A Trump Doctrine Emerges
The Trump administration turned longstanding U.S. policy on its head this week by stating that foreign governments like Russia, China and Iran don’t really want to pick a fight with the United States.
The administration’s Annual Threat Assessment released on Tuesday is as close to an articulation of a Trump doctrine as anything we’ve seen so far. But in a week dominated by Signal-gate coverage, the assessment has been roundly ignored by the news media.
Drawing on information from across the entire intelligence community (IC), the annual assessment normally feels like a predictable laundry list of “threats” that sound more like a fundraising pitch for the national security state than serious analysis.
Not this time.
The intelligence agencies conclude that Russia overall has been weakened by the Ukraine war, even though Vladimir Putin’s grip on power is stronger than ever. But absent is the usual rhetoric about Moscow’s broader (and certain) threat to Western Europe.
The Ukraine war is also characterized as being seen by Russia as a “proxy conflict with the West” and thus an element of a new Cold War. In the past year, the assessment says, Russia has “seized the upper hand” in what it calls “a grinding war of attrition” playing into to Russia’s military advantages.
U.S. intelligence’s concern here isn’t that Russia poses a threat to the West — remarkably, the assessment never once mentions NATO! — but more that Moscow might secure more concessions in the negotiations to end the war. (The assessment points to the “increased risk of nuclear war” as creating “urgency” for the U.S. to end to the war.)
“Concerns over escalation control and directly confronting the United States”have held Putin back from moving further on Europe, the assessment says. Such concerns have even “tempered the pace and scope” of Russia’s relationships with other adversary nations. And the future outside of Russia’s immediate military gains doesn't look bright, with mounting demographic and economic challenges.
China, which both the Obama and Biden administrations cast as the chief national security threat to U.S. (and the source of inevitable conflict), gets similarly unusual treatment. “China’s leaders will seek opportunities to reduce tension with Washington,” the assessment says.
While warning that China “seeks to compete with the United States as the leading economic power in the world” and will “continue to expand its coercive and subversive malign influence activities to weaken the United States internally and globally,” the assessment downplays the military threat. It instead focuses on the possibility of “miscalculations potentially leading to conflict.”
There is little talk of China as a threat to its neighbors, and the tone seems to focus on avoiding conflict. China is “more cautious than Russia, Iran, and North Korea about risking its economic and diplomatic image in the world by being too aggressive and disruptive,” the assessment concludes.
On Iran there’s another significant departure from the rhetoric of the Biden administration, and even Trump’s own rhetoric. Noting the many blows that Iran has sustained in the past year and a half — to its proxies like Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis, in the loss of Syria, and to Iran’s own air defenses and military forces — the assessment says that leaders in Tehran are beginning “to raise fundamental questions regarding Iran’s approach.”
The section concludes with remarks that make Iran sound less like the foreboding ‘greatest sponsor of terrorism’ Washington usually describes it as and instead almost meek. “Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei continues to desire to avoid embroiling Iran in an expanded, direct conflict with the United States and its allies,” the assessment says, adding that “Iranian leaders recognize the country is at one of its most fragile points since the Iran-Iraq war” — the bloody conflict that devastated Iran in the 80s.
Even on the subject of the hermit kingdom, North Korea, the assessment avoids the familiar hyperbole. “Since coming to power, Kim generally has relied on non-lethal coercive activities … to win concessions and counter U.S. and South Korean military, diplomatic, and civilian activities,” the assessment says. Gone is the ominous talk of a 15-minute march to Seoul.
Two months into the administration, for all its chaos, this is no Reagan-like military buildup threatening to bury its enemies, or Bush-style tirade about the Axis of Evil. Instead, the intelligence agencies have articulated a view of the world that is fairly coolheaded.
The leading "threat" to America, befitting Trump’s personal focus, is identified as transnational criminal organizations (like cartels), which for the first time appears as the first section of the annual assessment. With fentanyl and synthetic opioids racking up 52,000 American deaths in one year alone, as the report notes, it’s hard to argue against this being a bigger threat than, say, North Korea.
The relatively judicious picture is jarring to see coming from the national security state, for whom fear mongering about adversary nations is an Olympic sport, with medals awarded in the next budget. Let’s see if the intelligence is heeded.
— Edited by William M. Arkin
Trump declared himself the peace President, so any government report will always tell us the world loves us no matter how many war—military actions he orders.
How does this square with your reporting on Iran (e.g. "Trump is now at war with Iran"), the massive buildup of bombers on Diego Garcia, and of course the ongoing brutal campaign against Yemen? Does this report signal increased conflict with Iran (including direct attacks) or a desire to step away from confrontation?