Brookings experts on Trump’s first State of the Union

Truly standing with those affected by these natural disasters requires acknowledgement that events like these are more likely in a changing climate.

Belatedly, after a year of exacerbating partisan, geographic, and racial/ethnic hostility, President Trump rightly senses that what Americans need most is a skillful leader who will bring them together to solve the problems that face our divided country. The great deal-maker has missed golden opportunities. He could have: worked with moderates in both parties to replace the Affordable Care Act with a more workable structure; crafted and taken credit for a bipartisan tax reform; and worked with Congress to pass a budget for the current fiscal year that avoided shutting down the government. Now he has a chance to negotiate an immigration solution that will protect the Dreamers, secure the border, and move future immigration policy more toward rewarding skills. He can help Congress cut a deal on next year’s spending that will strengthen the military and launch infrastructure modernization. Moderates in both parties have been working together on all these fronts and many bipartisan groups have constructive proposals. But becoming the facilitator of bipartisan deals would require the president to transform himself in two unlikely ways. He would have to stop insulting the people whose support he needs and he would have to disappoint the hard right-wingers in his own party. As long as he lets the hard right hold him and the country hostage, we will have partisan warfare and likely gridlock.

Correct. As of December 2017, the black unemployment rate was 6.8 percent, the lowest it’s been since 1972. After peaking at about 16 percent during the Great Recession, it started declining in 2011. While a falling unemployment rate is good news, it masks a longer-term problem: that millions of Americans are dropping out of the labor market. In 2000, 66 percent of African-Americans over the age of 16 participated in the labor force, meaning they were either working or actively looking for work. That figure is now about 62 percent. When the unemployment rate goes up or down by four percentage points, we pay a lot of attention, and although the labor force participation rate isn’t a headline statistic, it’s also newsworthy. Other data highlight that labor force participation is falling markedly among people in some of their most productive working years (25-54), particularly among African-American men and people with a high school diploma or less. And it does not appear to be driven primarily by choices to focus on school or take care of family. Most people support themselves and their families through work, and if fewer people are working or interested in working, it raises difficult questions. How are they making ends meet? Why don’t they see work as an option? And how should we cope on a macro level, given that falling labor force participation is associated with slower economic growth?

President Trump once again took credit for the declining unemployment rate among African Americans and Hispanics, and failed to acknowledge the work of his predecessor whose policies and programs supported its decline. Under President Obama, black unemployment was cut almost in half from 16.8 percent in 2010 to 7.8 percent by the time the current administration took office. Hispanics also experienced similar declines in unemployment, bringing them to their current rate of 4.9 percent. Yet despite these positive gains, the combined unemployment rate for both of these groups is still higher than the national average of 4.1 percent, with current black unemployment at nearly double this figure. President Trump also failed to account for the combined effects of other Obama-era policies and programs on unemployment from employer-incentives that motivate hiring to safety nets that provide workers with some level of income stability, such as student loan forgiveness, employer-provided educational assistance, and even subsidized health care. Going forward, how the GOP rollbacks and reversals will affect these contributing factors will be the real test of his success.

The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that repeal of the individual mandate will reduce the number of people with insurance coverage by 13 million and increase individual market premiums by 10 percent. That outcome is a striking contrast with the president’s previously stated objectives for health care legislation: covering more people at lower cost. Looking ahead, most of the viable paths to expanding insurance coverage involve expanding the public sector’s role, such as by increasing subsidies for purchasing individual market coverage or restoring the individual mandate. Many Democratic policymakers would support those types of steps, but the president and his congressional allies have generally supported moving in the opposite direction.

President Trump’s claim that “we repealed the core of the disastrous Obamacare” does not reflect reality. Legislation to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act (ACA) did not pass the Senate. The one exception was the repeal of the individual mandate as part of the tax legislation, which my colleague Matt Fiedler discusses. So the ACA’s expansion of Medicaid remains intact and additional states are considering expansion at this point. Tax credits for those earning less than 400 percent of the poverty line continue and the dollar amounts of the credits will increase to offset the higher premiums that have come from ending payments to insurers for cost-sharing subsidies for low-income families and ending the individual mandate. The president has certainly damaged the individual insurance markets that were reformed by the ACA through these steps and others, with much of the damage impacting taxpayers and those needing individual insurance with incomes too high to be eligible for tax credits.

Economic optimism will be a hard sell for the 11 million American families who spend more than half their income on rent, then struggle to buy food and clothes for their children.

If only this were true! Economic mobility in the U.S. is lower than many other countries. And Trump-supporting counties have some of the lowest mobility in the U.S.

