Donald Trump’s election ushers in a new challenge for homeland security and counterterrorism both at home and abroad. Trump owns, has a stake in, or has lent his name to scores of properties all over the United States and the world. A terrorist could decide to target a Trump Tower in Stuttgart, a Trump hotel in South Korea, or a Trump golf resort in Dubai. A terrorist might even decide to target the famous carousel in Central Park, which Trump also owns. The attraction to the terrorist is obvious: Trump’s hotels, resorts, and condominiums are vulnerable “soft targets,” without any of the serious security measures surrounding American embassies or other government buildings. Even better, most of these targets have the president’s name on them in huge letters. Clearly the symbolic damage of such an attack would be immense.

What is not clear, however, is just how great a threat this exposure represents and how the United States should deal with it.

A quick look at the list of Trump’s properties reveals that several of them are located in countries with significant serious civil unrest and instability. Trump Tower in Istanbul, for example, probably seemed like a pretty safe bet five or ten years ago as Turkey was working towards membership of the European Union. But today, thanks to spillover from the Syrian civil war, the failed military coup, and the recent assassination of the Russian ambassador to Turkey, the neighborhood seems much less secure than it used to.

Trump properties in Muslim-majority nations may present the greatest risk of attack, given Trump’s hardline rhetoric towards the Islamic State and towards Muslims and Islam more generally. Trump Tower Manila, for example, sits within easy striking distance of Abu Sayyaf, a Philippine Islamist group that has pledged allegiance to the Islamic State and has a history of bombing attacks. Trump also owns high-visibility properties in Azerbaijan, the United Arab Emirates, and India, all of which house one or more jihadist groups. Even Trump Tower in Seoul might not be safe: ISIS has recently labeled South Korea an enemy of the caliphate, attempting to incite attacks on U.S. installations in South Korea. In all of these locales, Trump Towers might prove to be an irresistible target.

Trump’s properties clearly present a new kind of Achilles heel for the United States, but what exactly should be done about the potential threat? One position might be to argue that the United States should do nothing. After all, the United States government bears no legal responsibility for providing security at these private establishments. But practically speaking it seems obvious that a major terrorist attack on one of Trump’s towers would have political and security implications that go well beyond the legal question. Attacks on American embassies from Tehran to Benghazi, for example, have always provoked anger and support for retaliation among U.S. citizens. Aware of the symbolism of an attack on a Trump Tower, Americans would likely feel similarly, putting pressure on the U.S. government to respond.

Perhaps one of the most critical aspects to consider along these lines is the reaction of the president himself. How would Trump respond if Trump Tower in Istanbul went up in smoke, killing hundreds of people? From everything we have seen since he began his presidential campaign, it seems likely that Trump would take such an act extremely personally. And given his hawkish rhetoric about dealing with terrorism, it is possible that Trump would respond emotionally, using his executive authority to take extreme measures beyond those dictated by a cool calculation of costs and benefits. Unfortunately, not only might such a response be dangerous and counterproductive for the United States, it might also play right into the hands of terrorists seeking to provoke just such an overreaction.

A second possibility is for Trump to divest from his private holdings and to begin to take the necessary steps to rename his associated properties. This would have the benefit of dramatically reducing the symbolic value of the properties as targets while simultaneously reducing the potential emotional impact on Trump himself. An attack on a hotel that “used” to bear Trump’s name is less likely to offend his ego and to provoke him to an overreaction.

If Trump is unwilling to do this, then he must come up with an alternative plan to ensure that his privately-owned properties and those bearing his name do not expose him to potential blackmail or provocation once he becomes president. Unfortunately, Trump’s reluctance to divest from his businesses, or even to acknowledge the potential for conflicts of interest, strongly suggests that he will not come up with such a plan, or even admit that such a plan is necessary. If so, Trump will be choosing to leave the United States vulnerable on a new front in the battle against terrorism.

The fog of war, coupled with the output from multiple propaganda machines, makes it difficult to determine which side has the upper hand in any conflict. After the fall of Aleppo, it appears that President Bashar al-Assad’s forces are getting the upper hand. But are they?

