President Trump’s recent hospitalization with COVID-19 raised a litany of questions: How will this affect the election? Would the 25th Amendment be invoked to make Vice President Mike Pence our acting executive? And while so much uncertainty swirled through Washington, was U.S. national security in peril?
The answer to that last question is yes, but not because of Trump's illness. Worries over an adversary seizing the moment—like a direct Iranian attack on U.S. troops in neighboring Iraq or Afghanistan, Russian incursions into Eastern Europe, or Chinese invasion of Taiwan—betray a misunderstanding of the nature of deterrence and either ignorance of or refusal to acknowledge longstanding risks in U.S. foreign policy that required reform well before Trump was infected.
U.S. deterrence does not depend on Donald J. Trump—or any president. Insofar as other countries and nonstate actors have decided against attacking the United States, our allies, or other targets interests, that calculation was not changed by Trump’s COVID diagnosis. (Propagandizing at American expense, of course, is likely inevitable.) The probability of U.S. military reprisal was not diminished. No potential antagonist could imagine our government would simply accept an attack on U.S. forces or territories because the president is ill.
If temporary authority had been placed with Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, U.S. reaction to any attempt to exploit the moment might have been more severe. Trump’s foreign policy record is erratic and rarely matches his best impulses toward peace and proportionality, but at least he sometimes has those impulses and, very occasionally, acts on them. Pence, by contrast, is a consistent hawk who supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq and continues to envision a vast global role for the U.S. military. Pompeo too is notoriously reckless and militaristic, evincing a remarkable disinterest in productive diplomacy for a man in the most prominent diplomatic post on the planet.
That doesn’t mean we’d be more secure with Pence and Pompeo in charge. Deterrence is mostly institutional. American military might was not decreased by Trump's illness, nor would it be enhanced with Pence as acting president. Moreover, the sort of unrestrained response these two may be slightly more likely to select could put U.S. interests at serious and unnecessary risk.
Unfortunately, chronic lack of restraint in American foreign policy has already created those very risks. A sprawling global military presence, half a dozen active military interventions of varying scale, neglect and misunderstanding of productive diplomacy, and a habitually meddling, coercive, and impractical approach to foreign relations means the United States has needless points of exposure worldwide. We have troops in harm’s way in wars that should have long since ended. We have costly bases and nuclear weapons caches abroad which add little to our security but significantly increase our liabilities. A country as wealthy and powerful as ours can absorb the pain of such excess and irresponsibility when all is well, but under strain, such risks become more difficult to ignore.
The United States “is in a poor position to respond to provocations by adversaries, advance its foreign policy interests with support from allies, or serve as a credible model of functioning democracy,” is how the The Washington Post summarized warnings from former national security officials in a report on the implications of Trump’s diagnosis. These warnings have a grain of truth: Washington does need to get its own house in order. But that reform should not be undertaken with the goal of revitalizing the same interventionist, military-first foreign policy we have now. Rather, the reform must itself include reorienting away from global domination and aggressive war.
The distractedness and potential for dangerous missteps these officials perceive right now aren’t unique to our current circumstance; they’re simply more visible than usual. Our vulnerability is a product of our debacle of a foreign policy, which endlessly involves the United States in problems that are not ours to solve and spurns our most vital tool—diplomacy—when we need it most.
If the prospect of a sick president presiding over the feckless interventionism of the last two decades is troublesome, we should stop the feckless interventionism. Our foreign policy shouldn’t be so rickety that a presidential cough can knock it down.
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Bonnie Kristian is a fellow at Defense Priorities, contributing editor at The Week, and columnist at Christianity Today. Her writing has also appeared at CNN, NBC, USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, and Defense One, among other outlets. The views expressed are the author's own.
