Rumors are flying in Washington that Donald Trump is seriously considering an executive order which would lift at least some of the current U.S. sanctions on Russia. As with everything else the new president has ordered this week, details are sparse. But if the executive order would indeed lift sanctions unilaterally, with no attempt at negotiation, Trump won’t be sending a message of strength, but one of weakness.

I’ve never been a proponent of the U.S. sanctions regime. In fact, I’ve written extensively about the flaws of the sanctions regime on Russia, and even argued that they should be lifted before they calcify into a permanent impediment to improving relations with Russia. In Foreign Affairs last year, I argued that the sanctions have largely been a failure: they have been costly to U.S. and European business interests, and have not altered Putin’s aggressive policies towards Ukraine.

Nor is there good reason to believe that the sanctions will induce policy change in future. The underlying logic behind sanctions is to cause enough economic pain to the target state that leaders are compelled to change their policies. But though the Russian economy is in a terrible state, most of that damage was caused by falling oil prices, not by sanctions. Vladimir Putin was even willing to hurt his own people further by initiating countersanctions against European agricultural products, a move which served to substantially increase food prices for ordinary Russian citizens.

These conclusions are unfortunately supported by a substantial body of academic literature, which overwhelmingly finds that sanctions are rarely successful on issues of ‘high salience,’ such as questions of war and peace. Sanctions may be a useful tool for signaling to other states that their behavior is unacceptable, but when linked to unrealistic goals, they place policy makers in a difficult situation. Lifting them may be seen as a sign of weakness, yet there is little to be gained from leaving them in place. The path of least resistance can therefore end in situations like the half-century Cuban Embargo.

All of this suggests that policymakers should be a lot more cautious about implementing sanctions in the first place, as it may place them in a difficult situation further down the road. Indeed, academic studies also suggest that sanctions are not so much an alternative to conflict as a first step on the road to war: they serve to raise the stakes, and make it harder for policymakers to back down.

The problem is particularly acute in this case. Though the impact of Russian disinformation on the outcome of the presidential election remains unclear, an investigation is ongoing into whether advisors to the Trump campaign had contacts with Moscow. Donald Trump’s willingness to seek a better relationship with Russia is a solid policy choice, but unilateral concessions of this sort will only serve to intensify the idea that he is somehow beholden to Moscow.

Ultimately, understanding the flaws of sanctions cannot explain how to resolve this dilemma. There is no good solution for today’s U.S.-Russian relations, just a series of poor choices. The best of these bad options is an open process of negotiation. Russian leaders may not be willing to abandon Crimea or make other high profile concessions in exchange for the lifting of sanctions. But the sanctions are causing some economic damage, enough that Russian leaders do want them lifted.

A process of negotiation which proposes to lift most of the sanctions in exchange for concessions in other policy areas – implementation of the Russian portions of the Minsk Agreement, Russian concessions on ending the Syrian civil war, or a variety of other issues – is a way for the Trump administration to end the sanctions regime without making a unilateral concession. For the man who wrote the Art of the Deal, this would surely be a better solution.

Congressional Republicans have a new plan for a military spending boost. John McCain, the Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, last week released a report calling for a $54 billion increase in 2018 Pentagon spending and a $430 billion increase above current Pentagon plans for the next five fiscal years. McCain’s House counterpart, Mac Thornberry, backed that plan today in a Fox News op-ed. Both chairmen also want an immediate “supplemental” increase of an indeterminate amount to the 2017 military budget. 

Enacting the McCain/​Thornberry plan requires undoing the defense spending caps set by the Budget Control Act. Complying with the caps would shave more than $100 billion off existing plans over the next five years, meaning that the new plan would spend more than half a trillion more than current law allows. That’s before counting any 2017 supplemental or Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) funding, currently at $59 billion. The plan calls for transferring OCO spending, which is now uncapped, back into the base budget once the abolishment of the Budget Control Act leaves it unconstrained.

The title of Thornberry’s op-ed, Here’s How We Will Make America’s Military Great Again, suggests its intended audience. During the campaign, President Trump endorsed an across-the-board military buildup likely to cost $70 to $100 billion a year but absurdly claimed that he could fund it by cutting Pentagon waste, fraud, and abuse. Since his election, Trump and his advisors have done little to clarify how they’ll fund the buildup or use the expanded military, besides parading it down Pennsylvania Avenue.

