Allen Ruff &
Steve Horn*
[An abbreviated version of this article initially appeared at Anti.War.com as "The Pentagon Pitches Its New Staregic Narrative" -AR]
Speaking from the Pentagon press room on January 5, President Obama announced what initially appeared to be a major new strategic course and global military posture for the US. His brief DoD address laid out a redirected focus on East Asia and a reconfiguring of the military machine.[1]
By delivering his policy address from the Pentagon, Obama
set a precedent as the first standing president to do so. His press room
presence at military HQ actually symbolized the leading role that the military high
copmmand now occupies, not just in mapping out war contingencies, but in
shaping broader foreign policy objectives and the related mobilization of domestic
support for the maintenance US globalism.
That shift in the Pentagon’s role, more significant than the
reconfiguration of armed forces announced on January 5th, has been well
underway for some time.[2]
Most significant in regard to the Pentagon as a leader in shaping imperial
policy have been the steps taken to shape domestic public opinion in preparation
for what has been described as a permanent
war.
A public relations pitch for a new “grand strategy,” aimed at mobilizing broad domestic support for that decades-long projection of US power came out in early April 2011. It was issued not by the State Department or intelligence community, but by the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
A public relations pitch for a new “grand strategy,” aimed at mobilizing broad domestic support for that decades-long projection of US power came out in early April 2011. It was issued not by the State Department or intelligence community, but by the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Appearing under the pen name “Mr. Y,” A
National
Strategic
Narrative
has received considerable notice from an expanding circle of foreign policy
planners, think tank academics, public opinion makers and private sector elites.
Its promoters hope it will serve as a blueprint for a new “national consensus,”
a re-branded American globalism capable of winning the “Long War for the 21st century.”
| Matk "Puck" Mykleby |
The document’s actual authors were Navy
Captain
Wayne
Porter
and Marine Colonel Mark “Puck” Mykleby,
two “strategic assistants” to the former head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
(JCS), Admiral Mike Mullen. Ostensibly written in an unofficial “personal”
capacity, the Narrative clearly would not have seen the light of day
without a “sign off” from the JCS and probably then Secretary of Defense,
Robert Gates. It was vetted by key figures in the foreign policy establishment
before its release.
| Captain Wayne Porter |
The anonymous “Mr. Y” consciously referenced the Foreign
Affairs article on “The
Sources of Soviet Conduct” that appeared in 1947 under the pseudonym “Mr.
X.” Actually written by the State Department Russia hand and Moscow envoy, George Kennan, it argued
that an insatiable Soviet expansionism posed the primary threat to world peace
and national security. It came to provide the cornerstone for the U.S. Cold War
“grand strategy” of “containment” – the policy to confine the Soviet Union
within its East Bloc sphere and halt the spread of communism.
As Anne Marie Slaughter,
the State Department’s recent Director of Policy Planning pointed out in her
preface to the newer document, Kennan’s “X article” provided an intellectual
framework, a “narrative that fit the facts of the world… well enough to create
and maintain a loose bipartisan national consensus for forty years.”
The backers of Mr.Y’s piece clearly hope that it will do the
same.
Context Is
Everything…
The Cold War’s end in the early 1990s spelled the demise of
containment as a unifying grand strategy. It brought to a close the popular
framing of the East-West conflict that portrayed the struggle as a moralistic
“good versus evil” ideological crusade which presented the United States as the
“free world” defender against “tyranny” and “totalitarianism.”
As Slaughter pointed out, a new “story” was needed since
such phrasings as “leader of the free world” that encapsulated U.S. power and
the structure of the global order for so long now mean nothing to anyone under
the age of 30, the majority of the world’s population.[3]
With that Cold War narrative gone, it became clear to
foreign policy planners, military strategists, their imperial think tank allies
and corporate elites that a new set of explanations was needed to legitimize
and maintain domestic support for America’s world power position and global
pursuit of new century “national interest.”
Containment or defense against the “Red Menace” and
“communist aggression” had functioned, after all, to win domestic support for
ever-spiraling military spending, unchallenged expansion of the “military
industrial complex,” growth of the national security and surveillance state,
costly wars and interventions abroad, and an American globalism constrained
only by the existence of the Cold War adversary.