The racial bigotry that was displayed in Charlottesville found no place in President Trump’s address. Instead, words to promote nationalism served to mask what remains a very divided nation. In recent weeks, the president has not appealed to unity by offending immigrants from countries that he considers less desirable. He has instilled fear in the millions of undocumented immigrants who could face immediate deportation at any time, and from any location. He has ignored the widespread and public concerns around sexual harassment and workplace discrimination. His policies have threatened to reverse the progress of LGBTQ communities by placing them back into a zone of silence. African-American athletes who decided to #takeaknee to honor their convictions were called out as unpatriotic and their mothers equally disdained for raising them as such. And even during the actual speech, he made wholesale derogatory statements about Hispanic immigrants, calling them out as drug lords and gang members. If these deeply divisive, generalized categorizations of who comprises the heart of America are the foundation for his truth, the country will not make any movement toward racial healing and unity.

The appeal to faith communities, especially Evangelicals, has been Trump’s biggest political success. But what may not be fully known is that, even within his Republican base, the appeal to faith has been more impactful than the appeal to “America first.” In a fresh study I just released with my colleague Stella Rouse, based on three University of Maryland Critical Issues Polls (November 2015, October 2016, and November 2017), our results showed that American national identity has declined even among Republicans, despite two years of Trump’s “America first” campaign. In response to questions about which identity Americans ranked first among several (U.S. citizenship, world citizenship, religion, race, ethnicity, gender), 62 percent of Republicans chose U.S. citizenship as their top identity at the start of the U.S. presidential campaign in November 2015. Two years later, in the latest November 2017 poll, that number had dropped to 53 percent. Religious identity was the biggest winner, increasing by a corresponding 9 points, from 24 percent to 33 percent in the last two years. The Rev. Franklin Graham summarized the message that some Evangelical leaders are hearing when they listen to Trump: While Trump may not be a Christian, he is “defending Christians from secularists.”

The triumvirate that composed the Reagan coalition of conservatives—namely social conservatives, economic conservatives, and neoconservatives—is being replaced by a new coalition. The first two groups are still fundamental pillars of the GOP coalition. President Trump’s judicial agenda is enough to secure the social conservatives, who are thankful to him for nominating Neil Gorsuch and dozens of conservative federal judges. The economic conservatives are delighted by his tax reform and vast elimination of regulations. The third group, neoconservatives, has been among the most vocal critics of the new Republican president, denouncing his protectionist, sovereignist, and anti-immigration approach to foreign policy. However, their voice is diminishing within the party, replaced by identity nationalists who have adopted the president’s slogan for a primacy of American interests, “America First,” as well as his unabashed patriotism. The president’s stances on trade and immigration, as well as his call to stand during the national anthem, are all meant to unite and revive this brand of American nationalism. Slowly but surely, Republican members of Congress adapt to this new coalition of conservatives. The party of Ronald Reagan is becoming the party of Donald Trump.

As our colleague Russell Wheeler recently wrote, Trump’s claim about record confirmations of federal judges needs to be put into context. True, Trump and the Senate have put 11 judges on the appellate bench; but Nixon and Kennedy were close behind in their first year with 10. More importantly, Trump’s appellate judges filled 7 percent of today’s 179 appellate judgeships. Kennedy’s 11 appointees filled 14 percent of the 78 judgeships at the time.

An anti-regulatory mindset coupled with active deregulation of the housing and financial services sectors were key ingredients of the perfect storm that led to the housing/financial crisis of 2007-2009. As a candidate, Trump promised to “do a number” on the Dodd-Frank Act, the regulatory framework established under President Obama in response to the financial crisis. So far not many Dodd-Frank regulations have been rolled back, despite comments like this from the president and concerns from regulatory advocates. However, that is set to change as the Trump financial regulatory team is finally in place and starting to actively change financial regulation, particularly at the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau where President Trump has installed his chief White House budget officer as acting director.

There was no war on American energy before President Trump took office. U.S. oil and natural gas production reached near-record and record highs, respectively, during the Obama administration and the U.S. began exporting both oil and natural gas. Natural gas waged the only war on coal, by out-competing coal to fuel U.S. power plants. The decline in coal production happened due to competitive factors, not regulation.

President Trump has been talking about bringing down drug prices substantially for over a year now, but concrete policies to do this have not yet been put forward. An important exception to this has been actions by the FDA to speed approvals of both new drugs and generic drugs, which are encouraging. Faster approvals mean more competition. While some new drugs will be the first and will command very high prices, other drugs that are therapeutic alternatives will constrain prices through competition with the first drugs. Faster approvals of generic drugs will help address situations where few generic alternatives exist, although the proportion of spending involved in these cases may be small.

