The No. 1 Way Trump Could Strengthen U.S. Security If He Wins The Presidency
CONTRIBUTOR
I write about national security, especially its business dimensions.
A professor at the State University of New York says that if Donald Trump secures the Republican nomination for president, he has a 97% probability of winning the general election. That projection is based on a model the professor developed that reportedly has predicted every general-election outcome but one over the last hundred years.
Considering how well Trump has performed so far in this election season, there is a real possibility he could be the nation’s next commander in chief. I’m going to skip the obligatory insults about Trump’s character that pundits typically insert at this point in a commentary, and pose a question nobody has bothered to ask thus far. If Donald Trump actually were the next commander in chief, what is the one step he might take to greatly enhance national security?
The answer is that he could get serious about defending the nation against nuclear attack. Of all the mistakes Washington political elites have perpetrated in the years since the Cold War ended, this is the one that puts the most Americans at risk. Liberals and conservatives alike have accepted a military posture that lacks any capacity to repulse a major nuclear attack, even though that is the sole man-made danger that could obliterate American democracy overnight.
Our current nuclear posture assumes that Russia or China will always be led by rulers who are rational, in control of their strategic arsenals, and not prone to accidents. It also assumes they will not make grave misjudgments in the midst of crises, such as using a handful of nuclear weapons to halt a deteriorating tactical situation — a scenario that might rapidly escalate to all-out war. Unfortunately, Russian military doctrine raises the possibility of using nuclear weapons to de-escalate a conflict, making nuclear use tempting in some circumstances.
Trump may be the only presidential candidate who can look at the U.S. military posture with an unbiased eye, and grasp what is missing. (Photo by Tom Pennington/Getty Images)
If such a conflict were to occur, there is essentially nothing the United States could do to prevent an overwhelming attack on its homeland, because Washington has not invested in the means to intercept large numbers of incoming nuclear warheads. Within hours, every major U.S. city could be either destroyed or rendered uninhabitable. That would require only a fraction of the 1,500 ballistic warheads Russia has pointed at America today. Medical services, the financial system, power grids and law enforcement would all collapse at the same time.
So when candidate Trump complained at the Oklahoma State Fair last September that his Republican opponents want to “start World War III over Syria,” that wasn’t just rhetoric. Now that the forces of another nuclear power are engaged there, the possibility of escalation cannot simply be dismissed. The same is true of Ukraine, where Trump has shown much more restraint than his rivals and some Democrats by describing Russian aggression there as “Europe’s problem.”
He’s right, if the goal is to protect America. Becoming militarily engaged in a place that is barely a one-hour plane ride from the Russian capital is fraught with danger — maybe nuclear danger. Similarly, his repeated insistence that Washington needs to try to get along with the government of Vladimir Putin is only reasonable, given the fact that Washington’s best and brightest have conferred upon the Russian leader an unfettered capacity to destroy America.
It is truly absurd that other GOP candidates like Ted Cruz fret publicly over the nuclear threat posed by Iran — a country that has no nuclear weapons and no way to deliver them against distant targets — while almost totally ignoring the overwhelming danger posed by Russia’s nuclear arsenal. President Putin stated a year ago that he was ready for “the worst possible turn of events” during the Ukraine crisis of 2014, and considered putting his nuclear forces on alert. Nobody in Washington seemed to notice.
Ronald Reagan understood the world better. He grasped that security in the nuclear age depended first and foremost on a secure retaliatory force that could deter aggression, but that Washington also had a moral obligation to find some way out of the “mutual hostage relationship” that the two superpowers had backed into. Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative — derided by liberals — was an attempt to find that alternative to the threat of mutual annihilation.
Reagan’s initiative probably figured significantly in the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union. But Russia’s nuclear arsenal did not go away; what disappeared was the resolve of Reagan’s successors to defend the nation against the most fearsome weapons ever devised. The Obama Administration’s request for missile defense in fiscal 2017 represents barely 1% of the Pentagon’s proposed budget, and only a fraction of that would go to defense of the homeland.
It’s good that steps are being made to modernize the nation’s aging nuclear deterrent. The need to modernize the nuclear force was one of the first security issues Mr. Trump raised after declaring his candidacy last year (on Bill O’Reilly’s program, no less). But having an assured capacity to wipe out Russia or China after a surprise attack will be cold comfort if Russia’s next leader has the sensibilities of a Kim Jung Eun.
Over the long run, America’s survival requires something more than a strategic posture that depends on the restraint of other nuclear powers. Technology has come a long way since President Reagan’s efforts to defend America were allowed to die, and the very modest defenses against North Korean aggression that have been built on the U.S. West Coast can’t cope with a major attack. Instead of spending tens of billions of dollars each year trying to rescue hopeless cases like Iraq, the money could be better spent on expanding homeland defenses.
If a President Trump accomplished only that, he might do more to assure the survival of American democracy than every other commander in chief in moder
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