Donald Trump is headed toward the Republican Party’s presidential nomination. He’s among the most pugnacious of candidates.

Many of his political battles could reduce his chance of getting elected president. But his fight with foreign policy professionals might help. Given the disastrous course of U.S. foreign policy in recent years, there’s little public support for more military adventurism in the Middle East.

Trump clearly is out-of-step with the neoconservatives and militaristic interventionists who dominated the Republican Party of late. One of Trump’s most important pledges addressed personnel, not policy

He declared: “My goal is to establish a foreign policy that will endure for several generations. That’s why I also look and have to look for talented experts with approaches and practical ideas, rather than surrounding myself with those who have perfect resumes but very little to brag about except responsibility for a long history of failed policies and continued losses at war. We have to look for new people.”

Trump may have been reacting against the open letter from 117 self-described members of “the Republican national security community,” including leading neoconservatives and right-leaning interventionists of other stripes. They denounced Trump as “fundamentally dishonest,” acting like “a racketeer,” being “hateful,” and having a vision that “is wildly inconsistent and unmoored in principle.” Their critique contained important truths, but was fueled by Trump’s lack of enthusiasm for new wars.

Trump’s promise to ignore the usual foreign policy suspects also may reflect media coverage of some members of the very same policy elite publicly stating their willingness to serve Trump—though only reluctantly, of course. An unnamed GOP official told the Washington Post: “Leaving any particular president completely alone and bereft from the best advice people could give him just doesn’t sound responsible.”

Of course, it’s all about advancing the national interest, and not gaining attractive, influential, prestigious, and career-enhancing jobs. No wonder Trump apparently sees no need for advice from such folks.

Author Evan Thomas defended the “global corps of diplomats, worldly financiers and academics.” Thomas seemed to miss Trump’s point. Trump endorsed diplomacy, which would require the assistance of a variety of seasoned professionals.

Not needed, however, are “advisers” with the reverse Midas Touch, whose counsel has proved to be uniformly disastrous. Indeed, every recent intervention, such as Iraq, has created new problems, creating calls from the usual suspects for more military action.

Trump may be feeling especially dismissive of those who never learn from their mistakes—like supporting the wars in Iraq and Libya, for instance. In August 2011, after the ouster of Moammar Khadafy, Anne-Marie Slaughter celebrated the success in an article entitled “Why Libya skeptics were proved badly wrong.” Once that country imploded and the Islamic State made an appearance, she dropped any discussion of who had been “proved badly wrong” by that conflict.

Samantha Power later criticized the public for losing its faith in her strategy of constant war: “I think there is too much of, ‘Oh, look, this is what intervention has wrought’ … one has to be careful about overdrawing lessons.”

Of course, what she really sought was to avoid responsibility for supporting multiple foreign policy blunders. As I wrote in Forbes online, “consider what the Iraq invasion has wrought: thousands of American dead, bloody sectarian war, promiscuous suicide attacks, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed, trillions of dollars squandered, rise of the Islamic State, destruction of the historic Christian community, dramatic increase in Iranian influence. Why should anyone listen to such people with such ideas?”

There are many reasons to fear Donald Trump’s candidacy. However, he is right to dismiss Washington’s interventionist foreign policy crowd. Their policies have cost America precious lives, abundant wealth, international credibility, and global influence. The next president should reject the same failed advisers with their same failed proposals.

I spent the latter part of last week on a too-short trip to Alicante, Spain, to present some of my latest work on the reuse of former defense facilities in the United States. The occasion was a conference on “Defence Heritage” – the third since 2012 — hosted by the Wessex Institute (.pdf) in which scholars from more than a dozen countries shared their findings about how various defense installations around the world have been repurposed for everything from recreational parks to educational institutions to centers of business and enterprise.

This sort of research is sorely needed as Congress appears poised to deny the Pentagon’s request to close unneeded or excess bases. It is the fifth time that Congress has told the military that it must carry surplus infrastructure, and continue to misallocate resources where they aren’t needed, in order to protect narrow parochial interests in a handful of congressional districts that might house an endangered facility.


