Office Hours @ TMP: Michael O'Hanlon
By Celia Saada, Varun Thotli, and Bridgette Lang
Office Hours @ TMP is a monthly podcast where we bring your questions on current events to Columbia professors. This month, we delve into defense policy, national security, and the impacts of the Trump administration with Professor Michael O'Hanlon.
Dr. Michael O'Hanlon is the Philip H. Knight Chair in Defense and Strategy and a senior fellow in Foreign Policy at the Brookings Institution, where he specializes in U.S. defense strategy, the use of military force, and American national security policy. He is also director of research for the Foreign Policy program at Brookings. He is an adjunct professor at Columbia and Georgetown. He is also a member of the International Institute for Strategic Studies. O’Hanlon was a member of the external advisory board at the Central Intelligence Agency from 2011 to 2012.
Below is an edited and abridged transcript of The Morningside Post’s podcast series, Office Hours. To hear the full interview, listen here.
Q: Could you first tell us a little bit about what it means to be a professor here? How has your position at SIPA changed over the years?
A: I've got to say I just love Columbia, and it's always a treat to be involved here, including with your great podcast. I've been teaching here now almost 30 years, and the energy at Columbia is just really striking. The international energy, just being in the Big Apple and also near the UN—it's different from teaching at Georgetown, Princeton, or other places where I've taught. Also, some of my favorite professors are here, and starting with the late, great Bob Jervis, who many of us read over the years. I read him in the 1980s before I ever met him and got to know him quite well through Columbia. Betts is really the guy who hired me originally, and Steve Biddle is essentially my current supervisor. Then among the students I've had, Alyssa Slotkin, now Senator from Michigan, and I'm not mistaken, Andy Kim, Rachel Martin, former co-anchor of Morning Edition and NPR, and many who may not have quite the superstar name recognition, but are every bit as important for our country and the world. I just love the spirit of service here at Columbia as well.
Q: Could you tell us a bit about your day-to-day work at Brookings and how that position has evolved over the years?
A: At Brookings, it hasn't changed radically, and my core job is still to write books or do other long-form research and written work on key security issues of the day. I consider myself a defense analyst at one level, but a national security scholar at another. I don't really define myself as a political scientist per se. I went to a policy school for a PhD. I have an undergrad in physics. I think of myself more as an analyst and security studies scholar, but I also like history and science.
At Brookings, I've typically had leeway to write on topics that I consider important. What obviously has changed is that when I showed up at Brookings in 1994, we barely even had email. Everything that followed the explosion of the internet and then of social media has changed the way people communicate. Also, I think think tanks have proliferated, and they often include niche subject think tanks and or advocacy organizations that blur the line between lobbying and scholarship. In that sense, the ecosystem has gotten busier and more dense. I think when we come back to how I define success in my job, writing a good book that has some influence, or using what I've learned in writing a book in a policy debate, where I can have some effect on the conversation.
Q: We are also wondering how the new administration has impacted your daily work and responsibilities at the Brookings Institution? Does it give you some material for research, new elements, or new perspectives? Or, on the contrary, will it jeopardize your effectiveness in your role and make your work more difficult?
A: I'm not happy about the election of President Trump. Less because of his ideology, more because of his decision-making style, his self-involvement, and now his infatuation with Elon Musk and what that's doing to the government. Aid and life-saving programs are being interrupted all over the world. Some of the questions he wants to ask I find perfectly reasonable, but the style of the approach and the callousness I find very difficult at an emotional level.
But you know, I'm also an old guy. I've been through a lot in life by now, and I would say the harder things I've gone through at the personal level are more difficult for me emotionally than watching what's happening to the country, at least so far. And the best example I can give for that right now is Ukraine, where I certainly do not agree with President Trump's demonization of President Zelensky and diagnosis of what caused the war. But I do think Trump is correct that we need a new strategy. The war is stuck, and Ukraine cannot realistically hope to liberate the 20% of its territory and population that Russia controls through military means. I think it's time to find a way towards an armistice as long as it can be a stable armistice, and then allow Ukraine, over time, to maintain its political claim to those territories that have been stolen from it. But nonetheless, it’s time to stop the killing. On that front, I think Trump is right. I also think from my study of history that if we get too moralistic about punishing Russia coming out of this, that a) we're not going to get a peace deal, and that b) we're going to run the risks of how World War I ended.
Q: On U.S. grand strategy, do you think that it has become more selective? How can we ensure better decision-making?
A: First, I don't really think we became more selective. The irony is, after sometimes being portrayed as sort-of an isolationist, now Trump wants Greenland, Canada, the Panama Canal, the Gaza Strip, and he spends half his time thinking about Ukraine, even if he's not willing to commit to an American security guarantee.
In my new book that comes out in the fall, To Dare Mighty Things: US Defense Strategies Since the Revolution, I argue that for 250 years, we've been very assertive people. We sometimes like to tell ourselves that we created this country to get away from those bad old Europeans with their monarchs and their armies, and we just wanted to live in our North American paradise, tending our gardens. We've been assertive from the beginning, expanding the country, taking a good chunk of the southwest from Mexico, and taking possessions from Spain. That was the first half of our history before we even became a superpower. I think that Trump may be in the wrong century, but he squares with 19th-century American behavior.
I don't think we're seeing more selectivity. We're seeing less interest in framing our actions in grandiose, lofty principles. And we're seeing more of a Make America Great Again, self-promoting kind of foreign policy. We'll have to see where this goes because previous presidents, while they talked about big lofty principles, often did things that were good for the United States itself as well. If you had Hillary Clinton in here to do an interview, who wanted to be president, she would have said that she put America first herself. There's nothing wrong with that.
