It's time to admit that I'm getting old.  I feel the aches and pains from workouts a bit more keenly.  I have to Google acronyms I see on Twitter all the time.  No matter how hard I try, I just don't feel comfortable wearing an untucked shirt with a blazer.  Only now am I discovering Alison Brie, which makes me way behind the curve.  Most importantly, however, I find myself reading threat assessments made by junior international relations scholars and shaking my head at these young-security-kids-with-their-having-no-memory-of-the-Cold-War. 

To explain where I'm coming from, here's what I wrote a little more than a year ago: 

Terrorism and piracy are certainly security concerns -- but they don't compare to the Cold War. A nuclear Iran is a major regional headache, but it's not the Cold War. A generation from now, maybe China poses as serious a threat as the Cold War Soviet Union. Maybe. That's a generation away, however.... 

I'm about to say something that might be controversial for people under the age of 25, but here goes. You know the threats posed to the United States by a rising China, a nuclear Iran, terrorists and piracy? You could put all of them together and they don't equal the perceived threat posed by the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

I'll stand by that statement, and I'm not the only one here at FP to believe it.  Over the past week, however, I'm seeing some young whippersnappers junior scholars evince a different estimate of threats to U.S. national security. 

Over at Shadow Government, Paul Miller has a four-part series  -- count 'em, one, two, three, four -- of blog posts arguing that the world is a more dangerous place now than before.  He sums up his argument in this concluding section: 

Essentially, the United States thus faces two great families of threats today:  first, the nuclear-armed authoritarian powers, of which there are at least twice as many as there were during the Cold War; second, the aggregate consequences of state failure and the rise of non-state actors in much of the world, which is a wholly new development since the Cold War.  On both counts, the world is more dangerous than it was before 1989.  Essentially take the Cold War, add in several more players with nukes, and then throw in radicalized Islam, rampant state failure, and the global economic recession, and you have today.

I recognize that the world doesn't feel as dangerous as it did during the Cold War.  During the Cold War we all knew about the threat and lived with a constant awareness-usually shoved to the back of ours minds to preserve our sanity-that we might die an instantaneous firey death at any moment.  We no longer feel that way. 

Our feelings are wrong.  The Cold War engaged our emotions more because it was simple, easily understood, and, as an ideological contest, demanded we take sides and laid claim to our loyalties.  Today's environment is more complex and many-sided and so it is harder to feel the threat the same way we used to.  Nonetheless, the danger is real. 

Meh.  Actually, meh squared. 

To be fair to Miller, I do think he is getting at something that has changed over time during the post-Cold War era.  First, the threat envorinment does seem higher now than twenty years ago, as the Soviet Union was about to collapse.  China is more economically powerful, Russia is more revanchist, North, Korea, Pakistan and India have nuclear weapons, the barriers to entry for non-state actors to wreak havoc has gone up.  The likelihood of a conventional great power war is lower, but the likelihood of a serious attack on American soil seems higher than in late 1991.  So in terms of trend, it does feel like the world is less safe. 

What's also changed, however, is the tight coupling of the Cold War security environment (ironically, just as the security environment has become more loosely coupled, the global political economy has become more tightly coupled).  Because the U.S. and U.S.S.R. were such implacable adversaries and because they knew  it, the possibility of a small dispute -- Berlin, Cuba, a downed Korean airliner -- escalating very quickly was ever-present.  The possibility of an accident triggering all-out nuclear war was also higher than was realized at the time.  The current threat environment is more loosely interconnected, in that a small conflict seems less likely to immediately ramp up into another Cuban Missile Crisis.  Indeed, the events of the past year support that point.  Saudi Arabia essentially invaded Bahrain, and Iran did.... very little about it.  The United States deployed special forces into the heart of Pakistan's military complex.  The aftermath of that is undeniably uglier, but it's not we-are-at-DEFCON-ONE kind of ugly.  Miller might be more accurate in saying that there is a greater chance of a security dust-up in today's complex threat environment, but there's a much lower likelihood of those dust-ups spiraling out of control. 

In Miller's calculations, it seems that any country with a nuclear weapon constitutes an equal level of threat.  But that's dubious on multiple grounds.  First, none of the emerging nuclear states have anywhere close to a second-strike capability.  If they were to use their nukes against the United States, I think they know that there's an excellent chance that they don't survive the counterstrike.  Second, the counter Miller provides is that these authoritarian leaders are extra-super-crazy.  I'm not going to defend either the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei or Kim the Younger, but are these leaders more crazy than either Mao or Stalin or Kim Jong Il?  Those are three of the worst leaders in history -- and none of them came close to using nuclear weapons.   Finally, the Pakistan case is instructive -- even after getting nukes, and even after getting very cozy with radical terrorist groups, that country has refrained from escalating hostilities with India to the point of another general war. 

As for the non-state threats, they are disturbing, but I'd posit that on this front the United States really is safer now than it was a decade ago.  The only organization capable of launching a coordinated terrorist strike against the United States is now a husk of its former self.  Indeed, I'd wager that Miller's emotions, or his memory of 9/11, are getting in the way of dispassionate analysis. 

In essence, Miller conflates the number of possible threats with a greater magnitude of threats.  I agree that there are more independent threats to the United States out there at present, but combined, they don't stack up to the Soviet threat.  To put it another way, I prefer avoiding a swarm of mosquitoes to one really ravenous bear. 

In related exaggerated threat analysis, Matthew Kroenig argues in Foreign Affairs that an airstrike on Iran might be the best of a bad set of options in dealing with Iran.  This has set poor Stephen Walt around the bend in response, as op-eds advocating an attack on Iran are wont to do. 

I've generally found both sides of the "attack Iran" debate to be equally dyspeptic, but in this case I do find Kroenig's logic to be a bit odd.  Here's his arguments for why a nuclear Iran is bad and containment is more problematic than a military attack: 

Some states in the region are doubting U.S. resolve to stop the program and are shifting their allegiances to Tehran. Others have begun to discuss launching their own nuclear initiatives to counter a possible Iranian bomb. For those nations and the United States itself, the threat will only continue to grow as Tehran moves closer to its goal. A nuclear-armed Iran would immediately limit U.S. freedom of action in the Middle East. With atomic power behind it, Iran could threaten any U.S. political or military initiative in the Middle East with nuclear war, forcing Washington to think twice before acting in the region. Iran’s regional rivals, such as Saudi Arabia, would likely decide to acquire their own nuclear arsenals, sparking an arms race. To constrain its geopolitical rivals, Iran could choose to spur proliferation by transferring nuclear technology to its allies -- other countries and terrorist groups alike. Having the bomb would give Iran greater cover for conventional aggression and coercive diplomacy, and the battles between its terrorist proxies and Israel, for example, could escalate. And Iran and Israel lack nearly all the safeguards that helped the United States and the Soviet Union avoid a nuclear exchange during the Cold War -- secure second-strike capabilities, clear lines of communication, long flight times for ballistic missiles from one country to the other, and experience managing nuclear arsenals. To be sure, a nuclear-armed Iran would not intentionally launch a suicidal nuclear war. But the volatile nuclear balance between Iran and Israel could easily spiral out of control as a crisis unfolds, resulting in a nuclear exchange between the two countries that could draw the United States in, as well.