The Launch
The National Strategic Narrative was formally issued
by the public-private “non-partisan” think tank, the Woodrow
Wilson
International
Center
at midnight on April 8, 2011. A “roll
out” event that same day at the Center’s Washington DC headquarters was billed
as a kick-off
of
a
“national
conversation”
on the “search for a new national security narrative to guide US policy in the
21st century.”
 |
| Friedman, Slaughter, & Kagan at the Wilson Center |
Prominently featured was Anne Marie Slaughter. The former dean of Princeton’s influential Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, she served as Director of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff under Hillary Clinton. In that capacity, she headed the 2010 Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review (QDDR), the first Presidentially-mandated 4-year assessment of short- medium- and long-term imperial objectives.
Arguing that the “Global War on Terror” was too narrow in
scope, Slaughter previously was co-director of the Princeton Project on National Security, a
mid-2000s multi-year initiative to construct a U.S. national security strategy.
Retruned to Princeton, she also sits on the advisory board of the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), the
increasingly influential liberal hawk think tank serving the Obama
administration.
Slaughter’s Narrative introduction began by noting
that a national
security
strategy
– a definition of “core” national interests and the way to advance them --
already existed and that the “Mr. Y” document was something quite different.
Raising the “fundamental question that more and more
Americans are asking” regarding the U.S. role in the world, she pointed to the
lack of “guiding stars that will illuminate the path along the way.”
She then highlighted the need for “a story with a beginning,
middle, and projected happy ending;” a broadly defined a “national strategic
narrative” with a plot line that could “transcend our political divisions,
orient us as a nation, and give us both a common direction and the confidence
and commitment to get to our destination...” Further on, she described such a
story as “one that all Americans can understand and identify with in their own
lives.”
Slaughter’s Wilson Center remarks emphasized a main theme –
“...that in an interconnected world, the United States must remain the
strongest competitor” and “greatest source of credible influence—the nation
most able to influence what happens in the international sphere—while standing
for security, prosperity, and justice at home and abroad.”
The New Story
Describing an interconnected world filled with both “uncertainty
and opportunity” created by an undefined “globalization,” Porter and Mykleby
pointed to the need for “sustainment (sustainability) over containment,” a U.S.
“place in a complex and dynamic strategic ecosystem,” and a revival of a
liberal international order based upon American values.
As such, the document is loaded with an often contradictory
“good cop, bad cop” rhetoric.
Running through it are constant calls for an increasingly
sophisticated “global engagement” resting on the “3 Ds” of “diplomacy,
development, and defense” – favorable relations and assistance for those
aligned with U.S. interests backed, ultimately by a thinly veiled threat of
sanctions and force for those state and non-state actors displaying, in the
words of the authors, “destructive behaviors.”
Not coincidentally, the same 3-Ds, viewed as “the three legs of U.S. foreign and national security policy,” had already surfaced
as the new mantra coming from the strategic think tanks at Washington’s National Defense University, the closely associated CNAS, the State
Department
and the USAID.
Calling for international cooperation but not mentioning an
increasingly unequal global playing field, the Narrative also emphasizes
the gains to be made from “fair competition,” no longer viewed as a “zero sum
game,” but a “win-win” situation for those involved. The piece also promotes
the increased use of “smart power,” a shift away from a prioritized a “hard
power” focus on military deterrence and defense left over from the East-West
conflict.
Stalwart believers in an American exceptionalism,
Porter and Mykleby also speak of spreading the broadly defined but seemingly
universal “core values” of an abstract “freedom” based upon “fair competition
and hard work,” “a vibrant free market” and “an indomitable entrepreneurial
spirit,” as the “engines of… prosperity.”
Clearly moving away from the Bush era’s “my way or the
highway” unilateralism, their Narrative focuses on maintaining “credibility”
and “influence through example.” Cooperation and free competition, they tell
us, are the best ways to forward an amorphous “national interest” and “world
leadership.”
The idea of “a
whole of nation effort” [5]
combining the “3 D’s’ abroad with “smart growth” on the home front – longer
term investment in the young as “human capital,” sustainable resources, the
environment and infrastructure -- also runs throughout the document.
“Mr. Y” highlighted the need to ensure the nation’s
“sustainable security – on our own soil and wherever Americans and their
interests take them.” It spoke of the need “to develop a plan for the
sustainable access to, cultivation and use of, the natural resources we need for…
continued well-being, prosperity and economic growth in the world marketplace.”
Resting at the heart of the piece, shrouded in the rhetoric
of a revived liberal internationalism, is a concern for maintenance of the
imperial project.
In some sense very much the realist, “Mr.Y” notes that U.S.
strength as a “world leader” was largely derived from its central role in the
global economy. Assuming that the dollar will continue as the international
medium of exchange, the Narrative argues that the American economy will
likely remain the strongest in the world “into the foreseeable future.”
