Trump to unveil administration’s national security strategy
The document continues: “These competitions require the United States to rethink the policies of the past two decades — policies based on the assumption that engagement with rivals and their inclusion in international institutions and global commerce would turn them into benign actors and trustworthy partners,” is says. “For the most part, this premise turned out to be false.”
The document highlights two concerns Trump has raised during the 2016 campaign – unbalanced trade relations with other countries, and the way China conditions opening its markets to Western companies on these companies’ surrendering their intellectual property to Chinese rivals.
The document states explicitly that “the United States will no longer turn a blind eye to violations, cheating or economic aggression.”
And the document refers specifically to preserving the “national security innovation base.”
The document, reflecting Trump’s skepticism about climate change, moves in the opposite direction of the Obama administration by not recognizing changing climate as a threat to national security. The document instead places climate under a section on embracing “energy dominance,” and says that while “climate policies will continue to shape the global energy system,” American leadership will be “indispensable to countering an anti-growth energy agenda.”
Analysts note that this part of the national security strategy document contradicts the Pentagon’s approach, which has increasingly highlighted the national security threats a changing climate poses, including refugee flows as a result of droughts and intensifying storms and the repercussions of rising sea waters.
Last Tuesday Trump signed the National Defense Authorization Act, which sets policy for the U.S. military for the coming fiscal year. The bill contains a detailed discussion of climate change and the threats it poses to U.S. national security.
The bill says:
As global temperatures rise, droughts and famines can lead to more failed states, which are breeding grounds of extremist and terrorist organizations,” the bill reads. “In the Marshall Islands, an Air Force radar installation built on an atoll at a cost of $1,000,000,000 is projected to be underwater within two decades.
A three-foot rise in sea levels will threaten the operations of more than 128 United States military sites, and it is possible that many of these at-risk bases could be submerged in the coming years,” it continues. “In the Arctic, the combination of melting sea ice, thawing permafrost, and sea-level rise is eroding shorelines, which is damaging radar and communication installations, runways, seawalls, and training areas.
The White House has not yet released the full text of the strategy document, but the Times notes that excerpts suggested when dealing with the use of cyberattacks against the United States, the document describes the problems facing the United States rather than offer solutions. It refers to cyber weapons as a new threat because they can strike “without ever physically crossing our borders.”
“Deterrence today is significantly more complex to achieve than during the Cold War,” the document reads, saying a mix of inexpensive weapons and “the use of cyber tools has allowed state and nonstate competitors to harm the United States across various domains.”
The document notes that adversaries of the United States have learned to “operate below the threshold of open military conflict and at the edges of international law.”
“But the document deals with the subject at some remove, not dwelling on how Russia used cyber techniques in an attempt to interfere with the 2016 election. And it does nothing to describe any broad national strategy to guard against meddling in future elections,” the Times writes.
