But it would be a mistake to see the president’s defence budget announcement this way — it offers little serious hope that Trump will respond effectively to the strategic challenges inherited from Barack Obama.
As always with defence budgets, there is a much scope for confusion, but however you cut it, Trump’s boast of a historic 10 per cent rise in defence spending looks overblown. The White House itself has reportedly acknowledged that the spending proposed for the next fiscal year is only 3 per cent above this year’s projection, and inflation will eat up most of that. The amount of extra money actually flowing into combat capabilities will be limited.
What difference any extra money makes depends on how it is spent. So far, there are few details, but Trump’s focus is plainly on big-ticket, high-profile major equipment — especially new naval ships. There are several problems with this approach.
For one thing, this may not address the most urgent constraints on US military power. US forces struggle to find the funds to maintain and operate the capabilities they already have. Spending the money buying more expensive ships and aircraft, which then also need to be maintained, only exacerbates the problem.
Moreover, investing in major new equipment takes a long time. No matter how much money he commits, Trump’s initiatives will not deliver any extra ships for a decade at least. And how can he be sure that America’s rivals will not simply match his spending with defence budget increases of their own?
But above all, the idea that spending more money on things like building new ships will help restore US strategic pre-eminence reflects deep misunderstanding of the nature of the challenges that US leadership faces in Asia and elsewhere.
On the purely military level, The US’s problems cannot be solved by a few dozen more ships, aircraft or infantry battalions. In Eastern Europe, for example, the balance of conventional military power lies so heavily in Russia’s favour that even doubling the size of the US Army would do little to improve the chances of a quick, cheap and decisive US victory in a conflict over Ukraine or the Baltic States.
Likewise, more ships in the navy will do little to meet China’s challenge to US military preponderance in Asia — they will likely only make the problem worse. The key to the shifting maritime military balance in the Western Pacific is the growing vulnerability of surface warships to torpedoes and missiles launched from submarines, aircraft and land bases.
For over 20 years now, China has been working to exploit this growing vulnerability by building forces that can find and sink US naval ships. That allows it to raise the risks to the United States of projecting power by sea into the waters around China, which in turn undermines US regional strategic leadership.
Building more ships won’t solve that problem, because more ships just means more targets for Chinese missiles. That is especially true of the new aircraft carriers that Trump promised to build as the centrepiece of his plans to revive US military power. There is real doubt that these immensely expensive, increasingly vulnerable behemoths would ever be risked in a major naval combat zone again, and whether, if they were, they would do the enemy enough harm to justify their cost.
The United States will only be able to sustain its place as a major power in Asia if it completely overhauls its military strategy there. It will need to go with the technological flow by focusing on preventing its adversaries projecting power by sea, rather than swimming against it by trying to project power by sea itself.
But that still leaves the biggest question unanswered: does the United States still have the resolve to fight a major war in Asia or Europe against powers as strong as China and Russia? US allies in Europe and Asia must ask themselves why Washington would today risk a major war against a nuclear adversary to defend their interests.
Vague talk of upholding a rules-based global order might sound good in a lecture hall, but it would carry little weight in the White House Situation Room at 3am, facing even a remote risk of a nuclear attack on a US city — especially when the person at the head of the table is Donald Trump.
Ultimately, spending more money on defence makes little difference to the final strategic outcome unless you are willing to use your forces to go to war — and unless you can convince both your allies and your adversaries of that. That is something Trump will find very hard to do, no matter how big his defence budget grows.
Hugh White is Professor of Strategic Studies at the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre at the Australian National University.
A version of this piece was originally posted here on South China Morning Post.