The question is: where will it lead? I don't know how to predict the next three years, but I would not yet say that we're being more selective. In terms of avoiding the next big war, I think Trump is right not to want to bring Ukraine into NATO, but I think we need some way to help backstop its security. I think one thing we need to be wary of is the expansion of alliances even beyond where they are today. I want to use alliances to protect our core interests and backstop the ones we've already got. The idea of further expansion of alliances is usually a skeptical, questionable idea for me.
Q: I want to go into more detail about the Trump administration and talk about your most recent article with Brookings, where you discuss U.S. defense strategy and the defense budget.
A: As you know, right now, the U.S. national defense budget is almost $900 billion a year. That is huge. If you adjust for inflation and you look historically, the only time we ever spent more than that was at the very end of George W. Bush and the beginning of Barack Obama. Then, we were at about $1.2 trillion a year in World War II, if you adjust for inflation.
So, we spend a lot on the military. But [today’s military spending] is against a large economy: it’s a fraction of our gross domestic product. It's not that huge by historical standards, about 13% of federal spending. Then you bring in state and local. It's about 10% of all public spending. If you consider national defense to be the government's first obligation to its people (since if we're not safe, nothing else really counts), then it's not a huge burden to be spending 10% of all of our public funds on the military. But I don't want to waste money. I don't want to throw money at the problem. Today, we really have a military that's only sized to be able to fight one war at a time. Now, hopefully, we fight zero at a time, right? Deterrence is the goal. But if you're trying to deter, and now all of a sudden, Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea are communicating. If you see these four autocracies willing to coordinate more, it doesn't mean they're going to launch four massive all-out wars against our allies in four different places at the same time, but it does mean that you need to worry a little more about opportunistic aggression.
If we wind up preoccupied with one fight in one place, you don't want people to have the perception that we're incapable of defending our friends everywhere else. You want to have small holding forces in different regions that you don't have to tap into to go fight that one big war. I propose in the paper ways to have these hold and defend forces that can be anchored just on land. [They would be] in the Middle East, South Korea, and Eastern Europe, so that we can discourage and deter opportunistic aggression by Russia, Iran, or North Korea at the same time that we're fighting China. I think we can do that with a pretty modest expansion of our force structure. It becomes way less than a 10% increase in total active duty personnel.
I get to a national defense budget of about $950 billion a year, as opposed to today's$895 billion. It's a real increase at a time when we've got a big deficit, and I feel bad about that. I'd rather be looking for ways that the military could contribute to deficit reduction rather than adding to the defense bill, but I feel, given the state of the world, we probably need some selective increases here and there.
Q: In one of your recent podcast episodes for Brookings, you discussed whether Russia was winning against Ukraine. You mentioned that Russia made several incursions into Ukraine to the point where Ukraine would probably not be able to make a counter-offensive against them that would be meaningful in terms of post-conflict negotiations. Recently, you wrote an article with Paul Stares, who you mentioned earlier, suggesting a two-part plan that would allow Ukraine to remain at peace even without NATO security guarantees. If you had the agency to formulate a plan in this administration, hypothetically, what would it be?
A: The plan that Lise Howard and I proposed, which was before Trump won the presidency, was to find an alternative to NATO that would still involve the United States directly in providing a security reassurance. The central idea was to have Western troops in uniform in Ukraine permanently after an armistice. It's a tripwire in a sense. You make it clear that if these troops come under attack, you're going to reinforce them, and you do it without NATO. You could also have countries from outside of NATO and maybe even outside of Europe, like India. I don't think the Chinese are probably going to want to be part of it, but we wouldn't say no to them because the idea is you're not giving these other countries a veto over any one country's right to go protect its own troops. We wanted to lock the Americans into the operation.
Now that Trump's won, that idea is probably gone for now. The question is: if Europe will primarily backstop Ukraine's own defense, what do we do to help? A rapid reaction force based in Poland could help protect the European troops. I live in fear that every hour between right now and when this [podcast] is posted, several things could happen.
There could be some kind of possibility that the Europeans would have maybe 20,000 troops in Ukraine, and we would have maybe 10,000 in Poland postured as a reaction force. President Zelensky said that “if we do a peace deal without NATO, I think I need 200,000 Western troops in Ukraine to backstop.” There aren't those troops, there aren't that many. I think he realized that it was fantasyland. Ukraine itself needs to have a strong enough military that, even though they shrink it if they get a peace deal, they can still quickly repopulate the frontline positions if Russia decides to try to attack them again.
We, Ukraine, NATO, and the United States, all have to work on the assumption that any peace deal is fragile and that Putin cannot be trusted. First, how do you make Ukraine's military more or less reliably capable of self-defense? That's where the Europeans come in as the second line of defense. Then, the United States essentially is the third line of defense. It's a cascade. I don't want to use the expression of Russian dolls inside of each other, but it's sort of a sequencing of defenses. Each one is designed to be able to do the job successfully, but you still have multiple lines of insurance. I think if we let Russia be partly reintegrated into the world economy, and we let Ukraine maintain its claim on the stolen territories, there's a chance we could find our way towards a peace deal this year.
Q: To conclude, do you have any advice for SIPA students?
A: I think it's probably good to get your fingernails dirty with the real machinery of government. It can be working in the intelligence community. It can be working in the [Department of ]State or Defense. I realize it's going to be hard for the next few months or years in the Trump era, but don't give up.
Maybe you have to modify my advice. Some people won't want to apply for those kinds of jobs right away, but I wouldn't rule it out for your second or third job coming out of SIPA. Once you've got some experience and you've figured out what angle you want to take with your own writing and research, it really is nice when you feel a powerful desire to say something. You have reason and standing to say it. But you don't want to force that process. You don't want to start to write reports and books before you have found your full purpose.
(Photo/Michael O’Hanlon/Brookings Institute)