Unity08. A people's movement to take our country back.

Thought this was an excellent strawman starting point to develop a moderate bipartisan framework for Foreign, Defense, and National Security Policy. Please chime in....John
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Forging A World Of Liberty Under Law U.S. National Security In The 21st Century Final Report of the Princeton Project on National Security

http://www.wws.princeton.edu/ppns/report/FinalReport.pdf

A national security strategy for the 21st century must address all the dangers we face – diffuse, shifting and uncertain as they are – and seize all the opportunities open to us to make ourselves and the world more secure. It must begin with a clear set of objectives to be achieved and must be shaped according to a set of criteria that will maximize its likelihood of success. It must also be based on a set of overarching premises and principles that will allow us to chart a consistent general course in the world while still adapting individual policies to the context of individual countries, problems, and crises.

In 1948 George Kennan defined national security as “the continued ability of the country to pursue the development of its internal life without serious interference, or threat of interference, from foreign powers.” We are accustomed to thinking about national security threats as politically motivated behavior by a foreign actor, but increasingly we need to think of them as emanating from multiple sources, not just other states. The basic objective of a national security strategy seems obvious: to protect the American people and the American way of life. This report breaks down that overarching goal into three more specific goals: a secure homeland, a healthy global economy, and a benign international environment.

A Secure Homeland

The starting point of any national security strategy must be to protect the United States from foreign conquest, attacks on our people and infrastructure, and fatal epidemics.

Just when a conventional military attack on U.S. territory by a rival state, whether by land, sea, or even air, seems unthinkable, the likelihood of an unconventional attack has put our homeland at greater risk than at any time since our early history. As we know from painful experience, terrorists can wreak death and destruction on a growing scale; moreover, the threat of nuclear terrorism looms greater than any other nuclear threat because of the limits of traditional concepts of deterrence against adversaries who would willingly martyr themselves. We also cannot discount the possibility that a regime hostile to the West may develop the capability to launch a few devastating salvos of revenge against the United States or our allies in a future regional conflict involving American forces.

The security of the homeland extends beyond basic protection from direct violent attacks. It also means securing our economy, our utilities, our health care system, and our principal means of communication from a catastrophic cyber-attack. An attack on our food and water supply could lead not only to widespread death, but also to the forced destruction of crops, livestock, and even processing plants, as well as the closing of aquifers. Our reliance on space technology (e.g. satellites) as the linchpin of our civilian and military infrastructure means that an attack in space could severely disrupt our daily lives. Finally, the combination of the rapid global spread of new human diseases, antibiotic-resistant strains of old diseases, and the possibility of bioterrorist attack designed to spread disease means that our population must grapple with the threat posed by an old enemy, one we thought vanquished by the medical advances of the 20th century.

A Healthy Global Economy

Beyond the natural ups and downs of the business cycle, American national security depends on a healthy national economy. More than ever before, however, the strength of our national economy is integrally connected to the health of the global economy. We compete with other countries on a daily basis and rightly seek advantages and a competitive edge; ultimately, though, the prosperity of other nations, open markets, and free trade are critically important to sustaining the American way of life.

Over the longer term, global economic development and international economic integration contribute to stability and peace within countries and regions. They do not make positive outcomes inevitable, but they certainly make these outcomes more likely. By contrast, economic hardship can be immensely destabilizing. It is no accident that after World War II the Truman administration made the development of an open Western economy its top strategic priority – to avoid the fate of the 1930s and to provide a bulwark against communism.

In the 21st century, reaping the economic and political benefits of a healthy national and international economy means being prepared to deal with the risks inherent in globalization, including financial crises, supply shocks, and recessions in important markets. One of the most important ways that the United States is dependent on the global economy is that America has a low savings rate and therefore has to import savings from abroad, leading to a large and growing current account deficit. An additional problem is that managing the global economy, the foundations of which date back to the 1940s, will become increasingly difficult. Although the global economy has long been multi-polar, during the Cold War the other poles in the global economy were close allies of the United States. Today, however, China is a potential adversary and India, which has traditionally been neutral, is hardly as close a friend as Japan or the European Union (E.U.). Moreover, the contemporary economic concerns that stem from the rise of new economic powers – such as outsourcing, state financing of corporate takeovers, or increased energy consumption – are not even within the mandates of existing institutions.

