Liberal Forum

The president who loved generals: Trump’s foreign policy will be led by the military, not diplomats.

In the splurge of “news,” media-bashing, and Bannonism that’s been Donald Trump’s domestic version of a shock-and-awe campaign, it’s easy to forget just how much of what the new president and his administration have done so far is simply an intensification of trends long underway.

Those who already pine for the age of Obama — a president who was smart, well read, and not a global embarrassment — need to acknowledge the ways in which, particularly in the military arena, Obama’s years helped set the stage for our current predicament.

As a start, Nobel Prize or not, President Obama sustained, and in some cases accelerated, the militarization of American foreign policy that has been steadily increasing for the past three decades.

In significant parts of the world, the U.S. military has become Washington’s first and often only tool — and the result has been disastrous wars, failing states, and spreading terror movements (as well as staggering arms sales) across the Greater Middle East and significant parts of Africa.

Indicators of how militarily dependent Obama’s foreign policy became include the launching of a record number of drone strikes (10 times as many as in the Bush years), undeclared wars in at least six countries, the annual deployment of Special Operations forces to well over half of the countries on the planet, record arms sales to the Middle East, and a plethora of new Pentagon arms and training programs.

Nonetheless, from the New START treaty (which Trump has called “another bad deal,” as he does any deal the Obama administration concluded) to the Iran nuclear deal to the opening with Cuba, Obama had genuine successes of a sort that our present narcissist-in-chief, with his emphasis on looking “tough” or tweeting at the drop of a hat, is unlikely to achieve.

In addition, Obama did try to build on the nuclear arms control agreements and institutions created over the previous five decades, while Trump seems intent on dismantling them.

Still, no one can doubt that our last president did not behave like a Nobel Peace Prize winner, not even in the nuclear arena where he oversaw the launching of a trillion dollar “modernization” of the U.S. nuclear arsenal (including the development of new weapons and new delivery systems).

And one thing is already clear enough: President Trump will prove no non-interventionist.

He is going to build on Obama’s militarization of foreign policy and most likely dramatically accelerate it.

It’s no secret that our new president loves generals.

He’s certainly assembled the most military-heavy foreign policy team in memory, if not in American history, including retired General James Mattis at the Pentagon; retired General John Kelly at Homeland Security; Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster as national security adviser (a replacement for Lieutenant General Michael Flynn who left that post after 24 days); and as chief of staff of the National Security Council, retired Lieutenant General Keith Kellogg.

In addition, CIA Director Mike Pompeo is a West Point graduate and former Cold War-era Army tank officer.

Even White House adviser Steve Bannon has done military service of a sort.

The military background of Trump’s ideologue-in-chief was emphasized by White House spokesman Sean Spicer in his defense of seating him on the National Security Council (NSC).

Bannon’s near-brush with fame as a naval officer came when he piloted a destroyer in the Gulf of Oman trailing the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz that carried the helicopters used in the Carter administration’s botched 1980 attempt to rescue U.S. hostages held by Iran’s revolutionary government.

As it happened, Bannon’s ship was ordered back to Pearl Harbor before the raid was launched, so he learned of its failure from thousands of miles away.

When it comes to national security posts of any sort, it’s clear that choosing a general is now Trump’s default mode.

Three of the four candidates he considered for Flynn’s spot were current or retired generals.

And that’s not even counting retired Vice Admiral Robert Harward, who declined an offer to take Flynn’s post, in part evidently because he wasn’t prepared to battle Bannon over the staffing and running of the NSC.

The only civilian considered for that role was one of the more bellicose guys in town, that ideologue, Iranophobe, former U.N. ambassador, and neocon extraordinaire John Bolton.

The bad news: Trump was evidently impressed by Bolton, who may still get a slot alongside Bannon and his motley crew of extremists in the White House.

Another early indicator of the military drift of future administration actions is the marginalization of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and the State Department, which appears to be completely out of the policy-making loop at the moment.

It is understaffed, underutilized, slated to have its funding slashed by as much as 30 percent to 40 percent, and rarely even asked to provide Trump with basic knowledge about the countries and leaders he’s dealing with.

(As a result, White House statements have, on several occasions, misspelled the names of foreign heads of state and the president mistakenly addressed the Japanese Prime Minister as “Shinzo,” his first name, not “Abe.”)

The State Department isn’t even giving regular press briefings, a practice routinely followed in prior administrations.

Tillerson’s main job so far has been traveling the planet to reassure foreign leaders that the new president isn’t as crazy as he seems to be.

Although Secretaries of State Hillary Clinton and John Kerry were far more involved in the crafting of foreign policy than Tillerson is likely to be, the State Department has long been the junior partner to its ever better resourced counterpart.

The Pentagon’s budget is currently 12 times larger than the State Department’s (and that’s before the impending Trump military build-up even begins).

As former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates once noted, there are more personnel in a single aircraft carrier task force than there are trained diplomats in the U.S. Foreign Service.

Given the way President Trump has outfitted his administration with generals, the already militarized nature of foreign policy is only likely to become more so.

As former White House budget official and defense expert Gordon Adams has pointed out, his military-dominated foreign policy team should be cause for serious concern.

Policy-by-general is sure to create a skewed view of policy-making, since everything is likely to be viewed initially through a military lens by men trained in war, not diplomacy or peace.

For the military-industrial complex, however, many of Trump’s national security picks are the best of news.

They’re “twofers,” having worked in both the military and the arms industry.

Defense Secretary Mattis, for instance, joined the administration from the board of General Dynamics, which gets about $10 billion in Pentagon contracts annually and makes tanks and ballistic missile submarines, among many other weapons systems.

Trump’s pick for Secretary of the Air Force, former New Mexico representative Heather Wilson, is an Air Force veteran who went to work as a lobbyist for Lockheed Martin’s nuclear weapons unit when she left Congress.

Deputy National Security adviser Keith Kellogg has worked for a series of defense contractors including Cubic and CACI. (You may remember CACI as one of the private companies that supplied interrogators implicated in the Abu Ghraib prison torture scandal during the U.S. occupation of Iraq.)

This practice is rife with the potential for conflicts of interest, as such officials are in a position to make decisions that could benefit their former employers to the tune of billions of dollars.

“If you don’t fund the State Department fully, then I need to buy more ammunition ultimately.

So I think it’s a cost-benefit ratio.

The more that we put into the State Department’s diplomacy, hopefully the less we have to put into a military budget."

http://www.businessinsider.com/mattis-s ... ion-2017-2