The Allure of Magical Realism – Eric S. Edelman

This document, required by Congress in legislation, is the most politicized “strategy” document ever to emerge from the U.S. government. It drips with contempt for all its predecessors and their reverence for “cloud-castle abstractions like the rules-based international order” as well as their alleged undermining of the military’s “warrior ethos.” It also plays fast and loose with the truth, contending that Trump entered office “with the nation on the precipice of disastrous wars for which we were unprepared” but that miraculously, within one year, Trump had somehow presided over the creation of “the world’s strongest, most lethal, and most capable military.” 

A particularly annoying trope of Trump administration statements is that they are frequently accompanied by condemnations of the Biden administration. As attentive readers of The Dispatch will recall, I have had no shortage of criticisms of that team’s time in office, but it is simply false, as the NDS alleges, that U.S. access to the Panama Canal and Greenland were somehow in doubt because of the Biden administration’s policies. Nor is it accurate to claim that the Biden administration “effectively encouraged” U.S. allies to free-ride and somehow left the alliance unable to “respond effectively to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.” Nor is it the case that the Biden team failed to empower Israel after the horrific October 7, 2023, Hamas massacre. All of this seems more like fodder for a Trump rally than a serious strategy document.

Both the National Security Strategy (NSS) released in December and this NDS mark a departure from all past U.S. strategy documents, including the 2017 NSS and NDS from the first Trump administration. Those documents were notable for turning away from the wars of the post-9/11 era to a necessary focus on emerging great-power competition with a rising China and a revanchist Russia. That strategy built on previous efforts by the late Secretary of Defense Ash Carter and helped solidify an emerging bipartisan consensus on geopolitical competition that was carried forward in the Biden administration’s 2022 NDS, which specified that China was the pacing threat. This document, on the other hand, follows the recent NSS in prioritizing the defense of the homeland and the Western Hemisphere and preserving access to the Gulf of Mexico, the Panama Canal, and Greenland (which appears to have been a late addition since it is not mentioned once in the December NSS). How U.S. access was being jeopardized is never really spelled out.

There are several observations one can make about this shift in emphasis. First, since the 9/11 terror attacks on New York and Washington, all strategy documents have prioritized the defense of the homeland. This strategy, however, sees the continuing violent jihadist threat to the U.S as a relatively minor issue compared with an alleged immigrant invasion and narcotics trafficking, as well as cyber and ballistic-missile threats. The strategy suggests that the migration and narcotics challenges will be dealt with through the exercise of “the Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine as demonstrated in the “kidnapping” (Trump’s word) of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, while Americans will be shielded from the missile threat by the still inchoate “Golden Dome” missile defense effort (although recent reports suggest that it is mired in internal Pentagon disputes).

The NDS attempts to spell out the “Trump Corollary,” or what the president has taken to calling the “Donroe Doctrine,” which was left undefined in the NSS. According to the NDS, the Department of Defense will “restore American military dominance in the Western Hemisphere. We will use it to protect our Homeland and our access to key terrain throughout the region. We will also deny adversaries’ ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities in our hemisphere.” As anyone with a passing knowledge of American diplomatic history will recognize, this is merely a repackaging of the late 19^th century Olney Corollary—“Today the United States is practically sovereign on this continent and its fiat is law upon the subjects to which it confines its interposition”—and Theodore Roosevelt’s 1904 Message to Congress expanding the Monroe Doctrine even further by asserting that “chronic wrong doing” by countries in the Western Hemisphere could prompt the U.S. to undertake “the exercise of an international police power.” 

It is perhaps worth noting that these earlier assertions of U.S. dominance led to an endless series of interventions in Central America and the Caribbean that, while arguably providing some economic benefit to the region, contributed to growing anger at the “Colossus of the North” and were brought to an end by Franklin Roosevelt’s “Good Neighbor Policy” during the Great Depression. It is certainly fair to say that the U.S. has neglected the hemisphere over the past 35 years and that this neglect has, at least in part, contributed to the crisis of migration that has accelerated in the past few decades. But American military dominance in the hemisphere is not really a solution to that problem, and the destruction of U.S. soft power tools during the DOGE rampage through the U.S. government last year will not help curb China’s use of economic assistance and development projects to increase its presence and influence in the region.

Many had speculated that once Elbridge Colby, a leading exponent of ruthless prioritization of U.S. defense policy on the Indo-Pacific and the China challenge, had been named undersecretary of defense for policy that the NDS would give pride of place to the Indo-Pacific, but it ranks only second as a U.S. interest in the strategy. But the formulations, as in the NSS, focus more on ensuring “strategic stability” and deterring China with “strength” rather than confrontation with an emphasis on “deconfliction and de-escalation more broadly.” The strategy seeks an end state of “a decent peace on terms favorable to the U.S. but that China can also accept and live under.” What that would entail exactly is left unsaid.

