Lee has fought these battles before. But never like this.
This argument in favor of austerity for working families and munificence for military contractors is not exactly new. It has been a conservative mantra since the Grand Old Party purged itself of the “Modern Republicans” who clung to the vision of former president Dwight Eisenhower and made theirs a party of reaction rather than reason. But even Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush eschewed the budgetary extremism that Trump, via Mulvaney, embraced with a fervor that arrested any fantasy that a “billionaire populist” president might steer his adopted party back from the brink.
The budget proposal that Trump took to Congress, and that Mulvaney continues to peddle is not the final statement on fiscal priorities. It is, as they say, a blueprint. And final budgets are never built to spec.
But the indications are clear. Trump’s Office of Management and Budget does not intend to plot a course to “make America great again.” Rather, it proposes to tip the balance against greatness by making what the first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, referred to as “the last best hope of earth” into an ever more heavily militarized state that will not care for its own.
This is by design. It is not a grand design, however. Rather, it is an approach that Trump has adopted as he has moved from the capricious politics of his initial candidacy to the reality of a rigidly right-wing presidency.
Mulvaney said on the eve of the president’s “Budget Blueprint” speech: “The president is doing what he said he’d do when he ran.” But Trump said a lot of things when he was bidding for the presidency in 2016. He made big promises about jobs and infrastructure, delivering more and better health care, protecting Social Security and Medicare. He portrayed himself as a critic of the war in Iraq, a skeptic about new military adventures and a foe of “the fraud and abuse and everything else” in bloated Department of Defense budgets. “I’m gonna build a military that’s gonna be much stronger than it is right now,” he announced on NBC’s Meet the Press in 2015. “It’s gonna be so strong, nobody’s gonna mess with us,” he promised. “But you know what? We can do it for a lot less.”
That seemed reasonably definitive.
But, as everyone who has been paying attention knows, Trump bounced all over the ideological landscape during the 2016 campaign, and his presidency hasn’t exactly been a model of consistency. Unless you listen to Mulvaney. The OMB director claims, against all evidence to the contrary, that bloating up the Pentagon budget was always a high priority of the Trump campaign. “What you see in this budget,” the budget director explained in February 2017, “is exactly what the president ran on. He ran on increasing spending on the military.”
Mulvaney was unsettlingly vague when asked about keeping Trump’s promise to guard against Social Security cuts. But he was clear about the general thrust of the administration’s approach to budgeting. “[We] took $54 billion out of non-defense discretionary spending in order to increase defense spending—entirely consistent with what the president said that he would do,” Mulvaney said. “So what’s the president done? He’s protected the nation, but not added any additional money to the 2018 deficit. This is a winning argument for my friends in the House and a winning argument for a lot of folks all over the country. The president does what he says but doesn’t add to the budget [deficit]. That’s a win.”
Mulvaney is wrong. That’s not a win.
That does not protect America, at least not in the sense that Democratic and Republican presidents have historically understood the preservation of the republic. Budgeting is always a matter of striking balances. When the balance is right, the American experiment advances. When there is an imbalance, it is threatened.
Dwight Eisenhower explained this when he appeared barely two months into his presidency before the American Society of Newspaper Editors. The speech was much anticipated. Eisenhower was the first Republican commander in chief in two decades, and he was still placing his imprint on the Oval Office, the country and a world that was in the grips of a “Cold War.” The new president could have chosen any topic for his first major address to the assembled media luminaries. He chose as his topic the proper balancing of budget priorities.
Eisenhower recognized the threats that existed. He spoke, at length, about difficult relations between the United States and the Soviet Union and he addressed the threat of annihilation posed by the spread of atomic weaponry. But the career military man—the supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Forces in Europe during World War II, the chief of staff of the army during the post-war era when tensions with Moscow rose—did not come to suggest that increased defense spending was a singular priority. In fact, his purpose was the opposite. He spoke of the “dread road” of constant military escalation and warned about “a burden of arms draining the wealth and the labor of all peoples; a wasting of strength that defies the American system or the Soviet system or any system to achieve true abundance and happiness for the peoples of this earth.”
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed,” said Eisenhower, who explained:
This world in arms is not spending money alone.
It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.
It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population.
It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals.
It is some fifty miles of concrete highway.
We pay for a single fighter with a half million bushels of wheat.
We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.
This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking.