Trump’s distraction allowed McCain and Thornberry the opportunity to set the GOP’s direction on defense. Trump’s appointments and his difficulty formulating policies mean that he’s likely to support the McCain/​Thornberry plan. Given that and Republican control of both Houses, the plan might seem destined for success, with the increase funded in the GOP’s preferred way: through cuts to non-defense spending.

But Senate Democrats are likely to filibuster an effort to erase the defense caps absent a matching increase in non-defense discretionary spending. While that sort of deficit-swelling deal might be acceptable to Trump, McCain, and Thornberry, it could produce enough congressional Republican opposition to prevent passage.

If there’s a way to have a defense build-up while satisfying Democrats and most Congressional Republicans, it’s to stick with what’s worked in recent years: maintaining a semblance of concern about deficits and a show of parity between defense and non-defense spending. That means raising but maintaining caps in both areas while shoving more base Pentagon funds into OCO under the pretext that it’s temporary. The bottom line is that the current political circumstances will probably produce a big defense buildup funded through deficit spending or, more likely, a smaller defense increase funded by more deceptive deficit-spending.

Not even that sort of watered-down buildup is needed. The case for a buildup relies on a tired litany of exaggerated dangers and misrepresentations about the horrors of the Pentagon having to live on $600 billion a year. In fact, current military spending is easily sufficient to meet current threats. With a more restrained military strategy steering the U.S military away from avoidable tensions and endless wars, the defense budget could be far smaller.

Both McCain and Thornberry contend that sequestration is ravaging U.S. military readiness. But there has been no sequestration since 2013; it occurs only if spending exceeds caps, and defense spending remains near Cold War highs. The recent drawdown was historically mild and mostly funded by shrunken war costs. Readiness is generally okay but could be improved if the Pentagon—or the House Armed Services Committees—shifted money from acquisition to operational accounts.

The report and op-ed both focus on the threats low defense spending is supposedly encouraging. They fail to note that fighting terrorists including ISIS—even if the effort were expanded by Trump—costs less than a tenth of U.S. military spending. They fail to explain how higher defense spending would solve the difficulties posed by Iran and North Korea. Nor is there reason to believe that higher military spending would cow Russia and China into more compliant behavior, as both Chairmen contend. If there is a deficiency in the U.S. approach to the Ukraine and the South China Sea that allows aggression, it is a result of the limited U.S. will to start a catastrophic war over matters remote from U.S. safety, not an absence of military power to use if war occurs.

There are strains on the U.S. military today. But they’re more the result of a lack of strategy than a lack of money. By spending money on everything and endorsing every mission, the McCain/​Thornberry plan would create a larger version of the same problem. We should instead do less with our military—avoiding the distant trouble that justifies most military spending.

On why that sort of restraint would improve U.S. security, see the various Cato works on defense budgets and policy and our conference on “The Case for Restraint.” On the exaggeration of danger as a means to justify high defense spending, see Christopher Preble and John Mueller’s edited volume and other works by Cato scholars.

President Barack Obama leaves office today at Noon. His critics are happy to see him go, even as some acknowledge that he carried himself with dignity and grace for eight years in office. He departs the presidency with favorable approval ratings among the public at large, but is handing over power to a person who seems committed to overturning everything that he has done.

Donald Trump’s foreign policy doctrine is enigmatic, at best. Obama, in contrast, had a concise and tidy way to explain his approach : “Don’t do stupid s***.”

Alas, he wasn’t always successful. For all the complaints that Obama was too reticent to use military power, his actions as president don’t betray great skepticism of kinetic military operations (aka war). Some of those not-quite-wars weren’t entirely successful, others were an abysmal failure. I discuss some of these issues in this podcast with Caleb Brown.

He twice increased the number of U.S. troops into Afghanistan in 2009, even though he doubted at the time that they would be able to accomplish their mission. The United States still has 8,500 U.S. troops fighting in what is now America’s longest war.

Without congressional authorization, he carried out an air campaign over Libya that contributed to the overthrow of Muammar Qaddafi’s decades-long regime. Few people shed any tears for the crazy colonel (Hillary Clinton even laughed about it), but the country has been gripped by chaos and violence ever since.

