Obama's National Security Strategy leaves an empty feeling

Posted By Will Inboden Thursday, May 27, 2010 - 2:59 PM Share

It is a hard task to produce a National Security Strategy. The challenges are manifest, including: addressing multiple audiences (international, domestic, the U.S. government's national security agencies, Congress, the media, scholars, pundits -- and yes, even erstwhile policy-makers-turned-bloggers), balancing precise policy guidance with lofty principles, describing complex objectives in clear prose, and anchoring sound ideas in a coherent framework. The Obama administration team has clearly put much time, thought, and effort into producing this document, and for that they are to be congratulated.

On substance, how does the Obama administration's first NSS stack up? As I wrote earlier this week, the basic pillars of the strategy are sound and moreover show considerable strains of continuity in U.S. foreign policy -- including continuity with the Bush administration's grand strategy. Peter Feaver makes these points in more detail and shows numerous consistencies between the Obama NSS and the 2006 Bush administration NSS.

However, now that I've had a chance to read the entire Obama administration NSS, I worry that as a strategy blueprint the overall sum is less than the parts. In other words, it fails to articulate a compelling strategic logic that connects an analysis of opportunities and threats with resources, policies, and goals.

Why? To begin, it is too heavy on process and light on strategy. Much of the document is devoted to heralding worthy things like "engagement," "cooperation," and "partnerships." These are all essential methods of foreign policy, of course, but they are more means rather than ends in themselves. Yes, the "strategic approach" chapter includes sections on "The World as It Is" and "The World We Seek." Yet both of these sections are regrettably thin. The former offers up the customary points on the challenges and opportunities of globalization. The latter identifies the "world we seek" as "a just and sustainable international order," but does not adequately specify what this order should look like. A stable balance of power among nation-states? The global expansion of free market democracies? A world in which multilateral institutions and transnational communities eclipse the nation-state system? Or some combination of these, or another world order altogether?

A few other thoughts on various particulars:

  • The section on the campaign against al Qaeda says almost nothing on al Qaeda's ideology and very little on the battle of ideas dimension of the campaign. What is the administration's understanding of extremist ideology and how to defeat its pernicious yet persistent appeal? Unfortunately, this NSS only offers an anemic paragraph with the awkward title of "Contrast Al Qaida's Intent to Destroy with our Constructive Vision."
  • While the NSS rightfully devotes more rhetorical attention to the promotion of human rights and democracy, it unfortunately puts too much emphasis on the U.S. example alone ("More than any other action that we have taken, the power of America's example has helped spread freedom and democracy abroad"). Going back to Puritan John Winthrop's "City Upon a Hill" sermon in 1630, this strain of American exceptionalism has a distinguished tradition. Yet when it comes to promoting democracy abroad, just being an example is often insufficient. Freedom activists around the world such as Chinese dissidents, Iranian Green Movement protesters, Cuban prisoners of conscience, and Egyptian reformers already see the United States as a positive model. What they want is active American advocacy and support -- even when that support might cause friction in diplomatic engagement with their own governments.
  • For an otherwise high-minded and forward-looking document, the NSS unfortunately lapses a few times into using straw-men caricatures ("we reject... an endless campaign to impose our values" -- as if any serious voice has advocated that?) or occasionally indulging in what could read as gratuitous digs at the Bush administration.
  • The NSS a few times lumps "Russia, India, China" together as emerging nations of influence. While true in the "BRIC" sense, in a strategic sense this risks downplaying the important distinction between India as an emerging partner of the U.S. while Russia and China continue to play more (at best) ambiguous roles, and at worst have the potential to become peer competitor threats.

These points notwithstanding, there is still much that is good in the strategy. The real evaluation, of course, will come as the Obama administration continues to develop and implement these policies in a very challenging world.

Alex Wong/Getty Images

EXPLORE:OBAMA ADMINISTRATION, SECURITY, U.S. FOREIGN POLICY
 
Facebook|Twitter|Reddit

SURESH SHETH

8:38 PM ET

May 28, 2010

Second cold war has started

Creditor China has a upper hand against debtor US in this cold war unlike first one when US had a upper hand against Soviet Union.