These security threats would require Washington to contain Tehran. Yet deterrence would come at a heavy price. To keep the Iranian threat at bay, the United States would need to deploy naval and ground units and potentially nuclear weapons across the Middle East, keeping a large force in the area for decades to come. Alongside those troops, the United States would have to permanently deploy significant intelligence assets to monitor any attempts by Iran to transfer its nuclear technology. And it would also need to devote perhaps billions of dollars to improving its allies’ capability to defend themselves. This might include helping Israel construct submarine-launched ballistic missiles and hardened ballistic missile silos to ensure that it can maintain a secure second-strike capability. Most of all, to make containment credible, the United States would need to extend its nuclear umbrella to its partners in the region, pledging to defend them with military force should Iran launch an attack (emphasis added).

OK, first, exactly who is bandwagoning with Iran?  Seriously, who?  Kroenig provides no evidence, and I'm scratching my head to think of any data points.  The SCAF regime in Egypt has been a bit more friendly, but Turkey's distancing is far more significant and debilitating for Tehran's grand strategy.  Iran's sole Arab ally is in serious trouble, and its own economy is faltering badly.  The notion that time is on Iran 's side seems badly off. 

Second, Kroenig presume that a nuclear Iran would be more aggressive in the region and more likely to have a nuclear exchange with Iran.  I will again point to India/Pakistan.  Despite similar religious divides, and despite the presence of pliable non-state actors, those two countries have successfully kept a nuclear peace.  Kroenig might have an argument that Israel/Iran is different, but it's not in this essay.   Indeed, the bolded section contradicts Kroenig's own argument -- if Iran is not prepared to use its nuclear weapons, it seems unlikely that it will escalate crises to the point where its bluff is called.  If Kroenig's own scholarship suggests that America's nuclear superiority would still be an effective deterrent, then I'm not sure why he portrays the Iran threat in such menacing terms. 

There's more, but this post is long enough anyway.  Both Kroenig and Miller are correct to highlight current threats.  But, to put it gently, until all of these threats, combined, can cause this to happen in under an hour, I'm sleeping soundly. 

Am I missing anything? 

I've whored mingled enough with the magazine world to understand that publishing "best/worst" lists are fun and engaging.  Some choices will be universally acknowledged, others will provoke controversy and debate, and so forth.  Lists are always going to engage the readers.  It's almost impossible to get them wrong. 

I bring this up because The Atlantic's list of the best and worst foreign policy presidents of the past century is really, really wrong. 

Democracy Arsenal's Michael Cohen cobbled together the list.  Here are his criteria: 

After reaching out to host of historians, foreign policy experts, academics and various think tankers here's one stab at answering a question which, in many respects, has no right answer. How you choose the best and worst foreign policy President depends in large measure on what values inform your vision of what a good foreign policy looks like. If you're a foreign policy idealist, Wilson would seem pretty good; a foreign policy realist; you might cast a vote for George H.W Bush or even Richard Nixon. If you prefer your presidents to talk tough, Harry Truman might be your man; if you prefer a more modest and less partisan figure, Dwight Eisenhower might float your boat.

As my list suggests, I tend to lean toward the more restrained, pragmatic realists who are suspicious about the use of force. Conversely, I'm more wary of not only the idealistic and ideologically driven presidents, but also those who use foreign policy, most destructively, as a tool of domestic politics.

OK, fair enough.  Here's his list: 

The Five Best Presidents:  1) FDR; 2) Dwight Eisenhower; 3) George H.W. Bush; 4) Ronald Reagan; 5) John F. Kennedy

The Five Worst Presidents:  1) LBJ; 2) Jimmy Carter; 3) Woodrow Wilson; 4) Harry Truman; 5) Richard Nixon. 

I'll let Tom Ricks rebut the JFK assessment on his own blog.  I'll let my readers make other objections -- and there are many ones to make -- with most of he list.  My problem is with the assessment of Harry Truman as, somehow, one of the five worst foreign policy presidents of the last century. 

Here's Cohen's explanation -- let's do this by paragraph, shall we? 

Harry Truman has in the nearly 50 years since he left the White House grown significantly in the estimation of both the public and many historians. To be sure, he deserves enormous credit for protecting and stabilizing Western Europe with the Marshall Plan and the creation of NATO. These are signal achievements but as historians from Robert Dallek and Walter Lafeber to Fredrik Logevall have suggested there is a pretty significant downside to Truman's presidency as well.

One must stop here or a second and admire Cohen's ability to glom most of Truman's foreign policy accomplishments into a single sentence.  That takes some doing.  One could have at least noted that in the span of five years Truman and his foreign  policy advisors created pragmatic institutions that not only withstood the Cold War but prospered even after it ended.  Nope, nothing on that point.  That takes some serious doing. 

OK, let's move onto Truman's alleged defects:  

First there was Korea. An impulsive response to a cross-border attack that re-shaped American foreign policy. It was the final nail in the coffin of the more modest containment strategy proposed by George Kennan and by default enshrined the notion that the US had a responsibility to contain Communism wherever it showed its fangs.  But while the decision to go to war can be considered a debatable one; the failure in rein in Douglas MacArthur's push to the Yalu River, which triggered a Chinese intervention is a disaster that can't be washed away (even by Truman's later decision to fire the general). Considering that more than 20 million North Koreans continue to live in terrible hardship today because of that decision only compounds the mistake (emphasis added).

Why yes, that's so true.  Had Truman not decided to respond in force in Korea, there wouldn't be 20 million North Koreans living in terrible hardship -- there would be at least 60 million Koreans living in terrible hardship. 

Seriously, this line of reasoning makes no sense to me.  I understand but strongly disagree with the logic that intervening in Korea was a mistake.  I understand and kinda agree with the contention that crossing the 38th parallel was exceedingly costly in terms of blood and treasure.  I simply can't understand, however, the argument that had the U.S. not made that push, North Korea would have evolved differently.  Would Kim-Il Sung have abandoned juche if MacArthur hadn't tried for the Yalu? 

Speaking of MacArthur, you can't acknowledge Truman's failure to rein him in without also acknowledging that by firing MacArthur, Truman cemented civilian control over the military just as the size of the U.S. military was reaching a new high. 

Onward!!

Beyond Korea, the Truman Doctrine and its declaration that it was the "policy of the United States to support free people who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures" laid the groundwork for the limitless definition of US national interests that unfolded over the next 60 years. As Kennan would later note, it was one thing to contain Communism in Europe (a goal on which Truman succeeded). It was quite another to broaden that goal to the rest of the world. There is, as a result, a straight line between Truman's foreign policy choices and the war in Vietnam.

Right, this is why Eisenhower felt compelled to intervene in Vietnam during Dien Bien Phu -- oh, wait, as Cohen points out in his Eisenhower write-up, he did the exact opposite of that.  I don't buy straight-line arguments that take two decades to play out.   

