A New National Security Strategery is Coming!
A New National Security Strategery is Coming!
Curb your enthusiasm
The Biden administration is about to release a new national security strategy paper.
We should all keep our expectations low, in large part because the Biden team told us to do so.
“I think you will see the themes largely unchanged” from the preliminary document the Biden team released early last year, explained one Biden staffer. “I don’t think you’ll see any big surprises but rather a sharper articulation of those things.”
Sharper articulation! That’s not exactly the teaser that gets folks to tune in or produces seismic breakthroughs in global affairs and politics.
In other words, this staffer is saying that the Biden administration is set to release a document that is quite similar in contours to the Interim National Security Strategic Guidance released in February 2021.
Does anyone remember that paper? Probably not too many folks, including those of us living inside the Washington foreign policy bubble.
A lot has happened in the world and at home in the 20 months since then, and the Biden team decided to hold off on releasing its National Security Strategy (NSS) earlier this year due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Some members of Congress have grumbled about the delay, but that delay had no real consequences.
But now we’re told that the Biden team will release a national security strategy document that’s not all that different from what they put out last year – despite needing more time to pull it together.
It all raises the question of how much value there is in producing such a document these days as well as what sort of debate the paper is aimed at provoking with which audiences. Given the way foreign policy is made and debated these days, the old way of teeing up “strategic” debates mostly in elite circles seems passé.
The NSS report release also may miss an opportunity to engage the American public, including circles that have a strong interest in hearing big-picture arguments about how events in the world affect Americans at home. The past two years have driven home the point that a lot of big challenges impacting our lives know no national border: pandemics, global supply chain strains contributing to inflation, as well as volatile global energy markets and the Ukraine war.
Anyone trying to sell a gated community argument on U.S. national security these days will have to ignore the reality that what happens overseas hits all Americans here and there’s no wall high enough to deal with the consequences.
Americans are looking for clearer arguments from their leaders about why America does what it does in the world and how it’ll do it. Any narrative offered by America’s leaders that doesn’t try to explain what’s going on in the world and how it relates to Americans’ lives is incomplete. A strong case for an inclusive nationalism in America, something we strive to put forth here at The Liberal Patriot, necessarily needs to connect the dots between the domestic and international dynamics.
Most national security strategy documents by recent administrations fail to make a strong connection between the domestic and international factors, and they are often released in ways that get little notice with the wider public. They also often fail to set priorities and miss opportunities to build coalitions at home needed to get things done in the world.
If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it…
The National Security Strategy is a report outlining the executive branch’s national security worldview to the legislative branch. Mandated by the Goldwater-Nichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act of 1986, the president and his team are supposed to send the report to Congress to justify an administration’s national security priorities each year. Early on, administrations sent the reports annually, but over the past two decades it has taken most administrations several years to pull their thinking together and finalize the document.
The prose of a typical NSS usually leans towards the dull and academic, laden with bureaucratic jargon and abstract concepts that fly over the heads of most Americans. Take the time to read the NSS and watch the few discussions that take place about them over the years, and you’ll find some common shortcomings with these national security strategies and the role they play:
1. A typical NSS paper often lacks the key elements of what usually constitutes a strategy. Like Voltaire’s quip about the Holy Roman Empire being anything but those three things, the usual NSS lacks some core elements of a strategy. They often don’t set clear priorities, fail to define clear tactics to achieve the stated end goals, and don’t outline the necessary resources to achieve the outcomes. As a result, most NSS documents look more like an articulation of “strategery” – offering a pretense of strategic thinking without actually engaging strategic thinking and logic that stands a chance of rallying the country behind a unified approach to the world.
2. Administrations try to use them as messaging documents to distinguish themselves from previous administrations. America is stuck in a hyper-partisan moment that it can’t seem to get out of right now, and the tribalism of U.S. foreign policy that confuses most Americans has seeped into recent NSS documents. The funny thing is that as messaging, it often fails to connect with most Americans because they are ponderously written and use terms that lack resonance with ordinary people. Outsourcing narratives to academics, activists, and political journalists who lack a close connection to ordinary Americans is a surefire way to fall flat.
Moreover, despite the sharp political divides on U.S. foreign policy and the attempts to make key national security questions partisan wedge issues in America’s politics, there’s often still a continuity from one administration to the next in their overall foreign policy approach on big ticket items like competition with China.
3. Actions and events speak louder than words and “strategy” documents. Once asked what would determine the course of his government, the former British prime minister Harold Macmillan said that “events, dear boy, events.” The simple fact of the matter is that no matter what the Biden administration’s national security strategy document says when it is released, its nearly two years in office have already spoken for it. And like most U.S. administrations, its foreign policy has a mix of wins and losses, and its approach tends to be all over the map given America’s global reach and lack of political focus.
What we’ve got here is failure to communicate and tell a story about America
One safe bet you can make about the Biden national security strategy document once it’s released: it is quite unlikely to garner much attention outside of elite circles. This is especially true before the midterm elections, where the focus will be elsewhere in the coming weeks.
The NSS will spark the usual debate among a small group of people relitigating some of the same old debates. Some voices from previous administrations opposed to Biden will likely voice harsh criticisms, and those in the Democratic foreign policy veal pen seeking jobs and public recognition will voice approval of the document. A few academics at universities will publish an article or two and maybe there will be a few panel discussions at think tanks featuring a top administration official. Foreign governments will mostly observe and look puzzled as they often do at these moments when they see the gap between rhetoric and how the actual system of U.S. foreign policy works. Even assuming we pay that much attention to this document, we’ll all move on quickly.
But the one thing the next NSS document won’t likely do: connect with a wider public that’s interested in hearing a narrative about America’s role in the world and what our leaders are doing to inspire the country and keep our people safe and prosperous. That’s a core task for any foreign policy, and it’s one several administrations have fallen short at in the past two decades.
This won’t happen for two reasons:
1. The first reason is particular to the Biden administration: the top self-stated foreign policy priorities are all over the map: a foreign policy for the middle class, standing up for democracies (including our own), ending wars, putting diplomacy first, and tackling climate change. Take a close look at the list of more than a dozen issues that the Biden administration has highlighted as foreign policy priorities – if everything is a priority, nothing is a priority.
2. There’s a second reason why this effort won’t connect with the wider public: any attention the Biden National Security Strategy gets will be chewed up and spit out by the policy and political commentariat that is incentivized and trained by the political and media environment in America that is designed to fragment rather than build coalitions. Even if the Biden team has a few good ideas in its forthcoming strategy, the overall ecosystem is primed to foster greater disunity rather than unity of purpose about America’s role in the world.
So, if you take the time to read the Biden administration’s forthcoming national security strategy document and absorb some of the debates about it, remember one thing.
Keep in mind the irony at play in the whole exercise: a document aimed at producing greater coherence and unity inside of America about its role in the world will likely do the exact opposite.