On both economics and national security, Trump has consistently advanced this narrative of ending his recent predecessors’ alleged abdication of U.S. interests. As a presidential candidate, he described the multilateral Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement as a would-be “rape” of the U.S. economy. More recently, his National Defense Strategy laments that the U.S. is “emerging from a period of strategic atrophy.” And Trump’s National Security Strategy indicts at least three recent Democratic and Republican presidents with the charge that, after the Cold War, the “United States began to drift … [a]s … we took our political, economic and military advantages for granted … [and] stood by while countries exploited the international institution we helped to build … subsidized their industries, forced technology transfers, and distorted markets.” It still remains to be seen whether Trump intends to redress this perceived abdication by taking a crowbar to “the world America made” (the title of a splendid, short book by my Brookings colleague Robert Kagan), or instead by recalibrating America’s engagement with it. His recent speech at the Davos World Economic Forum suggests he is banking toward the latter. But 2018 will tell.

This is a reference to ongoing administration reviews and potential countermeasures against protectionist Chinese policies and regulations related to steel production and intellectual property. Not directly mentioned but closely related is what Trump’s National Security Strategy refers to as America’s “National Security Innovation Base” (NSIB). The administration has yet to define the potentially large swathes of industry and academic research activity it sees as comprising the NSIB. Nor has the administration sketched out the scope of restrictions it is considering. However, a recent hint at their ambition might be a recently leaked National Security Council memorandum proposing a nationalized 5G wireless communications infrastructure, designed to reduce U.S. vulnerabilities to malicious Chinese cyber activity. Expect the administration to table some controversial NSIB-related proposals in 2018. These could range from broadened standards and restrictions imposed by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, to new visa restrictions on foreign nationals working or studying in certain fields such as artificial intelligence, to measures designed to stop and, in some cases protect, private companies operating abroad from releasing or sharing advanced, proprietary technology and sensitive data.

Not one mention of broadband was heard in President Trump’s address, which is oddly strange for a leader who is heavily reliant on Twitter as his preferred method of communication. Bipartisan legislators have already come forth with proposals that urge the inclusion of at least rural broadband infrastructure, which should be one of the critical assets prioritized in the now $1.5 trillion infrastructure plan. Yet, references to traditional public works projects, followed by a call to action to improve citizens’ vocational skills only made it into the speech. The digital economy is driving job creation, while innovation is rapidly disrupting commerce, transportation, health care, education, and other sectors. Broadband service providers stand ready to invest in next generation networks, expand fiber backhaul, and even offer community benefits to ensure that every citizen and business are online. Yet, no mention of broadband as part of the infrastructure plan, which should be reconsidered if the U.S. wants to build more intelligent infrastructure, and lead in the next wave of technologies that are changing the way citizens live, learn, earn, and even communicate.

What is interesting here is that, unlike with immigration, the president has made no specific proposals, nor any way to fund the federal share of his (newly-increased) $1.5 trillion infrastructure investment target. Instead, he’s raising the bar and leaving Congress the task of achieving it and paying for it. The administration has repeatedly said it would make its own infrastructure proposal, but a year in has not done so.

Leverage federal funding with state and local financing and private capital is a mainstream and consensus solution to addressing the infrastructure deficit. However, it is far easier to call for it than to enact it, given the structural impediments to getting private capital investment, particularly given the active and cheaper source of financing: the municipal debt market. The devil is in the details in how to best unlock new capital sources: privatizing existing infrastructure assets has proven politically unpopular at the state and local level. The federal gas tax has not been raised since the price of gas was $1/gallon. Without actual federal dollars being offered, the federal government is a surprisingly weak player in infrastructure decision-making which is predominantly left to state and local governments. Republican philosophy has generally favored local decision-making, but that conflicts with setting federal priorities for infrastructure project selection. Details will make the difference and the State of the Union was surprisingly light on infrastructure. The administration probably has internal conflict, where the president maybe to the left of his advisers.

“State of the Union addresses can help focus Congress’s attention on policies prioritized by the president. President Trump touted a forthcoming infrastructure plan for much of the first year of his administration, so it’s not surprising that he mentioned the issue in the speech.

By calling for involvement by state and local governments, President Trump is signaling that the federal contribution to his plan will be relatively small; recent reports have suggested it will be roughly $200 billion, but that’s far from certain. Any proposal that relies heavily on state and local contributions may be a difficult sell for members of Congress from less densely populated states and those with cash-strapped state and local governments. The structure of the plan also matters for its potential to attract Democratic support.

The president also did not address how he plans to pay for the plan. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce recently called for an increase in the gas tax in order to cover increased infrastructure spending, but that idea is a non-starter with many Republicans. While congressional Republicans were willing to abandon deficit hawk rhetoric and pass large tax cuts last year, their enthusiasm for significant increases in federal spending is not on the same level.”

This is easily the largest infrastructure “program” we’ve seen mentioned in federal politics since the New Deal. It’s enough to denote images of grand new projects across the whole country. But hitting that level of public investment will be hard to match, as we wrote last year. And it will be especially hard without sizable federal investment, which leads to the next line …

The remarks are unspecific, but the plan being discussed by his team (still not released in long-form) is much clearer: the federal government would be a minority investor in most projects. That flies in the face of past and current federal programs from the New Deal to interstate highways where there is federal leadership on spending and content. It’s also insensitive to fiscal health in communities across the country, many of which would struggle with this approach. Here’s a primer on their position from a transportation perspective

One good idea with bipartisan potential. If the federal government can work with states and localities to streamline infrastructure approval, that would be a big win.

