Douglas Macgregor responds:
See the areas marked in yellow. This document will not
address strategy. Like its predecessors since 1991, it will contain lots
of soothing platitudes and push ideological agendas as a sop to domestic
constituencies, campaign contributors and the defense industries. Our Cold War
alliance structures economically benefit our so-called allies around the world
thanks to unfavorable trade agreements, but they don’t benefit us. Dependencies
and protectorates that finance Islamism and terrorism are not allies.
Islamist terrorism is a homeland security issue bound up with border security
and immigration. Disputes between China and its neighbors, especially,
Japan, over rock piles in the North or South China Seas are not matters for
resolution through aggressive U.S. military intervention.
This document promises to be an expensive tribute to the
past and our delusions of grandeur, not a fresh perspective designed to
reinvigorate American economic strength, to restore the high-tech manufacturing
base, to expand development of our agricultural and energy sectors and
realistically cope with the United States’ fiscally constrained future.
New US Strategy Carries Heavy Expectations
Defense News
December 9, 2013
New US Strategy
Carries Heavy Expectations
By PAUL McLEARY and JOHN T. BENNETT
WASHINGTON — The new national security strategy document that the White
House plans to release in 2014 is shaping up to be key to laying out the
administration’s thinking on everything from diplomatic engagement to
counterterrorism to training and advising allies, a host of national security
experts say.
But how it should do that is a matter of debate.
The broad outline of what the document will contain has been expressed in
speeches by President Barack Obama and administration officials over the past
several years: a push for nuclear disarmament, a rebalance of diplomatic and
military attention to the Asia-Pacific region, helping build economic stability
in emerging regions, and a continuing focus on the global counterterrorism
mission.
The administration’s first national security strategy was released in 2010, a
little over a year after Obama entered the White House and as the US was still
engaged in Iraq, preparing to surge more troops into Afghanistan, and still
firmly in the grips of a crippling global economic crisis. Four years on, with
the economy stronger, Osama bin laden dead, as much as $1 trillion in
government spending to be slashed over the next decade, and American troops out
of Iraq and heading for the exits in Afghanistan, the landscape has changed.
Most notably, there has been a shift from the Defense Department to the State
Department taking the lead as the face of American foreign policy, with the jet
set diplomacy of Secretary of State John Kerry dominating the headlines as he
brokers deals with Syria, Iran and Libya, while preparing to set his sights on
the Israel-Palestine peace process.
As for specific recommendations for how the administration can use the document
to help shape the way it uses both diplomatic and military power until the end
of Obama’s presidency in 2016, Rachel
Kleinfeld, of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Truman
Foundation, said the strategy must address the Arab Spring and subsequent
political changes in the Middle East and North Africa.
“The Arab revolutions show an urgent need to weigh more heavily in our security
calculus the risk factors that could create a sudden state collapse in allies
and strategic states,” Kleinfeld said. “That means greater weight to acute
corruption and population unrest in our security strategy — and developing the
tools to help allies alter gradually rather than fail catastrophically.”
What’s more, with the Afghanistan war winding
down and al-Qaida more globally dispersed than when the wars began, the US
needs “a new strategy to fight terrorism,” Kleinfeld said.
The issue here is the contentious debate over the 2001 Authorization for Use of
Military Force (AUMF), which many on Capitol Hill want rewritten to clip some
of the broad powers that it has granted the White House to use the military.
“This document will have to catch up to the shift from stability operations to
a more limited train, advise and assist mission, and hopefully fill in the
blanks on what the civilian agencies provide in that realm,” said Kathleen
Hicks, who served as principal deputy defense undersecretary for policy from
2012 to 2013, and is now with the Center for Strategic and International
Studies in Washington.
When it comes to the global counterterrorism
mission, “I don’t think we really have a strategy right now for that,” Hicks
added. “At the tactical and operational levels, there’s a lot of good work
going on, but I don’t think we’ve articulated the problem at a strategic level.
This is an opportunity for that.”
One former government official said the AUMF will have to be addressed in the
document, predicting that “I would expect to
see a legal framework that’s very much tied to al-Qaeda and what this
means in terms of how the US conducts itself going forward.”
Related to the AUMF issue are the lingering questions over the targeted killing
program the Obama administration has employed, largely by using armed drones.
Lawrence Korb, a former Pentagon official now with the Center for American
Progress, expects the strategy will include “something
about the use of drones and covert action.” Korb also said he thinks the
strategy will stress that “diplomatic solutions should always be our first
option.”
Diplomacy also plays a major role in writing such a sweeping, high-profile
document. Aides and senior officials spend months changing words and entire
sections, worried a friend or potential foe will react poorly.
“The strategy can’t send a signal to the Middle East that we don’t care anymore,
or make China think we’re going to go to war with them,” Korb said.
Speaking to the Asia Society in March, Obama’s then-National Security Adviser
Tom Donilon outlined a vision for the administration’s regional policy that
will likely be reflected in the upcoming strategy document.
The United States is focused on “strengthening
alliances; deepening partnerships with emerging powers; building a stable,
productive and constructive relationship with China; empowering regional
institutions; and helping to build a regional economic architecture that can
sustain shared prosperity.”
Some Obama critics have low expectations however.
“This president’s strategy has been retreat. Iraq: Retreat. Afghanistan:
Retreat. Total disengagement from the world,” said Danielle Pletka of the American Enterprise Institute. “Some signal of a
more robust American profile on the global stage would be a good thing.
“There is not one part of this administration’s foreign policy that I want to
see this strategy codify,” Pletka said. “Whether it’s remotecontrol
assassinations or cozying up to terrorists.”
Asked which terrorists she thinks Obama has embraced, Pletka pointed to Iran,
saying the recent deal it struck with the UN Security Council should have
included text that dubbed Tehran “a state sponsor of terrorism.”
Kleinfeld hit a similar — but less extreme tone — saying the strategy needs to
reassure frustrated allies and make the case
for and against isolationism to a war-weary American populace.
While the document will likely spend less time
on economic issues than its 2010 predecessor did, the $500 billion in
total sequestration cuts looming will have to play a role.
The United States will have to adjust its military ambitions to reflect the
cuts the Pentagon will have to make, said Frank Hoffman, a former Pentagon
official and now senior research fellow at the National Defense University.
“It’s going to be very hard for the administration — in a public document — to
calibrate our interests and our appetites in such a way that’s its clear to
everybody what we believe our most core and vital interests are,” he said.
There is little doubt that the American military will remain the most powerful
military force in the world, he said. “You’re
coming from a position of very dominant overmatch. Now it’s retaining overmatch
and focusing on the things that are really important to you, and that’s what
the [Asia-Pacific] rebalance is all about, maintaining overmatch.”
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