The best objective way to determine the course of a conflict is to observe black market (read: free market) exchange rates, and to translate changes in those rates via purchasing power parity into implied inflation rates. We, at the Johns Hopkins-Cato Institute Troubled Currencies Project, have been doing that for Syria since 2013.

The two accompanying charts—one for the Syrian pound and another for Syria’s implied annual inflation rate—plot the course of the war. It is clear that Assad and his allies are getting the upper hand. With their recent victory in Aleppo, the black-market exchange rate has moved in Assad’s favor and, likewise, inflation has continued to fall.

Prior to attacking intelligence assessments on Russian hacking and meeting with Kanye this week, the president-elect went on a bit of a defense jag. Monday, @realDonaldTrump bashed Lockheed’s F‑35 joint strike fighter program for its “out of control” price-tag. He said the same of Boeing’s Air Force One replacement last week. Saturday, he vaguely tweeted his approval for a Washington Post story claiming that the Pentagon “buried evidence” that it wastes $25 billion a year. Sunday, on Fox News, Trump criticized both aircraft and implied that their excessive cost results from a corrupt practice: the revolving door, where officials manage weapons programs and then go work for the manufacturer.

Trump’s tweets temporarily lowered defense contractors’ stock prices, prompting speculation that he’s paying CEOs back for criticism, or worse. But Trump’s comments aren’t new. He attacked the F‑35 during the campaign. He claimed that he could fund a massive military buildup by “conducting a full audit of the Pentagon, eliminating incorrect payments, reducing duplicative bureaucracy, collecting unpaid taxes, and ending unwanted and unauthorized federal programs.” He promised to “balance our budget,” by eliminating “waste, fraud and abuse” in the federal government. He repeatedly suggested that corporate interests—pharmaceutical, oil, finance and defense companies—have hijacked government and added to its cost.

Trump’s views on Pentagon waste then seem less whim than an outgrowth of his approach to public policy. Does that mean Trump is set to “crack down” on Pentagon spending, “make war on the defense industry or take on the “military-industrial complex?” There are several reasons why the answer is not really.

One is Trump’s appointments. As in other areas, they conflict with his campaign rhetoric. Trump famously said he knows more about ISIS than the generals, but seems inclined to defer to those that he deems “his.” That’s especially true of his Secretary of Defense pick, retired general James Mattis, who has mostly conventionally-hawkish views on military spending. For example, he repeats the false claim that sequestration, which only occurred once since the 2011 Budget Control Act, in 2013, annually slices the defense budget across-the-board. He even called sequestration a bigger threat than any U.S. enemy, while testifying in favor of a military spending boost. Mattis casts doubt on Trump’s commitment to defense reform in another way: he raced through the revolving door, going to work for General Dynamics upon his retirement from military service in 2013.

Another reason to doubt that Trump can successfully mine “waste, fraud and abuse” for savings is that it’s mostly fool’s gold. Fraud and abuse amount to small potatoes in Pentagon terms. Waste is tough to cut because people disagree on what it is. One man’s waste is another’s (usually a committee chair or Undersecretary) vital national security program. Going after waste requires political fights for which Trump seems unprepared.

I made that argument last week in the National Interest:

Budget cutters like to target waste because it means savings without sacrifice. Waste has no lobby or constituency, so you lose nothing and offend no one in hunting it. But true savings, even the efficiency sort where you do the same missions for less cost, don’t come for nothing. Efficiency savings include closing bases, combining or shuttering combatant commands, cutting a nuclear-weapons delivery system, lowering personnel costs and the like. All require political fights.

Bigger savings require going after the Pentagon’s efficient pursuit of foolish goals—by reducing military missions. With fewer wars to plan and fight, we could have less force structure, build fewer weapons and pay fewer people.

That piece tried to pour cold water on the Post story that Trump tweeted. For more criticism, see my letter to the editor, Robert Samuelson’s column, and Matt Fay’s post for the Niskanen Institute.

My point isn’t that we should buy F‑35s or be content with growing overhead costs in the military. The point is that saving money there is more a political challenge than a managerial one, especially the sort solved by attacking overlap or graft. Yes, there are procurement abuses facilitated by revolving doors. But closing them wouldn’t have helped the F‑35. Like most problematic acquisition programs, its troubles are belief in false economies of scale gained by joint production and an acquisition system that produces excessive requirements and incentives for premature production. That system reflects the will of Congress and the military services more than that of the contractors they hire.

