Introduction – What Is American Strategy?
1. How American “Strategy” Went Astray
To ensure that America remains the world’s strongest, richest, most powerful, and most successful country for decades to come, our country needs a coherent, focused strategy for how we interact with the world. And to get that right, all Americans need to know what, exactly, it is we are trying to do and why.
A “strategy” is a concrete, realistic plan that explains the essential connection
between ends and means: it begins from an accurate assessment of what is desired and what tools are available, or can realistically be created, to achieve the desired outcomes.
A strategy must evaluate, sort, and prioritize. Not every country, region, issue, or
cause—however worthy—can be the focus of American strategy. The purpose of
foreign policy is the protection of core national interests; that is the sole focus of
this strategy.
American strategies since the end of the Cold War have fallen short—they have
been laundry lists of wishes or desired end states; have not clearly defined what we want but instead stated vague platitudes; and have often misjudged what we should want.
After the end of the Cold War, American foreign policy elites convinced
themselves that permanent American domination of the entire world was in the
best interests of our country. Yet the affairs of other countries are our concern only if their activities directly threaten our interests.
Our elites badly miscalculated America’s willingness to shoulder forever global
burdens to which the American people saw no connection to the national interest.
They overestimated America’s ability to fund, simultaneously, a massive welfare-
regulatory-administrative state alongside a massive military, diplomatic,
intelligence, and foreign aid complex. They placed hugely misguided and
destructive bets on globalism and so-called “free trade” that hollowed out the very middle class and industrial base on which American economic and military
preeminence depend. They allowed allies and partners to offload the cost of their defense onto the American people, and sometimes to suck us into conflicts and 2 controversies central to their interests but peripheral or irrelevant to our own. And they lashed American policy to a network of international institutions, some of which are driven by outright anti-Americanism and many by a transnationalism that explicitly seeks to dissolve individual state sovereignty. In sum, not only did our elites pursue a fundamentally undesirable and impossible goal, in doing so they undermined the very means necessary to achieve that goal: the character of our nation upon which its power, wealth, and decency were built.
2. President Trump’s Necessary, Welcome Correction
None of this was inevitable. President Trump’s first ad ministration proved that
with the right leadership making the right choices, all of the above could—and
should—have been avoided, and much else achieved. He and his team successfully marshaled America’s great strengths to correct course and begin ushering in a new golden age for our country. To continue the United States on that path is the overarching purpose of President Trump’s second administration, and of thisdocument.
The questions before us now are:
1) What should the United States want?
2) What are our available means to get it? and
3) How can we connect ends and means into a viable National Security Strategy?