The economic development of China and India, which together account for over one-third of the world’s population, as well as other potentially large economies like Brazil, Russia, Mexico, and ultimately South Africa and Nigeria, is a positive-sum game, offering enormous opportunities to the world’s consumers and producers alike. But managing these countries’ growth, integrating them fully into evolving regional and global economic institutions, and addressing their concerns will be a challengethat we must meet. As Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa wrote in his novel The Leopard, “if we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.”

A Benign International Environment

In 1941 Americans learned that the security of their homeland and the viability of the American way of life as a free society depended upon developments in the rest of the world, thus settling an argument that had raged for two generations and had its roots in the nation’s founding. Simply put, we learned that aggressors in far away lands, if left unchecked, would some day threaten the United States. The implications of this lesson were profound. Rather than recoiling in isolation from great power politics, we decided as a nation that it was imperative to play an active and leading role in the world. Conventional wisdom describes this shift as a necessary response to the very real expansionist threat posed by the Soviet Union. And indeed, the transformation of the Soviet Union from ally to adversary helped overcome what would otherwise almost certainly have been greater domestic resistance to the depth and scale of America’s global involvement in the early years of the Cold War. But American postwar engagement with the world also reflected deeper lessons of the 1930s, lessons that transcended any particular geopolitical configuration.

The crystallization of this shift in American thinking came in NSC-68, the seminal 1950 memo that reorganized and reoriented our national security policy for the Cold War. It laid out the doctrine of containment, but also emphasized our need “to build a healthy international community,” which “we would probably do even if there were no international threat.” We needed then, and we need now, a “world environment in which the American system can survive and flourish.” In the 1940s the United States advanced this goal by building international institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, with initiatives like the Marshall Plan, and by encouraging European integration. We also routinely sacrificed our short-term economic and commercial interests to our longer-term security interests, seeing a value in providing global public goods that helped to support and stabilize both regional and global institutions. The results served the interests of many other countries, making it easier for us to pursue our interests as well.

The international system that existed in the late 1940s has changed dramatically; what is needed to make it benign has also changed. However, the objective of creating and maintaining a benign international environment remains crucial to our long-term security, today more than ever due to increasing global interdependence. In practice, it means safeguarding our alliances and promoting security cooperation among liberal democracies, ensuring the safety of Americans abroad as well as at home, avoiding the emergence of hostile great powers or balancing coalitions against the United States, and encouraging liberal democracy and responsible government worldwide.
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Criteria For A Successful Grand Strategy

1. Multidimensional: Post-9/11, America has understandably been focused overwhelmingly on terrorism. But a successful long-term national security strategy must be a post-post-9/11 strategy. It must take into account the totality of America’s interests and be able to meet multiple threats and challenges simultaneously. It must be coherent and based on a set of overarching principles, but must also function like a Swiss army knife, able to deploy different tools for different situations on a moment’s notice. We must be serious about terrorism but serious too about East Asia, pandemic disease, and globalization. It is neither safe nor wise to identify only one enemy and to prepare single-mindedly to confront it. We must instead identify an entire range of threats, hone our capacity to assess their relative risk, and then develop a diversified portfolio of strategies to address them as they arise.

2. Integrated: U.S. strategy must integrate our hard power with what Joseph Nye has called our soft power, allowing us to use all of our assets in pursuit of our objectives. This effort requires devoting as much attention to bolstering the civilian components of our national security infrastructure as to strengthening the military. Our soft power is our power to get what we want by attracting others to the same goals, rather than bending them to our will. It requires careful attention to how others may perceive us differently than we perceive ourselves, no matter how good our intentions. It also requires regular communication and engagement among U.S. officials and their foreign counterparts in formal and informal networks, listening as well as talking. Finally, it means drawing not only on government, but also on the assets and initiative of both the private and non-profit sectors.

3. Interest-Based, Not Threat-Based: To create maximum points of engagement and leverage, a successful strategy must begin by identifying and pursuing common interests with other states rather than insisting that they accept our prioritization of common threats. Even where other nations agree, for instance, on the need to fight terrorism, they may rank the rise of a neighboring power, environmental dangers, disease, disruption of their energy supply, or other threats as higher priorities. Finding ways to develop frameworks of cooperation based on common interests with individual nations or groups of nations minimizes frictions, maximizes common assets, and increases the likelihood of cooperative deployment of those assets to achieve common objectives.

