Robert Costa of the Washington Post assesses the first 100 days of the Trump administration.
Russia: A Land Power Hungry For The Sea
Simply, the argument is that geography demanded that insular and coastal nations such as England, Japan, and the Netherlands develop strong navies to support their national economic and political interests. Conversely, Germany, the Turkish Republic, and the Roman Empire were required to use their formidable land armies to defend and expand their territories. Russia stands out as a one-off. Situated squarely on the borders of Eastern Europe and central Asia, she endured numerous land assaults, and, accordingly built large defensive and offensive land armies. However, in fits and starts, she has also assembled naval forces equal to or greater than most of her presumptive adversaries. Why does Russia, a traditional land power, engage in such counterintuitive and unique behavior?
.. at the height of the Cold War when Soviet Adm. Gorshkov planned and built a naval force that rivalled American supremacy at sea. His submarines alone (385) outnumbered those of the NATO Alliance and they regularly patrolled off the American Atlantic and Pacific coasts until the fall of the Soviet Union.
.. in an act that surprised and impressed most of the world, the Russian navy launched multiple long-range Kalibr cruise missiles on so-called terrorist positions in Syria from both small Buyan-M patrol boats in the Caspian Sea as well as similarly small Kilo-class diesel submarines in the Mediterranean.
.. there is no point on the Russian periphery where a foreign military can now operate with impunity.
.. Russian fascination with the sea does not rest on economic necessity. Moscow never had, and still today does not have, an economy that is dependent on global trade, much less one that demands control of the seas.
.. The Russian naval mission appears to have quietly expanded to become a vehicle to sell sophisticated weaponry.
.. Weapons exports follow behind the sales of petroleum products as the leading source of Russian foreign exchange.
.. he is a risk taker, known to overplay weak hands – and get away with it.
The risks of the Trump administration hollowing out American leadership
The idea of America has been at the heart of our success in the world for 70 years. For all our imperfections, we have embodied political and economic openness, respect for human dignity and a sense of possibility. The power of our example has mattered more than the power of our preaching, and enlightened self-interest has driven our strategy.
.. Through policy incoherence and not-so-benign neglect, the Trump team risks hollowing out the ideas, initiative and institutions on which U.S. leadership and international order rest.
.. A second crucial asset has been American initiative — our willingness and ability to mobilize others to deal with shared problems.
.. A third ingredient of American leadership is the institutions that sustain it. Trump’s first budget guts institutions responsible for translating our ideas and initiative into action. By relying so heavily on hard power, Trump’s budget reinforces a pattern over much of the difficult post-9/11 period in which we have often inverted the roles of force and diplomacy, underselling the virtue of diplomacy backed up by the threat of force, while relying more on lethal force as our tool of first resort, with diplomacy an under-resourced follow-up, untethered to strategy.
.. At a moment when the international order is under severe strain, power is fragmenting and great-power rivalry has returned, the values and purpose at the core of the American idea matter more than ever.
.. The State Department has too many layers and ought to be streamlined. But cuts of nearly 30 percent are not motivated by an interest in sensible change; they reflect a dismissiveness of the role of nonmilitary instrument
.. Likewise, draconian reductions in assistance programs are penny wise and pound foolish. Rather than helping key fragile states avoid the kinds of failures and conflicts that often drag in the U.S. military, at far greater cost,
Pence Warns North Korea Not to Test Trump
Vice President Mike Pence warned North Korea not to push President Donald Trump, calling the recent American military strikes on Syria and Afghanistan an example of Washington’s strength.
.. “North Korea would do well not to test his resolve or the strength of the armed forces of the United States,” Mr. Pence said
.. Mr. Pence pointed to recent unilateral airstrikes by the U.S., first with 59 Tomahawk missiles on an air base in Syria and later with one of the U.S.’s largest nonnuclear bombs in Afghanistan as a warning to North Korea.