President Putin made three foundational assumptions in launching his war against Ukraine that should have been correct but were not. First, Putin assumed the invasion of Ukraine would be a quick and easy fight. Second, he assumed the world would denounce the invasion but tacitly allow it. Third, Putin assumed the war would deter NATO expansion.
Because of the urgency of addressing climate change, U.S. foreign policy should be re-oriented around climate change. This can be accomplished by linking climate change to national security, especially within the executive branch, pursuing a comprehensive international climate strategy, and addressing the U.S.'s own contributions to climate change, both domestically and abroad.
If the United States is serious about competition in a global, informationalized arena against other aspiring great powers, a better-informed and engaged populace capable of thinking critically about the veracity of information it encounters daily should strengthen America’s intrinsic informational and economic strengths. A better-educated and informed public is a cognitively armed population, better able to participate in the processes of government, drive civic outcomes, and thwart disinformation while also producing innovative products and solutions.
The proliferation of misinformation via social media continues to radicalize, alienate, or isolate American citizens across demographics, including specific targeting of military veterans. Misinformation-fed emotional and psychological effects can drive these individuals toward forming virtual and in-person communities of shared worldviews. The insurrection against the U.S. Congressional certification of the Electoral College results on January 6, 2021 demonstrated the power of misinformation to drive mass violence. Many of the insurrectionists were connected to the U.S. military, including retirees and veterans. The next National Security Strategy writers should attempt to answer: How does the United States counter misinformation within its military community?
Washington is littered with strategies covering everything from cyber, nuclear, and space to a national strategy to promote the health of honey bees. Some strategies get more attention than others, with a nexus to the National Security Strategy a fast track to prominence. Will the NSS get serious about women, peace and security?
The authors of the next National Security Strategy must ask how U.S. national security agencies fit in the anticorruption landscape. To inform the development of a comprehensive strategy to address corruption, they should consider how the use of foreign policy tools by national security and foreign policy agencies, from seemingly benign foreign assistance to tactical foreign subversion, interact with and potentially amplify the very challenges they seek to remedy.
Recent thinking on deterrence has evolved beyond these simple logics. Now emerging concepts such as tailored deterrence, cross-domain deterrence, and dissuasion offer new ideas to address criticisms of deterrence in theory and practice. Therefore, the most vital question for the new administration is: how should the U.S. revise its deterrence policy to best prevent aggression in today’s complex environment? A review of the problems and prospects in deterrence thinking reveals that in addition to skillfully tailoring threats and risks across domains, U.S. policymakers should dissuade aggression by offering opportunities for restraint to reduce the risk of escalation.
American national security depends on a comprehensive understanding of China’s recent defense reforms and weaknesses so that decision-makers remain aware of how willing Xi may be to go to war and how U.S. strategy in Asia should be adjusted to mitigate this potential. The primary concern of the new administration’s National Security Strategy in responding to China’s military modernization should be an equivalent focus on military capabilities, through a reinforced defense budget and collaboration with allies, and secondarily, greater efforts to increase high-level talks with Chinese officials on areas of potential collaboration.
In great power competition, alliances matter as much as anything else. And, as previous great power competitions demonstrate, alliance shifts can lead to instability and even open conflict between competitors. For the United States to maintain the upper hand in a worldwide strategic competition with China, alliances play a central role.
Looking back to the Cold War, most analyses, including American intelligence estimates, underappreciated the systemic weakness of the Soviet Union before the precipitous fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Currently, many over-appreciate systemic weaknesses in China linked to demographic decline, debt, and large migrant populations, among other issues, as signs of distress. Today, strategic analyses miss a possible leadership transition in China or gloss over the domestic fissures in American society. Therefore, it is critically important, now more than ever, to question conventional strategic assumptions and logic. Otherwise, the U.S. will be caught by surprise and face utter disappointment with its China policy once again in the not-too-distant future.
