Trump’s Arsenal

If it were a military budget just by itself, the increase in U.S. defense spending predicted by Donald Trump for 2019 would be the third highest, only behind America’s own and the Chinese. We are speaking about the addition of $90 billion to the $610 billion revealed yesterday in the annual SIPRI report [of 2017 world military expenditures].* The president plans to surpass $700 billion, with the aim of developing a series of new arms, from aircraft carriers to missile interception systems. This represents true manna for the defense industry, especially in the United States, which has six of the top 10 companies in the industry headed by Lockheed Martin, maker of the F-16 and Black Hawks. The campaign slogan “Make America Great Again” brought Trump to the White House, and with this investment, the president not only pleases his secretary of defense, the esteemed Gen. James Mattis, but sends a clear message to Beijing and Moscow: The military power commanded by Washington is unequivocally superior, going beyond being three times bigger than that of China and two times that of Russia. A few days ago, in an interview with DN, George Friedman asserted that the United States is so powerful that it can lose wars. Now, the geopolitical analyst, who speaks today at the 3rd Lisbon Conference, perhaps now may conclude that Trump won’t allow America to lose any war, small or large.

*Editor’s note: SIPRI is an acronym for the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, an institute based in Sweden dedicated to research into conflict, armaments, arms control and disarmament.