Yes, the Pentagon suffers from subpar accounting. But that’s largely because it’s a confederation of services and offices with their own systems. Better record-keeping will highlight excessive spending, not stop it.

Yes, there’s duplication galore in the Pentagon. The Navy’s ground force duplicates the Army in many ways, for example. But Congress is not about to abolish the Marines. And that sort of redundancy usefully offers alternative solutions to military challenges. It also allows bureaucratic competition, which can produce some of the disciplining effects that market competition provides in the private sector.

The best way to target Pentagon inefficiency is to cut its topline. The budget should remain capped, ideally at a lower level, with the Overseas Contingency Operations budget included under the cap. That would prevent it from being used as a bailout fund preventing hard choices. Lower budgets will encourage Pentagon leaders to target administrative costs to protect more important programs. The department’s drive for efficiency, which has run under the past four defense secretaries, began as last decade’s massive military buildup waned. By promising a military buildup, Trump is closing off the best path to the efficiencies that he claims will fund it.

In 2014, the Pentagon commissioned a study to identify wasteful practices and improve efficiency, but when the researchers found too much waste — approximately $125 billion worth — the officials who asked for the report tried to bury the findings. As reported in the Washinton Post, Pentagon officials worried that “Congress would use the findings as an excuse to slash the defense budget.”

The Pentagon imposed secrecy restrictions on the data making up the study, which ensured no one could replicate the findings. A 77-page summary report that had been made public was removed from a Pentagon website.

Particularly telling are a series of comments by Deputy Defense Secretary Robert O. Work, the Pentagon’s second-highest-ranking official, and Frank Kendall III, the Pentagon’s chief weapons-buyer. 

“At first,” the Post explains: 

Work publicly touted the efficiency drive as a top priority and boasted about his idea to recruit corporate experts to lead the way.

After the board finished its analysis, however, Work changed his position. In an interview with The Post, he did not dispute the board’s findings about the size or scope of the bureaucracy. But he dismissed the $125 billion savings proposal as “unrealistic” and said the business executives had failed to grasp basic obstacles to restructuring the public sector.

Kendall, meanwhile, wasn’t buying what the researchers were selling almost from the very beginning. He “challenged the board’s data and strenuously objected to the conclusion that his offices were overstaffed.”

Mostly, however, he worried about what it would mean for extracting more money from Congress for military spending.

Kendall knew that lawmakers might view the study as credible. Alarmed, he said, he went to Work and warned that the findings could “be used as a weapon” against the Pentagon.

“If the impression that’s created is that we’ve got a bunch of money lying around and we’re being lazy and we’re not doing anything to save money, then it’s harder to justify getting budgets that we need,” Kendall said.

President-elect Donald Trump largely bought into the notion that the U.S. military has been gutted by the supposedly devastating effects of the bipartisan Budget Control Act. This is a myth, as my colleague Benjamin Friedman explained at a Capitol Hill briefing last month. The U.S. military remains eminently capable of defending the United States and U.S. vital interests. The greatest threat to American security is U.S. officials’ collective inability to prioritize, and their tendency to be drawn into others’ disputes.

Still, Mr. Trump has pledged to rebuild the military, and dismissed critics who scoffed at his claim that he could find the money that he needs without raising taxes or cutting other popular domestic programs. The key, he said, was “eliminating government waste and budget gimmicks.”

He should thank the Pentagon for helping to identify some of that waste, and the Washington Post’s Craig Whitlock and Bob Woodward for making the findings public. Actually extracting the savings, including by getting Congress to stop treating the Pentagon as a particularly inefficient jobs program, is likely to prove tougher.

“We are going to appoint ‘Mad Dog’ Mattis as our secretary of defense,” President-elect Donald Trump told a crowd in Cincinnati last night. He added, “They say he’s the closest thing to Gen. George Patton that we have.”

To be successful, James Mattis will also have to be this generation’s George Marshall, and perhaps its Dwight Eisenhower and George Washington, too.

