Most U.S. allies are sure to be worried by the choice Americans made on November 5. Many observers are confounded by voters’ willingness to roll the dice and reelect the intemperate Donald Trump as president. But Americans have long had an outsize risk tolerance, a characteristic that is integral to both the dynamism of the country’s economy and the vibrance of its society. As the poet Robert Pinsky wrote in 2002, American culture is “so much in process, so brilliantly and sometimes brutally in motion, that standard models for it fail to apply”—an analysis the election result only reaffirms.
Since his arrival a decade ago on the national political stage, Trump has broken the Republican Party and rebuilt it in his image. The GOP is no longer the party of figures such as Senator Mitt Romney and the late Senator John McCain (for whom I once worked), both of whom ran unsuccessful presidential bids on traditional Republican platforms. In their place are figures such as JD Vance, Trump’s running mate, and Josh Hawley, the Republican senator from Missouri, who hew more closely to Trump’s brand of populist politics. American voters delivered a resounding victory for this new brand of conservative leadership. It is right and proper that Trump now get a chance to enact the policies he campaigned on and the latitude to respond to events as they happen, supported by a cabinet and an executive-branch bureaucracy that are responsive to his direction. It is in the United States’ interest that its president succeed.
But making Trump’s presidency successful does not mean simply adopting his ideas wholesale. Any new administration needs to square its sweeping campaign rhetoric with the realities of market behavior, fiscal constraints, and the actions of U.S. adversaries. In Trump’s case, the former president’s unpredictable, even erratic approach to decision-making could lead to foreign policy choices that reduce American power and increase the risk of conflict. It is therefore especially important to find ways to pursue Trump’s goals while avoiding potential harm.
A number of thinkers have grappled with how to do this, including Nadia Schadlow, who served in Trump’s first administration and recently advocated in Foreign Affairs for an approach she termed “a strategy of overmatch,” which would help Washington “retain or develop sizable advantages in military power, political influence, and economic strength over its adversaries.” I have argued for a revival of “conservative internationalism,” an approach that would extend U.S. power abroad and U.S. influence in international institutions such as NATO in order to deter foreign aggression that might otherwise disrupt the U.S. economy.
Although that will be unappealing in the coming administration, some tenets of conservative internationalism would serve Trump’s objectives in cost-effective and politically achievable ways. In particular, his administration is well positioned to advance two crucial objectives that the Biden administration (and Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign) neglected: reestablishing deterrence and raising defense spending. A second Trump term is not without its dangers, but it also presents an opportunity to shore up these foundations of American security.
SHOW OF STRENGTH
U.S. deterrence has suffered under President Joe Biden. The administration’s shamefully botched withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan and the timidity of its support for Ukraine in the face of Russian threats of escalation rewarded challenges to U.S. security commitments. In Biden’s tenure, U.S. adversaries have grown increasingly brazen in their provocations and ramped up cooperation with each other. Washington, meanwhile, has not offered an adequate response.
In Ukraine, the Biden administration has yet to recognize the shortcomings of the West’s policies, including those of the Obama and Trump administrations, in the years leading up to the full-scale Russian invasion. Biden’s unwillingness or inability to grasp this has made his response too cautious as well. The United States should be taking more risks to ensure that Russia’s war fails. Biden’s strategy of slowly dispensing allied weapons stocks telegraphs to U.S. adversaries the limits of Washington’s support and the fragility of its commitment to Kyiv’s success. His administration has allowed Russia to deter the United States from delivering weapons at the pace Ukraine needs, from putting more Russian territory at risk, and from turning the threat of escalation back on Russia.
Washington should spend less time worrying about what Russia might do and more time on getting Russia to worry about what the United States might do. Instead of loudly agonizing about the prospect of World War III, the U.S. president should sternly and publicly warn the Kremlin that unless Russian forces withdraw from Ukrainian territory, the United States will provide Ukraine with everything it needs to not just take back its occupied lands but also challenge Russian President Vladimir Putin’s rule. Washington’s message should be that, if Russia attacks a NATO country or uses a nuclear weapon, then the United States will deploy its own troops and rally its NATO allies to do the same to both defend Ukraine and hunt down all the Russian officials who made and executed the orders.
The United States’ failure in Ukraine is creating deterrence problems in other parts of the world, too. China is watching closely as the Russian strategy of waiting out Western interest in the war proves effective, which raises the prospect that China might adopt a similar strategy in pursuit of its ambitions to rule Taiwan and absorb the maritime zones of its neighbors. China has treated the war in Ukraine as an opportunity to gain operational and technological insights, reverse engineer U.S. weapons recovered from the battlefield, and find ways to circumvent Western economic sanctions. The longer the war in Ukraine drags on, the more the cost of deterring China goes up.