This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
Eisenhower did not propose surrender or immediate or casual disarmament. But he did propose diplomacy (“We welcome every honest act of peace”) and the sincere pursuit of a world with fewer weapons and fewer excuses for war making (“This we do know: a world that begins to witness the rebirth of trust among nations can find its way to a peace that is neither partial nor punitive”).
“The monuments to this new kind of war would be these: roads and schools, hospitals and homes, food and health,” Eisenhower concluded. “We are ready, in short, to dedicate our strength to serving the needs, rather than the fears, of the world.”
These are different times. The world has changed, and so has the United States. But what has changed the most is the understanding, once shared by Republicans and Democrats, that providing for the common defense does not preclude the promotion of the general welfare.
Conservatives like to say, “There is no free lunch,” and that is certainly true when it comes to budgeting. It is not possible to move tens of billions of dollars out of domestic programs that have already in many cases been squeezed to austerity levels and into a military budget so vast, the National Priorities Project reports that “U.S. military expenditures are roughly the size of the next seven largest military budgets around the world, combined.”
On a planet where Americans account for 4.34 percent of the population, U.S. military spending accounts for 37 percent of the global total. And Trump, with Mulvaney’s assistance, appears to be determined to push the latter percentage way upward.
That is a problematic imbalance in itself. But what makes it even more problematic is Mulvaney’s signal that, under Trump, the imbalance will be maintained not by collecting new revenues but by redistributing money that could have been spent on health care and housing and education at home—and on the international diplomacy and foreign aid that might actually reduce the need for military expenditures. “While Trump claims he’
s serious about great negotiation, his plan to pillage funds from the State Department and foreign aid to feed the insatiable Pentagon budget says otherwise,” notes Peace Action executive director Jon Rainwater. Instead of putting Americans first, Trump’s “plans to line the arms industry’s pockets by cutting programs like health care that provide real security to American families [say] otherwise.”
This is the contemporary realization of the fear that President Thomas Jefferson expressed on December 2, 1806, in his sixth annual address to the new United States. “Our duty is, therefore, to act upon things as they are and to make a reasonable provision for whatever they may be. Were armies to be raised whenever a speck of war is visible in our horizon, we never should have been without them,” warned Jefferson. “Our resources would have been exhausted on dangers which have never happened instead of being reserved for what is really to take place.”
— 12 —
THE ABSOLUTIST
Lieutenant General H. R. McMaster
National Security Advisor
One month into Donald Trump’s presidency, the White House was such a mess that the president had to devote a holiday weekend to the desperate search for a new national security advisor. His initial choice, retired general Michael Flynn, had been fired for withholding information from Vice President Mike Pence about contacts with Russia’s ambassador to the United States.
The storyline read like chapter 2 of a Tom Clancy novel that would not end well for the commander in chief. So it was perhaps appropriate that Trump’s pick to fill the void opened by Flynn’s exit was the best-selling author of a book that delves into the White House intrigues and military missteps of another time. The notable distinction, however, is that Lieutenant General H. R. McMaster is a nonfiction writer.
A scholar and a soldier who earned a doctorate in military history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a Silver Star for commanding a unit in a 1991 Persian Gulf War battle with Iraq’s Republican Guard (along with broad recognition for his leadership of the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment during George W. Bush’s second Iraq War), in 1997, General McMaster wrote the best-selling book Dereliction of Duty: Johnson, McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam.
General McMaster is a smart and confident man, with an independent streak. That explains why he was not Trump’s first choice for the job, and why, since his selection, there have been a number of reports of clashes between the general and the president. It also explains why Trump doubters celebrated the selection of General McMaster. Arizona senator John McCain, who had emerged as a frequently pointed critic of the president in a Republican Congress where most members of the House and Senate served as little more than rubber stamps, hailed the naming of the general as “outstanding.”
Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, broadly (if not entirely accurately) seen as a cabinet-level check and balance on Trump, encouraged his former colleague to take the job. And former Obama Defense Department official Andrew Exum described General McMaster as “one of the most talented men I know. A great officer and thinker. Huge upgrade.”
No one was going to debate that General McMaster was a huge upgrade from the scandal-plagued Flynn. But that does not necessarily mean that General McMaster was the right choice for one of the most important jobs in the White House—as the general’s embarrassing defense of Trump’s firing of FBI director James Comey soon confirmed.
The national security advisor post, which was established during the Cold War, has traditionally been occupied by civilians, usually with military experience, as opposed to active-duty military men such as General McMaster. While generals have held the position before (including then–lieutenant general Colin Powell, who held the post during Ronald Reagan’s second term), the national security advisor job is not a military posting. Rather, it is a senior slot in the executive office of the president, whose commander-in-chief status maintains civilian control over the military.