In a cover letter to a new Pentagon report that provides ample justification for the need to close bases, Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work explained:

Under current fiscal restraints, local communities will experience economic impacts regardless of a congressional decision regarding BRAC authorization. This has the harmful and unintended consequence of forcing the Military Departments to consider cuts at all installations, without regard to military value. A better alternative is to close or realign installations with the lowest military value. Without BRAC, local communities’ ability to plan and adapt to these changes is less robust and offers fewer protections than under BRAC law.

Work is almost certainly correct. But in my latest post at The National Interest’s The Skeptics, I urge him “and other advocates for another BRAC round” not to “limit themselves to green-eyeshade talk of cost savings and greater efficiency. They must also show how former defense sites don’t all become vast, barren wastelands devoid of jobs and people.”


It obviously isn’t enough to stress the potential savings, even though the savings are substantial. The DoD report estimates that the five BRAC rounds, plus the consolidation of bases in Europe, have generated annual recurring savings of $12.5 billion, and that a new BRAC round would save an additional $2 billion per year, after a six-year implementation period. A GAO study conducted in 2002 concluded that “BRAC savings are real and substantial and are related to cost reduction in key operational areas.”


Members of Congress who are uninterested in such facts, and who remain adamantly opposed to any base closures, anywhere, should consider what has actually happened to many of the bases dealt with during the five BRAC rounds, and the hundreds of other bases closed in the 1950s and 60s, before there was a BRAC. 



They don’t have to go far. They could start by speaking with the Association of Defense Communities and the Pentagon’s Office of Economic Adjustment, who keep track of these stories.



House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mac Thornberry (R‑TX) could visit Austin-Bergstrom International Airport in Austin, Texas. He probably has, many times. The closure of Bergstrom Air Force Base was a thinly disguised blessing for a city that had struggled for years to find an alternative for its inadequate regional airport. Austin-Bergstrom today services millions of passengers, and has won awards for its design and customer service.


Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R‑NH), Chair of the Senate Armed Services Readiness Subcommittee, might stop by the former Pease Air Force Base in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, during one of her trips home. One of the very first bases closed under the BRAC process, the sprawling site still hosts several massive runways, and the 157th Air Refueling Wing of the Air National Guard. But the base has chiefly been reborn as the Pease International Tradeport, which is now home to over 250 businesses that employ more than 10,000 people.


And both would benefit from a visit to the former Brunswick Naval Air Station in my home state of Maine. They used to launch P‑3 submarine-hunting airplanes (pictured), now they host dozens of businesses, including 28 start-ups in a new business incubator, TechPlace, that opened 14 months ago. 


It’s particularly lovely in the summer time, if you don’t mind all the tourists. If they go, Thornberry and Ayotte should talk to some of the people who are responsible for its rapid turnaround, including Steve Levesque, the Executive Director of the Midcoast Regional Redevelopment Authority (MRRA), who contributed a chapter in this forthcoming volume on the renovation and reuse of former military sites, and Jeffrey Jordan, the MRRA’s Deputy Director, who I interviewed in 2014. I’m sure they’d be happy to show HASC and SASC members around Brunswick Landing.

The American presidency has accumulated an unprecedented set of institutional advantages in the conduct of foreign policy. Unlike on the domestic side where presidents face an activist and troublesome Congress, the Constitution, the bureaucratic and legal legacies of previous wars, the overreaction to 9/11, and years of assiduous executive branch privilege-claiming now afford the White House great latitude to run foreign policy without interference from Congress.

But one of the most tragic reasons for this situation stems from the abject failure of the marketplace of ideas to check the growth in executive power. In theory, the marketplace of ideas consists of free-wheeling debate over the ends and means of foreign policy and critical analysis of the ongoing execution of foreign policy that help the public and its political leaders to distinguish good ideas from poor ones. Philosophers since Immanuel Kant and John Stuart Mill have championed this dynamic. The Founding Fathers enshrined its logic in the First Amendment. Recent scholarship argues that the marketplace of ideas is central to the democratic peace and the ability of democracies to conduct smarter foreign policies than other nations.

In practice, however, today’s marketplace of ideas falls terribly short of this ideal.

