Brian M Downing
The Trump administration is looking for a steep increase in military spending. It also wants significant cuts in social spending and the State Department budget to help pay for it. More guns, less butter. Less diplomacy too.
The budget will be contested in Congress; the cuts and boosts might well be less than the White House wants. But signals have gone out and world capitals are taking note, especially of the military expansion. How will China and Russia interpret and respond to the budget plans? And how will the deeply divided American public respond?
China
Three more aircraft carriers are called for in the new US budget, which would bring the number to thirteen. Allies along China’s long coast, from S Korea to Vietnam, will be at least somewhat reassured. China is a rising power whose military budgets have increased along with its GDP. It sees itself as a victim throughout much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and seeks to right many of the wrongs it had to endure.
Chinese naval vessels sail into contested waters and island groups. In the South China Sea Beijing builds airstrips and missile batteries on islets near sea lanes and oil resources. Its admirals seek to reclaim Taiwan and replace the US as the guarantor of a new East Asian order.
China will see American naval expansion as a threat, probably a deliberate one, to sea lanes connecting it with vital resources in Africa and the Persian Gulf. Its vision of national assertion and a new East Asian order will be in danger. Beijing will respond. Its navy will likely grow, even though the economy is relatively sluggish by China’s dynamic standards of recent years.
China will seek or expand naval bases in Tonga, Sri Lanka, Djibouti, and perhaps Gwadar – the Pakistani port it recently constructed three hundred miles east of the Strait of Hormuz. Longer term, it will look for facilities in Syria and Libya. Russia can be helpful in that part of the world.
Russia
Whatever understandings Trump and Putin may have once had, they are receding in importance as experienced figures, who recognize Russia’s many recent destabilizing actions, assert themselves in Washington. This and increased defense spending will hearten NATO allies, especially those in Eastern Europe.
Russia will be wary. Recent moves in Syria, the Balkans, Libya, and the Ukraine may face more difficulty. American weapons and trainers could back proxy forces that inflict higher casualties on Russia’s proxies and further deplete its coffers.
Putin will sense a reprise of the Reagan-era policy of weakening the Soviet Union through higher Pentagon budgets that Moscow struggled to match and support for Afghan guerrillas in a protracted war. The first part is underway, the second may soon follow in Syria, Libya, and Serbia. Add in greater American oil and gas production to soften world prices and Russian export revenue, and Putin may find himself in fiscal and political trouble. Russian youth may lose their adulation for his firm hand.
Russian culture, however, will play a role that strategists do not fully appreciate, disposed as they are to believe that people everywhere yearn chiefly for democracy and consumer goods. Russians historically view themselves as an endangered people. Dangerous forces are all around. The armies of the Genghiz Khan, Napoleon, and Hitler invaded and devastated the homeland. World War Two is within living memory of millions, and tens of millions know of relatives who are among the 27 million who perished in it.
American defense spending and action along its periphery will stir Russian concerns of impending danger to the nation. The public, including young people, will almost certainly accept further hardship and firmer rule from the Kremlin.
• • •
The American public might not be so accepting of increased defense spending and decreased social spending. The former will bring thousands of blue collar jobs – no small matter today – and a greater sense of national pride. Decreased social spending, however, will mobilize public opposition, increase polarization in the public, and sharpen enmities in congress.
The debate is likely beginning, not only in Washington, but in Moscow and Beijing. The foreign capitals are aware of growing paralysis in western democracies and see it as a strategic asset.
Copyright 2017 Brian M Downing
Brian M Downing is a national security analyst who has written for outlets across the political spectrum. He studied at Georgetown University and the University of Chicago, and did post-graduate work at Harvard’s Center for International Affairs.