Donald Trump's extraordinary proposal

Donald Trump has floated the proposal of a 50% cut in US military expenditure in return for reciprocal disarmament from China and Russia.

Donald Trump has announced a proposal to halve the US military budget if he can get Russia and China to agree to disarmament programmes too.

Here’s the video:

Even if Donald Trump has got a long track record of talking rubbish, this is still an extraordinary thing to hear from a President of the United States.

Even since the end of WWII, United States Presidents have continually signed off on bigger and bigger budgets for the US military, with military spending considered so sacred that no President has dared to announce military cutbacks, even when subjecting other departments to massive cuts.

The US spends more on its military than any other country on earth by miles.

Even the London-based IISS estimate that the US military budget is bigger than Russia’s and China’s combined, while the SIPRI Database of Military Spending put US military expenditure at $916 billion in 2020, which was more than the rest of the top ten military spenders combined (China, Russia, India, Saudi Arabia, UK, Germany, Ukraine, France, and Japan).

US military bases span the globe. The list of countries in which the US maintains Army, Navy, Marine, and Airforce bases is so long it’d probably be shorter to list the countries that aren’t under any kind of US military occupation!

Running literally hundreds of military bases across the world, staffed by hundreds of thousands of personnel, comes at an enormous cost.

If the US were to halve their military spending, a significant number of these bases would have to close.

As the country with by far the biggest military budget, the US is obviously the world’s biggest market for military equipment. It’s difficult to underestimate the effect a 50% reduction in military spending would have on the US arms manufacturing industry.

A lot of very rich people would be angered if Trump ever actually went ahead with such a proposal, because they’d be looking at enormous losses on their military investments. So it’s a radical and dangerous proposal for anyone to make in a country with such a powerful military-industrial complex and a history of Presidential assassinations.

There’s always the danger that Trump is just shooting his mouth off in order to generate more headlines, and that nothing will actually come of it.

Then there’s the concern that it’s just a ruse to con other nations into disarmament when the US has no real intention of reducing their own military capabilities.

If the US did actually cut military spending by the best part of half a trillion dollars or anything even like it, that would be an extraordinary amount that could be invested in beneficial infrastructure projects, but equally it could just be frittered away on handouts to the ultra-rich instead, which seems much more likely given the Republican Party’s track record in office ever since the 1980s.

In light of all of this you’d have to be more than a bit naive to take Trump at his word, or to trust in his intentions.

But, as unreliable and unlikeable as Trump is, it’s still utterly remarkable to hear a US President saying that he’d even consider going after the sacred cow of the US military.