Going back as far as I’ve paid attention to such things—which is going on four decades at this point—Foreign Affairs has published essays from the top foreign policy advisors to the two major party presidential nominees a few months before the election. Yesterday, they published an essay by former President Donald Trump’s last and possibly future National Security Advisor Robert C. O’Brien under the title “The Return of Peace Through Strength: Making the Case for Trump’s Foreign Policy.”
Not to put too fine a point on it, it’s not confidence-inspiring.
Distinguished Professor Dan Drezner pronounces it a “constant river of horseshit” and takes issue with O’Brien’s rosy assessment of Trump’s first (and one hopes last) term. Retired nuclear scientist and occasional OTB commenter Cheryl Rofer dubs the parts of the essay touching on her expertise “bluster rather than strength.”
The piece that most caught my attention, though, was this:
The navy should also move one of its aircraft carriers from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and the Pentagon should consider deploying the entire Marine Corps to the Pacific, relieving it in particular of missions in the Middle East and North Africa. U.S. bases in the Pacific often lack adequate missile defenses and fighter jet protection—a scandalous deficiency that the Defense Department should fix by quickly shifting resources from elsewhere. [Emphasis mine]
This is all O’Brien says about this idea but it makes no damn sense. At all.
It’s arguable, I suppose, that we should move American troops, period, out of the Middle East and North Africa. We’ve ostensibly been “pivoting to Asia” since 2011 and three successive presidential administrations have dubbed China our “pacing challenge” and the last two have acknowledged Russia as an “acute threat.” But MENA has become an economy of force mission mostly conducted by special operations forces. The Marine Corps’ contributions are really small, so taking it off their plate doesn’t return much in the way of combat power.
Regardless, it’s not at all clear what O’Brien would have the Marine Corps do in the region. The emerging Force Design concept has returned them to a maritime force enabling Navy operations with stand-in forces. But that’s for a future fight, not steady-state deterrence.
Further, if we are to take “the entire Marine Corps” even figuratively rather than literally (presumably, O’Brien would allow Marines to continue going to school, performing recruiting duty, staffing the Pentagon and other Combatant Commands, and similar essential missions elsewhere), stationing the entire Fleet Marine Force in INDOPACOM would crush retention. It’s one thing to deploy to combat or to a float every few years, it’s quite another to be assigned to a hardship station permanently.
Leaving aside the logistics of where we’re going to base and house these people, are these going to be accompanied (i.e., with family) tours? If not, that’s a deal-breaker in that it’s near impossible to sustain a family if permanently separated. If so, it’s also probably still a deal-breaker because most spouses will not be interested in living in Okinawa or some other place far from home for 20-30 years.
The half-assedness of the essay brings home a point that Drezner mentions in his post and that those of us in the national security space have been emphasizing since at least 2016: Trump has no foreign policy bench. The #NeverTrump moment, which I date to a March 2016 open letter at War on the Rocks, was anchored by the Republican foreign policy establishment. As such, most of those with expertise and experience had disqualified themselves from serving well before the election. Trump tried to make do with a bunch of retired (and, in the case of H.R. McMaster, active duty) general officers, CEOs like Rex Tillerson who were way in over their head, and his idiot son-in-law. There were relative bright spots (Secretary of Defense Mark Esper comes to mind) but most were just third-rate yahoos.
Granted, since Trump famously skips his intelligence briefs and eschews expert advice, anyway, it might not matter all that much. But an erratic mind getting advice from those who don’t know what the hell they’re doing is not the ideal way to run a global supervisor.