The President is right that major infrastructure investment can lead to greater economic opportunity, but it won’t be from just construction alone. That’s the immediate bump, although there is real question whether we need that bump during a time of near full employment. Instead, it’s the long-run gains from additional operations jobs and support for more trade-related occupation. See how we estimate infrastructure jobs to capture 11 percent of the labor market.

The problem here predates Trump, but achieving prosperity and financial independence is tough when real wages are flat. (Real wages are adjusted for inflation, so they represent the same buying power over time.) Since the late 1970s, median weekly earnings have barely budged, and earnings growth has been concentrated at the top. Average hourly wages of those in the highest 20 percent of earners climbed from $38 to $48 per hour between 1979 and 2016, an increase of more than 25 percent. Meanwhile, among those in the bottom 20 percent of the earnings range, real wages actually fell slightly over the same time period, and remained just under $10 per hour. Wages among those in the middle of the earnings range rose modestly by 3.4 percent, and reached about $20 per hour in 2016. While earnings of $20 per hour would lift most families above the poverty line, that’s a low bar, and leaves little margin for unexpected expenses, such as auto repairs or medical bills, let alone making investments in homeownership or education.

Here’s the only direct reference to education in the speech. It’s a notable one, although it lacks detail. Congress has been working to reauthorize the Perkins Act, which defines the federal government’s role in career and technical education. Last year, the House passed H.R. 2353 (by voice vote) with bipartisan support, which would grant more control to states. The Senate’s efforts dissolved in partisan disputes. However, there are signs that both parties are ready to move. An aide to Lamar Alexander (chairman of the Senate HELP committee) recently said that reauthorizing the Perkins Act is a top priority, and the Democrats chose an interesting location for Joe Kennedy’s SOTU response—Diman Regional Vocational Technical High School.

This in a nutshell will be Trump’s predicament in securing cooperation from Democrats on immigration reform. He has framed the need for immigration reform as a matter of keeping violent criminals out of the U.S. and stopping immigrants from taking U.S. jobs. That’s not how Democrats think about the challenges and opportunities offered by immigrants to the U.S. (and it incorrectly suggests that undocumented immigrants are the key perpetrators of violent crime) and will make Democrats doubt the president’s commitment to resolving the DACA issue to the benefit of their families and long-term success in the U.S.

Trump’s first policy prescription on immigration involves a Central American criminal gang. That reinforces Democrats’ skepticism about deal-making with the president to resolve the fate of the Dreamers.

Every country, and of course the U.S. too, has the right to secure its borders and define its immigration policy, including dealing with illegal immigration. But let’s be honest on the motivations to do so. When it comes to crime, the evidence does not fully support the statement made by the president. While the number of illegal immigrants in the US has increased from about 3.5 million in the early 1990s to over 11 million as of today, a report from the U.S. Department of Justice shows that crime rates have decreased by more than half during the same period. Moreover, another report suggests that in the U.S. the share of male immigrants (between ages 18 and 39) incarcerated is roughly 1.6 percent, as compared to 3.3 percent of native-born males in the same age range. Of course, there are immigrants who are criminals, but the numbers show that it is the exception rather than the rule.

Trump errs here. Jihadist terrorists have not successfully exploited weaknesses in U.S.-Mexican border security. The big issue is home-grown terrorism, both jihadist and right-wing—that’s where the President’s focus should be. Unfortunately, his anti-foreigner rhetoric risks legitimizing right-wing violence.

President Trump is right that the U.S. needs to fix its broken immigration system, but his motivations are not based on evidence. For instance, while diversity visa lottery winners are indeed randomly selected from countries underrepresented in the U.S. (citizens from Mexico, for instance, are not eligible to participate), they are still required to have completed a highschool diploma or to have had work experience in order to get a green card. Moreover, they go through clearances in terms of health and of security. But more importantly: this is a program that brings about 50,000 foreigners a year; in a country of 324 million people, this group of individuals is simply not enough to shape socioeconomic outcomes in the country. Without looking at the actual data on the propensity of people in this group to commit crimes, any policy decision is based on emotions and not on facts.