Instead of “strategic competition” with China, the strategy seeks a broader range of military-to-military contacts intended to prevent miscalculation and mistakes. Previous administrations, it should be noted, have also sought to improve military communications with little success in lessening tensions in the region. Moreover, although the strategy suggests that “we will erect a strong denial defense along the First Island Chain (FIC)” there is not a single mention of Taiwan and its defense in the document. Presumably it is incorporated by reference in the FIC, but the lack of any specific operational concept to underpin the buzzwords of “strong denial defense” is troubling to say the least.

In the East Asian context, and elsewhere for that matter, there is not a single mention of the importance of U.S. extended nuclear deterrence, although there is lip service paid to the importance of modernizing U.S. nuclear forces. The strategy does, however, call for the Republic of Korea to undertake the “primary responsibility for North Korea” with “critical but more limited support from the U.S.” In more recent days, President Trump has threatened to slap a 25 percent tariff on South Korea because it has been slow to ratify the trade agreement with the U.S. reached earlier in the year. This was, inconveniently, coincident with a trip to South Korea by Undersecretary Colby, who shortly before the president’s threat, had declared South Korea to be a “model ally.” In sum, it is hard to imagine how all of this doesn’t reinforce the existing debate in Seoul about the need for an independent South Korean nuclear deterrent.

Europe receives relatively short shrift in the strategy (although it is spared some of the insults that were the hallmark of the NSS) in part because it assesses Russia to be “a persistent but manageable threat to NATO’s eastern members for the foreseeable future” and “in no position to make a bid for European hegemony.” As a result, the U.S. will “calibrate” its force posture in Europe, and our allies there will have to make do with “critical but more limited support” (a phrase that appears in several places in the document). Precisely how this is meant to work is never spelled out. The U.S. will, according to the strategy, “seek to leverage NATO processes” to support European efforts to take over the responsibility for conventional defense of the continent, but that may be difficult to accomplish if, as the Washington Post reported, the Department of Defense cuts its participation in

“a range of the alliance’s advisory groups.” At a time when Russia is deploying intermediate range ballistic missiles that can reach well beyond the alliance’s eastern members, this almost invites more premature prophesies of the death of NATO and ultimately increases the potential for nuclear proliferation in Europe. Since Congress has repeatedly intervened to prevent the administration’s most irresponsible steps in Europe, one can hope that it will continue to restrain the impulse to leave Europe to its own devices.

The strategy understandably and correctly focuses on “supercharging” the defense industrial base (DIB) recognizing the frailties that the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East have exposed about the U.S. ability to produce munitions and other weapons at the scale that modern warfare will require.  There is precious little, however, in the way of specifics about how this will be accomplished. Even the generalities that the strategy employs—that supercharging the DIB will require national mobilization and that DoD must partner with both new entrants and traditional defense contractors—seem to fly in the face of the administration’s actions. It is hard, for instance, to imagine national mobilization in the current highly polarized political atmosphere that the administration appears committed to heightening rather than healing. Partnering with traditional vendors to the DoD also seems a bit at odds with threatening  defense industry over stock buybacks, executive compensation, and shareholder dividends. Even if some of these concerns are valid, the tenor and tone of the rebukes seem excessive.

All strategies rest on an assessment of the current international security environment. This document, despite its repeated injunctions about the need for “clear-eyed” realism, seems particularly cursory and deficient. There is no real analysis of the growing ties and defense industrial cooperation among China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. Although it acknowledges that the possibility of dealing with opportunistic and simultaneous aggression by America’s adversaries would be a very stressing case for the Defense Department and the U.S. military, it largely treats the issue with blame-casting and hand-waving. Coordinated aggression “would be less of a concern if our allies and partners had spent recent decades investing adequately in their defenses.” But because “our alliance network is far wealthier than all our potential adversaries combined,” if we just get them to invest wisely in defense all will be well. 

Moreover, Trump’s leadership has led our allies—“especially in Europe and South Korea”—to increase their efforts. So basically, increased burden-sharing becomes the fairy-tale formula that will allow the U.S. to “maintain favorable balances of power in each of the world’s key regions” despite the more limited assistance that allies can expect from the U.S. How this will transpire is explained nowhere in the document and the recent stresses of alliance management with Europe and South Korea seem to undercut much of the force of what argumentation one can find in it. 

The tension between the U.S. global role and the prioritization of the homeland and Western Hemisphere is palpable throughout, and the NDS is devoid of any serious discussion on how the strategy will enable the military to achieve its ends of a stable balance of power in all theaters. The strategy takes pains to say that it “does not neglect the other threats” and that it is merely “sensibly and prudently pressing and enabling allies and partners to take primary responsibility for defending against these other threats.” But this is unconnected from any discussion of the operational concepts, programs, capabilities, and budgetary resources that will translate these goals and objectives into realities. In the absence of any such explanation, the document reads more like a set of magical incantations than a serious strategy.

The Department of Defense has delivered to the people’s representatives a seriously deficient guide to maintaining the nation’s security in an increasingly disordered world in which the challenges to peace and prosperity are growing. One can only hope that Congress will subject this strategy to the same serious scrutiny with which I am certain America’s adversaries are subjecting it.