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U.S. President Donald Trump rejected pleas by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy for an American security guarantee as a precondition for a peace pact with Russia. Instead, Trump stated, a deal with Washington on sharing Ukraine’s rare earth minerals would be as good as a formal American defense commitment.
The contention apparently is that once vital U.S. economic interests are involved, America will naturally act to defend them irrespective of a contractual commitment. Thus, a transparent U.S. economic stake in an allied country is supposedly a sufficient deterrent against any foreign aggression there.
In strategic parlance the Trump administration in effect has extended the notion of a trip wire—which has usually involved the deployment of U.S. troops in a foreign theater—to argue that America’s economic interests would perform in a similar fashion. Like the original doctrine, which maintained that crossing the trip wire would automatically trigger direct U.S. involvement in the hostilities and obviate a decision on whether to intervene militarily, attacking American economic interests would precipitate a likewise response.
The Trump administration in effect suggests that maintaining a substantial American troop presence abroad— traditionally aimed to assure allies and deter enemies by making U.S. military support a matter of certainty—is no longer necessary. It is sufficient for the U.S. to have significant economic interests in the country to accomplish the same goals.
Unfortunately, Trump’s own record casts serious doubt about the credibility of his economic trip-wire claim. For example, on Sept. 14, 2019, Saudi Aramco’s (formerly known as the Arabian-American Oil Company) vast oil processing plant at Abqaiq was hit in a surprise cruise missile and drone attack. Further strikes damaged facilities at the Khurais oil field 150 miles away.
The strike temporarily disrupted 5.7 million barrels a day (mb/d) of oil production, over 50% of Saudi Arabia’s oil production and about 5% of global supply. It caused the largest ever outage in volume terms of oil production in the modern history of oil. Oil prices immediately jumped from $60 to $69 per barrel.
Although the attacks were claimed by Houthi rebels from Yemen they were widely believed to have been carried out with direct Iranian support.
Trump, then in his first term, chose to avoid any retaliatory military action. By so doing he trashed the guidelines of the 1980 Carter Doctrine which stated that Washington would use military force—if necessary—to protect its interests in the Gulf. In fact, the U.S. President suggested at one point that ultimate responsibility in dealing with the attacks rested with Saudi Arabia. “That was an attack on Saudi Arabia, and that wasn’t an attack on us,” he said on September 16.
Rather than ordering the US military to launch a direct attack on Iran, Trump opted for a strategy of deterrence. He approved a deployment of an additional 3,000 U.S. troops to the Gulf, along with a modest beefing up of Saudi air defenses. Five years later the Biden administration reacted to the largest missile attack in history, carried out by Iran against Israel, in a similar fashion. In so doing it demonstrated that the “ironclad commitment” to Israel’s security was limited to helping defend the country but not supporting an Israeli military counter-attack. Still unlike their previous passivity, U.S. forces actively participated in beating back Iran’s unprecedented aggression.
Saudi Aramco CEO Amin Nasser, whose board of directors includes four American ex-CEOs, gave voice to Saudi frustrations over the spineless U.S. response. “An absence of international resolve to take concrete action may embolden the attackers and indeed put the world’s energy security at greater risk,” he said on October 9 in London.
Even when U.S. troops—the original trip wire—were directly targeted by U.S. enemies, Trump’s response was tepid to non-existent. On January 8, 2020, Iran retaliated for the killing by a U.S. drone of Gen. Qassem Suleimani, commander of the Quds Force of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps —who led the Islamic Republic’s proxy forces in the Middle East and cultivated terrorist organizations such as Hezbollah and Hamas. Trump opted to hold U.S. fire. This abrupt about-face was in spite of his warning that any retaliation for the drone attack would result in the targeting of 52 significant Iranian sites, including cultural ones, by U.S. forces.
On that occasion the President offered the following (false) rationale: “No Americans were harmed in last night's attack by the Iranian regime. We suffered no casualties… Iran appears to be standing down."
However, it was later revealed by the U.S. Defense Department that 110 service members been diagnosed and treated for traumatic brain injuries (mainly concussions) after Iran fired more than a dozen ballistic missiles at two Iraqi air bases housing U.S. forces. This information was finally revealed only a month later.
It must be concluded that there is a disturbing and recurrent credibility gap between Trump‘s bone-chilling threats and their executions when it comes to the large-scale use of U.S. military forces. It appears that in Gaza, for example, he expects Israel to act as America’s proxy and carry out his “hell on earth” warnings while limiting his role to “providing [Israel] with everything it needs [to do the job.]”
Such a relationship would amount to the exact opposite of what his special envoy for hostage affairs, Adam Boehler, asserted – namely that the U.S. is “not an agent of Israel.”
Trump’s reluctance to resort to America’s military option is undoubtedly motivated in part by the deep impressions the IDF’s recent military triumphs have had on him. But he has been exceedingly skittish about exercising military instrument for other reasons as well. First, any large-scale American military undertaking would run counter to his repeated declarations that he was the “peace-making” President.
Advertising this as his prime mission has made Trump’s dire threats sound rather hollow and opened him to ridicule by friend and foe as a “paper tiger.” Trump has thus also undermined the U.S. position in any upcoming negotiations with Iran — a rookie mistake which is especially glaring in the case of someone who prides himself on mastering the “art of the deal.”
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No doubt Trump’s aversion to military entanglement also stems from the poor record of U.S. interventions abroad. Finally, for a leader who tends to see global affairs through a financial prism, the exorbitant cost of war must be a major disincentive.
Dr. Avigdor HaselkorndUnder these circumstances, it is likely the U.S. will limit itself to logistic and intelligence support if and when an Israeli preemptive attack is launched against Iran’s nuclear installations. It would be a surprise if Trump ordered his military to play a direct role in any such operation.
In fact, a new test of Trump’s defense commitment might be approaching quickly. Yemen’s Houthis announced on March 11 that they will resume attacks on “any Israeli vessel” passing through the Red and Arabian seas, the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, and the Gulf of Aden, effective immediately. Considering the Houthis’ past loose definition of what constitutes an Israeli ship, which suggests other vessels could be targeted as well, U.S. steadfast adherence to the principle of the “freedom of navigation on the high seas” could be challenged momentarily.
- Dr. Avigdor Haselkorn is a strategic analyst. He has been widely published on national security issues.