“Chain migration” (others refer to it as family reunification) has allowed immigrants to sponsor visas for their direct family members, but with quite a bit of restrictions. Can this system be improved? Certainly. But we need to understand more what it is and the data behind some claims. Without getting into the details on how it works, we have to be clear on a number of things when discussing this matter. First, it is not that easy as claimed by the president, for an American citizen to extend their residence or citizenship to their non-American direct family members to the country: it is a lengthy and expensive process, in which it is the U.S. government–and no one else—the entity that makes the final decision on a case by case basis; thus, it is a controlled system. Second, beyond a handful of anecdotal examples, there is no evidence whatsoever that immigrants and their families are more linked to crime (or terrorism) in higher proportions than the natives (see my other comment above). Third, immigrants are and have always been an important driver of innovation, entrepreneurship, job creation, and economic growth, and there is no mention about any of this, which makes me think that the president and his administration don’t understand that curbing migration is not going to result in better wages (or less crime) for the American people, but maybe even the opposite.

This was a huge missed opportunity to set a clear goal and mobilize the nation and all levels of government around stopping the opioid crisis, a top priority for both parties. The SOTU provided a prime-time platform to get specific–such as a call to cut the rate of overdoses and addiction in half by 2023–and outline clear policy actions that could have given Democrats and Republicans something to rally around, giving meaning to the calls for bipartisanship. Instead, we got a “long and difficult struggle” toward … what? By keeping his exhortations vague and undefined, the president is protecting himself and the administration from being held accountable for future lack of progress. The emphasis on drug dealers and pushers right after the overdose statistics implies that they are the core of the problem, whereas a 2014 study found that 75 percent of heroin users getting treatment started their addictions with painkillers. Hollow leadership all around.

True to his own motto, Trump delivered a speech that talked about “America First” and foremost, and the president relegated international interactions to footnotes. He did touch upon a few adversaries and rivals, denouncing their regimes as dictatorships (“corrupt” in Iran, “communist and socialist” in Cuba and Venezuela, “cruel” in North Korea) rather than explaining the threat that they pose to the United States. Other partners are viewed as mostly ungrateful (on Jerusalem), a familiar theme for a leader who claims to want to restore respect for America. President Trump makes no mention of European allies or NATO, referring only quickly to the “challenges” posed by Russia and China, an understatement in terms of threat assessment to say the least, especially compared to his vehement denunciation of gang-related or immigration-related crimes in the U.S.

This is the only sentence in which China and Russia—America’s two greatest strategic adversaries—are mentioned. A glaring omission.

This is the only excerpt of the speech that directly addresses China. The lack of focus on China puts this speech in sharp contrast with the National Security Strategy, which framed China as a central threat and ideological competitor to the United States. The National Security Strategy asserted that the United States was entering a period of great power rivalry. This speech, by comparison, omits discussion of great power rivalry and instead uses China as a justification for raising defense spending. The lack of emphasis on China and the argumentation around it (defense budgets) will add to growing anxieties among friends and allies in the Asia-Pacific region that the president lacks consistency and conviction on China, and instead pursues a situation-dependent approach to Beijing based on his needs of the moment. Countries confronting China’s rise will not take comfort in the lack of consistency in this administration’s public presentations on China. They will, in turn, continue to hedge by pursuing closer relations with Beijing to guard against Trump’s unpredictability.

Neither the one mention of Russia nor the several mentions of China recognized their most effective form of threat: cyberattacks. The various Russian interventions in U.S. elections, via hacking and social media, have been reported by the intelligence community and are well known; less well known is the fact that they are continuing both in the U.S. and in attempts to destabilize other countries as well. Less well publicized is cyber-espionage to gather business information and intellectual property. Although the president might, for political reasons, have chosen to ignore Russian cyber-political efforts, there’s no reason for him to ignore Chinese commercial espionage. At a minimum, he might have said that the effort will be part of his proposed expansion of defense spending. Instead he focusing on nuclear modernization, a debate more appropriate to the 1970s than the 21st century.

Directly in line with the new National Defense Strategy, but only possible with additional resources. Will Congress deliver?

This speech accurately highlights Russia and China as rival nations to the United States. However, the Trump administration must distinguish between the challenges that Russia and China pose to U.S. interests and to those of our allies. Placing Russia and China in the same “rivals” category without any nuance is unhelpful conceptually and strategically to U.S. foreign policy. The National Security Strategy made a similar omission. Russia and China see themselves as challengers to the liberal international order. Yet their conceptions of an alternative order, and their role in that order, differ significantly. Each seeks a distinct relationship with the U.S. and with the West. Finally, the U.S. must compete with Russia and China using different strategies and tools.

First, the president should state that America’s “unmatched power” lies not only in our military and economic capabilities. America’s allies are essential pillars of U.S. power in the world. They remain critical components of U.S. strategy toward Russia and China. Second, U.S. power must incorporate capabilities in the cyber, information, and influence domains. Russia and China operate in “the gray zone” of hybrid warfare. They are increasingly challenging western powers through asymmetric and non-conventional tools. To deter their use, the U.S. must make clear that their actions come with repercussions, including the possibility of offensive counter-measures.