Obama’s war against the so-called Islamic State in Iraq similarly lacked congressional authorization. It has been marginally more effective, largely because the many different actors threatened by ISIS’s reign of terror have managed to squeeze it on all sides. But, as in Libya, the question of what comes after looms large.

And when Barack Obama wasn’t willing to use American military power directly, through either ground troops or drones, he did provide assistance, including lethal assistance, to those who were doing the fighting. But war by proxy is always difficult, as the ongoing civil wars in Syria and Yemen attest.

The United States has struggled to prevail militarily in a host of conflicts during Barack Obama’s two terms in office. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that Obama hasn’t used force often enough, or doggedly enough, or smartly enough. More likely, it means that many of the problems that he has attempted to solve aren’t conducive to military solutions. And the claim that Obama has gutted the U.S. military conveniently ignores that Pentagon spending was higher during his eight years in office than during George W. Bush’s, and that we spend more every year, in real terms, than we spent during the Cold War. Military spending is down since 2012, but is still 30 percent higher than in 2001.

On the plus side, Barack Obama should get credit for normalizing relations with Cuba and moving to expand economic relations with our Caribbean neighbor. Critics of the move, such as Sen. Marco Rubio (R‑FL), point out that Raul Castro’s regime hasn’t reciprocated by improving its human rights record. But the embargo has similarly failed to crack open the regime. Congress and incoming-President Trump should finish the job, relax the remaining restrictions, and enable greater interactions between the Cuban people and their neighbors to the north.

President Obama successfully negotiated a deal that makes it substantially harder for Iran to develop a nuclear weapon. Critics claim that there was a better deal to be had, or that there should have been no deal at all. But, without a deal, Iran was well on its way to becoming a nuclear weapon state, and military action would have merely delayed the program, and at great cost in human lives. The deal will need to be monitored closely, as Secretary of Defense nominee James Mattis affirmed in his confirmation hearings last week. A progress review by the International Crisis Group on the one-year anniversary of the deal’s implementation concluded that, thus far, it was “effectively and verifiably blocking all potential pathways for Iran to race toward nuclear weapons, while opening the door to the country’s international rehabilitation and economic recovery.”

Lastly, President Obama deserves credit for resisting the bipartisan calls to get the United States more deeply embroiled in the Syrian civil war. His greatest error with respect to Syria was his demand that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad “must go”, and his proclaimed red line concerning the use of chemical weapons by the Syrian regime against opposition forces. He wisely backed away from this ill-considered pledge when he ignored the political class in Washington, and listened to the America people who wanted no part of another Middle Eastern conflict. The Syrian civil war is a grave human tragedy, with hundreds of thousands killed, and millions driven from their homes. But Obama’s critics, who believe he should have defied public opinion, and launched military strikes in September 2013, fail to show how such actions would have hastened the war’s end.

We should judge U.S. president’s foreign policies by whether they improved American security and prosperity, or whether they made Americans less safe and less prosperous. By that standard, Barack Obama could have done far worse.

Like the foreign policy commentary you see here on Cato’s blog? If you’re a PhD candidate or recent PhD, you should consider applying for our visiting research fellow position.

The Defense and Foreign Policy department is seeking candidates for a visiting fellow post. This one-year paid fellowship allows candidates to expand upon the policy implications of their dissertation research, and contribute to the work of the Cato defense and foreign policy department.

In order to apply, candidates must be either A.B.D. PhD candidates or a recent PhD graduate in political science, history or a related field, and must have authorization to work in the United States.

Candidates should also share Cato’s commitment to moving U.S. foreign policy towards prudence and restraint, and the policy implications of their work should be broadly compatible with a pragmatic, realist or restrained approach to foreign policy. You can find more information about Cato’s work on defense and foreign policy issues here.

During their time at Cato, the visiting fellow is responsible for:

• Producing one scholarly paper (8,000–10,000 words) in the Institute’s Policy Analysis series on a foreign policy issue (which may or may not be part of the fellow’s dissertation)
• Organizing at least two events
• Authoring op-eds and blog posts
• Handling media requests on international security issues

Fellows will work from Cato’s Washington, D.C. offices for the 2017–2018 academic year. Predoctoral fellows will receive $40,000, and postdocs will receive $50,000 in addition to health care coverage. Ideally, the fellow’s work at Cato would overlap considerably with his or her dissertation, making the fellowship useful both for policy research and finishing or refining the candidate’s dissertation.