“President Trump’s placement of career military personnel in positions usually filled by civilians is troubling,” said Paul Kawika Martin, senior director for policy with Peace Action, the nation’s largest grassroots peace organization. Noting that the United States already devoted over half its discretionary spending to the Pentagon, weapons and past wars, Martin explained that “as they say, if you only have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. The world is too complex for only one tool. The threats of climate change, terrorism and nuclear weapons require long-term solutions around energy policy, alleviating poverty, increased education and negotiating nuclear weapons agreements. Naming another general as national security advisor is a mistake, instead the White House needs more diplomatic skills in its tool box.”
That’s an old-fashioned American conception.
The founders of the American experiment, having only recently unshackled thirteen colonies from the British Empire, were wary of monarchs and the armies they had used to maintain “the divine right of kings.” “Among the Romans it was a standing maxim to excite a war, whenever a revolt was apprehended. Throughout all Europe, the armies kept up under the pretext of defending, have enslaved the people,” explained James Madison, the essential author of the Constitution, who warned that “in time of actual war, great discretionary powers are constantly given to the Executive Magistrate. Constant apprehension of War, has the same tendency to render the head too large for the body. A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive, will not long be safe companions to liberty. The means of defense against foreign danger, have been always the instruments of tyranny at home.”
Long before President Dwight Eisenhower counseled wariness with regard to a “military-industrial complex,” Elbridge Gerry, a delegate to the Constitutional Convention, observed that “standing armies in time of peace are inconsistent with the principles of republican Governments, dangerous to the liberties of a free people, and generally converted into destructive engines for establishing despotism.”
Today, the United States has a standing army. It is huge and expensive. Trump seems to be intent on making it huger, and more expensive—so big and so costly that his approach calls into question whether he even begins to comprehend what Eisenhower was talking about when he warned that “this conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence—economic, political, even spiritual—is felt in every city, every statehouse, every office of the federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.”
“In the councils of government,” Eisenhower argued, “we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists, and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals so that security and liberty may prosper together.”
General McMaster understands this concept. At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill he studied with Richard Kohn, the brilliant historian of peace, war and defense arrangements who famously explained that “the point of civilian control is to make security subordinate to the larger purposes of a nation, rather than the other way around. The purpose of the military is to defend society, not to define it. While a country may have civilian control of the military without democracy, it cannot have democracy without civilian control.”
General McMaster’s book, Dereliction of Duty, examines the challenges that arose when civilian leaders and the Joint Chiefs of Staff worked with one another during the Vietnam War. (A favorable New York Times review referred to it as “a comprehensive, balanced
and relentless exploration of the specific role of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.”) General McMaster dismisses the simplistic contentions of partisans and pundits—at the time and today. “The war in Vietnam was not lost in the field, nor was it lost on the front pages of The New York Times, or on the college campuses,” he explains. “It was lost in Washington, D.C., even before Americans assumed sole responsibility for the fighting in 1965 and before they realized the country was at war.” It was, he writes, “a uniquely human failure, the responsibility for which was shared by President Johnson and his principal military and civilian advisors.”
General McMaster’s “solution” is to argue that military commanders must be more assertive in defining strategic objections and making a case for decisive military action. That’s a popular notion with military commanders. But, as Dr. Steven Metz, the Henry L. Stimson Professor of Military Studies, U.S. Army War College, noted in a 1997 review of the book, it’s problematic.
“While Dereliction of Duty might set new standards for stridency in its criticism of America’s entry into Vietnam, it does not offer radically new ideas, evidence, or concepts,” wrote Metz. “It is, rather, a powerful case study of the approach to national security that predominates in the US officer corps and other conservative segments of the American public. In a sense, McMaster has taken precisely the tack on Vietnam that one would expect of a very bright, passionate, and articulate US Army officer. For instance, McMaster implies that national security should be above or at least quarantined from ‘normal’ politics. He clearly sympathizes with those service Chiefs who were unable or unwilling to link Vietnam policy with other concerns such as Johnson’s reelection and the passage of the Great Society legislation. He condemns military leaders like Maxwell Taylor who did think in such terms. In this, McMaster runs counter to the post-Vietnam tendency within the American military which teaches strategic leaders to consider the wider political context in which military decisions are made (even though not necessarily framing strategic advice in terms of domestic politics).”