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Trump’s Confused Approach to Burden-Sharing

The contrast between Trump's actual policies and his rhetoric about what allies "owe" is stark.
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Christopher Preble takes aim at the misguided priorities in Trump’s proposed budget:

But spending more money on the U.S. military is unlikely to induce greater burden sharing on the part of U.S. allies. After all, from Iraq and Afghanistan, to North Korea and the South China Sea, the U.S. military has been quite busy in recent years. Add in the four or five other countries regularly subjected to U.S. drone strikes and you begin to get a clearer picture of the scope of U.S. military activism. But Trump’s call for “a larger, more capable, and more lethal joint force,” suggests that he thinks our soldiers, sailors, airmen and U.S. Marines haven’t been doing nearly enough.

To some extent, that is a product of Trump’s outsourcing of almost all of his foreign policy to Republican hawks. Because he doesn’t know much about these issues and has even less experience working on them, Trump has been even more reliant on the hawks in his party than previous Republican presidents, and because of his own instincts he has been only too happy to throw more money at the Pentagon while starving State and other civilian departments of resources. Mocking diplomatic engagement, escalating current wars, and giving the military more money were three recurring themes in Trump’s campaign rhetoric, and regrettably these are the things that he has made a priority since taking office.

The contrast between Trump’s actual policies and his rhetoric about what allies “owe” is stark. Trump recently berated Germany over what it supposedly “owed” NATO, confirming that he doesn’t understand how the alliance works, but before that he had put forward a larger military budget that takes the pressure off allied governments to spend more for their own defense in any case. As long as the U.S. is prepared to continue increasing its already bloated military budget, allies have no incentive to increase theirs. Until the U.S. allows some slack for allies to take up, the allies will be more than happy to stick with the status quo. So Trump’s browbeating of allies isn’t going to accomplish anything, and he and his advisers will have no one else to blame for that but themselves.

There was a possibility that Trump might not be as indulgent of “free-riding” allies and clients as previous presidents, but once again this has proved to be an unfounded hope. Far from reducing support for those “free-riders,” the administration’s early actions and statements have been to signal an increase in backing for bad clients such as Saudi Arabia and a willingness to take on another free-riding ally by bringing Montenegro into NATO. Even when this promises to entangle the U.S. more deeply in foreign conflicts that harm our security, as we can see happening with the war on Yemen, this is what the administration is doing.

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