Give Vice President Mike Pence credit for loyalty to his boss, but give former Vice President Dick Cheney even more credit for the courage of his correct convictions.
Reports have emerged about a cordial but pointed and extended colloquy last weekend between the two veeps at the American Enterprise Institute World Forum, a conference in Sea Island, Ga. Cheney reportedly offered numerous criticisms of President Donald Trump’s conduct of foreign policy, with Pence gamely trying to defend the administration.
Most cuttingly, according to the Washington Post, Cheney compared Trump’s instincts to those of liberal predecessor Barack Obama. Cheney was a firm and fierce opponent of Obama’s diplomacy, including a famous speech for AEI early in Obama’s term that the Democratic president feared so much that he quickly scheduled a competing speech at the exact same time in order to draw TV coverage away from Cheney’s.
Cheney’s criticisms of Trump covered numerous issues. He questioned Trump’s cancellation of joint military exercises with South Korea, his radical swings on whether or not to remove American personnel from Syria, his threat to make allies pay more for the presence of American military bases on their territories, his reportedly contemptuous treatment of American intelligence personnel, and his apparent lack of respect for traditional alliances and organizations such as NATO. Overall, Cheney said Trump is making U.S. allies doubt this nation’s reliability.
Pence politely argued back, noting the Trump had pushed for hikes in military spending “as a way of ensuring the vitality and the prosperity of the free world,” while defending Trump’s “concern about deployments around the world.”
One need not be an avid interventionist or war hawk to see merit in Cheney’s criticisms. Even former members of Obama’s notoriously dovish administration have written that “[w]alking away from a major training exercise with South Korea sends a terrible signal to U.S. allies and leaves our forces less prepared while saving little money in the process.” They are correct.
As my colleague Erin Dunne has explained, the joint exercise “better enables allied forces to regain the initiative in the early stages of any North Korean attack … The number of South Korean and American deaths in an attack depends on how long North Korean forces can retain the initiative. Trump is shirking his duty as commander in chief by choosing a few million dollars savings over potentially saving American lives.”
Likewise with Trump’s incredibly foolish demand that our allies not just pay, but pay a premium, for hosting American military bases. Trump bizarrely seems to think the U.S. is doing our allies a favor by stationing American troops abroad. The truth is that American bases are protecting American interests, projecting American power, and saving American lives. Most of the bases are mutually beneficial; none of them is an example of purely disinterested altruism by the United States.
Cheney was right about Syria, too. Trump’s precipitous decision to pull our elite troops from that theater was so wrongheaded that the president was forced to backtrack – but only after costing the administration the services of the talented Defense Secretary James Mattis, who resigned in protest.
The former vice president reportedly quipped that Trump’s tactics repeatedly “sound like a New York real estate deal to me.” He did not mean it as a compliment. Nor should he. Foreign policy isn’t a zero-sum game, nor one that can bear repeated volatility. Trump’s seat-of-the-pants approach is dangerous. Lives hang in the balance.
