114 days and questions
describing rather than prescribing
I am always truly delighted to receive feedback on anything I write. Often it’s corrections as I don’t catch misspellings or grammatical errors. Sometimes it’s praise which is of course welcome. Most helpfully it’s questions to make me a better thinker.
Yesterday, however, one of the people I most appreciate for having taught me so much about naval aviation over the past three decades told me my list of items made his head hurt. You likely saw his reaction. I responded with a couple of more positive items but couldn’t come up with a long list in that column.
My point, however, was not to prescribe that we must be in charge of solving those potential threats but merely that advocates exist to suggest we should. This is a small thing but crucial to the overall point I want us to ponder: are these really things we can and/or should assume as national security missions? In other words, I was trying to describe rather than prescribe our actions.
Some reading this remember the Cold War where we had a relatively zero sum understanding of our objectives: to preserve our territorial independence by containing the Soviets. At least that is what I think we were doing. Forty years after we defined the threat as existential because the Soviets developed comparable civilisation-ending nuclear weapons to match our own, the Soviets proved unable to sustain their hollow system as George Kennan had predicted in 1946 in his ‘Long Telegram’.1 We did not have an objective of ending the Soviet threat. If that were a by-product, fine but we had a defined, limited aim of containing Soviet expansion.
In forcing Saddam Hussein to withdraw from Kuwait in 1990-91, we similarly had a defined objective. George H.W. Bush took a lot of heat for not ‘going to Baghdad’ in February/March 1991 to oust the brutal dictator because that was not the writ from the American people, the Congress, or the international coalition he gathered. He stood firm, reaping great international respect and support for his actions and those of this nation on behalf of democracy and the world.
After that objective, however, things changed in our thinking. In what historians undoubtedly will remember as a revision with incalcuable effects on U.S. foreign policy, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, Dr. Paul Wolfowitz, issued thoughts on the U.S. future national security policy, known today as the 1992 Defense Planning Guidance.2 He redefined how we should view the world.
Unsurprising statements for us today but radical at the time appeared early in the extended piece. It began stating ‘Our most fundamental goal is to deter or defeat attack from whatever source, against the United States, its citizens and forces, and to honor our historic and treaty commitments’. The statement on its own is a fundamental for any regime to provide security for its nation.
It’s the next three objectives representing the transformation of U.S. national security. Means to accomplish our objectives became objectives themselves to protect.
‘The second goal is to strengthen and extend the system of defense arrangements that binds democratic and like-mindednations together in cooperation on defense against aggression, builds habits of cooperation, avoids the renationalization of security policies, and provides security at lower costs and with lower risks for all. Our preference for a collective response to preclude threats or, if necessary to deal withthem is a key feature of our regional defense strategy.•
The third goal is to preclude any hostile power from dominating a region critical to our interests, and also thereby to strengthen the barriers against the reemergence of a global threat to the interests of the U.S. and our allies.These regions include Europe, East Asia, the MiddleEast/Persian Gulf, and Latin America. Consolidated,nondemocratic control of the resources of such a critical region could generate a significant threat to our security.
The fourth goal is to reduce sources of regional instability and limit violence should conflict occur, by encouraging thespread and consolidation of democratic government and open economic systems and discouraging the spread of destructive technology, particularly of weapons of mass destruction.’3
The text, taken directly from the declassified memorandum, is an open-ended commitment which we have pursued aggressively in the following 31 years. Kennan had been absolutely clear in how limited he saw specifici interests but Wolfowitz viewed things far more broadly. The 9/11 attacks reinforced this widest possible interpretation of threats.
The list of items I discussed yesterday is an outcome of the unlimited objectives the United States has followed over this period. While the ‘Wolfowitz memorandum’, as it was known, met with a great deal of skepticism at the time, is is now the basic assumption underlying U.S. national security approaches through every administration dating to George H.W. Bush sending U.S. assistance to Somalia in November 1992.
There is nothing wrong with humanitarian assistance, as Bush and then Clinton provided. it is part of who we are and how we view the world: we don’t like seeing anyone suffer. Ending civil wars is also a way to end suffering but far different if, as true in Southeast Europe in the late 1990s or Sudan today, we are not party to the conflict; it becomes much harder, if achievable at all.
The difference today in how we view the world is an automatic acceptance that we are obligated to respond. This application of unlimited objectives rarely requires us to prioritise as the concerns about all possible threats to widely definited interests (protection of the nation and its citizens, forces, and treaty obligations’) is pretty vast.
It is noteworthy that we actually have sought to expand those treaty obligations at the same time. The 1990s tranche of former Soviet states, led by Poland, seeking NATO membership coincided with this revision in our sense of the world. That is not a criticism but a description of the course of events.
My point last night was not to say we are obligated to that long list but to say that to the Pentagon, the National Security Council, and the overall national security ecosystem, each of those items is a mission to accomplish, even if poorly articulated as to what we are accomplishing.
Donald Trump discussed narrowing U.S. obligations but never did so. Clearly a portion of the ‘America First’ community would indeed like to rein back our commitments though they seek to expand others such as towards Saudi Arabia before its current reconciliation with Iran. Lots of talk about what they don’t want to pay for but are they also abandoning the states involved? I am not clear.
The point I ask you to consider today is which threats to you important enough to use U.S. treasure: blood and bucks? Are there any threats not worth doing so? How do we define those items? How do we determine this?
I am a proponent of affirmatively stated national security goals as I fear negatives become an unending treadmill. Treadmills are for walking, not conducting national security operations. ‘We don’t want to see’ a Taliban-governed Afghanistan allowing terrorism gradually evolved into not wanting to see a state where many other social conditions were allowed to go on. Yet, we did not think about how to accomplish those in a positive, measurable manner. And the public wearied of it all over time.
These are items for you and me the voter in democracies around the world. They are not merely the domain of government. Thanks, CAPT Tyson, for reminding me to clarify that yesterday. FIN
'The Long Telegram [original], from George Kennan in Moscow to the Secretary of State’, 22 February 1946, retrieved at https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/21042-long-telegram-original
‘Defense Planning Guidance’, 16 April 1992, retrieved at https://www.archives.gov/files/declassification/iscap/pdf/2008-003-docs1-12.pdf
'Defense Planning Guidance’, 16 April 1992, retrieved at https://www.archives.gov/files/declassification/iscap/pdf/2008-003-docs1-12.pdf