The White House unveiled its proposed budget for Fiscal Year 2020 and, to the apparent surprise of some military planners, the White House is calling for a top line national defense budget of $750 billion. Pentagon officials had reportedly anticipated a budget of $733 billion, which would have been a 2.4 percent increase over last year’s. They got a 4.7 percent increase instead. According to the supporting documentation, the request is intended to provide the Department of Defense with the resources to “remain the preeminent military power in the world, ensure balances of power in key regions remain in America’s favor, and advance an international order that is the most conducive to U.S. security and prosperity.”

The United States spends more than twice as much on its military as China and Russia combined, and is clearly the world’s “preeminent military power,” but it isn’t obvious that we’re getting the biggest bang for our bucks, nor that this additional spending will be critical to sustaining our edge. More to the point, even with all this “preeminence,” the U.S. military has struggled to bring current conflicts to a satisfactory end. As noted in 2016 by Admiral Mike Mullen, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “We’re 0 for a lot.” Military historian Andrew Bacevich similarly concludes “having been ‘at war’ for virtually the entire twenty-first century, the United States military is still looking for its first win.” (h/t Steve Walt)

Perhaps it’s not the military’s fault? And perhaps it’s not due to a shortage of funds? I think that the real culprit is that U.S. officials continue to expect the military to solve a host of problems that could be better addressed by other means, or left to be dealt with by other countries.

President Donald Trump has at times shown his frustration, but the reality of his budgets speaks louder than his words. This latest increase comes after he had gone back and forth on what he wanted to spend, initially telling all departments to prepare for a 5 percent cut, then back-tracking and saying the defense budget would not only be exempt from such reductions, but would actually increase. On another occasion, he blurted out on Twitter that it was “crazy” to spend $716 billion on the military, but then reversed himself a week later.

While $750 billion already represents a large increase in the budget, the most notable growth comes from within that request. The White House has asked that $165 billion come from Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO). Last year, OCO received $69 billion. While originally intended as a way to fund the supposedly unexpected costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, OCO has become a sort of “slush fund” for the Pentagon to avoid the budget caps put in place by the Budget Control Act (BCA). As my former Cato colleague Caroline Dorminey points out, $750 billion is an “astronomical increase” and well above the BCA cap of $576 billion. Taxpayers for Common Sense observes that OCO’s funding level would make it the second largest government agency, in terms of discretionary spending – behind the Pentagon, of course.

For a person who was elected to the presidency by railing against the foreign policy establishment, proclaiming America’s overly militarized foreign policy a “complete and total disaster,” and, most recently, declaring in his State of the Union address that “great nations do not fight endless wars,” President Trump has once again funded a military geared toward perpetuating the status quo, and remaining embroiled in the endless wars that he’s promised to quit.

I expect that House Democrats, beginning with House Armed Services Committee Chair Adam Smith (D-WA), will cast a skeptical eye toward the administration’s request. I also hope, however, that all Americans will dare ask how all this spending actually makes us safer, and ponder why the many other instruments of American power and influence – including diplomacy (Trump’s budget calls for cutting the State Department by 23 percent), trade, and voluntary cultural exchange – continue to get short shrift from this administration. 

(Thanks to James Knupp for his help with this post)

As the United States adjusts to a changing global balance of power, nuclear deterrence is poised to return to a level of importance in U.S. national security not seen since the end of the Cold War. However, U.S. nuclear strategy will have to contend with emerging issues like arms control in a multipolar world, the evolution of strategic technology, and the new contours of great power competition.

America’s Nuclear Crossroads, a forthcoming anthology from the Cato Institute, is a useful reference tool for policymakers as they navigate an increasingly complex nuclear security environment. We are pleased to present three advance chapters from the anthology examining the U.S. nuclear modernization plan, missile defense’s impact on nuclear stability, and the challenges posed by Iran and North Korea. 

The full anthology will be released later this spring. To view a digital copy of the three preview chapters and fill out a form to receive email updates about the project, including notification of the full publication and information about anthology-related speaking events, please visit https://research.cato.org/americas-nuclear-crossroads. 

The recent U.S.-North Korea summit in Hanoi has become the latest domestic partisan battlefield. President Trump now implies that congressional Democrats were at least partly responsible for the failure of negotiations with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un. His allegations are exaggerated, but they are not entirely erroneous.

The summit ended abruptly without an agreement on any issue or even the publication of a joint communique. That outcome was a surprise to many experts. Widespread expectations existed that the two leaders would issue a declaration officially ending the Korean War, and that they would establish liaison offices as the first step toward full diplomatic relations. Optimists also hoped for an agreement on initial measures toward North Korea’s denuclearization in exchange for the lifting of some U.S. and international economic sanctions.

For days following the summit, the president insisted that the meeting had not been a failure, merely one step in a very long, difficult process. He also contended that it became necessary to walk away from the negotiations in Hanoi because Kim insisted on the lifting of all sanctions merely for closing the Yongbyon reactor complex—just one of North Korea’s known or suspected nuclear facilities. The North Korean government denied Trump’s version of events, insisting that their negotiators had sought only a partial lifting of sanctions for that concession.

In a March 3 tweet, though, Trump seemed to change his argument, attacking the Democrat-controlled House Oversight Committee for holding hearings featuring the president’s former personal attorney, Michael Cohen. Trump stated that the hearings were a nasty distraction that may have “contributed to the ‘walk.’” His revised explanation is unconvincing. As late as the weekend television talk shows, National Security Adviser John Bolton was still arguing that the cause of the summit breakdown was Kim’s excessive demand for sanctions relief. Yet when Trump issued his tweet on the afternoon of March 3, it somehow became the Democrats’ fault.

The administration’s handling of the summit warrants criticism. Preparations for those delicate, complex negotiations seemed inadequate, even slipshod. The apparent confusion about the nature and extent of North Korea’s position on sanctions especially suggests a lack of professionalism or even basic competence.

But congressional Democrats don’t deserve high marks for their behavior either. Some accusations in Trump’s March 3 tweet were justified. “For the Democrats to interview in open hearings a convicted liar & fraudster, at the same time as the very important Nuclear Summit with North Korea, is perhaps a new low in American politics… . Never done when a president is overseas. Shame!”

That is a valid point. The House Oversight Committee could have postponed those hearings until after the summit—indeed, it could have scheduled them for any other time. Choosing to hold inflammatory sessions on the same days when the president was conducting extremely sensitive negotiations with a difficult foreign power, involving matters of war and peace on the tense Korean Peninsula, was inexcusable. The timing raised understandable suspicions that Democrats were trying to undermine their political opponent—and the nation’s foreign policy—for partisan reasons. Their conduct was petty at best, and dangerously irresponsible at worst.

Moreover, that was not the extent of questionable behavior on the part of Democratic leaders in Congress. Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and other senior Democrats spent the weeks before the summit making sneering comments that Trump might well “give away the store” to Kim in exchange for empty promises. Senator Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, collaborated with hawkish Republican Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) to oppose ongoing U.S.-South Korean efforts to create better relations with Pyongyang. Such unhelpful behavior caused even some on the left who seek to reduce the danger of war in Korea to accuse Democrats of sabotaging prospects for progress at the summit.

The partisan posturing before and after the Hanoi summit does little to alleviate the mounting public disenchantment with both major political parties. Neither Trump nor his opponents deserve even mediocre marks for their behavior. Especially on a matter that involved the challenge of preventing a possible war with nuclear implications, the American people deserved better.