Then there was Truman's use of anti-Communist rhetoric for political advantage that turned what might have been a balance of power, geo-political clash into an ideological one. This, of course, also helped to politicize the Cold War in the United States and heightened the issue of anti-Communism. Indeed, few Presidents more flagrantly used foreign policy as a political punching bag as frequently as Truman.

I'd be more charitable towards this point if Cohen hadn't also said that Eisenhower "used Cold War fears to push for national highway system and more money for higher education, two smart national security investments."  When is using foreign policy fears at home good and when is it bad, exactly?  Based on Cohen's list, I can't tell. 

Finally, ask yourself a counter-factual: how would the Cold War have unfolded if FDR had lived out his fourth term, rather than having the inexperienced Truman become the leader of the Free World? It's not hard to imagine that the tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union, so deftly handled by FDR during WWII, would have been minimized and a less militarist and dangerous conflict might have emerged. At the very least, as Robert Dallek points out even if superpower, ideological conflict between the US and Soviet Union was inevitable, Truman never really sought to find an alternative (emphasis added).

Again, I'm not sure what to make of this.  First, Cohen acknowledged that FDR "sold out the Eastern Europe countries at Yalta."  Does he believe that FDR would have somehow been able to repulse Stalin in Iran, Greece, Turkey and elsewhere without a Cold War -- or do those countries not matter? 

Second, if the bipolar distribution of power made superpower conflict inevitable, why exactly should Truman be blamed for not dickering around with alternatives that would have crashed and burned?  According to this logic, Truman is one of the five worst foreign policy presidents of the last century because he failed to pursue unfeasible options.  I'm sorry, but clearly I don't get it. 

In his blog post explaining the list, Cohen acknowledges that: 

I'm probably far too generous to John F. Kennedy, who makes the best list, and far too harsh to Richard Nixon, who makes the worst list. This is a pretty fair critique and if I had my druthers I'd put both men somewhere in the middle, but the need for editorial symmetry was too strong!

Fair enough -- but I'm sorry, listing Harry Truman as one of the five-worst foreign policy presidents is absurd. 

Am, I missing anything? 

Fareed Zakaria's Washington Post column today opens as follows:

Every few months, commentators find a new grand strategy that animates Barack Obama. First he was the antiwar candidate, because his rise in the Democratic primaries had much to do with his early and consistent opposition to the Iraq war. But even some on the right, including Robert Kagan, pointed out that he was interventionist on other issues, such as Afghanistan. Some criticized his multilateralism, pointing to his offers of engagement to all comers, from Iran to Russia to China. More recently, watching his vigorous outreach to Asian countries threatened by China, the scholar Daniel Drezner concluded that the new grand strategy was one of “counterpunching.”

In fact, the search itself is misguided. The doctrinal approach to foreign policy doesn’t make much sense anymore. Every American foreign policy “doctrine” but one was formulated during the Cold War, for a bipolar world, when American policy toward one country — the Soviet Union — dominated all U.S. strategy and was the defining aspect of global affairs. (The Monroe Doctrine is the exception.) In today’s multipolar, multilayered world, there is no central hinge upon which all American foreign policy rests. Policymaking looks more varied, and inconsistent, as regions require approaches that don’t necessarily apply elsewhere (emphasis added).

A minor point and then a major point.  Minor point:  as I said before, there's a difference between a foreign policy "doctrine" and a grand strategy, and Zakaria is conflating the two here. 

The major point:  the whole "world is too complex and multilayered to fit into a grand strategy" sounds great -- except that it is precisely in this kind of uncertain environment when countries need to prioritize what's important and what's not.  Or, as I phrased it in Foreign Affairs: 

A grand strategy consists of a clear articulation of national interests married to a set of operational plans for advancing them. Sometimes, such strategies are set out in advance, with actions following in sequence. Other times, strategic narratives are offered as coherent explanations connecting past policies with future ones. Either way, a well-articulated grand strategy can offer an interpretative framework that tells everybody, including foreign policy officials themselves, how to understand the administration's behavior.

That's what a coherent grand strategy should provide.  Admittedly, it's much easier to do this when a single overarching threat exists -- but it's still necessary in a complex world. 

Zakaria seems to equate a grand strategy with rigidity, but that's hardly necessary.  Linking back to my previous post on whether Reagan was really a Reaganite, one could argue that Reagan's greatest strength was his ability to simultaneously articulate a toghness in his rhetoric but have a political gifts to make exceptions when necessary.  This is the only way a president who traded arms for hostages, negotiated with terrorists, refused to escalate a crisis with the Soviet Union, cut and ran after a terrorist attack, and came veeery close to negotiating a nuclear-free world with the Soviet Union could have the reputaion as a hawk.   

I agree with Zakaria that there are times when grand strategy is not necessary -- but this ain't one of them.  Or, to repeat what I said back in April: 

[I]f I were Obama's foreign policy team, I'd start thinking very hard about a speech that clearly prioritizes American interests and values.  Because unless the president defines his grand strategy, pundits will be more than happy to define it -- badly -- for him.

I have an essay in the July/August issue of Foreign Affairs entitled, "Does Obama Have a Grand Strategy?"  

I daresay the title is pretty self-explanatory.  It's subscriber only temporarily accessible to non-subscribers --  but here's the gist: 

Despite what its critics say, the Obama administration has actually had not just one grand strategy so far but two. The first strategy, multilateral retrenchment, was designed to curtail the United States' overseas commitments, restore its standing in the world, and shift burdens onto global partners. This strategy was clearly articulated, but it delivered underwhelming policy results.

The second, emergent grand strategy is focused on counterpunching. More recently, the Obama administration has been willing to assert its influence and ideals across the globe when challenged by other countries, reassuring allies and signaling resolve to rivals. This strategy has performed better but has been poorly articulated. It is this vacuum of interpretation that the administration's critics have rushed to fill. Unless and until the president and his advisers define explicitly the strategy that has been implicit for the past year, the president's foreign policy critics will be eager to define it--badly--for him.

That's the thesis, but to be honest, my favorite passage also happens to be the snarkiest: 

If grand strategies are so overrated, why the furious debate? For two reasons, one petty and one substantive. The petty reason is that everyone in the U.S. foreign policy community secretly hopes to be the next Kennan. When a commentator bewails the failings of the United States' grand strategy, it is usually because he has scribbled down his own set of musings on the topic. Indeed, complaints about grand strategy have plagued every U.S. administration since the end of World War II for precisely this reason. Grand strategies are easy to devise-they are forward-looking, operate in generalities, and make for great book tours. Whenever a foreign policy commentator articulates a new grand strategy, an angel gets its wings.

It's funny because it's true. 

[What's the substantive reason?  Tell me!!  TELL ME!!--ed.  You'll have to read the whole thing to find out.]

After last night's speech on Libya, there's been an orgy of online discourse about whether there is now an Obama Doctrine or not.  All of which is making me feel very, very guilty. 