If you are interested in applying, please submit a C.V. and a writing sample via Cato’s online application system no later than February 15, 2017. The application can be found here.

China’s first and only aircraft carrier, the Liaoning, recently passed through the Taiwan Strait after conducting exercises in the South China Sea. Initial reporting and commentary on the transit paint a pretty dire picture. In The New York Times Bonnie Glaser of the Center for Strategic and International Studies called the transit “a show of force” that may be seen “as a test of U.S. resolve” by the incoming Trump administration. The BBC called the transit “the latest escalation amid tensions” between China and Taiwan, and Camila Domonoske’s story at NPR called it “a provocative move.”

Such coverage of the Liaoning’s transit is emblematic of the high degree of attention paid to China’s military exercises, but it also is emblematic of a tendency to read too much into these exercises.

Military exercises involving Chinese air and naval forces have received a lot of focus in recent months. The Liaoning’s first live-fire exercises in mid-December 2016 received a good deal of coverage. Earlier that month, China flew a “nuclear-capable” H‑6 bomber aircraft over the South China Sea. In September, the South China Sea played host to Russian and Chinese naval forces participating in a joint naval exercise.

These exercises stir up plenty of angst within the China-watching community over Beijing’s strategic intentions, and are often used to portray China as a dangerous actor. Framing military exercises as signaling tools is not a bad thing, and such analysis can provide useful information about state behavior. However, the reaction to the Liaoning’s transit of the Taiwan Strait and other recent Chinese exercises demonstrates the limitations of this approach.

For example, while the Liaoning was in the Taiwan Strait it stayed to the west of the strait’s midline and (as of yet) there is no evidence that it launched fighter aircraft during its transit or even had aircraft on the flight deck while it passed through the strait. Such behavior is consistent with the Liaoning’s previous transit of the strait in late 2013. The timing of the transit, coming around a month after Trump’s phone call with Taiwan’s president and hints at dropping the One China policy, bolsters the perception of the exercise as a signal. However, given the recent transit’s similarity to the 2013 transit, it is not obvious that China is trying to signal a challenge to Taiwan or Trump beyond the longstanding military challenge it has posed to Taiwan. If the carrier traveled to the east of the strait’s midline or scrambled aircraft then an intimidating signal would be obvious, but behaving in a consistent way suggests continuity in China’s approach rather than reactionary behavior in response to recent events. Therefore, interpreting the Liaoning’s recent transit of the Taiwan Strait as a signal of intimidation or test of American resolve is problematic.

Analysts should keep an eye on Chinese military exercises and movements in East Asia, but they should not put each instance under a microscope looking for a signal. Instead, analysts ought to look at the character of the exercises and movements over time to identify consistencies and deviations. This is where the most valuable signaling information exists. Consistent behavior signals a degree of stability, while deviations signal a change in Beijing’s calculus that could either be a one-off response or become a “new normal” in their behavior.

Divining deeper political or strategic intentions from military exercises has utility, but it is important to remember that such analysis is fraught with difficulties and is an imperfect approach. The tendency to interpret every exercise or movement as a signal of aggression or intimidation can lead to overreaction and inadvertent escalation. Looking at exercises over a long-term period and teasing out consistent behavior and deviations would provide much more useful information on the signals that China is trying to send. 

President Obama will deliver his Farewell Address tonight to a capacity crowd in Chicago’s McCormick Place convention center. It’s the right venue for the speech, the president explained last week, because Chicago is “where my career in public service began.”

Indeed, it’s the city where, as a young state senator in 2002, Obama gave an antiwar rally speech railing against the “dumb,” “rash” rush to war in Iraq; and where, as a presidential candidate five years later, he promised to “turn the page on the imperial presidency” and usher in “a new dawn of peace.” And yet, 2008’s “peace candidate” will leave office as the first two-term president in American history to have been at war every day of his presidency, having dropped over 25,000 bombs on seven countries in 2016 alone.