The most famous recent example is the run up to the 2003 Iraq War. The Bush administration used an assortment of half-baked intelligence, exaggerations, and flat out lies about Iraqi WMD programs to urge the public into supporting the war. Shockingly, however, the national debate over the war was muted. Though false and based on flimsy evidence, the Bush administration’s claims received surprisingly little criticism. Reality reasserted itself, of course, as the failure to find any evidence of such programs made it clear that the administration had waged war under false pretenses. Where was the vaunted marketplace of ideas?

In an influential article in International Security written just after the 2003 Iraq War, political scientist Chaim Kaufmann argued that a good deal of the reason for the Bush administration’s ability to sell the war lay in the president’s institutional advantages. As president and Commander in Chief, Bush not only controlled the flow of critical intelligence information, he also enjoyed greater authority in the debate than his critics, allowing him to (falsely) frame the operation as part of the war on terrorism, thus taking advantage of the public’s outrage over the 9/11 attacks.

But Kaufmann (among many others) made another argument about why Bush succeeded: the news media simply failed to do its job. Indeed, after a review of its coverage of the run up to war, the New York Times editorial board took the unusual step of acknowledging it had failed in its core mission: “Looking back, we wish we had been more aggressive in re-examining the claims [about Iraqi WMD] as new evidence emerged — or failed to emerge.”

At this point, one might assume that more than a decade of intervention, chaos, and terrorism in the Middle East would have provided the news media with a powerful set of lessons. These lessons might include things like: scrutinize the basis for intervention; ask hard questions about the plans for what happens after the initial military operation ends, work to appreciate how U.S. actions affect the attitudes and actions of other people, groups, and nations around the world.

Unfortunately it does not appear that the news media has learned much if anything. President Obama has spent eight years talking about withdrawing the United States from the Middle East but has in fact expanded the military footprint of the United States. He has done so without much real debate in the mainstream news about the wisdom of his actions. Tellingly, what debate has occurred has focused on erroneous claims that Obama has appeased our enemies by withdrawing too much.

The figure below reveals some telling evidence of this sad state of affairs. Libya, Yemen, Afghanistan, and Syria all represent countries in which the United States is engaged in combat in various ways and at varying levels of intensity. Crucially, each represents a situation with the potential to involve the United States military in a bigger and messier conflict.

Figure 1. Stories per Newspaper per Month Mentioning Obama & U.S. Military & Country Name

Source: New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal via Factiva

The figure indicates how often each month the three most important newspapers in the country (the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal) mention President Obama, the U.S. military, and the name of the country in the same story. In each case the newspapers are writing fewer stories per month in 2016 than they did in 2015 and the numbers over all are quite low. The average reader of one of these newspapers would have read just three stories about U.S. military involvement with Yemen, for example, assuming he or she was diligent enough to have caught all three stories over the past four and half months. 

This is no doubt an imperfect measure of the national debate about Obama’s foreign policy; it certainly fails to capture some of the other sources of information and debate. That said, it is difficult to imagine that the marketplace of ideas could be very robust without a good number of such stories in the mainstream news media. Moreover, this is something of a best-case metric for the marketplace since this figure only includes data from three newspapers that cover foreign affairs far more intensively than almost all other American news outlets.

For those who were hopeful that the American marketplace of ideas on foreign policy would improve as 9/11 receded into history, this comes as bad news. It suggests that the challenges to free-wheeling debate do not lie simply in emotional overreactions to terrorism, or to temporary Congressional obsequiousness to the White House. Recent concerns about presidential foreign policy narratives aside, it also suggests that the problem isn’t simply political spin. The problem is deeper than that. At root is a failure of the marketplace of ideas in at least one if not both of its most fundamental elements. The first possibility is that the news media in its current form – dominated by big corporations and yet weakened economically by the Internet, audience fragmentation, and increasing partisanship – is incapable of doing the job the marketplace of ideas requires of it. The second, even darker possibility, is that the public, the ultimate arbiter of what the news must look like, is simply uninterested in having the necessary debate required to force the White House to be honest and transparent about foreign policy.

America’s international position is distinguished by its alliance networks. Presidential candidates fear today’s dangerous world, but the United States is allied with every major industrialized power, save China and Russia. It is a position that Washington’s few potential adversaries must envy.

Yet as I pointed out in National Interest: “littering the globe with security commitments is costly. The U.S. must create a much bigger military to project force abroad to protect countries that often matter little for this nation’s security. Moreover, while policymakers hope to prevent war with treaty guarantees, the resulting tripwires ensure involvement if deterrence fails.”

