Donald Trump’s speech on national security at the Union League of Philadelphia Wednesday may have been his best imitation of a traditional, conservative Republican to date, particularly on his proposals to rebuild the U.S. military. When The Donald cites the 2014 National Defense Panel report, he’s gone Establishment with a capital “E.” Further, the speech was a succinct, devastating, and, setting aside the excesses of Trump’s anti-Hillary Clinton animus, quite substantive attack on Obama-era strategy.
To review the defense proposals first: Without specifying a topline number for the defense budget, Trump presented the argument for a major reinvestment in military capacity and capability well. He promised to build an active-duty Army of 540,000 soldiers from its current (and sinking) level of 480,000, and expand the Marine Corps from 23 to 36 battalions, the Navy from 276 to 350 ships, and the Air Force from 1,100 to 1,200 tactical aircraft, all recommendations that broadly track the report of the bipartisan defense panel. Trump’s text also included a heavy emphasis on ballistic missile defense. In sum, it was not unlike the kind of defense speech given by Jeb Bush or even Marco Rubio earlier this year.
However, Trump undercut the power of his proposals by soft-pedaling the cost of such a buildup. Yes, he promised to ask Congress to repeal the “sequester” provision of the 2011 Budget Control Act, but sequestration is only the latest—and hardly the least—of the repeated cuts to defense spending that have punctuated the post-Cold War years. Further, in demanding that Congress “offset” additional defense increases or calling for “commonsense reforms that eliminate government waste and budget gimmicks,” Trump in essence confessed that military increases were not really that urgent for him. Lastly, by reiterating his claim that America’s allies must “pay their bills” for the “security we provide for them,” he frames his national security positions in transactional terms. Trump wants to make America’s military strong again, but only if he gets bargain-basement terms on the deal.
Trump’s underlying lack of strategic seriousness also cripples what otherwise was a powerful critique of Obama-Clinton foreign policy. “Let’s look back at the Middle East at the very beginning of 2009,” Trump argued in a rapid-fire evisceration of Hillary’s claim to statesmanship. “Libya was stable. Syria was under control. Egypt was ruled by a secular president [who was] an ally of the United States. Iraq was experiencing a reduction in violence….Iran was being choked off by economic sanctions.” While Libya’s “stability” and Syria’s “control” were the illusions created by murderous dictators, the underlying idea—that Obama’s retreat from the Middle East has been a strategic catastrophe—underscores a real weakness for candidate Clinton. And Trump’s summary of “Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy legacy” since 2009 was similarly pointed. He didn’t confine it to the Middle East: “[Vladimir] Putin has no respect for President Obama or Hillary Clinton.”
Trump ought to have left his argument there. But he cannot control his penchant for the powerful autocrat, and Trump said he is “ready to work with any country that shares our goal of destroying [the Islamic State],” which is to say Putin, Bashar Assad, the Iranian mullahs, and, at least sometimes, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Trump suffers from the anti-interventionism that’s handicapped this White House. “Sometimes it has seemed like there wasn’t a country in the Middle East that Hillary Clinton didn’t want to invade, intervene [in], or topple. She is trigger-happy…when it comes to war.” This is the sort of thing that Barack Obama used to say about George W. Bush. It was mindless in 2008 and remains so now.
Finally, the speech was structurally hampered by the detours it took to allow Trump to take pot-shots at Clinton. Thus the section on cyber security issues made an occasion for a lame laugh-line: “Hillary Clinton has taught us all how vulnerable we are to cyber hacking.” Even if it were funny, it diverts attention from the goal of bestowing Trump with the kind of policy gravitas that was the principal purpose of the speech.
Yet even those of us with “never Trump” tendencies should give the devil his due. Today, and at least on defense policy, Trump stood squarely in orthodox Republican ranks. If his budgetary reckoning was squirrelly, well, that was already a problem of orthodoxy, not Trump.