Given that record, it seems unlikely that Obama will use his Farewell Address to warn against excessive foreign entanglements or the dangers of the military-industrial complex. But you never know: our 44th president has never lacked chutzpah. In a speech to US troops last month, he denounced the “false promise” that “we can eliminate terrorism by dropping more bombs,” and piously proclaimed that “democracies should not operate in a state of permanently authorized war.”

An audacious statement—given that it is Obama himself who’s made perpetual warfare the new normal, and the president the ultimate “decider” in matters of war and peace. Where George W. Bush secured congressional authorization for the two major wars he fought, Obama has launched two undeclared wars (in Libya and against ISIS), ordered 10 times as many drone strikes as his predecessor, and this summer bombed six different countries just over Labor Day weekend. And it is Obama who is largely responsible for warping the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force—passed three days after 9/11 to target Al Qaeda and the Taliban—into an enabling act for endless war, anywhere in the world.

Through it all, Obama has maintained the pose of a “reluctant warrior,” repeatedly lecturing the country about the dangers of an imperial presidency while forging new frontiers in the expansion of executive power. “Unless we discipline our thinking, our definitions, our actions,” he chided in May 2013, “we may be drawn into more wars we don’t need to fight, or continue to grant Presidents unbound powers.” In the same speech, Obama even had the gall to quote James Madison’s admonition that “no nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.”

Two weeks after Obama invoked Madison’s warning, the public got new evidence of its continued relevance. June 2013 brought the first of a series of revelations about secret dragnet data-collection programs that targeted Americans in the name of protecting them from terrorism. In the quest to “collect it all,” the National Security Agency had built what NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden termed a “turnkey tyranny.” As former NSA counsel Susan Hennessy has observed: “No one should kid themselves about the idea that in the wrong hands, [the agency] couldn’t do quite a bit that’s very scary.”

With Trump’s inauguration near, Obama has described the transfer of presidential power as ”a relay race” where he’ll pass the baton to his successor. In private, he’s occasionally used a more ominous metaphor: leaving “a loaded weapon” behind for the next president. In 10 days Obama will pass that weapon on to Donald J. Trump, a man he’s flatly declared “unfit” for the office—someone who can’t be trusted with a Twitter account, let alone the nuclear launch codes.

So it’s only fair that on Obama’s recent “legacy tour,” he’s faced some awkward questions about the vast new powers he’s forged. Not to worry, Obama told NPR’s Steve Inskeep recently, your president has been hard at work building “guard rails internally…. a whole series of processes to guard against government overreach, to reform some practices that I thought over time would threaten civil liberties.” But those self-imposed restraints won’t bind President Trump—they don’t even bind President Obama, who’s also spent his last months in office adding new fronts and targeting new enemies in the “Forever War.”

In keeping with the Washington-Eisenhower tradition, the outgoing president plans to offer some “admonitions” in his address tonight. He’s already used Madison’s warning about “continual warfare,” but if he’s looking for something equally prescient, Obama might try one of the lesser-known passages from Washington’s Farewell Address. In it, our first president warned of “the disorders and miseries [that] gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual,” with the result that “sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction… turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation on the ruins of public liberty.” 

Thanassis Cambanis argues in Politico that, contrary to what we may think, America’s role as global policeman, defender of more than 50 different countries, buyer of more than a third of worldwide military spending, etc. is not a costly burden compared to the benefits it yields. All this talk about how allies free ride off our security commitments and how the promiscuous use of U.S. military power imposes significant economic and geopolitical costs on the homeland are off base, according to Cambanis. Being the policeman of the world makes us richer, he says.

Since the United States is so extravagantly rich in relative international terms but also historically speaking, identifying even major costs can be difficult. But Cambanis misses the mark with some selective accounting. He makes his case with three main points. First:

[M]ost of America’s defense spending functions as a massive, job creating subsidy for the U.S. defense industry. According to a Deloitte study, the aerospace and defense sector directly employed 1.2 million workers in 2014, and another 3.2 million indirectly. Obama’s 2017 budget calls for $619 billion in defense spending, which is a direct giveback to the American economy…

Of course, a “giveback” to the American economy implies the real truth: that in order to create jobs by massively subsidizing the military industrial complex, the government has to first extract resources from the more productive sectors of the private economy. If the U.S. pared back its global role and initiated serious restraint-oriented cuts to the defense budget, it could produce something on the order of $150 billion in annual savings. That could serve as quite a stimulus if left in taxpayers’ pockets.

