Despite being fiscal hawks, Alaska’s Congressional delegation were elated by the Pentagon’s announcement that Eielson Air Force Base will be a home for a fleet of F-35A stealth fighters. It’ll bring more than 2,000 jobs to the region and could generate $450 million in economic activity. But the contrived military threat they’ve used to justify it should be recognized as a source for Donald Trump’s insane rhetoric about using nuclear weapons.
The F-35 is the most complex and expensive defense system ever conceived. The $1 trillion price tag includes pilot helmets that alone will cost $400,000 each. Like all big Pentagon projects though, there’s been multiple design problems which, according to a 2015 Defense Department report, makes the schedule for operational tests unrealistic. And that means Eielson’s F-35s will probably be arriving later than their 2020 target date.
So for at least five years the F-35s won’t be ready to counter what Sen. Dan Sullivan referred to last week as “rising threats in the Arctic, on the Korea Peninsula, and in the South China Sea.” But we shouldn’t lose any sleep over that. Neither Russia, China or North Korea have any real interest in starting a war by attacking our nation.
Unlike the Soviet Union of another era, there’s no tangible ideology that Putin’s Russia is seeking to export. Communist China is more concerned with stability. And North Korea is militarily insignificant. If we don’t start a war with any of them, then they’ll happily leave us alone.
Any country in the world would also be foolish to attack Japan, South Korea or the islands nations in the South China Sea because it’s well known that the U.S. military has their backs. And that’s what infuses the first line of Trump’s national defense position. He believes America can no longer afford to have our military protecting other nations from attacks unless their treasuries start contributing significantly for that support.
But that’s not the policy proposed by Trump that’s stunned the establishment.
First he went on record as saying nuclear nonproliferation is dead. He’s suggested America can’t stop Japan, South Korea and Saudi Arab from developing their own nuclear weapons. “It’s going to happen anyway” he said on CNN. “It’s only a question of time.”
Why would these countries need such weapons? Well, any American who trusts the Republicans in Congress is probably convinced that the nuclear deal President Obama signed with Iran means they’ll soon have nuclear weapons. And those same politicians are frequently warning us that both Iran and North Korea, which already has a handful of them, are so unstable and unpredictable that they’d use them in a first strike.
So by saying other countries need nukes to defend themselves against these threats, Trump is doing little more than echoing an alarm already sounded by war hawks across the country.
He takes it a dangerous step further though. “I’m not going to take it off the table for anybody,” he told Chris Matthews on MSNBC in response to whether he’d order the military to use nuclear weapons first.
Now I’m not claiming to understand Trump. But there might be a method to his madness if you examine his statements beyond their sensationalist appeal. He’s said more than once that nuclear weapons are the biggest problem the world faces. He’s acknowledged our nuclear system is “in very terrible shape,” so it seems he knows we’re planning to spend $1 trillion to modernize it. Even more significant is that he immediately qualified his statement about the inevitability that Japan, South Korea and Saudi Arabia will acquire nuclear weapons by saying “or we have to get rid of them entirely.”
If it was anybody but Trump, those remarks could be interpreted as a call for worldwide nuclear disarmament. Indeed, by not taking a first use off the table, Trump could even be trying to scare the rest of the world into moving in that direction.
Yet even if that’s his objective, it’s the kind of game that no one holding the nuclear codes should ever think of playing. It could embolden an erratic leader in another country to actually use one in a preemptive first strike.
And then again, what if he’s not bluffing?
Trump’s campaign should be a lesson to Americans that we’re not immune from electing a president who foolishly believes something good can from initiating a nuclear exchange.
And anyone with authority who frequently exaggerates the threats we face increases the risk we’ll make such a catastrophic mistake.
But that’s exactly what many members of Congress, including Alaska’s delegation, have been doing for years to justify military spending in their state. Not only must it stop. Trump’s misguided bluster makes it a moral imperative to rid the world of all nuclear weapons.