See, back in early 2009, I wrote one of the earlier posts about whether there was an Obama Doctrine or not.  Glenn Thrush quoted that post in Politico last week, which led to a lot of media inquiries on the matter.   Regardless of what I say on the subject, the topic du jour appears to be whether there is now an Obama Doctrine and how it holds up as a grand strategy.

I don't have the time today to write up my substantive thoughts on the matter, but I do think it would be useful to at least define the terms properly. 

First, on the Obama Doctrine -- unfortunately, foreign policy discourse being what it is, that "XXX Doctrine" has devolved into a meaningless catchphrase coined by news outlets the first time that an administration initiates military or quasi-military force.*  Whenever that happens, the news networks go into paroxysms of speculation about whether such action signals a new doctrine.  Based on Obama's speech last night, it seems pretty clear that the answer to that question on Libya is a clear "no," so I don't think we need to go there. 

Second, even if Libya did lead to an Obama Doctrine, that doesn't equate to a grand strategy.  The Reagan Doctrine, for example, had actual policy content -- it meant the arming and aiding of anti-communist guerillas in peripheral communist countries like Nicaragua or Afghanistan.  Not even the fiercest Reagan acolyte would agree that the Reagan Doctrine was America's grand strategy during the 1980's.  It was rather a policy that was part of the larger strategy of containing Soviet communism. 

Obama did not clearly articulate a grand strategy last night (and just as well, since his delivery was pretty weak).  He has tried to do so in his previous speeches and strategy documents, with variable results.  Far more important that what is said at the beginning of an administration is how Big Decisions are articulated ex post.

In that sense, Dan Nexon is right to say that Obama shouldn't have articulated a grand strategy out of what was clearly an exceptional decision due to exceptional circumstances.  That said, if I were Obama's foreign policy team, I'd start thinking very hard about a speech without the phrase "false choice" in it that clearly prioritizes American interests and values.  Because unless the president defines his grand strategy, pundits will be more than happy to define it -- badly -- for him. 

*Clear exceptions include those doctrines clearly articulated or embraced by Monroe, Teddy Roosevelt, Truman, Nixon, and Reagan.

In Theories of International Politics and Zombies, I noted that "one can only speculate" what great power governments were doing to prepare for the contingency of an attack of the undead.  One could argue that the absence of any mention of zombies in the Wikileaks cables suggests that no planning has taken place -- but one would assume that scenarios involving the undead would be classified as Top Secret or higher. 

Courtesy of the New York Times' William Glaberson, however, we now know that the State of New York is thinking seriously about this problem:

Major disasters like terrorist attacks and mass epidemics raise confounding issues for rescuers, doctors and government officials. They also pose bewildering legal questions, including some that may be painful to consider, like how the courts would decide who gets life-saving medicine if there are more victims than supplies.

But courts, like fire departments and homicide detectives, exist in part for gruesome what-ifs. So this month, an official state legal manual was published in New York to serve as a guide for judges and lawyers who could face grim questions in another terrorist attack, a major radiological or chemical contamination or a widespread epidemic.

Quarantines. The closing of businesses. Mass evacuations. Warrantless searches of homes. The slaughter of infected animals and the seizing of property. When laws can be suspended and whether infectious people can be isolated against their will or subjected to mandatory treatment. It is all there, in dry legalese, in the manual, published by the state court system and the state bar association.

Uh-huh... this is for "radiological" or "chemical" contaminations.  Ok.  Right.  Wake up and smell the rotting corpses of the undead, people!!!!!

Seriously, fhe foreword of the New York State Public Health Legal Manual (.pdf) opens with the following explanation/justification: 

 

In today's world, we face many natural and man-made catastrophic threats, including the very real possibility of a global influenza outbreak or other public health emergency that could infect millions of people. While it is impossible to predict the timing or severity of the next public health emergency, our government has a responsibility to anticipate and prepare for such events. An important element of this planning process is advance coordination between public health authorities and our judicial and legal systems. The major actors in any public health crisis must understand the governing laws ahead of time, and must know what their respective legal roles and responsibilities are. What is the scope of the government's emergency and police powers? When may these be invoked, and by which officials? What are the rights of people who may be quarantined or isolated by government and public health officials?

These questions must be researched and answered now-not in the midst of an emergency-so that the responsible authorities have a readymade resource to help them make quick, effective decisions that protect the public interest.

Are planning documents like this useful?  Yes and no.  On the one hand, this kind of thing is a classic example of what Lee Clarke would refer to as a "fantasy document."  In Mission Improbable:  Using Fantasy Documents to Tame Disaster, Clarke argued that plans like these have little chance of success, because an actual crisis contains too much randomness to plan out in advance.  They serve primarily as a way for the state to soothe the the public that Someone Is In Charge and will provide control, order, and stability.  Similarly, Anthony Cordesman argued in October 2001 that pre-crisis government efforts to handle this kind of emergency are likely to disintegrate once the actual crisis emerges. 

On the other hand, as many contributors argued in Avoiding Trivia, even if the plans themselves never work out, the effort to plan can be useful both for crisis and non-crisis situations.  This kind of exercise forces bureaucrats and officials to think about what standard operatijngf procedures won't be so standard in a post-disaster environment.  It also serves as a form of mental aerobics to prepare to the truly unknown unknowns. 

So, on the one hand, kudos to the New York State legal community for thinking about these questions.  On the other hand, I doubt that things will go according to plan.  Plus, I'm really curious to hear whether they think habeas corpus applies to the living dead. 

John Mearsheimer has the lead essay in the latest issue of The National Interest. Entitled "Imperial by Design," the main thesis is not going to shock anyone familiar with Mearsheimer's theoretical and policy writings over the past two decades:

The root cause of America's troubles is that it adopted a flawed grand strategy after the Cold War. From the Clinton administration on, the United States rejected [grand strategies of offshore balancing or selective engagement], instead pursuing global dominance, or what might alternatively be called global hegemony, which was not just doomed to fail, but likely to backfire in dangerous ways if it relied too heavily on military force to achieve its ambitious agenda.

The rest of the article details the flawed strategies pursued by the Clinton and Bush administrations, and then closes with this warning:

The United States needs a new grand strategy. Global dominance is a prescription for endless trouble -- especially in its neoconservative variant. Unfortunately, the Obama administration is populated from top to bottom with liberal imperialists who remain committed to trying to govern the world, albeit with less emphasis on big-stick diplomacy and more emphasis on working with allies and international institutions. In effect, they want to bring back Bill Clinton's grand strategy....

President Obama is making a serious mistake heading down this road. He should instead return to the grand strategy of offshore balancing, which has served this country well for most of its history and offers the best formula for dealing with the threats facing America -- whether it be terrorism, nuclear proliferation or a traditional great-power rival.

Mearsheimer's essay has drawn praise from others at FP, but I confess to finding it conceptually fuzzier than most of his other work.