Equally important, America’s involvement tends to turn friends and allies into dependents. The principle is the same as domestic welfare: Why should they do for themselves if they can get someone else to do so?

In his recent interview in the Atlantic, President Barack Obama complained: “Free-riders aggravate me.” Unfortunately, Washington has created a world filled with free- or at least cheap-riders.

The president recently visited one of the targets of his ire: Saudi Arabia. The royals long ago assumed the U.S. military would act as their de facto bodyguard. The first Gulf War was more about the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia than Kuwait. More recently, the “alliance” has dragged the U.S. into the KSA’s war in Yemen, which has gone from local civil war to regional sectarian conflict.

Content to spend barely one percent of its GDP on the military throughout the Cold War while facing the Soviet Union and Maoist China, Japan has started to do a bit more. It appears Tokyo is worried that Washington might not go to war with Beijing over the Senkakyu/​Diaoyu Islands. Japan only recently passed legislation allowing its military to aid U.S. forces under attack. For decades, Japan’s only responsibility as an ally was to be defended.

Since the Korean War, the Republic of Korea has raced ahead of the North, with an economy as much as 40 times as large, a population twice as big, and a dramatic lead in technological prowess, international influence, and most every other measure of national power. Yet the ROK, facing a supposed existential threat, spends a lower percent of its GDP on the military than does America.

Then there are the Europeans. Foreign policy should be based on circumstances. After World War II, Western Europe was prostrate and Eastern Europe had been swallowed by the Soviet Union. Today the Europeans not only vastly outmatch Russia, their only potential antagonist, but they possess a larger economy and population than America.

Yet Washington’s desperate, even humiliating pleas for its allies to do more continue to fall on deaf ears. In fact, in all of these cases, the United States has variously insisted, demanded, and requested that its friends do more. When they did not, it often turned to begging and whining, with no greater success.

One could at least argue during the Cold War that it was in America’s interest to defend countries even if they would not protect themselves. No longer.

Yet the alliances commit America to go to war in defense of other nations’ interests. At the same time, such guarantees dissuade friendly states from doing more on their own behalf. If deterrence fails, as it often has throughout history, the good times will come to a dramatic and bloody end.

Washington has tolerated allied free-riding for far too long. It’s time for America to engage in burden-shedding rather than hope for burden-sharing. In its quest to maximize its number of allies, the United States has needlessly created a gaggle of dependents.

It’s legacy-polishing season for the Obama administration, with the president making himself available for “articles that will allow [him] to showcase his major achievements,” the New York Times reports. Over at Time​.com, I have a piece on what I think will turn out to be Obama’s lasting legacy: the evisceration of virtually any remaining legal limits on the president’s power to wage war abroad.

As I note in the column, it’s unlikely that “history” will judge our 44th president harshly because of that. After all, “when it comes to presidential legacies, ‘history’ has lousy judgment.”

More specifically, the academics charged with evaluating presidential legacies have lousy judgment. A look at the presidential rankings reveals that the scholars who fill out the scorecards hardly subscribe to the historian-as-“hanging-judge” theory. Bill Kauffman’s arch description of the rankings is more accurate: “polls by which court historians reward warmarkers and punish the peaceful.” The odious Woodrow Wilson is a perennial top 10 favorite, while his normalcy-securing successor, Warren Harding, is nearly always dead last. Say what you will about Wilson’s brutality and contempt for civil liberties at home, his senseless waste of life abroad–at least the man dreamed big! Teapot Dome, however? Unforgivable. 

During the last presidential election cycle, CNN asked some leading presidential historians to opine on the theme “What is ‘presidential greatness’?” Their answers reveal a perverse favoritism toward activist, warrior presidents.

• “In good times or bad, a president is expected to do something!” says presidential biographer Richard Reeves: sometimes, as with the Cuban Missile Crisis, “he does the right thing and becomes great for it.” The “right thing” in this case, apparently, was bringing the world to the brink of thermonuclear war over a missile deployment that Kennedy knew had no strategic consequence, but would have made him look bad politically.

