Finding the Silver Lining of Obama’s National Security Strategy

After further study and reflection on President Obama’s National Security Strategy (NSS), I have a few thoughts to add to my earlier post, adding up to two additional critical observations and one push-back against other critics.

The NSS gives the impression that there are no risks associated with the strategy. 

The word “risk” does appear in the document, but as something prior to the strategy and choices the president has made. Risks are something “out there” that the strategy responds to, rather than a consequence of the strategy itself. Almost every use of risk in the document could be substituted with the word “challenge” or “problem” and the sentence would flow about as clearly. That is a true but incomplete understanding of risks. Yes, there are risks and challenges and problems “out there” that the administration must confront, but there are also risks associated with the different strategic responses — the responses the administration has chosen, and the responses the administration has considered and rejected. The administration’s public rhetoric about these other risks is woefully inadequate and the NSS simply compounds the problem. On the rare occasions when the administration does talk about that kind of risk, it exaggerates the risks associated with rejected courses of action and minimizes or ignores altogether the risks associated with its favored course of action.

This may work at the White House level, but at the operator level it quickly collapses as a rhetorical gimmick. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is required by law to produce a “Chairman’s Risk Assessment,” which explicitly lays out what Obama’s NSS ignores: the risks associated with the choices the president has made. The chairman is well positioned to make such assessments, but he is not the only one. I would have more confidence in the NSS if it demonstrated that the president himself, and his immediate senior foreign policy advisors, had clearly grappled with the risks and had identified viable ways of mitigating that risk.

The NSS gives the impression that doing nothing is hard whereas doing something is easy.

In the cover letter, the president praises himself for showing “strategic patience,” and in the accompanying rollout National Security Advisor Susan Rice praised the administration for not hyping the threats they faced and responding to a mood of panic. To be sure, panic is never a good foundation for a strategy. But it is misleading to pretend that using military force is the easy way out whereas not using military force requires great courage. In fact, the interagency system is optimized to point out all of the problems with using military force and the inertial default of that system is to keep doing what had been done before the crisis, which is nothing. Yes, it is likely that there will be a demand for the review of military options — and it is easier to generate military options that seem to have a plausible chance of shifting the trajectory of events than it is to generate non-military options offering such a chance — but actually choosing and implementing those military options is very hard, especially if it involves actual kinetic activity as opposed to demonstration moves like changing the position of a carrier or increasing military-to-military exchanges.

And that is why the U.S. government so rarely opts for kinetic military options. Yes, the Bush administration invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, but not Syria, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Sudan, and on and on — the list of national security challenges where a kinetic military option might have or had been considered but then was rejected is longer than the list of national security challenges where the military option was chosen. Obama has been about as quick on the trigger as Bush was. He has let national security problems linger for a very long time before opting for a military kinetic response.

Strategic patience may sometimes be the right option, but not always, as my Shadow colleague Kori Schake perceptively argues. Likewise, perhaps Bush and Obama were wise not to resort to the military kinetic option more often than they did. But if so, that was being wise in taking the easier path. As a friend of mine pointed out, “strategic patience” usually means persevering in doing something hard. In the context of his NSS, Obama means continuing to do something easy.

The NSS is a useful guide to policy thinking, even if it is not a useful guide to policymaking.

Every time an administration releases an NSS, some wag will joke about how the NSS is not much good because in a crisis no one says, “Hey, let’s consult the NSS to figure out what we should do.” Of course they don’t. But that does not mean that the NSS is useless. (By the way, while someone might say in a crisis “let’s consult our contingency plans, assuming we have written one,” in point of fact those contingency plans will also likely be quickly jettisoned. The first thing the CENTCOM commander said to Secretary Rumsfeld post-9/11 after Rumsfeld asked about existing military plans for dealing with Afghanistan was words to the effect of, “here is the contingency plan and it is no good — we will need to develop a new one.” The stuff written on paper, whether classified contingency plan or public national security strategy is not as valuable as the learning process that went into preparing them.)

While the NSS is not an action plan, it is a guide to how an administration thinks about policy problems. Indeed, it is more useful in these respects than other windows into policy thinking such as speeches and interviews, because the NSS is more carefully constructed and meant to be more comprehensive. In speeches, the speechwriter tends to trump the policy shop, and the president can end up saying something that sounds good but is problematic as policy. And in an interview, the president can say something without adequate reflection that — once subjected to the rigors of an interagency cross-examination — the administration would refrain from saying. That doesn’t mean the NSS is a perfect guide, but it is one of the more consequential guides we have available and so it is worth taking seriously.

So let’s keep taking the NSS seriously and pointing out ways in which it could be improved. Doing so can help improve the overall performance of the Obama administration in foreign policy, and that would be something every American should welcome.

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