He's positing that a global dominance strategy doesn't work, and that the post-Cold War era demonstrates that it doesn't work. To demonstrate this, however, he focuses the overwhelming majority of the essay on the Bush administration. Fair enough, except that he's arguing that Obama is copying Bill Clinton and not George W. Bush. Here is the entirety of Mearsheimer's discussion of the Clinton period:

Bill Clinton was the first president to govern exclusively in the post-Cold War world, and his administration pursued global dominance from start to finish. Yet Clinton's foreign-policy team was comprised of liberal imperialists; so, although the president and his lieutenants made clear that they were bent on ruling the world-blatantly reflected in former-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's well-known comment that "if we have to use force, it is because we are America; we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future"-they employed military force reluctantly and prudently. They may have been gung ho about pushing the unipolar moment onward and upward, but for all their enthusiasm, even these democracy promoters soon saw that nation building was no easy task.

During his first year in office, Clinton carelessly allowed the United States to get involved in nation building in Somalia. But when eighteen American soldiers were killed in a firefight in Mogadishu in October 1993 (famously rendered in Black Hawk Down), he immediately pulled U.S. troops out of the country. In fact, the administration was so spooked by the fiasco that it refused to intervene during the Rwandan genocide in the spring of 1994, even though the cost of doing so would have been small. Yes, Clinton did commit American forces to Haiti in September 1994 to help remove a brutal military regime, but he had to overcome significant congressional opposition and he went to great lengths to get a U.N. resolution supporting a multinational intervention force. Most of the American troops were out of Haiti by March 1996, and at no time was there a serious attempt at nation building.

Clinton did talk tough during the 1992 presidential campaign about using American power against Serbia to halt the fighting in Bosnia, but after taking office, he dragged his feet and only used airpower in 1995 to end the fighting. He went to war against Serbia for a second time in 1999 -- this time over Kosovo -- and once again would only rely on airpower, despite pressure to deploy ground forces from his NATO commander, General Wesley Clark, and then-British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

By early 1998, the neoconservatives were pressuring Clinton to use military force to remove Saddam Hussein. The president endorsed the long-term goal of ousting the Iraqi leader, but he refused to go to war to make that happen. The United States under Bill Clinton was, as Richard Haass put it, a "reluctant sheriff." (emphasis added)

There are some factual errors in this account (Clinton did not pull out immediately after the Black Hawk Down incident -- in fact, he bolstered U.S. forces and then withdrew six months later). More importantly, however, the policies described in this section suggest that Mearsheimer is going Vizzini on the phrase "global dominance." There's very little in the quoted section that bears resemblance to the bolded statement -- at best, it looks imperial by accident rather than design. That doesn't sound like a global dominance strategy to me -- and nowhere in this section does Mearsheimer describe the strategic costs that came with Clinton's approach.

(Maybe one could argue that Clinton's reluctant successes in Bosnia and Kosovo paradoxically bolstered Americans' faith in the utility of force, and that this faith paved the way for neoconservatism to pursue a more militarized approach. But Mearsheimer doesn't make that argument, and I don't think it holds up terribly well).

Mearsheimer is warning us that Obama is trying to replicate Clinton's grand strategy (though he offers minimal evidence to support this assertion). His implicit argument is that Clinton's strategy was a disaster, but he provides no evidence to support this assertion, and I don't think it's obviously correct either.

Instead, Mearsheimer devotes page after page to chronicling the errors of the Bush administration's grand strategy. Which is fine, but after the 5,476th evisceration of the neoconservative grand strategy, diminishing marginal returns do start to kick in. Bush 43's errors of strategy, management and implementation are pretty sui generis, to the point where it's dangerous to generalize from the Bush administration to the entire post-Cold War era.

Maybe offshore balancing is the right grand strategy to pursue, the Clintonian approach was blinkered, and Obama's approach is flawed. These are good propositions to debate and argue. The tragedy of Mearsheimer's "Imperial By Design" is that all of these points are asserted rather than argued.

North Korea has spent the past week demanding that someone pay attention to them.  In response, online policy recommendations have ranged from Thomas P.M. Barnett's doubling down on strategic patience to Glenn Reynolds recommendation that the U.S. nuke North Korea "if they start anything."  

The IR wing of the blogosphere is pretty pessimistic about the current situation.  Rob Farley concludes:

North Korean behavior has vexed Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and now Barack Obama. The difficulty doesn't lie with the delusions or incompetence of any American administration, although the United States has suffered from its fair share of both. Rather, reaching a conclusive agreement with North Korea is simply beyond the capabilities of the United States. Under current circumstances, North Korea cannot be "solved"; it can only be managed.

In a follow-up post, Farley is even more pessimistic:

The best we can do now is hope for change internal to North Korea, which need not necessarily take the form of full-scale regime change. I suspect that Kim Jong Il needs to be dead before any meaningful change can happen, not necessarily because he’s particularly crazy or irrational, but rather because the impending succession crisis makes any diplomatic maneuver more difficult for North Korea. I should hasten to add that I don’t support military action in the service of regime change; the costs are virtually incalculable. I do think that military response is one necessary managerial tool for the relationship, but it is critically important that any response to specific provocations is measured, limited, and spearheaded by South Korea.

 Dan Nexon looks at the strategic calculus and concludes that escalation won't happen:

[N]one of this suggests an alteration in the basic factors that restrain Seoul:

a)  Before they collapse, North Korean forces will kill a lot of South Koreans and do a lot of damage to South Korea's economy;

b)  The United States has no appetite for taking part in an additional large-scale military conflict;

c)  Uncertainty surrounding Beijing's likely actions in the event of a conflict; and

d)  The significant challenges that would come from assuming control of North Korean territory if the conflict leads to ROK victory in a full-blown war. 

These four factors--two of which aren't particularly manipulable--make significant escalation unlikely.

Erik Voeten notes that if the reason for the current dust-ups are internal rather than external, then escalation would be a bad move:

If this is a provocation as usual, then new negotiations and concessions may "work" in the sense that they will quiet the North Koreans until they feel the need to provoke again. If [Victor] Cha is right, then the North Korean leadership may actually want to see a limited military response that they can defend themselves against in some heroic fashion.

Finally, here at FP, both Michael Green and Steve Walt recommend that the U.S.not play into Pyongyang's hands by overreaqcting, and try reach some accord with China over what to do with the preoblem child of Northeast Asia.  Aidan Foster-Carter argues that... er... well, to be honest, I'm not entirely sure what he's arguing.  He starts by saying that there's no way Beijing is going to rein in its bestest ally, but then he observes that since China is North Korea's only ally, "if [North Korea's leaders] have an ounce of sense, they must know the old game is up. Militant mendicancy won't cut it any more; no one will buy that old horse again."  So damned if I know what he's saying.

Speaking for myself, the artillery barrage, although scary, is not what scares me about the stituation.  No, the guided tour of their new light water nuclear reactor facility is the real game-changer on the Korean penunsula, because it undercuts the U.S. policy of strategic patience.  See, 18 months ago, I wrote:

I think maybe, just maybe, the international community has found a status quo that makes the North Koreans less comfortable than everyone else.  Assuming that the interdiction and sanctions regime works well -- which is a robust but not entirely unreasonable assumption -- then North Korea gets nothing for thumbing its nose at the world except some more weapons-grade fissile material. 

