RELATED BOOK: Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win by Jocko Willink<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n
\u201cI think Biden may have some wind at his back on this that no president has had before,\u201d Chuck Hagel, a former Republican senator who served as defense secretary in President Barack Obama\u2019s administration, told Reuters.<\/p>\n
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Hagel, who had endorsed Biden, said he expected the former vice president and U.S. senator to bring some Republicans into his administration and govern in a way that builds consensus.<\/p>\n
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Biden secured enough Electoral College votes to clinch the presidency on Saturday and major allies congratulated him on his victory.<\/p>\n
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But strains between Republicans and Democrats were already building in the run-up to the Nov. 3 presidential election. Experts say Biden\u2019s ability to sustain bipartisan support into 2021 may depend on how he handles pressure within the Democratic Party to rein in military spending and how he confronts American rivals, including Russia, China and Iran.<\/p>\n
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Adam Smith, the Democrat who leads the U.S. House of Representatives Armed Services Committee, acknowledged friction over defense spending. Even Trump\u2019s own budget proposal in 2020 had foreseen largely flat spending in a second term in office after increases in his first term.<\/p>\n
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\u201cThere is a growing wing, the progressive wing of our (Democratic) party, that wants to see the defense budget cut on general principle,\u201d Smith said before the election.<\/p>\n
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\u201cThey think that spending money on bombs and weapons of war is nowhere near as important spending money on well, just about anything else, for that matter,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n
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Smith himself has questioned Navy plans to build a 500-ship <\/span>fleet and criticized the Trump administration\u2019s guiding strategy document on national defense, which focuses on countering both Russia and China. He recently called it \u201ca recipe for a very dangerous and unnecessary Cold War.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
That document has broad support among Republicans.<\/p>\n
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Still, Mac Thornberry, the top Republican on the committee, told Reuters he was optimistic for the prospect of broad cooperation between Republicans and Democrats under a Biden administration.<\/p>\n
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He noted that the strongest voices among Democrats for major spending cuts were not major players on national security.<\/p>\n
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\u201cIf you look at some of those people who are the loudest, (they) have never voted for defense anyway,\u201d Thornberry said.<\/p>\n
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The list of Republican national security experts who endorsed Biden is long and includes Colin Powell, once chairman of the military\u2019s Joint Chiefs of Staff and secretary of state under former President George W. Bush, as well as Richard Armitage, a former senior Republican State Department and Pentagon official.<\/p>\n
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Biden\u2019s backers also include former senior military officers, including William McRaven, the retired admiral who oversaw the operation to kill Osama bin Laden as head of Special Operations Command, as well as Paul Selva, who served as vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Trump.<\/p>\n
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Both Republicans and Democrats have voiced concern over Trump\u2019s approach to long-standing U.S. alliances, including his criticism of NATO and his efforts to squeeze more contributions from South Korea to help offset the cost of U.S. troops there.<\/p>\n
gCaptain<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
But it is unclear how long that backing will endure among conservatives who endorsed the Democrat as the antidote to President Donald Trump\u2019s anti-globalist agenda, which clashed with long-held Republican positions on military alliances and raised doubts about the United States\u2019 role in the world. RELATED BOOK: Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":20988,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[1090,3157,3004,8891,13126,1760,1089,13127,1423,2222],"class_list":["post-20987","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-marine-world","tag-budget","tag-calls","tag-cold","tag-dangerous","tag-democrat","tag-house","tag-navy","tag-recipe","tag-top","tag-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20987","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20987"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20987\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/20988"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20987"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20987"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20987"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}