In his first presidential administration, President-elect Donald Trump certainly faced immense national security challenges. But nothing compares with the scope or complexity of the situation he will inherit upon returning to the White House. While counterterrorism and border security remain essential missions, the United States has fully entered a new period of great power competition that could deteriorate into global emergency at nearly any moment.
Without question, the single greatest threat to American national security is increasing cooperation between President Vladimir Putin’s Russia, the Islamist regime in Iran, and the Chinese Communist Party. Though each power has distinct ideological goals, their shared purpose is to roll back American primacy around the world. Neither liberal shibboleths nor isolationist mantras will ever be enough to deter this aggression — only the careful cultivation of American power can. If the incoming Trump administration wants to keep America safe from this threat, it must avoid simplistic populist clichés about “restraint” and “nonintervention.”
Over the last four years, the Biden administration utterly failed to contain aggression from these three enemy regimes. On their watch, Putin launched his bloody invasion of Ukraine, and the Iranian-backed “Axis of Resistance” began a new terrorism campaign across the Middle East from the Gaza Strip to the Red Sea.
Meanwhile, the CCP was not only quietly supporting Russian and Iranian aggression but also advancing its own agenda toward regional hegemony in East Asia. From a national security perspective, Joe Biden’s presidency was nearly as disastrous as his one-term forerunner Jimmy Carter.
The chief reason for Biden’s failures is simply that he could not convince enemy powers that they would suffer consequences for aggressive actions. He entered office, much like Trump today, as a president who promised to end wars. But the short-sighted policies developed from those pacific promises were really a sign to America’s enemies that he lacked any sort of resolve to defend our interests. Each of our three major rivals understood that Biden was unwilling to take major steps to deter them, and so they forged new relationships among themselves to take advantage of American weakness.
Increasingly, this anti-Western bloc is openly binding themselves to one another with public statements and treaties. President Xi Jinping declared a “no limits” partnership between Russia and China in February 2022 and ever since has backed up that pledge with concrete action.
More recently, Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, has been pursuing an actual legally binding treaty with the Iranian regime. The threat is not simply informal cooperation between these enemy powers but rather the confluence of their interests and action.
One painful illustration of this problem is the presence of North Korean troops on the Ukrainian battlefield. Not only do these massed forces demonstrate the budding relationship between Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, but they also show how much passive support the CCP is giving to Putin’s war effort. There is simply no way these troops could have gotten all the way to Europe without Beijing’s consent.
Combined with the Iranian-manufactured drones Russia is still deploying against combatants and civilians alike, the war in Ukraine is a terrifying image of what global conflict will look like over the next four years and beyond. Biden simply did not have the strength or force of will to prevent these hostile connections from developing.
In his several presidential campaigns, Trump unfortunately trucked in the same kind of quasi-isolationist rhetoric that Biden did. And although his last administration was less disruptive than many anticipated, he still implemented policies that sapped away at deterrence. It was Trump and then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, for instance, who negotiated the deal with the Taliban that eventually led to Biden’s shameful retreat from Afghanistan.
Even with the supposedly hawkish team staffing the incoming administration, Trump’s isolationist instincts and rhetoric could undermine American interests and repeat the very same mistakes his predecessor made.
What the incoming Trump administration needs to learn from this season of catastrophe, then, is that weakness invites aggression. A competent national security strategy would acknowledge the dire global situation and enact policies to put America back on top. Biden did not fail because he overextended American resources or pursued too many interventions — he failed because he refused to make national security the top priority it ought to be.
In the first place, Trump and the Republican Congress ought to focus on massively increasing defense production. Ever since the end of the Cold War, politicians in Washington have vastly underestimated the scale of threats to American security. They promised constituents a “peace dividend” if they slashed defense spending, or supported moves to turn the military into a counterterrorism police force as opposed to maintaining warfighting standards that could deter enemy aggression before it even began.
As a result, we barely have enough equipment and material to share with our Ukrainian, Israeli, and Taiwanese friends, let alone the force size necessary to project overwhelming power across multiple theaters. Republicans should include massive increases in defense spending in their first budget. It may not be enough to forestall disaster in all three theaters of conflict in the short term, but it is absolutely necessary to return the U.S. military to fighting shape.
Next, the Trump administration must reassure America’s allies that we will not abandon them. Controversial as it may be among the most rabid elements of Trump’s base, a good step toward that would be doubling down on support for Ukraine. It would signal that Trump is more serious about national security than his campaign rhetoric would indicate, and provide regional partners elsewhere in the world, such as Taiwan and Japan, greater confidence in Trump’s long-term intentions. Furthermore, it would be a warning to the Russia-Iran-China axis that their days of unimpeded aggression are over.
Another step Trump should consider is using trade policy to solidify America’s relationship with our allies. Although he and other protectionists are clearly wrong about tariffs as a means to economic prosperity, they are entirely correct that the United States is far too reliant on China for manufactured goods. Rather than ill-considered policies designed more out of nostalgia than from strategic calculation, though, this problem would be better addressed by pursuing trade deals with countries that share our geopolitical interests. Asian allies such as Japan or the Philippines would love increased trade with America, and European allies such as the United Kingdom have indicated an openness to some kind of trade deal.
In the first volume of his World War II memoir, The Gathering Storm, Winston Churchill insisted that cataclysmic conflict was in fact entirely preventable. Throughout the 1930s, Western powers, including Britain’s Conservative government, chose to appease totalitarians instead of deterring them — and the world paid the price. “The counsels of prudence and restraint may become the prime agents of mortal danger,” Churchill wrote, and “the middle course adopted from desires for safety and a quiet life may be found to lead direct to the bull’s-eye of disaster.”
That is why America cannot afford the “false reptile prudence” of isolationism counseled by some in Trump’s orbit. The “restraint” practiced by the Biden administration did not cool down global conflict; it just provided more kindling for the fire sparked by Russian, Chinese, and Iranian ambitions. A successful second Trump presidency must be, in every sense, a repudiation of Biden’s mistakes — including the illusion of foreign policy restraint.
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Michael Lucchese is the founder of Pipe Creek Consulting, an associate editor of Law & Liberty, and a contributing editor to Providence.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
