'indispensable nation'

Let us stipulate at the outset that Donald Trump is a vulgar and dishonest fraud without a principled bone in his corpulent frame. Yet history is nothing if not a tale overflowing with irony. Despite his massive shortcomings, President Trump appears intent on recalibrating America's role in the world. Initiating a long-overdue process of aligning US policy with actually existing global conditions just may prove to be his providentially anointed function. Go figure.

The Valhalla of the Indispensable Nation is a capacious place, even if it celebrates mostly white and mostly male diversity. Recall that in the 18th century, it was a slaveholding planter from Virginia who secured American independence. In the 19th, an ambitious homespun lawyer from Illinois destroyed slavery, thereby clearing the way for his country to become a capitalist behemoth. In the middle third of the 20th century, a crippled Hudson River grandee delivered the United States to the summit of global power. In that century's difficult later decades, a washed-up movie actor declared that it was "morning in America" and so, however briefly, it seemed to be.

Now, in the 21st century, to inaugurate the next phase of the American story, history has seemingly designated as its agent a New York real-estate developer, casino bankruptee, and reality TV star. In all likelihood, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan would balk at having Donald Trump classified as their peer. Yet, however preposterously, in our present moment of considerable crisis, he has succeeded them as the nation's Great Helmsman, albeit one with few ideas about what course to set. Yet somehow Trump has concluded that our existing course has the United States headed toward the rocks. He just might be right.

In all likelihood, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan would balk at having Donald Trump classified as their peer. Yet, however preposterously, in our present moment of considerable crisis, he has succeeded them as the nation's Great Helmsman, albeit one with few ideas about what course to set

"Great nations do not fight endless wars." So the president announced in his 2019 State of the Union Address. Implicit in such a seemingly innocuous statement was a genuinely radical proposition, as laden with portent as Lincoln's declaration in 1858 that a house divided cannot stand. Donald Trump appears determined to overturn the prevailing national-security paradigm, even if he is largely clueless about what should replace it.

Much as Southerners correctly discerned the import of Lincoln's veiled threat, so too have Trump's many critics within the nationalsecurity apparatus grasped the implications of his insistence that "endless wars" must indeed end. In the unlikely event that he ever delivers on his campaign promise to end the conflicts he inherited, all the claims, assumptions and practices that together define the US national-security praxis will become subject to re-examination. Tug hard enough on this one dangling thread - the wars that drag on and on - and the entire fabric may well unravel.

The decalogue plus one

In other words, to acknowledge the folly of the United States' endless wars will necessarily call into question the habits that people in and around Washington see as the essence of "American global leadership." Prominent among these are:

o Positioning US forces in hundreds of bases abroad;

o Partitioning the whole planet into several contiguous regional military commands;

o Conferring security guarantees on dozens of nations, regardless of their ability to defend themselves or the values to which they subscribe;

o Maintaining the capability to project power to the remotest corners of the Earth;

o Keeping in instant

"triad" of nuclear strike forces;

o Endlessly searching for "breakthrough technologies" that will eliminate war's inherent risks and uncertainties;

o Unquestioningly absorbing the costs of maintaining a sprawling national security bureaucracy;

o Turning a blind eye to the corrupting influence of the military-industrial complex;

o And easily outpacing all other nations, friend and foe alike, in weapons sales o and overall military spending. Complementing this Decalogue, inscribed not on two tablets but in thousands of pages of stupefyingly bureaucratic prose, is an unwritten 11th commandment: Thou shalt not prevent the commander-in-chief from doing what he deems necessary. Call it all D+1. In theory, the US constitution endows Congress with the authority to prevent any president from initiating, prolonging, or expanding a war. In practice, Congress has habitually deferred to an increasingly imperial presidency and treated the war-powers provisions of the constitution as non-binding.

This Decalogue-plus-one has been with us for decades. It first emerged during the early phases of the Cold War. Its godfathers included such distinguished (if today largely forgotten) figures as Paul Nitze, principal author of a famously unhinged policy paper known as NSC68, and General Curtis LeMay, who transformed the Strategic Air Command into a "cocked weapon" capable of obliterating humankind.

During the 1960s, better-dead-than-Red began to fall from favor and a doctrine of "flexible response" became all the rage. In those years, as an approach to waging, and therefore perpetuating, the Cold War, D+1 achieved maturity.

readiness

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