Of all the differences Defense Secretary Mark Esper has with his commander in chief, one of the most profound is over the value of allies.
Like his immediate predecessor Jim Mattis, Esper (who, according to one report, is preparing his resignation) sees allies as a vital force multiplier giving the United States military “an asymmetric advantage our adversaries cannot match.”
“They have nearly none, and we have many,” Esper said at a RAND forum in September, referring to China and Russia. “When China has to think about a potential conflict with the United States, it just can’t think about the United States. It has to think about the United States and Japan and Australia and Korea, Singapore, and whoever else.”
Or, as Mattis put it more colorfully, “When you’re going to a gunfight, bring all your friends with guns.”
President Trump, on the other hand, sees allies as consumers of American military might, a drain on U.S. resources, who need to pay more for the protection or go it alone.
It’s why Trump abruptly pulled 12,000 troops from Germany and ordered the Pentagon to abandon bases in Stuttgart that have been headquarters for U.S. combatant commands since the end of World War II.
“It’s costing us a lot of money, and they’re delinquent on their payments,” Trump told the Wall Street Journal in June. “They’re delinquent on their NATO payments. They owe a lot of money. Germany owes a lot of money. They don’t pay their bills.”
Germany owes no money to NATO or to the U.S., but it’s true that Germany is not on track to meet its pledge to increase its defense budget to 2% of its gross domestic product by 2024.
But Germany, with Europe’s strongest economy and largest GDP, still spends more on defense ($56 billion) than any other NATO member, with the exception of the U.S. ($740 billion) and the United Kingdom ($59 billion), according to the latest NATO figures.
Still, whatever amount allies spend, Trump usually believes they should pay more.
In November 2017, when U.S. Korea Commander Army Gen. Vincent Brooks took Trump on a helicopter tour of a sprawling new base housing U.S. troops and their families in South Korea, he told the president the South Koreans spent $10 billion on the base and covered 92% of the cost, according to Bob Woodward’s book Rage.
“Why didn’t they pay for all of it?” Trump reportedly responded.
“He is distrustful of alliances and partnerships because he basically thinks that we’ve been suckers in those, all these years,” says Rep. Adam Smith, a Democrat and the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee.
“His impression on all of this is, you know, we’ve been helping out all these other countries in the world, and we don’t get anything for it,” Smith said at an Oct. 29 webcast.
“What we get for it is global stability,” Smith argued. “And what we get for it is the most prosperous country in the history of the world because of that global stability. There’s a benefit there.”
The House version of the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act contains provisions that would limit the president’s authority to reduce troops levels in Germany and South Korea.
While Trump has worked to extricate the U.S. from alliances he sees as too costly and one-sided, Esper has been quietly working to build more and stronger ties with like-minded military partners, issuing last month what he dubbed GDAP, “Guidance for Development of Alliances and Partnerships.”
One area where Esper and Trump’s views do converge is on the issues of arms sales to foreign countries, which Trump sees as a boon to the U.S. economy in general and the defense industry in particular. Esper views this as a tool for cementing relationships while making potential partners more capable of contributing combat power in the event of war.
“Allies become now more important than ever. It’s not just the allies in the European theater. It’s the allies in the Indo-Pacific theater,” Esper said. “We are providing F-35 aircraft to Japan, Seahawk and Apache helicopters to India, and F-16 fighter jets to Taiwan, to name a few examples.”
The buzz these days is about a new “Quad” alliance, a sort of Indo-Pacific NATO, made up of the U.S., Australia, India, and Japan.
Esper advocates moving away from bilateral one-on-one relationships, to multicountry alliances, especially in China’s backyard.
“I think the more we can multilateralize the relationships in this theater, the better,” Esper said. “You know, NATO is a great standard to hold up, the collective security and cooperation among allies and partners.”
That’s not how Trump sees NATO.
“We defend Europe, but Europe also takes tremendous advantage of the United States on trade — advantage like you wouldn’t believe,” Trump said at a White House news conference in June, hinting that he would be raising the stakes in his second term. “I would imagine they’d like to wait until after the election so that maybe they could deal with somebody other than President Trump. But after the election, they’ll just have to pay more, but that’s the way it is.”
Trump prefers to deal with leaders one-on-one, especially those who can act without having to get approval from their parliaments or aren’t constrained by other democratic institutions.
In the tapes of his conversations with Woodward, Trump boasts of his relationship with authoritarian Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
“Everyone says what a horrible guy, but for me, it works out good,” Trump said of his relationships with dictators. “The tougher and meaner they are, the better I get along with them,” which he insisted is “not a bad thing.”
That kind of talk rankles Sen. Ben Sasse, one of the most conservative Republicans in the Senate and a self-declared China hawk.
“The way he kisses dictators’ butts, the United States now regularly sells out our allies under his leadership,” Sasse said in a call with constituents before the election.
Trump admitted he doesn’t get along that well with some of America’s most stalwart allies.
“The easy ones,” Trump told Woodward, “I maybe don’t like as much or don’t get along with as much.”
It is the ever-quotable Winston Churchill who has the most famous observation about the vexations of alliances with other counties.
“There is only one thing worse than fighting with allies, and that is fighting without them,” he said during World War II.
Jamie McIntyre is the Washington Examiner’s senior writer on defense and national security. His morning newsletter, “Jamie McIntyre’s Daily on Defense,” is free and available by email subscription at dailyondefense.com.