That's not nothing, but it's not all that much either.  Pyongyang already has a deterrent to prevent invasion.  It can't threaten nuclear blackmail all that persuasively, because it's a pretty hollow threat on their part.  And if they can't sell their technology to other countries, then there's no profit in it for them either.  Which means they're stuck, wallowing in their own barren dirt.

The fast development of a light-water reactor -- during a period when the DPRK leadership has been kinda busy with an uncertain leadership transition -- changes the strategic calculus.  It suggests that North Korea has not been contained; instrad, Pyongyang has been able to ramp up a technologically sophisticated prograqm during the time period when that task should have been fantastically difficult.   

How did this happen?  At least one of the following things must be true:

1)  North Korea has developed an indigenous group of nuclear researchers with sufficient brainpower and access to resources to move forward in the nuclear arena;

2)  Despite the best efforts of everyone involved, the sanctions/interdiction regime is leaking like a sieve.

3)  Elements of the Chinese leadership are saying "f*** it" and assisting the DPRK in their nuclear program. 

4)  The entire Chinese leadership is saying "f*** it"  and assisting the DPRK in their nuclear program. 

If (1)  or (4) are the problems, they can't be fixed.  North Korea won't stop, and telling the Chinese to act contrary to their own perceived interest isn't a viable strategy.  I'm not really sure that (2) is the problem, but ramping up Proliferation Security Initiative efforts does force Beijing to sit up and pay notice, since it really means a lot more unfriendly warships in its backyard, which might affect (3) or (4).  It probably won't cause the Chinese to change their mind, however.  (3) might be fixable, but I doubt it.  Beijing's slow-motion response to the latest contretemps suggests that if the problem is a divided foreign policy leadership in Beijing, then it's a problem that won't be going away anytime soon.  Meanwhile, the sanctions regime will falter. 

So, for now, I'd advocate increasing the PSI presence surrounding North Korea while demonstrating a receptivity to talks if/when Pyongyang drops the  brinksmanship routine.  Very reluctantly, I'm beginning to wonder if it's time to call the North Koreans in their game of Crazy No Limit Texas Hold 'Em.  Voeten hypothesizes that a low-level military attack would be just the thing Kim the Older would need to boost support for Kim the Younger.  A more costly military attack -- say, the Yongbyon facility -- might have the reverse effect, however. 

Of course, the problem with that option is that the North Koreans could respond by ramping up the retaliation.  This is why I'm only beginning to wonder about this possibility.  There really is a point, however, after which Pyongyang doesn't want this to escalate -- because in an all-out war, North Korea really does lose. 

The question is whether that point can be located without a Second Korean War breaking out as a result.  That risk is what gives me serious pause about considering any military option. 

Increasingly, however, I don't think the status quo can hold. 

Brilliant and original policy ideas are welcomed in the comments section. 

Keith Bradsher reports on the latest move in Chinese economic statecraft:

China, which has been blocking shipments of crucial minerals to Japan for the last month, has now quietly halted some shipments of those materials to the United States and Europe, three industry officials said this week.

The Chinese action, involving rare earth minerals that are crucial to manufacturing many advanced products, seems certain to further intensify already rising trade and currency tensions with the West. Until recently, China typically sought quick and quiet accommodations on trade issues. But the interruption in rare earth supplies is the latest sign from Beijing that Chinese leaders are willing to use their growing economic muscle.

"The embargo is expanding" beyond Japan, said one of the three rare earth industry officials, all of whom insisted on anonymity for fear of business retaliation by Chinese authorities.

They said Chinese customs officials imposed the broader restrictions on Monday morning, hours after a top Chinese official summoned international news media Sunday night to denounce United States trade actions....

The signals of a tougher Chinese trade stance come after American trade officials announced on Friday that they would investigate whether China was violating World Trade Organization rules by subsidizing its clean energy exports and limiting clean energy imports. The inquiry includes whether China's steady reductions in rare earth export quotas since 2005, along with steep export taxes on rare earths, are illegal attempts to force multinational companies to produce more of their high-technology goods in China.

Despite a widely confirmed suspension of rare earth shipments from China to Japan, now nearly a month old, Beijing has continued to deny that any embargo exists.

Industry executives and analysts have interpreted that official denial as a way to wield an undeclared trade weapon without creating a policy trail that could make it easier for other countries to bring a case against China at the World Trade Organization.

So far, China seems to be taking a similar approach in expanding the embargo to the West.

Hat tip to Will Winecoff, who asks, quite reasonably, "What in samhell is China thinking?"

Assuming that the New York Times story is accurate, there are three ways to think about what Beijing is doing. First, this could just be all about domestic politics. Bradsher notes that the decision was made after a Central Committee meeting. It's possible that as the currency wars heat up, and as the U.S. starts complaining to the WTO, there was a need to assuage some nationalist outrage. Of course, no one really knows what Chinese domestic politics looks like, so who the hell knows how much validity to give to this argument.

The second way to look at it is that China's leaders have been reading The Sanctions Paradox. I argued in that book that high expectations of future conflict between the sanctioning and the sanctioned state would lead to frequent episodes of economic coercion, but each attempt would yield only minimal concessions. So far, this model holds up: the past month of China's rare earth export controls have yielded them exactly one returned fishing boat captain. Maybe they are hoping that extending the ban to the United States will force Washington to back down in their WTO complaints. Given rising conflict expectations, that's about the most they're going to get from this action.

The third way to think about it is that China is being ridiculously short-sighted in their use of economic coercion. As Patrick Chovanec notes at Seeking Alpha:

[China] really shot itself in the foot. By flexing its muscles so eagerly, over a relatively minor incident, it alarmed its customers and possibly frightened them off, when a softer approach might have lulled them into continued and deepening dependence. There's no question that China can extract rare earths at the cheapest price, in purely monetary terms. But now China's trading partners must be seriously wondering, what could the real price amount to, when the bill eventually comes due?

China's foreign economic policies with respect to raw materials suggests that Beijing doesn't think market forces matter all that much -- what matters is physical control over the resources. This is a pretty stupid way of thinking about how raw materials markets function, and it's going to encourage some obvious policy responses by the rest of the world. Non-Chinese production of rare earths will explode over the next five years as countries throw subsidy after subsidy at spurring production. Given China's behavior, not even the most ardent free-market advocate will be in a position to argue otherwise.

More importantly, China's perception of how economic power is wielded in the global political economy is going to have ripple effects across other capitals. If enough governments start reacting to China's economic statecraft by taking similar steps to reduce interdependence with that country, then China will have created a self-fulfilling prophecy in which geopolitics trumps economics. Another possibility is that the rest of the world will operate as before in dealing with each other, but treat China differently, developing CoCom-like structures and fostering the creation of explicit economic blocs.

That really would be the worst of both worlds for Beijing. China is growing, but the economic weight of countries that prefer market-oriented ways of doing business is still much, much larger.

In going for the short-term gain, China is inviting a long-term containment policy. That might allow for some rally-round-the-flag support at home, but it's going to be a massive net loss for their economy.

