THE budget proposal that Donald Trump will send to Congress, proposing to boost the Pentagon’s spending by $54bn next year, is less transformative than the president appears to believe. As Senator John McCain, the chairman of the Senate armed services committee, swiftly pointed out, the 10% increase is only $19bn more than that forecast by the outgoing Obama administration (out of a total annual spend of close to $600bn).
Mr Trump’s conviction that this will ensure America wins its future wars, in contrast to the unsatisfactory outcomes in Iraq and Afghanistan, suggests a limited understanding of those conflicts. Few would argue that a lack of aircraft and ships were the problem. Moreover, in seeking ways to pay for a 350-ship navy, additional fighter planes and more troops for both the army and the marines, Mr Trump wants to slash spending on soft power. Cuts to the State Department’s budget and foreign-aid programmes would probably reduce America’s influence in the world and undermine attempts to make the world stable. The defence secretary, Jim Mattis, while giving testimony to Congress in 2013, warned: “If you don’t fund the State Department fully, then I need to buy more ammunition.”
Mr Trump is also in danger of undermining his goal of stronger military forces by what looks like a willingness to trigger a new nuclear arms race with Russia. It has emerged that in his hour-long telephone call with Vladimir Putin on January 28th, the Russian president suggested extending the New START strategic arms reduction treaty by five years after its expiry in 2021. Mr Putin no doubt saw this as something relatively uncontroversial that could help unfreeze relations between the two countries—something Mr Trump frequently says he wants. It seems that Mr Trump may not have known what his opposite number was referring to. But, after pausing the conversation for advice, he resumed it with a tirade against the nuclear deal, describing it as a typical example of a bad Obama-era negotiation.
In an interview with Reuters on February 23rd, Mr Trump doubled down on the nuclear treaty: “It’s a one-sided deal. It gave them things that we should have never allowed...whether it’s START, whether it’s the Iran deal...We’re going to start making good deals.” Mr Trump added that while he would love to see a world without “nukes”, America had “fallen behind on nuclear weapon capacity” and that he would ensure it would return to “the top of the pack”.
The history of strategic arms-control agreements between America and Russia (as the former Soviet Union) stretching back to 1972 is based on negotiating equal reductions with the aim of ending up with rough parity between the nuclear forces of each side. The New START treaty, which came into force six years ago, was no exception. It limits both sides to no more than 1,550 deployed strategic warheads on a maximum of 700 deployed missiles (land-based and submarine-launched) and nuclear bombers. There are currently some slight differences between the two nuclear arsenals, but both are working to come into full compliance with the treaty’s limits by the due date of February next year.
Far from being one-sided, New START is firmly in America’s national interest. Steven Pifer of the Brookings Institution notes that the treaty was not only unanimously supported by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but was also endorsed by seven former heads of Strategic Command and a large part of the foreign and security policy establishment from both parties.
Apart from capping the number of warheads aimed at America (while leaving it with one-third more than the Pentagon says it requires for an effective nuclear deterrent), the treaty provides a trove of information about Russia’s forces that in a less open society than America’s would be impossible to come by. It allows for 18 on-site inspections every year, detailed data exchanges every six months and a stream of mutual notifications (nearly 13,000 since 2011). While the treaty permits each side to modernise their nuclear forces, the transparency it brings means they can do so without making what Mr Pifer calls “costly worst-case assumptions”.
Should Mr Trump decide to pull out of New START, the likely consequence would not be America racing to the “top of the pack” but a Russian advantage in strategic systems for most of the next decade. Russia is at a later stage in its nuclear modernisation cycle: its production lines for new missiles and ballistic-missile submarines are already humming. America’s will take several years to crank up. As things stand, America’s nuclear modernisation plan was forecast earlier this month by the Congressional Budget Office to cost $400bn up to 2026. Other estimates suggest a sum of $1trn over the next 25 years. Finding the money will be difficult anyway. But a wholly unnecessary and dangerous new nuclear arms race would mean either giving up on conventional military capabilities or raising taxes.
A nuclear issue which does require the president’s attention is the recent report that Russia has fielded a cruise missile that violates the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaty. The INF treaty permanently bans both countries from deploying ground-launched missiles with ranges of between 500 and 5,500 kilometres. However, noisily rubbishing New START is precisely the wrong way to restore Russian compliance with the INF.