With President Donald Trump’s second term well-underway, eyes are now shifting to national security and how the president plans to keep the world safe in an age where nuclear tensions are on the rise.
KUNM sat down with Dan Grazier, a senior fellow and the Director of National Security Reform at the non-partisan think-tank Stimson Center to talk about how security policy might shift under the new presidency and the role New Mexico’s national labs will play in it.
DAN GRAZIER: I kind of caution everybody when a new administration comes in. Each administration is going to have its own priorities and its own focus, but the national security establishment endures. So, a lot of things really do kind of carry over from one administration to the other for a whole host of reasons, like there are a lot of political considerations, so it kind of remains to be seen.
Donald Trump, now that he's in his second term as president, doesn't have to worry himself about re-election... He might be more willing to take those kinds of political chances, but only time will tell.
KUNM: When it comes to national security policy, the elephant in the room is Project 2025 — that's the right-leaning Heritage Foundation's policy recommendation document for Trump's new term. Specifically, the “militarization-first” view of the U.S. security strategy towards China – which would include advancing nuclear arms research. How would this shift national security policy?
GRAZIER: Well, I mean, I read that chapter of Project 2025. That chapter was written by Chris Miller, who was the last Acting Secretary of Defense during the first Trump administration. I think it's pretty interesting that he was not nominated to be the Secretary of Defense the second time around. So, I don't know how much impact Project 2025 is going to have on actual defense policy this time around. And, another thing about at least the defense chapter, that was pretty boilerplate Washington D.C., national security establishment policies. All of those policy proposals have existed or were already in place in Washington, and have been for years. There might have been a slight shift in focus, but the overall policy proposals, like hard security policy proposals, in Project 2025 were not that much different than what the Department of Defense was already doing.
KUNM: New Mexico is home to some of the largest arms research labs in the entire country, namely Sandia and Los Alamos. They boasted massive historic budgets and even jumps in employment. Under Trump, could we see a bigger investment in the labs?
GRAZIER: Yes, we absolutely could. Nuclear weapons policy, that's a big focus of my team's work. Donald Trump's inherited a nuclear weapons modernization program that dates back to 2011 during President Obama's first term. It's grown and expanded since then. This isn't isolated specifically to Donald Trump. Donald Trump carried on a lot of this during his first term. The Biden administration certainly carried on during their term and now Donald Trump's falling back in on it again.
There's a lot of interest throughout the national security establishment to increase investments in the nuclear weapons enterprise to the tune of approximately $1.7 trillion on all aspects of America's nuclear weapons capabilities. There's proposals to increase the capacity of the labs. There are proposals to restart production of plutonium pits, to build the actual cores of new nuclear weapons. I think that's a little problematic, because the United States already has several thousand nuclear weapon cores in storage.
KUNM: What needs to shift, in terms of balancing the interests of the environment, our communities, safety, and our budget overall?
GRAZIER: I would like to see us spend a whole lot less in the military, mostly because I think a lot of our spending is actually counterproductive. We spend so much money on defense, it creates unreasonable projects like you end up with big, clunky acquisition failures, like the Sentinel Program, if you want to talk about nuclear weapons. I think beyond that, what really needs to change is we need a change in strategy, one that's focused on actually defending America's interests, rather than one that's ultimately geared towards projecting overwhelming military power all over the globe.
If you change that, if we right-size the strategy, then the actual policies, and especially the spending policies, will kind of fix themselves. This isn't the Cold War anymore. There's a new global political reality. The national security establishment here in Washington almost wishes it was still the Cold War. You know, when nobody really questioned what they were doing. The money keeps flowing all over the country, building a bunch of things that, I think, in a lot of cases, we don't need.