There's been a lot of oh-my-God-China-is-eating-America's-lunch-have-you-seen-how-pretty-their-infrastructure-is?-kind of blather among the commentariat. And, to be sure, China has had a good Great Recession. But one of the points I've been making on this blog repeatedly is that, for all of China's supposed deftness, "China's continued rise seems to be occurring in spite of strategic miscalculations, not because of them."

Now, I had also assumed that China's leadership would quickly move down the learning curve and practice a more subtle form of statecraft. After reading Keith Bradsher in the New York Times today, however, I guess I was wrong:

Sharply raising the stakes in a dispute over Japan’s detention of a Chinese fishing trawler captain, the Chinese government has blocked exports to Japan of a crucial category of minerals used in products like hybrid cars, win turbines and guided missiles.

Chinese customs officials are halting shipments to Japan of so-called rare earth elements, preventing them from being loaded aboard ships this week at Chinese ports, three industry officials said Thursday.

On Tuesday, Prime Minister Wen Jiabao personally called for Japan’s release of the captain, who was detained after his vessel collided with two Japanese Coast Guard ships about 40 minutes apart as he tried to fish in waters controlled by Japan but long claimed by China. Mr. Wen threatened unspecified further actions if Japan did not comply.

Is this effort at economic statecraft going to accomplish Beijing's objectives? In a word, no. True, according to Bradsher, "China mines 93 percent of the world’s rare earth minerals, and more than 99 percent of the world’s supply of some of the most prized rare earths." 

It's also true, however, that Japan has been stockpiling supplies of rare earths. Furthermore, this kind of action is just going to lead to massive subsidies to produce rare earths elsewherein the world (including the United States) and/or develop rare earth substitutes. Oh, and one other thing -- given the spate of flare-ups between Japan and China as of late, the last thing Tokyo will want to do is back down in the face of Chinese economic coercion. 

Don't get me wrong -- if China persists in this ban, there will be come economic costs to the rest of the world. Those costs just won't translate into any political concessions. [UPDATE: The Wall Street Journal has an excellent follow-up story suggesting that China is not imposing a ban.] 

It is hardly surprising that (reported) actions like these are leading the entire Pacific Rim right to Washington's door: 

[R]ising frictions between China and its neighbors in recent weeks over security issues have handed the United States an opportunity to reassert itself — one the Obama administration has been keen to take advantage of.

Washington is leaping into the middle of heated territorial disputes between China and Southeast Asian nations despite stern Chinese warnings that it mind its own business. The United States is carrying out naval exercises with South Korea in order to help Seoul rebuff threats from North Korea even though China is denouncing those exercises, saying that they intrude on areas where the Chinese military operates.

Meanwhile, China’s increasingly tense standoff with Japan over a Chinese fishing trawler captured by Japanese ships in disputed waters is pushing Japan back under the American security umbrella....

“The U.S. has been smart,” said Carlyle A. Thayer, a professor at the Australian Defense Force Academy who studies security issues in Asia. “It has done well by coming to the assistance of countries in the region.”

“All across the board, China is seeing the atmospherics change tremendously,” he added. “The idea of the China threat, thanks to its own efforts, is being revived.”

Asserting Chinese sovereignty over borderlands in contention — everywhere from Tibet to Taiwan to the South China Sea — has long been the top priority for Chinese nationalists, an obsession that overrides all other concerns. But this complicates China’s attempts to present the country’s rise as a boon for the whole region and creates wedges between China and its neighbors. 

This latest rare earth ban is just going to accelerate this trend. The ironic thing about this is that it's not like U.S. grand strategy has been especially brilliant. The U.S., however, has two big advantages at the moment. First, it's further away from these countries than China. Second, Washington's actions and rhetoric have been far more innocuous than Beijing's.

In yet another New York Times story, David Sanger provides a small clue as to whether Beijing either knows or cares about the blowback from its recent actions:

Early this month Mr. Obama quietly sent to Beijing Thomas E. Donilon, his deputy national security adviser and by many accounts the White House official with the greatest influence on the day-to-day workings of national security policy, and Lawrence H. Summers, who announced Tuesday that he would leave by the end of the year as the director of the National Economic Council....

[O]fficials familiar with the meetings said they were intended to try to get the two countries focused on some common long-term goals. The Chinese sounded more cooperative themes than in the spring, when two other administration officials were told, as one senior official put it, that “it was the Obama administration that caused this mess, and it’s the Obama administration that has to clean it up.”

Well, that is learning, but it's of a very modest kind. 

Now, it is possible that Beijing has simply decided that its internal growth is so big that it can afford the friction that comes with a rising power. My assessment, however, is that they're vastly overestimating their current power vis-a-vis the United States, and they're significantly undererstimating the effect of pushing the rest of the Pacific Rim into closer ties with the United States (and India).  

More significantly, and to repeat a theme, China is overestimating its ability to translate the economic interdependence of the Asia/Pacific economy into political leverage. With these misperceptions, however, China is risking some serious conflicts down the road.

Am I missing anything? I'm serious -- this problem ain't going away anytime soon.

I'll be blogging more on the particulars of what I'm  learning just as soon as I sort out the on-the-record/off-the-record rules here.  However, as I see the U.S. trying to jawbone the Israelis and Palestinians into direct negotiations, I will point out one thing I've learned so far:  Israelis are not really in the mood to listen to American advice on how to deal with their security threats.   

Readers might find this puzzling, given the political fallout from the 2002 West Bank incursions of Operation Defensive Shield, the 2006 invasion of Lebanon, Operation Cast Lead in Gaza, and the recent flotilla flare-up.  The Israeli response to this is multifaceted, but a big part of it can be distilled to the following: 

Let me see if I've got this straight.  Your country has been fighting two wars for the past seven years at a horrible cost to the local populations and with over 4,000 Americans dead.  At present, one of them is going very badly and one of them is going slightly less badly.  No matter how harshly you judge the past decade of our military operations, our longest military operation lasted little more than a month.  Do you really think you're in a position to offer us strategic and/or tactical advice? 

Readers are warmly encouraged to think up a snappy comeback to that talking point -- because I had nothing.   

The United States might be able to pressure Israel into changing its policies.  The power of United States persuasion, however, is pretty much nil.

Hey, remember last month when I promised I'd do more than skim the National Security Strategy? It took me a while, but I finally got around to looking closely at the entire document.

My assessment perfectly mirrors The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy's assessment of Earth: mostly harmless.

First of all, when reading these documents, you need to separate the parts that seem really important from the parts that seem.... boilerplate. For example, consider this laughably overtaken-by-events pledge:

Effectively Manage Emergencies: We are building our capability to prepare for disasters to reduce or eliminate long-term effects to people and their property from hazards and to respond to and recover from major incidents. To improve our preparedness, we are integrating domestic all hazards planning at all levels of government and building key capabilities to respond to emergencies. We continue to collaborate with communities to ensure preparedness efforts are integrated at all levels of government with the private and nonprofit sectors. We are investing in operational capabilities and equipment, and improving the reliability and interoperability of communications systems for first responders. We are encouraging domestic regional planning and integrated preparedness programs and will encourage government at all levels to engage in long-term recovery planning. It is critical that we continually test and improve plans using exercises that are realistic in scenario and consequences.

