The American Conservative’s Curt Mills predicted John Bolton’s demise as national security adviser. So it’s probably worth listening to Mills’ suggestions as to who might replace Bolton.
I think two of Mills’ five predictions stand out as the most attuned to President Trump’s views and style: Douglas Macgregor and Jack Keane. Both are retired career Army officers and both are known for outside-the-box thinking of the kind Trump adores. But Keane would make a superior choice to Macgregor.
First off, there’s the distinction between Keane and Macgregor’s conception of international order. Where Keane sees alliances such as NATO to the assurance of global stability and democratic order, Macgregor views NATO as a “zombie.” The “life ran out of NATO with the demise of the Soviet threat,” Macgregor says. That might sound good to Americans rightly frustrated with subsidizing European security, but it’s a delusion proven by Russia’s continuing penchant for hostility.
This is not to say that Keane is an Angela Merkel. Like Trump, the former four-star general has rightly called on NATO members to do more to support alliance security. It betrays the notion of friendship that nations such as Belgium, Germany, and Italy continue to starve their militaries of investment. But Keane recognizes that global alliances provide not just shared security under democratic rule of law, but the shared comforts of that rule. Namely, access to trading partnerships and broad economic growth.
But it goes beyond that.
Unlike Macgregor, who seeks a withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan and Syria, Keane recognizes that losing a footprint means ceding that footprint to the enemy. A bad recipe, we should have learned on Sept. 11 and in the November 2015 Paris attacks, for western security.
Finally, Keane’s track record of predictions stands above Macgregor’s. In 2011, for example, Macgregor suggested major cuts to the U.S. military budget. He did so in part under the expectation that “there is no other power in the world that is able, or likely to be able, in the next quarter-century to build a fleet that could seriously challenge U.S. naval supremacy. This includes China.”
This is now provably false. Had Macgregor had his way back in 2011, America would be at China’s mercy today.
Trump needs a national security adviser of experience and temperament who knows how to work the national security bureaucracy and get good things done. That’s Jack Keane.
