President Trump’s tweeted dismissal of Defense Secretary Mark Esper sparked a series of high-level departures from the Pentagon.
The positions vacated by firing or resignation, including the undersecretary of defense for policy, the undersecretary of defense for intelligence, and Esper’s chief of staff, have promptly been filled by people with closer ties to Trump. And though acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller reportedly told officials not to anticipate “significant changes at this time” (that is, just two months from the end of the Trump administration), the shake-up has raised fears of a breach in U.S. security during the lame-duck period.
The good news is that those fears are almost certainly unfounded, but the bad news is neither this late-stage fiddling nor the incoming administration’s overhaul is likely to produce the change needed at the Department of Defense.
The case for short-term calm is straightforward: U.S. defenses and the deterrence they effect are not changed by this brief period of turnover. The calculations other nations have made that keep them from attacking the United States are no different with or without two more months of continuity in these half-dozen roles. Adversaries such as Russia, China, North Korea, or Iran are not so foolish as to imagine that the departure of a few political appointees will somehow preclude a Pentagon response to military aggression against our country. There is no world in which the exit of undersecretaries leaves the wealthiest and most powerful nation on Earth magically undefended.
This is why claims such as that from Democratic Rep. Adam Smith of Washington state, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, are overblown. Smith declared it is “hard to overstate just how dangerous high-level turnover at the Department of Defense is during a period of presidential transition.” This is not, as Smith claimed, “the beginning of a process of gutting the DOD.” It is one last round of Trump’s erratic personnel policy, and it is rendered all but irrelevant by his forthcoming departure from office. “Embarrassing,” sure. “Dangerous,” no.
While we’re on the subject of “gutting the DOD,” big changes are needed — not an ousting of undersecretaries but a dramatic reorientation of U.S. foreign policy away from reckless interventionism and toward a new era of peace and restraint. That means ending a generation of war in the Middle East, downsizing our global military sprawl, and returning realistic diplomacy to the center of our foreign policy.
Unfortunately, there’s little reason to believe this will happen on any comprehensive scale in the final days of the Trump administration or the next four years under President-elect Joe Biden. Both men campaigned this year on promises of ending endless wars, but Trump has repeatedly broken this promise throughout his tenure. He now stands ready to leave office without having formally ended U.S. involvement in a single conflict. Some key Biden endorsements and adviser picks suggest we should anticipate more consistency rather than departure from the last two decades of foreign policy failures.
For these final months with Trump, however, there are some lingering causes for hope. CNN’s Jake Tapper reported after Esper’s firing that he and his team are out because they “were pushing back on what they viewed as a premature withdrawal from Afghanistan before conditions were met.”
The subsequent hiring of retired Army Col. Douglas Macgregor as a senior Pentagon adviser lends this theory credence, as Macgregor was a relatively early critic of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and who advocates immediate U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan (as well as realistic cooperation and diplomacy with Iran and North Korea).
If Macgregor’s advice is taken seriously, a withdrawal from Afghanistan might actually happen before Inauguration Day. It would be anything but “premature.” Unfortunately, Trump reportedly plans to reduce troop levels in Afghanistan and Iraq to 2,500 in each country rather than to initiate a full withdrawal, and key congressional Republicans are vocally opposing even that troop reduction.
As for what will happen after the inauguration, here, too, adviser selection will be instructive, and hopefully, the Trump administration will permit a normal transition process to move forward so we know soon who those selections will be.
In the best-case scenario, Biden could take office with the U.S. intervention in Afghanistan fully concluded, an easy political path to a withdrawal from Yemen’s civil war, a rebuilt State Department, and a roster of Pentagon and National Security Council staff willing to reject the foreign policy status quo where it has not served U.S. interests or fostered peace. That best case probably won’t happen, but the worst-case worries over personnel moves won’t either.
Bonnie Kristian is a fellow at Defense Priorities, a contributing editor for the Week, and a columnist for Christianity Today. Her writing has also appeared at CNN, NBC, USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, and Defense One, among other outlets.
