Whack A Mole Strategy

I don't know where I am going with this but here we go. My view on US grand strategy, or lack thereof, and why its important we establish one and communicate it to the public.

The world is in a period of transition. China is rising and the US seems to be faltering on the world stage. Our leadership and influence is being challenged. Our military exhausted, our government gridlocked through hyper partisanship and unending war.  How is the US going to confront a world where China will soon be the largest economy on earth? How will the US promote our core values of peace, freedom, democracy and human rights.

Since the fall of the USSR in 1991 the US has lacked a coherent grand strategy.  We have been playing whack a mole without a solid, realistic strategy to reinforce and our core values.   I’m talking about the US maintaining its status as the world's preeminent power. If the US does not maintain this status our core beliefs will fall victim to a new international order led by nations that have a much dimmer outlook for the world.

During the cold war the grand strategy was born in National Security Council (NSC) memo 68 which set forth how the US was going to defeat the USSR and the communist movement through the policy of containment.  This worked and avoided a direct conflict between the US and USSR. 

Under Bill Clinton, and to some extent George H.W. Bush, US grand strategy did not follow up on this victory and failed to assimilate Russia into the post communist world.  This lack of a post cold war strategy  further isolated Russia by enlarging NATO for little apparent strategic reason. Russia is a proud nation and the way they lost their empire was embarrassing, especially to the ruling class. The loss of global influence, and more importantly its traditional sphere of influence in Eastern Europe, the Balkans, the Baltics and the Caucasus directly contributed to the rise of Russian aggression since 2008. 

Since 1991 the closest the US came to an active grand strategy t was under George W. Bush and his neoconservative buddies (Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Paul Bremmer, Dick Cheney). The policy was preemption. Bush declared the US would intervene, unilaterally if needed, to protect itself from WMD,  terrorism and promote democratic regime change.  

Preemption was more of an operational response to a strategic problem. It relied overwhelming on the military and left out the subtle yet powerful aspects of US soft power.  GWB’s policy was short sighted and failed. 

Obama, despite denouncing foreign intervention, adopted some of its properties and greatly expanded the role of special operations and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) in counter terror operations.  Obama also trashed US credibility by issuing empty threats in Syria and intervening on a seemingly haphazard basis across the middle east.  Preemption gave us the mess that is the middle east.

Preemption and the fiasco in Iraq also served to strengthen the global radical islamic movement and allowed China and Russia to increase their international influence. While the US is fighting cave dwellers and hunting down individuals all over the planet China and Russia were improving their conventional militaries to point of near parity to the atrophied US force.   

So what is the Trump administration going to do? So far there seems to be two schools of thought from my point of view. 

1. They have a brilliant strategy that is being secretly enacted behind the scenes and all of these self imposed crisis and drama is just subterfuge to confuse our enemies.
2. There is no strategy and they are winging it. 

The one thing I know is that Trump is definitely keeping our rivals on their toes, and I dont think anyone but Trump knows what our way forward will be. That is not a good thing. Just look at his National Security Council, it does not include the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the intelligence community has been marginalized and beat down in public.

What is the way forward?  Times are a'changin and the nation deserves a solid grand strategy to uphold our core values in a time of a rising China. Our government needs to come forward and state the obvious, we must retain our status as the world's preeminent power in order to support our core values. Peace through strength,,,but its gotta be done right.

Image:
By Kenneth Catania, Vanderbilt University, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8923296