President Trump spent little time talking about big picture fiscal issues like the deficit and the national debt, but this single line near the end of the speech touches on a major fight currently playing out on Capitol Hill. Since 2011, both the defense and non-defense sides of the discretionary federal budget have been subject to spending caps. Congress has repeatedly chosen to increase those limits. Doing so requires overcoming the threat of a filibuster in the Senate, so Democrats have maintained leverage on the issue and have insisted on treating the non-defense and defense sides of the budget the same. A lack of agreement on whether, and by how much, to lift the spending caps is one reason that Congress has yet to finish its spending bills for the current fiscal year—a task that’s gotten tied up with passing an immigration measure. Most of the conflict involves the non-defense side of the ledger, but frustration from Republican defense hawks has led some to threaten to withhold support from short-term bills to keep the government open.

The anti-ISIS campaign is something the Trump administration should take pride in. Sure, he built on the Obama administration’s efforts, but progress continued under his watch. As the president pointed out, ISIS’ territorial control is vanishing. In addition, it is losing recruits and money and is far less inspiring, and potent, than at its peak in 2015. Trump’s willingness to emphasize the role of allies is also commendable for a president who has often expressed skepticism concern America’s many friends. Local fighters did much of the heavy lifting against ISIS, and maintaining a regional coalition is vital. Finally, his note of caution that the job is not done is also fitting. ISIS can still inspire attacks worldwide and is trying to directly conduct terrorist strikes, especially in the region. This isn’t the end of the group, but we can hope it’s the beginning of the end.

President Trump’s desire to put forward the defeat of ISIS as a major victory for his administration is in tension with legal positions put forward by U.S. officials in recent weeks, a fact evident here. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson recently announced that the United States intends to maintain an open-ended military presence in Syria to engage in stabilization operations and prevent a resurgence of ISIS, among other objectives. Subsequent statements by senior U.S. officials confirmed that the anticipated legal justification for this continued presence would be the same as for current counter-ISIS operations in Syria, namely the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) as a matter of U.S. domestic law and individual and collective self-defense against ISIS as a matter of international law. Both justifications, however, are premised on the assertion that ISIS remains present and threatening enough to warrant the U.S. operations being pursued. Statements by President Trump that exaggerate the degree to which ISIS has been defeated thus run counter to these legal justifications and may weaken both their legal persuasiveness and the resulting level of support for U.S. operations. Alternately, if and when ISIS has been thoroughly defeated, the United States will no longer be able to rely on these legal justifications in good faith, requiring a new legal basis for the Trump administration’s proposed activities.

President Trump’s use of the phrase “unlawful enemy combatants” is an apparent allusion to the George W. Bush administration’s counter-terrorism policies. Specifically, this phrase is commonly associated with the argument that captured members of al-Qaida and the Taliban are not entitled to protections provided by the Geneva Conventions, a position that the Supreme Court rejected in its 2006 decision in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld. Due to these associations, the Obama administration stopped using this phrase and instead described such individuals as “unprivileged enemy belligerents” in line with the laws of armed conflict. Congress similarly implemented this new terminology when reforming the military commission system in 2009. While President Trump could be using this phrase to signal a change in position on what protections should be provided to captured terrorists, this is unlikely. Many of the legal questions surrounding detention policy are now well-settled, including standards of treatment for captured terrorists. Further, the Obama administration successfully implemented broad detention authorities in a manner that has withstood legal scrutiny. Hence, the Trump administration has little to gain from reopening these debates. Instead, President Trump is likely using this phrase to underscore his rejection of the Obama administration’s perceived weakness on terrorism, in line with his standard rhetoric on counter-terrorism issues.

The newly signed Executive Order that President Trump refers to here is largely symbolic. While it revokes President Obama’s earlier directive to close the Guantánamo Bay facility, that directive was never successfully implemented due to opposition from Congress. Aside from this, the new Executive Order simply affirms that the United States may transfer additional individuals to the Guantánamo Bay facility where “lawful and necessary”—an assertion that is largely undisputed as a legal matter—and directs that detention operations should “continue to be conducted consistent with all applicable United States and international law[.]” The Executive Order does direct the secretary of defense to develop policy recommendations regarding “the disposition of individuals captured in connection with an armed conflict” within 90 days, which may result in the new detention legislation that President Trump references in his remarks. That said, the current U.S. position is that the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) already gives the executive branch extensive detention authority in relation to al-Qaida and ISIS (though the latter position is more controversial). And the Trump administration has thus opposed proposals for a new AUMF on the grounds that the 2001 AUMF provides adequate authority. Hence, it is unclear what new legislation President Trump may be seeking here, or whether this reflects a change in the Trump administration’s position on a possible new AUMF.