Of course, the downside of bolder U.S. action to deter Russia is that it runs a greater risk of getting drawn into the fighting. Putin might even welcome this outcome, preferring to lose a war to the United States than to Ukraine. But Russian forces, already struggling to gain ground in Ukraine, would be decimated by the U.S. military. Stressing to Putin that such a humiliation could cost him his rule—or even his life—would likely stay his hand. In the end, the United States must be so strong and determined that Russia and other adversaries don’t want to hazard actions that compel it to carry out its threats. That is successful deterrence, and it is the best and cheapest policy option, despite the inherent risk. If the United States is unwilling to make that gamble, it is letting the bad guys win.
SHORT OF FUNDS
The weakening of U.S. deterrence under the Biden administration is compounded by a failure to properly resource the U.S. military for the current security environment. Bipartisan congressional commissions have warned that the U.S. military and its industrial base are in urgent need of major investment. And Congress has more broadly recognized the deficiency of U.S. defense spending, with legislators from both parties voting to add $28 billion to the president’s first defense budget in 2022 and $45 billion to his second in 2023, and likely adding between $21.5 billion and $37.4 billion to Biden’s final budget submission, which is now pending.
But this is still not enough. The United States currently commits roughly the equivalent of three percent of GDP to defense, which is a historic low. This figure is particularly alarming given the rising threats the country faces today. China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran are increasingly belligerent and increasingly operating in concert. China’s navy is growing rapidly, and its shipbuilding industry has a capacity 250 times that of the United States. In a potential conflict in Asia, the U.S. Navy is already at a disadvantage, as it would need to traverse an ocean. Reconstituting a war-winning navy should be the top priority of the U.S. defense program.
But a fight in the Pacific is not the only scenario the United States must be prepared for (and, ideally, deter), and readiness in other arenas will require addressing other deficiencies. The United States must also restock ammunition and air defenses, modernize its nuclear forces, and create redundancies in its communications channels. To make all of this possible, the Trump administration should advance a plan along the lines of one that Roger Wicker, the Republican senator from Mississippi, has proposed, which would increase defense spending to more than five percent of GDP.
Critics of this approach argue that the United States cannot afford more defense spending. This is manifestly untrue. Washington devised emergency spending mechanisms during the financial crisis and the pandemic; today, the country faces a defense shortfall of similar consequence. Arguments against defense spending increases often cite the ballooning of the national debt—but even though the debt is unquestionably a problem, defense spending is not its primary cause: entitlement programs such as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are. In the absence of changes to entitlement spending, which Trump has promised not to make, the best way to afford necessary upgrades to U.S. defenses is to expand GDP with growth-friendly policies on taxes and regulation.
A STEP TOWARD SECURITY
In his first term, Trump, to his credit, hewed closely to the ideas he campaigned on and kept faith with what voters endorsed. Despite his seeming attraction to the madman theory of international relations—the historian Lawrence Freedman has described Trump as “delighted by his own unpredictability and impulsiveness”—the former president actually has rather predictable policy views. He thinks that the globalized economy and immigration are bad for American workers and that allies take advantage of the United States. He admires authoritarian leaders, and tariffs are his favorite bludgeon.
Given those views, some elements of traditional Republican foreign policy are unlikely to reemerge under Trump. Free trade is out of the question in the foreseeable future, even though, according to a 2023 Chicago Council survey, three-quarters of Americans consider international trade good for the economy. The Trump administration is sure to shun multilateral trade deals and make bilateral agreements that are heavy on tariffs and focus on restricting U.S. market access and leveling the balance of trade. Trump is also unlikely to value alliances. American support will come with higher expectations of allies, in terms of both spending on their own defense and alignment with U.S. policies. Eventually, however, Trump may come to appreciate the need for healthy alliances if the United States is to assemble enough military and political power to confront the convergence of its adversaries.
On both deterrence and defense spending, by contrast, the Trump administration could be poised to address glaring vulnerabilities from the start. During the campaign, Trump vowed, “I would tell Putin, if you don’t make a deal, we’re going to give [Zelensky] a lot. We’re going to [give Ukraine] more than they ever got if we have to.” Turning that promise into policy would go a long way to reestablish American deterrence. Trump’s willingness in his first term to take offensive action, such as by striking the Iranian commander Qasem Soleimani in January 2020 and having U.S. troops attack Russian mercenaries in Syria in February 2018, suggests that he could once again use U.S. military force purposefully. Coupling that determination with investment in American defenses could dramatically improve U.S. national security—in other words, restoring peace through strength.
These changes, however important, won’t solve all the problems a Trump administration will face or create. Trump may make deals with authoritarians over the heads of allies. Allies that feel exposed may make choices that damage their own security and that of the United States. Deploying U.S. troops for domestic law enforcement, border patrol, or deportations may fracture the bond between the American public and the military, as well as sow discord within the military itself. But a second Trump administration could also harness the country’s brilliant and sometimes brutal motion in productive ways, taking meaningful steps to make the United States more secure in a perilous world.
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