Can Defense Industrialists Work with Trump?

Donald Trump’s twin business advisory panels have collapsed. Members of both the Manufacturing Council and the Strategy & Policy Forum had been resigning quickly, and according to today's Wall Street Journal—“CEOs Scrap Trump Panels”—they voted yesterday just to disband. At first, the president asserted that he could replace all the “grandstanders” with compliant substitutes; he later claimed on Twitter that the disbanding was his idea, to save them all from public pressure. In “Why A&D CEOs May Be Happy To No Longer Counsel Trump” (Aviation Week, 16 August), Michael Bruno did opine that “few in the business world are likely” to consider the actions anything but “an astute public relations move.” Then again, Bruno also expressed worry about attracting talent to any organization too closely identified with Trump. In “Trump Loses Corporate America” (Wall Street Journal, 15 August), Holman Jenkins took the hard-nosed view that the administration is proving itself incapable of delivering useful change, so no one in business owes Trump the time of day. Or, we could permit business leaders some righteous outrage after those not-so-presidential prevarications following last weekend’s would-be fascist uprising in Virginia. Either way, after seven months of not-so-businesslike business in the White House, interest amongst business people in taking the man seriously seems to have evaporated.

Over these seven months, those indiscriminate outbursts have left plenty in industry grasping for clues about policy like some Cold War Sovietologists. All the same, some of the emanations from the White House sound suspicious, but actually may be rather sound. Is Trump’s initiative for a defense-industrial review as ham-handed a protectionist prop as we might consider the earlier Section 232 investigations of steel and aluminum imports? As I wrote late last month, using the example of the not-so-rare rare earths, that all-hands evolution could easily get derailed by facile acceptance of conventional wisdom. As my colleague Steve Grundman wrote early this month in “How to Be Like Ike,” we could hope that a study this portentous might resemble in its approach the 34th president’s review of national strategy toward the Soviet Union. But however we might wonder about the motives or the methods, let us lend some credit: what other American president initiated such an end-to-end analysis of the supply chains of our security?

This is important, because beyond a merely resurgent Russia, and a menagerie of bad actors remotely plumbing our data, the United States are actually facing a no-kidding peer competitor with greater manufacturing capacity than we are likely to recover. With the doubling of the federal debt during the preceding administration, there is no more money, so as Lord Rutherford intoned, we need to start thinking. If as Americans, our chief business is indeed business, then as defense industrialists, our business is supplying those who deliver the security that makes that business possible. The president may come calling again loudly demanding another very public price reduction, and CEOs probably must take those calls. The Pentagon will come calling, asking about what’s coming from California, Costa Rica, or China, and everyone on the team should stand ready to take those calls. At this point, like the little tank engine, we in the business have work to do. 

James Hasik is a senior fellow at the Brent Scowcroft Center on International Security.

This article appeared originally at Atlantic Council.