Engaging Today's Global Citizens

An Unrealistic Plan

The Bush administration's latest plan for US national security is an unrealistic one that offers few achievable goals to safeguard American interests, contradicts the actual policies and actions of the administration, and reveals an absence of introspection and lessons learned from the mistakes of the first term.

What the United States needs instead is a strategy that places the threats to our security in the proper context and one that integrates all of the tools of US foreign policy—economic, military, and diplomatic—in order to find effective solutions to national security challenges.

Those are the conclusions of Lawrence Korb and Caroline Wadhams, who have authored a Stanley Foundation policy analysis brief that critiques the Bush administration's National Security Strategy (NSS), as required of presidents by Congress since 1986.

A good place to start a constructive review is to look at the basic logic and conceptual soundness of the arguments made in the NSS. Unfortunately, the new NSS makes a number of conceptual errors that undermine its relevance for solving or managing many of the complex global problems now confronting the United States.

First of all, the NSS continues to confuse preemption with preventive war. By doing so, the United States has created a new precedent that could lead to the collapse of a widely held international norm that forbids offensive attacks by one state against another purely for self-gain. Furthermore, by making preventive war the centerpiece of US strategy even against other states, this plan, like its predecessor, ignores the role that containment and deterrence can play.

The new NSS also emphasizes the unachievable goal of "ending tyranny" completely throughout the world. Perhaps the greatest weakness of the new strategy is its failure once again to define an enemy, place it in the proper context, and offer a coherent, realistic strategy to defeat it. "Terrorism" and "tyranny" cannot be enemies. They are tactics, not states or even political movements. The vagueness of this terminology is confusing to the American people and the world.

Finally, the NSS fails to make a realistic assessment of the threats to our security. While the NSS admits that the United States is not yet safe, it claims that the country is safer than it was 42 months ago. Yet terrorist attacks have increased worldwide since 9/11, and the US military is overstretched, undermining its ability to respond to natural disasters and terrorist attacks on the homeland or to other global contingencies.

The 2006 version of the NSS is deficient on several counts. First, it is three years late. The 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act mandates that a new NSS be forwarded to Congress every year. From 1987 through 2006, the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton administrations produced 12 strategies, nearly one every year. During his five years in office, the second President Bush has produced only two. Given the foreign policy challenges currently facing the nation, this is unconscionable.

Second, while the language in the 2006 version is less belligerent than the 2002 edition, the essence remains the same. The 2006 NSS glosses over the real issues, exaggerates successes, and emphasizes the wrong priorities. Finally, after more than five years in office, the administration has yet to produce an achievable national security strategy that has a realistic chance of gaining the support of the American people on a bipartisan basis.

—J. Ashley Calkins