As the Biden administration settles into office it faces a number of monumental tasks - dealing with the ongoing global health pandemic, repairing alliances, and preparing the country for the coming great power competition with China, just to name a few. This poses the question regarding which issues in particular should inform the rewriting of the next National Security Strategy. While a number of pressing foreign and security policy issues are high on the agenda, the Biden administration’s National Security Strategy should also make reference to and lay the framework for an active cruise missile counterproliferation and arms control strategy.
President Biden’s Africa team will face three dilemmas that would be recognizable to any American statesman responsible for Africa policy in the post 1945 period. The answers to these three foundational questions, set out in key strategic documents like the National Security Strategy, provide the intellectual framework that foreshadows subsequent resource allocations and shapes the policies through which the United States engages the African continent.
To guide its National Security Strategy’s technology priorities, the Biden Administration should turn to analytic methods that rely less on predictions of future scenarios and capabilities. Instead, they should use the net assessment methodology pioneered by Andrew Marshall and others during the Cold War. Although there is no fixed methodology to conduct a net assessment, in general it evaluates trends in each competitor’s strategy, doctrine, and capabilities a decade or more in the past and future to identify asymmetries.
The next National Security Strategy must make operational integration a priority. Such integration would provide the requisite foundation for driving the organizational reforms necessary to revamp doctrine, enhance the planning and execution of operations, and the conception and development of systems and platforms to best achieve U.S. strategic goals. This is not to argue for abolishing America’s traditional armed services but rather to reduce their distorting focus on the tactical level of war. It is time to recognize that twenty-first-century conditions require that strategic and operational capabilities need to be developed and utilized by women and men whose training, background, and education are not tied to the services' parochial imperatives.
Questions are our best friends for the invention and refinement of strong useful theory, and they are the lethal enemies of poor theory. So suggests Colin Gray. These questions then undergird and shape strategic thinking. What theoretical and empirical question should most inform the rewriting of the U.S. National Security Strategy? This quarter’s series seeks compelling arguments to inform the senior leaders responsible for authoring the next U.S. National Security Strategy.
The 2017 National Security Strategy (NSS) serves as the keystone document of America’s strategic posture. Considering how the world has changed since it was first published, and in response to how our adversaries have reacted to U.S. actions on the world stage, the next National Security Strategy must shift to meet evolving threats. The next National Security Strategy must remain grounded in principled realism, but also must pivot away from the insular tone that has isolated the U.S. from its friends and has needlessly provoked its enemies. America must engage with the world and shift from a policy maintaining peace through strength of arms to a posture of peace through strength of engagement.
The U.S. government should nevertheless find a non-partisan, fact-based mechanism to determine what happened, capture lessons learned, and make recommendations regarding public health, the economy, and continuity of basic services. Regardless of how well or poorly the coronavirus was handled in this instance, an independent evaluation is necessary to better prepare the country for future pandemics. Moreover, the Department of Defense should review the 2018 National Defense Strategy to determine its relevance in a globally persistent novel coronavirus environment.
Despite the multitude of domestic issues facing the United States as it approaches a presidential election, policymakers must also not lose sight of enduring foreign threats to the nation. Members of both political parties generally agree China constitutes the preeminent national security concern. How should the United States, in a post-COVID world, check Chinese global influence to best protect American national interests?
States, organizations, and individuals engaged in competition must ask themselves: Will I win or lose this competition if I make no changes to systems or policy? Whether they predict a persistent advantage or imminent decline, they must strive to identify the culprit that will lead them to the winner’s circle or cause their failure. Only then should they consider positive action to cement their advantage or prevent its deterioration.
At a time when the U.S. maintains a significant military advantage over all other countries, it is seductive to think that simply applying those resources to any and all problems will cause success, but it will not. As a country, the U.S. can and must do better. One small step toward improving American strategic competence is to explicitly articulate our strategies as theories of success based on clear conceptualization of all variables and causal mechanisms.
