The New York Times Editorial Board on Monday lambasted President Donald Trump's short-sighted foreign policy that focuses more on bluster than defense.
Earlier this year, Trump and his secretary of defense decided they would start calling the Department of Defense the Department of War. The board explained that this is exactly the kind of wrong-headed thinking that takes America's eyes off the road.
"The Trump administration brings a starkly different mind-set to the issue. Out with the Department of Defense; back to the Department of War. Well-established rules of engagement have yielded to blowing up small boats on the high seas. In place of standing with Ukraine’s embattled democracy against Russia’s invasion, the administration has adopted a course of moral equivalence between the two sides while seeking profits from the war through arms sales and mineral deals," wrote the Times.
The board called Trump's military foreign policy more necessary in the 1800s than in the 21st century.
"The architects of the Cold War understood that the country’s future security required engagement, not isolation, and that the primary purpose of military power was the prevention of war through deterrence, alliances and international legitimacy — hence the name the Department of Defense, not War," the Times explained.
Previous leaders understood that having a "scientific and technological edge" over the former Soviet Union was a key piece of not war but defense, the board said. Those efforts meant an investment in American universities and built generations of advancement. Today, however, Trump has gone to war with higher education, mandating that they meet his demands or lose federal funding.
"Trump believes in cutting deals, not sharing values; in making money, not winning friends," the board wrote. "He has waged a funding war against basic research at our leading universities. And he is infatuated with displays of hard power — the power to coerce, in the formulation of the political scientist Joseph Nye — but contemptuous of the value of soft power, which is the power to attract. His latest National Security Strategy, released this month, is notable mainly for its indifference to the distinction between despotism and democracy."
It's "inadequate for the long-term," the editorial said. "Arsenals alone did not win the Cold War."
The column argued that "soft power" was just as important as military might. Building relationships with allies and "mutually beneficial trading ties" brought countries closer together.
Today, the U.S. is on the "cusp of a new Cold War" with foreign enemies and Trump is playing power games with the countries American will need to fight back.
"We cannot afford the consequences of a world in which dictators can aggress at will, as they did before World War II, and as they have started to do again," the board closed. "Preventing that requires a military that has the right tools, the right tactics and the right culture. It requires a global alliance of like-minded democracies. Most of all, it requires leaders with the wisdom and vision to explain the stakes and rally the free world to the work ahead."