The new Executive Order President Trump signed this week officially closes the door on the Obama administration’s valiant efforts to contain the damage from the Bush administration’s aggressive GITMO detention policies. But it does not on its face proclaim a return to the controversial open-ended detention approach of the past. In fact, the EO contains language that carefully prescribes detention tactics in accordance with the law and explicitly preserves the attorney general’s authority to prosecute terrorist defendants in the U.S. criminal justice system, an approach that has proven to be successful. White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, having run GITMO from his last post as commander of U.S. Southern Command, has made sure that all options are preserved when it comes to keeping terrorists off the battlefield.

Directly in line with the new National Defense Strategy, but only possible with additional resources. Will Congress deliver?

In March 2003, France and Russia indicated that they would not support a new UN Security Council resolution sanctioning the Iraq war. As a result, the U.S., the UK, and Spain withdrew their draft, and went to war without specific UN backing. In response, then Secretary of State Colin Powell stated that countries that had opposed the U.S. would face “consequences,” including the reduction in foreign aid. By May, however, recognizing that the U.S. needed those countries’ support in the reconstruction of Iraq, to cooperate on lifting UN sanctions, as well as on trade, investment, counterterrorism, and peacekeeping in other parts of the world, the U.S. relented. This illustrates how awkward it can be for a country with a massive portfolio of global interests such as the U.S. to withhold foreign aid as retribution. If Trump is demanding that aid flows be stopped to countries that voted against the American position on Jerusalem at the UN, it could be even trickier.

Regardless of what one thinks about the president’s decision to move the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, it is a bad precedent to have such a sovereign decision become the subject of a vote at the United Nations General Assembly.

How successful was this touted move? The answer is found in what’s missing in the speech: Any mention of “the Deal of the Century” for Middle East peace, featured early on presidential priorities–rendered dead in its tracks.

These two goals—foreign aid only in the national interest, no foreign aid to enemies—are often at odds in donor aid policies. First, U.S. aid has often been used strategically to fund “rivals of rivals,” which is the situation the U.S. now finds itself in with respect to Iran’s chief Sunni adversaries in the Middle East and North Africa—all of which voted against the U.S. at the UN. Second, severing aid—to Pakistan, the Palestinian Authority, etc.—could backfire given that U.S. (military) aid is usually the main financier of counter-terrorism efforts in recipient countries. Moreover, where the U.S. does fund “enemies” it typically receives tangible and intangible benefits in return in the form of airspace rights, access to military bases or government property, or access to natural resources. Third, in a global aid landscape in which new bilateral donors (esp. China) and private aid now match or exceed official aid, a U.S. threat to cut off aid is a much weaker punishment. If the U.S. hopes to use foreign assistance as a more effective tool of foreign policy, Congress should first enact a number of reforms to deliver aid both to more productive targets and through more reliable channels.

This is probably one of the most foolhardy statements in Trump’s otherwise conventional SOTU speech. Drawing black and white lines for conditioning U.S. foreign assistance, which Trump’s first budget proposed cutting drastically, around what is “always” in American “interests” and who are America’s “friends,” is a hopeless exercise. Even more so now that China is offering billions of dollars in assistance to our partners with few strings attached. But we should continue to impose certain targeted conditions on U.S. aid, especially on human rights and anti-corruption terms like in the Magnitsky Act and its accompanying Executive Order signed in December. This line, on the other hand, is nothing more than political bait for those factions of Trump’s pro-Israel base who support the Jerusalem embassy decision.

American foreign assistance serves American interests by ending extreme poverty and hunger, improving health and education, and stimulating economic opportunity for the world’s poorest. It is a key component of our national security and a basis for long-term economic relationships: nearly all of the U.S.’s top trading partners were once recipients of U.S. aid. At its core, it is an expression of the highest American ideals: the dignity of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The proposal to turn our foreign assistance into a transactional quid pro quo for UN votes reinforces the worst stereotypes of the U.S.: crass, materialistic, and overvaluing the importance of money. China is already building significant influence with developing countries by outracing the U.S. through investments in its massive One Belt, One Road initiative, and this policy would open the door that much wider for them. Only seven out of 192 countries voted in favor of the ill-fated UN resolution on Jerusalem, a decision controversial even in the U.S., so it’s an odd choice to retaliate with such a damaging proposal. The Beatles had it right: “Money can’t buy me love.” It’s unclear why the president thinks it will become a winning strategy now.

Trump’s recently issued National Security Strategy (NSS) and National Defense Strategy (NDS) promise to redress his recent predecessors’ strategic “complacency” and “atrophy” by refocusing U.S. foreign policy on competition with China and Russia, which are argued to collectively “challenge American power, influence and interests, attempting to erode American security and prosperity.” It is therefore striking that this speech makes only a fleeting reference to China and Russia. Trump instead dwelled on Iran and North Korea, and reserved the balance of his foreign affairs time for ISIS, Afghanistan, and keeping open the U.S. detention facility at Guantánamo Bay—despite the NDS’ categorical statement that “interstate strategic competition, not terrorism, is now the primary concern of U.S. national security.” The absence of talk about China in particular also undercuts an argument some in the administration have offered in support of the NSS’ aggressive public rhetoric vis-à-vis Beijing: that such a tone is necessary to persuade the American people to spend more on defense and also absorb potential costs arising from trade enforcement or related measures against China. These officials could be right, but Trump doesn’t seem to agree.

