For
Clinton, a skirmish with history. From Trump, an ambush of the facts
Get
new generals, steal Iraq’s oil, reinvent military justice –
Commander-in-Chief Forum showcases Republican candidate’s loose
grasp of defense priorities
Spencer Ackerman in
New York
@attackerman
Thursday 8 September
2016 04.30 BST
In October 2011, as
Mitt Romney prepared to win the Republican presidential nomination,
his campaign prepared a guiding document outlining what to expect
from Romney as commander-in-chief. Troop reductions in Afghanistan
would not necessarily end, but their pace would be determined by
ground commanders. Missile defenses would again be aimed at
protecting eastern Europe from Russia, rather than focusing on Iran,
as Barack Obama had shifted them. The country would spend 4% of its
gross domestic product on defense. The navy would see a shipbuilding
surge to 15 ships annually, up from nine.
If many of the
details of Romney’s plans were murky – Romney never specified,
for instance, which classes of ships the US needed surging – the
presence of generations of experienced Republican advisers aligned
with Romney provided assurance that the Massachusetts governor
wouldn’t be winging it (among them, for instance, was Ronald
Reagan’s Navy secretary, John Lehman). Liberals would find much to
dispute, but a dispute could proceed on the merits of Romney’s
national-security perspective weighed against Obama’s.
No one would ever
accuse Donald Trump of being Mitt Romney.
Before boarding the
aircraft carrier turned museum USS Intrepid, Trump gave a speech on
Wednesday gesturing in the direction of Republican national security
orthodoxies. The army’s active-duty force levels, known as “end
strength,” ought to return to 540,000 soldiers, where it was
earlier in the decade, reversing a trajectory down to 450,000 by
2018. The navy ought to have a fleet sized at 350 ships, beyond its
current planning for a 308-ship fleet after 2020.
Along with an
expansion of combat aircraft and missile defenses, and repealing a
budget cap on defense spending known as the sequester, Trump’s
enthusiasm for purchasing more military hardware would not sound out
of place coming from a typical Republican on the congressional armed
services committees. Superficially at least Romney might not have
disagreed, either. That was likely the point: to reassure voters
Trump possesses a baseline level of familiarity with the basics of
military responsibility.
By the evening,
however, at NBC News’ touted “Commander-in-Chief Forum,” Trump
ordered off his familiar campaign menu of word salads. He lied about
opposing the Iraq war, criticized Obama’s 2011 withdrawal and
repeated his now-boilerplate advocacy of stealing Iraq’s oil – a
measure that he evidently believes would require a minimal force
presence, despite the certainty that the well-armed locals might have
a problem with their principal source of wealth being plundered by a
foreign power.
Speaking before an
audience of veterans, Trump unexpectedly attacked the current
generation of generals and flag officers. The current senior officer
corps has been “reduced to rubble”, Trump said, and were
“embarrassing for our country”. While previously Trump had said
he knew better than the generals about fighting Islamic State, this
time he intimated that he’d get “different generals” – a
habit more typical of caudillos than American presidents.
He followed up by
saying his ultimate plan to defeat Isis would be some parts of his
still-unspecified plan, and some parts of his unspecified generals’
unspecified plan. He waved away his lack of specifics for a war in
which 5,000 US troops are currently serving as not wishing to
“broadcast” his plans to the enemy.
Trump again lavished
praise on Vladimir Putin, pledging a new era of US-Russian
cooperation – something both Obama and George Bush attempted and
failed to achieve after US and Russian interests diverged. Despite
months of Russian military demonstration in Syria that Vladimir
Putin’s objective is to suppress Bashar al-Assad’s domestic
resistance, Trump claimed that Russia wished to defeat Isis “as
badly as we do”. Putin might be a dictator – Trump waved away
moderator Matt Lauer on this point – but he had “very strong
control”.
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Nor did Trump
demonstrate greater mastery of urgent issues of US service members’
health and safety. He interrupted a veteran’s question about
veterans’ suicide rates after she gave the correct number, 20 per
day, so he could give an incorrect one, 22. Trump fumbled through a
question about redressing sexual assault against women service
personnel – something he once tweeted was the inevitable result of
mixed-gender service, a point he defended on Wednesday – by arguing
the military needed to set up internal courts. As if the military did
not already have its own well-established justice system.
Trump’s reversion
to his typical ignorance and certitude obscured a poor showing from
his opponent, the Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton. Clinton spent
her preceding half-hour grilling on the Intrepid defending herself on
her lax handling of classified information, a situation that a former
navy lieutenant in the audience correctly observed would spell doom
for a low-ranking service member. She acknowledged her vote for the
Iraq war was a “mistake” and gestured in the direction of the
same for her advocacy of the 2011 Libya war, but waved it away by
pointing out Trump’s support for the same disastrous interventions
– a baffling decision for a candidate whose central pitch is that
Trump is uniquely unqualified to be president.
Trump praises Putin
again as he and Clinton face foreign policy questions – as it
happened
Presidential
candidates take same stage – but not at the same time – for first
time in campaign to talk Isis, Iraq and women in the military
Read more
To reassure a
progressive veteran in the audience Clinton offered that she would
treat the use of force as a “last resort”. Every presidential
aspirant issues that boilerplate – as it elides an explanation of
what the candidate thinks is worth fighting for – but Clinton’s
long public record, which she uses as a selling point against Trump,
gives reason to doubt it. “We are not putting ground troops into
Iraq ever again,” Clinton said, as if there were not thousands of
them already there.
Clinton’s gestures
in hawkish directions are at least predictable. Trump is something
wilder, less disciplined and far less grounded. Asked about his
fitness for diplomacy, Trump boasted of his disastrous meeting in
Mexico last week with Enrique Peña Nieto, in which the Mexican
president publicly contradicted Trump’s claim that the two did not
discuss payment for Trump’s proposed border wall, and which left
Peña Nieto diminished at home.
For all the derision
Mitt Romney endured in his presidential bid, at least he never
engineered a lose-lose diplomatic summit.
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