The authors pointed out, however, that “globalization,”
while providing “a cultural, intellectual and social commingling,” had also
increased economic interdependence and made narrowly domestic economic
perspectives an “unattractive impossibility.”
Raising a vague concern about the reality of economic stagnation in the
absence of growth, they pointed out that “prosperity at home” was linked to
economic competition abroad and that overseas “development” would remain “one
of America’s enduring national interests.”
Drawing to a close, the Narrative called for a
“National Security and Prosperity Act,” a modern day equivalent of the 1947 National Security Act,
which at the start of the Cold War merged the US Armed Forces into what became the Department of Defense, and
created the Central Intelligence Agency
and the National Security Council.
The newer act “would integrate policy across agencies and
departments,” and provide for more effective “public/private partnerships” in
order to “converge domestic and foreign policies toward a common purpose.” It
would “provide for policy changes that foster and support the innovation and
entrepreneurialism of America… essential to sustain our qualitative growth as a
people and a nation.”
The country must be prepared for the Long War on all fronts.
The Campaign
In her preface to the Narrative, Anne Marie Slaughter
expressed the hope that it would provide “a first step down a new path.” She
optimistically suggested that all that was needed was for the “politicians,
pundits, journalists, businesspeople, civic leaders, and engaged citizens
across the country to read and respond.” The public relations campaign
immediately got underway.
Mykleby and Porter quickly began appearing before diverse audiences ranging from the ultra-conservative Institute for World Poltics, to environmentalist conclaves, futurist gatherings, and various centrist think tanks in between. They spoke before the annual meeting of the National Rural Assembly, and appeared alongside Slaughter at a recent conference of Pop Tech “a global community of innovators, working together to expand the edge of change.”
Mykleby and Porter quickly began appearing before diverse audiences ranging from the ultra-conservative Institute for World Poltics, to environmentalist conclaves, futurist gatherings, and various centrist think tanks in between. They spoke before the annual meeting of the National Rural Assembly, and appeared alongside Slaughter at a recent conference of Pop Tech “a global community of innovators, working together to expand the edge of change.”
Numbers of articles immediately appeared in the opinion
setting press, such as the New
York
Times
and influential journals such as the Council on Foreign Relations’ Foreign Affairs.
Time Magazine editor, Washington Post columnist and CNN
international commentator Fareed Zakaria gave it full
coverage, subsequently posted on YouTube, and linked
the
full
text
on his website.
The Narrative soon had its own Facebook
page
as the full text or stories about it and its authors spread rapidly on a
diverse range of web news and blog sites,
going from the University of Southern California’s Daily
Trojan
and the University of Wisconsin’s popular “Science is Fun” page, to a
number of military-oriented sites including those for the Marine Corp,
the counter-insurgency focused Small Wars Journal,
and the right-of-center independent Veterans
Today.
Front and Center
at Ft. McNair
The Narrative was the focus of a major two day
conference at the National Defense University at Washington
D.C.’s Fort McNair on November 8-9. “Forging
an
American
Grand
Strategy
– Securing
a
Path
Through
a
Complex
Future”
brought together a number of national security state movers and shakers,
military strategic planners, think tankers, and university pundits to discuss
the ways to mobilize public opinion and support; on how best to win and
maintain “hearts and minds” at home for the Long War.
The symposium
notice
clearly stated the event would not focus on actual warfare or the preparation
for such. The intent, it read, was “to promote a discussion about the elements
of, and prospect for a grand strategy for America.” They convened to discuss
ways of implementing the National Strategic Narrative.
The call noted how the terrain for mapping out a grand
strategy had changed with “the empowerment of individuals or small groups with
new technologies,” post-9/11. It also
observed that, “Some would argue that in a democracy it is not possible to
attain the necessary consensus to craft and implement a national strategy in
the absence of an existential threat” and that, “recent political discourse
lends some credence to that line of reasoning.”
Disagreeing, the conference announcement spoke of the need
to forge that “necessary consensus,” and stated the belief that “an American
grand strategy is not only possible, but critical to the future of the nation.”
It suggested that, “A common strategic vision can do much to focus the
attention and energies of the nation towards a common good.”
