DEL.ICIO.USObama’s team realizes world more complex
Monday, December 01, 2008
The national security team scheduled to be announced today by President-elect Barack Obama is a serious, pragmatic group of people, and for that reason alone it provides a welcome contrast to the neoconservative radicals brought into power by President Bush.
Hillary Clinton at the State Department; Jim Jones, a retired four-star Marine general, as national security adviser; Robert Gates, a longtime mainstream Republican, remaining at the Department of Defense — they are also a far cry from the Marxist, pacifist, naive radicals that Republicans claimed would come into power with Obama.
Gates, Clinton and Jones come from very different professional backgrounds, but they share an understanding with the president-elect that diplomacy must be our primary means of engaging with the world, with military power held in reserve and used only as needed.
The wisdom and necessity of that approach were confirmed last week with a new report by the National Intelligence Council, “Global Trends 2025.” The report, compiled by analysts from throughout the U.S. intelligence community, does not attempt to predict the future but to spot the trends likely to drive that future.
The coming world it describes is much more complicated, with many more moving pieces that the United States can perhaps influence but cannot hope to control.
“The United States will remain the single most powerful country but will be less dominant,” the analysts report. “Shrinking economic and military capabilities may force the U.S. into a difficult set of trade-offs between domestic versus foreign policy priorities.”
Overall, “the multiplicity of influential actors and distrust of vast power means less room for the U.S. to call shots without the support of strong partnerships.”
As the report points out, recent years have seen a historic and unprecedented transfer of wealth from the West to the East, a phenomenon it predicts will continue. That too cannot help but have national-security implications, in no small part because our military dominance is founded on an economic dominance that no longer exists.
Although the report doesn’t go into such details, among those trade-offs may be cancellation of expensive projects such as the Army’s high-tech Future Combat Systems and the Air Force’s F-22 jet fighter, assembled in Marietta. Gates has already expressed doubt about both programs, and his reappointment as defense secretary bodes poorly for their future.
While most conflict in the post-World War II era has been ideological in nature, the report suggests that has changed. The prime driver of conflict in the years to come is likely to be access to energy resources, and “descending into a world of resource nationalism increases the risk of great-power confrontation.”
That strengthens the case for investment in energy efficiency and alternative energy sources, which in reality are investments in our national security.
Since the end of the post-Cold War era, we have been groping our way through challenges without a real concept of the international role we want to play, and without thinking through hard issues such as matching our ambitions with our resources. We invaded Iraq, for example, without understanding the drain it would place on our manpower, economic and diplomatic power, all of which are finite.
As the report acknowledges, history takes its own unpredictable course. But it offers three important lessons of the past century:
• Economic volatility creates political volatility, which raises the risk of war.
• Geopolitical rivalries, more so than technological change, have been “significant causes of the multiple wars, collapse of empires and rise of new powers.”
• “Leaders and their ideas matter … As demonstrated by the impacts of Churchill, Roosevelt and Truman, leadership is key.”
For that and other reasons, including evidence of good judgment, the leadership team assembled by Obama is reassuring.
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