4. Grounded in Hope, Not Fear: Focusing on threats, and above all insisting on the preeminence and global scope of one specific threat, feeds a pervasive sense of fear. U.S. strategy must advance the larger and more positive purposes behind our power. America has never defined those purposes in purely defensive or protective terms. We have also sought to stand for a particular set of values in the world and to promote those values in ways consistent with our security and our morals. That is why Americans so readily see U.S. power as a force for good. The most enduring source of American national security is to do everything possible to ensure that citizens of other countries see U.S. power the same way, not only so that they do not perceive us as a threat and balance against us, but also so that they are willing to join their power with ours in the service of larger common goals.

5. Pursued Inside Out: Increasingly, what happens inside states matters to the United States as much as what happens between them. Our vulnerability to terrorist attacks, for instance, depends upon the capability and intentions of police forces in countries like Pakistan and Indonesia, while our vulnerability to global pandemics depends upon the strength of the public health systems in China and Thailand. However, the United States is often ill-equipped to influence the domestic development of an adversary or rival, both because other states are suspicious of American motives and because of the limits of relying primarily upon military power. Squaring this circle is a necessary and critical step. U.S. strategy must include the creation of institutions and mechanisms whereby the international community as a whole can help strengthen government capacity and encourage sound practices within states without using force or illegitimate modes of coercion.

6. Adapted to the Information Age: A national security strategy for the 21st century must operate in a world where information moves instantly, actors respond to it instantly, and where all the major actors are connected in real time, allowing individual decisions to become mass movements in weeks and months rather than years. Where specialized small units come together for only a limited time for a defined purpose – whether to make a deal, restructure a company, or plan and execute a terrorist attack. In this world, we need to be fast, flexible, and nimble, capable of grouping and regrouping as necessary and capable of coordinating many different actors engaged in a common effort. We also need to be able to “know what we know:” to figure out quickly and efficiently what information we have and to transmit it to everyone who needs to know it and to figure out what information we do not have and how to get it.
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Spreading Governmental Reform Abroad

In a world of popular, accountable, and rights-regarding (PAR) governments, the United States would have many more, and more effective, partners in our efforts to fight terrorism, nuclear proliferation, pandemic disease, economic crises, and a host of other threats. The best way to help bring governments up to PAR is to connect them and their citizens in as many ways as possible to governments and societies that are already at PAR and to provide them with incentives and support to follow suit. We need to create these myriad points of on the common interests shared by the United States and any particular country or group of countries and then devising the policies and mechanisms necessary to pursue those interests.

Working System of International Institutions

We need a system of effective global institutions to harness cooperation on problems we simply cannot tackle unilaterally or even bilaterally. These institutions cannot all be formal organizations. On the contrary, harnessing cooperation in the 21st century will require many new kinds of institutions, many of them network-based, to provide speed, flexibility, and context-based decision making tailored to specific problems. This combination of institutions, and the habits and practices of cooperation that they would generate – even amid ample day-to-day tensions and diplomatic conflict – would represent the infrastructure of an overall international order that provides the stability and governance capacity necessary to address global problems. (UN, NATO, Intl finance and Econ Orgs etc)

Role of Force

At their core, both liberty and law must be backed up by force. Domestically, this is why the state maintains a police force and a military. At the international level, of course, no such enforcement mechanism exists. A national security strategy dedicated to forging a world of liberty under law must reckon with the necessity and perils of the use of force both within nations – to safeguard liberty and uphold the rule of law – and among them – to ensure that some nations cannot destroy the liberty of all.

Summary

A Grand Strategy cannot consist simply of responses to many different threats. As Henry Kissinger observed in 2024, “the war on terror is not the ultimate test of U.S. foreign policy, which is, above all, to protect the extraordinary opportunity that has come about to recast the international system.” The Princeton Project seeks to help America grasp this opportunity to lay the foundations for advancing America’s interests on every front, rather than just vanquishing one enemy. While America’s tactics and short-term policies must take the world as it is, a long-term strategy should strive to shape the world as we want it to be. That positive vision should serve as a plumb-line through crises and changing administrations.

This report’s vision of a world of liberty under law grows out of both knowledge and conviction. As demonstrated by both reason and social science, a world of liberal democracies would be a safer and better world for Americans and all people to live in. It is thus in America’s deepest interest to pursue such a world. But America must also pursue a values-based foreign policy to be true to itself – the cold calculations of realism, in its eternal quest for a balance of power, can never long satisfy the American people.