When President Trump addressed U.S. troops at MacDill Air Force Base last week in Florida, he sounded about as hawkish as you can get, anxious to unleash the full fury of America’s military to end the scourge of radical Islamic terrorism.
“And we are prepared to fight,” he said, as he acknowledged he was taking a page from President Ronald Regan’s military doctrine of “peace through strength.”
Just a few days before, Trump made one of the weightiest decisions a commander in chief can make: whether to send U.S. troops into battle.
He signed off on an audacious, risky raid by U.S. Navy SEALs deep into Yemen to strike at the heart of al Qaeda.
In Tampa, he heaped praise on U.S. special operation commandos as “legendary warriors” who can be dispatched on “the most secret, sensitive and daring missions” in defense of the United States.
“No enemy stands a chance against our special forces,” he boasted, “not even a chance.”
This followed a week in which Trump’s National Security Adviser Mike Flynn “officially” put Iran “on notice,” and a pre-inaugural tweet by Trump in which he warned North Korea that its plan to develop a long-range intercontinental ballistic missile capable of reaching the U.S. “won’t happen!”
This from a president who campaigned on a promise to pursue a new foreign policy that “learns from the mistakes of the past,” and would “stop looking to topple regimes and overthrow governments.”
So which Trump is it: The one who seems poised to put more U.S. troops in Iraq and Syria and join with Russia to defeat the Islamic State, or the one who never misses a chance to say he opposed the 2003 Iraq War, and has sworn off nation-building?
“It’s one thing to say ‘I’m going to bomb the you-know-what out of ISIS,’ or ‘I’ll put more troops in to get rid of ISIS,’ ” said Lawrence Korb, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. “It’s another thing to say after that I’m going to rebuild Syria.”
Korb, a former assistant secretary of defense during the Reagan administration, sees Trump as a limited interventionist, willing to use military force, but with little appetite to stick around to clean up afterward.
“It’s an attempt to deal with what he perceives as the enemies, but not rebuild societies,” Korb said.
Mackenzie Eaglen, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, said so far Trump seems more aligned with former President Barack Obama’s views on the use of force than any traditional defense hawk.
The one exception: Trump’s call for establishing safe zones in northern Syria, which she said would be a big shift from Obama. But Eaglen said it’s hard to say without knowing the details of what Trump has in mind.
“In particular, it’s unclear if it will require a lot of U.S. ground forces,” Eaglen said. “My guess is they’ll seek to have allies take the lead with us providing air cover mostly.”
Most observers say it’s too soon to predict what the Trump Doctrine will look like.
“He doesn’t have a formed worldview that could be called either isolationist or interventionist,” offers former Deputy Defense Secretary John Hamre, who now heads the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “When President Trump says ‘national security’ he really means border protection,” he said. “It is a transactional focus on what he thinks threatens America most, and that is radicalized terrorists.”
George Washington University professor Stephen Biddle agrees. “My sense is that he’s neither [interventionist nor isolationist]. He interprets U.S. interests very narrowly, but is very aggressive in responding to threats he perceives to those few interests he takes seriously.”
For example, Biddle said, “Homeland security against ISIS he takes very seriously; threats to NATO he doesn’t.”
The Heritage Foundation’s James Jay Carafano thinks it’s folly to read too much into Trump’s early bellicose threats.
“There is little to assess other than inconsistent rhetoric and canned executive orders put together by the transition team to go on,” Carafano said.
“What we have seen with most modern presidents is more continuity than change on the big issues,” he added, warning against overly fixating on “superficial reflections of rhetoric and mannerisms.”
“I deeply suspect this president will be no different,” said Carafano, who predicts Trump “will likely prove more in the mainstream of presidential leaders than some might imagine.”