Second:

America’s steering role in numerous regions — NATO, Latin America, and the Arabian peninsula — gives it leverage to call the shots on matters of great important to American security and the bottom line. For all the friction with Saudi Arabia, for instance, the Gulf monarchy has propped up the American economy with massive Treasury bill purchases, and by adjusting oil production at America’s request to cushion the effect of policy priorities like the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Active international engagement certainly gives a peerless superpower like the United States more leverage to secure its interests more efficiently, but Cambanis inadvertently draws attention to the benefit-outweighing costs of that “steering role” we’ve played in the world. The Iraq War is not synonymous with Liberal Hegemony, but if America had not been playing the role of global policeman, it’s hard to imagine the invasion of Iraq having happened in the first place. It served mostly as an achievable item on a pre-existing laundry list of errands that the Bush administration thought would serve as a useful show of force following the 9/11 attacks. It cost trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives and it destabilized the region in a way that continues to eat up lives and resources to this very day. And the U.S. relationship with the Saudi regime has hardly been a net positive for U.S. interests. 

Third:

America’s “global cop” role means that shipping lanes, free trade agreements, oil exploration deals, ad hoc military coalitions, and so on are maintained to the benefit of the U.S. government or U.S. corporations. The truth is that America puts its thumb on the scale to tilt the world’s not-entirely free markets to America’s benefit. Nobody would be more thrilled for America to pull back than its economic rivals, like China.

It’s not clear to me that America secures better oil exploration deals as a result of its expansive grand strategy. Nor am I convinced that the ability to organize ad hoc military coalitions always serves U.S. interests; too often they have been used as a veneer of international legitimacy for reckless interventions. It seems a good thing, for example, that the U.K. parliament refused to go along with Obama’s plan to bomb the Assad regime in 2013. According to Secretary of State John Kerry, that was the pivotal moment in derailing a war that was deeply unpopular with the American public and that Congress wouldn’t even formally approve.

More interesting is Cambanis’s argument that America’s “global cop” role keeps shipping lanes open and facilitates free trade agreements. I think America’s post-war and early Cold War role in setting up international institutions that liberalized economies and encouraged the lowering of trade barriers was important, but the notion that global free trade today depends on U.S. hegemony is dubious. Most countries have learned the lesson that freer trade and globalization is a net economic benefit; they don’t need U.S. military bases to continue to be convinced. And certainly America’s frequent “global cop” military interventions don’t help. Moreover, as Joshua Shifrinson and Sameer Lalwani write in a chapter for a Cato Institute book on threat perception and U.S. national security, “Although more actors are increasingly capable of disrupting American command [of the seas], none are capable of systematically undermining the maritime status quo.” Indeed, any state interested in gaining global power and influence will strive to keep shipping lanes open and engage in free trade. Just ask China.

And as for the argument that China would be “thrilled for America to pull back,” I seriously doubt it. China certainly prefers an American withdrawal from the South and East China Seas, but, as a recent RAND Corporation study found, China is all too eager to let the U.S. carry the burden for Middle East energy security, believing (erroneously) that American military presence there helps secure the free flow of oil out of the Persian Gulf, incidentally a region that China relies on for oil imports far more than the U.S. does.

Much of this debate boils down to whether or not U.S. primacy deserves credit for the decline of interstate war, and thus for the increase in global economic productivity, since 1945. Many argue that it does, but there are competing arguments. Nuclear weapons and the destructive power of modern conventional militaries have created an environment of “defense dominance” in which war and conquest are either prohibitively costly or just plain infeasible. Economic interdependence, which developed long before America’s rise to superpower status, also creates incentives to keep the peace and get rich instead – so the cause-effect variable could very well be the reverse of what Cambanis and others claim. Cato’s own John Mueller has long argued that a normative shift in the way most societies see war, from a glorified practice to an abhorrent last resort, is the real reason for the decline of international conflict.

Cambanis predicts that, contrary to the prognostications of some fearful commentators, Trump will not reduce America’s role in the world because he will soon realize that it is a net benefit to the country’s interests and its bottom line. I agree Trump is unlikely to pare back U.S. predominance, but I think it will have more to do with his predilection for exercising immense power than anything else.