Donald Trump is a reckless fool. But the U.S. defense establishment is M.A.D.
And herein lies one of the darker problems with the Trump candidacy, and the
reason why so many establishment conservatives are awkwardly distancing themselves
from America’s leading narcissist – if not running screaming into the night
in fear for their lives (and everyone else’s).
Trump as commander in chief? Trump with his finger on the button?
When the subject of nukes has come up in interviews, he has come across as
creepily naïve. For instance, according to MSNBC’s Joe
Scarborough, Trump allegedly hounded a foreign policy expert with the question:
“If we have them, why can’t we use them?”
And when Chris Matthews, in another interview, scolded Trump for even suggesting
that maybe – maybe – launching a nuclear attack might be necessary someday,
he shot back: “Then why are we making them? Why do we make them?”
America, America. This is why we’re great. A clueless billionaire TV personality
can get within screaming distance of the presidency and, in the process, push
all sorts of (non-nuclear) buttons with his politically incorrect questions,
implications and assertions. I have no doubt that a huge part of Trump’s popularity
is due to his aggressive naiveté. He doesn’t know any more about this than Joe
Sixpack does, so the questions he asks are Average American questions. In the
process, he yanks the geopolitics of nuclear deterrence – the embedded insanity,
you might say, of Mutually Assured Destruction – out of the clutches of the
deep state and its secret priesthood.
The last thing I want to see is Trump gaining admittance to this realm. But
his banging at the door may serve a valuable purpose. At the very least, it
brings certain realities into the consciousness of the American mainstream.
The planet has been trapped – for the entirety of my lifetime – in a nuclear
standoff among various world powers. Even though the Cold War ended 25 years
ago, some 16,000 nuclear weapons still infest the planet; the United States
and Russia still have 2,000 nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert.
“The president has basically unconstrained authority to use nuclear weapons,
a seemingly insane system that flows pretty logically from America’s strategic
doctrine on nuclear weapons,” Zack
Beauchamp wrote recently at Vox. “The US needs a system to launch
weapons fast for deterrence to work properly, which means one person needs to
be able to order the use of nukes basically unencumbered. The president is the
only possible choice.”
Beauchamp quotes Michael Dobbs, a former military aide to President Bill Clinton,
who describes the target options contained within the “nuclear football” that
a US president has access to as “a ‘Denny’s breakfast menu,’ allowing presidents…