“A new era”? US defense and strategy policies one year into the Trump administration

Résumé 0

Since January 20, 2017 and Donald Trump’s inauguration as the 45th President of the United States, his decisions have led to many questions about the strategic direction he wants the world’s leading military power to pursue. In the midst of an analytical fog that is expected to continue, Donald Trump’s security and defense decisions nonetheless provide a fairly enlightening benchmark for the priorities of the new executive. Structured by a number of doctrinal and budgetary documents and focused by nature on long-term capability and technology, these orientations provide a scale of measurement to judge the gap between the United States’ traditional security policy and the specific course that the new administration could choose to follow. In this regard, it is more a case of evolutions than revolutions, which this article suggests by analyzing the Trump administration’s first military budget and the adaptation of US military doctrines to the “new era” that is projected in the new National Defense Strategy published in January 2018, and in the National Security Strategy released in December 2017, in the wake of the closure of the federal budget.