We’re still spending stupidly on the Mideast

The White House debuted its infrastructure proposal, outlining a plan to spend $200 billion in federal money over the next decade. President Trump took to Twitter to hype the plan, contrasting this program with the reckless spending of the past 17 years of U.S. foreign policy. “This will be a big week for Infrastructure,” he wrote. “After so stupidly spending $7 trillion in the Middle East, it is now time to start investing in OUR Country!”

Whether the infrastructure plan should or will work as Trump hopes remains to be seen, but the contrast he presented deserves attention now because the president denounced reckless military spending immediately after he demanded more of it — a contradiction emblematic of the administration’s stagnant and confused first-year foreign policy record.

The tweet follows close on the heels of the congressional budget agreement that sets funding for the Pentagon’s staggering $700-billion budget for 2018. That includes a 15.5 percent bump over the previous year which comes at Trump’s insistence, and the Chicago Tribune reports it is the Defense Department’s “biggest year-overyear windfall since the budget soared by 26.6 percent” in 2002 — the first full year of the Mideast war spending Trump decried.

The $700-billion budget also includes $45 billion for the war in Afghanistan in 2018 alone, more than double the average of $20 billion for each year of the infrastructure proposal. As much as Trump speaks of shifting Washington’s priorities away from overseas adventures and toward the basics at home, the numbers tell a different story.

The Afghanistan price tag could go higher still, for it fails to account for the administration’s plan to increase the number of U.S. boots on the ground — and that’s just one war, one of many. Meanwhile, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has indicated American troops will stay in Syria indefinitely. We’ve learned the post-Islamic State drawdown of U.S. presence in Iraq will not be quick, total or permanent. And any number of unknown U.S. military interventions in the greater Mideast and Africa will persist, their costs, purposes and consequences all mysterious to the American people. In short, the “stupid” spending Trump condemns continues apace under his own administration.

Instead of leading Washington on a new path that moves away from stupid spending, from trying to impose an external American military solution on the internal political problems of other nations around the world, Trump has fallen into Washington’s familiar groove of intervention and occupation without concern for cost or consequence — or benefit to U.S. taxpayers and citizens. Despite his own critique of the impulse to “send troops everywhere,” regardless of any clear connection to vital U.S. interests, Trump has largely continued the foreign policy of his postCold War predecessors. The American people have continued to foot the bill.

Trump’s tweet undercounted, too, if a 2016 calculation of long-term costs is correct. Per that analysis from Brown University, interest payments alone will total nearly $8 trillion by 2053, bringing the cost of U.S. interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan and Syria above the $12 trillion mark — and that’s if our military operations in all four nations had ended in December.

They did not, so “stupidly spending in the Middle East” has not ended either.