US has nobody to blame but itself for the rapid rise of China to challenge US.

Afterall China was a pariah country in the world just like today’s North Korea until anti-Communist Nixon’s 1972 visit. All the West European and East Asian countries stayed away from China following the US lead until 1972 and embraced China after Nixon’s visit. While US would not give MFN status to Soviet Union (remember Jackson-Vanik amendment?) unless Russia shed Communism, it had no problem giving it to China’s Communist dictators with a capitalist mask. Trade with China expanded by leaps and bounds during 12 years of Republican rule beginning in 1981. Bush Senior had no problem sending his national security advisor to Beijing within two months after Tiananmen massacre. After campaigning against butchers of Beijing in 1992 elections, even Bill Clinton became enthusiastic supporter of trade with China once he took lessons in foreign policy from Nixon in early 1993 during a special Whitehouse-arranged meeting. US also promoted China to a super power status by accepting it as a permanent UNSC member.

Now China has US by the tail - US businesses are hooked to huge profits that cheap Chinese products generate for them as a walk through any Walmart, Sears or Home Depot filled with cheap Chinese goods attests to and US government is hooked to huge investments that Chinese government makes in US treasuries.

Nixon’s China embrace to counter Soviet Union has come back to haunt US with the rise of China to challenge US just as Reagan‘s embrace of Islamic fundamentalists to counter Soviet Union in 1980s Afghanistan came back to haunt US in the form of 9/11 attacks.

Reagan must be squirming in his grave for his Republican predecessor Nixon being responsible for the rise of dictatorial China as a threat to US after Reagan was supposed to have vanquished Soviet Union.

The West will desperately try to reverse the rise of China but will be largely unsuccessful. Little could Mao or even Deng have imagined that their followers will beat capitalists at their own game. Lenin used to say that ’capitalists will sell us the ropes with which we will hang them’. With the West selling such ropes (in the form of technology transfers), China has proved that Lenin quote quite prophetic.

 

MARTIN SULLIVAN

2:20 AM ET

June 3, 2010

I would not give credence to this by calling it a strategy

Unfortunately, I don't believe the NSS will have any effect on helping guide government agencies in a resource constrained environment in making national security trade-offs and choices - to determine what should not or cannot be done efficiently and effectively and then mitigate or accept the resulting risk - These decisions are the essence of strategy making.

My analysis intends no criticism of the amount of work or the effort that people put into the project nor am I impugning the writers' motives, indeed they may have been writing while feeling they were wearing a political straight-jacket, but I don't see the document as being useful, just as I haven't seen previous Administrations' NSS as useful in harnessing the whole of government to achieve national security goals. I see NSS' as smorgasbords; each Administration mashing up on one groaning table every interest, value, and goal expressed in their platforms no matter how tangential the issue is to achieving national security. While at the same time, the NSS assigns no agency to be in charge of planning, implementing, organizing resources, providing oversight, or measuring progress toward achieving anything of substance.

While the NSS makes a effort to begin developing organizing concepts, its failure to assign clear goals and specific agency responsibilities in accord with those concepts will not assist DoD and State in structuring and budgeting to achieve national security. More importantly, the NSS does not assist DoD, State, and OMB in answering the most fundamental security questions - whether there is or is not diplomatic and economic logic and, therefore, any future positive benefits that may arise from protecting some of the initiatives and functions of currently uncoordinated US national security efforts while lessening in priority or completely abandoning others. More broadly, the strategic uncertainty left in the wake of the NSS is unsettling for our allies, unhelpful in recruiting potential partners, and casts a pall over US businesses that are trying to make their own determinations on future goals, markets, strategies, and organizational structures, functions, and personnel.

Given that the global economic environment is a strong driver of security risks, the NSC, OMB, DoD and State must soon make real strategic choices and then, with an understanding of the diplomatic, economic and military impacts of those choices in mind, begin to organize, budget and apply resources to most effectively protect our vital national interests.

 

Shadow Government is a blog about U.S. foreign policy under the Obama administration, written by experienced policy makers from the loyal opposition and curated by Peter D. Feaver and William Inboden.

Read More