Trump can still flip the fiscally irresponsible status quo

On Dec. 3, President Trump tweeted a statement that got defense hawks in Washington incredibly nervous.

Trump was absolutely correct to opine about how ludicrous it is that the Pentagon budget is so large, particularly at a time when the federal government is on course to run trillion-dollar deficits and the national debt approaches $22 trillion. The president’s tweet suggested that after a $165 billion increase in the Pentagon budget over the last two fiscal years, the administration was finally serious about taming Washington’s addiction to spending. Just weeks earlier, the White House was preparing to order a 5 percent spending cut across all government departments and agencies, leaving the Pentagon with a world-highest $700 billion budget that would have still eclipsed the next seven countries combined.

Apparently, Trump has already changed his mind.

After meeting last week with Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and the chairmen of the armed services committees, the White House has reversed course. According to Politico, Trump will now propose to Congress a $750 billion military budget for fiscal year 2020, a $50 billion hike from his previous position.

Trump is on the verge of making a dangerous mistake, one that would both worsen America’s budding fiscal crisis and perpetuate the strategic drift national security policy has taken over previous years.

No honest person can look at the U.S. military budget today and credibly claim the country is vulnerable, left defenseless, or at risk of being usurped by a great-power competitor. In 2017, the U.S. share of global military expenditures was 35 percent, a figure more than 2.5 times larger than the second-highest country, China. U.S. defense spending has only risen since that time to the highest it has been in history, a number defense hawks continue to believe is too low. For legislators such as Senate Armed Services Chairman Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., and House Armed Services Chairman Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, money grows on trees alongside the Capitol Rotunda. All Congress needs to do is go outside and pluck the dollars from the leaves.

The more important point to remember, however, is that a higher defense budget does not automatically equal greater security. As has been the case throughout history, a nation’s economic prosperity is the foundation of national strength, prestige, and influence and serves as a harbinger of what a nation can or cannot do on the world stage. To conflate military spending with more security, as Washington too often does, is to work off an inaccurate paradigm.

Too often, the solution to a problem in the Beltway is to appropriate more taxpayer money. The Pentagon is no exception. Too many lawmakers have persuaded themselves that the issues surrounding military readiness, equipment maintenance, and training are the products of insufficient resources when the real problem is overcommitment, an inability to establish appropriate national security priorities based on our interests.

This strategic overstretch has persisted since the end of the Cold War and has meant a continuous loop of highly stressful operations around the world largely disconnected from defending U.S. security, prosperity, or our way of life here at home. With soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines ordered to do everything from stability operations in the deserts of Eastern Syria and bombing missions in the poppy fields of Afghanistan to backstopping Europe’s territorial defense and training African troops in the Sahel, politicians and foreign policy officials should not be shocked when these operations degrade the Navy’s sea vessels and the Air Force’s aircraft.

Before any discussion of Pentagon budget increases should come a sober analysis of what matters for our security and prosperity and what priorities are best left for regional countries to address. Not every problem around the world holds the same significance. Rather than attempting to do everything everywhere and failing to achieve strategic gains, budgets should align with a realistic, pragmatic, but wise strategy that distinguishes the truly important with the tertiary distractions.

The solution to Washington’s many foreign policy failures from the last decades is not spending more money and pretending that dollars will paper over our foreign policy failures. The solution is setting national security priorities, distinguishing which military programs and security policies are essential to America’s national defense and which are actually drains on the military, and making difficult decisions to ensure America’s economic prosperity is maintained instead of saddled with unsustainable debt and overseas commitments that hollow out the force and further deteriorate the military’s readiness problem.

Retired General Mike Mullen, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, put it succinctly in 2016: “[I]f we don’t get our fiscal house in order, it’s going to dramatically affect our security of our country.”

Fortunately, security is readily available. The U.S. is in the privileged position of having two benign and friendly neighbors, a dominant presence in its own hemisphere, a durable system of alliances and partnerships around the world, a highly innovative population, and enormous influence in the international financial system. Washington simply doesn’t need to meddle in the internal affairs of other nations or engage in decades-long nation-building projects to promote its own security. Doing so only outsources our military power to countries that should be taking more responsibility for their own defense and overburdens the military.

The world has changed drastically and continues to shift. Foreign policy leaders need to shift with it and rethink our strategy, especially because a debt crisis would weaken the country, creating a catastrophe for Americans and the world.

President Trump still has an opportunity to challenge this status quo. But he will not be able to do it if he defers to his more hawkish advisers, all of whom continue to advocate for policies — a continuation of the war in Afghanistan, U.S. involvement in Yemen’s civil war, and perpetual containment of Russia — that delay the difficult but strategically vital conversation the country needs.

Daniel DePetris (@DanDePetris) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a fellow at Defense Priorities.