Which, of course, is impossible. The problems that afflict this nation’s foreign policy are too daunting to be repaired by a single man, even one as remarkable as Gen. Mattis. But within the Trump administration he could be a critical voice of caution with respect to the wisdom or folly of the use of force going forward.

Mattis exudes a combination of toughness and thoughtfulness. His voracious appetite for reading is the stuff of legend. The “Warrior Monk” has a deep knowledge of history which could serve him well, if President Trump is inclined to listen to his SecDef. 

Early signs suggest that he will. For example, during the campaign, Trump spoke blithely about bringing back torture. After the election, Mattis apparently convinced him to reconsider. 

Even before Trump’s announcement of Mattis as SecDef, a number of commentators despaired over the president-elect’s apparent fixation with filling civilian offices with military officers. This included several people who admitted to loving Gen. Mattis. The principle of civilian control, they explained, is more important than any one man. 

I share those concerns. I’m particularly worried that the one common trait among the officers that have caught Trump’s eye is their willingness to challenge their commander-in-chief at the time, Barack Obama. It seems unlikely that Trump will value that same independent spirit when he’s in charge. 

On the other hand, as public trust in a number of institutions has cratered, respect for the military remains high. This is true despite the fact that the public also senses that our wars haven’t served the country’s interests. In other words, Americans are holding accountable the civilians that sent the country to war with dubious rationales, not the men and women in uniform who have answered the call. Up this point, Mattis has been on the receiving end of these orders. Going forward, he would be the one giving them, or at least advising those who do.

In addition, in my experience, men and women who have served in the military are less likely to support military interventions than those who have never worn the uniform. They are especially wary of wars fought for questionable reasons, or where the means don’t align with the ends. Robert Gates commented on this in his memoir, From the Shadows, long before his tenure as Secretary of Defense (H/T Micah Zenko).

There are exceptions, to be sure: John McCain and Tom Cotton, both combat veterans, remain strong advocates of the use of force. Both have called for American no-fly zones over Syria, and Cotton claimed that war with Iran would only take “several days.” I have no idea whether Jim Mattis is more like them, or more like Gens. Zinni, or Shinseki, or a number of other generals who quietly (or not so quietly) questioned the wisdom of invading Iraq in 2002. 

However, within the small circle of foreign policy advisors in any given administration, the president is most likely to hear from those making the case for action — recall Madeleine Albright during Bill Clinton’s administration, or Hillary Clinton during Obama’s first term. That is why it is so important for any administration to have a strong contingent of intervention skeptics, or at least a few people who are willing to ask tough questions.

A brief clip near the tail end of the documentary “American Umpire” (starts at 46:34) suggests that James Mattis, if confirmed as the country’s next Secretary of Defense, could play that role.

As I look back over these wars since World War II — Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, dare I say Afghanistan, stick Somalia in there somewhere, other expeditions — when America goes to war with murky political end states, then you end up in a situation where you are trying to do something right, but you’re not sure if it’s the right thing. And suddenly you end up with a situation where the American people say “what are we doing here?” And “what kind of people are we that we do this sort of thing?”

If you don’t know what it is that you’re going to achieve, then don’t be surprised that eventually you’ve wasted treasure, lives, and the moral authority of the United States.

The United Nations Security Council has approved another round of sanctions against North Korea in response to its latest nuclear test. No one really believes that the new penalties, focused on Pyongyang’s coal and other exports, will have any effect. In fact, it is doubtful that China, which purchases most of the North’s goods, will fully enforce the new resolution.

Still, with most policymakers giving up any hope that the so-called Democratic People’s Republic of Korea will voluntarily negotiate away its nuclear program, Beijing remains the best option for constraining the DPRK’s nuclear ambitions. The People’s Republic of China so far has refused to play its assigned role, but Washington continues to press the PRC to act.

Getting Beijing to take strong action against North Korea is a long-shot, as I explain in an upcoming Policy Analysis, but worth serious effort by Washington. What that would involve is the subject of a forum at Cato at noon on December 8. Susan Glaser of the Center for Strategic and International Studies and Scott Snyder of the Council of Foreign Relations will join me in a panel discussed moderated by Cato Vice President Christopher Preble to discuss the challenges and possibilities of engaging China over the issue.

