America needs a war leader. Has it got one?
How the next president handles Putin, Xi and Kim will define their term - not only for the US but the world.
It’s raining wars. Blood and thunder in Ukraine, the Middle East, Sudan, a Chinese invasion of Taiwan just around the corner. You would think, then, that the hour of the war leader has come for the United States. Instead, the two candidates for commander-in-chief have presented muddled visions as to how they will guide America through international conflict.
Has Donald Trump grown in confidence since his first term? Has the quality of his advice improved? Is Kamala Harris still dependent on Joe Biden’s style of regional crisis management? On the stump she leaned towards a ceasefire in Gaza. She had no answer to what should happen next. Diplomatic caution dictates that she has not engaged with the most sensitive questions - would she discourage Israel from attacking Iran’s nuclear programme, or would she stand back? - but still one senses a strategic callowness.
Trump has the record of his first term to indicate how he will deal with war. On the face of it, the stats aren’t bad: he dodged new wars, Russia was deterred from expanding its 2014 invasion of Ukraine, North Korea stopped testing its nuclear weapons. Trump ordered a limited but effective air attack on Bashar al-Assad’s regime in 2017 after it used chemical weapons against its own people, gave the go-ahead to target the Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and assassinate the ruthless Iranian commander Qasem Soleimani. It never amounted to a Trump doctrine, simply a readiness to project military strength at will.
The problem is that Trump, in love with what he sees as a favourable score card from the first term, believes he is ready for whatever the world can throw at him. In Trump 1.0 he surrounded himself with generals - as defence secretary, national security adviser, White House chief of staff - and assumed he enjoyed the loyalty of the military even when he stretched the boundaries of the constitution. His central premise, like that of Richard Nixon (who praised his generals for their courage but noted “the plodding mediocrity of their strategy and tactics"), was that he possessed a special genius for command.
Harris may not harbour any such pretensions but her strategic indecisiveness could be read by opponents as fear. Vladimir Putin’s preference may, therefore, be for Harris. After all, one of his axioms is that “a dog senses when somebody is afraid of it and bites”. Not the first time the Russian leader has self-identified with a canine.
The only way to test their respective commander-in-chief credentials is to gauge how they might respond to three imminent crises. The first, long flagged, is a potential tariff war with China. Trump as president is likely to press for a 60 per cent tariff on Chinese goods and tougher export controls on any technology that might be useful to China. His logic: the US is losing the nuclear, electronics, textiles and chemical industries to its arch-rival. The very solid Australian Strategic Policy Institute argues the US is behind China in 57 out of 64 critical technologies.
Harris as president is likely to repeat some of the mixed messaging of the Biden administration but she will argue that the transition to a green economy is best served by targeted subsidies for R&D, while national security concerns should be tackled by diversifying supply chains: more trade, in other words, not less.
Soon enough, the Trump positions will alienate US allies in Asia that are dependent on Chinese trade. Military partners such as Australia, Japan and India may quickly have to make a choice between their national security interests (siding with the US) and economic growth (siding with China). Beijing gambles that zugzwang will sap future US attempts to impose a containment policy on it. A President Harris would have to tailor her trade policy towards China accordingly; a President Trump would no doubt count again on his strategic genius to square the circle.
The second challenge is connected to the North Korean presence in Russia. If these soldiers amass close to the Ukrainian border they will make themselves a target for Kyiv. Russia may be gambling on precisely that. If Ukraine uses long-range western weapons to hit these forces, Putin could escalate in line with Moscow’s defence agreement with Kim Jong-un. Or Kim could send his own ballistic missiles flying in the direction of US bases in Asia.
The aim of this Russian trap might be to get the new US president to ban outright any long-range weapons transfer to Ukraine. As Oleksandr Danyluk of the think tank Rusi convincingly argues: “North Korean involvement has irreversibly changed the dynamics of the war and finally made it global.” Two highly militarised nuclear powers are now in play. A President Trump will use the crisis to reach a shifty “peace” deal with Putin. A President Harris might allow Ukraine to hit inside Russia but only at prearranged military infrastructure.
The more distant risk is a possible Chinese blockade of Taiwan. Xi Jinping has already declared 2027 to be the year when Taiwan will fall into his lap. The rapidly expanding Chinese navy has to be high on the anxiety list for a new US president.
China boasts the largest number of warships in the world, on course to have 395 by 2025 and 435 by 2030. The US has a stretched, often ageing, fleet of 296. If it wants to ensure that Beijing does not take over Taiwan’s globally vital semiconductor industry, the new president needs to be building ships. “We must be the great arsenal of democracy,” declared President Franklin D Roosevelt in 1940. That should set the bar for the incoming administration.
The Times
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