"Your Mission is to Win Our Wars"

Trump’s broad approach to the world is captured in two phrases that he repeated during the 2024 campaign: “America First” and “Peace Through Strength.”

Peace Through Strength means formulating and implementing a defense/foreign policy strategy that improves our geopolitical position relative to other great powers to such an extent that our strength will deter attacks on the United States and its security interests.

Trump’s approach is not limited to military power. As George Washington said, the best way to keep the peace is to prepare for war. That was the key to Ronald Reagan’s military build-up in the 1980s, and it worked. Reagan won the Cold War without firing a shot. But the reason he didn’t have to fire a shot was because he invested in military power (a nuclear build-up here and in Europe, a 600-ship navy, strategic defenses), and he exploited the enemy’s economic and political weaknesses and vulnerabilities.

China is also engaging in what the Pentagon calls a “rapid expansion” of its nuclear arsenal. It is estimated that by 2030, China will have more than a thousand nuclear weapons, and most of them will be able to strike the American homeland. We must maintain our nuclear superiority over China. It would be an unforgivable error to repeat the mistakes of the Robert McNamara-led Pentagon which willfully surrendered nuclear superiority to the Soviet Union in the 1960s.

But Trump’s national security team must be mindful of avoiding the Lippmann Gap—a gap between the country’s commitments and its resources, which journalist and commentator Walter Lippmann wrote about in his masterful U.S. Foreign Policy: Shield of the Republic. Without unlimited resources—and our resources are not unlimited—Trump will have to scale-back our commitments and shift our resources. Our military is too small and is spread too thin around the world. Our commitments are too vast. We must prioritize the Indo-Pacific, which is where our greatest challenger and our most important allies are located. Yet, we have expended huge resources in Ukraine—which is not in the Indo-Pacific, and is a country involved in a conflict which does not threaten our vital national security interests or those of our Indo-Pacific allies.

The Atlanticists in the U.S. and Europe say otherwise, refusing to acknowledge their own culpability for the Ukraine war after decades of enlarging NATO in the face of repeated Russian complaints despite warnings by George Kennan and 50 other national security experts of the folly of poking the Russian bear.

Jonathan Haslam tells this tragic story in Hubris: The American Origins of Russia’s War Against Ukraine, a book that should be required reading by Trump’s diplomats and defense/national security staffs. The Atlanticists are fond of comparing Russian President Vladimir Putin to Hitler, invoking the lessons of Munich, emphasizing the sufferings of Ukrainians, depicting the war as part of a larger ideological conflict between democracy and autocracy, and urging support for the “rules-based international order.”

Yet, Russia’s inability to swiftly and decisively defeat Ukraine at the war’s outset is clear evidence that it lacks the capability to conquer Western Europe.

The culture of the Pentagon must change, too. “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) must be replaced by “Duty, Honor, Country.” No leaders in the Pentagon should keep their jobs if they actually believe that climate change is the greatest existential threat to the United States. The warrior culture must return to the Defense Department and the entire Defense establishment from the service academies to boot camps. The words of Gen. Douglas MacArthur should ring in the ears of every soldier, sailor, airman, and Marine: “Your mission remains fixed, determined, inviolable—it is to win our wars.” Anything that detracts from achieving victory is wasteful and unnecessary.

If we have learned anything from the past two decades it is that global crusades bring disappointment, loss and tragedy. That is one of the lessons of the Afghan and Iraq Wars and the Global War on Terror. The blood of our sons and daughters should never again be frittered away in wars of choice. We should heed the advice of the great statesmen of the past. From John Qunicy Adams: go not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. From Lord Palmerston: we have no permanent friends and no permanent enemies, only permanent interests. From Thucydides: wars derive from fear, honor, and interest. From George Washington: interest, not sentiment, should guide our foreign policy. From Dwight Eisenhower: beware the undue influence of the military-industrial complex.

The big, lumbering Pentagon and the national security bureaucracies will not change overnight. There will be much resistance. Bureaucratic empires and vested interests don’t give up without a fight. Trump’s bold executive orders are a good start. That same boldness will be needed by his national security team to implement America First and Peace Through Strength.

Francis P. Sempa writes on foreign policy and geopolitics. His Best Defense columns appear at the beginning of each month.