Originally Authored at TheFederalist.com
As the second Trump administration prepares to take office, it faces a full slate of foreign policy crises and a limited capacity for dealing with them. For decades, U.S. foreign policy has been led by people who saw a world without tradeoffs. There was no need for prioritization, either among foreign policy goals or between domestic and foreign projects. America could have more guns and more butter, forever.
Even at the height of the unipolar moment, tradeoffs still existed, but now they are back with a vengeance. The Trump administration will have to deal with insolvency in its foreign policy, both in terms of material resources, as well as its attention. Strategy is about prioritization among various objectives and applying resources commensurately. The D.C. foreign policy establishment is bad at strategy.
In his 1943 book, US Foreign Policy: Shield of the Republic, Walter Lippmann famously worried about the alignment of American ends and means. Solvency, Lippmann wrote, was achieved when “our power [was] adequate to our commitments.” Still, it was not merely balance that policy should seek, but “a comfortable surplus of power in reserve.”
Can anyone with a straight face argue that U.S. foreign policy is, at present, solvent? Much less that we have a comfortable surplus of power in reserve?
The questions answer themselves.
Since President Trump left office in 2021, the People’s Republic of China has eroded the U.S. military advantage each year. In Europe, U.S. policymakers deploy tumid prose to argue that unless Ukraine is capable of defeating Russia (it is not), Americans cannot be safe. For its part, Israel has consumed roughly $18 billion in U.S. military aid for its wars in Gaza and Lebanon. All this while Washington spends more than a trillion dollars per year on defense programs.
There is no slack capacity to draw from. The national debt is $35 trillion and growing. The Congress is racking up budget deficits in excess of $1.5 trillion each year. Unsurprisingly, forward-looking budget projections are absolutely dismal. With Medicare, Social Security, and interest on the debt largely off the table to close the gap, defense hawks have no stash of money into which they can tap.
Unfortunately, the insolvency of America’s allies and partners is, if anything, even larger. Taiwan, which faces arguably the worst threat environment on earth, spends a piddling 2.5 percent of its own GDP on defense, piling its insolvency on top of ours. U.S. policymakers have made matters worse by not prioritizing the provision of weapons to the island. Taipei is still waiting for roughly $20 billion of U.S. weapons it has purchased but not yet received, but the Biden administration made clear in June that its priority for weapons transfers was Ukraine, not Taiwan. As Biden put it, other recipients are “going to have to wait. Everything we have is going to go to Ukraine until their needs are met.”
Despite this, Ukraine is presently losing its war, and our European allies are also insolvent. Drawing on a tradition four generations old, European capitals have chosen to rely on our largesse rather than defend themselves. Since Trump’s election, some European leaders have made the right noises, such as France’s Emmanuel Macron, who observed that Trump “was elected by the American people, and he’s going to defend the interests of the American people — that’s legitimate and a good thing. The question is, are we ready to defend the interests of Europeans?”
The fact that the division of labor in Europe — and the answer to Macron’s question — is unclear is particularly perverse because Europe is the theater in which actual U.S. interests have largely been achieved. If any progress is going to be made toward American solvency, the new Trump administration must force Europeans to grow up and lead on their own security.
Existing efforts to grapple with insolvency have been disheartening. For its part, Congress appointed a commission to examine the resourcing of the National Defense Strategy. The commission held U.S. foreign policy constant, while admitting the strategy was insolvent. It recommended that Congress should fund huge increases in defense spending through “additional taxes and reforms to entitlement spending.” Congress asking to be told to raise taxes and cut entitlements to pay for hundreds of billions more in defense spending is a new level of cynicism, even for Congress.
Other hawks assume away tradeoffs altogether. AEI foreign policy chief Kori Schake, who has marketed herself as a Trump Whisperer, argues that the historic U.S. debt and deficits should not limit defense spending, since “Washington devised emergency spending mechanisms during the financial crisis and the pandemic” and the administration can fund a massive increase in defense spending with “growth-friendly policies on taxes and regulation.”
This is magical thinking. The trillions in additional spending during the financial crisis and pandemic helped bring us to the national debt that exists, and constrains us, today. Were there growth-friendly policies lying around that could forestall a reckoning, policymakers would have used them already.
There is one tribe of foreign policy thinkers on the right that doesn’t assume away tradeoffs or the need for strategy. Often referred to as “Prioritizers,” these analysts argue that American resources are limited, and the greatest threats to the United States emanate from large, powerful countries, which in practice has meant “China, then everyone else.”
Referring to strategists who focus on material tradeoffs and great power competition should be like referring to economists who focus on supply and demand. The fact that it is treated as an innovation shows how poor the DC foreign policy consensus is.
American foreign policy is insolvent. So are those of its allies. The early indications on Trump’s foreign policy appointments are good: reflexive hawks like Tom Cotton, Mike Pompeo, and Nikki Haley have been sent to exile. For the sake of the country, we should all be rooting for the Prioritizers to carry the day.
Justin Logan is director of foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute. You can follow him on twitter at @justintlogan.