A new national security strategy: why it matters

After an extended hiatus punctuated by a series of field exams, I am back to blogging – and the time is opportune.  As early as this week, the Obama Administration will be releasing its first national security strategy.

National security strategies in the US are formal documents submitted to the US Congress on an annual basis in fulfillment of a legislative mandate established by the Goldwater-Nichols Legislation of 1986.  In practice, however, the NSS is only revised two or maybe three times in a President’s term.  After all, any strategy that lives up to its name should remain relevant for at least a few years.  The last NSS was issued in 2006 by the Bush Administration.

Before parsing statements from National Security Advisor Jim Jones and the President himself this past weekend to preview the broad sweeps of the strategy, it is worth asking why the NSS is important in the first place.

WHY THE NATIONAL SECURITY STRATEGY MATTERS

First, the NSS is a capstone document that sits atop a hierarchy of national strategy documents.  To the extent that these strategies do have real-world policy and budgetary effects, they are very important indeed.

The Federal Government supports a cottage industry of strategy-generating offices and bureaucracies.  We have strategies for everything from combating weapons of mass destruction to securing cyberspace to controlling drugs.   Each of these strategies, and the departmental budgets and priorities that they support, are theoretically subservient to the priorities outlined in the NSS.  In practice, this relationship is maintained through the issuance of “implementation plans” that spell out how departments and programs support the priorities enshrined in the strategy documents in mind-numbing detail.  These documents tend to be classified.

Second, the process of generating a coherent NSS serves an important function within the administration.  By definition, the NSS process requires policy-makers to look beyond the day-to-day crises, articulate their assumptions about the security environment, assess America’s priorities, and formulate a theory regarding how America’s security is best advanced.  Eisenhower once quipped that although plans are often useless, planning is essential.  Much the same could be said about policy-planning.

Lastly, the NSS creates a common lens or shared “mental map” among policy-makers that colors how they perceive the world around them.  The principles and priorities enshrined in the NSS become an intellectual touchstone that shapes how the American leadership understands, shapes, and reacts to external events.

President Bush’s first NSS in 2002 described transnational and state-based threats in the starkest terms, endorsed the notion of prevention under the aegis of preemption, and issued a call-to-arms declaring that:

History will judge harshly those who saw this coming danger but failed to act. In the new world we have entered, the only path to peace and security is the path of action.

One need only to review American foreign policy choices from 2002 through 2006 (when the next NSS was issued) to conclude that the NSS is in fact a prescient indicator of an administration’s approach to foreign-policy decision-making.

Obama’s first NSS is expected to constitute a significant break with the previous administration’s strategies.  Yet, much of Obama’s national security policy to-date has borne a striking resemblance to that of the Bush Administration.  It will be interesting to see where the Administration acknowledges continuities and seeks to create conceptual and policy breaks from the past.  If history is any guide, these distinctions will be reflected in a big way down the road.

Managing American decline or preserving American primacy?

Robert Kagan wrote an interesting evaluation of the Obama Administration’s foreign policy one year on.  His central premise is that although the Obama Administration won’t admit it, they are re-orienting American foreign policy away from the preservation of American primacy in favor of managing America’s relative decline.  He hesitates, however, to call the Obama Administration’s worldview “realism” because it rests on a fundamentally idealistic assumption:

The Obama administration’s core assumption, oft-repeated by the president and his advisers, is that the great powers today share common interests. Relations among them need “no longer be seen as a zero sum game,” Obama has argued. The Obama Doctrine is about “win-win” and “getting to ‘yes.’” The new “mission” of the United States, according to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, is to be the great convener of nations, gathering the powers to further common interests and seek common solutions to the world’s problems.

While Kagan’s article is thought-provoking, it leaves two important issues unaddressed.

First, can the U.S. actually maintain primacy over the long run in spite of the demographic, economic, and/or military prowess of rising powers like China?  The National Intelligence Council isn’t so sure.  It is somewhat disingenuous to suggest that we should try to freeze the international order as it is today without evaluating whether or not this is actually possible or at least addressing the risks that such a policy might pose.

Second, is Obama’s assumption regarding shared interests and the end of zero sum games really that far off the mark?  In short, yes and no.

Scholar Robert Gilpin provides some answers in his classic work War and Change in World Politics. Gilpin distinguishes between two types of interests which are subject to absolute and mixed-motive games, respectively.  Absolute interests (e.g. preservation of territory, cyber dominance, military superiority in outer space) are zero sum and Obama is wrong to suggest that we don’t have some absolute interests that simply aren’t shared with any other power.

It is equally important, however to recognize that shared interests are prevalent in international relations.  In most cases interests are neither symmetrical nor diametrically-opposed but rather an intractable mix of common and conflicting interests.  When this happens, we have what Gilpin would calll “mixed-motive relations.”  Mixed-motive relations reflect a combination of “mutual dependence and conflict, of partnership and competition.” In stark contrast to the zero-sum construct, mixed-motive games involve two mutually-dependent centers of consciousness and require some degree of tacit or direct communication to arrive at optimal outcomes. Clearly, Kagan is wrong to discount the prevalence and importance of shared interests.

It would be more insightful to ask where the U.S. should defend its primacy and where it should be prepared to cede some autonomy to rising powers.  A more nuanced view of the world reveals that there are some power domains where we can accommodate the needs and interests of other powers without diminishing our own in absolute terms.  There are, however, others where we should make a stand.  The trick is knowing the difference.