The notice quoted Slaughter’s definition of a narrative as
“a story with a beginning, a middle and projected happy ending”needed to orient
the nation and a new consensus. Agreeing with the necessity of such a
“storyline” and “associated ways and means” as “the basis for an American grand
strategy,” the NDU organizers explained that the goal of the conclave would be
to “help illuminate that path to the future…”
The conference
panels
were clearly top-heavy with Department of Defense and NDU associates. The first
panel session, “What is Grand Strategy? (How) Can we develop it? What
should it look like?,” was introduced by Nick
Rostow,
director of the NDU’s Center for Strategic Research and the son of the
Johnson-era liberal war hawk, Eugene Rostow.
Participants included not only Mykleby and Porter, but Robin
Raphel,
formerly the State Department's nonmilitary aid coordinator for Pakistan and a
one-time lobbyist for Pakistan.
The opening keynote featured Leon Fuerth, with the
NDUs Center
for
Technology
and National
Security
Policy,
founder and director of the Project
on
Forward
Engagement
at George Washington University and a National Security Advisor to former Vice
President Al Gore. Viewed as an expert on arms control and “strategic stability”
and somewhat of a futurist, Fuerth more recently has been involved with the Project
on
National
Security
Reform,
the Congressionally-mandated public-private consortium whose 2008 findings
called for a new National Security Act.
| Michele Flournoy |
Most of the two day summit was filled with various panelists
holding forth on the need for Slaughter’s grand strategy “storyline.” A panel
on “Educating Strategists,” in addition to two reps from the NDU’s National War College, featured three
Long Warriors directly tethered to the inter-university Grand
Strategy
Program
network.
One was the associate director of Yale’s
Brady-Johnson
Program
in
Grand
Strategy,
Minh Luong. Another was the CIA
historian Richard Immerman, a former Assistant Deputy Director of
National Intelligence, and head of Temple University’s Center for Force and Diplomacy (CENFAD). Historian Mathew Connelly, Columbia
University’s Hertog Global Strategy Initiative, filled out
that panel.
Clearly, some of the Grand Strategy academics were
successfully transitioning from their campus confines to rub elbows with the
defense establishment elite.
 |
| Peter Feaver |
He heads Duke’s “Program in American Grand Strategy,” and is director of the
Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill strategic planning consortium, the Triangle
Institute
of
Strategic
Studies
(TISS). Moving through the revolving doors that lead to the corridors of power,
he twice served as a staffer to the National Security Council under George W.
Bush.[6]
He also is known within national security state circles as an expert on the
increasingly contentious issue of the separation
of civilian and military authority.
A presence at an increasing number of strategic planning and
“grand strategy”
conclaves,
Feaver also has been involved with the high-level coming together of major
corporate leaders and the military under the auspices of the Secretary of Defense Corporate Fellows Program,
centered at the NDU. A bi-partisan long warrior, he too is affiliated with the
Center for a New American Security.
| David Abshire |
In a language reminiscent of the early Cold War, he stated that, “We are confronted by the decline of America as the leading global power,” and that, “there is a threat as urgent to the nation as in 1861, 1941 and 1947.” The main question for Abshire was, “how to convince the mind of the Chief Executive, as well as the Congressional leadership” of that reality.
Looking ahead to “the task of restoring an America with no peer,” he argued that, “grand strategy can only be realized if it is owned and driven by the President, grounded in domestic strength, and embraced by the American people.” He called for developing a “public strategy – a public consensus around the national Grand Strategy.”
Looking ahead to “the task of restoring an America with no peer,” he argued that, “grand strategy can only be realized if it is owned and driven by the President, grounded in domestic strength, and embraced by the American people.” He called for developing a “public strategy – a public consensus around the national Grand Strategy.”
Back to the
Future?
A major lesson that national warfare state planners clearly took
away from Vietnam revolved around the strategic importance of “winning hearts
and minds” at home. It is a lesson those currently preparing the 21st
Century’s 3-D Long War have taken to heart. It remains uncertain, however,
whether their Strategic Narrative storyline will manage to mobilize the
kinds of broad support for their remodeled imperial project.
First off, the new story lacks the kind of “Red Menace”
“existential threat;” that “scare-the-hell-out-of-‘em”
fear factor that proved so crucial in winning elite backing, public support,
and Congressional appropriations throughout the Cold War.
Filled with an optimism and faith in the country’s “core
values” and the ability of an almost mythic “entrepreneurial spirit” to
overcome new sets of global challenges, the Narrative also avoided any
mention of harsh realities, the specific not so long range challenges facing
the empire.
Such factors as the approaching end of the dollar’s global
hegemony, protracted economic stagnation, competing “national interests” and
ascendant power bloc competition in Asia
and elsewhere, were barely referenced, if at all. Nor was the increasing
inequality between the global “haves” and “have nots” and related instability.
