McConnell urges Trump to reject isolationism

Outgoing Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is calling on President-elect Trump to reject isolationists in the Republican Party who will argue for the United States to focus on China at the expense of Ukraine and other areas of the world.

McConnell laid out his advice to the incoming president in a 4,500-word piece in Foreign Affairs, warning that “Trump will inherit a world far more hostile to U.S. interests than the one he left behind four years ago.”

“China has intensified its efforts to expand its military, political, and economic influence worldwide. Russia is fighting a brutal and unjustified war in Ukraine. Iran remains undeterred in its campaign to destroy Israel, dominate the Middle East, and develop a nuclear weapons capability,” McConnell wrote.

The GOP leader criticized the Biden administration for trying to manage these threats “through engagement and accommodation” but argued that America’s “revanchist” adversaries “do not seek deeper integration with the existing order” because they “reject its very basis” and “draw strength from American weakness.”

“The response to four years of weakness must not be four years of isolation,” he warned the new administration and colleagues in Congress.

“Even though the competition with China and Russia is a global challenge, Trump will no doubt hear from some that he should prioritize a single theater and downgrade U.S. interests and commitments elsewhere,” McConnell predicted.

But McConnell warned that shifting focus and resources away from the war in Ukraine, allies in Europe and the unstable situation in the Middle East would only strengthen China.

McConnell cited what he described as former President Obama’s failed pivot to Asia.

“Republicans who consider Ukraine a distraction from the Indo-Pacific should recall what happened the last time a president sought to reprioritize one region by withdrawing from another,” he said. “In the Middle East, Obama’s premature withdrawal from Iraq left a vacuum for Iran and the Islamic State (also known as ISIS) to fill, and the ensuing chaos there consumed Washington for years.”

He criticized the Obama administration and the Congress — which was divided at the time between Democrats and Republicans — for cutting into defense spending with the Budget Control Act of 2011 that “harmed military readiness.”

And he argued forcefully that a Russian victory in Ukraine would hurt U.S. interests in Europe and compound the threats posed by China, Iran and North Korea.

“Standing up to China will require Trump to reject the myopic advice that he prioritize that challenge by abandoning Ukraine,” he wrote, describing the interests of China, Russia, Iran and North Korea as “interconnected.”

He criticized the Biden administration for signing a five-year extension of the New START nuclear arms reduction treaty with Russia, claiming it squandered leverage with Russia and has tied the United States’ hands in keeping ahead of nuclear threats from China and North Korea.

He said Trump needs to ignore from “neo-isolationists who discount the importance of American allies to American prosperity,” asserting that these advocates for retrenching U.S. foreign policy “misunderstand the basic requirements of the U.S. military to deter or win faraway conflicts.”

He said NATO allies have responded to Trump’s call to pick up more of the costs of defending Europe and now spend 18 percent more on defense than they did a year ago and have ordered more than $185 billion in U.S. weapons systems since January of 2022.

“The most inconvenient truth for those calling on Trump to abandon Europe is that European allies recognize the growing links between China and Russia and increasingly see China as a ‘systemic rival,’” he wrote.

McConnell, who is set to take over as chairman of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee next year, made a full-throated call to increase defense spending and to revitalize the nation’s military-industrial complex.

He pointed out that the United States spent only 3 percent of its GDP on defense in 2023, a small fraction of the 37 percent of GDP it spent on defense during World War II and the 9.1 percent of GDP it spent on defense at the height of the Vietnam War.

“The wars of the future may well last longer and require far more munitions than policymakers have assumed, as both Israeli and Ukrainian munitions-expenditure rates suggest,” he warned. “U.S. stockpiles are insufficient to meet such a demand.”

He observed that Russia and China have amassed arsenals of weapons that, while not as sophisticated as U.S. systems, would prove formidable on the battlefield due to their sheer number.

“Quantity has a quality of its own,” he wrote, observing that Russia and China can produce more munitions than the United States and that many of them can outrange U.S. versions.

He advised Trump to maintain the decades old benchmark of preparing to fight two wars simultaneously, even though this would require maintaining a large and expensive military force.

He argued that the nation simply can’t afford to let itself slip into a position where it could only meet one major national security threat at a time, citing the dual threats of Nazi German and Imperial Japan during the 1930s and 40s.

“Isolation is no better a strategy today than it was on the eve of World War II. Today, in fact, in the face of linked threats even more potent than the Axis powers, a failure to uphold U.S. primacy would be more catastrophically absurd than was the refusal to assume that responsibility 85 years ago,” he said.

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