Planning integration!! Community collaboration!! More integration!! Hey, that's killer material in the NSS. It's a good thing this stuff is being done to prepare for a real emergency. Oh, wait....

As to the portions that matter: it's not that bad. In contrast to some previous strategy documents, this NSS is an actual strategy rather than a laundry list of regions and countries. The administration wisely notes the connections between domestic economic vitality and the ability to project and husband power in a complex world. In contrast to a lot of criticism I read, the administration makes a clear distinction between allies (NATO, Japan) and partners (Russia, China). The attitude towards multilateral institutions is appropriately clear-eyed. Al Qaeda is discussed but not to the point of obsession. The strategy could have just quoted John Quincy Adams rather than trying to perfect his prose about promoting democracy abroad by practicing it at home -- but that's picking at nits.

So, most of it is harmless. There are two things that nagged at me after I'd finished it, however.

First, there's a mismatch between the Obama administration's emphasis on retrenchment/"hard choices" and their sincere commitment to eliminating nuclear weapons. From his 2007 Foreign Affairs essay onwards, every major strategy document has emphasized that the administration will "Pursue the Goal of a World Without Nuclear Weapons." This is the part of the NSS with feeling, and the part where the administration has racked up some significant achievements.

The thing is, a retrenchment strategy requires relying on the tools of power that yield the greatest bang for the buck. Nuclear weapons accomplish little as a means of compellence, but they are the best and most cost-effective deterrent capability imaginable. Now, nothing the Obama administration has done to date compromises that deterrent capability. They seem to be moving in that direction, however. Pledging to eliminate nuclear weapons involves investing a lot of diplomatic capital towards a goal that fundamentally contradicts the national interest of the United States.

The second problem is the strictly horatory nature of some of the key NSS planks. There's a lot of "rising fiscal and trade deficits will... necessitate hard choices in the years ahead" kind of talk in the document. There are repeated emphases on getting America's fiscal house in order. Which is great, until we get to the paragraph on how this is going to happen:

Reduce the Deficit: We cannot grow our economy in the long term unless we put the United States back on a sustainable fiscal path. To begin this effort, the Administration has proposed a 3-year freeze in nonsecurity discretionary spending, a new fee on the largest financial services companies to recoup taxpayer losses for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), and the closing of tax loopholes and unnecessary subsidies. The Administration has created a bipartisan fiscal commission to suggest further steps for medium-term deficit reduction and will work for fiscally responsible health insurance reform that will bring down the rate of growth in health care costs, a key driver of the country’s fiscal future.

That's it? I was expecting a bit more. True, budget pledges in a National Security Strategy don't count for much, but would it have been so bad to articulate a more detailed vision of our fiscal future? If the administration can pledge to double exports in the next five years, can't it put in a goal for what the debt/GDP ratio will look like by 2015?

Still, on the whole, it's a decent strategy document as these things go.

Mostly harmless. Mostly.

Your humble blogger participated in a panel discussion at a "global strategy conference" over the weekend that was run by a Management Consultancy Group That Shall Remain Nameless.  The audience consisted of a lot of CEOs, corporate officers, and at least one business coach. 

Seeing as I'd just edited a book related to this topic, you'd think I'd have known what to expect in discussions about business strategy.  However, with my limited exposure to, you know, the for-profit sector, this was quite the eye-opening experience.  Management consultants are kind of like think tanks -- they matter a great deal, but no one is precisely certain why they matter so much. 

Chatham House rules prevent me from revealing anything that was said, but after 24 hours of exposure to cutting-edge management consultant practices, I am confident that I can pass on Ten Timeless Tips for How to Excel at, and Even Enjoy, Management Consulting. 

Ready?  Here we go:

1)  Market Every Piece of Advice as a Product.  Did you noticed that this list is called "Ten Timeless Tips"?  That's mine, baby!  [NOTE:  the Ten Timeless Tips may be updated at a future point in time.]

2)  Know And Repeat Your Buzzwords. This is an absolutely crucial aspect of the job.  The more business jargon you employ, the more your clients will need you to interpret what the jargon means.  For example, at the conference I attended, there was a lot of talk about the need for a "granular" perspective. 

For extra fun, try using neologisms from The Simpsons as your buzzwords.  Example:  "You need to embiggen your strategic perspective!" 

3)  Only Speak When You Have 14-Foot Graphics-Laden Screens Behind You to Amplify Your Points.  Otherwise, just nod sagely.  Bonus tip:  if you're having difficulty finding good graphics, just use this. 

4)  In Every Coversation with a Client, Mention Your Last Trip to China. This is tricky, as you have to be casual about it, while still drivng home the point that you are intimately familiar with the world's fastest-growing market.  Here are some possible ways to get this point into casual conversation: 

• "I was talking to one of our clients in Shenzhen On Monday, and..."
• "I was sunbathing in Chengdu a week ago..."
• "When I went bass-fishing in Chongqing last month..."
• "A funny thing happened when I went to a cockfight in Harbin on Tuesday...."
• "If, like me, you ever find yourself in Tianjin biting the head off of a live chicken...."

5)  Wear Lifts/Heels, and Stand on Risers Whenever Possible.  Remember, height is positively correlated with success in the business world.  To send a non-verbal cue to your customers that you deserve their money, try to sky over them. 

6)  Use Factoids To Distract Amaze Your Audience.  To drive home a point that might encounter pushback from the audience, be sure to snap off a statistic that seems related to your point.  For example, if you're trying to convince your customers that Western Africa is a more promising market than Western Europe, you can say, "Did you know there are more live births in Nigeria than in W. Europe?" 

Some other possibilities:

• "Did you know that in Tokyo, a bicycle is faster than a car for any distance less than 30 miles?"
• "Did you know that the most popular first name in the world is Muhammad?"
• "Did you know that the first product to have a bar code was Wrigleys gum?"
• "Did you know that Jedi is an official religion in Australia?" 

7)  Put a Modern Spin on Old Cliches.  Example:  "To paraphrase Keynes, 'In the long run, we're all liquefie-- I mean, we're all liquid.'"

8)  Get Your Clients To Work For You.  The point of being a consultant is to get your client to give you the necessary information to do their job better.  Anything that gets them to reveal more local knowledge to you is useful and labor-saving.  Example: breakout sessions!

9)  Synergize!  Mention the various ways that multimedia campaigns can augment and properly orient your business strategy.  Oh, and say Web 2.0 a lot.  Example:  I already built buzz for this post using Web 2.0 -- a series of Twitter tweets.  How awesome is that? 

10)  Leave them wanting more... in exchange for $$$$.  Example:  I have many more tips for those who truly want to know the Management Consultant Way.  Just send a check for $10,000 to the offices of Foreign Policy and you'll receive a registered letter containing the rest of them.