It was another strange weekend in American foreign policy, the sort of weekend that suggests the strategic machinery of the republic is being operated by someone who keeps misplacing the instruction manual.
One headline announced that the United States would substantially scale back military exercises with South Korea. President Trump cited their cost, their provocative nature, and his good relationship with Kim Jong Un, a man who presides over one of the most repressive governments on earth and possesses nuclear weapons.
At the same moment, the United States is waging war against Iran and speaking openly about Cuba, governments repressive in their own ways but hardly comparable to North Korea.
It becomes difficult to identify the principle.
Then came news that the Navy is considering major changes to future aircraft carriers because the President dislikes their appearance and prefers something closer to the look of World War II era ships. The changes could cost billions and complicate construction. It is a curious moment to prioritize aesthetics, as though the central challenge of modern warfare were insufficient nostalgia.
This comes just as Ukraine and Iran have demonstrated that traditional measures of military strength are changing. Our stocks of important missiles have been badly depleted. Our resources, financial, industrial, and military, are finite. Ships take years to build. Missiles take time to manufacture. Sailors cannot remain at sea indefinitely.
How we spend those resources matters.
Yet it is increasingly difficult to discern the hierarchy governing how we spend them.
Despite the President’s professed rapport with the leader of North Korea, we have adopted something approaching a “bad things to bad people” policy elsewhere. Iran must be confronted militarily. Governments in the Western Hemisphere are threatened with force or removal. New missions and new rhetoric continue to appear even as the military strains to service the commitments it already has.
The human consequences are becoming harder to ignore.
There are now reports of serious mental health crises among sailors aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln during an extraordinarily long deployment without a port call, including accounts of sailors attempting to go overboard. Sailors and their families have complained about conditions aboard the ship. The Administration disputes these accounts, and one hopes its denials are accurate.
But the Lincoln still has to come home.
To replace it in the Middle East, the Navy is sending the USS George Washington, its forward deployed carrier based in Japan. An aircraft carrier sent from the Pacific to the Middle East is an aircraft carrier that is no longer in the Pacific.
That is what strategy ultimately means: choices.
The United States possesses extraordinary military power, but it does not possess infinite military power. Precisely because the world is dangerous, priorities matter. Russia is still fighting Ukraine. China remains a formidable strategic competitor. North Korea possesses nuclear weapons. Iran is at war with the United States.
We cannot treat every problem as the most important problem simultaneously.
Ships must be maintained. Missiles must be manufactured. Sailors must sleep, eat, see their families, and eventually come home. Money spent redesigning a carrier for aesthetic reasons is money unavailable for something else. Forces committed to one theater are forces unavailable in another.
A dangerous world requires choices.
It requires deciding which adversaries matter most, which allies matter most, which weapons we need, which conflicts we can avoid, and which commitments we are actually prepared to keep.
There may be answers to all of those questions.
But after another strange weekend in American foreign policy, it is increasingly difficult to discern what connects them. Personal relationships seem to matter. So do grudges. Appearance matters. Instinct matters. What is harder to identify is a disciplined process for deciding where America’s finite resources are most needed.
The danger is not that we do not know enough to make these choices. Or we have choices based on personal choice, not necessarily in the national interest.
It is that knowing sometimes seems beside the point.