This final “Line of Effort” underpins the preceding three regarding the Western Hemisphere, the Indo-Pacific, and burden-sharing, all of which are being pursued in furtherance of Trump 2.0’s grand strategic goal of restoring the US’ predominant position over the world, including over China and Russia.
Andrew Korybko
Trump 2.0 just released its National Defense Strategy (NDS) two months after its National Security Strategy
(NSS), and as could be expected, they each preach the need to
prioritize the Western Hemisphere. The “Trump Doctrine” that’s
discernable within both, which was analyzed here,
aims to restore the US’ predominant position (unipolarity) over the
Americas and then the rest of the world. “Flexible, practical realism”
will explicitly guide the implementation of this grand strategic goal.
Instead
of redundantly pointing out all the similarities between the NDS and
the NSS, the present piece will draw attention to how the administration
envisages applying the aforesaid realist approach. Four “Lines of
Effort” (LOEs) are enumerated: 1) “Defend the U.S. Homeland”; 2) Deter
China in the Indo-Pacific Through Strength, Not Confrontation”; 3)
Increase Burden-Sharing with U.S. Allies and Partners”; and 4)
“Supercharge the U.S. Defense Industrial Base”. They’ll now be briefly
described in order.
The Department of War’s (DOW) primary tasks in
the Western Hemisphere are defending the US’ borders, countering
(Islamic and narco-) terrorists, building the “Golden Dome”, and
ensuring military and commercial access to key terrain like Greenland,
the Gulf of America, and the Panama Canal. The last-mentioned task is
the essence of the “Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine”. The DOW’s
explicit goal in this LOE is described as “restor[ing] American military
dominance in the Western Hemisphere”.
By way of comparison,
its explicit goal in the Indo-Pacific LOE is “peace through strength”,
which the DOW plans to pursue through “strong denial defense” in the
First Island Chain. This will be carried out together with the US’
regional allies, which can be described as the AUKUS+ network,
although that terminology isn’t used in the NDS. The authors expect
that this will create a favorable “balance of power” for achieving a
“decent peace” that allows for mutually beneficial coexistence with
China.
The third LOE embraces the “Lead From Behind” (LFB) concept that was described here
in 2015 by incentivizing partners to do more to advance their shared
regional interests with the US. The NDS earlier described Russia as a
“persistent but manageable threat” in the sense that “European NATO
dwarfs Russia in economic scale, population, and, thus, latent military
power.” The aforesaid just have to be fully unleashed through US
incentives and strategic guidance in order to more effectively contain
Russia.
The last LOE underpins the preceding ones. Without
“Supercharg[ing] the U.S. Defense Industrial Base”, the US cannot
“restore American military dominance in the Western Hemisphere”,
practice a “strong denial defense” in the First Island Chain, or LFB to
contain shared adversaries like China (described as “the most powerful
state relative to us since the 19th century”), Russia, Iran, and North
Korea. This part ends with a call for military-industrial production
comparable to the two World Wars and Cold War.
Therein lies
the top takeaway from the NDS, namely that the US will resume World
War-like levels of military-industrial production in furtherance of
Trump 2.0’s grand strategic goal of restoring the US’ predominant
position (unipolarity) over the world. Although the US will try to avoid
Great Power conflict with China and Russia, this will be very difficult
to do given its attempt to establish strategic superiority over them through this new undeclared arms race, which risks a war breaking out by miscalculation.