Connecting the Dots: Linking Principles to Priorities in the New National Security Strategy
Connecting the Dots: Linking Principles to Priorities in the New National Security Strategy
The Obama Administration has just released its 2015 National Security Strategy. The updated strategy concentrates on broad lines of effort that are crucial to American interests, ranging across the categories of security, prosperity, values, and international order. However, to have full effect, leadership is needed to transform the document’s intent into concrete priorities. Indeed, the document reads, “our resources will never be limitless. Policy tradeoffs and hard choices will need to be made.” In moving towards implementation, therefore, national security leaders have the opportunity to reassess their near-term policy priorities to make sure they are addressing long-term trends. In particular, priorities should better reflect the need to effectively deal with the security challenges of global climate change, negotiate balanced trade deals to reinforce American economic power, allow more decisive leadership on American values by closing the Guantanamo Bay facility, and move the Asia rebalance to the next phase to consolidate a favorable international order.
The 2015 National Security Strategy lays out the key areas of U.S. national interest, but government must refine specific priorities for implementation. NSN Board Member Julianne Smith explains how setting specific priorities with limited resources and political capital prompts complex questions: “As the document clearly demonstrates, there is no shortage of global threats. But how will this administration and future ones go about setting priorities and maintaining strategic focus in light of such a complex and fast-moving national-security environment? Does the country’s prized national-security apparatus need an overhaul? And how can the policy tools of the last seven decades, which many of us acknowledge are largely outdated in coping with so many of today’s asymmetric tactics, be paired with new approaches that match our budget lines, bring along a skeptical public and draw from the innovation one finds today in the private sector? If traditional approaches for everything from the way we draft our national-security strategy to the way we take decisions, to the way we bring innovation to the U.S. government, to the way we tackle hybrid warfare all appear inadequate at times, how should this country start anew?” [Julianne Smith, 2/5/15]
Implementing a forward-looking national security strategy requires hard choices on priorities. The 2015 National Security Strategy articulated the four functional interest-areas of security, prosperity, values, and international order. In each of these areas, key priorities have either gone underrepresented or still lag in implementation:
U.S. and global security depends upon tackling global climate change, and American leadership running up to the climate summit in Paris this year can ensure sufficient global collective ambition for success. The 2015 National Security Strategy rightly emphasizes climate change as a security threat. The Pentagon’s planning already incorporates climate change and scientists warn that the global climate system is on the precipice of a catastrophic transformation. This coming November, a summit in Paris will meet with the goal of reaching the first ever global agreement on greenhouse gas emissions. The United States can lead to help ensure those efforts are successful. President of the World Bank Jim Yong Kim explains, “We have the opportunity in Paris to make clear our collective ambition. That ambition can be translated into long-term demand for clean growth and an increased commitment to adaptation. The higher the ambition, the greater the demand will be for programs and projects that will transform economies…Paris must be where we make the rallying cry for effective management of local, national, and global economies to fight climate change. Many observers expect an agreement in Paris to be comprised of a number of essential components. Each of those components must reflect an ambition equal to the challenge before us in order to send an even more powerful signal to economic actors around the globe.” [Jim Yong Kim, 12/8/14]
American prosperity depends upon shaping global trade, but successful negotiation of landmark deals requires striking a delicate balance between reducing barriers and maintaining reasonable safeguards. The 2015 National Security Strategy highlights the need to use new trade agreements to bolster American competitiveness and serve as mechanisms to set fair standards for trade in the 21st century. The two deals under negotiation, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (T-TIP), would be powerful agreements towards that end if successfully concluded. But to be successful, these efforts have to provide greater benefits to the American middle class than past deals. Former World Bank Senior Vice President and recipient of the Nobel Prize for Economics Joseph Stiglitz explained the challenge of contemporary trade deals: “Today, the purpose of trade agreements is different [than after the World War II]. Tariffs around the world are already low. The focus has shifted to ‘nontariff barriers,’ and the most important of these — for the corporate interests pushing agreements — are regulations. Huge multinational corporations complain that inconsistent regulations make business costly. But most of the regulations, even if they are imperfect, are there for a reason: to protect workers, consumers, the economy and the environment.” Striking the balance between streamlined regulations and reasonable safeguards is therefore the delicate task of America’s renewed economic statecraft. [Joseph Stiglitz, 3/15/14]
The success of American values depends upon leading by example, which is not possible as long the Guantanamo Bay detention facility remains open. The 2015 National Security Strategy stresses the need for the United States to lead by example, including closing the Guantanamo Bay detention facility. This effort, though, faces considerable challenges, starting with legislation proposed by Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-NH), Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC), and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), which would prevent the transfer of the remaining
detainees, even including the 54 individuals cleared for release. As NSN has notedpreviously, the conservative advocates of prolonging the operation of the Guantanamo detention facility have relied on inflated recidivism figures and out-of-date prisoner assessments; these arguments for keeping the detention facility open have no grounding in fact. But the strongest arguments for the facility’s closure are a matter of American values. As Maj. Gen. Michael Lehnert (Ret.), who was the first commander of the detention facility, wrote recently, “It is hard to overstate how damaging the continued existence of the detention facility at Guantanamo has been. Repressive governments use it to deflect criticism of their own policies by charging hypocrisy. Violent extremists use it as a recruiting tool. It is a symbol for many around the world of torture, injustice, and illegitimacy.” [Michael Lehnert via Politico,1/11/15]
The international order depends upon the success of the Asia rebalance, but the necessary diplomatic resources for its implementation are still lacking. The 2015 National Security Strategy rightly highlighted the rebalance as critical to the international order. But implementing these policies require doubling down on commitments. A major report by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (SFRC) explained, “The United States has successfully moved forward with the initial phases of implementing the military aspects of the rebalance. But given the broader strategic and policy goals, it is essential that the non-military elements also move forward with equal speed and weight. An ‘unbalanced’ or under-resourced approach to the rebalance threatens to undermine the goals of the policy and, consequently, the prospects for greater prosperity.” Despite increased high-level diplomatic attention towards the region and the creation of new programs, the report notes, “the State Department has not substantially increased diplomatic engagement resources to its Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs. Department of Commerce staffing levels have not significantly increased, hindering the ability of U.S. businesses to take full advantage of new prospects. U.S. development assistance to the region, which saw a modest increase in the administration’s FY 2015 budget proposal, is still below levels from several years ago, and the U.S. development approach needs updating and upgrading.” [SFRC, 4/17/14]
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