President Trump Body Slammed by his Generals

(Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)

President Trump’s 2017 busybody National Security Strategy (NSS) guide is every bit as dangerous for America as 1992’s Defense Planning Guidance report (DPG). Robert Merry explains the shear folly of Trump’s NSS. The best explanation you can read of 1992’s DPG is supplied by my friend, Cato Institute’s Chris Preble. Trump, contrary to all campaign promises, has abandoned non-interventionists as well as the constitutionally obvious intent of our Founders.

America is once again on a foreign policy minefield, putting the entire country at risk. Washington politicians, whoever they may be, never seem to learn. The voters are just going to have to see that this situation is rectified once and for all. But how?

President Trump’s 2017 National Security Strategy, or NSS, is a dangerous document. If followed by the administration over the next three years, it will almost surely continue America’s arrogant ways of the past 30 years, destabilize major regions of the world, create hostilities where none need exist, and increase the chances of unnecessary U.S. wars, particularly against Iran.

The most striking characteristic of the document is the extent to which it merely nibbles around the edges of the foreign policies of George W. Bush and Barack Obama. So much for Trump’s grandiose rhetoric heralding a new era in American foreign policy. In fact, there are echoes in the language that go back to one of the most unfortunate doctrines of the past quarter century: the idea that America must prevent any other nation from becoming a dominant power in any region, thus bolstering our goal of global hegemony. That impulse helped generate the Iraq war, the unraveling of the U.S.-Russian relationship, and the tensions with Iran under Bush II. […]

This concept goes back to a 1992 Defense Planning Guidance report crafted during the H. W. Bush administration by men who later became the architects of America’s Iraq invasion during the George W. Bush years. […]

On China, Trump says the rising Middle Kingdom “seeks to displace the United States in the Indo-Pacific region, expand the reaches of its state-driven economic model, and reorder the region in its favor.” This is true, and the United States will eventually have to decide whether it will allow itself to be displaced in the Pacific, which it has dominated since World War II. […]

On Europe, Trump has backed away from his campaign pronouncement that NATO had become “obsolete. […]

The document also contains hints of the hoary notion that remaking other nations in our image will advance global stability and U.S. security. Trump vows to “advance American influence because a world that supports American interests and reflects our values makes America more secure and prosperous.” This is babble. […]

Trump has been coopted—if indeed he ever possessed any serious intention of changing America’s direction in the world.
Robert W. Merry, longtime Washington, D.C. journalist, author, and publishing executive, is editor of The American Conservative. His latest book, President McKinley: Architect of the American Century, was released in November.[…]

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