(Oil & Gas 360) – After three decades of foreign policy based on Fukuyama’s End of History, The Strategy of Wishful Thinking, it is over. Trump is putting his foreign affairs team together and we do not know what strategy they will develop, and we may not know for a while.
Marco Rubio, Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard, John Ratcliffe, Robert Lighthizer, and Mike Waltz are already named choices for foreign policy positions.
They have various backgrounds, and they have many immediate, ongoing problems to address quickly. They will need to coordinate with Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy on re-structuring and pruning the Departments and groups they lead. They are loyalists to Trump and they will need to support and implement his overall vision. It will take time for an overall, coherent guiding strategic vision to develop.
Because of several decades of feckless, misdirected foreign policies, the US is threatened by various adversaries and conflicts on several continents. What to do about Ukraine, the Middle East, China, and ancillary problems will dominate early considerations, actions, and decisions regarding how and where to allocate resources and effort. We can hope for an assertive but not aggressive set of foreign policy actions.
Foreign policy considerations raise the question whether the United States can implement a strategy – any strategy. Reportedly, 71% of US fighter planes are not fully mission-capable, 40% of the Navy’s ships need repair, the US only has two repair ports, nearly half of its submarines are non-operational, recruitment is down, and munitions production is so low it will take years to replace what we have sent to Ukraine and Israel. In response, the Biden Administration cut the defense budget, proposed retiring several ships and warplanes, and cut submarine production in half. If you want to work against US interests, this is how you do it.
Do we really want to send our young people into harm’s way outnumbered, short of ammo, in ships and planes that need fixed? All foreign policy proposals involve building more, manufacturing more, repairing and maintaining more, and operating more. More bases, ships, planes, weapons, personnel, munitions, materials, and facilities are needed as backup to foreign policy and as deterrent to aggression against us. All this is expensive and requires an immediate re-allocation of funds. A good start would be to add to the reduced $884 billion defense budget the $500 billion/year spent on illegal migrants.
Chinese President Xi Jinping’s administration is now implementing a new mandate from the Central Committee of the Communist Party. To re-invigorate the Chinese economy, Xi plans to do this by increasing centralized control for workforce mobilization and allocation along with more ideological indoctrination. These are the features of communist economies which stymied growth and resiliency in the past.
To confront these challenges and prevail, the United States needs a larger, more efficient, and more flexible economy. The United States has done it before and can do it again. It has done it by mobilizing its greatest weapon: capitalism. Capitalism is the enabling system which in turn mobilizes the United States’ large, innovative, productive, resilient, and experienced private sector.
Fortunately, the election rescued us from further descent into socialism. Socialism, in any form, regardless of any euphemistic adjective (national, democratic, Bolivarian, worker’s), cannot match it; not even close. Over decades, the US Government put its knee on the throat of private enterprise in the form of ever-increasing mandates, regulations, restrictions, taxes, and executive orders. Like George Floyd, capitalism cannot breathe.
The United States has a unique and successful heritage of rapid growth, prosperity, and national security with a combination of capitalism, freedom of the entrepreneurial spirit, and our particular Western Civilization heritage and innovation capability. We need to remove the barriers between government and private sectors, reduce government’s pressure on capitalism’s throat, let it breathe, and let it make us strong, secure, and prosperous, again.
The private sector, unfettered, will build the ships, bases, weapons, and planes we need, maintain and repair them, and give us an economy which can afford it. We can then formulate a strategy, implement it, and prevail. If we don’t, we can only capitulate and surrender.
Possibly the best result of the election will be the Musk-Ramaswamy DOGE operation to clean up, clean out, disrupt, and re-structure the US Government – particularly the Pentagon and Department of Defense procurement policies. Emphasis should be placed on using commercially available supplies, equipment, and services available from the private sector whenever and wherever possible.
American private enterprises and their people are our greatest assets but are not recognized in Washington. With the Trump Administration, including many outsiders, we can expect that to change.
I submit that, if a company that builds offshore oil platforms had been given a contract for Biden’s Gaza pier, that pier would not have washed up on the beach in nine days; it would be there as a disposal problem in the next century. Gazans could be getting fat on junk food delivered by McDonald’s, Amazon, Domino’s, Costco, and Walmart.
Nothing denotes the generational and philosophical change coming with the Trump Administration quite like the two tech company executives, Musk and Ramaswamy, adopting the joke name, DOGE for their serious effort. I suspect few, if any, of the Biden Cabinet members, particularly the hapless Treasury Secretary, Clueless Janet Yellen, realize the joke behind it.
The United States and China each want to expand their economies and enhance innovation. We are in a race for economic and innovation leadership. Winning decides who dominates whom. Fortunately, Trump is well aware of these problems. He appointed Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to head a Department of Government Efficiency, DOGE, to re-organize the US Government to win. No two more qualified people could be imagined.
The American voters may have just saved themselves again.
By Dr. Charles Kohlhaas oilandgas360.com contributor