The global scramble for vital resources - especially for
water, oil and gas - and the ever worsening ecological crisis received no
attention beyond some vague talk of “sustainable development.” Nowhere did “Mr.
Y” raise the obvious -- the actual unsustainability of a system propelled by
market-driven “growth and prosperity.”
At the same time, the staying power and strength of the national security corporate state, the might of its military and a media system with its ability to manufacture consent, and the overall imperial consensus of its elites remain firmly in place, unchallenged.
The U.S. actually had a grand strategy long before the Cold
War, dating to the turn of the 20th century. At that time a late
entrant in the quest for empire, the U.S. was locked out of a China market
already partitioned by the major imperial powers. The period’s statesmen and
military promoters, believers in the invincibility of Yankee know-how,
entrepreneurial spirit and inventiveness, steeped in an earlier American
mission storyline, called for “Open
Door” access. Up and coming contenders in a divvied-up world, they too argued
for open competition, free trade and the right to self-defense.
Rhetorically combining an American mission idealism and a strategic
realism, the Persuader-in-Chief’s Pentagon announcement suggested the influence
of the National Strategic Narrative storyline. Facing west with a
reconfigured Pacific vision, Obama launched a back-to-the-future new beginning.
Bets are that the “happy ending” currently being projected is highly unlikely.
****************
* Allen Ruff is a U.S. historian and independent writer on foreign policy issues.
Steve Horn is a Research Fellow at DeSmogBlog, as well as a freelance investigative journalist.
Both live in Madison, Wisconsin
Not to be quoted or reproduced without the permission of the authors
[1]
A post-Iraq move away from large scale ground war strategies still lingering
from the Cold War and a return to an emphasis on sea and air power, Obama’s “Sustaining
US Global Leadership: Priorities for 21st Century Defense"
highlighted a revived “national interest” in the Pacific. The Pentagon
declaration actually marked a “pivot” back toward a century-long strategic
emphasis on an “Open Door” access to Asia, and a staking out of surf and turf
against an ascendant China rival. (http://www.defense.gov/news/Defense_Strategic_Guidance.pdf
)
[2]
Obama’s Pentagon appearance followed a number of advance statements. The President
and Secretary of
State Clinton both made several
recent forays into the Pacific. A major article by Clinton
on “America’s
Pacific Century” appeared in November’s Foreign Policy. In addition,
major national security strategy statements from the White
House and the DoD
have laid out long-term projections for US global reach.
[3] “Mr. Y,” A
National Security Narrative (Washington, D.C.: 2011)
[4] The National Conversation at the Woodrow Wilson Center: In Search of a National Security Narrative for the 21st Century. April 11, 2011
[5]
Like the concept “3-D,” the phrase “whole
of nation effort” appeared in various Pentagon-related documents prior to and
after the appearance of the National Strategic Narrative. For example, see not only the site linked
here, but the text of a speech the March 3, 2010 Kansas Sate University by
Admiral Mike Mullen, head of the JCS when the Narrative was generated.: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:yvcmSaa20rMJ:findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0IAJ/is_1_32/ai_n55087295/+%E2%80%9Ca+whole+of+nation+effort%E2%80%9D+Mullen+Kansas&cd=4&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a0 and http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:vRA7zsROnw8J:www.mda.gov/2011/11/09/on-the-other-side-of-the-hill/+%E2%80%9Ca+whole+of+nation+effort%E2%80%9D&cd=4&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a
[6] Feaver served
on President Clinton's National Security Council staff in 1993 and 1994. He
joined George Bush’s N.S.C. staff as a special adviser in June ‘05 and played a direct role in preparing a document
titled, "Our National Strategy for Victory in Iraq,” that accomapnied the
President’s December, 2005 Naval Academy “Plan for Victory” address
Feaver was recruited after he
and Duke colleagues presented the administration with an analysis of public
opinion polls on the Iraq war that concluded Americans would support a war with
mounting casualties if they believed it would ultimately succeed.
Feaver's Duke colleague and co-author of the work on public tolerance of casualties noted that Bush’s speech and the related document clearly were aimed at American public opinion. (“Bush's Speech on Iraq War Echoes Voice of an Analyst” http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/04/politics/04strategy.html?pagewanted=print )
Feaver's Duke colleague and co-author of the work on public tolerance of casualties noted that Bush’s speech and the related document clearly were aimed at American public opinion. (“Bush's Speech on Iraq War Echoes Voice of an Analyst” http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/04/politics/04strategy.html?pagewanted=print )
