America’s enemies will be “frightened” by President-elect Trump, according to a former NATO commander, but that doesn’t mean that the United States will have a total reprieve from international aggression.
“They are frightened of President-elect Trump because he’s unpredictable, but they will seek to remediate that by defining where those lines are,” retired Navy Admiral James Stavridis said Tuesday at the United States Institute of Peace.
Stavridis, the top NATO commander in Europe under President Obama and a contender to be Hillary Clinton’s running mate in the 2016 presidential election, was concurring with Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., who suggested that fear of Trump would deter major powers from taking aggressive action early in Trump’s presidency.
“I think a simple fact is most of our adversaries are scared of Donald Trump, to put it very bluntly, and adversaries like China and Russia, I think, are unlikely to test us in the early days of the administration,” Cotton said.
Although they agreed on the existence of an intimidation factor, Cotton and Stavridis offered different views of the primary threat that Trump will have to handle in the short-term. “North Korea, because of Kim Jong-un’s history of erratic behavior and the difficulty in deterring him; and Islamic terrorists, because of their fanatical beliefs and the difficulty of deterring them, I would say are the two most likely challenges that a new President Trump would face in the early days of his administration,” Cotton said.
Stavridis agreed with Cotton’s suggestion that Russia will “play possum or rope-a-dope,” but he’s more pessimistic about Chinese behavior.
“I see something maritime happening, and it could be Iranians going after one of our destroyers in the Arabian gulf. I could see China pushing in a maritime sense, in kind of a soft tug in the South China Sea, possibly in the East China Sea,” Stavridis said. “I agree with the senator [that] Russia will take a wait and see attitude.”
But that only holds for the physical realm. Stavridis expects a flurry of cyberattacks early in Trump’s presidency. “You’re going to see intrusion in cyber and it’s going to come from all directions — North Korea, Iran, Russia, China — because they want to know where those limits are,” he predicted.