One thing is clear. Washington and its East Asian allies need to persuade rather than demand that the PRC act. How best to convince Beijing, and what mix of carrots and sticks would be most effective in doing so, will be among the issues discussed on the 8^th. I hope you can join us: the details, including where to RSVP, are included here.

A new study from the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, “How Much is Enough? Alternative Defense Strategies,” reports on military spending plans produced by teams from five think tanks, including Cato. CSBA asked each team to use its “Strategic Choices” software to make hundreds of choices amounting to a ten-year budget plan for the Pentagon and to provide a brief statement of their strategic rationale. The report includes those rationales, summaries of each budget, and comparative analysis of them.

As you can tell from the chart below, the Cato team’s answer was that way less is enough. We cut $1.1 trillion over the period. We’d have cut even more had the software allowed us to target all the spending going to “Overseas Contingency Operations,” intelligence programs and nuclear weapons. You can also see that our plan was the outlier. The others all raised spending—in AEI’s case, massively, by $1.3 trillion.

Why did our budget so diverge from the others? The simple answer is that our defense strategies diverge. Our teams’ choices follow a grand strategy of restraint. The others differ on details but accept the current grand strategy of primacy or liberal hegemony, which holds that U.S. security requires global stability maintained everywhere by U.S. military activism—alliances backed by garrisons and threats, naval patrols, and continual warfare, at least. As we put it in the report, the restraint strategy follows from four underlying claims:

First, U.S. geography, wealth, and technological prowess go far to secure the United States from attack, especially considering our historically weak enemies. Second, we should generally avoid wars meant to stabilize fractured states or to liberalize oppressive ones because they tend to backfire at tragic cost. Third, while allies can be useful in balancing the power of a threatening hegemon, like Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union, alliances should not be permanent. Today no such threat exists, and vast chunks of U.S. military spending goes to maintaining forces meant to defend states that can afford to defend themselves. Our protection can also encourage allies to avoid accommodating rivals and instead to heighten conflicts that can entangle U.S. forces. Fourth, while U.S. forces, especially the Navy, should protect trade routes from disruption during conflict, almost nothing threatens peacetime trade. Overseas garrisons and naval patrols are not needed to protect it.

The other groups’ shared desire to increase spending reflects rejection of those claims—with some dissent on the second.

Their budgets also suggest a deficiency of primacy. Strategy, by definition, is logic for choice, a means to prioritize resources. In defense, that means choosing among threats to confront, types of warfare, and weapons programs. Because primacy sees U.S. military power as necessary to peace everywhere, it suggests a force that is always busy and nearly ubiquitous—either present or capable of being there fast. Primacy is then less a strategy than a sophisticated way of answering “faster, better, more” whenever military spending choices arise. That’s one reason why the other groups increase spending and say little about what our military can safely not do.

A more general explanation for the plans’ divergence is the complexity of defense budgeting. It is impossible to precisely calculate how much defense is enough, let alone achieve agreement on a figure. In his classic work on the subject, Warner Schilling attributes the difficulty to uncertainty—about future threats, what defense goals best meet threats, which military means best serve those goals, and how to compare the value of military and other spending. The result of this complexity, Schilling writes, is that:

A multiplicity of answers, all of them “right,” must be admitted to the question of how much it is rational to spend on defense. The opportunities for reasoned and intelligent conflict with regard to the factual premises involved are legion. The questions of value involved are, in the final analysis, matters of personal preference…Choice is unavoidable: choice among the among the values to be served, and choice among the divergent conceptions of what will happen if such and such is done. It is for this reason that the defense budget, while susceptible to rational analysis, remains a matter for political resolution.

The report’s competing expert advice shows why the question of how much defense is enough is best answered through democratic politics, not military judgement or expert analysis, even ours. Outside expertise is useful less as guidance for policy choice than to frame it by revealing tradeoffs that political rhetoric obscures.

The report’s conclusion points to a current example. Congressional leaders and the president-elect suggest that global military dominance and fiscal prudence, even liberally defined, are compatible. They aren’t. That’s one point of agreement among the report’s contributors, at least.