• Aida Donald, author of Lion in the White House: A Life of Theodore Roosevelt, informs us that “Harry Truman was also a great president, because he was commander in chief in a great war.” That would be Truman’s “police action” in Korea, launched without congressional authorization, in which over 33,000 U.S. servicemen died.

• And historian H.W. Brands, while noting that “being a good president” should be “good enough,” squelches that sensible point with another atrocious example: “James Polk broke the impasse over expansion to the Pacific.” Polk did that by “unnecessarily and unconstitutionally” launching a war—as a young congressman named Abraham Lincoln pointed out—to steal land from Mexico.

Presidential scholars tend to wax messianic when they mull “presidential greatness.” In their book on the subject, the scholars Marc Landy and Sidney Milkis write that the great ones demonstrate the wherewithal “to engage the nation in a struggle for its constitutional soul.” 

The president described in the Federalist Papers is a humbler figure, possessing “no particle of spiritual jurisdiction.” His actual job description, contained in Article II’s oath of office, is to “preserve, protect and defend” the nation’s fundamental law.

If historians used that metric, Obama would have reason to worry about his legacy. As it stands, though, he’ll probably do just fine. 

Two years ago Russia detached Crimea from Ukraine. Since then the Western allies have imposed economic sanctions, but to little effect. No one believes Crimea, Russian until six decades ago, is going back to Ukraine.

Yet the European Union called on other countries to join its ineffective boycott. However, most nations have avoided the controversy. They aren’t going to declare economic war on a faraway nation which has done nothing against them.

Although Washington, with less commerce at stake, remains among the most fervent advocates of sanctions, Europe is divided over the issue. Opposition has emerged to routine renewal in July of restrictions on Russia’s banking, energy, and military industries. Particularly skeptical of continued economic war are Cyprus, Greece, Hungary, and Italy.

Sanctions supporters insist that Russia more fully comply with the Minsk peace process and end support for the separatist campaign in Ukraine’s east. “Today Russia faces a choice between the continuation of economically damaging sanctions and fully meeting its obligations under Minsk,” contended Secretary of State John Kerry.

Yet the armed conflict has ebbed, political crisis fills Kiev and some Ukrainians aren’t sure they want the separatists back. Indeed, Oksana Syroyid, Deputy Speaker of Ukraine’s Rada, has blocked passage of a constitutional amendment providing autonomy for the Donbas region, explaining: “We need to stop thinking of how to counter Putin, or how to please all our partners.”

Brussels faces the unpleasant possibility of Russia fulfilling its responsibilities while Ukraine breaks the deal. “Both sides need to perform,” complained Germany Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier.

Targeted sanctions against named individuals and concerns have a certain appeal. However, there is little evidence that they are more effective than broader measures.

The latter have hurt the Russian public without turning many of them against their government. Moreover, Western penalties have discouraged, even reversed, liberalization of the Russian economy, as businesses have grown even more dependent on government support.

The belief that imposing sanctions a little longer will force Moscow to capitulate reflects the triumph of hope over experience. Rather than reflexively continue sanctions, the Western states should rethink their policy toward Russia.

Vladimir Putin isn’t a nice guy, but that hardly sets him apart from other authoritarians. Geopolitically Ukraine matters far more to Moscow than to Europe or America. Russia always will spend and risk more to protect its perceived security interests next door.

And the West did much to challenge Moscow, including encourage a street revolt against a democratically elected president. That still didn’t justify Russia’s brutal actions to dismember its neighbor, but Putin acted predictably and rationally. He is neither Hitler nor Stalin reincarnated, but a traditional Tsar. Putin has never demonstrated a desire to swallow non-Russian peoples.

Thus, I argued in Forbes, “the allies should negotiate their way out of the sanctions box in which they are stuck. They could drop economic war, promise to stop expanding NATO along Russia’s border (most importantly, to Ukraine), reduce military support for Kiev, and encourage Ukraine to look both ways economically. Moscow could drop support for Ukrainian separatists, cooperate with restructuring Kiev’s unsustainable debts, accept Ukrainian economic ties with the EU, hold an internationally monitored status referendum in Crimea, and accept whatever outcomes emerge from the messy Ukrainian political system.”

