Spring 2004
Resetting the national consensus on security strategy. Published by the Chicago-based National Strategy Forum, this piece revisits the myths which have framed traditional US security strategy and proposes new ground rules for citizens thinking about how to shape American security policy.
THE NATIONAL STRATEGY FORUM REVIEW
US FOREIGN POLICY: A SEARCH FOR COMMON PURPOSE
Spring 2004 – Volume 13, Issue 3
Can Americans fashion a new strategy for national security that gathers us all to a common purpose? We can. Indeed, an overhaul of our international stance is overdue. We live in such radically changed circumstances that the old ground rules may be getting us into trouble. But to move such an enterprise from idea to implementation, we must recall just what those now-antique precepts are and how strongly they still grip our strategy thinking.
America is not a young nation. Our political culture harbors several old myths about foreign policy. We commonly assume, for example, that the domestic and the international agendas must be treated separately. Notice how our politics force the two apart. Famously, President Bush 41, a successful war president, is said to have lost his bid for reelection because he didn’t care enough about life here at home. Enroute to becoming No. 42, candidate Clinton “focused like a laser” on the home front, then carried that disdain for the foreign into his first years in office. Reversing the template but reinforcing the pattern, President Bush 43 now parades himself as a “war president” whose international responsibilities trump more homely concerns.
The roots of another DNA-level intuition run back to our nation’s origins in the era of sailing ships: America is isolated and Americans are isolationists. Insulated by broad reaches of salt water, more lately castled behind our parapets of military power, Americans are said to care little and know less about foreign affairs. With this indictment in mind, campaign gurus hold it good to squirt a whiff of international policy into politics from time to time, but insist that elections ultimately turn on voters’ primal concerns here at home.
Another pleasant myth has it that politics stop at the water’s edge. Patently untrue, as a glance at the history of any of America’s wars will show, it nonetheless remains a mantra, often deployed against one’s partisan and therefore unpatriotic opponents.
Never mind that these myths don’t quite add up. As a set they supply a threat-think perspective that has been with us a long time. In this strategic outlook we Americans need glance up from our comfortable lives only if high danger looms from overseas. No subtle, long-term menace will do. Our adrenaline stirs only for gargantuan, ocean-crossing malevolence. Between emergencies, we can leave matters to the specialists in Washington, the diplomats and warriors hired to deal with the routine hazards of life around the globe.
There is one more precept wound into our strategic intuition: engage overseas. Right from our beginnings, when Thomas Jefferson sailed almost all of his tiny navy against the Barbary pirates then raiding American merchantmen in the far off Mediterranean, America has dealt with the occasional Big Threat by engaging it with as much military force as possible as far away as possible.
Furnished with this simplifying outlook, Americans have had no need for the nuances of high strategy. A plain yardstick did the job. How big is the threat? What size military do we need to go over there and deal with it?
Time-tested as it may be, overseas threat-think has become obsolete. Terrorists are not the only forces that now reach deep inside our homeland without necessarily exposing anything vital that can be attacked by our military, no matter how far-reaching their firepower. As every American worker can tell you, America is no longer separable from the rest of the world. National security is now job security, energy security, food security, even dollar security and environment security. All are cross-connected; all are tied intimately to complex dynamics swirling around the whole globe. Our old standby, military vigor, is only one of the contributors to the common wellbeing—and a lesser one at that.
How might we go about creating a new American consensus around this larger understanding of security? One thing we don’t need to do is tell Americans the facts. They already know about jobs going overseas, TVs coming from China, and the cost of living tied to the price of oil in the Middle East. What our citizen-voters need is an opportunity to weigh in on how all the threads of national security are to be brought together.
What can citizens do? Here are three concrete steps, two for immediate use in this election season and one to deploy on November 3rd, the day after the election when the winning candidate begins (re)organizing, to deliver four years of good governance:
1—Insist that our politicians cross-connect the domestic to the international. Accept no more speeches in obsolete compartments. If they are elected, our candidates will have to juggle energy policy, Middle East politics, and counter-terrorism programs all at the same time. Ask them how they plan to do that and get a win-win-win outcome.
2—Refuse to accept the size of the Defense budget as a proxy for security. Yes, we want our young men and women to have the very best training and equipment. But whether coming out of Republican or Democrat mouths, pro-military slogans are no substitute for sober discussions with the electorate about how we can multiply the Pentagon’s leverage by correcting our public diplomacy failures and acting to prevent conflicts before we have to send in the Marines.
3—(For use after the election.) Push for a major update of our top-level strategy-making procedures in Washington. Washington’s institutional problem is not whether our intelligence community is serving up good all-source “dots.” The failure is that no one is chartered to weave all-factor plans out of the disparate threads of “security.” Not finding WMD in Iraq was a minor problem compared to the shock of discovering the day after the military victory that no one knew what to do next. Now our muddled, hugely expensive country-building project is led by the Pentagon even though Iraq’s reconstruction interconnects both to American domestic policies and the fortunes of many other countries. We can do better.
Throughout, we must insist on foresight. Very rarely can the complicated problems that undermine the security of an American citizen be fixed by emergency military intervention. As we fashion a new collection of strategic precepts let’s make this the first one: an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of (military) cure. What do you have on your list?
Larry Seaquist, a former US Navy warship captain and Pentagon strat-egist, works internationally and in the US to help governments and citizens develop practical conflict prevention and peace building strategies.