some good steps, like giving lethal assistance to Ukraine—but the failure to respond to Iranian aggression in the Gulf, including calling off retaliatory strikes on Iran because Tucker Carlson worried it would lead to escalation, and failure to respond to the Iranian attack on the Saudi Abqaiq oil facility, degraded U.S. deterrence in the region. Sanctions on Russia were imposed by Congress over Trump’s vigorous objections. The world barrelling toward World War III obviously has deeper roots than the past four years, and both Trump and Biden bear some responsibility for where we are.
On Afghanistan, O’Brien intimated that he stopped a harebrained effort to precipitously withdraw from Afghanistan, that Trump agreed with him, and that Biden botched the withdrawal. That last part is true, but the first part—not so.
The effort to withdraw recklessly from Afghanistan went completely around O’Brien, who was a weak national security advisor within the chaotic Trump administration. It was Secretary of Defense Mark Esper and, after Esper was fired, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, who stopped the idea.
O’Brien also carefully elides the fact that it was Trump who sought and sanctioned the Doha Agreement (signed by Mike Pompeo) behind the back of our Afghan partners, demoralizing them and setting the stage for the disaster that followed. He also ignored that the Trump administration never held the Taliban accountable to the terms of the Agreement. One of the Biden team’s early mistakes was retaining Trump’s Afghanistan negotiator, Zalmay Khalilzad, to carry out the agreement. What reason or evidence can anyone advance that an Afghan withdrawal under Trump would have been any better than it was under Biden?
Turning to Ukraine, O’Brien proposes a plan—though, he cautions, not necessarily Trump’s plan—to escalate economic sanctions on Russia rather than escalate militarily to get them to the negotiating table.
There are problems with O’Brien’s plan, but they don’t really matter because we know what Trump’s plan is. Trump has said hinted that he wants to end sanctions on Russia. More specifically, he has apparently endorsed the plan published by Gen. Keith Kellogg and Fred Fleitz of the America First Institute, which consists of threatening both sides, and when that fails, imposing the current lines of contact as an armistice line. (Colby essentially endorses this framework in his conversation with Douthat.) The plan would, in effect, ratify Putin’s aggression.
The former national security advisor also asserts without evidence that Trump’s chumminess with dictators like Putin was a tool to have tough conversations with them that kept them off guard and guessing about his real intentions. This theory, while dubious, is impossible to disprove because we don’t really know what was said between Trump and Putin in their one-on-one meetings in Helsinki and Hamburg. Trump confiscated the translators’ notes.
Perhaps the most easily disprovable of O’Brien’s assertions is that the Trump team spent four years rebuilding the military and replenished our depleted stockpiles of munitions. But the numbers don’t lie: Trump’s first two years saw 3 percent growth in the defense budget, followed by two flat budget years (which means slight decreases in defense spending due to inflation). The munitions accounts were not increased significantly. In fact, the 2018 National Defense Strategy Commission that I co-chaired with former Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Gary Roughead pointed out that we nearly ran out of precision munitions in the counter-ISIL campaign—but virtually nothing was done to remedy the situation.
When asked by Douthat whether the Middle East is a priority region for the United States, O’Brien starts his answer, “If you are a Jewish person . . .” Douthat saved him from saying something regrettable by redirecting the question.
Elbridge Colby is more sophisticated than O’Brien and wouldn’t make that kind of mistake. He argues, as he has many times, including at book length (with a blurb from Douthat) that faced with limited resources, the United States must ruthlessly prioritize the Indo-Pacific theater because China is the most important long-term strategic threat to the United States.
Colby’s policy therefore seems to have no hope of repeating the defense build-up of the 1980s. Call it “peace through retrenchment.” The National Defense Strategy Commission I co-chaired with Rep. Jane Harman calls for 3 to 5 percent real growth in defense spending for two years, followed by ramping up to roughly 5 to 6 percent of GDP thereafter—roughly the proportion of defense spending to GDP during the 1980s. Colby seems to believe that is impossible, which it would be if Trump were to realize all his irresponsible tax proposals.
Moreover, the idea that we can prioritize among our commitments to allies—prioritizing those in East Asia and neglecting those everywhere else—ignores the fact that our allies themselves are indivisible to our national defense. Faced with declining American power relative to the rest of the world, Colby calls for alienating our friends, when the only logical option is to draw them closer. What happens in Europe has repercussions in Asia—just ask the South Koreans, or for that matter the Taiwanese and the Japanese.
Almost everyone in Washington wishes it were easier to get America’s allies to bear more of the weight of their own defense, but it’s easier said than done—especially for Colby.
For the United States, he advocates tailoring a foreign policy to what the American people are willing to support: “We need a willingness to grapple with the difference between what the American people are realistically willing and able to do and what we’re trying to do on the international stage.” (No argument there, though part of the job of politicians is to lead, not follow, public opinion.) And yet, puzzlingly, our allies don’t face the same constraints. “Europeans need to be the ones to step up,” he admonishes. “And Germany and Poland can do a lot more. . . . the Italians and the Spanish and the Greeks and the Turks and the Brits and the French, with their naval forces, they could actually take a much more significant role. . . . Most of the Europeans are spending too little.” If convincing the public to spend more on defense is so hard for Americans, why should it be easy for our allies?
Colby is well practiced at explaining and defending his iconoclastic and idiosyncratic view of foreign policy, but it’s not clear what it has to do with Trump, who has questioned whether or not we should defend Taiwan. He also neglects the valuable steps by the Biden team to improve our competitive position in the Indo-Pacific: AUKUS, additional base access agreements with allies, and improved coordination through the Quad and U.S.-ROK-Japan consultations, just to name a few.
All of these elisions, omissions, and downright falsehoods don’t make a very convincing case that a second Trump term would be anything other than a train wreck with enormous damage to our alliances and to international security writ large.
And the timing couldn’t be worse. Robert’s testimony that Trump loves our soldiers flies in the face of John Kelly’s and Mark Esper’s revelations that he considers dead service members to be “suckers and losers” and that he didn’t like seeing wounded warriors because it was a “bad look” for him. Milley, Mattis, Kelly, and Esper have all been in the news recently calling Trump’s views and fundamental fitness into question. If the guy at the top is an unstable admirer of fascists, then what his foreign policy advisers think doesn’t really matter that much.
Amb. Eric Edelman served as the U.S. ambassador to Finland and Turkey and as under secretary of defense for policy. He is co-host of The Bulwark’s Shield of the Republic podcast.
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