Of course, Kiev is independent and free to decide its own future. But Ukrainians should choose their own course while fully aware that no one in the West is prepared to initiate all-out economic war, let along military conflict, with nuclear-armed Russia over Kiev’s status.

The U.S. and Europe shouldn’t allow the perfect to be the enemy of the good in policy toward Russia. At most economic sanctions act as a moral statement, but one better made through other means.

At the same time, there are many important issues in which the West would benefit from Russian assistance. After two years, it’s time to make a deal with Moscow.

In 2014, a militant group calling itself the Islamic State, or ISIL, but more generally known as ISIS, burst into official and public attention with some military victories in Iraq and Syria in the middle of the year—particularly by taking over Iraq’s second largest city, Mosul.

Cries of alarm escalated substantially when ISIS performed and webcast several beheadings of defenseless Western hostages. Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein was soon insisting that “The threat ISIS poses cannot be overstated”—effectively proclaiming, as columnist Dan Froomkin suggests, hyperbole on the subject to be impossible. Senators John McCain and Lindsay Graham de­emed the group to present an existential threat to the United States, and the media quickly became canny about weaving audience-grabbing references to the arrestingly diabolical ISIS into any story about terrorism.

The challenge presented by ISIS has become perhaps the most important and consequential foreign policy issue for the United States today. And a poll conducted a few weeks ago asked the 83 percent of its respondents who said it closely followed news stories about ISIS whether the group presented “a serious threat to the existence or survival of the US.” Fully 77 percent agreed, more than two-thirds of them strongly.

Unlike other groups designated as terrorist organizations, ISIS actually seeks to hold and govern—and then expand its control over—territory. ISIS obtains finances by selling oil and antiquities and by extorting, or taxing, people under its control. Key to its success or failure is whether it will be able to fund itself through such activities and whether its social and economic viability can be undermined.

It is this issue that will be central to a discussion by two experts at 4pm on May 18, 2016, hosted by Cato (a reception will follow). Howard Shatz is a senior economist at the RAND Corporation, and Jacob Shapiro is Associate Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University and the author of the prize-winning The Terrorist’s Dilemma: Managing Violent Covert Organizations. I will be moderating the discussion.

There seems little doubt that since its advances of 2014, the vicious group’s momentum has been substantially halted, and its empire is currently under a form of siege. And, by holding territory, it presents an obvious and clear target for airstrikes and other methods by military opponents.

Even by late 2014, it was finding that its supply lines were overstretched and its ranks of experienced fighters were being thinned. Over the course of the next year, it lost some 40 percent of the territory in Iraq that it had held at its peak in 2014. In late 2015, it tried to push back by launching three offensives in northern Iraq using, among other things, “armored bulldozers.” The offensives were readily beaten back.

By 2016, ISIS was in retreat in many areas, and frontline commanders were observing that “They don’t fight. They just send car bombs and then run away. And when we surround them they either surrender or infiltrate themselves among the civilians….Their leaders are begging them to fight, but they answer that it is a lost cause. They refuse to obey and run away.”

ISIS is finding that actually controlling and effectively gov­erning wide territories is a major strain. And it has to work hard to keep people from fleeing its brutal lumpen Caliphate.On close examination in fact, its once highly-vaunted economic capacity—selling a lot of oil and antiquities, for example—may be proving to be illusory.

Even in late 2014, there were reports indicating that ISIS was experiencing major problems with providing services and medical care, keeping prices from soaring, getting schools to function, keeping the water drinkable. And by the end of 2015, in part because the territory it controlled had diminished so much—thereby reducing the number of people it could tax (or extort)—ISIS was forced to reduce the salaries of its fighters by half. Those salaries, it appears, constitute two-thirds of the group’s operating budget.

By 2016, there were increasing reports of financial strain and clashes among senior commanders over allegations of corruption, mismanagement, and theft. Not only was the tax, or extortion, base much reduced and oil sales disrupted, but the huge cash windfall from the seizure of banks during the group’s season of expansion in 2014 was now reportedly mostly gone.

Does this indicate that ISIS is being fatally degraded as a threat? Can it maintain itself despite these setbacks? What might be required to break its still-substantial control over wide areas and large cities in Iraq and Syria? What are the best options for the United States and its allies to pursue? These questions will be very much on the agenda on May 18.