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hap, Report Brookings experts on Trump’s National Security Strategy

As you know Brookings experts are not exclusive of right or left, but pretty
well cover the decent and respected part of the political continuum.

Thursday, December 21, 2017

On December 18, 2017, the Trump administration released its first
National Security Strategy (NSS). The NSS is a congressionally-mandated document (dating to the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act) that outlines an administration’s appraisal of U.S. national security interests, the global security environment, challenges to U.S. interests, and policies and tools for securing such interests.

The Trump administration’s first NSS has been anticipated with special interest in light of President Trump’s questioning—expressed both during the course of the 2016 U.S. presidential election and also while in office—of many principles and policies previously embraced for several decades by elected leaders and foreign policy experts associated with both major political parties.

Below, experts from across Brookings offer their comments on the Trump administration’s first NSS. Hover over or click on highlighted text to see what they have to say.

Participants: Madiha Afzal, Scott R. Anderson, Célia Belin, Jessica Brandt, Charles Call, Tarun Chhabra, Tamara Cofman Wittes, Brahima Coulibaly, David Dollar, Robert Einhorn, Khaled Elgindy, Samantha Gross, Shadi Hamid, Ryan Hass, Thomas Hill, Dhruva Jaishankar, Kemal Kirisci, Suzanne Maloney, Chris Meserole, Michael O’Hanlon, Jung H. Pak, Ted Piccone, Tony Pipa, Alina Polyakova, Natan Sachs, Landry Signé, Amanda Sloat, Mireya Solís, Constanze Stelzenmüller, Torrey Taussig, and Thomas Wright.

[The repeated bits are the highlighted text to be hovered over to get the experts comment]

My fellow Americans:
My Fellow Americans

Thomas Wright
Striking how different in substance and tone the president's cover letter is from the rest of the document. Personal praise abundant and no mention of Russia or China.

[...]

We are rallying the world against the rogue regime in North Korea and confronting the danger posed by the dictatorship in Iran, which those determined to pursue a flawed nuclear deal had neglected.
We are rallying the world against [...] a flawed nuclear deal had neglected.

Suzanne Maloney
Here and elsewhere, the strategy affirms one of the most insidious critiques of the Obama administration's Iran diplomacy and the 2015 nuclear deal. The insinuation that Obama failed to address the threat posed by Iran reveals a deliberate disregard for the genuine, if imperfect, security benefits of the agreement's constraints on Iran's nuclear program. And it perpetuates a myth that Washington would have been better equipped to confront Iran in the absence of a nuclear agreement. One only need look at North Korea today to appreciate how misguided that presumption is.
It is undeniable that Iran's regional position expanded during the course of the nuclear crisis and negotiations. But responsibility for that unfortunate development rests primarily with the Bush administration's catastrophic 2003 decision to invade Iraq. Obama was clear that the nuclear agreement solved only one element of the Iranian challenge, but to his credit, he saw Tehran's steady progress toward nuclear weapons capability as the most urgent and destabilizing piece of that puzzle. Jettisoning the nuclear deal, as President Trump has forewarned, will only escalate the risks and further erode any realistic prospect of blunting Tehran's regional reach. Read more .. https://www.brookings.edu/blog/markaz/2017/10/10/to-certify-or-not-to-certify-thats-not-the-question/ .

[...]

American principles are a lasting force for good in the world.
American principles are a lasting force for good in the world.

Ted Piccone
...because they are not just American principles but also universal values that are shared across diverse cultures, regions, and peoples. The more we wrap them into "America First" rhetoric, combined with the highly unpopular and controversial image of this administration, the harder we make it for other reformers to advance our common cause of a more democratic and peaceful world, and a safer America.

[...]

We stood by while countries exploited the international institutions we helped to build.
We stood by while countries exploited the international institutions we helped to build.

Thomas Wright
The document does not explicitly endorse the rules-based international order like its predecessors. Instead it blames the order for some of the country's woes.

[...]

A Competitive World
A Competitive World

Thomas Wright
This is the central theme of the document—the world has become more geopolitically competitive.

The United States will respond to the growing political, economic, and military competitions we face around the world.
The United States will respond to [...] competitions we face around the world.

Célia Belin
Within two months of each other, France and the United States have released a document, although of different bureaucratic nature, highlighting their respective assessments of their strategic environment and direction (on the French side: the 2017 Strategic Review on Defense and National Security). Both countries share a similar diagnosis on the state of the world, but disagree on remedies. They both see a competitive geopolitical environment, with a strong challenge from Russia in particular, as well as transnational threats. Yet the French perceive a risk in an era of unpredictability, in which the United States itself is participating in the demise of multilateralism, while the United States is acutely concerned with the shrinking of its own military superiority. More than anything, the emphasis on the U.S. side is great power rivalry and the need to strengthen American power and put U.S. interests first, while the French insists on the emergence of multipolarity and the need to strengthen the multilateral order. The "Competitive World" section does not mention allies.

[...]

China and Russia challenge American power, influence, and interests, attempting to erode American security and prosperity. They are determined to make economies less free and less fair, to grow their militaries, and to control information and data to repress their societies and expand their influence.
China and Russia challenge American power, [...] their societies and expand their influence.

David Dollar
To say that China is attempting to erode American prosperity is a strong statement that would be hard to back up. Much of the economic exchange between China and the United States—including two-way trade, 400,000 Chinese students in the United States, and investment in both directions—is mutually beneficial and a foundation of global stability.
Dhruva Jaishankar
You really couldn't get a clearer statement of the challenges being faced today by the United States from revisionist great powers. The Russian bits will undoubtedly get more attention. But despite some interpretations of the China leg of Trump's Asian tour, these sentiments and much of the rest of the document are consistent with his administration's overall approach to China.
Ryan Hass
Lumping China and Russia together is imprecise and unhelpful.
It does not serve American interests to push China and Russia toward each other. By suggesting that the United States views them as one and the same in their actions and objectives, we remove reasons for Beijing and Moscow to maintain distance. Such an approach stands in contrast to Henry Kissinger's efforts to pull China away in order to isolate the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
Such thinking is also blind to the many divergences between China and Russia, and in the case of China, it strengthens the hand of hard-liners inside Beijing and marginalizes those that support working with the United States, including on North Korea.
Given President Trump's identification of North Korea as the top threat facing the United States, this type of framing creates clear costs for uncertain benefits.
Tarun Chhabra
Many foreign policy analysts will rightly question whether Trump believes in core aspects of this NSS, and debate whether it makes sense to lump Russia and China together as birds of a feather. But this narrative of a failed geopolitical experiment - a "premise [that] turned out to be false"—weighs in on an unresolved if dormant debate (particularly among Democrats) about whether previous administrations overestimated the dividends of cooperation and underappreciated the character of U.S. economic and military competition with both countries, albeit in different ways. Some Obama administration national security officials would concede today that they were slow to calibrate the balance of competition vs. cooperation as China and Russia became increasingly assertive, especially in the course of Obama's second term. 2020 presidential candidates who wish to be credible on foreign policy will need to weigh in on this debate.

https://www.brookings.edu/research/brookings-experts-on-trumps-national-security-strategy/