This is a derogation of presidential responsibility. I’m a supporter of the Iran deal, but if the president thinks it is not in America’s interest he should have a plan for ending it and an alternative policy in hand. He has neither, and handing it off to Congress indicates that he doesn’t want to lead on this but just distance himself politically.

It’s worth noting how the sanctions on these two countries are so misaligned with other U.S. priorities. Cuba, a small Caribbean island that poses no serious security threat to us, faces one of the most comprehensive and punitive unilateral embargoes, which Trump made even worse by decisions that hurt the burgeoning Cuban private sector and ordinary Cubans. The embargo has utterly failed to achieve its objectives for over five decades. Venezuela, which potentially poses a greater risk to our security, appropriately faces more targeted sanctions. But it is too soon to know whether they will put enough pressure on the Maduro regime to back off from its disastrous policies. So far, it looks like they are making a bad situation worse by rushing to elections this spring.

Trump warned against “complacency” in facing North Korea’s nuclear program. But despite his tough tone toward the country and its leader, he offered no specific moves. That’s not necessarily bad, as options are limited, and specific warnings could backfire. Still, there is concern that this warning against “complacency” may hint that the White House may be considering some “military options.” As my colleague Michael O’Hanlon shows, all possible military options range from risky to unthinkable. But Trump faces other challenges: credibility and public opinion. Results from recent University of Maryland Critical Issues Poll public opinion polls that we carried out with Japanese partners, The Genron NPO, and released at Brookings, are troubling. While the Japanese identify North Korea as the top threat to world peace, and need to cooperate with the United States over this threat, they also identify the United States as a close second in threatening world peace. In fact, the Japanese identify Donald Trump as the single most threatening world leader, ahead of North Korea’s Kim Jong-un. Even in the United States, Trump statistically ties Russia’s Vladimir Putin in second place, after Kim Jong-un, as most threatening. This credibility deficit is exacerbated by a prevalent sentiment among the U.S. public (and the Japanese public) that military action and even stricter sanctions are unlikely to work. This leaves little but diplomacy, at a time when global credibility is low and with an undermined Department of State.

This statement reflects Trump’s desire to “solve” the North Korea problem once and for all, where other presidents have failed. He and senior U.S. officials have consistently pointed to the failures of past negotiations with North Korea and emphasized the futility of any potential future negotiations, therefore heavily weighting the importance of military options over diplomacy. The prominence of North Korea in the State of the Union speech suggests that the Trump administration continues to see North Korea as a top national security threat.

Overall, the North Korea portion of the speech is consistent with Trump’s speech to the South Korean National Assembly in early November. It calls out the brutality of the Kim Jong-un regime and highlights Pyongyang’s record of human rights violations. The State of the Union speech also reflects Trump’s comments on last month’s National Security Strategy document in its portrayal of North Korea as the ultimate outlier, an evil regime trying to threaten the United States, Americans, and their values. Consequently, the speech seems to argue, North Korea must be stopped now because we would face more dire consequences in the future, like the terrible fate that Otto Warmbier and Ji Seong-ho met.

A large portion of this very long State of the Union speech was dedicated to honoring everyday Americans who have behaved heroically or have faced tragic personal circumstances, following the tradition initiated in 1982 by President Reagan with plane crash hero Lenny Skutnik. It allowed the president to underline some of his domestic priorities–fighting crime and drug abuse, rebuilding the military and veteran affairs, etc.–and one of his top foreign priorities, North Korea. However at times, President Trump seemed to over-rely on this tool. These incredible stories of bravery and raw suffering risked becoming a distraction from the underlying policy message: For example, was President Trump denouncing North Korean nuclear proliferation, or its human rights abuses? It wasn’t always clear.

Seong-ho’s was a journey to refuge, and indeed a powerful story worth noting. It’s also worth noting that President Trump has taken up a broad effort to restrict the admission of refugees to the United States, especially those from countries it deems “high risk,” among them North Korea. Since the start of the fiscal year, the United States has admitted fewer than 6,500 refugees. At this pace, the total number of refugees it admits this year will be less than half the shameful 45,000 limit President Trump set last fall.

Mr. Ji’s story is an inspirational one and Trump is sympathetic to Ji. But I would note that the Presidential Proclamation of September 24, 2017 would prohibit Ji’s entry into the U.S. (obviously, exceptions were made, given his attendance at the SOTU): “The entry into the United States of nationals of North Korea as immigrants and nonimmigrants is hereby suspended.”