The New National Security Strategy
The Obama Administration’s new national security strategy, released Thursday, is a truly impressive policy document and includes several elements that are, for lack of a better description, very encouraging.
This is particularly true with respect to sections stressing the importance of building global institutions and partnerships, explicitly identifying unconventional challenges that the U.S. will fact in the near future such as reducing energy dependence and combating global climate change, rejecting overreaction and fear as drivers as policy, and recognizing that national security and domestic rule of law go hand in hand.
Setting out this forward-thinking, well-reasoned strategic framework is a critically important step. The more difficult task, though, is obviously going to be figuring out how some of the more specific and thorny security issues mentioned, especially those relating to how the U.S. will approach counterterrorism, can be reconciled with the engagement-based, common-sense security approach that the administration has set out.
One of the biggest difficulties will be related to the fact that the U.S. will continue to use missile and air strikes as to maintain pressure on terrorist groups, but will do so fully cognizant of the fact that the civilian casualties those strikes will inevitably generate have significant potential to make them strategically counterproductive.
There is much to appreciate and admire in President Obama’s broader vision for the future of U.S. security. This critical element, however, unfortunately remains grounded in tactical thinking; we’re going with what works well in the short-run, entirely aware that it will likely undermine our strategic goals down the road.
Though this is understandable given the current lack of viable alternatives, what we need over the course of the next few years is an approach that deals with this disconnect and effectively reconciles it. Only then can we really have a counterterrorism “strategy” in the truest sense.
