Chapter Three: North America

Abstract

On 20 January 2017, Donald Trump became the 45th President of the United States. The administration quickly moved to take action on the issues Trump had emphasised in his campaign, including tackling perceived disparities over burden-sharing within the transatlantic alliance. In the campaign, Trump had questioned the relevance of NATO. During a May 2017 speech in Brussels, the president returned to the theme, chiding the Alliance’s European members for not spending enough on defence. Meanwhile, issues including ongoing investigations into ties with Russia during the 2016 presidential campaign, White House staff turnover, and delays in naming senior and mid-level national-security officials all played a part in a troubled start for the administration. That said, some coherence in national-security policy had begun to emerge by late August. In addition to Secretary of Defense James Mattis and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, the shuffling of key players (Lt.-Gen. H.R. McMaster for Michael Flynn as National Security Advisor; John F. Kelly for Reince Priebus as White House Chief of Staff) provided for experienced advice regarding national-security priorities and introduced greater process into the administration’s national-security decision-making. Nonetheless, the president’s proclivity to comment on policy matters on social media, at times contradicting existing policy (such as on the issue of transgender service members), played a part in unsettling his own appointees, not to mention allies and partners. In addition, key positions in the departments of defense and state (and elsewhere) were only slowly being filled, with the result that career civil servants, and military officers in the case of the Department of Defense (DoD), still occupied many of these posts. Although debates within the administration persist regarding what should be expected of the United States’ allies, Trump has moderated his criticism and increasingly adopted policies similar to those of past administrations. The European Reassurance Initiative continues, with a funding increase under the Fiscal Year (FY) 2018 budget, and in June 2017 Trump delivered a speech in Warsaw assuring Poland of US support. A key milestone came on 21 August 2017, when the president announced his decision to send additional troops to Afghanistan, although their role in the country is expected to be less expansive than in the past: ‘We are not nation building again’, said Trump, ‘we are killing terrorists’. Afghanistan is only one of the security challenges facing the US, its allies and partners. As Mattis noted in his testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee in June 2017, these fall into four main areas: ‘filling in the holes from trade-offs made during 16 years of war ... the worsening security environment, contested operations in multiple domains, and the rapid pace of technological change’. Mattis also stressed that it is a ‘more volatile security environment than any I have experienced during my four decades of military service’.